Maddie Hatter and the Gilded Guage

by Jayne Barnard

  The Maddie Hatter Adventures:

  Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond

  Maddie Hatter and the Gilded Gauge

  Maddie Hatter and the Timely Taffeta (forthcoming)

  Maddie Hatter and the Gilded Gauge

  Published by Tyche Books Ltd.

  www.TycheBooks.com

  Copyright © 2017 Jayne Barnard

  First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2017

  Print ISBN: 978-1-928025-67-2

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-928025-68-9

  Cover Art by Robin Robinson

  Interior Art by Robin Robinson

  Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey

  Interior Layout by Ryah Deines

  Editorial by Adria Laycraft

  Author photograph: Kevin Jepson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.

  This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.

  This adventure is dedicated to the Steampunk of the Calgary Mess Deck, and their children, who are a continual and joyous inspiration; to Caresse Nadeau for her amazing silk-rope performance and contagious enthusiasm; to Emmelia Taylor who kept the strands of my daily life flowing while I hid out in the writing; to my delightful and very patient editor and publisher at Tyche Books; and, ever and always, to Kevin, whose support for my creative antics is unflagging.

  Chapter One

  MADDIE HATTER WAS trapped. Surrounded. Hemmed in by billowing clouds of tulle, taffeta, and satin, all adorned with ells beyond measure of ribbon, ruffle, and flounce. Bustles as big as breadboxes blocked the aisles. Hats wider than tea trays endangered the unwary eye with poking plumes and fulsome flowers. Fans in fabulous fabrics wafted the stuffy air. The viewing gallery was a fashion reporter’s heaven, crammed with copy for the whole autumn’s worth of daily columns. Coming after a delightful summer of travel and adventure across all America, however, it was a stark reminder of the coming winter. Whether Maddie returned to Europe or remained in New York City, she faced endless hours in over-crowded rooms, rhapsodizing over sleeves and skirt-hems until her fingers cramped and her eyeballs ached.

  A mysterious message had lured her away from breakfast at Mrs. Darling’s boarding house in Lower Manhattan. “If yer wants an ’ot tip,” uttered the street urchin who brought the communiqué, “Emmy Gat says git yerself ter Madame Lavinier’s Parasol Academy, hard by Carnegie Hall, afore them snooty ladies goes fer mornin’ coffee.”

  Hiram Phillips explained, between spoons-full of porridge, that Emmy Gat was an odd lass who dressed like a boy. She could often predict when a factory might be sold, allowing workers to prepare for job changes or losses, and last Spring she’d suggested a certain garment-making attic was a fire risk, a warning that saved a whole block from conflagration and led to arson charges against the owner. If Emmy pointed Maddie at a story, it ought to be looked into.

  That sounded promising for a spot of investigative reporting. Maddie thanked him and added cream to her coffee.

  Hiram’s young Darling cousins, on the other hand, loudly proclaimed Emmy a villainess worse than the whole Five Points Gang. They chanted a rhyme in unison, thumping their spoon handles on the table for emphasis.

  Emmy Gat ain’t no flat

  Strangled a man with her silk cravat

  Catch her eye and she’ll cut you in half

  Ain’t no flies on Em—

  There might have been more but Mrs. Darling, returning with a jug of milk, hushed them in no uncertain terms.

  “It wouldn’t do, dear, to ignore a tip from Emmy Gat,” she said when the boys were quietly shovelling porridge. “Best get a move on, for the parasol academy is far uptown, nearly at Central Park.”

  Society coffee and visits began at precisely eleven a.m., leaving Maddie just enough time to finish her breakfast, press the travel creases from her linen suit, and take the trolley up the length of Manhattan. The Academy was two short blocks from Central Park, and not much further from the grand Vanderbilt mansions at Fifth Avenue. It stood amid dainty cafes, millionaires’ clubs, and a handful of professional offices behind imposing facades. There might be a story in any of those buildings, but in a parasol academy where young ladies went to learn the honourable combat imported from Europe? No place in New York seemed less likely to merit the attention of an investigative journalist. After lingering a quarter-hour outside, waiting for something to happen, Maddie had followed a chattering flow of exquisitely gowned ladies through the academy portals. Here she sat, suffocated by ruffles and lace, with not a sniff of a story as far as her eye could see or her ear could overhear.

