Gossamer Wing Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t be present to vote—in exchange for the prospect of nobility and wealth in the newly subdued American Dominions.
    “I wonder what he would think of this, your ancestor?” Now Darmont was talking about the wall.
    Dexter smiled, feeling much more at his ease discussing this than he had the surreal prospect of marrying Lady Moncrieffe in order to go help her spy on the French in violation of an international treaty. “I suspect he would be amused that I’d left it exposed, but I doubt he would mind. He did build it, after all. Or at least he started the process.”
    He enjoyed the Viscount’s expression; the man was clearly startled. Dexter always enjoyed telling this tale.
    “He was a suspicious old curmudgeon, you see, and after he was widowed at age fifty or so he married again to a much younger woman. She was very beautiful, and he was predictably jealous despite her being, by all accounts, the most virtuous creature ever born and quite in love with the old fool.
    “He couldn’t bear to be apart from her, and she did like to take a solitary ride every fine morning. It preyed on his nerves not to know where she went, but he dreaded the thought that she might catch him spying and think ill of him, or think he didn’t trust her. So he rigged a sort of spyglass on the roof. The stairs were hell on his rheumatism, though, so next he developed a periscope in order to watch her while remaining in his own study.”
    “I think I see the direction this will take,” quipped the Viscount.
    “These things never end well, do they?” Dexter agreed. “From there it became a fixation, and then an obsession. He couldn’t see past the row of trees after she entered the lane from the south gate, but she would certainly question the removal of such a fine old row of elms. So he put a crude sensor in the gate, that tripped a bell if the gate was opened. The system grew in complexity, and he guarded his study as closely as Bluebeard guarded his wives’ heads.”
    “We all know how that turned out. Can I assume this tale had an unhappy end?”
    “Unhappy, possibly,” Dexter allowed with a smile and a shrug, “but at least not grisly. He did get found out eventually, of course, and she was furious. Nevertheless, she went on to bear him five children that looked too much like him to doubt their parentage, so one can only assume some sort of treaty was arrived at.”
    “Based on the evidence of the children?”
    “And on her journal. She was alternately horrified and flattered by his intensity.”
    “The first Baron Hardison was not a stable chap, I take it.”
    “Mad as a hatter, I suspect. But a dab hand with the gadgetry.” Dexter took a moment to appreciate the wall of delicate machinery in front of him. “Of course his devices were mostly glorified trip wires and the like. Levers to pull at bells, essentially, with a few extra steps in between. But the second and third Barons added their own fillips, most notably the clockworks. All the clocks in the house are synchronized by this system here. It’s still wound from a central location in the kitchens each morning. My grandfather added fans and thermostats. Centralized temperature control. I’ve contributed intrastructural communication devices. And this is a cross-section of the entire system. Remarkable, really.”
    “Your grandfather was the one who married Eliza Chen.”
    “Yes, sir.” He couldn’t help the note of pride that crept into his voice at the mention of his famous grandmother, who’d been a formidable political activist.
    Lady Moncrieffe’s father turned that oddly calculating gaze on him again. “And two generations later, her crusade for workers’ rights and the destruction of the class system is honored posthumously by your habit of styling yourself
Mister
Hardison?”
    Dexter stared back, suddenly feeling all the potential danger of this man. He heard, in Darmont’s pointed questions, the equally sharp intelligence of his daughter.