An Imperfect Princess (5 page)

He looked around
the room at the sad empty beakers on a countertop where he had recreated an
experiment with ether, but had not been able to progress any further with it. 
The old stone walls were chilly at night, and the candles were too weak to
provide enough illumination to completely light the room this late.  Although
small, the tiny windows near the ceiling faced the south and provided light
during the day.  That was the best time to work, and when he was able, he stole
down into the basement, forbidding anyone from interrupting him while he tried
desperately to hold on to his dreams.

Sometimes it seemed
as if the only person who still believed in him was Mr. Lassell, who had called
him one of the most promising young scientists at the university and had given
him the beautiful telescope last month as a means of encouraging him to keep
trying.

Well, all
right.  Perhaps he wasn’t destined to contribute to steam technology, or to
chemistry, or to physics.  Perhaps he was better off sticking to the stars,
where untold discoveries still awaited them.  He had a feeling that there was
much more to the universe than they realized, and if he could contribute to
science in that respect... he’d be satisfied.

The old steward
Wilkins greeted him first thing the next morning, with word that a shipwreck
had washed up on shore.  Wilkins had returned with him to Cornwall, closing up
the townhouse at Cambridge on his own initiative.

“Another one? 
That’s the second time this year. Great, that is
another
letter I shall
have to write.”  The young man rubbed his head, mussing his slicked back hair. 
The pomade was sticky.  His valet despaired of ever getting the fashionable
wave to work; his hair was too bushy and refused to stay fixed for long.

 All rights of
salvage for shipwrecks from the coast of Cornwall belonged to the Prince of
Wales.  That meant he must inform the Crown of the incident, even if no one
bothered to claim the salvage.  “Thank you Wilkins. I’ll examine it after
breakfast.”

“Understood, my
lord.”  Wilkins bowed, and he went off to go do whatever things were required
to run the estate.  James felt a rush of gratefulness. When he had returned
from London with two bereaved girls in tow, the older man had taken them all
under his wing.   James had known little about running an estate.  His father
had been in his prime, in good health, and showed no reason for any of them to be
worried about his fate.  Wilkins, who had been old even when James was a boy,
had helped them add some order to a disordered world.

“Good morning,
ladies,” he said to the girls, who were already sitting at the breakfast
table.  Both were early risers.

“Good morning,
James,” Clarissa replied politely. She picked at her breakfast with her usual
birdlike appetite.  She often cut the food up and shoved it around the plate,
but he rarely saw her actually eat much of it.  He supposed that if one’s major
activity during the day was staring at fashion plates, one did not work up much
hunger.

“Any more news
on our fireball from last night?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

“Mitsy says that
the boys in the stables believe it was a sign from the heavens,” Marilyn said. 
She then bit into a piece of toast too widely, earning her a gentle chastisement
from Clarissa for the unladylike bite.

“A sign of
what?”  James shook his head.  “It’s a sign that a piece of debris from space
has hit the Earth, nothing more.”  He sighed and started to serve himself from
the piles of food in the country breakfast before him.  “Now, the shipwreck,
that is going to be far more interesting.”   He paused and briefly prayed for
anyone who had been aboard when it sank.  It seemed that as long as he lived in
Cornwall, the sea would taunt him with death.

“They say the
ship fell from the sky!”

“That’s
impossible.  Ships don’t fall from the sky.  We saw burning iron and rock in
the atmosphere last night.  Although, the bolide probably did fall in the
ocean.”  A thought tickled him.  “Perhaps it hit the ship...?”  In that case, he
would be surprised if there was any ship left to wash ashore.  “I’ll go take a
look at it later on.”

Marilyn put her
toast down.  “I’m coming with.”  For such a young girl, she could speak with
very firm and quiet authority, especially when she insisted that she saw a
unicorn or a mermaid.   She would plant her feet down, cross her arms or hug
the cat too tightly, and after that she would not be moved.  Often those
arguments ended up with her sent upstairs, where Mrs. Thomas tried desperately
to reason with her.

“Oh how
exciting, an outing to the beach.  I would like to come too, James.”  Clarissa,
her heart full of romanticism, clapped her hands together delicately.   She was
trying hard to be a good society lady, but sometimes she could not completely
hide her girlish enthusiasm. 