  What she could see was fodder a-plenty for her Kettle Conglomerate fashion columns. Coifed ladies in the latest Paris-inspired gowns peered into the gymnasium below, making sly observations about this woman’s daughter and that one’s niece. Mentally cataloguing the sizes of leg-of-mutton sleeves—from Spring lamb to aged ram—she too gazed down. Two roped-off dueling rings at the far end were unused. In front of them, young ladies in blue exercise frocks stood languidly, their practice parasols poised as they awaited instruction from a severe woman in brown garb. Parasol dueling? Hah. Maddie had seen more fighting spirit in a canary pecking its jingle-bell.

  She wasn’t aware of muttering aloud until a young lady at her side leaned close.

  “Are you quite well, miss?”

  Could one of these insular Society women be addressing Maddie? She slanted her eyes sideways. The young lady looked back at her from anxious amber eyes under soft topaz curls. A demure day dress of daffodil, trimmed with gold-threaded lace, imparted a glow to her whole being. The question came again.

  “Yes, thank you,” Maddie replied, keeping her voice low. “I note these parasol duelists do not exhibit much enthusiasm for their pursuit.”

  “Indeed.” The gem-eyed girl turned her gaze on the gymnasium. “It is not at all the done thing to appear enthusiastic. Or to, well, move vigorously. Lest one . . .” She trailed off, leaving Maddie to silently fill in the indelicate word “perspire.”

  “I see. It is certainly less vigorous than the dueling I witnessed in California.”

  “You went to California? Is that not rather a long journey?”

  “Hardly a week by airship, if one flies direct. Unless one meets those frightful prairie storms that sweep the ship backward, away from the mountains.”

  “Gracious,” said the girl. “Papa is flying from San Francisco this very week. Shall he be long delayed, do you think? Is September a bad time for storms?”

  “Any storm would blow his ship in this direction, as I understand the prevailing winds.” The girl seemed a well-meaning type and willing, against all the social rules, to talk. Maddie ventured a question of her own. “Might you explain to me how parasol dueling is done here? My travels have exposed me to many regional styles, but nary a one had this leisurely air about it.”

  “They only learn the forms, to walk gracefully in the park. Rarely does anyone duel at all. At least, not in our circles.” The gilded-lace girl ended on a sigh.


  “You wish they would?”

  “One does not, in public, but I paid for private tutoring in the art. I intend to travel and must be prepared to defend my honour in foreign parts. Where, pray, have you seen duels?”

  “London, at first. Strictly Brandenburg Rules there, as approved by Her Majesty. France, where graceful movement and fetching attire are de rigueur. Prussians march, in coordinated movement through the figures. Rather like an infantry drill, in fact. I learned a little from each style, and sometimes prevailed.”

  “You dueled?” The words came on a breath of excitement. “Would you duel with me?”

  Surely a girl of good family wishing to duel was not the promised story? But Maddie had nothing else to occupy her, and if the girl truly intended to travel, she must learn some skills beyond this passive posing or she would be meat on the skewer of any European duelist. And Maddie could use the exercise. “Where would we undertake such a thing?”

  “I am a member here,” said the young lady. “I could book us gymnasium space. Perhaps before tomorrow’s class, if you don’t mind arriving early?” The students below bowed to their severe instructor and departed, while the ladies along the gallery moved in a silken rustle to the stairs. Maddie’s new friend stood, too, and put out her hand. “But we have not yet been introduced.” The card she offered read, in flowing script: Miss E. G. Gauge.

