Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(29)
A movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. The door stood ajar, with Gia Pisano’s face framed in the opening. Alek glanced across the table at Filippo, whose focus was so strongly locked upon the discussion that he had not noticed the arrival of his own wife. Alek hid a smile—paying attention to more than one thing at once had never been Filippo’s strength. So Alek levered himself out of his seat and slipped from the room as quietly as he could into the grand entrance hall.
The latch clicked behind him, and he bent to accept the kisses Gia placed upon his cheeks.
“How goes it?” she said, her voice lowered so as not to disturb the people inside.
Together they drew away from the closed council room door, with Alek saying, “About as well as you might expect. One pazzerellone murdered and another missing … it’s, well, it’s a madhouse in there.”
For that pun Gia cast him an arch look. “Too many hypotheses, too few data, zero plans of action?”
Alek nodded. “That about sums it up.”
“All right, then,” she said, ever the voice of practicality. “Let’s find ourselves a room with a blackboard and work through the problem, see if we can’t make some progress—something Filippo can bring to the table tomorrow.”
Alek let her lead the way, keeping the protests of his tired bones to himself. He really was getting too old for this.
*
Elsa lay in the too-soft bed that night, not sleeping, all the details of the day and concerns for tomorrow churning around in her brain. She considered offering the doorbook to shorten the journey, but eventually decided against it. The trip would only be a matter of hours by train, and she’d rather keep the doorbook a secret. Especially from Porzia. The doorbook was practically heretical by the standards of European scriptology, and Elsa already felt like enough of an outsider without having to weather the storm of Porzia’s shock and disapproval. Would they still accept her, still want to help her, if they knew about the doorbook? Perhaps; perhaps not.
Best not to mention the doorbook for now.
When that issue was settled in her mind, she moved on to worrying about de Vries. Not that she’d expected him to work a miracle in just two days, but the way Signora Pisano had been suddenly called away concerned her. What did the Order know? Would they fear Elsa more than they feared for Jumi?
Useless speculation. Elsa pressed her face into the pillow, trying to squeeze out the thoughts. She gave up on the bed and tried the floor again instead, and finally managed some sleep.
Elsa rose early and dressed in some clothes sent to her, via house-bot, by Porzia. She tried to decline, of course, but Casa insisted the clothes would make her less conspicuous for traveling in public. They were excessively complicated, and Elsa struggled into the chemise, the corset, and the dress only with some assistance from one of Casa’s bots.
Finally dressed, she lifted her carpetbag of books and met Leo in the foyer to depart for the train station. Porzia and Faraz were staying behind to watch the children and maintain the appearance of normalcy.
Instead of exiting through the front doors, Leo led the way out a side entrance and along a covered walkway to the carriage house. Elsa followed but cast him a puzzled look.
“I thought we were taking a train.”
“Certainly, but we’re not going to walk all the way to the train station.” He said the word walk as if it were blasphemy. With a flourish, he pulled open the carriage house doors. “Not when we have this. May I present: the spider hansom.”
Elsa peered into the semidarkness within. The spider hansom was an eight-legged walking machine with a small, open-topped passenger compartment in front of a moderate steam engine. Aside from a narrow smokestack sticking straight up in the air toward the back—to direct the furnace smoke away from the passengers’ lungs, Elsa presumed—it did rather resemble a spider’s anatomy. Despite herself, she was impressed with the uniqueness of the design.
“My invention, of course,” said Leo without a hint of modesty.
At rest, the passenger compartment touched the ground, making it a relatively simple matter to climb onto the seat. Leo’s European manners dictated that he should, nonetheless, help Elsa in, which she suffered with no small amount of irritation. When they were both settled, Leo set his hands and feet to the levers and pedals, and he fired up the engine. The cab rose in the air so they hung suspended between the eight legs and stepped out into the street with a jerk.
The motion startled a horse pulling a hansom of the more traditional kind, and the driver gestured angrily at them from his perch behind the cab. Leo hardly seemed to notice. Apparently the residents of Casa della Pazzia were so accustomed to enraging the regular citizenry of Pisa that a single irate driver did not merit Leo’s attention.
As Leo drove, Elsa watched the reactions of the pedestrians they passed. Some looked curiously at the spider hansom, while others didn’t give it a second glance. But she saw no fear or suspicion, no nervous ladies with parasols like on the streets of Amsterdam; Pisa was a city that accepted its pazzerellone residents as a customary feature of everyday life.
They drove through a broad piazza surrounded by impressive old buildings. Off to one side was a marble statue of a man standing on some sort of fantastic creature; Elsa squinted, trying to get a better look as the hansom clattered by, and wondered what in the world that was about. Then they took a bridge over the river to cross into the southern half of the city.