“Mr. Bishop!” Mary Ann called. “I think you should get up here.”
Neville Bishop’s head popped through a porthole. He was half-shaved and she could see that he was annoyed at being disturbed. The dog was barking, the woman was screaming, and the captain was storming up the gangplank, ready to take back his ship. The old man was in his 60s, but the muscles in his neck and shoulders were bulging and he looked ready to kill.
Bishop’s two dockyard thugs appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and were on him like dogs mauling a deer, one on either side, bearing down on him with all their weight. It was the first time Mary Ann had witnessed real violence in her life and it horrified her to see their knees banging against his groin, their thumbs gouging for his eyes and their fingers around his throat. But the captain kept on going, fueled by sheer strength and anger.
She sensed rather than saw Bishop coming up behind her, turned, and gasped. Bishop had his silver-headed cane back over his head, holding it with both hands like a club, ready to brain the old man.
“No!” she screamed, and grabbed the cane just before he swung it.
Bishop turned toward her, the lather on his face making him look like a demented hydrophobic, and raised his hand to hit her. She flinched, knowing the blow was coming.
"Bishop!" yelled Harding.
Bishop stopped just before his fist reached her face. Then all the violence drained away as suddenly as it had started. The two thugs held the captain, one by each arm, and lifted him up by the elbows so that his heels were slightly off the ground. All he could do was squirm and yell and kick like a hanged man.
“I let you rent my boat,” he spoke hoarsely in broken English, “not destroy it! You told me that you would take care of my Bethanie. You gave me your word.”
“That is not dispositive,” said Bishop, brandishing his silver-headed cane in the old man’s face. “You read the lease...or should have. It gives me the purview to make whatever changes I see fit.”
It was obvious from the captain’s face that he didn’t understand a single word of Bishop’s speech.
"Harding!” Bishop yelled. “Explain to this French idiot what I just said.”
Harding shrugged and turned to the captain. “He cheated you,” he said in French, pointing at Bishop. Harding’s words set off a new burst of violence.
The old captain must have known that the odds were against him, but he couldn’t retreat, particularly in front of his wife. He made a last effort, wrenched his right arm free and grabbed for Bishop, who jumped back.
The bodyguard who still had a good hold swung him around efficiently—as if he were a drunken bum at the bar—while the other came up from behind and pushed. They may have wanted to send him down the gangplank, or perhaps they just didn’t care. The old man went sprawling off the edge of the gangway. He hit so hard that the planking cracked and he fell headfirst into the water. Mary Ann heard the splash, and then more screams from his wife.
The two thugs didn’t bother to see if he was alive. They went below deck. Bishop finished wiping his lather off, looked at Mary Ann’s shocked face, and told her to get back to work. She saw with relief that the captain was wading up onto the quay, soaked and exhausted.
His wife was still on the quay, but now her chant had changed. She was moaning, “Mon chien, mon chien.”
Mary Ann looked where she was pointing and saw that the dog had leaped over the side and was being strangled by its collar. Harding walked over, broke off the stake, and the dog fell into the water. It swam to shore to join the captain and his wife. The three of them stood there, a portrait of the dispossessed. The fishermen on the quay sat with their long bamboo poles in the water. None of them moved a muscle. What must they think of us? said Mary Ann to herself.
Chapter Sixteen: The Night of the Storm—June 22
Although she wouldn’t admit it to Harding, the reason Mary Ann wouldn’t leave was that she wanted to finish the aeroplane. Every time she stretched a piece of varnished cotton over a wing, fitted a strut or tightened a belt on the motor, she remembered her father Samuel, and how they had laughed at him. Then she would look at Saint-Cloud. Win or lose, she wanted Alain to be proud of her.
As time went on, it was obvious that she had absorbed more wisdom from her father accidentally than Bishop had ever accumulated on purpose. Bishop knew only the mechanical things. His idea was to make everything big and put rivets in it; a large enough motor would push anything off the boat. But he didn’t understand the subtleties of flight the way she did: the need for balance, the lightness of wings, and the energy of motion.
