The Great Unravel, page 13
part #3 of Riddle in Ruby Series
“Reginald Shackleton?” His mouth made an O of respect. “Of Shackleton’s Shackle Town?”
Ruby risked it. “The same.” Reggie’s voice was close to his warble.
The man’s eyes flicked over for a moment. “Well, milord, we do love your chains and manacles. Best quality in the colonies for keeping prisoners trussed up.”
“Thank yoo. So much.”
“And thank you for your patience. You are cleared to pass!” As he leaned forward to pass back the documents, he said, “Best to make your stay a short one? Dangerous night. There are rumors abounding. Good citizens like yourself most likely should stay in with doors locked and barred. I’m not certain it will be safe for anyone in the streets tonight.”
The concern in Athena’s “Oh, dear,” was the first remotely authentic emotion Ruby had heard since the conversation began. “We will, sir, and good luck to you tonight.”
Something fluttered behind his eyes. “Thank you, miss. And good luck to us all.” He bowed, and Athena closed the window and shut the curtains.
Quiet descended. They were alone.
Athena collapsed back into her seat. “I feel as if I’ve sparred for hours.” She made a face. “How do women do that?”
The low thwock thwock thwockthwockthwock of the carriage gears spun up, and they began moving again, cobblestones rumbling under the thick iron wheels.
Athena looked at Ruby as if she were china. “Are you all right?”
Ruby took her hands away from her parts, and they didn’t waggle. “Progress,” she said.
“No. I don’t mean that. Can you go through with this? is what I’m asking. If you falter and your foot falls off in the middle of a Virginia reel, my fading flower routine will not be able to save us.”
Athena’s laugh was strained, but it helped. Her friend’s courage helped Ruby focus. Bit by bit Reginald Shackleton solidified. She tried to wrap him about her like a cloak. Not just being a boy but being a boy who, when he sucked his thumb, was congratulated for it. Warmth bloomed in her chest, and she puffed it out. It felt good. It felt wonderful. There was nothing to fear here. Reggie was with his people, and Reggie’s people were not suspicious of him. They loved him. Reggie grinned. Everyone loved him. “I’m ready,” Ruby said. “And with what the soldier just said—danger on the streets tonight—”
“Agreed,” said Athena. “As quickly as we can, find Paine and Van Huffridge, warn them, get alla Ferra’s money, and get out.”
In her very best Reggie voice, Ruby said, “And snacks. We cannot forget snacks. I want a stuffed goose.”
Athena gave her a sidelong glance and then leaned back from the other window. “I’m glad you’ve found your footing, Reggie, because we’re here.”
Cram’s knock rang low on the thick wood of the door, and then it opened.
Sound flooded in: music from a quartet and people laughing and the clatter of dishes and the rumbling of tinker’s carriages.
Cram and Henry stood at attention, and Reginald Shackleton stalked down the steps of the carriage, extending a hand to help Evallina Puddledump down as well. Before them lay the front porch of Van Huffridge House.
It would have been impossible to miss.
The clouds had cleared a bit, and the house, still wet from the rain, sparkled in the reflected light of a hundred tinker’s lamps.
“Is that—” Ruby murmured.
“Yes,” said Athena. “The outside walls are all alloyed glass.”
The shining walls of Van Huffridge House rose up into the night sky: glittering panels supported by a crosshatch of silvery metal support beams. It perched on a corner of the Lid, jutting out over its edge like a crystal figurehead. A double line of footmen ran from the edge of the street, up the stairs, across the wide porch to the door. Milling about on the porch to either side churned a crowd of partygoers, panniers bustling, buttons gleaming, and witty chatter spinning. All along the glass railing, groups of men and women clustered to watch the new arrivals. They spoke with one another in hushed whispers from behind shining brass gloves and magnesium fans, all the while taking in the new prey. Which, currently, was Ruby and Athena.
Ruby smiled a wide smile that she hoped said, “I am completely at ease here” and said, under her breath, “What now?”
Just then a little man hurried up, his eyes wide behind rose lenses. His purple and gray Van Huffridge livery was gussied up with so many ribbons it was hard to see the fabric underneath. “Welcome back to Van Huffridge House, Lord Shackleton!”
