Etiquette & Espionage (13 page)

Sophronia quickly placed her hand in her lap and tucked the offending digit under a fold of skirt. “Oh, I believe I have the glove under control, thank you.”

“Right, ladies, shall we get back to our studies?” Professor Braithwope said as he reentered the room. “We are going to try to
address first the best and most deadly application of wooden stakes, hatpins, and hair sticks. If we have time, I will move us on to how to properly judge a gentleman by the color and knot of his cravat. Believe you me, ladies, the two subjects are far more intimately entangled than you might first suppose.”

Sophronia straightened her spine and prepared to be
educated
.

T
he rest of the evening proceeded in a much milder manner. They moved from classroom to classroom, each room having been arranged to that teacher’s particular taste. Each time the lesson was more in the manner of a visiting call or an intellectual salon than any school lesson Sophronia’s siblings had ever relayed to her.

Sister Mathilde Herschel-Teape’s room, which led out onto a small deck, was half potting shed, half manor-house kitchen. Their lesson was on emuhe wlsification and the fine art of egg whites as applied to sugared violets, fake eyelashes, skin care, and poison control. She left them with the wise, if somewhat confusing, “Now, remember, my dears, a separated egg is worth two in the bush.”

Lady Linette’s room was a combination conservatory, boudoir, and house of ill repute. It featured a good deal of red; three chubby, long-haired cats with funny, scrunched-up faces; fringe
wherever fringe might be stuck; and some highly questionable artwork. The girls sat in prim rows on long velvet fainting couches. A stuffed duck in a lace mobcap stared austerely down at them from the mantelpiece.

By the end of Lady Linette’s lesson on how to faint properly at any event and in a manner to cope with varying types of undergarments, Sophronia was yawning hugely. It had, after all, been a long day full of travel, excitement, and now classes that persisted well past her regular bedtime.

“Ladies don’t yawn in public,” Monique said loudly, so as to draw Lady Linette’s attention to the transgression.

“You’ll get used to the London hours eventually, country girl,” Preshea added.

“I suppose you’re from London?” Sophronia had a countryside suspicion of towns.

“My parents keep progressive hours,” the girl replied, avoiding the question in a manner that suggested this was a sore point.

“Miss Temminnick, Miss Buss, Miss Pelouse, if you’re quite finished? Miss Buss, it is as embarrassing to remark upon a behavior as it is to enact it. Of course, Miss Pelouse is, as always, correct, Miss Temminnick. Perhaps, Miss Pelouse, as you know everything so well, you would like to demonstrate fainting in a crowded ballroom in a manner that might attract only the attention of a specific gentleman? Without wrinkling your dress.”

Sophronia was enthralled by the odd way in which the teachers treated Monique. They made it clear her demotion was a punishment, yet sometimes it was almost as if Monique
had a kind of control over them.
Which must tie into how she has gotten away with not revealing the prototype’s location.
Then there were times like this, when she was called out and made an example of.

Monique stood and did as instructed.

Lady Linette critiqued the faint closely as Monique executed it.

“Note both hands raised to the forehead. A classic maneuver, but perhaps overly dramatic for a large crowd; you might draw too much attention. Try only one, pressed to the breast. That has the added benefit of drawing a gentleman’s gaze to your décolletage. Not that you younger ladies have any yet, but we can hope. No, not pressed so hard. Miss Pelouse, you’ll skew your gown’s neckline. Very nice. Now, a short breath and a small sigh. Eyes rolling slightly back. Only slightly! Otherwise one looks like a dying sheep. Flutter the eyelashes. Flutter them! More fluttering. Lovely. And sag back slightly. Always backward, ladies, never topple forward. And be certain to situate yourself so that if the gentleman does not respond appropriately, you can pretend to catch yourself against the wall or mantelpiece and make a recovery. Very nice, Miss Pelouse. Very realistic.”

Sophronia yawned again.

“Sophronia,” Dimity whispered, “what are we going to wear to sleep in tonight?”

“Goodness knows. Our petticoats, I suppose.” For all Sophronia knew, their luggage still lay scattered in the road leagues away.

Such was not the case, as it transpired Cit l l. After being let out
from Lady Linette’s class—“Practice your eyelash-fluttering, ladies. Six rounds of one hundred each before bed”—she and the other girls went to supper in the back part of the school. The recreation section, as the others called it, was much the same as all the others, only with larger, grander, and fewer rooms. Supper completed, their manners closely monitored by the teachers and Sophronia’s knuckles rapped twice for her misuse of a fish knife, they returned to their quarters. The debuts found Sophronia’s battered portmanteau and Dimity’s cases neatly stacked in their parlor.

The girls were divided into two per room, Preshea seeming honored to have been selected by Monique as the best of a bad lot of options. Sophronia was delighted to find Agatha willing to vacate her abode to settle in with Sidheag so that Sophronia and Dimity might share.

“Do you think Monique has some kind of control over the teachers?” Sophronia asked the moment they were left alone. Bumbersnoot had woken upon their return and followed Sophronia dutifully into her new room, then paced back and forth as she unpacked.

“How could she?” Dimity pulled out her underthings furtively and stuffed them quickly into a drawer.

Sophronia gave her a look.

“Her family, I suppose. Although I’ve never heard of them, so they can’t be that important or that evil.” Dimity moved on to less embarrassing apparel: dresses, pinafores, petticoats, slippers, and boots.

