Read Online A Flight of Fancy by Laurie Alice Eakes - Free Book Online

thanks to a young physician Father called in, who insisted on cleansing tinctures that burned with their high content of spirits, then the burning soothed with applications of cold compresses. Ice compresses. The apothecary and other physicians told him he was beyond his reason and her death would be on his head. But she lived. The burns healed. Her life returned.
    But not to normal. Normal would be marriage and children. Not for Cassandra now. She would have books and balloons. Those gave her a reason to live—the prospect of flying especially now that walking was painful still.
    “I will fly from the Dale to York,” she vowed in a murmur. “I will view York Cathedral from above.”

    If the wind wasn’t fickle and sent her across the Irish Sea to Belfast instead.
    She smiled at the notion and made her way to bed. She would think of aeronautics instead of Whittaker. In time, as Father predicted, he would forget her in favor of another girl, a pretty, vapid girl who would make him an excellent countess and a mother to his heir and a spare.
    Her mind drifted like a balloon on a summer breeze, but sleep eluded her. Her legs itched and burned. Barbara snored. Honore kept murmuring an incomprehensible name in her sleep, probably the name of the man who had come too close to ruining her in the spring. Poor child. To think she had loved a man with a pretty face and some charm, who used her for his own ends and—
    The outer door closed, then the one into the room Father shared with Mama. Cassandra endured the need to lie still in the broad bed for another quarter hour, according to the chiming of a distant church tower clock, and then rose, donned her dressing gown, and entered the parlor. One candle still guttered in the candelabra on the table. Hearing nothing from her parents’ room, Cassandra lit the other candles and carried the branch of lights to a small desk in the corner, where pens, ink, and paper lay for the convenience of the best guests who could afford to purchase a set of rooms for the night.
    She drew one sheet to her, checked the trim of a pen, and opened the bottle of ink. She did not have Lydia’s skill with drawing likenesses of people or even the scenery around her. Cassandra drew machinery, things that coiled through her brain like those electricity machines. Or her brain worked through formulas like recipes poured out of that pretty little cook who had graced Bainbridge House for several weeks in the spring. She wasan artist. Cassandra was a chemist. They’d once discussed how the two weren’t all that different. Only the ingredients changed.
    “Vitriol versus vinegar,” Cassandra murmured.
    Deciding the paper was too small for a good detailed design, she began to work on one of her formulas, a way to make the silk of a balloon more airtight. She knew many used a mixture of birdlime, turpentine, and linseed oil, but that could prove highly flammable and needed more than one coat on either side of the silk. Doing so would take days, and how would she manage to find a place where she could boil a pot of something so odorous, let alone dangerous? Not to mention stretch the silk for the balloon. Surely it would make the fabric too stiff to properly inflate and deflate as needed. Elastic gum, perhaps? No, heavier still than the birdlime. She would adjust the amounts of the birdlime concoction first, since it was so common. Perhaps no linseed oil? Birdlime was oily enough. Yes, that might work. She still encountered the difficulty of where to melt it . . .

    Her musings and calculations kept her awake through the night so that she slept in the coach, annoying Honore, who wanted to chatter about how much she would enjoy autumn in the country.
    “Lies,” Cassandra managed to mutter at one time. “You will despise it.”
    She would too, if she ended up confined to afternoon calls from dull neighbors or evening parties or, worse, that favorite country house party activity of acting out a play.
    “I