Dorrie had just lifted a ladleful of oatmeal at the serving table in the Sharpened Quill when she heard Lybrarian Della Porta’s voice from a nearby table. “No sense, that apprentice. Did you see that photograph of her in that newspaper from Passaic? Couldn’t have focused more attention on our new Spoke Library if she’d led one of Hannibal’s elephants through it.”
A great gob of Dorrie’s oatmeal fell from the ladle with a plop as a temporary sort of paralysis took over her.
“Well, no harm done really,” said another lybrarian.
Lybrarian Della Porta swallowed noisily. “Can’t say that about the History of Histories page, though you’d think from the inaction around here, it didn’t contain the crux mission that kept that loathsome—”
“Kindly steward your words,” cut in the Archivist’s voice. Out of the corner of her eye, Dorrie saw that though he had spoken quietly, his hands gripped the back of an empty chair at Della Porta’s table. His eyes were blazing.
Dorrie longed to sink into the floor.
“If you must assign blame for…‘the situation,’” the Archivist continued, “then lay it entirely at my feet.”
Della Porta slurped his coffee, deep disdain in his eyes. “As you wish.”
Dorrie replaced the ladle in the pot and hurried back to the apprentices’ table, grateful that it was far from Della Porta’s.
After breakfast, Dorrie took her time walking across the Commons to the Celsus. She checked her mailbox in the hopes that Savi had left her another invitation—he hadn’t—and then walked even more slowly to the Archivist’s office. When she entered, he was bent over a rubbing of a monument stone from out in one of the wherens. “Good morning,” he said, getting up to pour her a cup of tea.
Dorrie lingered in the doorway. “I’m really very sorry,” she said, her voice catching.
The Archivist set down the teapot and blinked at her.
“For losing the History of Histories page last quarter and…” Dorrie felt tears in the corners of her eyes. “And for letting people think you had lost it and just couldn’t remember. That wasn’t right.”
The Archivist quickly poured the tea and offered her one of the pretty blue cups. “There, there,” he said, smiling. “It’s not like people were fully confident in me before the page went missing.”
Dorrie smiled back over the lump in her throat. “How…how is your work on the translation going?”
“Terribly,” said the Archivist, settling himself on the bench. He sighed. “What’s hardest is knowing that Mr. Biggs is sitting out on that island with the answers. I’m sure of it. If it weren’t against every principle I’d sworn to uphold as a lybrarian, I’d be tempted to squeeze Mr. Biggs myself!”
The morning they were to leave for London, 1913 again, Dorrie at last received another invitation to practice with Savi. During the lesson, she did her best to focus, but by the end, she had begun to hate the sand-filled glove. Sweat dripped off the end of her nose as, for about the fiftieth time that hour, she took a ready stance, sword arm bent and rapier level. This time, she thought fiercely. This time!
Savi pushed the lever, and the glove fell. With a brutish grunt, Dorrie lunged forward—and missed.
“Can’t I practice something else?!” she shouted in frustration.
“Why?” Savi replied, busy writing again. “Have you mastered aim?”
Dorrie glared at him, panting, desperate for a distraction. “What are you working on now?”
“I am writing another essay. It’s called ‘For Witches.’ In it, I lay out passionately and in great extravagant detail my argument for their existence.”
Dorrie stared at him. “But you just wrote a whole essay about how witches don’t exist!”
He dipped his quill. “This is a satiric essay.”
“Which means…?” asked Dorrie, relishing the fact that she wasn’t busy for the moment failing to spear the glove.
“It means I’m writing the essay as though I do believe in witches. It means I’m writing it with such absurd vigor that the belief in them is shown to be ridiculous. In the part I’m working on now, I recount the words of a witch I say I met who shared with me the details of her typical day.”
“Can I hear some?” asked Dorrie, hoping to prolong her rest.
“Only you would know,” said Savi, blowing on the parchment.
Dorrie rolled her eyes. “May I? May I hear some?”
