Mission Category: Protection of Printed Material
All right, she thought, that’ll be the banners carried by the Alpha Suffrage Club…
Wheren: London, England, February 1913
Dorrie read the words again. She frowned slightly. The parade that the Alpha Suffrage Club would try to march in was to take place in Washington, DC. And then her frown cleared. Hypatia must have listed the wheren that held the Spoke Library they’d have to go through to get to Washington, DC. She read on.
Imperiled Subject: The National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage
She read it again. Who were they? And opposing! That couldn’t be right. There had to be a mistake. She glanced at Ebba, who was frowning and squinting at her own page. Dorrie skimmed down farther.
Nature of Threat: Copies of the Anti-Suffrage Review have been taken repeatedly from the doorstep of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage before they can be distributed.
Mission: Prevent any further disappearances.
Dorrie nudged Ebba. “Anti-Suffrage Review?”
“This isn’t what we proposed at all,” Ebba said.
“Excuse me,” said Dorrie, looking up, “but there must be some mistake. Our mission proposal was to help Ida B. Wells and the Alpha Suffrage Club at the suffrage parade in Washington, DC, but this says our mission is to assist the…” She looked down at the piece of paper again. “The National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage.”
“Indeed.” Hypatia smiled. “I hope you’ll forgive the subterfuge. To give you an opportunity to put the Principle of the Even Eye into practice, the research department looked at the opinions and ideas your chosen imperiled subjects were trying to express and found each of you a substitute imperiled subject.”
“A substitute?” Dorrie repeated, not liking the way this was going.
“Yes,” said Hypatia. “An imperiled subject who holds opinions opposite to those held by your chosen imperiled subject.”
Ebba gaped at her. “You mean…someone who doesn’t want women to vote.”
“Precisely,” said Hypatia.
“But…we’re girls!” said Dorrie. “We don’t want to help people who want to convince other people not to let women vote!”
“And that’s exactly why you must practice doing so.”
At dinner, Dorrie and Ebba cornered Mathilde.
“Why’d you tell us to pick the Alpha Suffrage Club?” Ebba demanded furiously.
“I’m sorry,” said Mathilde. “I forgot about the whole bait-and-switch part of that practicum. I was just thinking about how rotten things were for the Alpha Suffrage Club.”
Dorrie banged her satchel down on the table in a resentful temper. “Well, if you had remembered, we could have proposed a mission to help those obnoxious anti-suffrage people and gotten one to help Ida B. Wells!”
Mathilde chased a butter bean around her plate. “Somehow, I don’t think you would have fooled Hypatia.”
That evening, Dorrie and Ebba and about half the other apprentices trooped down to the Gymnasium to take part in the first of the quarter’s weapons tournaments organized by Mistress Mai.
In the corner set aside for the rapier tournament, Dorrie and the other competitors donned pads and helmets. After assigning them to pairs for their first bouts, Mistress Wu moved among them, watching their form and calling out corrections and encouragement. They were expected to keep track of when they were touched. Dorrie was assigned to take on Kenzo. Mortifyingly, despite the work she’d done with Savi the previous quarter, she found herself fighting hard to beat the eight-year-old and, in the end, only did so by one touch.
After being beaten handily by two lybrarians-in-training, Dorrie came close to beating Fatima but couldn’t really celebrate since directly after the bout, Fatima had run outside to throw up in the shrubbery and had then been sent up to see Ursula in the human preservation and repair department due to a raging fever.
Finally, Dorrie found herself facing Millie. If Dorrie was at the bottom of the heap in terms of sword skill, Millie was very near the top, even among the adults. Exuding a stiff, simmering sort of hostility, Millie defeated Dorrie in a humiliating thirty seconds to the sound of Izel’s admiring giggles and her taunt of “What do you expect from the Archivist’s apprentice?”
Tearing off her pads and helmet, Dorrie stormed from the Gymnasium without even waiting for Ebba. Rapier still in hand, she charged through room after room, feeling she might bite the next person who strayed into her path.