No room for hesitation now. Straight into the whirlpool. “Thank you, my good man! So good to be back. Er”—Ruby fluttered Reggie’s handkerchief—“I am so terrible with names.”
Sweat beaded his upper lip. “Clivens, milord. Third factotum of the western entrance.”
“Well, I’m sure second is not far off now. Keep up the good work.”
“Thank you, sir.” He turned to Athena. “Miss?”
“Puddledump. Evallina Puddledump.”
“Of course.”
Ruby smiled. “Of course!”
Athena smiled all the way to the roots of her teeth and then stuck her arm out.
Oh. Ruby took her elbow, and the two of them flowed forward, past Factotum Clivens and along the row of servants. Ruby wanted to look back. She wanted to check to make sure that Cram was all right, and Henry. But she didn’t.
Reginald didn’t care about servants.
At her side Athena wheezed.
“Is everything all right?” Ruby muttered.
“Corset, that’s all.” Athena gritted her teeth. Her eyes bulged slightly.
“Evallina, everyone is looking at us. Like they know us.”
“Just act as if you know them. Everyone is an old friend.”
“But—”
“You were spot on with Clivens. No one will be so rude as to ask if you recognize them. Be vague as you like, but not overly familiar. You don’t want anyone to feel invited to keep speaking to you. Above all, and this is most important, be pleasant.”
“Pleasant?” Ruby nodded and smiled to a silver-nosed tinker who was waving madly at them.
“As if you had just spent the afternoon becoming fast friends while watching your falcons mate in your parents’ two-hundred-year-old cypress grove.”
“What?”
“Personal experience, sorry. Just assume you know everyone. More than half of them are doing the same with you, I guarantee it.”
The silver-chased doors of Van Huffridge House were fifteen feet high if they were an inch. Two guards stood to either side; hard sorts whose swords and clocklocks gleamed dull and menacing against their party finery. Perched atop each guard’s head was a freshly brushed coonskin cap. They looked as fit for the wilderness as a raccoon would in Clivens’s tights. They flung the doors open, and waves of music and chatter washed over Ruby.
Flowers wound above on the inside struts, crawled in every direction, drooped drowsily from winding vines and jutted up from cleverly affixed pots. Gardenias and magnolias, iris and bee balm—everywhere Ruby looked there was a new one. The house was packed with them. It felt like some kind of living thing. A wave of heat and moisture rolled over them, accompanied by a heady, thick mix of sweetness. Athena wobbled, grabbing Ruby’s elbow for a moment. The foyer rose three floors of open air straight up to where rain had started up again fitfully tapping on the roof, spattering on panels that looked as if they could be slid back to let in the outside air. Bright, vigorous music filtered in from balconies wrapped in vine and creeper.
Transparent stairways of alloyed glass swept up in both directions out of the foyer, and Ruby and Athena had no choice but to join the tide of partygoers rolling upward. At the top of the stairs, next to a palm tree in a platinum planter, waited a serving woman adorned with somehow even more ribbons than Clivens. She held a cobalt staff of office and gave Ruby a graceful bow. “Lord Shackleton. Welcome back to Van Huffridge House.” She turned to Athena. “And mademoiselle, welcome. How may I announce you?”
Athena fired off a stunning curtsy. “Evallina Puddledump, of the Virginia Puddledumps.”
“Of course, mademoiselle.” The woman flowed in through the doorway, plonked her staff three times, and proclaimed, “Lord Reginald Shackleton and Mademoiselle Evallina Puddledump.”
Every corner was overflowing with the very finest people, a treacherous sea of rocks and monsters. Ruby looked down at Athena. “Ready?”
Athena’s eyes tightened in a smile. “Always.” Athena gave Ruby’s wrist a squeeze. It would have been reassuring, but it left a pulsing divot in her skin.
Ruby swallowed. “Brilliant.”
CHAPTER 16
Take my gold. Take my soul. Hell, take my children, if you like. But if you look sideways at my steward? I’ll keelhaul you and leave you for the sharks.
—Precious Nel, Scourge of the Seven Seas
If the drive at the front of Van Huffridge House was a bubbling cauldron, the rear was a forest fire.
