Etiquette & Espionage

LESSON 11: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF PROPER DRESS

Vieve was as good as her word. Her word. Sophronia still could not quite believe it. It seemed that Professor Lefoux’s nine-year-old niece liked to dress as a boy and fraternize with sooties. And that apparently Professor Lefoux let her!

“What-ho, Miss Sophronia,” said the girl, standing at the door and clutching a chubby reticule before her.

“Good evening, Miss Genevieve,” replied Sophronia formally. “Won’t you come in?”

Vieve didn’t look at all embarrassed at being found out. “So you know, do you?”

“Why on earth would you want to go about as a boy?”

“Boys have it far more jolly.” Vieve gave one of her dimpled grins. “I assure you, I find female dress fascinating. I simply prefer not to wear it myself. It’s very confining.”

Sophronia looked her guest up and down. This evening the girl was wearing her customary cap paired with an oversized man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a brown vest, and brown jodhpurs. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t entirely trust your judgment in matters of appearance.”

Vieve laughed.

“There is your patient.” Sophronia pointed to Bumbersnoot, who had taken advantage of the absence of Sophronia’s fellow denizens to lounge in the parlor under the tea table in a position of prominence he wasn’t normally permitted.

Vieve dumped the contents of her reticule onto the top of the tea table. Her kit appeared to be mainly mechanic’s tools and a few unlabeled glass bottles with corks. The girl coaxed Bumbersnoot out from under the table, sat down on the settee, and lifted him into her lap.

“Can I do anything to help?”

“Don’t think so. I take it you got caught climbing during shutdown and that’s why they banned you from attending the play?”

“I didn’t get caught; someone saw me and told.”

“That’s not on!” Vieve tipped the mechanimal upside down, opened up his stomach, and began tinkering and poking about with a sort of long squiggly stick made of iron. She picked up one of her little bottles, uncorked it, and poured a drop of some dark, viscous liquid down the stick so it went directly where she wanted it to. Vieve really was remarkably adept for a nine-year-old.

“So you’re Professor Lefoux’s niece?”

“That’s what she tells me.”

Sophronia sat back on the settee and tried to look casual. “Know anything about this prototype?”

“Now, miss, why would you think that?”

“You like mechanics and inventions, and so far as I can gather, the prototype is both.”

The girl looked up and smiled, looking far more her age than when she was concentrating on Bumbersnoot. “It’s for a special communication machine.”

“A what?”

“Ever since the telegraph failed, stymied by the aether currents, they’ve been working on this new idea for communication over long distances—one station to another. Unfortunately, there seems to be some difficulty making them transmit back and forth. The researchers at the Royal Society in London came up with a new prototype to fix this. They made two: one for London, and one to come here, to Bunson’s.”

“Why Bunson’s?”

“Well, that’s where the other communication machine is located, of course. Anyway, something happened to that prototype.”

“Monique hid it.”

Vieve looked impressed. “Really? How do you know that?”

“I was with her at the time. That’s when I was recruited.”

“It was her finishing assignment?”

“Yes. And she failed.”

“That explains why she’s bunking down with debuts. And why she wasn’t allowed to attend the play either.” Vieve’s dimples disappeared and she once more looked unnaturally serious for a nine-year-old.

That little bit of information was news to Sophronia. She’d sent Dimity off with strict instructions to keep a very close eye on Monique. Instructions that Dimity would find very hard to follow. “Monique didn’t go? Why isn’t she here in quarters?”

“Skulking about the teachers’ section, ain’t she? Nasty piece of work, that one. And gets away with it, what’s worse.”

Sophronia pursed her lips. She didn’t have time for Monique’s tomfoolery at the moment. “So do you know where it is?”

“The prototype?”

“No, the communication machine at Bunson’s.” If I could get a look at it, I might learn why everyone thinks it’s so important. Besides, I’d like to see inside Bunson’s, where girls aren’t supposed to go, on principle.

Vieve looked up at that, her green eyes narrowed. “I can see why you keep getting into trouble. Are you sure you’re a girl?”

“That’s rich, coming from you.”

“You don’t act like a girl.” Vieve cocked her head. “You want to go after it?”

Sophronia nodded. “See what all the fuss is about.”

This didn’t appear strange to Vieve. “We’re going to need help. Can’t get on and off this airship that easily.”

“Good thing we’re friendly with the sooties, then, isn’t it?”

Genevieve Lefoux dimpled down at her work. “Good point. Right.” She put Bumbersnoot back on his feet. “That should do it.”

The mechanimal shook himself, like a wet dog might, and trotted about the room. His tail wagged excitedly, ticktockticktock!