He gave the piece of parchment he held a shake. “In this essay, I claim I have met a witch and I’ve written down a description she gave me of her typical day.” He hunched one shoulder and made his voice high and gravelly. “I cause the thieves to burne Candles of dead mens grease, to lay the Hoasts asleep while they rob their houses; I give the flying money, that returnes again to the pocket after ’tis spent; I make the witches seeme nothing but a troope of Cats; ’tis I that, invisible, tumble the dishes and bottles up and downe the house.”
Dorrie giggled.
Savi spoke again in his own voice. “I’ve so far stacked about seventy-five such inane claims into a great teetering pile of lunacy.”
“But what if someone thinks you’re serious?” asked Dorrie.
“Then the person is too far gone to worry about.” He began to write again.
“Please, can’t we do something different?”
Savi looked up her. “Something fun, you mean?”
“Yes!”
“Something that involves crashing blades and long, satisfying runs of parries and thrusts, preferably while covering a great amount of territory with several changes of elevation, including, perhaps, a jump up onto the lip of the well?”
“Yes!”
“No,” he said, cranking the glove upward again.
A few days later, dressed again as proper young English ladies and wielding a pair of binoculars for their stakeout, Dorrie and Ebba slipped through the archway with the keyhand again.
They went immediately to McAndrews Laundry to find Annie. A very sweaty, red-faced woman with a booming voice told them Annie wasn’t there.
“We’ll try again after the stakeout,” Dorrie said as they hurried across Hyde Park toward the League’s headquarters.
Fatima had told Ebba that Master Franklin was going to be leaving Petrarch’s Library for a few days at the end of the week and that they could print the Suffragette on one of his presses then. Mathilde, Saul, and Marcus had also agreed to help. Now Dorrie and Ebba just had to talk Annie into entrusting them with the job.
The benefit tea dragged on for hours, with the headquarters choked with well-dressed guests.
Lady Agnes was in a state of perpetual apoplexy and insisted on filling Dorrie and Ebba’s arms with stacks of anti-suffrage pamphlets, urging them to hand them out to one well-dressed guest after another.
“Oh! Mr. Sacks-Sandbottom!” said Lady Agnes at one point, her voice suddenly breathless. “Lady Whitcomb is here.”
Dorrie followed Lady Agnes’s admiring, if slightly terrified, gaze and saw that it was trained on a woman who’d just arrived. A maid took Lady Whitcomb’s coat but left a long fox fur draped around her neck, the snarling head of which looked as though it might still bite someone. Elegant gloves ran up to her elbows. Beautiful in a cold, chiseled way, she was listening with all the vital interest of a fork to an older man standing beside her.
“She’s immensely wealthy,” said Lady Agnes. “Her family made a fortune in ginger beer bottling. Oh, my goodness. She’s coming this way.” Lady Agnes glanced hastily at herself in a nearby mirror, her hands restless on her dress, smoothing and arranging.
“Lady Agnes. Mr. Sacks-Sandbottom,” said Lady Whitcomb, arriving in their midst. “How good to see you.” She waved away a plate of watercress sandwiches as if they were gangrenous big toes. “I just wanted to thank you for your work on the Anti-Suffrage Review. So much wisdom and
good sense in its pages. I’ll be donating liberally.”
Lady Agnes blushed deeply and dug her elbow sharply into Ebba’s side to remind her to offer Lady Whitcomb a pamphlet, which she ignored.
“You have my appreciation,” said Lady Whitcomb, playing with a thin necklace inlaid with tiny white stones that shimmered against her neck. “I must excuse myself as I’ve promised the Earl of Sandwich a conversation. Feel free to join us, of course.”
Lady Agnes and Mr. Sacks-Sandbottom fairly ran to catch up with Lady Whitcomb, finally leaving Dorrie and Ebba to their own devices. They wandered to the front window, hoping to glimpse Annie, but the sidewalk in front of the park was empty.
“Mrs. Richardson said she hasn’t been here all day,” said Ebba.
“Then I hope the copies of the Anti-Suffrage Review do get stolen tonight,” said Dorrie.
They suppressed laughter.
