Rand nodded his understanding. He watched as Mayhew folded his easel, collapsed the stool, then shouldered his satchel and lifted easel and stool.
Rand waved toward the forecourt. “I’ll walk with you.”
Mayhew’s lips quirked, but with an inclination of his head, he accepted Rand’s escort.
They were halfway across the lawn when Mayhew, his gaze fixed on the stable, said, “I mentioned to Miss Throgmorton that I was thinking of taking a short holiday in the area and might call in at some time. However, I’ve recalled that my arrangement with the News requires several more sketches of other villages before I can call my time my own. Consequently, I’ll be out of the area for a few weeks.” Mayhew glanced at Rand. “Could I ask you to convey that to Miss Throgmorton and Mrs. Makepeace, and to assure them that I’ll drop by with the sketch I promised them when I return?”
Maintaining a genial but uninformative mien, Rand inclined his head. “I’ll pass the message on.”
They reached the stable yard. This time, Mayhew had arrived in a gig. While he strapped his easel and folding stool to the back of the seat, Rand noted the stamp on the gig’s side that proclaimed it the property of the Green Man Inn in Basildon. The horse between the shafts bore the same inn’s brand.
With his equipment stored, Mayhew slung his satchel onto the seat and climbed up. He nodded at Rand. “I’ll bid you a good day, Lord Randolph.”
“Good sketching,” Rand dryly replied.
Mayhew grinned, snapped off a salute, then shook the reins.
Rand stood back and watched the gig rattle down the drive. Even when the trees hid Mayhew from sight, Rand remained staring after the artist.
Wondering.
Especially over what Mayhew’s last message might mean.
Was the artist simply an artist and temporarily moving out of the area purely in order to satisfy his employer?
Or had Mayhew merely claimed to be leaving in order to paint himself as no threat?
Had he decided on a few weeks in response to Rand’s presence at the Hall, assuming that, as Rand had intimated, in a few days, Rand would be gone?
There were fifteen more days until the exhibition. Artist or no, that left Mayhew plenty of time to return and sabotage the engine.
Frowning, Rand turned and headed toward the house.
He still didn’t know what he thought of Mayhew, but as for the artist taking himself off...
As he mounted the porch steps, Rand couldn’t bring himself to place any reliance on that.
CHAPTER 7
The following day, after having had Johnson strike the gong to summon William John and Rand to the luncheon table three times, all to no avail, Felicia gathered her skirts and started down the workshop stairs.
“Ridiculous men!” She muttered more pointed imprecations as she carefully made her way down the spiral staircase. If she gave up on them and ordered the table to be cleared, then, as sure as eggs were eggs, a minute later, they would be wandering into the dining room looking for sustenance.
Truth to tell, as it was now well past one o’clock, she was surprised their stomachs hadn’t accomplished what the gong and their ears had not.
She slowed as she rounded the stair’s last curve and looked down into the workshop.
Although she’d made no effort to conceal her approach, her slippers hadn’t made that much noise. Neither man had realized she was there.
They were staring at the engine, each, in their own way, radiating frustration. William John was scowling; his hair stood up in clumps—he’d clearly clutched at it several times. As for Rand, he’d rested his forearm on the bench and was leaning on it, his expression one of focused exasperation.
She shifted her gaze to the object of their ire. It was the first time she’d given the engine at the center of their now-joint mission more than a cursory glance. The contraption was a fantastical construction of pipes and tubes, cylinders and pistons, all wrapped around a gleaming copper boiler. Pipes curved and bent, creating a knotted skein of sleek metal that glowed softly under the harsh lights.
Unexpectedly mesmerized, she stared. She was conscious of a tug, as if prompted by some inner compulsion to unravel and understand the complex construction.
She tried to draw back, to pull away; she managed to keep her frown from her face when she didn’t succeed.
She stepped down to the workshop floor. It might have been years since she’d walked upon it, yet everything seemed the same—still familiar.
Instead of berating both men for not responding to the gong, she heard herself ask, “What’s wrong?”
Ferguson, the blacksmith, had delivered the new boiler the morning before; she’d seen it being carried in, an oval balloon in shining copper, quite unlike any boiler she’d previously seen. It now sat in the center of the welter of pipes.
Although Rand looked up at her question, William John didn’t. Instead, he clutched his hair with both hands and wailed, “I don’t know!”
Before she had a chance to react, he pointed dramatically at the boiler. “That’s the new boiler.” She drew closer, and he hurriedly added, “Don’t touch it. It’s hot.” He frowned. “In fact, it’s too hot, which I think is part of the problem.”
She told herself she shouldn’t ask, yet the words “What is the problem?” popped out of her mouth.
“It’s the throttling back that just isn’t working.” William John whirled to face the large board on which he’d pinned his diagrams.
Felicia walked around the engine so she could see more clearly.