And Henry knew something of forest fires. He knew nothing, however, of the land of servants. The drive spiraled down and around a massive retaining wall, and as soon as they passed that border separating the front from the back, chaos attacked. Crowds of attendants hurried madly to and fro as if their lives depended on it, calls echoing from the vaulted brick ceilings. The carriage house was a castle in its own right. No fewer than three different grooms screamed garbled instructions at Cram, directing him and the carriage to various slots among a dizzying array of other coaches, spaces that seemed so narrow to Henry as to be completely impossible.
Through it all, Cram sat next to him silent and impenetrable as Bacon’s tomb, his hands and feet like hummingbirds on the wheels and levers. He sailed the coach through the carriage house entirely and out into the court directly behind the main house. The carriage barreled past a fleet of wheelbarrows, casting a purple flood of fresh-cut violets to the ground and setting off a chorus of curses. They braked so hard that Henry was almost thrown from their perch, and then, nimble as a dancer, the coach sidled through the tiniest of gaps between two parked carriages. Henry could have reached out and tugged the quivering red mustaches of the driver on his side. For a moment he feared the man would tear him from his seat. Finally, as if by a fit of prophecy, Cram landed them in a space so recently vacated by a tart wagon that a bystanding groom swallowed a small scream of fear.
Henry opened the latches on his safety straps. “By Providence, Cram,” he muttered, “that was well done!”
The serving boy nodded and coughed, covering a smile. He jumped down from the carriage and tied it up, hiding his words in the fierce motion of the ropes. “Follow me, Kevin. And don’t say nothing to nobody, you savvy?”
“Why do they tie the ropes? There are no horses anymore—”
Cram rounded on him and hissed low, “It’s just the way it’s still done, see? Don’t say nothing to nobody.”
Henry cleared his throat. He was in Cram’s hands now, Cram’s world. He nodded. “Don’t say anyth—nothing to nobody.”
He followed Cram’s lead and grabbed up a platter of tarts recently deposited by the tart wagon. When he turned about, a woman had appeared in front of him.
She was dressed in sensible wool, in the Van Huffridge purple and gray. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she bore a faint wisp of a mustache on her lip. She wore her hair in a forgettable bun and carried a battered, worn chain of keys and tools about her waist.
She bore down on them like a team of angered oxen.
“Who are you?” said the woman.
Cram instantly abandoned his air of authority, transforming before Henry’s eye into a meek, polite nobody. “Begging your pardon, Miss Chatelaine. Lord Shackleton tasked us to help in any way we could, and the head groom said to help with the unloadings of provisions for the feast and the like.”
A terrible skepticism hung about her like a cloud. “Head groom, eh?”
Cram’s eyes and Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in tandem.
“I will string up that oaf. I told him we could make do without the guests’ folk pitching in. It don’t look right.”
“Yes, mum,” said Cram.
Henry thought it would be good to nod.
As soon as he did, he knew he had made a mistake. The chatelaine’s gimlet eye skewered him. “You think it don’t look right?”
The details of hundreds of false people, some from books he had read, others from visions of his past life, coursed through his head like a raging river. He went on with the nodding.
Cram sighed, a sad sound. “Kevin, miss, he’s mute these four years. Cain’t speak a word.”
Should he nod? Make a face? Start to cry? Science, he was terrible at this. He settled on a shrug.
The chatelaine sniffed like a coursing hound, eyes darting back and forth between the two of them. It felt like years passed. Finally she sniffed one last time. “Well, however it looks, we do need help. Those tarts will not move themselves, and they’ll be ruined in this damp. Take them down to the kitchens.”
The kitchens? Henry’s eyes bulged. He tried to keep them in his sockets. Where in the name of all Science were the kitchens?
Cram seemed to take in all of this in a split second and tugged at Henry’s shirt with his free hand. “COME ON THEN, KEVIN,” he yelled. Directly into Henry’s face.
They hurried past the chatelaine, already fixing her glower on some new victim. Cram walked ahead as if he owned the place through a massive set of ironbound oak doors. On the other side lay the maw of hell, also known as the kitchens of Van Huffridge House. Great ovens belched fire. Cooks and pastry chefs vied for counter space. Everywhere there was motion and chaos.
