Chapter Ten

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Previously in Murder on the Aerial Express:

Reimund tells Isabelle to call on him if she needs a friend. She goes to sleep but wakes up to the sound of people searching the cabin next door (Beechcraft’s suite) in the middle of the night. She creeps out on the window walk to spy and overhears a group of individuals searching, but they leave unsatisfied: “it’s empty.”

The next morning, Captain Miro asks to speak privately to Mrs. Darling. When the chaperone returns, she is shaken. Someone informed Miro of her history, and he warned her that the authorities would wish to speak with her in Venice. The ladies head to breakfast.

(Remember: if you need a more thorough refresher, the “Previously In” summaries are also online.)

The breakfast room crackled with energy. The murmur of disgruntled passengers filled the air, punctuated by the clatter of silverware against china. As they walked across the floor, Isabelle spotted the Macons, their dining companions from the previous night. 

The woman’s complaint pierced the low hum. “Disgraceful. I do hope that writer — Aitkin, the fellow in second class — will report on how Beechcraft has mishandled this matter.”

Mr. Macon muttered a reply. His wife missed it and insisted he repeat himself. “The man is dead. I’m not sure what you expect of him.”

She sniffed. “You know I mean Beechcraft Enterprises. It’s not right that we should be inconvenienced, particularly when the person who died was the owner of the ship.” 

Isabelle tried to understand her logic. Would the delay be acceptable if the victim had paid for his passage?

Mrs. Jones waved a teacup from the table she shared with the German cousins. Isabelle directed Mrs. Darling in that direction. Her dazed chaperone was pliable as a sleepwalker, one who wanted a guide out of their nightmare.

They sat, and Baron Hoffman asked whether they slept well, a polite question to which they gave the polite lie. The others were tea-drinkers, so Isabelle caught the eye of a porter and requested coffee. Breakfast was self-serve, and she crossed to the center of the room, pulling a lever to lower the massive tray. She helped herself to crumpets, sausage, and eggs, then sent the platter ceiling-ward once more. The design let the staff refill dishes from the compartment overhead, keeping the way clear for passengers navigating the area.

She returned to their table. Mrs. Darling sat wringing her napkin into a tight coil on her lap and had yet to touch her tea. 

Reimund lounged back in his chair. “My patrician rose, if I may so, you look lovely in a gown as blue as your blood.”

Isabelle’s dress was green. Her nightrobe was a brilliant sapphire.

She gritted her teeth at the reminder that Reimund had seen her in a state of undress. “Thank you, Russell. You are too kind.” 

The exchange confused the rest. Baron Hoffman frowned and asked his cousin, “Do we need to find you a pair of spectacles?”

He shook his head. “A private jest.” 

Mrs. Jones fiddled with the end of one sleeve. Green and red rioted in today’s gown. There were multiple shades of each, and they collided in the least complementary pairs. “I know a gentleman who struggles to differentiate between red and green. My current dress would give him fits.” She smiled at the idea, fond of the unnamed individual.

Mrs. Darling blinked and contributed to the conversation for the first time. “My father was the same, as was a companion I had as a girl. I used to think the affliction common to all men.” 

“It isn’t only men, though I believe it more prevalent in the sex.” Isabelle thought again of Pippa, whose heroine was colorblind. She wished her friend were here, able to help parse the shipboard insanity.

The conversation turned to everyone’s plans for the day.

Reimund said, “I hear there will be a shuffleboard tournament in the atrium. I need a partner. How about it, my illustrious iris?”

Isabelle enjoyed the game. Captain Miro’s was the only dirigible to adopt the sport, which was popular with passengers at sea. Tess and she often played on less eventful voyages. Today, shuffleboard didn’t seem like a good use of her time, and she shook her head. The gesture was brusque, which must be why she offered, “I could watch your first match.” 

“I depend on you to bring me luck. Lend me a token of your favor to wear as jousting knights once represented their ladies.” He held out his hand. “Your handkerchief, please.”

She blinked. “Be patient. I need time to soak it in a vile-smelling concoction.” Reimund laughed, and she felt pleased with herself as she spread marmalade on a crumpet. 

Mrs. Jones said, “I suppose we must cram in our fun while we can. Will the rest of you continue to Constantinople or remain in Venice?”

Mrs. Darling flinched at the city’s name.

