“Ah. And did Professor Plumb disembark in London too?”
“That he did. When Obie said you was interested, I asked around. Plumb were one o’ the first off the ship. Nobody remembers how much luggage he had. Not after a whole winter’s weekly crossings.”
“Thank you, Hiram.” Maddie smiled, and then, at a faint sound from the small stateroom’s door, asked how to get her charges transferred to a private airship the following afternoon. Obie said finding a Steamlord yacht at the terminal would be peaches and cream.
“Just you ready them and their luggage when you see Venice off the port bow, likely around teatime, and I’ll pop by with porters as soon as we hook onto the terminal. Bring you any news at the same time.”
“Thank you, Obie.” After checking for long-nosed matrons, she saw the two young men out into the corridor and went to bed, worrying how to proceed in Venice if no message came from Madame to help direct her actions.
On the third morning since Cairo, the airship cruised low along the Dalmatian coast, over unfolding views of rocky crags, green fields, and stony medieval towns with orange tiled roofs. It was not yet teatime when Venice rose out of the sea in the distance, its islands verdant and its buildings antique cream in the misty sunlight.
Obie arrived with the porters, and said in quick, quiet tones, “The imposter’s long gone. On arrival in February, she stayed a week at the Lido Hotel under your name, vanished for a month, and then departed on a White Sky liner as you again.”
A small mercy: she had not spent all of Carnivale carousing as a Main-Bearing. “Going where?”
“Paris-London, same as us. Only thing is, she never got off in either place. Not under any name Madame’s minions could discover.”
“She switched names on me again? How will I ever find her now?” And what was to stop the woman switching back to Maddie’s name whenever convenient?
“Madame says if you will come straight up to London, she may have more answers by the time you arrive there.”
“London! Oh, Obie, that’s a terrific risk.”
“What else can you do? Where else would you go?”
Clarice, in the parlour doorway, exclaimed. “You’re going? Oh, please, not yet, Miss Hatter. You must turn us over to Lucy in person.”
“Yes, of course I will take you to your cousin,” Maddie assured her. She’d long ago worked out that Lucy was no threat to her identity. An Aquatiempe, possibly a sister of the groom, had attended pre-Season dance classes at the same academy as Maddie in the same year, but she would be far away in London. No Steamlord’s daughter would interrupt her all-important dress-fittings to supervise the return of two little cousins by marriage. “I was merely asking whether there would be an affordable stateroom to London, for this one is too large for me alone.”
“You’re going on to London at once?” Clarice clapped her hands. “Come with us. The yacht has bags of staterooms. And surely you could write a column about our Court dresses?” Maddie’s eyes met Obie’s. He shrugged. She did too. As a way to get to London, it had the merits of being both fast and free.
“Yes, I will come, if your cousin permits.” She swept up her wide hat, with TD already nestled amongst the metallic ribbons, and pinned it into place.
In a very short time, Maddie, Clarice, and Nancy were walking down the gangplank to the Venetian aerodrome. The greeny-gray waters of the Grand Canal murmured four floors below, but the gangplank was wide and the side-rails sturdy oak. Their trunks, bags, and hatboxes followed in a veritable parade of porters. Mist kissed their cheeks, too delicate to be called rain, but leaving a slick over the vast, flat rooftop with its contra-dance of passengers, porters, and luggage.
At the last step, a man in majordomo’s livery of black and teal—the Aquatiempe colours, Maddie recognized—lay in wait for them. A phalanx of one-wheeled automatons stood behind him, their armatures ready to take the load from the porters. Steamer trunks would be towed while smaller boxes were piled on their polished platforms. The ladies, the majordomo indicated with a bow and an outstretched hand, would be conveyed across the terminal in a teacup-shaped, auto-steering steam-carriage, painted and upholstered in teal with black accents. Trust an Artificer family to have the best and newest automatons.
