Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond (6 page)

“THE UNMITIGATED
gall of that woman!” Maddie finished her recounting of yesterday’s events rather louder than she’d begun.

Obie wafted the lieutenant’s white hat he held in one hand, disturbing the dark curls on his forehead. “My, but you are hot under that delightful collar. Understandably so. If Madame is delayed, I will make inquiries when my ship next touches at Venice.”

“Well, thanks for that. Maybe I won’t be summoned home in a hand-basket just yet.” Maddie cast her eyes up at the archway on the second-floor landing. In her chamber, TD was romping with his twin, under orders to hide on top of the armoire if anyone came in. Could he be tweaked to click images of any future intruders? “Nice uniform. Did you re-enlist in the Navy?”

Obie flashed very white teeth, under blue eyes sparkling with mischief. “If you can be incognito, so can I. Besides, you said to wear my best uniform, and the crew’s togs of the White Sky Line are nothing to shout about.”

“You’re working on White Sky liners? Have you ever seen the owner, Miss, or Mrs. White?”

“Mrs. Midas-White,” he corrected. “Not personally, but I’ve flown with her aboard. And we’ve all heard the instructions: skimp everybody but the First Class passengers. Not that there’s much room for other classes; a half-deck of business travelers and missionaries in Second, almost inside the envelope, and amidships are servants and crew, all stacked up like pants in a press. But oh, the First Class is luxury itself. Huge staterooms, velvet everywhere, real wood paneling and lead-crystal glassware. Old hat to you, but smart enough for us plebs. Actual books in the library, which, I might add, is half the width of the hull and almost as long as the main dining room. They hold entertainments there, visiting lecturers and opera singers, that sort of thing. Doesn’t get my blood pumping like a dance-party on a surface ship, but what can you do?

“Anyway, the old lady’s got claws for fingers. For real,” he added as Maddie’s eyebrows rose. “Metal claw-things, a couple on each hand, that she uses for counting her money and poking anybody who wastes supplies. I saw her draw blood on a drinks steward, and all for letting a few drops extra fall into a snifter.”

“How many White Sky routes have you traveled?” Maddie listened with half an ear while she watched the nearest brass monkey. It would lower its paws from over its eyes to signal the daily aethernet news from London. Her article detailing the baron’s lavish spending and his investor’s identity might not have made the morning edition, but surely her earlier article about his friendships with Colonel Muster and Professor Plumb would appear today. She would still be “Our Correspondent in Cairo,” but the words would be hers.

Their coffee arrived before the aethernet update. They sipped while Obie recounted what he’d learned of the
Jules Verne
from his privileged position as an aerodrome insider.

“The labourers are worried about the
Verne’s
reverse-blower or its battery pack. Either might have failed over the desert. You know anything about the airship’s condition?”

“Not until I find someone up in Cornwall to look it over. What’s a reverse blower?”

“In desert travel, air-cooled engines can suck up a lot of dust over the course of a day. So, once a day or more, they disengage, and the fans turn in the opposite direction, drawing a mighty whoosh of filtered air out through them, carrying away any collected grit before it can damage the machinery. Battery-powered, since the engine has to be off while it happens. Then the engine starts up again, the right way around, and recharges the batteries for the next day’s cleaning.”

“And they think this might have failed on the baron’s airship? But that wouldn’t send him overboard, surely? No risk to him or the ship except that she was adrift. Why not wait for land and signal for help?”

“I understand his ship was almost over England anyway. No sandstorms to speak of at that latitude. None of us believe it got all the way there without him aboard, either. Mark my words, he’ll be found in England or France.”

France? Bodmin’s nephew had been in France when the news of the disappearance got out. Was that a coincidence, or was he helping his uncle—very much alive—escape the investor’s vengeance? After a moment she realized Obie was saying something about trans-oceanic crossings.

He repeated, “I said, I’m going to bid for America again as soon as we reach London, and then try for cross-country to California. Wouldn’t you love to come along?”

“Not enough to work on a White Sky ship. A servant wouldn’t be permitted to wander the First Class areas or attend the entertainments.”

“True enough. Although it’s a fair question whether even you, with all your book-learning, would find entertainment in a pair of professors arguing the location of a lost Nubian city when neither had ever set foot in a desert before. My pal Hiram was on duty up there, said half the audience nodded off.”

“Lost Nubian city? Was one of them a Professor Plumb? Cambridge man, who favours smoking robes over dinner jackets?”

Obie shrugged. “Sounds like the English bloke, I guess. Beard like sheep’s fleece, spoke like a prime minister. The other fellow was a Yankee through and through. Leather coat always, and a pistol under it. Simple name. Smith?” He shook his head.

“Jones?”

“Ah, that’s the man. Professor Windsor Jones, Junior. From Indiana State University. Told me and Hiram about the wide open lands and skies. You can fly over the middle of America for three days without crossing a good-sized hill.”

Obie took his leave before luncheon, saying he had that night’s watch and wanted to sleep a bit first. “We’re leaving day after tomorrow, as soon as the sands warm sufficiently to assist the lift. Leave early and pay for that pound of extra fuel? Not on the White Sky Line, I assure you.” He kissed her cheek and strode away, tipping his hat in passing to Lady HH’s nieces, who were eyeing him with frank appraisal.