Cram scanned the church-size room, then froze like a hunting dog catching a scent. Henry couldn’t hear what the other boy said over the din, but he followed nonetheless as Cram deftly maneuvered the tarts through the press to the far side.
A slight breeze trailed down two twin staircases, one with a stream of platter-laden servants traveling up and one for harassed folks coming down, bearing trays that looked as if they had been picked over by ravenous hyenas.
Cram marched up to a harried steward with eyebrows like bristle brushes and presented the tarts. “For Miss Paine?” he asked.
The steward barely gave him a glance. “Music room.”
Cram nodded as if that were the most precise direction in the history of directions. “Of course, mum. We’re with Lord Shackleton’s people. Can you direct me to a particular music room?”
She gave a great gout of a sigh. “Four flights, long hallway. Second door, across from the tapestry of the lions eating the farmers.”
A tall serving girl, her chestnut curls tucked up under a purple and gray cap, detached herself from a group of other servants and sidled up to them. “Those for Miss Paine?”
Henry nodded.
The girl made room on the platter for a pitcher and a single tankard. “Take those, too, will you please? Compliments of the house. In honor of the evening.” She winked.
“Of course. Thank you, miss.” Cram dived into the crowd of streaming servants. After the first turn he craned his head back over his shoulder. “Did you see that?” he whispered.
“Yes,” said Henry. His mouth was dry as a bone, and his pulse pounded in his ears. He risked a glance back around the turn at the clump of servants the girl had come from. A big one and the two white-haired twins. As if she could somehow sense him, the girl turned around and gave him a brilliant smile. All he could think to do was smile back and wave, as if he fancied her. He ducked back around the corner and tried, with all his might, to speak casually. “Those are reeves. That was the girl from the canyon.”
Cram dumped the pitcher and tankard in a nearby plant. “We’d best move. We ain’t the only ones masking as servants tonight.”
CHAPTER 17
What, you ask, is the Great Blight upon our new Age? It is neither the terror of the Second Inquisition, nor is it the Hungry Ghost of Poverty. It is that most horrible of scourges:
The Well-Attended Party.
—Silence Dogood, Boston Mercury
Athena couldn’t breathe. She rested her gloved fingers on the table to hold herself up as another wave of dizziness passed. She swallowed a grim smile, taking a moment to imagine the faces of some of the women in the room if they saw what lay underneath the tiny pearls that marched all the way up to her elbows. Tan skin. Chipped fingernails. Calluses at the join of the thumb and forefinger, raised slowly and agonizingly after years of study into her own style of needlepoint, the art of the blade.
Her vision cleared, and she found herself staring into the transparent maw of a roaring bear. Colonials took pride in their ferocious animals, and the ice sculpture centerpiece did not disappoint. Fully four feet high from the table, the beast was somehow chemystrally chilled by an artifice in the flat silver base. Silver, of course, because iron or even steel would not do for a party of this importance. The great finger-size fangs were so cold they did not even drip. She let the cool air wash over her as she got her bearings. The little balcony she and Ruby had found offered a better view of the packed main floor below, and a trellis full of morning glory offered cover from observation as well.
Anger at Greta boiled up through her cinched-in waist, forced itself through her manacled lungs, and trickled out in a swallowed curse. Athena flicked at the unwieldy panniers jutting out from her hips. Her artfully arranged hair tickled the back of her neck like the finest of water tortures. Her entire life she had worked to keep her distance from exactly this: being held captive in a bedamned prison of silk and lace.
Next to her, tall and handsome in a peaked way, Ruby Teach, in her guise as Reginald Shackleton, leaned over and warbled, “Barnacles.”
Athena let her fingers play across a platter of radishes, bitter oranges, and anchovies. Country fare, but made up fancy. A wicked-looking knife had been artfully left in a loaf of hearty brown bread. She palmed it and secreted it among her ruffles. The familiar feel of steel against her skin helped her breathe a bit more easily. She smiled at a couple passing below, their hair tortured into a pair of overengineered matching ships. “I’m sorry?” she murmured.
