She crept down to the door in the curving wall. The countess’s back was to her, the white-and-scarlet head bent over the controls. She stepped inside, raising her parasol like a dagger, ready to strike the temporarily paralyzing blow called the Emperor’s Hand or, as it was known in Hungarian-Imperial circles, Die Hand der Freundschaft.
The clockwork dragon lifted its head from the countess’s shoulder. Its jewelled eyes flickered in the glow from the lone light-pipe. When she was halfway across the floor, it leaped at her, its wings outspread. TD launched from her hat. His beak stabbed at a wing. His bronze claws scrabbled at the gleaming scales. The dragon crashed to the floor. It scuttled away with TD flapping and pecking above it.
The noise brought the countess sharply around. Her parasol came up, pointing directly at Maddie’s unprotected face. Maddie jumped backward, knocking the naked tip aside with her own. Olga hiked her layers of skirt with one hand and darted forward, slashing at Maddie’s forearm. Maddie countered with a sideswipe at an exposed ankle.
As the countess skipped backward, Maddie flicked her own tip-guard aside. This was no practice bout, and formal dueling rules would not apply. Olga Romanova had too much to gain by getting the gauge away. She would hurt Maddie if that’s what it took. Well, Maddie wouldn’t let her. They circled in the tiny room, barely out of reach of each other.
“You should have stayed away from the Gauge girl,” the countess said, her sharpened steel point waving toward Maddie’s. “You were in my way.”
“So that’s why you tried to Hobble me?” Maddie tapped the tip away with hers.
“I should have tried harder.” Olga bared her teeth in a horrid smile. “I could have poisoned you at the benefit afternoon. Then I’d have caught her sooner.” So the Russian had definitely been behind the kidnapping, and not Maddie’s father. The last doubt about him faded.
Maddie grinned. “You underestimated Emmeline as well. She was safe at home as soon as she woke up.” That wasn’t even a lie. It was Maddie, not Emmeline, who had not been safe that frightful morning.
More shouts came from below, young voices and men’s deeper bellows. Maddie blocked them all out and concentrated her attention entirely within the room: the bluish walls slashed by girder-shadows, the transparent circle in the floor a-glow from the light-pipe overhead. The slim woman in the red dress sidestepping while her scarlet, ruffled parasol made tiny tip-circles at Maddie’s eyes.
The engineer groaned again. Maddie stepped over his prostrate body and kept moving. The countess’s parasol tip menaced. Maddie waved it back and skipped sideways as the woman lunged across the transparent floor. Maddie’s parasol stabbed at the other’s exposed inner arm. The countess jerked out of range.
Off-balance, she backed away. As Maddie advanced, the red parasol’s tip lifted to her face. Maddie heard a faint hiss and dodged, holding her breath. The gas stung her eyes. While she retreated from the noxious cloud, Olga followed up with a flurry of strikes. Maddie held her parasol out from her body with both hands like a quarterstaff, deflecting the hammering as best she could. Bruising blows rained down on her wrists and hands.
This was taking too long. Emmeline was on her own against Gnave, on the much more dangerous stairs. When the countess’s blows faltered, Maddie swung back immediately, driving the other woman across the room. From the corner of her eye, she saw the downed man roll over onto his back. He was waking up.
She yelled, “Get up. Get those stairs moving.” But he only groaned.
Olga came at her again, tip toward her face, readying another attack with the gas. She beat that aside with a back-handed swing and stabbed toward the other’s forward leg. Olga jumped backward and stumbled over the engineer’s limp forearm. As she teetered, flailing, Maddie hurtled forward and grabbed the slim, strong wrist, slamming it against the nearest girder. The red parasol clattered down the wall.
Olga was disarmed.
Instead of surrendering, she punched Maddie in the stomach. As Maddie staggered, gasping for breath, Olga pushed past her and fled out the doorway. She turned at first to the stairs and then, before Maddie reached the doorway, sprinted around the upward walkway. There was nowhere to go up there but the torch. She’d be trapped, and without her parasol or her dragon to help defend her.
There she could stay while Maddie aided Emmeline.