She knew, for example, that to raise their machine cleanly into the sky, the wings would have to be curved and set at exactly the right angle. That way the air rushing by above the wing would go faster than the air below, creating a vacuum above the wing and lifting it up. A Swiss had figured that out more than 100 years ago.
But she didn’t know what that angle should be. She looked in her father’s old logbooks. Many of the notes were in equations. Mathematical formulae were everywhere, along with jotted notes and, occasionally, exclamation points. She concentrated on these last.
Mary Ann had studied French in finishing school until she was 17 and it helped her survive in Paris. But, like most girls, she had been taught only the most basic math. She needed to know more. She rummaged through Samuel’s papers until she saw what she was looking for: a letter from a French professor of mathematics at the Sorbonne that her father had kept all these years because he was so proud of it, a letter praising his work.
The Sorbonne was full of big, intimidating buildings with high columns and arches. She found the professor’s office in a tower overlooking the flagstone courtyard of a walled medieval castle. She was so nervous that she didn’t even knock, just waited outside the door until she saw him. Would he show her the meaning of those formulae?
“Mais oui,” he said, smiling. He was an elderly man with thick glasses and white mustaches. He thought it enchanting that a woman, a mere slip of a girl, really, would want to learn such things.
She sat and listened politely as he explained. She smiled whenever he looked up, nodded when she was supposed to, and left without knowing a thing more than when she came.
So she went back. This time he was less polite, but he explained it again as he rushed across the courtyard to class, followed by a covey of his students. He made a comment about how women’s minds weren’t meant for such things, and everyone, except Mary Ann, laughed. Once again she tried to do her father’s equations for herself. Tried all night. And failed.
So she went back again.
This time the professor wasn’t friendly at all. He rolled his eyes and called her “a little fool who would be better off having babies.” But she stood stubbornly in the doorway.
Finally he took her to a classroom and scratched out her father’s equations on an old blackboard. The chalk dust made her eyes water, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing any tears. He hurried through his explanation while she desperately scribbled notes. Then he told her not to bother him again and walked out.
But this time she got it. And that night, when she read and understood one of Samuel’s formulae, she felt like a child who has spoken its first word.
With her new language she began to learn what Samuel had done. Most men were groundlings; scuttling moles who hurried from one meaningless place to another with their heads down. They understood life only in two dimensions. They were condemned to the flat earth.
But her father had comprehended it in three. Like Alain, he had envisioned a new world above them, a turbulent sea of tides, currents and eddies more expansive than the ocean, a world constantly in motion, constantly changing. To survive in that world either the wind flowed around you or you flowed through it. “In the air—as in life,” Samuel had written, “one is condemned to go forward.” She recalled those birds that lived in Alain’s Region of Fire, the birds who flew forever, and now she understood.
To stop was to fall. And to fall was to die.
With her new language Mary Ann began to see a different world, a world of relationships. The Eiffel Tower was an inverted bridge extending up into the sky, its struts and openness designed to both fight the wind and forgive it by letting it pass through. The windmills that churned throughout Paris were nothing more than big propellers. And riding a bicycle required the same sense of balance as flying would. It was all part of The Great Equation. Understanding that was her father’s last, best gift to her.
She started explaining to the others how it had to be done. Bishop’s two thugs didn’t listen, but one day shortly after the fight with the captain they were gone. She suspected they left when the money ran out.
Harding would help when he was around, but he was often out at the bars, places with strange names like “Men Without Women,” “The Lavatory Club” and “The Wrath of God.” He didn’t seem to care anymore. Was it because he wasn’t getting paid? Or was there another reason? she wondered.
Even Bishop seemed depressed, poring over his books, perhaps trying to calculate how much of the million francs he would need to save himself.
That left it up to Mary Ann to find the perfect angle for the wings. Theory was one thing, but she needed to experiment. She needed a wind similar to the speed of the plane when it was traveling through the air. But where would you find such a wind in Paris?
