The Steam Walker (Steam World Book 1), page 5
“That’s all?” Father cried. “Why not ask for gold to rain from Heaven, child? Have ye any idea how long that’ll take?”
“If we get some help from the shipwrights, less than four days,” I told him.
“What?” He was startled by my number. “Which shipwrights?”
“MacArdle, Henry, and Stoops,” I told him. “I showed them the plans and they say they can have it built in three days.”
“So why did you say four?”
“Because on the fourth day, we mount the boiler and the engine,” I told him.
“Four days?” He asked me, catching my eyes. When I nodded he blew out a sigh of relief. “That’s good because Hamish says his’ll be ready in five.” His expression changed once more. “And how much will your ‘friends’ be wanting for all this work?”
“I’ve arranged the work on exchange,” I told him.
“Exchange for what?”
“Well, they’ve thought of a few ways they could use the engine,” I told him. “I allowed as how if they’d help, I could build them an engine for a mere forty guineas.”
“Forty guineas!” Jamie said.
“And they’d pay that?”
“They’ve some notion to hook it up to power a ship,” I said with a shrug. He gave me a stern look and I sighed. “Well, all right, if you must know, I might have suggested the paddle idea to them but it seemed simple enough and they were taken with the notion.”
“Forty guineas!” Jamie repeated. He turned to our father. “Even if we lose with Hamish, we’d break even!”
“And you can bet that if the engine works as planned, there’ll be demand for more,” father agreed. He pursed his lips for a moment, then nodded. “Very well, we’ll go with your friends.” He shook a finger at me. “But I mean what I say, from now on, take someone with you.”
“I’ll take Bessie,” I said.
“No, she’s too small,” father said with a shake of his head.
“I’ll find someone.”
“Maybe you should stay here,” father said with a frown. “Your nautical friends don’t need you and the yard’s safe enough.”
“What if I find someone?”
“Someone Hamish and his men can’t handle?” Father asked doubtfully. “No, they’d pay a lot now to have you out of their way.”
#
“Father’s right, you know,” Jamie said as we got ready for bed. He must have seen my mulish look. He saw the way I flushed and laughed. “Ah, Danni, you’re as open as a book to me!”
“I know a way,” Bessie spoke up from where she sat on the stool. I was brushing her hair; I’d insisted on it after we’d gotten rid of the lice — I was not going to have that sort of vermin back again — and while she’d resisted at first, she’d grown to like it. I suppose it wasn’t proper, like the noblewomen would have said but it was the way I wanted it. Better a clean maid than a dirty me, I thought.
“How?” I said, pulling on her hair in my irritation. She winced in pain. “Sorry.”
“It’s just that... well, you know, there are the ones who sleep by the forge,” Bessie said.
“We ought to know, you were one,” Jamie said.
“Well, there’s enough of them to keep an eye on you,” Bessie said.
“Hamish MacAllister would skewer them sure as look at them,” Jamie said dismissively.
“Only if he saw them,” Bessie said slyly, turning her head out of my grasp to look Jamie in the eyes. “All they have to do is keep an eye on our miss, and let us know.”
“It’d be too late then,” Jamie said. “They’d be thinking of hauling her straight off.”
“Well then, they could interfere,” Bessie said.
“Why would they want to help?”
“If you’d let them stay at the forge over the winter, miss, that’d save a lot of them,” Bessie allowed.
“Is there one of them you’re sweet on, little Bessie?” Jamie asked tauntingly.
“Jamie!” I said, turning around and swatting at him with the brush. I turned back again just as quickly and said to Bessie, “It’s a brilliant idea. Now sit straight, I’ve got to finish your hair.”
Bessie was a long time turning around so when she did, I leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “He’s just a silly boy!”
Bessie sniffed at that. I could tell that, to her at least, Jamie was the biggest and best boy in her whole world.
Chapter Four
“Danni! Danni! Danni, wake up!” Jamie’s voice was loud and right in my ear.
“Go ‘way, Jamie!”
“Danni, get up now! There’re soldiers, lots of them!” Bessie said. “Your father says to wear your dress.”
Drat! I flumped in the bed and dragged my eyes open. Jamie was on one side, Bessie on the other, glaring at him and holding my best dress in her hands.
“James Walker, ye know better than to be present when a lady’s dressing!” Bessie said like she was a lady’s proper maid. Jamie started to answer, thought better of it and left. “Quick, ye’ve got to get this on!”
“Soldiers?” I mumbled as I allowed her to force me into the dress and lace me up.
“Aye, so many of them!” Bessie said. “First there were the English but they ran and then there was the Scottish.” Her voice dropped to a whisper of awe. “They say that Bonnie Prince Charlie himself is here!”
“Oh, that’s nice,” I mumbled. “But we’ve got to get to work, I can’t wear a dress today.”
I was so tired because the night before we’d managed to mount both the boiler and the engine on the platform. All that was needed now was the rigging of the gear and we’d be ready.
It had been a tough several days, mostly without sleep and one particularly nervous day as we tested the boiler to ten atmospheres. Jamie insisted on being the one to do the test, even though I swore it was my job.