As Dorrie ducked through another doorway into a graveled yard, her rapier was sent flying. It landed with a clatter.
Filled with sullen fury, she spun around. “Hey—” she cried but broke off her exclamation. Savi was sitting on a wooden bench, his own rapier aloft.
“Mademoiselle, either march blindly or hold a rapier unsheathed before you but not both at once. It’s very poor manners.”
“Savi!” she cried, a grin splitting her face. About to throw her arms around him, she stopped short as the murky feelings of resentment and abandonment she’d been keeping stuffed away swelled inside her.
“I’m experimenting with sitting and doing nothing,” said Savi, looking at the bench upon which he sat as though it were a strange curiosity. “Phillip tells me it’s a wonderful thing to do. Would you like to join me?”
“Why didn’t you write me or find me or something?” Dorrie hated the strain and squeak in her voice. “Why did you just disappear like that? Like you didn’t even care about me!”
“Of course I care. But in the last few weeks, circumstances have dictated I be far away and not in a position to send messages, however much I might have liked to.”
“I didn’t even sign up for any sword-fighting practicums,” said Dorrie hotly. “I’ve got to help a bunch of anti-suffragists in my principles practicum, and they’ve stuck me with the Archivist! It’s terrible.”
“Non, mademoiselle,” said Savi, grimacing as he shifted his position, his hand going to his side. “Bad puns and dead friends are terrible.”
For a moment, the memory of the glorious, terrible day when she’d watched Savi sink wounded to the ground after fighting off at least six attackers at Porte de Nesle flashed loudly and frighteningly before her.
Dorrie’s bitterly felt disappointments collided with perspective, and she dropped onto the bench beside Savi. “But that’s just it. The Lybrariad is in trouble. The world is in trouble. Algernon Sidney is definitely in trouble, and I’m just sorting papers for the Archivist while other apprentices…” She broke off the thought. “I don’t want to be his apprentice. I want to be yours! I wanted to help you with your missions the way I did at Porte de Nesle! I want to help you find out where the Foundation’s making Whim’s Gift and help stop them.”
“Is the important thing that you and I are the ones who stop them?”
“No!” said Dorrie, feeling herself scowling.
Savi looked down the entirety of his nose at her, which took a while.
“Okay, yes!” she cried. They stared at one another for a moment, and then she kicked out a leg. She groped to explain. “I want it to be impossible for anyone to ever think for a second that the Lybrariad offered me my apprenticeship just because”—she took a deep breath—“because I’m an ‘accidental keyhand,’” she said, curving her fingers into angry air quotes.
Savi stared at her. “I have no idea what you are trying to convey with your fingers, but this I know, and mark me well.”
Something in his tone of voice made Dorrie give him her full attention.
“One could waste a lifetime trying to prove one’s worth to others rather than developing the worth itself.” He stood. “Now as far as I’m concerned, you are indeed my apprentice, and I am simply loaning your services to the Archivist. In the meantime, I will offer you this. While missions will keep me away from Petrarch’
s Library for much of this quarter, I will still make it my business to give you rapier lessons as I can.”
“You will?” Dorrie asked, her spirits lifting.
“No,” he said, adjusting his hold on the hilt of his sword. “I just said that to hear myself speak.”
“When can we start?” she stammered, jumping up.
“When I’m sure you intend to bring your best effort to helping the Archivist.”
Dorrie stared at him, feeling needled. “Would you?”
“At your age?” He looked thoughtfully at the little pond full of goldfish nearby. “Probably not. But then again, I didn’t have such a fine mentor as myself who will now tell you that the Archivist is no more a fool than any of the rest of us. It’s likely that he’s as wrong as wrong can be about Petrarch’s alphabet, but his efforts are not necessarily any less worthwhile than Della Porta’s, for all that Della Porta likes to tell the world that story. Hypatia wouldn’t have assigned you to the Archivist if she didn’t think he deserved an apprentice.”
