Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School, #1)(68)
All the while they were working to get free, Sophronia had to pause to blast the mechanical with the obstructor. When the sticky stuff was finally gone, they could not push the huge, heavy soldier mechanical out of the way, for it was somehow locked down.
Soap couldn’t manage to pick the lock in the space of one obstructor blast. So Sophronia had to stand before the sentry and disable it with the obstructor every six seconds while Soap worked diligently behind it.
Sophronia worried the obstructor might run out or fade in its effectiveness. Vieve had not explained exactly how it worked, and Sophronia could hardly believe it would continue indefinitely, but it showed no signs of stopping.
Eventually Soap got the door open. Sophronia hit the mechanical with one last blast and they squeezed inside the room before the thing woke up again. They closed the door firmly behind them.
Only to be faced with an entirely new problem.
The record room looked like a small factory or cotton mill—machines and conveyors and rotary belts ran along the walls and filled the corners of the room.
“Look up,” hissed Sophronia.
Dimity and Soap did.
Above them dangled the records. They were clipped to conveyers mounted on the ceiling, like an upside-down, dangling version of mechanical tracks. The records themselves looked like nothing so much as laundry hanging from a clothesline. They were far too high up to reach, and there seemed no way to know where any particular record was. There were hundreds there, if not thousands—it was a nightmare.
“There must be some method of search and recall,” Sophronia said, looking around desperately.
There were three desks in the room, each with a small leather seat, an oil lamp, and a writing pad. Each also boasted a large brass knob with a lever sticking out of the top. Around the base of the knob, and taking up a good deal of the desk space, was a circular piece of parchment paper with writing on it.
Soap went to one desk, Sophronia to another, and Dimither desk spay to the last. Each bent to light the oil lamp and examine the writing on the round parchment.
“Try not to touch anything; we are still all-over sticky,” warned Sophronia.
Even as she said it, a quill adhered itself to Dimity’s bosom as she leaned in. Dimity didn’t notice. She said, “Mine is labeled with locations.” She craned her neck to the side to read around the circle. “Cities, counties, a few districts, and even some wards. Here’s London. Here’s Devonshire.”
Sophronia looked at hers. “Mine looks like it’s skill sets. Knife, seduction, armored umbrella, flirtation. What’s yours, Soap?”
Soap was standing over his desk with his head down, not even looking at the paper.
They didn’t have much time. “What’s it say, Soap?”
Soap looked up, clearly embarrassed. “Sorry, miss, can’t tell.”
“Goodness me, why not? Is it something horrid and unladylike?” Soap was proving, often, to be far more conscientious of Sophronia’s dignity than Sophronia was.
Soap only shook his head.
Dimity said in a sympathetic tone, “You can’t read, can you, Mr. Soap?”
“No, miss. Sorry, miss.” His voice was almost a whisper.
Sophronia blinked. Poor Soap! What a thing to go through life without books. “Oh, right.” She ran over. “It’s the alphabet.” She pointed, “See, A, B, C, D, and so forth.”
Soap only backed slightly away, looking hugely embarrassed. Sophronia bumped up against his side, much in the manner he had done to her in the past, and gave him a little smile. This seemed to only embarrass him further. “Aw, miss.”
“What do they mean?” asked Dimity.
Sophronia shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
She grabbed the lever on Soap’s desk and pushed it toward A.
All around them, with what seemed to be a tremendous amount of noise, the machinery of the record room came to life. Steam hissed out from pistons and rotary mechanisms as they whirled up, thundering, shaking, and groaning. Above them the records moved on those tracks, shifting from one part of the room to another, parting and regrouping. They whizzed around one another, the parchment flapping and crackling. Finally a large cluster moved purposefully in Soap and Sophronia’s direction, coming to a stop directly above the desk.
“Now what?” wondered Soap.
Sophronia searched around the desk for some other operational mechanism or switch.
“This is when I wish we had Vieve with us,” she said, frowning. She returned to the original lever, and after tapping and picking at it, pressed down hard on the round brass nodule at the base.
With a loud clunk, the records above her dropped.
She and Soap both ducked out of the way, narrowly missing being whacked by dangling paperwork as the collection above the desk came flying straight down and stopped, hovering, in a manner undoubtedly convenient to whomever was seated at the desk.
Sophronia unclipped and examined one of the pieces of paper, mindful of any stickiness. She read bits aloud, in deference to Soap, and to the fact that Dimity still stood at her desk some distance away.
“ ‘Com-1"sticktesse de Andeluquais, Henrietta, née Kipplewit,’ it says at the top of the file.” Below this was a sketch of a personable young woman, with written vital statistics such as hair color, eye color, social position, and fashion preferences. Then came a string of locations and dates, starting with what Sophronia assumed was a birthplace and ending with what must be the comtesse’s current residency in France. Below that was written a list of particular skills, which in Henrietta’s case appeared to be “Parasol manipulation, hairstyles for concealment, ballistics, quiet footsteps, fast waltz, and rice pudding.”