Etiquette & Espionage (22 page)

Sophronia hid while Soap pulled the porter’s bell rope. They had decided to let Vieve face the porter mechanical initially, both because she had the obstructor and to ascertain whether the porter would recognize her as a female. Vieve maintained that the identifier nodule apixiter, whatever
that
was, had to be the shape of the lower half of a human body and that if Sophronia would only don trousers like a sensible person…

Either Vieve was correct or some other aspect of her personality came off as intrinsically masculine, for when the gate was
thrown open and the mechanical stood facing her, he made no objection.

Vieve stepped toward him and puffed up her chest. “Message for Mr. Algonquin Shrimpdittle from Professor Lefoux,” she said in her high treble voice.

“Give to me, young sir,” boomed back the porter from behind his faceless confusion of gears and cogs.

“Can’t be done,” replied Vieve. “Orders are to deliver it directly.”

The porter let out a blast of steam in apparent annoyance. This f cyannialapped up the cravat pinned about his neck so that it momentarily obscured his clockwork face. He whirred and clunked, sending out a puff of smoke from a stack at the top of his head. Finally he said, “Very good, sir, follow me.”

The porter made a wide loop on its tracks. It hadn’t the pivot mechanism and nimbleness of the single-track mechanicals on board the finishing school. It began to trundle away, the wheelbarrow on its backside rattling side to side.

Vieve turned to Sophronia and whispered, “Go on! Hop in!”

“What, inside?”

“It hasn’t any sensory nodules on its back.”

Sophronia gave the young girl a look of doubt.
Then again, Vieve was correct about the porter not recognizing that she was a girl.
She exchanged a look with Soap.

The tall boy flapped his hands slightly in the universal gesture of “you decide.”

Sophronia shrugged, jogged after the porter, and, with a flutter of skirts, hoisted herself inside the wheelbarrow. Soap sprinted after and jumped nimbly in next to her. He sidled in
close, bumping up against her shoulder, and grinned. He smelled of soot. Sophronia thought it rather a pleasant odor, on him, and smiled back. Genevieve Lefoux was correct—the porter didn’t register their presence.

Vieve walked alongside the mechanical, as though they were companions out for a stroll. It was rather comical, given that the porter was easily twice the young girl’s height and three times her girth.

The mechanical’s tracks ended at the front of the school’s main building.

This was far more the kind of structure Sophronia had expected from Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Bunson’s had an impressive staircase leading up to huge double doors of wood and iron, engraved with an intricate pattern. Sophronia crouched low in the wheelbarrow as the porter mechanical approached the steps.
How will he alert the interior as to the presence of a messenger?

The porter touched up against the bottom step where his tracks stopped. This triggered a response. A tremendous amount of steam emanated from below the lowest step, and with a great creaking and groaning, the stairs closed in upon themselves. The whole front section of the building that housed the main doors compressed downward like a concertina. After only a few moments, the doors were at ground level and the stairs had flattened out in such a way that it allowed the porter’s tracks to continue.

The porter proceeded toward the doors sedately and bumped autocratically against them with a clang. This was obviously a signal, for one of the doors opened, revealing a darkened
corridor. The porter backed off of the collapsed stairs far enough to switch tracks, beginning another loop that would lead him away to commence a circuit of the grounds. As he did this, Sophronia jumped out. She dashed inside, flattening herself instantly on the back side of the unopened half of the door.
One never knows who might be watching.

Soap and Vieve followed sedately after.

As she passed through the doors, Sophronia noted that the intricate pattern carved into them was that of multiple octopuses holding one another’s tentacles in a long unending chain.

It was a good thing she’d chosen stealth, for on the other side of that door a new set of tracks started up, and waiting patiently was yet another faceless mechanical, this one smaller, wearing a white ruffled pinafore, and car cfor iron, enrying a duster in its articulated forceps. It was different, more chunky-looking, than the maid mechanicals at Mademoiselle Geraldine’s. This maid said nothing and did not react to Sophronia. Sophronia hoped that meant the creature could not make her out in the shadows.

Close on her heels, Vieve and Soap crowded in, intent upon coming to her rescue, if necessary, or her disguise, if not. They saw her hiding and confronted the mechanical maid, both talking at once and gesticulating wildly.

Sophronia hoped that this would confuse the sensory nodules Vieve had referred to earlier and took it as permission to inch past the maid and run down the hallway. Soap and Vieve followed.

They paused for a breather on a small staircase to one side of the hall.

Behind them, the front foyer of the building raised itself back up, filling with white steam as it did so.

“You should have worn trousers,” said Vieve in a low but disgusted voice.

“I may not be a lady yet, by any account,” said Sophronia with great dignity, she felt, “but I am not a boy, either!” She was finding herself far more concerned with attire now than before attending Mademoiselle Geraldine’s.

Soap looked at her. “You look like a lady to me.”

“Thank you, Soap.”
Thank goodness it is dark enough for him not to see me blushing!

“Of course, miss.”

They continued down the next corridor.

There seemed to be fewer maids at Bunson’s, or perhaps they were decommissioned while the students were out. Sophronia would have predicted that a school full of boys would require more maids, not fewer! Everything was going swimmingly, with Vieve leading them unerringly ever upward through the building.

“You’ve been here before?” whispered Sophronia.