“This is the boiler.” William John pointed to the diagram. “Although it doesn’t look like that anymore, for our purposes, it’s the same. It sits on top of the burner, and that’s all working as we’d hoped. We’ve drastically improved the efficiency of the generation of steam from a given amount of coal, which was one of our primary aims to improve Russell’s modifications to Trevithick’s design. So we’ve got that right, and all the rest”—he waved to the pipes, valves, and pistons that connected in a tangle of pieces between the boiler and the representation of what Felicia vaguely understood was a drive mechanism—“works faultlessly. Exactly as required. But it seems we can only drive the carriage at an ever-increasing pace. We can ease back a little, but the slowing is quickly overcome by the pressure building in the boiler. The valves that used to work to allow us to slow still work, but they don’t reduce the pressure sufficiently, and it just keeps mounting.”
Felicia frowned at the diagrams, her eyes tracing pathways through pipes and pistons.
“At present,” Rand said, “the power escalates at an ever-increasing rate. If we allow it to run for even ten minutes, it’ll blow up.”
Felicia grimaced. “That’s the last thing we need—another explosion.” After several moments, she glanced at William John. He looked more dejected and defeated than she’d ever seen him.
She didn’t look at Rand, but she’d heard the same low ebb in his voice.
That odd compulsion prodded at her, nagging, all but whispering: What could it hurt?
To her, the problem appeared reasonably straightforward. She must have retained more from her earlier years than she’d realized; the diagrams were as readily interpretable as Mayhew’s sketches.
The suggestion circling her brain might well be ludicrous, yet given the men’s dejection, what would it hurt to voice it? There was nothing more at stake than her pride.
She focused on the diagram of the boiler and its immediate connections, mentally working through her argument again, then she drew in a breath, lifted one hand, and tapped on the paper. “When you throttle back, this valve releases, doesn’t it?”
William John had gone back to staring at the engine. He returned to the board of diagrams, halted by her side, and looked at where she pointed. He nodded. “Yes. That’s the one.”
&nb
sp; “If you’ve drastically increased the efficiency of generating steam,” she said, “shouldn’t there be more than one?”
William John blinked. He opened his mouth, then shut it. Then his face came alive. “We reengineered the pistons, but we left everything else as Russell had it.”
Behind Felicia, Rand straightened. “But she’s right, isn’t she? You’ve allowed for the extra power in the forward drive, but you haven’t adjusted the release.”
William John was nodding feverishly. “Yes. That’s it!” He stepped closer to the board and jabbed a finger at the offending valve. “We need to double the size of that, and I think we should run two in parallel. Yes, that’s right—in series won’t do it. Parallel, it should be.” His voice was rising, excitement building. He started to mutter, all but babbling as he rethought his approach.
Emboldened, Felicia raised her voice and said, “And is there any reason you can’t attach a valve to the boiler itself? One with a high enough limit so it will only release if the pressure rises beyond safe levels?”
William John pulled up short. He thought, then peered at the diagram of the boiler. “You mean directly on the boiler? We’d need it to be recast.”
“We haven’t got time for that, so what about here?” She pointed to one of the two connectors at the top of the boiler. “Can’t you change that and insert a valve with a gauge there?”
Rand came to stand beside her. “Can that be done?” From his tone, William John’s excitement had infected him, too. “I assume if so, we would be able to test the rest of the engine without constantly having to turn it off whenever the pressure in the boiler gets too high.”
William John’s eyes were alight. “Yes—yes! We can do that. We must have the right bits here somewhere—we can figure it out, and then... Yes! That’s it!” He turned to Felicia; his expression ecstatic, he waved his arms in the air. “Eureka!”
She had to laugh—then she felt strong hands fasten about her waist, and Rand, laughing, too, spun her about, picked her up, and, stepping away from the engine and board, whirled her around.
Their excitement sank into her and bubbled through her veins. As the workshop whirled about her, she smothered a squeal. Her hands fell to Rand’s shoulders and gripped; as he slowed, she looked down into his face, wreathed in relieved delight. He grinned boyishly up at her, and something nebulous and elusive tugged at her heart. His eyes met hers, and his expression grew a touch more serious; he held her gaze for several seconds, then, slowly, he lowered her to the floor.
As he released her, he said, “You have no idea how close we were to admitting ultimate defeat.”
She arched a brow at him, then shot a glance at William John. “Am I allowed to say I find that hard to believe?”
William John humphed, but he was still grinning and didn’t seem able to stop.
Before he could start assembling the bits and pieces to create his new valve assembly, she firmly stated, “Now I’ve helped solve your problem, you can solve one for me. There’s a cold collation waiting upstairs, and thus far, only Flora and I have turned up to eat it.”
It was difficult, but she did her best to mock-glare at them both.
“Great heavens! Is it lunchtime?” Rand consulted his watch.
“Good!” William John said. “Now we know what we’re doing, I’m as hungry as a horse.”
She shook her head at him, then turned and led the way to the stairs.
Rand followed her up, with William John happily clattering behind.
