The trip up the Nile was innocuous. The girls were content to sit upon the shady balcony much of the day, eyeing the archaeological ruins that passed beneath the airship’s keel and gossiping about their fellow passengers. None of these were young men either handsome or eligible, and Maddie’s first fear, that she would be forced to chaperone the girls everywhere to ward off undesirable attention, had fallen away with the last sight of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
After luncheon, they explored the facilities. Clarice and Nancy were no strangers to airship liners, but Maddie, until she had run away, had traveled like any Steamlord child, in private luxury. To her, the fittings of the various regions were not especially luxurious, but after two years of living as a working woman, she relished the comfort of servants to bring a cool drink, the latest newspapers, and blank aetherogram forms on request.
After a whirlwind pass through the dining room, First-Class Lounge, Spa facilities (with a rather ominous masseuse offering her services in or out of the steam-closets) and an outdoor viewing platform complete with chaises from which one could comfortably view the passing scenery, Maddie settled in the ship’s library. She looked around at the heavy books on the inner wall, the flimsier airship editions of popular works on the other walls, and the large globe of the Known World, with its uncharted spaces over the poles left blank. This might be the very room in which the two professors had argued over Nubian cities and, possibly, treasures. That was unlikely, given the vast number of White Sky Line airships circling the world, but surely the room itself was similar in most aspects.
Thinking about the unsolved mystery of the baron’s death only reminded her of her failure to find the widow. Where in Venice could she begin her search for the imposter? She had only visited once before, as Madame Taxus-Hemlock’s lab assistant, and barely long enough to attend a rather riotous embassy party most memorable for Obie’s dramatic departure. He had leapt across a canal to the opposite balcony by moonlight, scaled the wall to the rooftop, and flown away on a small private runabout that had carelessly left a rope ladder dangling as it lifted off. Maddie did not fear being recognized at the embassy, if chance took her there. Back then, she had been wearing purple goggles that matched her hair, and a laboratory smock much stained with exotic hues and some odd scents as well. Miss Maddie Hatter, journalist, had never been to Venice before.
That evening, with the girls safely in their stateroom preparing for bed, Maddie took a turn on the stern viewing platform. It was deserted, for few passengers braved the sharp, clean tang of the desert by night. She had seen Obie going about his duties several times that day, and knew he would look for her when he could. Meanwhile, she could look out over the desert below, its rocky outcrops and sloping dunes tinted blue by a waxing moon that shimmered over crests and limned each sandy windrow in purple shadow. Concerns of the civilized world were as ants beneath the weight of mere survival down there; up here, too, her worries faded before the vast empty majesty of the land and sky, the whisper of the night-time breeze teasing the sand into new patterns for the next morning. A bird warbled, alone in the immensity.
It warbled again, very close. She turned her head as TC landed on her shoulder, his little brass claws folding lightly into the fabric of her gown.
“Hello, little bird,” she said, and touched its head by way of greeting. “Where’s your master?”
“Just coming,” said a voice from above, and a dark shape swung down from the crew catwalk suspended below the great liner’s envelope. Obie landed almost as lightly as his bird and joined her at the rail. “Lovely night.”
“It is that.” Maddie sighed. “Looking at this endless sand, my worries seem so small. I ran out on my job in Cairo and might lose my allowance or my freedom over that woman’s antics in Venice. I have no idea how to go about finding and exposing her, or if I should even try, when to call attention to her will reveal to Society that I am choosing to live away from my family. But at least I am not struggling to survive the desert.”
Obie patted her hand. “Madame Taxus-Hemlock will have that imposter sorted by the time we arrive in Venice.”
“You seem very certain of that. What if she can’t waste her family’s minions on my little problem?”
“Of course she will. You’re her protégé. Reminding her of her younger self and all that. Anyway, she’ll send a message to the ship when we’re in range. You’ll see. And then you can decide what to do. This ship is only hanging about in Venice overnight, but I’ll have shore leave and can help you get started.”
“Thanks, Obie. You’re a great pal in a tight spot.”
He said nothing by reply, and they leaned on the rail in companionable silence. After a while, he asked, “Were you still curious about those two professors?”
“Sort of. Why?”
“My mate, Hiram, was the steward on their corridor during that Atlantic crossing. He’ll tell you all about them if you like.”
“I’d like that. When and where?”
“Let’s aim for tomorrow evening, same time?”
“Same place, too?”
“Nope. This platform will be crowded tomorrow night. The ship has a shore day in Athens, departing at sunset, but hovers near those famous ruins if the moon is full enough for a view.”
“The Parthenon by moonlight? I will have to bring the girls out for that. After they’re in bed, where can we meet that won’t be conspicuous?”
“I’ll bring Hiram along to you,” said Obie. “Anyone who sees two crew members going into your stateroom will merely think you are irate about something. First Class gets the kid glove treatment, remember?”