The baron sucked his lips inward and popped them out, tilting his head. “I am debating. Beechcraft’s death leaves several projects uncertain, and I should return home to manage them. On the other hand…” He shrugged. “I am not so lost to ennui that further travel has no appeal.”

Reimund nudged his relative in support. “Let yourself enjoy the trip, Heinrich. Beechcraft demanded you join him aboard to suit his convenience, but, for once, selfishness stumbled into generosity. I vote we reap the rewards.”

Baron Hoffman twitched and called an end to the topic.

Mrs. Jones watched the exchange with greedy eyes, noting those things left unsaid. Mrs. Darling cleared her throat before the pause could linger. “Shuffleboard sounds entertaining. Perhaps I will accompany Isabelle and watch you play, Reimund.”

“Good.” He toasted her with a teacup. “You can prevent the lady from sabotaging my performance.”

After breakfast, Isabelle returned to her room and lab equipment. She had neglected her work yesterday and could think of nothing to do for Captain Miro or Mrs. Darling, so she sat at her desk, her notes on the failed experiment spread before her.

Her mind refused to settle, bouncing between the alchemical problem and the mystery of Julius Beechcraft’s murder. 

Who informed the captain of Mrs. Darling’s history? 

Had Isabelle missed something in the article about bonding aether to hydrogen? 

Who searched Beechcraft’s suite last evening? What were they looking for?

Did she need to try a different vessel?

What about the secretary, Mr. Notti? What was his role in this affair?

Should she take a stab at preheating the aether before adding water?

Stab was an unfortunate word in context.

Salt.

Isabelle’s brain screeched to a stop. 

Salt. Isabelle needed to slow down the phase change, giving the liquid aether time to bond before the water evaporated.

She again set up her equipment on the floor. Liquid aether. Distilled water. A flask perched over a burner. Jittery with excitement, she added iodized salt to the array. 

Her initial try was unsuccessful. The water continued to vaporize too fast, leaving behind salt-speckled aether. Isabelle was undaunted. For her next attempt, she first dissolved the salt, then withdrew a measure of homemade saltwater to add to the aether.

Corrosion and corsets, it worked.

She grinned savagely. A cloudy liquid perched on top of a new distillate. She didn’t know how to detach the ugly crud without destroying the glass. But who cared? It was a small price to pay in the quest for infinite energy.

Isabelle stopped congratulating herself and busied herself with notes, glancing at her equipment, less for information than for reassurance. The distillate was still there. At last, she stretched, muscles stiff from her position on the floor.

There was a knock, and she pushed herself to her feet, grabbing her success as she did. She opened the door with a smile, ready to share her triumph with Mrs. Darling.

It wasn’t her chaperone, and Reimund’s sardonic expression faltered at Isabelle’s unexpected enthusiasm.

“Look.” She brandished the beaker, and he leaned back. 

“It’s a dirty flask.”

“No.” She reconsidered. “Well, yes. But it’s also progress. This is a compound of aether and hydrogen.”

Reimund studied the grayish-brown solid. “Hooray?”

Isabelle frowned, but his shortsightedness couldn’t dim her good mood. “What did you want, anyway?”

“Shuffleboard.” He leaned against the door jamb. 

A wrinkle connected her eyebrows. The word belonged to another world and language, and she struggled to make sense of it. 

“The tournament?”

When the light dawned, she sighed. 

Reimund nodded. “Yes. I’m here to collect you. The others have already gathered.”

She looked over her shoulder at the mess on the floor. “Come in. I need a moment.”

Turning her back on him, she collected her scientific debris. Reimund lingered in place, surprised at the bold invitation, and Isabelle again chafed at the idea that she needed supervision in her personal quarters. He came to the correct conclusion, validating her agency. 

Yes, that was the slight thrill she felt as he closed the door behind him. Validation.

He took the desk chair, and she sensed his eyes on her as she cleaned. The moment was domestic, even intimate, and she grew self-conscious.

(Reimund watched Isabelle restore order to her domain. Her exactness delighted him, sparking a previously undiscovered fetish for precision.)

Isabelle didn’t put away the glass or stand. She set them on the desktop, brushing against Reimund’s outstretched legs. He smirked, so she stepped on his toes, and he yanked them in with a laugh.

Isabelle crouched to collect her notebook. The pen had rolled off, and she scanned the floor, loath to crawl about under his keen gaze.