“And what sort of chances would ye have if ye were scalded by a burst?” Jamie had demanded.
“No worse than you!”
“Ach, but I’m not looking for a husband, am I?” Jamie had demanded. “It’s my job, Danni, and I know how to handle it.”
Father agreed and together, we’d worked out the best way to approach it. We had Jamie dressed in an oilskin and arranged for him to rush behind a stout wall as the boiler reached full pressure. Of course, we’d tested it at one atmosphere and slowly at all the other pressures up to the final full ten atmospheres.
I’d nearly cried with relief when I heard the plug blow and heard Jamie’s shout of triumph. “We did it, Danni, we did it!”
Hooking up the engine after had been time-consuming, tiring work but nothing as worrying as the boiler test.
Our shipwrights had been most impressed with the results, particularly when I gave them a low-pressure demonstration of the full engine.
“That’s only four atmospheres,” I told them. “We’ll run it at five when we’ve got it hooked to the legs.”
“Well, missy, the sooner the better,” Mr. MacArdle said.
“Aye,” Mr. Henry agreed, looking oddly at the engine and boiler. To me he said, “But lass, why not run it hotter?”
“For safety, Mr. Henry,” I told him. “We don’t know how the boiler will behave over long periods of time.”
“The best way is to just try,” Mr. Henry said to me.
“Have you ever been scalded, Mr. Henry?” Jamie said, moving over and pulling up his sleeve to reveal a nasty red scar. “That’s what a regular boiler can do.”
“That’s not so bad,” Mr. Henry said, eyeing the scar critically.
“The steam in our boiler is five times worse, Mr. Henry,” I told him. “And that’s only at five atmospheres.”
Mr. Henry grunted at that and we turned to our proper task of assembling the walker.
#
I wore my dress all that day and the next but once they told me that the soldiers had left for the south of the city, I was back in trousers. Nothing had been done in the past two days and I didn’t want MacAllister to beat us.
The walker was all set up, the boiler and engine were set in their place at the back. At the front we’d have to rig some ballast to counterweight them.
“In future, that’ll be cargo, of course,” Mr. Henry had predicted sagely.
Our supply of coal was set in a bin to the side of the boiler.
From the engine snaked several large cables.
“Are they strong enough?” I’d asked when the shipwrights had first brought them.
“Strong enough?” Mr. MacArdle had laughed. “Lass, why with any one of them cables you could lift a ship of war!”
“Not quite what I had in mind, Mr. MacArdle, but I suppose they’ll do.”
“If anything’s going to break, miss, it won’t be the cables,” Mr. Henry assured me. “Of course,” he said, glancing around the tall platform at the cables, “first something’s got to work, hasn’t it?”
“We’ve still the rigging to complete,” I reminded him.
“Aye, and it’s an amazement in itself,” Mr. Stoops said.
“Wouldn’t it work in a ship?” I asked, gesturing to my sketches and the cables.
“Lass, have ye ever heard of a ship that walked?” Mr. Stoops replied. He knew I hadn’t; no one had. “So how can ye be sure all this will work?”
“We’ll learn in the trying, Mr. Stoops,” I told him, pointing toward a cable. “That one goes to the near foreleg.”
“The what?”
“Port forrard beam, Stoopie, the lass means the port forrard beam,” Mr. Henry told him, glancing down at me and nodding with a wink.
“And why didn’t she say so, then?”
“Ach, she’s only a wee lass, Stoopie, she’s no knowledge of the sea, has she?”
“Probably just as well, she’d be taming the very waves next,” Mr. Stoops said, dragging the cable to the near foreleg.
“This is a walking horse, Mr. Stoops,” I said to him, “it’s best to think of it that way.” I pointed to the near foreleg and named it, then the far foreleg, the near hind leg and, finally, the far hind leg.
“What a daft set o’ names!” Mr. Stoops allowed, even as he followed my instructions on the setting of the cable.
Mr. Gillie had worked it out a treat: we had cables to raise the calf beam and the thigh beam, cables to lower both, and cables to move the whole leg. That was easy enough, the trick was in building the gearing that moved the whole leg and all four legs in the right order. Worse, we had to gear the whole to allow us to reverse and to turn, to raise the front or the rear of the platform.
Mr. Pugh and I spent a lot of time casting the gears, Mr. Gillie threw up his hands after figuring out the easiest parts of the walk; Mr. Pugh, Jamie, and I figured out the rest.
When started, the engine would first drive nothing. It would take throwing a lever to get it engaged and then, as the steam rose, it would start moving forward faster and faster. Neither Jamie nor I were quite sure how fast so I’d decided we’d start with only four atmospheres — the greater the pressure the greater the power and speed of the engine.
To stop all that was needed was to throw the lever again. Turning was a slower affair — we’d rigged a tiller which would alter the rate at which the legs moved, slower to the left when the tiller pointed left, slower to the right when the tiller pointed right. For reverse, we had to throw a different lever which reversed the order of the legs and their movement.
Of course, all that was in theory.
If I was right, when she was moving, the walker would only need a stoker for the boiler and a gearman for the motion.