The mist thickened to dampening droplets. An umbrella rose from the teacup’s rim and spread itself over the cushioned area. Its surface shifted hues with each raindrop, making an ever-changing mosaic of water-scapes from deep blue to palest green around a core palette of purest teal. The pole slid upward to permit easy entry to the semicircular seat, and then lowered itself to a distance safe for hat trimmings, its angles optimized for deflecting rain from passengers. As soon as the ladies were seated, the teacup turned on its saucer and rolled smoothly away, its steam-driven wheels making less sound than the clockwork mechanism that guided it.
Hearing the tiny chuff of released steam above the ticking, Maddie knew a small thrill of family pride. Her great-grandfather had introduced the first bronze bearing that allowed a step-down in power from a steam-driven mechanism to a clockwork one, opening up the world to wondrous steam-and-clockwork constructions, including self-propelling, self-guiding vehicles like this one. For that invention a grateful Empire had created him the third-ever Steamlord, and awarded him the family heraldic alloy of bronze. To that one invention the family ever since owed its prosperity. Not so thrilling was the old man’s use of an entirely unrelated technology to tinker with the family’s genetic heritage and turn all their hair bronze with a single black streak. Dying over that gleaming metallic hue, on lashes and brows as well as scalp, was one of Maddie’s more irksome grooming tasks. But nothing the Aquatiempe had accomplished would have been possible without her great-grandfather’s bronze, step-down, power bearing.
Across the terminus they went, the teacup gliding this way and that through the clusters of passengers and multi-cart baggage trains. Obie walked beside it, the majordomo behind, his automatons following him with the trunks and hat-boxes. Above the buzz of wheels, voices, and airship engines, Obie pointed out to the nieces the airships of various nations’ fleets, the Greek Royal Barge, and the Venetian Doge’s personal craft, which was rumoured to be used largely to ferry visiting Vatican officials to discreet gaming establishments.
“Hah,” said Maddie. “Nothing in Venice is discreet. Some pleasures are merely more expensive than others for the quality of their illusion of discretion.” Too late she realized the discussion might be straying into waters unsuitable for sheltered English debutantes, but the girls were not attending. Instead, they looked ahead eagerly for their first glimpse of their cousin’s new family’s air yacht. The procession halted beside an elaborately painted airship of considerable size. Its Carnivale mask motif was predominantly teal and black, ornamented with silver scrollwork and fist-sized crystals polished to the sheen of diamonds. This was what Maddie’s father would consider vulgar ostentation. She stepped out of the saucer with the aid of Obie’s hand and the teacup carried on, up a black gangplank railed by silver ropes.
Clarice called back, “Please hurry, Miss Hatter. Anyone will guide you to the ladies’ parlour.”
“Just thanking the nice officer,” Maddie said. As the automatons flowed around them with the luggage, she asked Obie softly, “How can I find Madame in London?”
“I don’t know if she’s there yet,” Obie replied. “She was en route from the Hungarian-Imperial Parasol Championships in Frankfurt. We haven’t had a chance to get a message off save that we’d reached Venice and would advise, and we don’t know how long that news will take to find her. What do you want me to pass on, since you can’t send TD up from this garish vessel unseen?”
“Tell her . . . say I will go to Claridge’s Hotel to seek an interview with Mrs. Midas-White, to save my job with CJ. Once I find a quiet professional ladies’ club for the night, I’ll let her know where to find me.” Obie was about to protest, but Maddie shushed him. Yes, walking into Claridge’s might put her into the path of ladies who had known her. However, she had often stayed there as Madame’s assistant, in purple hair, a lab coat, and thick magnifying goggles, and would readily find another disguise to shield her from passing glances. She squeezed his hand, thanked him for his help, and followed the last automaton over the black gangplank.
Stepping inside was like going home. A human footman bowed and led her inward without daring to inquire of her identity or destination. The aerodrome noises hushed. The thick carpet gave beneath her boots. The servants stowing luggage stepped aside and lowered their gaze as she passed. It mattered not that the livery and carpets were not in her family’s colours, or that the veneered walls with their raised scrollwork were black rather than brushed oak, or that the handrails, sconces, and doorknobs were silver instead of gleaming bronze. The whisper of steam in unseen pipes was the life-beat she had heard since the day of her birth. She relaxed and walked calmly onward, ready to face the young mistress of this magnificence.