At last, dusk fell, and the room began to empty. Dorrie and Ebba hurried into their coats, intent on taking up their watch—first for the delivery of the Anti-Suffrage Review and then for the thief—from the park. They were about to leave when Mr. Sacks-Sandbottom grabbed hold of Ebba’s arm. He looked angry. “Lady Whitcomb is missing her diamond necklace. It has a faulty clasp, and she believes it fell.” He stared pointedly into Ebba’s face. “Did you find it?”
Dorrie didn’t like the hold he had on Ebba’s arm—or the accusatory look on his face and the way little flecks of spit had gathered in the corners of his mouth.
Ebba must not have liked these things either because she jerked her arm free, looking angry herself. “No, I haven’t.”
Mr. Sacks-Sandbottom glowered at them. “Lady Whitcomb says that the last time she remembered it on her neck was when you, Ebba, Lady Agnes, Lady Whitcomb, and I were talking.”
“Well, I didn’t touch it,” Ebba said, looking icily at Mr. Sacks-Sandbottom. They let themselves out.
On the sidewalk, coat collars up, Ebba spoke first. “So that’s what Master Casanova was talking about. Mr. Horrible Hyphenated assumed I took the necklace because I have darker skin?”
“He didn’t even think to ask me about it,” said Dorrie.
“And he gets to vote?” Ebba jammed her hat on. “Glad I don’t live in this wheren.”
Since the bundles of the Anti-Suffrage Review weren’t scheduled to be delivered to the League’s headquarters for at least another hour, Dorrie and Ebba decided to check McAndrews Laundry one more time before settling in for their watch.
Luck was with them. Through the steamy window, they could see Annie behind the counter. They went in.
Annie looked up from where she was turning the crank on a great wooden drum and smiled. “If you’re here to warn me about the numerous rotten fish that will be thrown at me today, you’re too late. It already happened.”
Dorrie and Ebba looked at each other.
“Actually,” Dorrie whispered, “we came here to warn you about something worse.”
Chapter 19
Waves
Annie hadn’t believed them at first. “How do you know this?”
Dorrie had been prepared. “My father has a cousin who has a friend who works in the Parliament building. He heard Lord Cromer talking about it in an elevator.”
When they’d shared their second rehearsed fiction—that Ebba’s uncle’s hobby was printing and that he had a press in his basement and that he quietly supported the cause of women’s suffrage and had offered to help print the next edition of the Suffragette—she’d positively gaped at them.
All the same, Annie had agreed to go find her sister—who helped edit the Suffragette— when her shift ended, tell her the news, and put the proposal to her.
Dorrie and Ebba had hurried to the park to shiver beside one another on a bench. At 6:00 p.m., a motorized van had dropped off two tall bundles of newspapers on the doorstep, where they’d remained undisturbed for two hours. At 8:00 p.m., Dorrie and Ebba, cramped and cold, called it quits and hurried back to McAndrews Laundry to see what Annie and her sister had decided. A half hour later, they emerged, faces shining.
Though they ran all the way to the London Library after they emerged a half hour later, they were late to meet the keyhand but very glad he did not ask them what was in the battered valise Dorrie now carried.
Near midnight, when most of the other apprentices had gone to bed, Dorrie, Ebba, Marcus, Mathilde, Fatima, and Saul sat crowded on Dorrie and Ebba’s beds.
“It’ll take us hours just to typeset all this,” said Fatima, looking at the contents of Annie’s valise. “Never mind printing off the copies.”
“But we can do it, right?” Dorrie asked.
“With six of us working on it?” said Fatima. “I think so.”
“Beauregarde & Gloop, Publishers at Large,” said Marcus.
Before breakfast the next morning, Marcus was given the task of informing Mistress Wu that he’d seen Darling slithering down the corridor near the room that held the printing presses. To the apprentices’ delight, during announcements she declared the area off-limits until Master Yeshi, who handled all the animals kept in Petrarch’s Library, returned from tenth-century Mongolia and could search for the creature.
As Mistress Wu asked the staff lybrarians to attend a short meeting in Hypatia’s office, the members of Beauregarde & Gloop exchanged triumphant glances that made Izel’s eyes dart with wild suspicion.
“Apprentices should go on with work as usual,” finished Mistress Wu.