Maddie hurried upstairs to let TC out of her window, and admired how his painted feathers blended effortlessly into the cityscape. Maybe she should ask Madame about getting TD a paint job. She fed the little bird his weekly power pellet and sat down to compose a brief article about Mrs. Midas-White and the possibility of a reverse-blower failure. Then she flipped back to her Christmas notebook to confirm her hunch: Jones was the man Professor Plumb feared would learn of his association with Baron Bodmin.

So the professors had traveled together from America. They and the baron shared an interest in things Nubian; did that include the legendary Eye of Africa? Perhaps Jones was entitled to a share if Bodmin found it. Which led back to the question: could Baron Bodmin have deliberately abandoned his airship, in order to be presumed dead, rather than share the proceeds with his investor or anyone else?

And where did Colonel Muster, the last of the baron’s claimed expedition supporters, fit in? Muster was handling the baron’s estate while he was away, and would doubtless have to disperse it when eventually the baron was pronounced dead. If a treasure had been found, the estate would become immensely more complicated as various interested parties tried to claim a share. Otherwise, it was simple: the whole lot went to the nephew. Maybe Muster, too, could claim a share if the mask was found?

Speculation was fruitless until another source of information turned up. Maddie closed the notebook and got down to writing a by-the-number article on hair adornments seen on ladies at breakfast, luncheon, tea, and supper during Spring in Cairo. For this, she could still get paid.

As she approached the dining room a scant hour later, pink Clarice grasped her arm, gasping something so quietly that Maddie barely made out the word, “vanished.”

“Speak up.”

Clarice took a deep breath. “Colonel Muster is disgraced in London, vanished from his home, and feared dead by his own hand.” As Maddie stared at her, she added, “So maybe he was lying about the widow and she really was a broken-hearted soldier’s wife.”

“She may have been a soldier’s wife once for all I know, but I doubt very much if that was her real name.”

“You investigated her?”

Maddie ignored that. “How did you hear about the colonel? He’s been gone from Egypt more than three months.”

“It’s in the aether-news. The whole dining room is a-buzz.”

“Go in to luncheon. I’ll be there shortly.” Maddie hurried toward the nearest brass monkey and fiddled a penny out of her pocketbook. She yanked over a chair and sat fidgeting while the monkey rolled forward, opening its vest. Then she scrolled, and scrolled, through screens of tiny letters and slightly larger headlines until CARDSHARP COLONEL caught her eye. She cranked up the magnifier to read the article.

The Floating Fortress,

England’s Aeronautical Weekly

CARDSHARP COLONEL EJECTED

FROM ST. JAMES CLUB

According to reliable witnesses, Colonel Bilious Muster, long an habitué of fashionable gaming clubs on St. James Street, London, was recently ejected from the Royal Air Arms. The club refused to confirm or deny the incident, citing member privacy, but rumours fly of Muster’s cheating at piquet and failure to pay his club dues. Creditors are encamped outside the retired officer’s lodging, where the landlady admitted his rent is also in arrears.

The Colonel’s downfall is all the more shocking as his service record is filled with battle honours. His earliest post was with the high-altitude scouts, who spend many hours aloft in tethered balloons to report enemy troop movements. These daring aeronauts were constantly at risk from enemy snipers and vagaries of weather, with only a canvas canopy to slow their descent should their balloon be ruptured. Muster earned three valorous medals aloft before returning to the Airship Services’ Marine Corps for many further years of honourable service.

Muster’s absence from his usual haunts went unremarked for some days, until this reporter sought him out for reaction to the disappearance of his friend, Baron Bodmin. Fellow club-men disagree whether he was ejected before or after Bodmin’s airship was found adrift. Some hope he is living modestly on substantial winnings from Sir Ambrose Peacock, while others suggest he followed a long tradition for disgraced military men, i.e. an honourable suicide by service revolver.

It was true then. Colonel Muster was discredited, and nowhere was Maddie credited, even indirectly, for sending reporters to find him. If he was dead, and the baron was in or near England—either dead or alive—then the story’s Egyptian roots were dead too, at least as far as earning Maddie a byline.

Now what?

There was still the mysterious widow who had usurped Maddie’s identity and possibly many others. Fifty years on from the publication of that novel about conniving Becky Sharp, English readers remained fascinated by beautiful schemers. But no story could be attempted until Madame sent word of investigative results in Venice. What if she could not justify using her family’s spies for Maddie’s very minor (to a worldwide corporation) problem?

With drooping ruffles, Maddie went into luncheon, prepared on principle to keep her ears open about the colonel, the baron, and the widow, while her eyes recorded the cuffs, collars, ascots, and waistcoats worn by those illustrious guests who had not yet fled the heat of Egypt for the moderate climes of Italy or France.

THE CHATTER AT
luncheon interspersed people’s previously suppressed suspicions about the colonel with which liner each party had booked on for the return to Europe. As Lady HH put it in her brook-no-argument way, “No lady of breeding wishes to be caught in Cairo when the heat makes public perspiration unavoidable.”

Maddie was struck by the realization that her source of fashion columns was fleeing the desert and taking her income with it. Would CJ reassign her or consider their association at an end? Or worse: expect her to eke out an existence in Cairo until next winter’s call for foreign fashions. Waiting around had never been her strongest suit. She would ask outright for a reassignment to a European city, and she knew just which one. As luncheon and gossip wound down and the residents dispersed for postprandial naps or brandies, she dropped her napkin onto her plate and stood.