Reimund leaned close to her precious experiment but wisely didn’t touch it. “What is this?”

“I told you. A compound of aether and hydrogen.” 

His eyes flicked toward the ceiling. “But what does that mean to you? Why did you look like you discovered the secret of transmuting lead into gold?”

She almost objected that, per Timwell’s eighteenth-century formula, one could turn lead into gold. The problem lay in the enormous cost. It would require a person to outlay more money than the product was worth. She dismissed the mental tangent, overflowing with her triumph. Pippa wasn’t here to discuss and rejoice. Isabelle would take what she could get. 

She sat on the floor, rotating to face him. “I believe this is the first step in harnessing aether as a source of energy.”

Reimund relaxed back into the chair and stared. Uncomfortable, she folded over her crossed legs to return the distilled water to her kit, snapping the leather thong that held it in place with a click.

“Huxley’s folly,” he murmured.

Of course, he would make the connection. Reimund had mentioned her parents on meeting her. Isabelle cursed perceptive louts, her overeagerness to share, and the journalists who coined the term Huxley’s folly.

She hated no person with the fire she reserved for those writers and believed most reporters weren’t worth the ink they spilled. She grouped them with thieves and mountebanks. They combined the larceny of the one with the false promises of the other. 

Reimund studied her as if he could see beneath the skin, tracing the network of viscera and painful memories at her core.

He didn’t drop the subject. “That’s it. The world derided your parents for seeking evidence of the Baghdad Battery, long dismissed as a myth. You’re trying to prove that an aetheric battery is possible.”

Out of respect for her equipment, she didn’t throw anything at him. “Do you not understand the appeal of aetheric energy? For one thing, there would be enormous health benefits in using aether rather than coal and oil. Just ask Dr. Chakraborty, the shipboard physician. Our growing industries have led to a dramatic increase in lung diseases and chronic conditions.”

Reimund leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Yes, but you also want to recover your parents’ reputation.”

A ludicrous amount of publicity had attended the Huxleys’ disgrace. At any other time in history, the attention would have been limited to a few archeology journals. Even if a snide academic came up with the phrase Huxley’s folly, it would never leave the ivory tower. 

Isabelle’s mother hated the term. When her husband laughed, she pointed to the spelling of Huxley’s. Apostrophe, s. Singular. Referring to Lord Huxley, no doubt.

But it had been Lady Huxley who first hypothesized that “Baghdad Battery” was a misnomer. A mention in the Assyrian scrolls convinced her that scholars should name the device the “Kabul Battery.” Isabelle was four years old when her family started digging in Afghanistan and six when they returned to England after the outbreak of hostilities. She was seven when her parents accompanied the peace-seeking expedition back to Afghanistan.

The story made the society section first. The papers had always poked fun at Lord Huxley. It wasn’t every day that an earl abandoned his estates in a scholarly quest. But the journalists discovered that her parents’ colleagues thought the project pointless, superstitious even. Her parents’ tale became, first, a comic romance, and then, a tragic farce. 

The governor of Herat massacred the couple along with everyone else on that mission, and her parents made front-page headlines. Reporters seized upon Huxley’s folly as a human-interest element in international affairs. The phrase reappeared — as a metaphor for blundering Englishmen — throughout the coverage of the Afghan War’s second half.

Isabelle finished tidying and fiddled with the clasps on the case so that each lay at a precise ninety degrees.

“I’m sorry.”

She raised a shoulder, not looking at him.

“Truly, my gentlewoman genius.” Sincere regret tinged his voice.

Isabelle’s hands clutched her upper arms, protecting her heart.

Reimund withdrew his gold pocket watch, the beautiful timepiece marred by a dent in the cover. “The tournament will begin soon.”

“Very well.” Isabelle rehung her chatelaine around her neck. She had removed it during the experiment so as not to push her luck. One near-miss with fiery death was enough.

She locked her door behind them, and they strolled toward the atrium. 

Journalists were in her mind, and Isabelle thought of Ulysses Aitkin, the second-class passenger who detailed Beechcraft’s sins for the press. The event was open to all passengers, and she hoped he’d participate. 

She wanted to speak to the man. She could start by asking what brought him aboard the ship of someone he openly despised…for that man’s last voyage.

That’s it for this chapter! See you next week.

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