Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School, #1)(29)
Sophronia yawned again.
“Sophronia,” Dimity whispered, “what are we going to wear to sleep in tonight?”
“Goodness knows. Our petticoats, I suppose.” For all Sophronia knew, their luggage still lay scattered in the road leagues away.
Such was not the case, as it transpired Cit l l. After being let out from Lady Linette’s class—“Practice your eyelash-fluttering, ladies. Six rounds of one hundred each before bed”—she and the other girls went to supper in the back part of the school. The recreation section, as the others called it, was much the same as all the others, only with larger, grander, and fewer rooms. Supper completed, their manners closely monitored by the teachers and Sophronia’s knuckles rapped twice for her misuse of a fish knife, they returned to their quarters. The debuts found Sophronia’s battered portmanteau and Dimity’s cases neatly stacked in their parlor.
The girls were divided into two per room, Preshea seeming honored to have been selected by Monique as the best of a bad lot of options. Sophronia was delighted to find Agatha willing to vacate her abode to settle in with Sidheag so that Sophronia and Dimity might share.
“Do you think Monique has some kind of control over the teachers?” Sophronia asked the moment they were left alone. Bumbersnoot had woken upon their return and followed Sophronia dutifully into her new room, then paced back and forth as she unpacked.
“How could she?” Dimity pulled out her underthings furtively and stuffed them quickly into a drawer.
Sophronia gave her a look.
“Her family, I suppose. Although I’ve never heard of them, so they can’t be that important or that evil.” Dimity moved on to less embarrassing apparel: dresses, pinafores, petticoats, slippers, and boots.
Sophronia unpacked her own bags. For the first time in her life, she was slightly embarrassed by her own wardrobe. Her family was largely considered, by the surrounding gentlefolk, to be one of means. But she was still the youngest of four girls, and with three older sisters to clothe, she found her own dresses deficient. She was already composing a begging letter home in her head.
“What if she didn’t hide the prototype but gave it away?” Sophronia suggested.
Dimity was prosaic. “Well, no sense in speculating. We’ll simply have to find out more.”
Unpacking complete, the girls prepared for slumber—Dimity’s nightgown was bright yellow!—and settled down for the evening.
Bumbersnoot sat next to Sophronia’s cot with a little wheeze of distress. She picked him up and put him at her feet. He wasn’t exactly cuddly, and she was sure to bark her shin if she rolled over, but the little mechanimal seemed pleased, and the mini steam engine within made him quite an excellent foot warmer, if nothing else. Sophronia wondered idly if he required a diet of coal and water, and if so, where she would get the coal. The airship must have a boiler room. The last thing she heard as she closed her eyes was the tick-tock of Bumbersnoot’s mechanical tail wagging back and forth.
Unlike her fellow students, Sophronia awoke early in the morning and decided she might take the opportunity to explore. She supposed there would be mechanicals trundling about and sounding the alarm if they encountered her, so she determined to figure out a way around the massive ship that did not cross any tracks. She chose her most basic dress, with the fewest underskirts and the shortest top skirt, and pulled on her boots with the india-rubber strapping.
She had to use the hallway to get to any exterior decks, so she ran as quickly as possible, sticking to the sides of the passage, away from the tracks that ran down the center. Luckily, she didn’t stumble upon any mechanicals. This allowed her to escape out onto one of the lower decks and over the rail t Cer center.o cling on the outside with no one, human or constructed, the wiser. She was left breathless and leaning out and in a manner she was certain would be thought most unladylike.
In the early morning, the moor below was still mist-shrouded, but there was no longer any other cloud cover. Sophronia looked down, considered for a moment, and then decided it was probably better not to look again.
She inched around the banisters and along the outside of the railing. The deck extended around the dirigible’s side and then in, before another deck rounded back out again, like flower petals. The difficulty was how to get from one to the next, over the small gap in between. Sophronia had a system developed soon enough: a little twisting movement as she thrust herself willfully over the abyss.
Several of the decks, smaller and more like private balconies, did not have mechanical tracks. Sophronia climbed over the railings of these and explored, peering in at the round windows. It would be good to know, for secrecy’s sake, which balconies were safe from mechanical spies, not to mention vulnerable to attack because they lacked mechanical defense. She was also nosy.
As Sophronia made her way, one deck at a time, around the edge of the ship, she eventually left the students’ residential area and found herself in the classroom area. There the decks changed, some of them made of strange and mysterious materials, and they did not always have rails. She passed the one that featured Sister Mathilde’s greenhouse, and another with long tassels and fancy wicker furnishings that must belong to Lady Linette’s classroom. Funny; Sophronia hadn’t noticed a door from the classroom out onto the balcony during lessons.
Lady Linette’s was the last classroom before the next balloon. There was another balcony, almost touching it, in the forbidden section. There was a little walkway to that balcony.