Curtsies & Conspiracies

It was maddening, for everyone except Sidheag. Even Agatha, normally reticent, yearned to take in a theatrical performance. “Or perhaps an opera. I do adore the opera.”

Sophronia ruminated over whether the ban was intended to drive them into transgression, or if there was some serious threat to the students that warranted keeping them holed up. The teachers were not revealing any secrets, and with only a few attempted escapes by some of the older girls, the day passed smoothly.

The only odd occurrence was later that night, when instead of Professor Braithwope for evening lessons, they were put in with the older girls under Professor Lefoux. This was their first experience with Vieve’s aunt as an instructor.

Professor Lefoux was patiently brilliant and moved through the topic—industrial sabotage, tea, and supply trains—with such rapidity it left most of the class, regardless of age, utterly confused. Then she began to fire off questions in such a way as to make them all feel stupid. It was a traumatic experience and left them fervently wishing for the nice, easygoing, friendly vampire of their ordinary schedule.

Professor Braithwope was a dedicated teacher, and he didn’t like to change his routine. A monster of habit, the vampire. What, then, could possibly draw him away?

His place was empty at the head table at supper, as was a guest spot set next to it.

“He has a visitor,” said Sophronia, nibbling at some fried haddock.

“Oh, you think so?” Dimity was much less interested in the goings on of teachers than Sophronia.

“I do. An important visitor.”

Halfway through the meal, when the main course was to be brought out, Professor Braithwope arrived with a gentleman in tow.

The gentleman was tallish, not overly thin or overly fat. He wore proper dress to the height of style but nothing more elaborate. He had a long face with lines about the eyes that suggested exhaustion, not humor, and the general pallor of an invalid or an accounting clerk. The most remarkable things about him were his hands, which were long and elegant, mothlike in the candlelight. Mademoiselle Geraldine insisted on candlesticks for supper. Gas, she said, was too harsh for food.

The stranger sat next to Professor Braithwope as though it pained him to do so, and took no food, only a little port.

Sidheag, following Sophronia’s gaze, said idly, “So that’s why Captain Niall was so anxious.”

“Captain Niall was anxious?”

“About coming to London. I thought it only that werewolves don’t like town, except the West End. Now I suspect that it has to do with him.”

Sophronia examined their visitor, trying to determine what it was about this man that the school’s werewolf would find objectionable. “Why him in particular?”

“Don’t you recognize our dear fanged member of the Shadow Council?”

“Goodness, no, why should I?”

Sidheag had been raised in Scotland but nevertheless enmeshed in supernatural politics. “True, he likes to stay out of the public eye, but that’s him, all right.”

“Him who?”

Sidheag nodded, firmly. “Funny me having information before you.”

Now Sidheag was simply being obstreperous.

“Are you telling me that is the potentate!” Sophronia hissed the revelation. Things began to click into place in her brain. Not unlike the workings of the oddgob machine. Could this be the school’s mysterious patron? Not just a vampire, not just the government, but Queen Victoria’s pet vampire?

Sidheag chewed a bit of fricassee of rabbit and new potatoes. “Looks like.”

The potentate glanced up and directly at them, as if sensing they were discussing him, although even with supernatural hearing there was no way he could possibly cut through the suppertime chatter all the way to the back of the room. Or could he?

Sophronia raised her water goblet in salute. Sidheag ignored him. As Lady Kingair, she was allied with werewolves. Wolves might shun polite society, but they equaled vampires in status.

Felix, observing this interchange, said from across the table, “Very unpleasantly august company you keep here, for a ladies’ seminary. Now, where’s the pudding course?”

“It doesn’t look like your teacher is too thrilled,” replied Sophronia.

Professor Shrimpdittle was looking bilious. He had a bright paisley scarf tied high about his neck. He was focused on his mutton and spinach with single-minded intent.

Felix said, “In no way are two vampires better than one.”

Especially not if you believe you’ve recently been bitten. “Are you certain it’s not the political power he wields?” Sophronia asked.

“Why, Ria, are you speaking in riddles? That’s sweet. I might almost think you wished to lure me in.” Felix batted long lashes at her.

The meal came to a close, the millet pudding and Norfolk dumplings consumed with gusto, especially by Pillover. Sophronia held back while most of the students crowded out through the door, eager for their brief spate of spare time before night classes began. The teachers let them go, lingering over their sherry or brandy, as nature dictated. In the case of Sister Mattie, nature dictated barley water.

Alone, Sophronia inched her way toward the front of the room. She pretended interest in some leftover nibbles at one of the tables. She watched the teachers out of the corner of her eye.

Professor Braithwope stood to take his leave, and the potentate clapped him on the shoulder in a fair imitation of jocularity. There was no real friendliness to the touch. I suppose they are nervous; one is inside the other’s territory. This ship, after all, belongs to Professor Braithwope by vampire law. So the potentate is imposing, whether invited or not.

She heard the potentate say, “For blood, queen, and country, Aloysius. You take a grave risk, my boy, a grave risk. You are to be commended.”

Professor Braithwope replied, mustache under control for once, “Thank you, sir. I shall do my best.” This was said in the tone of a son to his military father on the eve of battle.

