Read Online A Gentleman of Means by Shelley Adina - Free Book Online

He had accepted being treated like a janitor instead of an engineer, and had risen in the ranks for what appeared to be twenty years, his star finding its zenith in this third-floor office, this leather chair.
    Her star was out there in the flight paths of Count Zeppelin’s mighty ships, plying the winds and wheeling over time and tide alike.
    And therein lay her sin.
    “You will return to your bench,” Her Brucker said in a tone all the more dangerous for its quietness. “You will fulfill your assigned duties with patience and goodwill, and cease this meddling in levels of operation far above your pretty head. Am I clear, Fraulein Junior Engineer?”
    She could defy him. She could go over his head, too, and bring the shortcomings of the Flight Development Department to the attention of the vice president or even the count himself. But what would that net her except a widening circle of resentment, dislike, and quite possibly sabotage?
    “Quite clear,” she replied, her jaw tight with the need to restrain herself from slapping him. “Shall I take my reports with me?”
    “That will not be necessary.” With deliberate precision, he picked up each report by the corner and dropped it in the rubbish bin behind his desk. When he was finished, he folded his hands on its glossy surface and regarded her with something akin to triumph. “You are dismissed.”
    She turned on her heel and left, practically hissing with rage. If ever the thought had crossed her mind that she might show someone besides the count her sketches for the power-generating fuselage skin she was calling the Helios Membrane, she abandoned it now. They should never get her invention.
    Then she snorted, a sound of derision in the quiet laboratory. She could leave her engineering notebook on her bench for a month and nothing would happen to it. For it was clear that no one within two hundred feet would recognize what they were looking at.
     
    *
     
    That evening, while the girls were preparing their assignments for the next day, and Alice and Jake had gone back to
Swan
to see whether Ian could be persuaded to take some nourishment, Claire sipped her thimble of port and debated whether or not to approach Count von Zeppelin.
    “You are a man,” she said at last to Andrew. “If you were in my position, what would you do?”
    Andrew laid down his pencil and let the drawing he was working on roll itself up. “That is precisely the difficulty, my dear. I could not be in your position. There is a reason I maintain my own laboratory in Orpington Close, shabby and smelling of fish and mud though it might be. I am the sort of man who must be his own master—even more so now, since James’s departure from this world.”
    She gazed at him. “I have always wondered what brought two men of such differing temperaments together. I could not imagine how you would have found companionship in one another’s company.”
    “I would not call it companionship,” he reflected. “Certainly not friendship. I should call it rather a shared goal, with skills complementary to one another that made it possible to attain that goal.”
    With a sigh, Claire put the tiny glass on the table at her elbow. “It distresses me that I find none of those things at the Zeppelin Airship Works. And I had such high hopes of it—of finding like minds with mutually agreeable goals. What shall I do if I am like you, Andrew, and unable to call men of lesser capability master?”
    “There you go, being arrogant and self-aggrandizing again.”
    “I know,” she said sadly. “It is becoming quite a failing in my character. I am glad to find a similar flaw in yours, otherwise I should be in danger of thinking you quite perfect.”
    At this point the drawings were abandoned altogether and Claire rejoiced in the affections of a man whose attentions gave her as much pleasure as his conversation. She was reminded again that if she did not pay more attention to her wedding plans, she would be