  “Miss Madeleine Hatter,” said Maddie, offering her Kettle Conglomerates card. After a summer of informal living, where names were swapped as readily as smiles, she found polite society foolishly formal. But she must behave or be labelled brash, which would severely curtail her access to fashionable events. With the formalities completed, they went downstairs. Miss Gauge made arrangements for the following morning, and procured for Maddie a visitor’s card. As they neared the exit to the street, however, she hung back.

  “Go on without me. I have, that is, I need to . . .”

  Assuming that prudery forbade Miss Gauge simply excusing herself to visit the lavatory, Maddie bade her goodbye and stepped out into the unseasonably sultry morning. On the faded hope of a story, she halted to watch the elegant ladies and languid girls mount into waiting carriages and steam-mobiles. The crowd thinned as the conveyances drew away. All except one, a sleek, shining steam-mobile shaped rather like an artillery shell, with a hatch that opened upward to admit passengers. This vehicle’s chauffeur pulled his machine up to the Academy’s entrance and stood by the passenger hatch on the deserted sidewalk. For interminable minutes he waited. Then Miss Gauge hurried from the Academy doorway, scanned the street, and scurried as quickly as her slim skirts allowed toward the mobile. She scrambled inside, the chauffeur closed the hatch, and the machine drew away. The last sight of Maddie’s new friend was a frightened face peering out from the shadowed interior.

  Of what was Miss Gauge frightened in this genteel neighbourhood? Maddie surveyed the street with all her senses on alert, but nobody seemed to pay the slightest heed to the Gauge girl. The only person loitering was a newsboy, wafting a folded broadsheet and yelling, “America’s greatest detective called to White House.”

  America’s greatest detective? Maddie pulled a penny from her purse and snatched the newspaper. The headline read, “Sneero Fawkes, New York’s Greatest Detective, Finds First Lady’s Lost Ring.” Was the man a great detective or, like Horatio Hornblower, fond of tooting his own horn? Maddie scanned the story for details hinting of genius but the main point was in the headline: the detective had gone to Washington D.C. and found, or helped find, a bauble misplaced by the president’s wife.

  A policeman gave Maddie the stern eyeball. Realizing she was the only solitary female on the avenue, and lacking a story or a girl in boy’s clothing, she gave up on Emmy Gat’s mystery and strode off toward the trolley stop for the long, rattling ride back to her boarding house on the edge of the East Village. On arrival, however, she found the young brothers all agog. They dragged her out to the rear stoop, where a small, grubby lad in a newsboy’s cap waited. He whipped off his cap and recited, “Midnight at Stuyvesant Street Triangle. Bring a parasol. Emmy sez.”

  Chapter Two

  A STEEPLE CLOCK chimed the three-quarters as Maddie, with Hiram as escort, approached the rendezvous. The moon laid deep shadow at the edges of the tall, narrow buildings but nothing stirred. She stopped before the corner, staring out across the deserted pavement. Where three streets crossed was a triangle of beaten-down grass and dusty shrubbery, anchored by a rundown bandstand and a single, spreading tree. No-one could be seen.

  An owl launched from a branch and floated over their heads, hooting softly. Maddie put her hand on her hat to keep TD from answering. The hunting birds of New York City—hawks by day and owls by night—viewed smaller birds as their rightful prey. While TD’s brass and gears were surely indigestible, they were not armour-plated. His delicate mechanisms would be severely damaged by aggressive talons and beaks, and the only person who could repair him was far off in London. Or was it Singapore by this time? Madame Taxus-Hemlock never stayed in one place for long. If she wasn’t on her family’s business, she was overseeing some country’s parasol dueling championship. She was not in New York, at any rate, and Maddie could not be half so effective a reporter without TD’s secret techniques of capturing images and recording speech.

  Hiram muttered, “We’ll have to go out in the open, where she can see us.”