* * *
Then one night the wind came to her.
On that night late in June, Mary Ann was sleeping an unsettled sleep when she felt the boat rocking. Then she heard the wind howling and the portholes rattling. A summer storm was attacking the city.
She struggled into her clothes and ran on deck. The aeroplane was almost completed now, with the wings ready to be set into place, but she needed two men to help her. Bishop was on board. But where was Harding? Probably in that hole-in-the-wall room of his near the train station.
She searched in vain for a fiacre to take her there. When one did come by, the driver ignored her outstretched hand, and instead whipped his horse and held his coat tight around him as he drove by in search of shelter. Then the rain hit, billowing her dress and blowing her hair back. Since it was only a few blocks away, she decided to run.
She dashed down the empty streets past the empty, unlighted churches and through the maze of apartment buildings, ignoring the crack of lightning and the rain that drenched her, knowing that she had to come back to the boat while the wind was still high.
She ran into his building, past the concierge’s apartment and up the stairs to what looked like Harding’s door. Did she have the right one? She knocked, uncertain, and heard muffled noises, then Harding’s voice. Good, he was there. She knocked again.
Harding answered the door in his nightshirt and told her to come in and get warm. She caught a glimpse of bare buttocks as he struggled with his long johns. He seemed groggy.
Then she heard a woman’s voice say, “Who is it?”
The room had a strange musky odor. As Mary Ann came in, her dress plastered to her body, a big redhead was getting out of the bed, and she was nude. She pointed an accusing finger at Mary Ann.
“What is this thing?” she said. Her nipples jiggled as she pointed at Mary Ann, as if they were accusing her of something too.
“This, my dear Marquesa, is a friend of mine,” said Harding. “She has asked me to perform a small service for her.”
The woman loomed over Mary Ann, who was soaked and shivering.
“And what kind of ‘service’ does this little tramp, this piece of baggage, need?” she sneered.
Mary Ann saw a sudden flash of anger on Harding’s face. “That is something that a horizontale such as yourself wouldn’t understand. Now get out!”
The Marquesa tried to slap him, but Harding caught her arm in mid-swing. With his other hand he gathered up her silk dress, parasol, undergarments, boots and wrap, and pushed them at her. As she grabbed them, still naked, he shoved her out the door.
“Don’t keep your husband waiting too long!” he yelled loudly enough so the whole building would hear. “He may be home from his mistress by now, although God knows why he’d come home to you. And one more thing...” He picked up her whalebone corset and threw it in her face...“Don’t forget your bastion of modesty.”
She turned toward him, face full of fury. “Bast…” she snarled, but Harding slammed the door and turned back to Mary Ann.
“I love making a scene,” he grinned.
* * *
The storm was still in full force when they got back. They turned the boat and anchored it in the middle of the river so it faced the wind. Then Harding and Bishop stood on both sides of the aeroplane, each holding one end of the wing and facing one another, while Mary Ann made adjustments with a wrench, trying to find the angle at which it caught the wind. They had to dig in their heels to keep from being blown off the boat.
A bolt of lightning struck the river so near that the flash and crack came at the same time. A blue haze swept across the water to envelop the boat. It crept up her body and made it tingle. It formed a fierce halo around Bishop’s unkempt hair. She could see fear cross Harding’s face, perhaps more for her than for himself. A spark jumped from her upturned metal wrench to the frame of the aeroplane.
And then the miracle happened. The plane bounced up and down on its mounts, like a dog eager to obey her, jumping higher with every driven gust. Ready to fly, she thought. Ready to fly.
As quickly as it came, the storm rumbled off toward the hills to the east, as if it knew it had served its purpose. Neville Bishop offered no congratulations, and seemed annoyed at having been dragged from his cabin. Mary Ann wondered if he even knew what had happened. He ignored her, and went back down the hatch, rubbing his pince-nez on his shirt to clean them.