Sophronia unpacked her own bags. For the first time in her life, she was slightly embarrassed by her own wardrobe. Her
family was largely considered, by the surrounding gentlefolk, to be one of means. But she was still the youngest of four girls, and with three older sisters to clothe, she found her own dresses deficient. She was already composing a begging letter home in her head.

“What if she didn’t hide the prototype but gave it away?” Sophronia suggested.

Dimity was prosaic. “Well, no sense in speculating. We’ll simply have to find out more.”

Unpacking complete, the girls prepared for slumber—Dimity’s nightgown was bright yellow!—and settled down for the evening.

Bumbersnoot sat next to Sophronia’s cot with a little wheeze of distress. She picked him up and put him at her feet. He wasn’t exactly cuddly, and she was sure to bark her shin if she rolled over, but the little mechanimal seemed pleased, and the mini steam engine within made him quite an excellent foot warmer, if nothing else. Sophronia wondered idly if he required a diet of coal and water, and if so, where she would get the coal.
The airship must have a boiler room.
The last thing she heard as she closed her eyes was the tick-tock of Bumbersnoot’s mechanical tail wagging back and forth.

Unlike her fellow students, Sophronia awoke early in the morning and decided she might take the opportunity to explore. She supposed there would be mechanicals trundling about and sounding the alarm if they encountered her, so she determined to figure out a way around the massive ship that did not cross
any tracks. She chose her most basic dress, with the fewest underskirts and the shortest top skirt, and pulled on her boots with the india-rubber strapping.

She had to use the hallway to get to any exterior decks, so she ran as quickly as possible, sticking to the sides of the passage, away from the tracks that ran down the center. Luckily, she didn’t stumble upon any mechanicals. This allowed her to escape out onto one of the lower decks and over the rail t Cer center.o cling on the outside with no one, human or constructed, the wiser. She was left breathless and leaning out and in a manner she was certain would be thought most unladylike.

In the early morning, the moor below was still mist-shrouded, but there was no longer any other cloud cover. Sophronia looked down, considered for a moment, and then decided it was probably better not to look again.

She inched around the banisters and along the outside of the railing. The deck extended around the dirigible’s side and then in, before another deck rounded back out again, like flower petals. The difficulty was how to get from one to the next, over the small gap in between. Sophronia had a system developed soon enough: a little twisting movement as she thrust herself willfully over the abyss.

Several of the decks, smaller and more like private balconies, did not have mechanical tracks. Sophronia climbed over the railings of these and explored, peering in at the round windows. It would be good to know, for secrecy’s sake, which balconies were safe from mechanical spies, not to mention vulnerable to attack because they lacked mechanical defense. She was also nosy.

As Sophronia made her way, one deck at a time, around the edge of the ship, she eventually left the students’ residential area and found herself in the classroom area. There the decks changed, some of them made of strange and mysterious materials, and they did not always have rails. She passed the one that featured Sister Mathilde’s greenhouse, and another with long tassels and fancy wicker furnishings that must belong to Lady Linette’s classroom. Funny; Sophronia hadn’t noticed a door from the classroom out onto the balcony during lessons.

Lady Linette’s was the last classroom before the next balloon. There was another balcony, almost touching it, in the forbidden section. There was a little walkway to that balcony.

Lavishly decorated
, thought Sophronia,
so probably Lady Linette’s private quarters
. She had, as yet, not determined how to get up or down to any of the upper or lower decks, but from the sculpted railing of that particular private deck, a tempting rope ladder hung down to the lower levels.

Sophronia hesitated. She couldn’t see any tracks, and she guessed Lady Linette wasn’t an early riser. It was a risk. She didn’t want trouble on her second day. Then again, there was that rope ladder.

Sophronia made the switch to the forbidden section, shimmied along the outside of the railing over to the ladder, and began to climb down.

The ladder was pegged inward at the next level. Sophronia considered getting off there, but at the very bottom of the ship there
had
to be an engine chamber. She could see the steam emanating from below. And where there was steam, there would be boilers. And where there were boilers, there must be coal.
Bumbersnoot was probably hungry. So she kept climbing down. There were no decks at the bottom level; only small portholes which she could press her face against. The glass in these was too filthy to see through, and not from the outside world, but from something within.

The ladder ended at a hatch in the side of the ship. After a brief hesitation, Sophronia twisted the handle and climbed inside.
Boiler room!

The boiler room of the school was loud, and hot, and as soot-covered as Professor Lefoux’s classroom had been after the fake prototype exploded.

Sophronia’s entrance caused little reaction. It had to have been noticed, for she let a blast of light and fresh air into the dark, musty inte Ck, thought Srior. But there was a controlled chaos all around her, and very few bothered to acknowledge her presence.

There were a number of larger men, who must be the firemen or engineers, and two dozen or more very grubby boys, covered in black soot, running about with fuel and scurrying up and down stacks of boxes, piles of coal, and ladders to the upper levels. A few of these doffed their caps as they passed Sophronia, but none bothered to stop or properly greet her.

She simply stood, taking in the bedlam and the massive boilers and wondering why the place was not staffed by mechanicals.
Perhaps the tasks are too complicated? Or too vital to entrust to machines?
The work seemed to be quite labor intensive, yet once or twice a bark of laughter issued forth from one side of the room, where a group of boys were hard at work shoveling coal into an immense boiler.

Sophronia made her way cautiously over to them, bending to scoop up some small pieces of coal, which she stuffed into the pocket of her pinafore.