Her Ladyship's Curse

Page 2

“Who’s that?” A sweaty face smeared with grease popped up from behind a cabinet filled with cogs and gears. “Kit? Oh, fabulous. You’re just in time for the latest bash.”
“Am I?” I glanced around me to see if anything appeared ready to clout me, fall on me, or explode. Most everything did. “I can come back later, if you like.”
Docket waved a wrench. “Nonsense. This is just the sort of thing you females love.”
I studied the cabinet he’d been fiddling with, which seemed to be sprouting mechanical arms with hooks on the end. “It’s a tenner printing press?”
“No. Take off your jacket and I’ll show you.”
“It’s almost new,” I warned him as I shrugged out of it. “I’m very fond of it.”
“Precisely why you need my HangItAll.” He adjusted one of the dials on the side of the cabinet and stepped away as its internal works began to grind and whistle. “Hold it out. Go on, it won’t bite you.”
With a great many misgivings, I held out my jacket. One of the mechanical arms stretched out, folding over on itself to form an elongated triangle with its hook at the top. It inserted one corner of the triangle into a sleeve as it pulled my jacket out of my hand and then tilted up as it inserted the opposite corner. The arm retracted my jacket into the cabinet, catching a rod inside with the hook and neatly hanging it.
“You see?” Docket beamed. “You’ll never have to wait for a maid to answer your bell again.”
“That’s good, because I don’t have any maids or bells,” I reminded him as I peered into the cabinet. “You’ve got this working off your boiler, then?”
“I started out with hydraulics, but the joints leaked oil onto the garms. Bloody mess it was.” He caressed the side of the cabinet with his hand. “What do you think? I’ll wager someday one of these will be in every man’s front hall, and every female’s boudoir.”
“Possibly the wash house.” I reached in and removed my jacket from the interior, which caused him to yelp. Then I held it up so he could see the condensate drip from the sodden hem. “If you change the name to WashItAll.”
“Bloody hell, that wasn’t supposed to happen.” As he watched me wring out the sopping-wet material, he scratched at his chin whiskers. “WashItAll’s not bad. Would it sell, do you think?”
“I suppose, if you came up with a way to dry them as well.” I glanced down at the puddle forming around the base of the cabinet. “And install a catch basin.”
“Capital idea.” Never one to brood, Docket closed off the boiler feed valve and wiped his hands on a dirty rag. “So what can I do for you today, love?”
“I need some dippers and an echo.” I briefly described Lady Walsh’s situation, leaving out the names and personal details, and added, “The echo will have to be very small. Something I can hide in a satchel or under my skirts.”
“I’ve just the thing.” He disappeared into his mechanized warren, and after some loud banging and scraping emerged with an envelope and a small mallet. He led me over to the nearest worktable, shoved aside some blueprints, and set them out.
“Best tuck the dippers somewhere they can’t be spotted,” he said, carefully counting out from the envelope five thin, folded strips of paper. “Dip or dab them with a drop of wine, trace of powder, or whatever you think is tainted. If all’s not as it should be, they’ll show color.”
I removed and unfolded one strip and sniffed it. The chemical odor wasn’t so strong that it would be detected coming from my person. “Blue for drugs, black for poison?”
“Aye.”
I took out my da’s pocket watch and tucked them in the back of the case. I could get at them easily by pretending to check the time. I glanced at the little mallet beside the envelope “I can’t go about hammering on the walls, Doc.”
“Don’t have to.” He gestured for me to follow him over to one of the Dungeon’s support walls. He placed the flat end of the mallet head against the wall, and flipped up the cap on the other end, revealing a magnifying lens. “Press in the bottom of the handle, like so.”
He demonstrated, and through the lens I saw a wide, solid green bar appear. The bar glowed faintly, as if it were hot.
“That’s a strut on the other side of the wall. Move it along careful-like”—he slid the mallet slowly across the wall until the green bar disappeared and the lens filled with rough green pebbles—“and there, you see? That’s the fill between the struts. The foundation walls down here don’t have any hidey-holes, but if there’s one in your manor house, it will show black on the lens. Then you’ve only to find the seams and pop it open.”
I took the mallet from him and studied it. “What makes it glow like that?”
He grinned, showing all the gaps in his teeth. “If I told you that, I’d have to marry you.”