“And this will beat MacAllister’s Scuttler, will it?” My father had asked late last night as we finished the last of the rigging.
“It should do, it’s got four times more power,” I told him.
MacAllister’s apprentices had been whipped raw in his fury to get his walker done first — they’d just tested theirs the day before.
“Ye’ve got two days, Walker!” A drunken MacAllister had declared triumphantly that evening when he’d visited, eyeing our walker intently — clearly disturbed that it looked nothing at all like his quickly-named Scuttler.
I was glad that the Scuttler worked, it proved most of my fears baseless, but it was just as ugly and ungainly as I’d first thought it might be. It worked by wobbling from leg to leg and I was pretty sure it could neither turn nor reverse — something that Mr. MacAllister clearly hadn’t considered when he’d reiterated the terms of the wager — “The first one to walk from the far side of the Grass Market to the end and back.”
It was clear he hadn’t thought of how his Scuttler was going to turn around or reverse its way.
#
“I’ve got to do this, father!” I cried the next morning as he grabbed at me as I clambered up the side of the walker.
“Let Jamie do it, you stay down here.”
“It takes two, father and we’re the lightest,” I told him. I saw his look and explained, “We don’t know how slow or fast the walker will be.”
“And we can jump and roll,” Jamie said from his position high above on the walker platform. He gestured to ropes that were draped around the sides. “Or clamber down the safety lines.”
“Bessie —”
“Bessie knows nothing of gears or steam,” I told him, not bothering to add that Bessie, wise lass, was no doubt trembling in the darkest part of the root cellar against just such an occasion.
Father sighed, and with a boost, lifted me up to the platform.
“Remember, everything can be repaired except your bones and your skull,” he called up to me.
“We’ll remember,” I promised, nudging Jamie and rushing to my place by the gears. “We’re going with four atmospheres.”
“Good,” father said, moving off to stand by the three shipwrights. Mr. Pugh came through the arches at that moment, with Mr. Gillie in tow. “Are we too late?”
“Just building steam now,” father called to him, gesturing for them to join their group.
In a voice that carried only to my ears, Jamie said, “This had better work.”
“I know, I know,” I said, looking at the boiler and gesturing for him to shovel in more coal. I shouldn’t have worried, the pressure rose and rose. Mr. Pugh had figured out a simple way to measure the pressure, based on my idea with the weights and we’d switched from my rather poor idea to his so that I could now see that the boiler was over three atmospheres and steadily rising.
“I’m turning on the engine,” I called out loud, putting on the thick insulated gloves and moving to turn the large valve that separated the boiler from the engine.
I jumped as the engine started and then began turning, faster and faster, the rod going back and forth, back and forth.
With a silent prayer, I called out, “I’m engaging the legs.”
I slid the lever that connected the engine to the leg cables and the running gear and then I jumped over to the tiller.
If we were wrong, if the cables snapped —
— a creaking noise startled me and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jamie jump —
— and then the platform lurched.
“It’s going to fall!” My father cried. “Jump!”
“No,” I shouted back, “It’s working!”
The next leg moved and the platform leveled. And then another leg and another and —
“You’re going to crash!” Mr. Pugh shouted.
— we were headed to the archway and we were going to get jammed.
I pushed hard on the tiller and slowly, very slowly, we turned. It wasn’t enough.
I jumped back to the power lever and kicked it so that the legs were free of the engine.
With a lurch we stopped.
“Whew!” Jamie called. “That was close!”
“Now what are you going to do?” Mr. Stoops called, looking at our precarious position. “You’re too close to the entrance and you’re not lined up.”
“Ach, that’s easy,” I said, kicking the lever over, “we’re going to back up!”
In truth, I held my breath as the platform slowly started moving again and only let it out in a silent curse as I realized that I’d left us turning the wrong way. I raced back to the tiller, pushed it over and slowly we backed up, turning to line up with the archway.
“You need to go slower!” Mr. Henry called from below.
“Yes,” I said, glancing around at the boiler and the engine. I hadn’t thought of that, I’d been too worried about going at all. And then — I grabbed the thick gloves and turned the valve halfway between the engine and the boiler.
“Danni, are ye daft?” Jamie called, eyes wide but we slowed down. “Och, you’re daft all right.”
I smiled at him, kicked the lever over again and the walker started to move forward at about half the earlier speed. I could still work the tiller, so I lined us up with the archway.
“Danni, no!” Father called as soon as he saw what I’d planned.
“But we’ve got to know if she can do it!” I called.
“No, you’ve done your part, Danni, it’s time to hand it over to me and the others,” father said. “Now stop the engine and let us get up.”
Jamie cocked his head at me to say that father had the right of it. I couldn’t argue, so instead, I kicked the power lever away and called down, “Come on up!”
#
“Now, I want to take it slow, Danni,” father said. “Can we do that?”
“I’ll turn the steam back down,” I said, moving to get the gloves.
“No, let me,” father said. When I gave him a hurt look, he explained, “I need to know how to do this so there’ll be no doubt who’s in charge.”
“Remember MacAllister,” Jamie muttered at my back.