But Mary Ann could see from Harding’s face that he understood, and was happy for her. “Congratulations!” he shouted, his voice strangely loud and hoarse now that the storm was over. “You know, the French call electricity ‘white magic.’ It feels like we’ve been touched by it just now. Maybe God or whatever power has mercy on lost souls wants us to win.”
Then he embraced her. He might have even kissed her, but she pushed him away.
"You said you wouldn't do that," she reminded him, remembering the woman back at his apartment. It was too late to make amends. From now on she would ignore him, except when she needed him.
Chapter Seventeen: Cotillion at the Opera House—July 13
The aeroplane may have been ready to fly at the end of June, but Neville Bishop wasn’t.
“Wait until Jack Reece gets here,” he told them. “I’ve seen him. He can fly or ride anything. I can’t take a chance on letting one of these Frenchmen...or anyone else (and his eyes slid over Harding and Mary Ann) fool around with it.”
So they waited. First they heard that Reece was in London. Then in Cherbourg. Then he wanted another 100 dollars. The days turned into a week...and then two. Mary Ann fidgeted. Harding barely talked to her at all now. She wondered what other women he was seeing. And she wondered about Alain.
Then it was July 13, and that night the whole sky lit up. Fireworks were exploding at parks all over the city: from the Children's Garden to the Tuileries, from the heights of the hills of Chaumont to the Luxembourg Garden, and even from all three levels of the Eiffel Tower. Red, white and blue flags—the French tricolor—fluttered from every window.
“What’s going on?” asked Mary Ann, watching from the deck of their boat on the Seine.
“Tomorrow is Bastille Day, France’s Independence Day. But for us it’s the start of the contest,” Harding reminded her. “And tonight, in case you’ve forgotten, the Aéro Club is having its annual ball, and one of us has to be there for the ceremony.”
“Why?” she said skeptically.
He shrugged. “Orders from President Pouchet. To accept ‘permission’ to fly over the city. It has to do with that little escapade you and Alain pulled ov
er his palace.”
Mary Ann had forgotten about the ball, or perhaps did not want to remember. The idea of going out in “Society,” of dancing, of a ceremony frightened her. But who would go? Bishop was down in the hold poring over his ledgers, trying to figure out a way to get Reece to come to Paris without paying him any more money. She didn’t even want to talk to him.
“Go by yourself,” she told Harding.
“But Alain will be there,” said Harding with a half smile, as if he assumed that would change her mind.
It did. “What do we wear?” she asked. “We can’t go dressed the way we are. And everything I have on this boat is covered with soot.”
“Leave it to me,” said Harding, “I know where I can rent some clothes.”
What kind of clothes? She wondered if he would pull them off a clothesline somewhere, but she kept her doubts to herself.
Harding left and came back in an hour with a full outfit for him—even including top hat—and an evening gown for Mary Ann. “A cab will be here in an hour,” he said.
Mary Ann rushed to her cabin to try on her gown. It was slightly too long, but it would have to do. She hitched it up at the waist and pinned the hem the way she had seen her mother do, wishing now that she had paid more attention. She washed up by drawing a bucket of water from the Seine, not the purest of water, she realized. Sometimes she would see dead cats and other refuse floating by. The clock kept ticking away the minutes.
Next, she pulled back her light hair into a bob and put on powder and rouge—or was it rouge and powder—which came first? Mary Ann realized that she knew more about greasing an engine than making up her face. She looked in the cracked mirror that had been left in the room. “You don’t look too bad,” she told herself, then turned away quickly, afraid the mirror would answer back.
Only 20 minutes left. Mary Ann laid out the pile of clothes: white stockings, knee-length pantaloons, petticoat, corset, cashet corset. All the clothes! Some of them had a funny smell, like cleaning fluid. To cover it, she found a bottle of perfume the French captain’s wife had left, and splashed some on.
Now the whalebone corset. Try as she could, there was no way to reach the strings in back.