“She assigned three to Della Porta,” mumbled Dorrie.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Savi said.
“All right. Fine,” Dorrie said, scurrying to retrieve her sword from the gravel.
“Fine, what?”
“Fine, I’ll do the whole best-effort thing,” she said, advancing on Savi with her rapier aloft.
“You haven’t even thought about it properly yet,” flamed Savi as he offered a slow thrust for her to parry. “How can I possibly take you seriously?” He left himself open, daring her to take advantage. Dorrie attempted a feint, which he parried in a flash, and then in some way she didn’t understand, he caused the rapier to fly out of her hand for a second time.
“Can you teach me to do that?” she asked.
“Perhaps in a year or two,” Savi said as she retrieved her sword again.
“A year or two!” Dorrie exclaimed, feeling like that was so far away as to not be real.
“That’s if you put in an enormous amount of practice time.”
“All right. What are we going to start with?”
“Well, I have found that aim is of some importance in swordsmanship.”
Chapter 13
Turn of Events
For three glorious days, Savi remained in Petrarch’s Library, and true to his word, he gave Dorrie a lesson on each of them. Right off the bat, he ordered her to retire the rapier she’d checked out from the circulation desk.
“But…but…” Dorrie had said, finding it difficult to part with the fine-looking sword with its ornate hilt and shiny blade.
He had plucked it out of her hand with a disgusted thumb and forefinger. “It’s an ostentatious, unbalanced hatpin.” He handed her a terribly plain-looking rapier, the bell of which was dented and scratched, but Dorrie had to admit it felt better in her hand as she practiced the footwork Savi had shown her the previous quarter.
Rather than invite her to cross blades with him in any of the lessons, Savi had talked her through the fundamentals of aim and then had her lunge at a spot inked on a pad he had hung on the Gymnasium courtyard wall. Repeatedly. So many times, in fact, that Dorrie thought she might expire from the pure tedium of it.
Savi spent the lessons sitting on his favorite bench, his quill busy on a piece of parchment in his lap.
Midway through the lesson on the third day, she staggered toward the well and poured a dipperful of water into her mouth, not caring how it splashed on her hot face and neck.
“There are no water breaks on the field of battle,” said Savi.
“There aren’t any quills either,” Dorrie replied grumpily, splashing the dipper back into the bucket.
“Ah, you believe I should be sweating along with you,” Savi said, scratching out a line with a flourish. “That I am too comfortable here in the shade with my blistered feet up and a cushion beneath my poked and lacerated frame?” He scratched out a sentence. “Believe me, apprentice, I’m doing my own sweating here. It takes excessive amounts of energy to aim for the perfect word, to deliver the perfect verbal thrust, to parry in advance the lurching and threadbare objections that will be made by my most clever readers, to employ the sure footwork of one splendid analogy after another. Trust me when I say that my brain is laboring ten times as hard as your arm.” He glanced up at Dorrie, who was just finishing the dipperful of water. “Make that a hundred times.”
“Is that your very long way of asking for a drink of water?”
“Yes. Would you mind?”
Dorrie grinned.
“The hole in my side still complains.”
Dorrie’s grin faded, remembering how much blood had stained his shirt. Quickly, she scrambled to her feet, scooped up another dipperful, and brought it over to him. “What are you writing?” she asked cautiously as she sat beside him, trying not to look over his shoulder in case she’d see a new round of love poems.
“It’s an essay entitled ‘Against Witches.’ In it, I aim to lay out the whole, logical, beautiful, and certain case against the existence of witches, warlocks, warty devil spawn, the gibbering possessed, and any number of other absurd creations of the human mind.” He dipped his quill in a pot of ink. “And if it’s all the same to you, I think it’s time you got back to your own aiming.”