Stepping over the engineer, whose eyes were blearily open, Maddie scanned the control panel. The staircase controls were clearly marked as “Clockwise” and “Anti-Clockwise” but she had no idea which way would close the gap and let Obie and Hiram past the waist platform. From scanty memory of how the countess’s hands had turned, she turned the big dial other way. Far below, the great machinery ground into motion, sending a shiver up through the floor.
Something tumbled against her ankle. She looked down to see the little dragon on its back, its four sharp-clawed legs scrabbling at the air while two clockwork sparrows darted at it, pecking and clawing. Obie had sent TC to assist TD.
Now for the countess. Maddie yanked the red parasol from between the girders where it had wedged. She carried it out the door and let it fall down the far outside of the stairways, almost along the folded copper draperies of the Statue’s tunic. It would be smashed beyond repair from bouncing off beams and crashing into the cement floor thirty flights down.
A piercing scream came up from below. Emmeline!
Maddie leaned out over the long, central drop. Way down, yet terrifyingly high above the waist platform, Emmeline dangled over empty space, her jonquil frock floating out around her. A man’s upper body was folded out over a stair rail, his hand locked around Emmeline’s thin wrist. As Maddie watched, her breath held to the point of bursting, he swung Emmeline far out, away from the stair, over the long drop to the Statue’s base. Was he trying to kill her?
He let go.
Emmeline’s dress billowed. Her feet came up and her head went down. Her outstretched arm hooked around a strut and her body pivoted around it. Her boots landed on a girder one level below. Several small arms grabbed the dress, pinning Emmeline to the structure. After a moment, helped by many hands, she began to inch her way onto a landing.
Blinking hard with relief, Maddie set off down the stairs. She ran full tilt into Mr. Gnave running up. His hat was gone, the sack too. His black overcoat hung by one arm. He bowled her down without a second look and charged into the Statue’s head.
Before she could get her feet under her he was out again, running up the curved walkway. Gold flashed in his hand. Had the gauge been inside his coat? She struggled to her feet and followed.
Gnave hadn’t gone far. He was pushing the countess’s clockwork dragon out through a window, onto one of the crown’s broad tines. When he saw Maddie coming, he stripped his other arm out of his overcoat, flung the coat over her upraised parasol, and scrambled outside.
Maddie shook the coat away and shoved herself outside, onto an adjoining tine. The wind whipped her hair, yanked at her hat, buffeted her. She stayed on her knees rather than stand up and give it a chance to blow her right off.
“Give up, Mr. Gnave,” she yelled. “There’s nowhere for you to go.”
Gnave didn’t look at her. He stared upward, then scrambled to his feet and edged out along the tine, waving his arms. Maddie looked up too. Her mouth dropped open.
Chapter Thirty
WELL ABOVE THEIR heads, Countess Olga Romanova climbed over the railing around the torch catwalk. Was she going to jump?
As she perched outside the railing, her scarlet dress billowing out around her, she began, one hand at a time, to unfasten straps among the skirt layers. With each strap loosed, the skirt billowed more. At last she turned to face outward, with her stockings showing all the way up to her scarlet bloomers. She stepped away from the railing and let go.
Maddie shrieked, “Stop!”
The wind caught the billowing scarlet. The erstwhile skirt filled like a huge balloon, its edges held down by straps attached to the countess’s corse
t. She dropped fast toward the Statue’s crown, then slowed with a jerk. The wind blew her outward, barely clear of the tines that threatened to snag her brilliant canopy. As she came down level with the watchers, the dragon scrabbled up the slanting spire, its tiny claws gouging through to the un-oxidized copper beneath. Reaching the narrow point, it leaped. The countess caught it with one arm and set it on her shoulder. It promptly curled around her neck. She looked up at Maddie as she tugged straps to turn the canopy.
“Our paths will cross again, Miss Maddie Hatter,” she called, and then woman and dragon floated down past the crown, drifting further from the Statue, outward across the wide, blue bay.
On the tine beside Maddie’s, Gnave crawled toward the tip. “Come back,” he wailed. “You said we’d both go.”
“Face it,” Maddie called. “She abandoned you. You are no more use to her.”