Feeling she was pushing her luck, Sophronia drifted toward the exit, only to find herself accompanied by Professor Braithwope.

“Sir,” she said, politely.

“I don’t like how obsequious they all get when he is around,” said the vampire, as though answering a question she hadn’t asked.

“He is a very important person.”

“More than you will ever know, I hope. Don’t try any of your tricks on him, Miss Temminnick. He won’t put up with them the way I do.”

Sophronia’s mind was whirring. If the school works for the potentate, does that mean graduates are agents of the Shadow Council? “For blood, queen, and country, sir?” she said, softly.

“So he says, Miss Temminnick. So he says.”

Sophronia had always enjoyed the idea of intelligencer work but been worried about who she might be an agent for. Queen Victoria and her supernatural advisers seemed safer than the Picklemen or the vampire hives, but were they really any better? If I want to, will I be permitted to make my own arrangements? Can I choose a patron, or do we automatically go to the highest bidder? And if the latter is the case, how is that a fate better than an arranged marriage?

Sophronia wasn’t certain what instinct drove her to drop by the classrooms that night—but she did.

She saw the light on in Professor Lefoux’s lab and climbed outside to peek in, listening with her trumpet pressed to the porthole. There was only one person in the room, and he wasn’t talking. Professor Shrimpdittle was bent over the large metal suitlike object that he and Professor Lefoux had tinkered with earlier that week. He was working in intense silence, and though Sophronia watched him for a quarter of an hour she got no information. She returned to her room, puzzled, but with a certain sense of anticipation. Soon, she felt, all her questions would be answered. They were, after all, in London.

Her bed was lonely and cold without Bumbersnoot’s hot metal body to warm her feet.

HIGH FLOATING ABOARD

W hen she first saw Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing School for Young Ladies of Quality, Sophronia had been impressed by the size of the airship. But no one would ever make the mistake of calling it pretty. It was a cumbersome thing that seemed to stay up by will rather than ability, like a potbellied pig. One got the impression it didn’t really want to float but was doing so out of a sense of polite obligation.

The same could not be said of Giffard’s aether-current floater, christened the Puffy Nimbus Eighteen. It was a thing of technological beauty. Its bottom half was still barge shaped, but all sleek and elegant. Its blimp was sleek as well, an elongated almond with no patches from cannon fire and no extraneous ropes or ladders. The balloon was made of silk and oiled to a dark midnight purple. The ship glided in over a jubilant crowd and sank to land at the center of Hyde Park, some distance away from the embarrassingly emblazoned Mademoiselle Geraldine’s.

The girls were permitted to visit the assembly area to watch the landing, along with hundreds of others. They were under strict orders to stick together, paired into two long lines. They dressed in their best walking frocks and bonnets, parasols raised against an overcast sky.

“Pretty as a pineapple,” pronounced Mademoiselle Geraldine, waving them off with a lace handkerchief. Mademoiselle Geraldine never left the airship if she could avoid it. “An Englishwoman’s dirigible is her castle” was one of her favorite sayings.

The girls joined in the cheers of welcome. It was a magical event, for Giffard had managed the journey in under an hour. He’d come all the way from Paris, mostly inside the aetherosphere, higher up that any manned float-craft had ever been before. “He must have used the crystalline prototype guidance valve,” insisted Vieve. “He couldn’t have managed those currents any other way.” Then she vanished into the crowd.

Henri Giffard pranced down the gangplank of his wondrous machine with all the fanfare of a circus ringmaster. He was dressed in a suit of cream check with a turquoise cravat and boasted a mustache the likes of which Sophronia had never seen before. Had he been awake, Professor Braithwope and his sad excuse for a lip curtain would have trembled in humiliation. Henri Giffard’s mustache curled up and out like a corkscrew, waxed to within an inch of its life. It was too theatrical. Sophronia instantly stopped looking at him and looked about the crowd. He must be intentionally drawing attention away from someone?

The gathering was what one might expect of a Hyde Park afternoon. There were toffs in fancy carriages and on horseback. Mademoiselle Geraldine’s young ladies of quality were companioned by a number of other students from surrounding schools, all allowed to walk out for the momentous occasion. There were groups of boffins from the Royal Society, distinguished by slightly rumpled attire and a predilection for spectacles and oddball gadgetry. There were riffraff as well: some chimney sweeps, the occasional shop girl, greasers, and other representatives of the rougher orders. Before she had met Soap, Sophronia would have glanced over them, but now she examined all with interest. Intelligencers could be anyone, after all.

She wasn’t certain exactly what she was looking for—something out of the ordinary, she supposed. She noted a group of extraordinarily well-turned-out dandies to one side. They were a bit out of place. It was early in the day for that sort to be awake, and they were not the kind of men to be interested in dirigibles. She stared at them for a long moment, but then Giffard hailed the young men with a whoop, and they whooped back. Chums from the gambling circuit? Giffard was rumored to be a bounder. Several of the academics looked like they might be too well dressed; perhaps they were in disguise? Then again, they could be French scholars, over to observe the landing.