Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond

Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond

Published by Tyche Books Ltd.

www.TycheBooks.com

Copyright © 2015 Jayne Barnard

First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2015

Print ISBN: 978-1-928025-33-7

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-928025-34-4

Cover Art by Robin Robinson

Interior Art by Robin Robinson

Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey

Interior Layout by Ryah Deines

Editorial by M. L. D. Curelas

Author photograph: Kevin Jepson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.

This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.

Dedication

To Kevin, who supports my antic imagination in ways beyond counting.

With thanks to the Calgary Steampunks of the Airship’s Mess Deck for being such good sports. Special thanks to Monica Willard for the seeds of Maddie’s history and a hearty handshake to Andrew Nadon, who inspired Oberon O’Reilly and brought me chocolate.

The Cornwall Cog and Goggles

POTTY PEER’S AIRSHIP ADRIFT

The expeditionary airship of Baron Bodmin, ardent African explorer, has been found adrift and deserted. Its log-book is missing and no clue remains to its captain’s fate.

A fortnight after its last sighting over the mouth of the Suez Canal, the airship appeared off the coast of Cornwall, floating low and rudderless above the waves. No escape canopy or life-vest remained on board. The Coast Guard believes the explorer bailed out over the water and expects the body to come ashore any day now. No trace was found of the fabled Nubian treasure Baron Bodmin sought during his winter’s expedition to Egypt.

“I AM VINDICATED
.” The Honourable Madeleine Main-Bearing danced into her bedchamber with unladylike glee, waving a yellow telegraph flimsy at the room’s sole occupant. The clockwork sparrow, half the length of her gloved hand, focused one shiny eye on her as she unpinned her hat and flung it toward her bedpost. “The batty baron’s airship has been found adrift near England, abandoned. Suddenly, after months of making me ignore that fascinating fellow’s adventure for hats and cravats, CJ wants all my notes about the baron’s time in Cairo. Hah!” Maddie fluttered the telegraph again, a thin yellow victory flag, as she pranced across the room. “Let us give him what he asked for, by the ream. Oh, Tweetle-D, there might be a byline for me at last!”

Maddie’s name in a London newspaper. The culmination of a dream. Not her real name, naturally, for daughters of Steamlords did not embarrass their families by appearing anywhere but the Society pages, and then only as belles of exemplary style. Her mother had never lived down that Main-Bearing debutante portrait in the Times, under the huge headline:
Peer’s Daughter Feared Kidnapped!

The fashion columns were only permitted by the family because nobody knew who wrote them. But a story like the baron’s could not appear under her hats-and-sleeves name. “Miss Maddie Hatter” lacked the dignity to sit atop any paragraph of more import than whether ecru net gloves were permissible for daytime in the heat and dust of Egypt. Maddie needed a new nom-de-plume, a name with gravitas, suitable for the big stories that were sure to be in her future.

First, though, she needed a fast report so CJ could get something into the evening edition. She stripped off her gloves—not ecru netting but plain white, smudged with the orange dust of Cairo streets. Then she retrieved her notebook from a pocket and flipped back the shell-pink cover, ignoring the sequins that spelled, in flowing italic,
“Miss Maddie Hatter, Foreign Fashionista for the London Fog & Cog.”

The Fog was one of several weeklies owned by CJ Kettle’s conglomerate, one for every day of the week in some part of England. Although issued a suitably covered notebook for each paper, she found it simpler to carry a single notebook for scribbling on the move. As long as CJ got a daily telegraphed report filled with trivia about sleeves, shawls, collars, or hat trimmings in vogue with the English aristocracy wintering in Egypt, he need never know she had flagrantly ignored almost every other of his copious instructions.

Today at last he wanted more than the trend in neckwear, and it was all here in her notebooks. She leafed through pages of scribbled notes and sketches of ornate millinery to find the entry titled, in tall, firm printing, “Eccentric Adventurer Exits Egypt.”

“TD, do we have any images of the baron’s departure?”