Well, why not? 
If there had been a major ship lost off the coast, he’d have heard of it
yesterday, so most likely it was nothing more than yet another fishing boat
that had drifted loose from the marina at St. Ives.  And if there was something
that fell from the sky and actually
caused
a shipwreck, it would
definitely bear a presentation to the Royal Society when he returned to London
for the upcoming season.  Perhaps he wasn’t going to be so out of his career
path, after all.

Wilkins appeared
again after breakfast, with confirmation that others had spotted the fireball
that had fallen over the sea, and that a strange boat had indeed washed up on
the beach.  The tenants on the land were sure
the ship had fallen from the
sky. The older gentleman said this with an air of disbelief. 

The Cornish
people weren’t as superstitious as their neighbors to the northeast, but even
then a perfectly valid scientific explanation might fall on deaf ears once they
settled into a belief.  The locals were as stubborn as Marilyn.

There was a
delay as Clarissa announced she needed to change from her morning gown into
something more suitable for a visit to the beach, at which point Marilyn said
she wanted to go down there in her finest dress.  Marilyn’s long suffering
governess explained that doing so would probably ruin the dress and that the
pinafore she was wearing would do just fine.  The child sulked in the foyer
while they waited for Clarissa to descend.

The four of them
marched toward the beach on the far edge of the lawn. As they walked, they were
greeted by a group of servants and farmers whose own curiosity had been piqued
by the rumors.

“It was a
fireball the likes I’ve never seen, my lord,” Jeremy Wright the stableman said,
gripping his cap and glancing nervously at the distant sea. “I reckon it must
have... well, it must have hit that little boat.  The windows were cracked from
what I could tell.” 

“I saw that
fireball as well.  It was just a normal shooting star.”

The older man
shook his head.  “No milord... I’ve seen those.  This was a giant ball of fire
from the sky.” He glanced up at the heavens, as if expecting another one to
fall upon them any moment.  “It was a sign from God in Heaven.”  He turned the
hat in his hands, bending the felt. “And I’ve never seen a boat like that
either.  It’s not Cornish.  I’m not even sure it’s English.”

James always
felt a bit out of place around his tenants.  His father and brother had been
beloved by the people here, and they had maintained an active involvement in
farming and fishing.  They had known everyone by name and could rattle off a
profession and their extended family without blinking.  James, on the other
hand, was still struggling to remember the difference between Mr. Wright the stableman
and Mr. Wright the cooper.

The ragtag group
picked their way down the stairs hewn into the stone wall that separated the
estate land from the beach proper.  They were greeted by yet another crowd of
curious onlookers, but none had dared to approach the ship until James was
there with them. 

The scene on the
beach before them was desolate.  A ship had indeed washed up on the shore,
fatally wounded, with a gaping hole in the side and cracked windows in the
front.  It was the most unusual boat any of them had seen; not a small craft,
but one that did not appear to have any decks or sails.

It did not occur
to anyone that it was not a boat.  It had clearly come from the ocean, had it
not?  Shipwrecks off the coast of Cornwall were all too common and there had
been exotic vessels before, although none quite as exotic as this.

“I reckon that
what we saw last night was a lightning ball that struck her, my lord,” another
one of the farmers said, scratching his head.  “Although it didn’t look like
any fireball I’ve seen afore.”

“Struck her and
stripped her of her mast and sails?”  The earl looked thoughtfully at the
wreckage in the distance.  Something about the ruined vessel was bothering
him.  It appeared to be made of
metal
, not wood, with glass fittings. 
The cargo hold was shallow, and he’d pay money to see it actually float even
when it didn’t have a ragged, pierced dent in the side.

“Well, let’s
have a closer look,” he said, and he began to pick his way down the footpath
that led to the beach below the cliffs.

He was very
afraid that whoever had been inside that boat had not escaped.  He had seen
dead bodies before; the medical sciences classes at Cambridge dealt with
cadavers routinely.  He had not wanted to see what a drowned person looked
like, however.  That hit far too close to home.

The craft looked
even stranger on closer inspection.  The men stopped short of it by a few feet,
at a loss of what to say. 

Marilyn had no
such qualms.  "Fairy!" she shouted gleefully and pointed inside the
hull.

“Marilyn, there
is no such thing as fairies,” her uncle reminded her sternly.  “And stay back,
or else I’ll have Mrs. Thomas escort you back to the house.”

No one wanted to
touch the sinister looking thing that was a boat and somehow not a boat. The
dark metallic hull gleamed dully in the rising sun.  The black glass encasing
the front of the vessel had shattered on one side, giving them a glimpse of the
interior.  James stepped forward, running his hands along the side.  It was
slick to the touch.