It occurred to Dorrie that this was the perfect time to return the skipkey, so she hurried down to the Archivist’s office, relieved to finally have an opportunity to return the “borrowed” skipkey. After slipping it back in the trunk, she sat down to the work she hadn’t finished the day before. At the usual time, she remembered to put the kettle on to boil, sure the Archivist would be surprised and pleased. However, when the Archivist finally returned, he didn’t even notice. Barely acknowledging Dorrie, he went straight to one of the great cupboards and unlocked it.
When he swung open the door, Dorrie gaped. On the shelves within stood volume after volume of History of Histories. It seemed to be an entire set. Her heart beat a little faster. Ever since she’d overheard Francesco and Lybrarian Della Porta talking about the crux mission, Dorrie had assumed that only the lybrarians—or the page she and Marcus had lost—could tell her the identity of its imperiled subject. Yet, another source of the knowledge had been right under her nose for more than a month.
The Archivist pulled out a volume and brought it over to his end of the worktable, where he hunched over it. Having finished the work he’d given her the day before, Dorrie had to ask him three times what he’d like her to do next before he snapped at her to think of a job herself.
“Is something wrong?” Dorrie asked, her feelings hurt.
“No, no. Forgive me.”
Dorrie saw that his eyes held grief along with some of the wildness she’d seen when he’d been upset at other times.
The Archivist gave her a weak smile. “I’m just… Why don’t you…straighten up a bit.”
Dorrie swept the floor, then steeped and poured a cup of tea. She set it by the Archivist’s elbow.
He took it gratefully, and then, whether because Dorrie’s eyes had drifted to the open History of Histories volume or for another reason, he marked his place with a feather, closed the book, and laid a pile of rubbings atop it.
For the rest of the morning, the Archivist bent over his translation work, lifting his head now and then to stare at the set of symbols on the wall.
• • •
Starting just after practicums and for the duration of the afternoon and into the evening, the six partners of Beauregarde & Gloop, Publishers at Large threw themselves into the task of producing one thousand copies of the Suffragette.
Once, returning to the printing press
room with some water for the parched among the publishers, Dorrie nearly collided with Mistress Daraney. Luckily, the librarian, who’d been invited to play whist at Ursula’s cottage, was too preoccupied with having gotten lost again to ask any uncomfortable questions about why Dorrie’s face and hands were covered in ink.
Dorrie gave her directions, and she’d stumped off on her peg leg, muttering about the impossibility of navigating without stars.
Beauregarde & Gloop finished its task near midnight. There had perhaps been more tidy editions of the Suffragette produced, but it was doubtful that any of them had seen such copious amounts of sweat produced on its behalf.
After they’d stowed the newspapers in an empty trunk in the Abbey St. Gall, Marcus suggested a trip to the Inky Pot for some baklava. Only Ebba considered.
“What about Fedya?” Dorrie asked.
“He hasn’t poisoned me,” said Marcus.
“Yet,” said Fatima ominously.
Only Ebba, citing near-starvation, agreed to go. The rest of the apprentices decided to return to the attics by ones and two for the sake of inconspicuousness. When Dorrie slipped in last, it was immediately apparent that something was wrong.
For one thing, despite the late hour, the den was packed. Izel stood with her fists on her hips, her mouth open as if Dorrie’s arrival had interrupted her midsentence.
“What’s going on?” Dorrie asked.
“What’s going on?” repeated Izel, her eyes flashing. “Remember the reversal Mr. Biggs threatened? The one that would undo Algernon Sidney’s rescue? Well, it turns out the Foundation didn’t just choose that event randomly.”
Dorrie’s blood seemed to run instantly cold.
Izel marched toward her. “Lybrarian Della Porta says the mission is listed on the History of Histories page you and Marcus lost in Athens and it’s now in the Foundation’s clutches!”
“Clutches?” repeated Mathilde. “Who says clutches? Now you’re just trying for drama.”
Izel rounded on her. “Lybrarian Della Porta says the page has an extremely important crux mission listed on it!”
The Ninja Librarians: Sword in the Stacks Page 18