Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School, #1)(64)

“Lady Kingair, where is your handkerchief?”

“Well, blast it. I put it in. It seems to have slipped down inside my corset.”

Mademoiselle Geraldine fanned herself. “Lady Kingair, there is no need to go into detail. A lady of qualit-tay does not mention such a thing out loud.”

“What? What did I say?” Sidheag was genuinely confused.

“Corset,” hissed Sophronia.

“Miss Temminnick! Not you, too.”

“I beg your pardon, Headmistress.” Sophronia executed an almost perfect curtsy. This seemed to mollify Mademoiselle Geraldine.

“She doesn’t have enough to hold it up, Headmistress,” said Monique.

“Hush now, Miss Pelouse. We do not talk about another lady’s endowments in public. Lady Kingair, my dear, did you put the handkerchief in before or after you laced this morning?”

“Before; otherwise I forget,” Sidheag answered promptly.

“Well, you must wait to put it in after. Then it won’t disappear on you. Miss Temminnick, lend Miss Woosmoss your spare, please? Then at least she will have something. Now, ladies, where was I? Oh, yes, the quadrille.”

Agatha took her place in the set with Sidheag and Dimity. Sophronia stepped in to be her partner and passed her the handkerchief. Agatha stuffed it down her bodice with a muttered “thank you.”

“Ladies, we begin with the Le Pantalon. And a one, two, three, four. Step forward, salutation to your partner—no, Miss Buss, you’re playing the man, remember? You bow.” The headmistress was making up the fourth in the other set with Monique, Preshea, and a mop dressed in a hat. They were having a much more difficult time trying to pass notes back and forth without her noticing. The mop, of course, was of absolutely no help.

“What happened, Agatha? Are you feeling quite the thing?” Sophronia asked when the dance permitted conversation.

“It’s nothing to concern you.”

“Let me guess—Monique?” While she talked, Sophronia slipped Dimity a small, folded bit of paper. There was nothing on the paper; it was only for technique.

Sidheag said, “I saw that.”

Dimity whispered, “Perhaps note-passing is better done during L’été?”

Agatha said, answering Sophronia’s question, “She’s evil. And not in a good way.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing of import.” Agatha’s face was red. “Not for you, anyway.” The way she said it implied that Sophronia was somehow to blame.

They moved on from Le Pantalon to L’été. As Dimity had predicted, it was easier to pass the notes, but Agatha kept dropping hers. Every time she did so, everyone had to stop the pattern while she looked under her full skirts to try to find the scrap of paper. It was decidedly not covert. They had to pretend she was lacing her boot.

At the end of the hour, Mademoiselle Geraldine clapped her hands to get their attention. “That was adequate, ladies, but only adequate. You are to practice the first two sections of the quadrille ten times over this evening. In our next lesson, we will move on to the La Poule, so I expect you to have the Le Pantalon memorized.”

“Do you think,” Sophronia wondered to Dimity as they left the headmistress’s classroom, “that she realizes she is saying ‘the’ twice?”

Dimity raised an eyebrow. “Why, Sophronia, are you implying Mademoiselle Geraldine is not actually French? Shocking suggestion.”

“Any more than Lady Linette is a lady?” added Sophronia.

“Oh, come now, she could be a lady, you can’t be certain of that. After all, Sidheag is a lady, and no one would ever have guessed that.”

“Oh, thank you very much, Dimity,” said Sidheag from where she stalked along behind them.

Dimity tilted her curly head back and over one shoulder, looking up at the tall girl with a cheeky grin. “Oh, don’t pretend to be offended. I’ve figured you all out now. You’ll take that as a compliment. You don’t really want to be a lady. That’s your whole difficulty.”

Sidheag muttered something about who would want to be a lady when she could be a werewolf, which everyone politely ignored. Such an idea was patently ridiculous. Everyone knew girls couldn’t be werewolves.


It was Dimity who found out what happened to Agatha. Dimity might not be very good at finding out anything about prototypes, or world domination, or next day’s tea cakes, but she certainly had an ear for gossip.

“Did you hear Monique cornered Agatha in the hallway this afternoon? Apparently she said she wondered how someone of Agatha’s vulgar proportions even got admitted to Mademoiselle Geraldine’s. She said that Agatha probably wouldn’t be asked back after the winter break, even if she did come from a long line of intelligencers. She said you would take Agatha’s place, since there was no one better.”

“Oh, dear, no wonder Agatha was mad at me. It’s not true, is it?” In normal finishing schools, the general attitude was the more students the better, but this one was different. Perhaps on an airship number restrictions have to be followed.

Dimity chewed her bottom lip. “It’s possible. Not that you’d take her place, but that she might not make it through. I don’t mean to be unkind, but she really isn’t very good. She might be better off at a real finishing school, and even then… I mean to say, hav {n t that yoe you seen her? It’s not so much her figure as her confidence.” Dimity shook her curly head in sympathy. “If only her posture were improved.”