Relief was still pouring through Rand, so intense he almost felt giddy. He’d spoken truly. He and William John had been at their wits’ end. He’d greatly feared they’d been staring failure in the face.
Felicia’s insight testified to the benefit of having a fresh pair of eyes look over a problem. He and William John had been studying the diagrams for so long, they hadn’t been able to see the valves for the pipes.
Yet as he followed Felicia into the dining room, he had to own to being impressed by the ease with which she’d taken in the problem, then unerringly put her finger on the source. He’d worked alongside inventors long enough to appreciate that seeing through all the layers of obfuscation created by complicated mechanical systems to the heart of a problem required a certain clarity of mind.
In his experience, it took a special type of brain and mind to be able to “see” at that level.
Felicia said nothing about her success as she resumed her seat beside Flora, who had already finished her meal.
Rand smiled and made his and William John’s excuses, then claimed the chair opposite Felicia.
As usual, William John sat at the head of the table, opposite Flora. Transparently released from all worries, glib and gay, he rattled on to Flora, heaping accolades on his sister’s head for her invaluable assistance.
Felicia, Rand noticed, looked pleased, but also faintly disturbed.
To fascinating and occasionally enigmatic, he could now add intriguing.
From where he sat, there was definitely more to Felicia Throgmorton than he’d had any reason to suppose.
* * *
The next day was Sunday. Rand and William John went down to the workshop immediately on returning from church.
The previous afternoon and evening, they’d worked together—Rand acting as William John’s assistant—to make the modifications Felicia had suggested. They’d had to leave the connections to harden overnight before testing the new valves.
They could barely wait to fire up the boiler.
Then they watched the gauges. Watched and waited as the pressure built.
The valve released precisely as it should. “Yes!” William John raised his fists to the ceiling.
Rand grinned, but kept watching. Only when the new valve continued to release, maintaining the pressure in the boiler at the maximum safe level, did he finally relax.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of their difficulties. William John reattached the drive shaft—he’d dismantled it while they’d concentrated on working on the boiler—only to discover that now, although the issue with the pressure was resolved, even with a steady pressure applied, he couldn’t get the pistons to remain in strict tandem. After five minutes of running, they were sufficiently out of rhythm to have the drive shaft groaning.
After an hour of poking at the pistons and their connections, clearing all the tubing, and then studying the diagrams, William John had once again resorted to tugging his hair. “I don’t understand it,” he wailed. “We’ve increased the pressure, but it’s now under control and steady. The timing shouldn’t have changed.”
It occurred to Rand that, as with the earlier problem, this one was almost certainly more about design than the actual mechanism. “Why don’t we carry on with those changes you wanted to make to the drive shaft itself and wait until your sister comes to pry us away for lunch, then see if she can suggest a way forward?”
William John had looked ready to throw a spanner at the board. Rand’s words gave him pause, then he shrugged. “Yes—why not? We’re getting nowhere here—let’s move on to something we can do.”
When, after Johnson had struck the gong twice with no result, Felicia again made her way down the curving stairs to the workshop, it was to find William John and Rand waiting for her with welcoming smiles on their faces.
Frowning, she paused on the last stair. “What is it?”
William John leapt to tell her—in detail.
And, once again, she found herself, however reluctantly, inexorably drawn into considering, studying, and evaluating the problem.
When William John finally fell silent, and both men waited, patently expecting her to offer them a solution, she frowned at them. “Yesterday...that was very likely just luck. A fluke. A moment that won’t be repeated.”
William John looked at her beseechingly. “Please.” He
gestured to the diagrams.
“We’re stuck.” Rand’s tone was less cajoling and more definite. “You’re here, you understand the problem—just look and see if anything strikes you.”
She humphed, but consented to fix her attention once more on the diagrams. The more she traced the connections, the more she felt as if her mind was sinking into the structure of the engine, making sense of the complexity in a way that was almost beyond her conscious grasp. As if some deeply buried part of her recognized the challenge and rose to meet it.
This difficulty was...trickier. There were more possibilities, more points at which things might be going awry.
She lost all sense of time as, with her eyes, she traced, tracked, and backtracked.
As if from a distance, she heard slow, ponderous footsteps on the stairs, heard Flora’s voice raised in a question that cut off when Rand said something.
She almost smiled as she realized what she was doing—that she was just like her father and brother in being able to cut herself, her mind, off from everything around her...
She used to consider that a flaw. Now...
She blinked, looked more intently, then she stepped closer to the board, swiftly ran through her thoughts once again, then with a fingertip, she tapped each of the four feed lines to the pistons. “These are the source of your problem—you haven’t equalized the lines. The pressure going into each is equal, but because the lines are different lengths, the pressure delivered to the pistons is fractionally different. It didn’t matter, at least not so much, when you were running with much less power. Now you’ve increased the power, the pistons will be noticeably out of time after even a relatively short run.”
She turned to William John and saw his eyes widening, widening, then a huge grin split his face.