The next day was a repeat of the first, save that they woke over the Mediterranean off the fabled Greek Isles. Morning passed quietly as they enjoyed the crisp sea breeze on their private balcony, watching while passengers and luggage were winched to the roof of the Athens terminal. Those passengers staying with the ship were offered an afternoon’s excursion to the National Archaeological Museum, but the girls declared they had seen quite enough archaeology in Egypt and were content to stay on board, playing deck sports with other young people. Maddie took herself off to the Library and the new day’s aethernet news. It wasn’t long before a familiar name caught her eye: Professor Windsor Jones, Junior.
The University Times
AMERICAN LECTURER
LAUGHED OUT OF OXFORD
Professor Windsor “Windy” Jones, a scholar visiting from a middle-American “university,” gave a detailed description of a fabled proto-Nubian mask, The Eye of Africa, at the Explorers Club dinner in Balliol College last week. He embellished the telling with convincing detail.
When asked to produce evidence of his conclusions, Jones claimed his research was all lost on his airship voyage to England last fall. The White Sky Line denies any claim was made by Mr. Jones for lost luggage. His research cast into grave doubt, Jones’ visiting-professor status at Oxford has been terminated. The rest of his British lecture tour dates are in doubt.
An American, Professor Jones did not depart with the dignity of a British don. After confronting an esteemed Cambridge professor in the dining hall with accusations of theft, Jones was escorted from the Sacred Halls of Academe. At the university gate he yelled, “I’m right and I’ll rub all your noses in it.”
The egregious insult has cast further doubt on the recent contentious policy of treating America’s fledgling academic institutes as on par with the venerable universities of England. Look for sparks to fly at next month’s meeting of the Oxford-Cambridge Guild.
Maddie raised her eyes from the brass monkey’s vest to the wide sky outside. Professor Jones was an expert on the Eye of Africa mask, and claimed his research had been stolen on his trans-oceanic passage. Could Professor Plumb have absconded with Jones’ research, and provided it to Baron Bodmin? Did either of the academic gentlemen have cause to engineer the death of the baron? Once the matter of the imposter was settled, Maddie would make her way closer to England and poke
her nose more deeply into both professors’ movements. There was more to this Bodmin death to be explored, and the byline might be within her grasp after all.
That night, after an hour spent gazing upon the ancient wonder that was the ruined Parthenon, its crumbled columns and tumbled stones ghostly white in the clear moonlight, she shepherded the girls into their beds.
“Tomorrow we will come to Venice, after which you will be very busy getting ready for your Court presentations. Tonight, you must rest. I will speak to the crew this evening, to ensure you and your luggage are transferred directly to your cousin’s air-yacht with all possible dispatch.” That last would cover the situation if either girl woke later and heard male voices in the parlour.
As the hour grew late, she began to fear some wakeful matron would spot two male crew members slipping at midnight into the stateroom of a young, attractive female passenger. That would ruin the reputation of this identity completely, and she would have to start afresh in some other arena. She was about to give up and prepare for bed herself when a bird warbled from the balcony. TD, bored with his day’s confinement to the wardrobe, answered it. There, at the balcony doorway, stood Obie, his hand raised to tap.
“What on earth are you doing out there?” Even as she asked, she knew the answer. Obie, as a midshipman on that experimental Navy craft where they’d first met, had often taken unconventional routes around the outside of the airship. He had no fear of the altitude, and rather too great a belief in his own ability to move about the envelope’s netting in perfect safety. Behind him stood another young man in crew whites, looking rather like a long-legged crane and quite sanguine about his external scramble along the great ship’s envelope. Clearly this fellow was a kindred spirit to the adventurous Obie.
Obie introduced his shipmate. “Miss Maddie Hatter, meet Hiram Phillips, great-grandson of the captain of the first settlement ship to reach Australia. He can tell you all about those professors.” Hiram Phillips bowed slightly, a courtesy due to any First Class passenger, even Maddie Hatter, lady reporter, whose status on solid ground was barely higher than that of an airship steward. She tipped her head to him, whipped out her pink sequined notebook, and invited both men to sit.
“Mr. Phillips, please tell me: what do you remember of professors Windsor Jones and Polonius Plumb on their crossing last fall? Did they spend a lot of time together? Did they argue much? Do you remember anything they discussed? Did Professor Jones misplace any research materials?”
Hiram stared at her. “Now how did you know about that, Miss? The crew made no report.”
“So his research did go missing?”
“Yeah, s’right. Last night o’ the crossing it was, sky calm as a millpond. The professors were elbow-bending a-plenty. Professor Jones has to be drunk to fly at all, but this was a big ’un. Started in the bar and went on to Jones’ stateroom in Second Class. They were in there for hours, yarning and looking at papers and charts, ringing for more brandy. Last time I went by, maybe four in the morning, door was open and Mr. Jones was snoring with his head on a bare desk. I shoved him onto his berth, stripped off his boots, and shut his door on the way out.
“Next morning, they thought he was gone ashore with the rest but cleaners found him still abed. He woke up ranting about his trunk of papers being gone. Day crew had no idea what he meant, just hurried him ashore with promises it had been offloaded with the rest of the luggage. We went straight on to Paris and never heard another word from him.”
“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 te
al. 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.
Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond Page 6