Sophronia watched him. “He’s moving much easier, and he doesn’t seem to be squeaking. You do good work.”

Vieve blushed. “I try. He might… oh, there he goes.”

Bumbersnoot crouched down in one corner of the parlor and deposited a pile of ash in a small mound.

“Oh, dear. Bad mechanimal!”

Vieve defended the dog. “He is a tiny steam engine. There’re bound to be a few deposits.”

“What about his capacity as a storage device?”

Vieve said, “About the size of your fist. Any larger and it might get stuck.”

Sophronia nodded, hoarding the information away for future use. “So are you any good at climbing?”

“Yes, but fortunately, we don’t have to.” The girl held out her wrist. On it she had strapped a wide leather band with what looked like a small brass jewelry case affixed to it. She flipped open the lid and held up the gadget for Sophronia to see.

At first Sophronia thought it might be a music box, but when she looked closer, she saw there were all sorts of dials and wheels and small knobs.

“What is it?”

Vieve grinned. “I call it my anti-mechanical mobility and magnetic disruption emission switch. Soap calls it the obstructor.”

It took only five minutes for Sophronia to badly want an obstructor of her own.

Vieve simply marched out into the hallway, and when a maid came trundling threateningly in their direction, the girl pointed her wrist at the mechanical and clicked a switch with her free hand.

The maid froze in place. Steam stopped emanating from the base of its carapace, and the gears and dials where its face ought to be stopped moving. It was as though the mechanical had seen something scandalous and been seized by a fainting fit. Ingenious!

“Come on!” Vieve grabbed Sophronia by the hand and dragged her past the mechanical. “The effect wears off in six seconds. I’m trying to figure out how to extend it, but that’s the best we’ve got at the moment.”

They ran past the maid, pausing at a bend in the hallway and peeking around the corner in case there was another mechanical, or possibly one of the students who was being punished by confinement and had similar escapist tendencies.

So they proceeded through the sections and levels of the airship, engaging in a kind of transdirigible hopscotch. Anytime they happened upon a mechanical, Vieve froze the poor thing for six seconds while they dashed past and continued on.

They crossed the midpoint of the school and immediately headed down toward the lower levels. As Vieve explained, “There are still two teachers aboard.”

“Professor Braithwope?” Sophronia said, hazarding a guess. “He can’t leave the ship. And”—she paused to think—“your aunt?”

“Because she doesn’t care for anything fun or entertaining,” explained Vieve without rancor.

Eventually, they found themselves at the entrance to the boiler room. Sophronia felt odd approaching that room from above rather than below. They pushed aside two massive brass doors emblazoned with images of fire and all sorts of symbols of danger. Sophronia squinted. One of the symbols looked to be a badger with his tail in flames. Another was a skull like that on a pirate’s flag, but with its mouth open and long vampire fangs. If that’s a vampire, perhaps the badger on fire is meant to be a werewolf? Another, Sophronia could swear, was a robin in a bowler. What, she wondered, is dangerous about a robin in a bowler?

They climbed down a small flight of stairs out onto an internal balcony that overlooked the engine chamber. It was like being in a box at the theater. From that vantage, Sophronia and Vieve could see the entirety of the boiler room spread out below them: the four huge boilers with orange mouths agape, the mountain of coal over to one side, and smaller piles near the boilers. There were giant pumps and pistons, and rotary gears and belts, some cycling round, others moving up and down, and some utterly still. Lit by the flickering of the boilers, the colossal machinery glowed. Even all the coal dust and steam in the air had not dulled the shine. Sophronia wondered if they polished the metal regularly. Threading through and around and within the machines were the sooties, like ants. The larger forms of the greasers, mechanics, and firemen stood as points of stillness within this movement; fulcrums to which the sooties would periodically gather for instructions, as if those selfsame ants had discovered a nice crumb of cheese.

“Impressive, from this angle,” said Sophronia.

“Beautiful.” Vieve’s eyes gleamed. “Someday I want a whole massive laboratory exactly like this all to myself.”

“Oh?”

“I shall name it my contrivance chamber.” She had clearly given this a great deal of thought.

“Excellent name. Perhaps we should move on before we’re noticed by an engineer?”

“Well put.” Vieve led Sophronia over to a set of steep stairs that spiraled to the boiler room floor. Vieve scuttled down. Sophronia, who was in a dark blue visiting dress with multiple petticoats, followed as nimbly as those petticoats would allow.

Vieve knew the way once they got down. She moved with purpose through the machines and around the coal heaps, in easy avoidance of greasers, sliding in and out of the sooties as if she were one. With her cap pulled low and her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jodhpurs, she looked like a sootie, only shrunken and a little less dirty.