Not because he loved me, I imagined, but to keep me from bearing witness. Once a woman gave her hand in marriage, she became her husband’s legal property. Property could not testify against its owner—something I imagined would prove useful if the Crown ever questioned the origins, and the exact rights claim, to any particularly clever mech.
Now it was time to dicker over price, which Docket and I usually took out in barter. “What do you want for them?”
“Two weeks’ laundering and five hot suppers hand-delivered,” he said promptly.
“One week laundering and two hot suppers by bucket,” I countered. As he started to bluster, I added, “And a grand pudding.”
He gave me a suspicious look. “What sort? Not plum. Too hot for that.”
“Summer pudding,” I said, and moved in for the kill. “Fresh-picked raspberry.”
“Raspberry.” Docket’s expression turned dreamy for a moment before he eyed me. “You’ll get all of the stains out of me coveralls?”
“An act of New Parliament couldn’t do that, mate.”
“Aye, well, I’d just dirty them up again anyway.” He wiped a filthy hand over the front of his bib. “Make it three dinners by bucket, and I’ll shake on it.”
“Done.” I kissed his bald, shiny pate. “In lieu of the shake.”
Embarrassed pleasure made his face rosy. “If only I were thirty years younger.”
Chapter Two
Lady Walsh’s request did make a trip downtown a necessity, but the day was so fine I decided to take the trolley. A few old ladies in the back seats frowned my way as I stood with the men at the front of the car, reminding me that I was still in my skirts. If I’d dressed in my native costume of bucks they wouldn’t have given me a second glance.
The men, mostly young clerks and old gophers who couldn’t afford to keep their own carri, collectively ignored me. A woman who didn’t assume her proper place in public effectively rendered herself invisible to the tonners and anyone who emulated them, which were most of the respectable citizens of Rumsen. Rina called it wishful blindness.
As we passed through one of the older quarters, a funeral procession halted the trolley, and as the black-shrouded carts and carris passed, I saw a shimmering form drifting after them. The ghost of the deceased, I guessed. I often caught glimpses of such specters following the newly dead or hovering about a fresh grave. When I tried to go near them, they faded from sight.
I knew from experience that they weren’t creatures of magic. While mages insisted the proper spell or ritual could bring back the spirits of the dead, I’d found enough noise-making contraptions hidden in séance chambers to explain such convenient “visitations.” I had no explanation for what I sometimes saw, but I suspected they might be a trace of the spirit left behind by those who passed on. Like the scent of a lady’s perfume that lingered in a room for a time after her departure, or the outlines of a face in an old, sun-faded portint.
Mum would have insisted they were fantasies of the imagination, nothing more. I often wondered how she’d explain away the chill they left behind in the air once they vanished.
At Pike Street I got off and walked to an alley between a boardinghouse and a dressmaker’s shop.
The alley was famous for one thing: it was the lowest point in the city. It also had flooded every year during the storm season until one Mrs. Carina Eagle had purchased the boardinghouse and hired a road crew to dig trenches on either side for drainage pipes. As for the boardinghouse, where no one ever boarded for longer than a night, it still bore the sign Mrs. Holcomb’s Rooms to Let, but everyone knew it as the Eagle’s Nest.
I stopped in front of a bruiser in a pilled tweed coat who had one shoulder propped against the corner. He was reading over a short sheet without much interest and rubbing a flat, milky-white stone between his broad thumb and the stump of his first finger.
I waited politely until he finished reading and looked up at me. “Morning, Wrecker.”
“Miss Kit.” He touched the brim of his cap. “She’s not up yet. Late night, she had, what with all of ’em sailors what come into port yesterday.”
Wrecker had been sent over to Toriana on work-release from Sydney a few years back after serving ten years in the quarries for kneecapping the wrong chap. He’d finished out his debt to the Crown and now lived as a freedman. Had Rina not hired him, he might have kept at the work he knew best. Luckily protecting her and her gels required Wreck to commit far fewer felonies.
“No worries, I’ll bring her a cup.”
Knowing my long-standing relationship with his mistress, he nodded and let me pass.
At the other end of the alley was the back of the boardinghouse, a red door, and a bright brass bell. After I tugged on the pull, a narrow eye-slot appeared in the door.
“Miss Kittredge to see Mrs. Eagle.”
The door opened, and a fellow almost as huge as Wrecker inspected me. He was new, which meant his predecessor was either dead or in prison. “Selling or buying?” The way he ogled my body from the neck down made it clear he hoped I was selling.