Father’s runabout circled in from the far side of the Statue. Mr. Fairweather was on deck, peering in their direction. She waved her parasol at him. The runabout steered into the wind and soon came up within a few cables’ length of the crown. Mr. Fairweather held up a megaphone.
“Can we lift you off at the torch, Miss?”
“No,” she yelled back, making a half-megaphone of one cupped hand. “Go after that woman under the red canopy. Then come back and collect this miserable specimen over here.” She pointed at Gnave. “They’re both wanted for industrial espionage.”
The runabout veered off in pursuit of the countess. Maddie edged backward until she could slide her feet through the opening into the Statue’s head. Someone in there took hold of her legs and guided them down to the walkway. With both feet on solid floor once more, she looked at her helper.
“Obie! You made it. Then the stairs must be in the right place.”
“That they are. And the engineer’s awake now, sick as a Sunday morning. What happened to him? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Maddie took a last look out at Gnave, who had suddenly realized how precarious his perch was. He had stretched flat on his spire with his fingers gripping the riveted bands, and would likely be glued there until the runabout crew came to haul him away. Even if he came inside, there was nowhere for him to go but down. She took Obie’s arm and headed around the curving walkway. “The engineer got sprayed with some horrid knock-out gas from Countess Olga’s parasol. She tried to spray me too.”
“Where is she?”
“Got away under a scarlet canopy. Colonel Muster would have loved that stunt. Leaping off the Statue of Liberty to amaze the earth-bound.” Maddie leaned into the round room behind the Statue’s face. “TD and TC are in here.”
The two clockwork sparrows stood side by side under the control console, keeping well away from the engineer’s big boots. The engineer paid them no mind as he leaned over his controls, muttering and making adjustments to various knobs and dials. At Maddie’s call, the birds hopped slowly over the transparent circle in the floor, dragging something between them. Obie bent down and let them walk onto his arm with it. He eyed their prize with a puzzled frown.
“Did they tear apart the controls?”
Maddie peered at the item. It was a tangle of wires almost as long as a sparrow’s flight-feather, with a tiny metal ball at one end. Half the ball, on the side away from the wires, was a gleaming, multi-faceted, green jewel.
“It’s the dragon’s eye! Well done, TD and TC. Madame will be very interested in how this eye is constructed.” She stroked TD’s head and gave him her finger to hop onto. When he tilted up to look at her, she saw his black eyes were greying again. So were TC’s. “Oh, dear. They’ve burned up a lot of energy in their battle with the dragon. We’ve got to get them charged up.”
“I brought pellets this time,” said Obie, and pulled a match-box from his jacket pocket. He shook two blue power pellets onto his palm and held them up where the clockworks could snap them up. “That should hold them, although they’ll need another after they’ve cleared their brains of the fight images. It must have been quite a battle.”
At that point, the engineer glared at them over his shoulder. “Tourists ain’t allowed in ’ere. Messin’ wid my controls. Off wid youse.”
Maddie looked at Obie and shrugged. “I guess he doesn’t remember any of it. Let’s go down. I hope everyone is all right down there. Do they have the gauge? Gnave doesn’t have it. I thought he’d thrown it out onto the crown but the gold I saw was the dragon.”
Obie growled under his breath as he guided her down the first flight of stairs. “That whimpering spalpeen threw it overboard, sack and all, when he was about to be caught. Likely hoped his pal below would grab it before it hit the ground. Miss Emmeline flung herself after it, right off a moving stairwell. She snatched it in mid-air and almost went to the bottom with it. That Coggington fellow managed to catch her arm as she plummeted past. Hiram grabbed his coat so he didn’t go over the railing himself. Gutsy fellow, for a civilian.”
“Yes, but is Emmeline safe? Was she injured?”
“Lord, she’s fine. Cool as an Arctic afternoon, that girl. She told him to swing her out and then dived herself in to the nearest girder like a circus acrobat. She never let go of the sack for an instant.”
Maddie looked over the railing, down to the waist platform that was only a few storeys below now. The jonquil dress glowed in the dim. Emmeline was waving up at them. She waved back.