Sophronia, on the other hand, felt self-conscious. She stuck out like a puff pastry among meat pies in her prim dress. She was glad that when they stopped it was behind a massive rotary engine to one side of the room, mostly out of sight.

Vieve grabbed an impish towheaded boy by one elbow. “Rafe, fetch Soap, would ya?”

“Do it yourself, Trouble.”

“Can’t. I got important company. Couldn’t leave a lady alone in this dangerous place, now could I?”

“Her?” The blond boy squinted into the shadows where Sophronia stood. “What’s one of them doing down ’ere?”

“Same as everybody else: minding her own business. Now get Soap, would ya?”

The blond sniffed, but ambled off.

“Pleasant young man,” commented Sophronia.

“They can’t all be as charming as me,” Vieve replied with a smile.

“Or as adorable as me,” added Soap, coming up behind Vieve and nicking her cap. “Good evening, Miss Temminnick; Vieve. To what do we owe this honor? Shouldn’t you be watching a play or something highfalutin in town?”

“Give it back!” Vieve made a grab for her hat, but Soap held it out of reach. “Can’t stand the theater.”

“And I’m not allowed,” Sophronia added. “But Soap, Vieve and I were wondering if you could help us get out?”

“Out?”

“We want to pay a visit to Bunson’s.”

“But why? No one will be there.”

“Exactly,” crowed Vieve.

“They’ve got something we want to see.”

Soap was suspicious. “What kind of something?”

“A communication machine,” Sophronia explained.

Vieve nodded, grinning.

Soap looked back and forth between them. He ended with Sophronia. “Not you as well? Gone barmy over mechanics, have you? I should never have introduced you two. It’ll all end in tears and oil.”

“Not really. I’m more intrigued by this one’s desirability.”

“What?”

“Flywaymen want it, or parts of it. Monique failed because of it. I’ve seen two air battles so far over stray bits of it.”

Soap latched on to the last part of her statement. “You saw what happened with the mid-balloon?”

“Yes, and I saw you repairing it.”

“No joke. I was squeaking for nigh on an hour because of all that helium. Funniest thing, repairs up top. So?”

“Someone fired a cannon at us.”

“Because of this communication machine?”

“Not exactly. Because of a piece that might make the communication machines actually communicate with each other.”

Soap looked confused but willing to play along. “Well, very good, then, but I better come with you. Can’t have you two scrabbling about groundside unsupervised.”

Sophronia arched her eyebrows. “I assure you, I have been sneaking around with impunity for years.”

Soap glowered at her.

“Oh, very well,” said Sophronia, unwilling to waste any more time.

Soap enlisted a few off-duty sooties so that a small, dirty herd escorted Sophronia and Vieve over to yet another hatch in the boiler room floor. This was one Sophronia hadn’t noticed before, in a corner behind what she assumed was a hot water pump for the school’s serpentine room-heating system. Up top, in the residential rooms, the heating contraptions looked like grates in the walls, and they kicked in at night if it got icy, which it often did up high. The one in Dimity and Sophronia’s room made such a rumbling and growling that Dimity named it “Boris the Indigestive.” This, then, was Boris’s origin.

There was a coiled rope ladder resting nearby. When the hatch flipped open, it became clear the airship was floating very low to the ground, perhaps only two stories up. They were also at the edge of the moor. Swiffle-on-Exe became visible after they let down the ladder and began to climb.

The school had stopped above a knoll off a goat path above the town, but it was far enough outside the village for Sophronia to be nervous that, should the moor mists rise up, they would not be able to find their way back. The moon was full, which explained both the revels in the town and the absence of Captain Niall. He would be a true monster tonight, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Sidheag had explained that Captain Niall took himself off several days before the moon, far into the moor, away from civilization, so that his moon-mad werewolf self wouldn’t be a danger to anyone. Sophronia thought this sad. Werewolves supposedly loved the theater.

They dropped down to the grass, Sophronia first, then Vieve, and then Soap. Soap saluted the sooties above and the ladder was pulled up. They would lower it again in exactly two hours, right before the performance was supposed to let out. Sophronia worried about the time constraint, but Vieve was confident that two hours was enough.

Under the bright moon, the path into town was well-lit. Swiffle-on-Exe was a silvery hodgepodge of thatched roofs, church steeples, and the looming monstrosity of Bunson’s to the left. They moved at a swift trot and arrived at the gates to the boys’ school in a little under a quarter of an hour.

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 flapped 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 carrying 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 all 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 stocky 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.