Holding his
breath, he peered inside and felt his heart stop.

“There’s someone
inside!”

The inaction
ended suddenly as all the men gathered around and tried to break the remaining shattered
glass from the front, allowing access to the person trapped inside.  It was
surprisingly strong, however, and it took several attempts. Finally, James
hauled himself on top of the hull and reached inside and pulled the body out,
grateful that it wasn’t a day old swollen corpse.  It was completely dry, with
a head full of fairly long brown hair and a nasty gash on its forehead.

“It’s a woman!”
someone cried from the small crowd.

“Aye,” James
said, amazed at the warm skin and the shallow breathing as he held her in his
arms.  “And she’s alive.”

She was dressed
almost like a man, in tight fitting trousers and a weskit.  A pair of large
goggles blocked much of her face from view.  Multiple pockets bulged with
mysterious objects.  A beautifully crafted pendant hung from her neck, at odds
with the rest of her appearance, but the fitted suit could not hide her tall
frame and shapely figure.  She was not very slender, but she wore her weight
well, and James had little trouble holding on to her as he slipped back down to
the beach.

“Let’s get her
to the house, quickly,” he said to everyone.  “The ship is off limits, since
its owner still seems to be alive.  You should return home. Excitement’s over.”

That of course
wasn’t true.  Shipwreck survivors were their own special kind of excitement. 
But they obeyed their lord’s wishes and followed him back up the hill to the
road that led to their farms and homes.

The woman’s skin
was a cool olive tone, and her hair appeared dark brown with an odd shimmer of
blue, perhaps a trick of the morning light.  One thing was clear, she was not
English.  Spanish? Greek? Italian?  He couldn’t tell from her features, which
were exotic, but very regular and even.  She was quite pretty, in fact.

“My lord, where
do you suppose she came from?”  Mrs. Thomas asked, peering at the young woman
he carried.

“I’m going to
guess from the continent, perhaps Italy,” the James said thoughtfully, voicing
his ruminations. 

They left the
boat, its mysterious origins forgotten in the excitement of having its occupant
alive.

Marilyn ran
ahead to fetch the housekeeper. When they arrived, half the staff was there to
meet them.  The woman was given to the care of the maids, who followed James’
instructions and removed the suit and put her in one of Clarissa’s old
nightgowns.  As the only person for miles with any medical training, however
little it was, he would have to take care of her himself until he could fetch
the doctor from St Ives.

The goggles came
off her head easily, and James gathered them along with her clothing and
jewelry while the maids fussed over her.  He left them alone, feeling a little
unsettled at the vulnerable expression on the stranger’s unconscious face.  She
was very young.

He took her
things to his study and began to examine the contents of her pockets, hoping to
find a clue as to her origin.  He could recognize nothing, although everything
appeared to be extremely well made, with seamless joins and shiny metals.  He
held up a clear piece of glass with rounded edges and shook his head. 
Mysterious didn’t even begin to cover it. 

The goggles had
strange wires poking out from them.  They appeared to be made out of a soft
black rubber, but odd glass buttons and protuberances made them look quite
strange to his eye. 

This was not how
he had envisioned his morning, he thought ruefully, as he looked at the objects
arranged on his desk.  He was supposed to be writing letters.  He was supposed
to be going through the stack of paperwork he had ignored for the last week. 
He was supposed to arrange for a modiste from London to create Clarissa’s debut
wardrobe.  There were accounts to tally and numerous other tasks associated
with governing a prosperous estate–or so he had been told by an impatient
Wilkins.

Ah, but they
could wait. 
Science
called.

He fingered the
pendant, admiring the workmanship.  The stone itself was a magnificent black
opal, the likes of which had never seen. Dozens of small diamonds set in
silver–or perhaps something else–flanked the stone.  Platinum? The diamond
earrings matched it. The set was worth thousands of pounds, and its presence
indicated that they were either dealing with someone of affluent means or a
thief.

While he perused
the objects rescued from the discarded coverall, James did not notice that he
had a visitor in his room.

Aijo, having
watched her mistress be rescued by humanoids, had immediately been spotted by
the child.  She had gone into hiding, dimming herself until she was almost
invisible, and watched as the humans carried off Eneria, hopefully to tend to
her and not to offer her as a sacrifice to their gods.  You never knew with
primitives. They had left the ship on the beach, however, and Aijo suspected
they didn’t quite know what to do with it.