The sparrow’s brass wings shimmered in a beam of sunlight as he flapped to the desk. He tapped the inkwell with his beak until she reached over to open the lid. His throat buzzed softly as he drank. Then he hopped over to the blotter where she laid out a fresh sheet of paper and secured its corners with pins. When he began to dot-dash lines onto the page, she turned back to her notebook, scribbling on a separate sheet. At the end of the page, she stopped writing and read over what she had written, crossing out a word here and inserting another there.

“The eccentric English adventurer, Baron Bodmin, left Cairo early this year on a dangerous quest for a legendary treasure known as the Eye of Africa.

A large white stone with veins of red in its heart, the so-called “Bloodshot Diamond” was reportedly set in a tribal mask as a third eye. Nubian legend says the diamond lights up with a fantastical red glow if touched by an evildoer’s blood. The baron widely claimed he possessed secret knowledge to lead him to the mask’s hiding place, an uncharted oasis deep in the Nubian desert.

During the long refit of his expeditionary airship, the
Jules Verne
, for desert travel, Baron Bodmin was best known in Cairo for elegant dinner parties at Shepheard’s English Hotel. On January fifth of this year, he set out from Cairo aerodrome at dusk and never returned.

The baron’s fate remains unknown. Was his quest fruitless? Were his bones picked clean by hungry desert-denizens? How came his ship to be floating, unattended, so far from Egypt? Could it, indeed, have traversed the Mediterranean Sea and all Europe un-guided by a human hand? If there is a clue to his fate in Egypt, your faithful correspondent will excavate it and report it here, in the pages of . . .”

She left the name of the newspaper blank. Let CJ decide where to place her prose to best effect. The sparrow’s pattering over his page petered out with a final dot-dot-dot, and she looked at the picture he had produced: the baron at the aerodrome, lit by the setting sun as he leaned toward a beautiful, dark-haired woman.

“Oh, yes, that soldier’s widow.” Maddie wiped the little bird’s beak free of ink. “The blue evening gown with bouffant sleeves and the adventurous neckline so suitable for displaying jewels. I wonder if she hung onto that diamond-and-sapphire collar the baron gave her, or if he demanded it back. He seemed that kind of man. But I expect she’s acquired another protector by now.”

This style of remark had given Mother the vapours on Maddie’s last, incognito visit to London, but Maddie was not the sheltered debutante who had fled her own ball two years earlier. She knew men and women formed irregular connections that did not lead to marriage. Similar connections had been offered to Maddie on her travels, in token of her youth and lack of looming male relatives, but thus far she had not accepted any offers. Or jewels.

“I must find out where the widow went,” she told the bird, “and gain an interview. She is, after all, the last person known to have spoken to the baron before he vanished.” She transcribed her article onto a telegraph sheet, using the much-condensed word forms beloved of penny-pinching newspapers editors, and hoped whoever expanded them at the other end did so correctly. Wiping a splotch of ink from one dainty finger, she re-fixed her hat and donned a clean pair of gloves. Someone in the tea-and-gossip party that was Shepheard’s English Hotel would know the fair widow’s name and direction. “Wait here, TD, while I send this telegraph and pursue my inquiries.”

The little bird gave a small warble that might have been disapproval, but hopped to his windowsill and resumed staring out at swallows and pigeons, and the Egyptian hawks that circled lazily above the teeming city of mud-brick and stone, occasionally swooping down to prey on the smaller birds.

In early April, Shepheard’s remained filled with British winter residents, most of whom were gathered in the tea-garden at this hour. After sending her telegram to CJ, Maddie paused in the archway, scanning for likely gossips among the sea of pastel muslin tea dresses. Pale plastered walls reflected murmuring voices and the whisper of water from several fountains. Potted palms rustled as fans whirred in the vaulting overhead, driven by a complex array of rods and gears. Arches along the far wall opened the tearoom to the courtyard, where stately palms augmented the shade of the massive hotel’s wings. Wicker tables draped in pristine linen were dotted across the ochre floor tiles. Running among them were self-propelling tea-carts, dispensing the genial beverage with puffs of steam. Waiters bore trays of dainties and pitchers of cream. Ruffled and ribbon-strewn ladies at every table paused in the act of lifting teacups or plying fans, hoping the eye of the young lady reporter would light upon their Indian shawls or Irish lace cuffs.