The Adventures of Arabella Ashby

Born on Mars, sixteen-year-old Arabella Ashby enjoys many more freedoms than most girls her age. But that liberty is not to last. Finding Mars much too unladylike for her daughters, Arabella’s mother takes the girls back to London, where they’re sure to find suitable husbands among the ton. Weighed down by Earth’s gravity—and her own unhappiness—Arabella dearly misses her father and their shared passion for automata. When she learns of his death, she also uncovers her cousin’s devious plot to travel to Mars, murder her brother, and claim the family inheritance for himself.

Though happy to be back on her home planet of Mars, Arabella’s peace is shattered when she receives distressing news. Her long-absent fiancé Capt. Prakash Singh, commander of the Honorable Mars Company airship Diana, has been taken as a prisoner of war on Venus, the very planet where the exiled Napoleon has fled. Desperate to rescue Singh any way she can, Arabella pays off the gambling debts of a rakish privateer captain in order to arrange passage on his vessel. But when they’re captured by a French squadron and taken to Venus, Arabella finds herself reunited with Singh.

Finally and truly husband and wife, Arabella Ashby and Capt. Prakash Singh are lauded as heroes in England after defeating Napoleon at the Battle of Venus. When they are invited to the Brighton palace of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, a Martian- and Venusian-inspired architectural marvel, the mechanically-bent Arabella finds herself drawn to the prince’s steam-powered Merlin chair and two-wheeled Draisine. But the Prince has motives other than mere entertainment for their visit. He offers Singh a great opportunity, divulged under a cloak of secrecy.