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speak for her in the men’s clubs. He’d accepted because he’d seen it was his best chance to get to know her.
    But now, the governor had agreed that discussions on the political future of the Swan River Colony would be held in settings where women could also participate, and Esme had released him from his spokesman’s role.
    He ought to have been using his freedom to focus on his work, but he’d discovered love and concentration didn’t mix. He kept wondering what the heck Esme would get up to next.
    Just last week she’d signed up to take dirigible pilot lessons. No respectable woman flew a dirigible. Those dangerous aircraft were purely for sky pirates.
    Esme just kept pushing the boundaries.
    Women! Who could understand them?
    He picked up the packet of papers he’d thrown on the desk. Poor Gupta. Jed suspected he well knew that Lajli’s pursuer wanted back the money she’d stolen—and that she was likely to be highly resistant to that idea. She’d probably spent most of the money buying passage to the Swan River Colony. The papers were a diversion while Lajli worked on her evasion techniques.
    Still, he’d promised to look at them, and he was curious why Gupta had sought his advice. He laughed under his breath. It would be ironic if Gupta expected him to know how to handle women.
    Was Esme right? Were the townsfolk waiting to see a performance of The Taming of the Shrew?
    Darn interfering busybodies. Their interest was making her more skittish.
    He sat in the room’s sole armchair drawn up to the fire. The oxblood leather of its right arm was cracked, and Mrs. Hall hid the deficiency with matching antimacassars crocheted in vile orange and brown wool. But the chair was comfortable.
    Jed unfolded the papers, blinked and angled them to catch the firelight. At first he thought the writing was in a foreign language, but one or two words popped out at him, waves and tone. He squinted and recognized vibrations.
    It was difficult writing, a cramped fist that a graphologist would label secretive. Even the diagrams were odd. He turned one page sideways. They looked to be made up of a random collection of parts from musical devices. An elongated phonograph trumpet lay near a side-section view of a music-box reel.
    He deciphered two more words, Kali’s Scream, and then, with increasing interest, The British Raj shall dance, crashing to its knees, when Kali screams.
    “Surely it isn’t possible.” But he switched on the gas lighting and moved to his desk, pushing aside the unfinished letter to his mother and lining up a fresh sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Slowly, disbelievingly, he deciphered the blueprints and notes, while the grandfather clock in the hall below gravely chimed the hours.
    Fascinating. Since he was an inventor, the science of the device laid out in the blueprints intrigued him. As a man…he smiled. Lajli’s stolen papers held definite possibilities.
    A yawn caught him by surprise. He stood and stretched cramped muscles. Bending, he added another log to the fire, then leaned against the mantelpiece and watched the flames greedily embrace it.
    The sap crackled and snapped. All through history, fire had been the symbol of hell, a force of terrible destruction and suffering. But if these papers weren’t the ravings of a lunatic, then there existed the potential for a new hell, an inferno—no, a volcano—of sound. There existed the means and the will to devastate lives.
    Except he didn’t believe them. Oh, the theory sounded superficially plausible, but if one wanted an explosion, the answer was dynamite. No, the value of the papers lay in something else entirely… Handled properly, they were an invitation to adventure.
    Forget roses. He was going to give Esme a mystery.

Chapter Three
    Esme handed Mrs. Ayesha Dam a screwdriver and watched her friend replace the back of the clock she’d just repaired. An individualist in her own quiet way, Ayesha alternated between days she wore a sari and