Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School, #1)(49)
There was a coiled rope ladder resting nearby. When the hatch flipped open, it became clear the airship was floating very low to the ground, perhaps only two stories up. They were also at the edge of the moor. Swiffle-on-Exe became visible after they let down the ladder and began to climb.
The school had stopped above a knoll off a goat path above the town, but it was far enough outside the village for Sophronia to be nervous that, should the moor mists rise up, they would not be able to find their way back. The moon was full, which explained both the revels in the town and the absence of Captain Niall. He would be a true monster tonight, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Sidheag had explained that Captain Niall took himself off several days before the moon, far into the moor, away from civilization, so that his moon-mad werewolf self wouldn’t be a danger to anyone. Sophronia thought this sad. Werewolves supposedly loved the theater.
They dropped down to the grass, Sophronia first, then Vieve, and then Soap. Soap saluted the sooties above and the ladder was pulled up. They would lower it again in exactly two hours, right before the performance was supposed to let out. Sophronia worried about the time constraint, but Vieve was confident that two hours was enough.
Under the bright moon, the path into town was well-lit. Swiffle-on-Exe was a silvery hodgepodge of thatched roofs, church steeples, and the looming monstrosity of Bunson’s to the left. They moved at a swift trot and arrived at the gates to the boys’ school in a little under a quarter of an hour.
Sophronia hid while Soap pulled the porter’s bell rope. They had decided to let Vieve face the porter mechanical initially, both because she had the obstructor and to ascertain whether the porter would recognize her as a female. Vieve maintained that the identifier nodule apixiter, whatever that was, had to be the shape of the lower half of a human body and that if Sophronia would only don trousers like a sensible person…
Either Vieve was correct or some other aspect of her personality came off as intrinsically masculine, for when the gate was thrown open and the mechanical stood facing her, he made no objection.
Vieve stepped toward him and puffed up her chest. “Message for Mr. Algonquin Shrimpdittle from Professor Lefoux,” she said in her high treble voice.
“Give to me, young sir,” boomed back the porter from behind his faceless confusion of gears and cogs.
“Can’t be done,” replied Vieve. “Orders are to deliver it directly.”
The porter let out a blast of steam in apparent annoyance. This f cyannialapped up the cravat pinned about his neck so that it momentarily obscured his clockwork face. He whirred and clunked, sending out a puff of smoke from a stack at the top of his head. Finally he said, “Very good, sir, follow me.”
The porter made a wide loop on its tracks. It hadn’t the pivot mechanism and nimbleness of the single-track mechanicals on board the finishing school. It began to trundle away, the wheelbarrow on its backside rattling side to side.
Vieve turned to Sophronia and whispered, “Go on! Hop in!”
“What, inside?”
“It hasn’t any sensory nodules on its back.”
Sophronia gave the young girl a look of doubt. Then again, Vieve was correct about the porter not recognizing that she was a girl. She exchanged a look with Soap.
The tall boy flapped his hands slightly in the universal gesture of “you decide.”
Sophronia shrugged, jogged after the porter, and, with a flutter of skirts, hoisted herself inside the wheelbarrow. Soap sprinted after and jumped nimbly in next to her. He sidled in close, bumping up against her shoulder, and grinned. He smelled of soot. Sophronia thought it rather a pleasant odor, on him, and smiled back. Genevieve Lefoux was correct—the porter didn’t register their presence.
Vieve walked alongside the mechanical, as though they were companions out for a stroll. It was rather comical, given that the porter was easily twice the young girl’s height and three times her girth.
The mechanical’s tracks ended at the front of the school’s main building.
This was far more the kind of structure Sophronia had expected from Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Bunson’s had an impressive staircase leading up to huge double doors of wood and iron, engraved with an intricate pattern. Sophronia crouched low in the wheelbarrow as the porter mechanical approached the steps. How will he alert the interior as to the presence of a messenger?
The porter touched up against the bottom step where his tracks stopped. This triggered a response. A tremendous amount of steam emanated from below the lowest step, and with a great creaking and groaning, the stairs closed in upon themselves. The whole front section of the building that housed the main doors compressed downward like a concertina. After only a few moments, the doors were at ground level and the stairs had flattened out in such a way that it allowed the porter’s tracks to continue.
The porter proceeded toward the doors sedately and bumped autocratically against them with a clang. This was obviously a signal, for one of the doors opened, revealing a darkened corridor. The porter backed off of the collapsed stairs far enough to switch tracks, beginning another loop that would lead him away to commence a circuit of the grounds. As he did this, Sophronia jumped out. She dashed inside, flattening herself instantly on the back side of the unopened half of the door. One never knows who might be watching.
Soap and Vieve followed sedately after.
As she passed through the doors, Sophronia noted that the intricate pattern carved into them was that of multiple octopuses holding one another’s tentacles in a long unending chain.