Before Savi left Petrarch’s Library again, he extracted a promise from Dorrie at the Paris, 1647 CE archway. “Practice your footwork, and practice your aim for at least a half hour a day—more if you’d like to be able to hit your target with any kind of consistency before you need your own set of false teeth.” He had raised her chin and then looked down his nose at her. “And don’t forget. Best effort for the Archivist.”
She jerked her chin away and given Savi an exasperated look.
The weeks that followed were busy ones as Dorrie and Ebba prepared to launch their Principles mission in London, 1913. Hypatia had given them the task of thoroughly researching the wheren’s politics, technology, music styles, food, and entertainment as well as popular pastimes, manners, and lifestyles of the very rich and very poor and everyone in between—and a hundred other topics, it seemed.
Each student had to meet with Master Casanova in his luxuriously appointed office. He handed Dorrie and Ebba dossiers containing the details of the false identities they would claim in London.
“Ebba.” He tossed the end of one of the scarves he always wore smartly over one shoulder. “Your father, William Risien, is a successful lawyer of the South African bar and practices in Bulawayo in the area currently known as Rhodesia. You have been sent to London for a visit with your uncle, Dr. James Risien Russell. He is the personal physician of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, who happens to be a member of the National League Opposing Woman Suffrage, hence your knowledge of the organization and your fervent wish to lend your energy to their sterling efforts.”
Ebba made a face of which Mathilde would have been proud.
He turned to Dorrie. “Dorothea. Your parents exist on the outskirts of the aristocracy but have fallen on hard times. Your father is Rathcliffe-Exleys, lately of Rhodesia. Opportunity to pillage and claim treasure in the name of civilization and all that. Your mother and Ebba’s father are acquainted, hence you have been included in the trip to England. You’re both looking forward to living lives full of proper deportment at tea parties and marrying well.”
Master Casanova picked up Sophocles, one of the two small terriers that accompanied him everywhere he went. “Now we must talk about something unpleasant.”
“More unpleasant than anti-suffragists?” said Dorrie.
“In London, 1913, the majority of persons have light skin. Most of them labor under the illusion that they are superior to anyone with darker skin.”
Dorrie and Ebba gave each other sidelong glances.
“Based on that, Ebba, you’ll need to prepare yourself for insulting
theories, superciliousness, and most likely flagrant disparagement and discrimination.”
Sophocles growled.
“Like Ida B. Wells?” asked Ebba.
“Precisely.”
“That doesn’t sound fair at all,” said Dorrie.
“Well, if you want to experience it yourself, you’ll have to go to seventeenth-century China.”
Dorrie reared back. “I didn’t mean—”
“However,” said Casanova, getting up from behind his desk, “you can both enjoy the male chauvinism. Plenty of that to go around.”
After that, there were arrangements to be made for the clothing they’d wear, which necessitated a trip to the circulation desk and a meeting with one of Mistress Lovelace’s staff members.
She had stroked her chin as she had first looked over Casanova’s dossiers and then Dorrie and Ebba with a hard, evaluative eye, remaining silent for a good minute. “Linen blouses and skirts. Simple yet smart,” she’d finally declared. “Navy coats. Leather boots. Wool tights. No shouty trimming. Ridiculously large hats.” She cocked her head to one side. “Not quite old enough for corsets, which is unfortunate.”
“Why?” asked Dorrie.
The assistant stared at her as if she’d asked why humans eat. “Nothing says ‘wealthy’ more than personal discomfort. Rich people positively insist upon it. Think of the scads of people it takes to care for your needs when you can’t bend over. Comfort, my dear, is for bootblacks.”
In Mistress Daraney’s practicums, Dorrie and the other students had been introduced to the parts of the dinghy and the basics of maneuvering it in the surf. They had spent hours rowing around in a large circle, many of the students crashing into one another and losing oars, while Mistress Daraney stood effortlessly balanced in a rocking boat in the center of the circle and called out instructions and insults by turn. Dorrie found she had a knack for the rhythm of rowing and felt marvelously at home in the boats.
The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks Page 12