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Bell gently changed the subject. “Did he ever take friends when he went big-game hunting? Did he shoot with a party?”
“He hired guides and bearers. But otherwise he was alone.”
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bsp; “Did you go with him?”
“I was busy flying.”
“Did that disappoint him?”
“No. He knew I was flying before we married.” Her eyes tracked a Blériot swooping past at sixty miles an hour.
“Before? May I ask how you got started in flying?”
A high-spirited grin lighted her open face. “I ran away from home – stuffed my hair under a cap and pretended to be a boy.” It wouldn’t be hard, thought Bell. She didn’t look like she weighed over a hundred pounds.
“I found a job in a bicycle factory in Schenectady. The owner was building flying machines on the weekend, and I helped him with the motors. I knew all about them from fixing my dad’s farm machinery. One Monday, instead of going to work, I snuck out to the field and flew the machine.”
“Without lessons?”
“Who was there to teach me? There weren’t any schools back then. Most of us learned on our own.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“And you just climbed on the machine and flew it?”
“Why not? I could see how it worked. I mean, all it is, really, is the aeroplane goes up by pushing the air down.”
“So with no formal training,” Bell smiled, “you proved both Bernoulli’s theorem and the existence of the Venturi effect.”
“What?”
“I only mean that you taught yourself how to shape the wings to create the vacuum over the wing which makes it rise.”
“No,” she laughed. “No, Mr. Bell. Venturi and all that is too complicated. My friend Marco Celere was always rattling on about Bernoulli. But the fact of the matter is, the flying machine goes up by pushing the air down. Warping the wings is just a way to deflect the air away from where you want to go – up, down, around. Air is wonderful, Mr. Bell. Air is strong, much stronger than you think. A good flying machine like this one-” She laid an affectionate hand on its fabric flank. “Marco’s best – makes the air hold you up.”
Bell absorbed this with a certain amount of amazement. He liked young people and routinely took apprentice detectives under his wing, but he could not recall speaking with any twenty-year-old who sounded more clear and more certain than did this dairy farmer’s daughter from the wilds of the North Country.
“I’ve never heard it put so simply.”
But she had shed no light so far on her husband’s habits. When he queried her further, he developed the impression that she had known little about Harry Frost before she married him, and all she had learned since was to fear him. He noticed that her eyes kept darting to the other airships rolling about the infield and climbing into the sky. Whatever confusion or youthful ignorance had led Josephine into marriage with a man like Harry Frost, the vulnerable, naive girl on the ground became a confident woman in the air.
“Having taught yourself, did you then learn a lot more from your friend Marco?”
Josephine sighed. “I could not understand his Italian, and he spoke very little English and was always working on the machines.” She brightened. “But he did teach me one thing. It took me quite a while to understand what he was trying to say in English. But I finally pried it out of him. He said, ‘A good flying machine has to fly – it wants to fly.’ Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Is it true?” asked Isaac Bell.
“Absolutely.” She laid a firm hand on the machine again. “So if you will excuse me, Mr. Bell, if you have no more questions, I hope that this one wants to fly. But it is going to take a while to find out for sure.”
“Do you miss Marco Celere?”
Her eyes did not fill, as Archie had reported, but Josephine did admit that she missed the inventor very much. “He was kind and gentle. Not at all like my husband. I miss him very much.”
“Then it must be a comfort to be flying his latest machine.”