“Many times. Auntie always has some matter to discuss with Mr. Shrimpdittle. Lady Linette won’t let her leave me unsupervised on board. She used to try to get Mademoiselle Geraldine to mind me, but I’d always escape her.”

“So you’ve
seen
the communication machine?”

“Not as yet. They leave me outside. ‘Workshop’s no place for a child.’ ” Vieve’s voice was full of outrage as she repeated a phase she had clearly heard overmuch in her nine years. “But I know where it’s kept. On the roof.”

Both Soap and Sophronia paused, raising their voices in shock. “The roof?”

“Shush! We don’t know who might
not
have attended the theater. They wouldn’t leave the school with only mechanicals on duty.” Vieve took a moment to roll up the long sleeves of her shirt, her exposed wrists small and bony.

Sophronia said, “But why stash a piece of delicate equipment on the roof?”

“Search me. Intriguing, isn’t it?” Vieve dimpled at them in a way that made her look very young indeed.

We are being led into enemy territory by a child,
thought Sophronia a
ll of a sudden.
This is madness. Oh, well.

At that moment, a door ahead of them opened out into the darkened hall. Bright unflickering light of the kind that could only come from high-quality gas spilled forth. Into the beam trod a dark blob of a boy—not a mechanical.

The boy was relatively stock cati spiy and, like Vieve, shrouded in clothing too big for him. He was bent over a large, antiquated book and humming to himself.

Sophronia, Soap, and Vieve froze in horror.

The boy looked up, caught sight of them lurking in the shadowed hallway, let out a shriek of surprise, and dropped his book. The door slammed closed behind him and all was once more dark.

W
ho’s that?” came a querulous voice into the darkness. “I know you’re there; show yourselves!”

Sophronia stepped forward. “Buck up, Pillover. It’s only me.”

Pillover squinted. “Miss Sophronia? What are you doing here? How’d you get in? Is that my sister with you?”

Sophronia dragged a reluctant Vieve and Soap forward. “No, but I do have company. Pillover, may I introduce Genevieve Lefoux and Phineas B. Crow? Vieve, Soap, this is Pillover Plumleigh-Teignmott, Miss Dimity’s brother.”

Pillover gave his two new acquaintances a very haughty look. “Riffraff?”

“Only on the surface. They’re both good eggs. Vieve here is an intellectual, and Soap’s, erm”—she paused, struggling—“an engineer of a kind,” she managed to come up with.

Soap gave a little snort, but Vieve looked childishly delighted to be described as academic in any way.

Pillover looked Vieve over and seemed to accept her title readily enough for all that she was nine. Then he turned to look up at Soap, illuminated by a bit of moonlight. “But Miss Sophronia, he’s colored!”

Sophronia tilted her head and contemplated Soap as though she had never noticed his skin tone before. “It’s irrelevant. Or do I mean irreverent?”

“It is?” Pillover arched one brow.

Sophronia nodded firmly. “Yes.”

Pillover bent and picked up his book. “If you say so.”

“Pillover, what are you doing here, instead of at the theater?”

The boy shrugged. “I’m tired of dealing with Pistons. Oily pains, the lot of them.”

“Pistons?”
He can’t possibly mean roving bits of steam engines, can he?

Soap sidled in. “Miss Sophronia, we don’t have much time.”

“Oh, of course. Want to come, Pillover? We’re going to the roof to look at a transmitter.”

“Rather!” Pillover’s normally dour face brightened at the idea.

So the infiltration party increased to four, and they trotted onward.

“Is he going to be useful?” Soap asked Sophronia.

“You never know,” replied Sophronia wisely. She turned to their new companion. “So, these Pistons?”

“Oh, they think they are something quite exclusive, skulking about in riding boots, and wearing black shirtwaists, and
being all gloomy about the state of the Empire. They sew cogs on the breasts of their jackets in fati sring a non-useful manner. Really it’s only an excuse to push everyone else around. And no one does anything about them, because half of them are supposedly the sons of Picklemen. I think it’s all faked, but they’ve got most of the school stitched up. You’d think we were here to learn, but apparently not.”

Sophronia was awed by Pillover’s chatter. “Oh, I know what you mean. We’ve got Monique de Pelouse living with us.”

Pillover wrinkled his nose. “Must be quite the lark.”

“Indeed. She’s already tattled me out.”

“No?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And how’s my pestilence of a sister settling?”

“Better than I. Although she fainted again.”

“Blood?”

“Blood.”

“From what I hear of your school, that’s to be expected.”

“We had lessons in knife-fighting from a werewolf.”

“Werewolf? Bully! We don’t have any supernaturals here. It’s quite a dearth in the deanship if you ask me. Any reputable school ought to have at least one vampire professor. Eton has three. You lot are only girls, and you’ve a vampire
and
a werewolf. Jolly unfair, that’s what I call it.”

By this time they had climbed up several flights of stairs, getting ever closer to the roof, when they came face-to-face with a maid mechanical. Instantly, Vieve and Soap stepped in front of Sophronia and began bouncing about.

“What are you doing?” Pillover demanded.

“Keeping it from deducing that I’m a girl,” explained Sophronia.

“Oh, of course, I forgot.” After a hesitation, Pillover too began an awkward gyration. They all looked so ridiculous that Sophronia had to suppress a giggle. She managed to slip past the distracted maid and thought about reminding Vieve of her obstructor, but it was so much fun watching them dance she decided not to.