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.”