“Yes, she seems fine.” Then, as a familiar small face popped around a girder, she added, “Hello, Drink-me. All right?”
“All right wid us, Miss Mad. You aces?”
“I’m aces, yes, thank you.”
THEY GATHERED THE rest of their gang at the waist platform and headed down the remaining two hundred steps to the ground. The gauge was indeed still in its burlap sack, cradled in Emmeline’s arm like an infant. Mr. Coggington kept possession of her other arm, with no objection from her. Maddie supposed his saving her life had gone a good ways toward eliminating her lingering distrust. Cat hung back, gazing at Emmeline with worshipful eyes. A new heroine for her to emulate?
Near the ground they collected Gnave’s stone-throwing collaborator. Hiram had left him tidily trussed to a beam with three bootlaces and the belt that had held up Hare’s trousers. He was just far enough under a walkway that the few late-shift engineering crew had passed him by unnoticed. The poor fellow turned out to be so afraid of even that modest height that he’d lain perfectly still throughout the adventure, not daring to call out for help. Once back on solid ground outside, he sat down promptly and refused to move.
“I know nuttin’,” he said over and over. “Feller paid me ter break da winders and run off wid da bag. Dat’s all I know.” They left him sitting in the early evening sun, with his hands once more tied behind his back, and walked a little ways away across the almost deserted island.
The last ferry had gone. The wind whistled where once the hawkers’ cries had sounded. Maddie borrowed Emmeline’s oculex and scanned the skies for her father’s runabout, and for the countess’s scarlet canopy. She saw neither. Hoping that meant they’d captured the woman and were lifting the secretary off the crown, she tilted her head very far back and looked up. But she was too close to the immense copper draperies to see all the way to the top.
“Where are they?” she demanded of no-one in particular.
Hiram took the oculex and amused himself identifying the airships over the Brooklyn and Jersey shores. Part way through his scan of the latter, he asked, “Scarlet canopy, you said?”
“Yes. Why?”
“There’s one trailing off the Russian Imperial Air Yacht.” He handed back the oculex and Maddie followed his pointing arm. Yes, that was the Tsar’s airship, exactly as she’d seen it two winters ago, all black with the Imperial Eagle painted across the canopy in silver. Trailing from its stern was a billow of scarlet. The air yacht was headed out to sea, unquestionably carrying the countess and her damaged dragon away from the city where she had, just barely, fail
ed to steal the Gatsby Gauge for Russia.
And Maddie had failed to catch her. She lowered the oculex and sat down on the nearest bench.
“You kept the gauge out of her hands,” said Obie, folding himself down beside her. “And you exposed the conspirator inside the Gatsby household. And you kept Emmeline safe from kidnappers. Twice. It’s a good week’s work even if the mastermind got away.”
“Yeah, I guess,” said Maddie. Heedless of appearances, she leaned her head on his shoulder. “Oh, Obie, I really need a good night’s sleep.”
Chapter Thirty-One
MADDIE GOT HER good night’s sleep eventually. First, though, she supervised the transfer of Gnave and his confederate to Mr. G-G’s factory security, who took them off to the police. Then she spent the runabout-ride from the factory back to the mansion explaining to Mr. G-G mostly truthfully—if leaving a lot out—how Emmeline had hired her to safeguard the gauge and find out if there was a spy in the household.
Emmeline was no help in this endeavour, having elected to ride back to land with Mr. Coggington in the speedy steam-launch he had apparently purchased from the surprised owner in order to get it quickly. Cat and the urchins had gone with them as chaperones.
Finally, after a supper made lively mostly by Mrs. G-G’s wide-eyed exclamations and frequent reaching across the table to clasp both her hand and Emmeline’s, Maddie dragged herself up the main stairs toward her chamber, where TD had been stashed once more in the white desk with a fresh bottle of ink and a stack of clean paper.
Lord Main-Bearing, last seen in the parlour frowning behind his London Times, accosted her before she reached her bedroom door. He opened his bedroom door and said, in a voice that brooked no argument, “In here. Quickly.”
Maddie Hatter and the Gilded Guage Page 17