At the bottom of a wide staircase, an oval foyer opened. Beyond an archway was the grand salon, consuming the forward quarter of the ship with its velvet, fringes, and panoramic view. To the left an open double door revealed a billiard table and other accoutrements of idle entertainment. The footman took her to the right, to an elegant parlour done in shades of teal from the silk damask upholstery and draperies to the flocked wallpaper. Even the ladies’ gowns were teal, one conservatively cut as befit a young, brown-haired bride from the Old Nobility—Lucy—and the other a daring splash of turquoise tulle over a black lace dress slit so high up the thigh and down at the cleavage as to be barely there at all. Knee-high black boots and fingerless, black lace gloves completed the ensemble. One of the sisters-in-law had come along after all. Maddie quickly decided this must be a married woman, for no Steamlord papa would permit his unwed daughter out in such apparel.
The owner of the dashing couture looked at Maddie from under natural teal hair cut into numerous black-edged wedges. Her eyelashes were impossibly long, tipped with black hearts, over eyes painted in sweeps of water hues that mimicked the sea beyond the lagoon. The flawless artistry of the cheeks ended in deep teal lips shaped in the most perfectly plump cupid’s bow Maddie had ever seen. Surely the loveliest lips in London.
The lips . . . oh, hell. Serephene Aquatiempe, the one member of this family who might possibly have seen enough of the Honourable Madeleine to recognize her in Maddie’s working-class face. And how under the heavens did she get away with that daring dress?
The room was bathed in the glaring electrical light most likely to highlight the greeny-bronze undertones beneath Maddie’s mousy brown dye job. Exposure might occur as soon as she removed her hat. She cast her eyes down, tilting her wide blue brim forward to shield most of her face, and curtseyed clumsily, as if she had not been trained to it since birth. How could she spend the next thirty-six hours in close confines with this young lady and not be revealed? Better to claim air-sickness and keep to her stateroom. She repeated the curtsey to Lucy.
“I hope,” she said, aping a Yorkshire accent as far as she dared, “the misses have not importuned you for me to join your family party. If this is not convenient, I will debark at once and find a place on a commercial airship.”
“Bosh,” said Serephene, her exquisite eyes fixed on Maddie still. “Lucy, dear, do take your cousins to their stateroom, and I will show the chaperone to her quarters. Come this way, Miss . . . Hatter.”
Maddie followed. Nobody actually from the lesser orders refused a . . . request . . . from a Steamlord’s daughter.
Serephene led the way along the starboard corridor, her tulle side-bustle briskly brushing the wall and a maid who was squeezed flat in a doorway to stay out of the lady’s way. More black paneling and silver fittings, room upon room, broken by a single open space with wide windows, comfortable chairs, and bookshelves on either end. One lace-gloved hand waved in that direction.
“The library, such as it is. You will be right next to it, should you desire to read. Your choices are popular literature and dozens of treatises on the water-clock miniaturizations for which the English Crown found my grandfather worthy of a peerage. There’s a brass monkey comes down from the ceiling; just hit the blue button on any chair-arm. We depart at once, and dine over the Alps.
En famille
, so you need not unpack an evening dress.” She opened a door and ushered Maddie into a stateroom almost as comfortable as the one she’d had on her own father’s air yacht. “Unless you’d like to borrow one of mine?”
“That would not be suitable, milady,” said Maddie, “for one of my class.”
“Pity,” said Serephene. She opened a panel to show a bathing closet with full-sized tub and a wall filled with colourful jars, towels, sponges, scents, and at least eight shades of toenail lacquer. “I’d hoped you would admit it, and not force me to say so. I know who you are.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, milady.”
“Bosh, darling.” The lady flung herself into an armchair tapestried with gondolas on water. “What I want to know is how you managed it. If I have to sleepwalk through one more Season shoving away the chinless would-be bridegrooms with the toe of my boot, I shall go utterly mad with boredom. You ran off two years ago, or were kidnapped, but anyway you have survived in a world in which we pampered daughters are expected to perish from sheer terror, and yet here you are, in blooming health. Although more shabbily dressed than I ever expected to see the Honourable Madeleine M—”