Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School, #1)(80)
Sophronia pretended to trip as she rounded the tussling boys. She lurched to one side, knocking the gun from the surprised dandy’s grasp. “Oh, dear, pardon me, sir. Whoop—oh!” In the same movement she spun, simulating a continued stumble—Lady Linette would have been proud.
She blundered against Monique. With one hand she reached out and tore down the front of the older girl’s dress, popping the decorative buttons and making certain to expose plenty of undergarments. “It is a certain truth,” Mademoiselle Geraldine had said, gesturing at her own heaving cleavage illustratively, “that a lady’s attention dwells overmuch upon the state, condition, and sanctity of her own assets.”
Monique shrieked, clapping both hands to her exposed corset, and dropped her reticule.
Sophronia continued to the ground, rolling both her upper body and the reticule underneath Monique’s full skirts. Under cover of those copious petticoats, she slipped the prototype out of the reticule. In almost the same movement, she replaced it with the wrapped cheese pie Dimity had handed her only moments before.
Monique kicked at her viciously, but Sophronia was already rolling away, her borrowed ball gown mitigating the force of the blow. She emerged in time to see Dimity wrest the flask free from Pillover and the Pistonandt Sophrons and pour its contents over the head of the massive mechanimal bulldog.
Monique bent and retrieved her reticule triumphantly and turned to run, no doubt thinking to take advantage of the chaos. The Pickleman, not as distracted as the others, hurled his target blob at her fleeing form. The mechanimal roared to life and charged Monique. Acceleration required the creature to send new power to his limbs from the internal boiler. All it took was one excess spark for Sophronia’s plan to work. The contents of the flask were, as she had guessed, alcoholic, and thus highly flammable.
The mechanimal caught fire; so, too, did one of Mrs. Temminnick’s lilac bushes, part of the gazebo, and the hem of Monique’s gown as the creature blundered after her. Monique dropped to the path and rolled around to put out the flames, at the same time stripping off what remained of her overdress. The target must have adhered to that, for now that she had squirmed out of her gold gown, the mechanimal began savaging it to smithereens with sharp, superheated teeth. The dandy and the Pickleman came running up.
The Pistons were partly distracted by this short but excitingly fiery chase, and partly distracted by a new threat in the form of a small but enraged Dimity. Dimity, bless her heart, was reciting one of Mademoiselle Geraldine’s longest lectures on proper behavior at a dance, finger shaking in autocratic fury, Lord Dingleproops notwithstanding.
Still seated on the ground, Sophronia fed Bumbersnoot the prototype parcel, trusting that it was not actually combustible, but figuring it was better destroyed than in the wrong hands, regardless. Bumbersnoot immolated the paper and the string and swallowed the contents whole. He emitted a puff of steam and donned a contemplative look. There was crystalline clanking inside his metal belly cavity. Fortunately, there was still so much noise that no one heard it.
Sophronia stood, adjusting her Bumbersnoot reticule slightly. No one noticed her. The Pistons were shouting and tussling with Pillover, who in turn was squealing loudly while Dimity yelled at them all to get away because the gazebo really was going up in flames and could come tumbling down on them at any moment. A little ways off, Monique lay in the path, half undressed and screaming as the stomping, flaming mechanimal moved ever closer to her. The great beast had one foot placed firmly on her petticoats, effectively immobilizing her. The Pickleman was slapping at his mechanimal with his overcoat to put it out. The dandy was standing over Monique, waving his gun around and instructing her to hand over the prototype, which Monique thought was still in her reticule, which she was clutching firmly to her breast.
“Good dogs,” said Sophronia softly to both mechanimals.
Getting the prototype to safety was of paramount importance. The dandy or the Pickleman could get hold of Monique’s reticule at any moment and discover it contained no prototype valve at all, but a cheese pie.
From among the tussling Pistons, the young man with the pale face paused indolently and looked over at Sophronia. He tossed a lock of dark hair out of one eye with a casual sway of his head. One corner of his mouth twisted up into a heartbreakingly sweet smile. Rake in training, decided Sophronia.
She shook her head at him once and then took off toward the house at a dead run. “Dimity, Pillover, scatter!” she yelled as she did so, using Soap’s favorite term.
Dimity and Pillover understood the instruction. Pillover managed to extract himself with a quick twist, and Dimity left off her yelled lecture. Sophronia could hear them panting behindpand t her.
She attained the relative safety of the crowded dance floor feeling as though she had been through a small war. No one noticed her entrance at all. Dimity and Pillover followed shortly after. The Pistons did not. They had taken Dimity’s lecture to heart, or were still cavorting with the burning gazebo, or had realized they had stumbled upon something more dire than their normal uninvited antics and escaped to their carriage.
Sophronia, Dimity, and Pillover looked as if they had been rolling about on the ground in their fine dress—which they had. A quick smoothing of one another’s hair, repairs to smudged faces with handkerchiefs, and brushing off of dirt, and they were mostly respectable. Sophronia was merely once more the Sophronia of before finishing school—scruffy youngest daughter, a mild embarrassment. Her appearance resulted in nothing more than a few disparaging glances from some of the older matrons present.