  “I’ll go. You stay here, ready to aid me if I call. And keep your eyes skinned for an ambush.” Not that Maddie was frightened—she had handled riskier situations in more dangerous locales than a deserted New York garment district—but Hiram would feel purposeful and might yet be useful. Whispering, “TD, look, listen, and record,” she strode toward the grass, eyeing the shadowy bushes and peering into the deep gloom beneath the tree. Nothing moved, yet she could feel eyes upon her. She shifted her parasol to a dueling grip. “Hello? Miss Gat?”

  A chuckle echoed eerily off the surrounding buildings. “Miss Gat? Ain’t been called that afore.”

  Maddie turned, trying to pin down a direction before the voice vanished. Nobody. A rustling of leaves drew her hand up to her hat again, lest the owl be making another pass over TD. A dark form swung down from the tree, landing two-footed, with a thump and a cackle. Striding into the moonlight it bowed, with a flourish of one scuffed velvet arm.

  “Emmy Gat, and I ain’t at nobody’s service.”

  Maddie blinked. Forewarned she had been, but still the mysterious neighbourhood oracle was a strange sight. She wore dark satin knee breeches over black-and-white stockings. Old-fashioned heel shoes held glittering buckles. The wine-dark velvet was an old man’s frock coat fashionable forty years ago, and around the neck, under a blunt fringe of cherry-red hair, was a black silk cravat. Filling the gap between red lips and battered black bowler hat was a white-and-gilt eye-mask. By moonlight the eye-holes were devoid of reflection.

  Screened with black chiffon, Maddie guessed. However dramatic the setting and the player, it was a chilly September midnight and she was tired. Emmy Gat had better come up with a good story or this reporter was going straight home to her warm bed.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “I’m Miss Hatter, reporter. What’s this hot tip you’ve got?”

  Emmy cackled again. “Comin’ out with all sails set, hey? Mind I don’t shoot ’em all away on yer.”

  “Talk to me or I’m leaving.”

  “Fight me an’ I’ll decide if yer worthy.”

  “Fight you?”

  The creature turned. Held along her leg was a tattered umbrella of some dark fabric, with the hook of its handle broken off. She raised it in a parody of formal salute.

  “Ah. You want to duel with me? Here, now?” Maddie glanced around, but the area was still empty. The grass underfoot seemed reasonably level, and if the shadows gave her opponent’s darker clothing an advantage, it was slight. Maddie’s navy blue suit would vanish into the shadows almost as completely. She raised her own parasol t
o the exact vertical before her face. “What rules are current here? I take it not Brandenburg.”

  Emmy chortled. “My street, my rules. No hits past a Snub.”

  “That’s it? Anything else goes?”

  “Yer cries, yer out. Yer bleeds, yer out.”

  “As you wish.” Maddie swished down her parasol and sprang forward, swiping the weighted tip at the other girl’s ankle. Emmy leapt aside and parried. Unseen barbs on her umbrella snatched at the cloth of Maddie’s parasol, pulling it and her forward. She stumbled before jumping backward, evading a Plant so ferocious it stabbed into the earth her right foot had abandoned.

  So the umbrella had a sharpened tip? The girl was playing for blood.

  While Emmy was yanking out her weapon, sending a divot of dry grass into the air, Maddie swung her dainty parasol sideways like a baseball bat, landing the weighted tip precisely on her opponent’s exposed wrist-bone.

  “Gah!” Emmy backed, raising and opening her brolly in a swift Snub. Checked from hitting her head on, Maddie sidestepped until a prickly bush blocked her way. She feinted forward, forcing Emmy to give ground, and darted sideways to get around the open Snub. In a flash, Emmy spun on one clunky heel, dragging the umbrella over her shoulder and slashing it wide open, right in Maddie’s face. The hat-brim took the worst, but as the barbs dragged it forward over her eyes, TD rose with a whirr of his wings and darted away. She didn’t dare call him back, but concentrated on dodging the sharpened tip that was probing for her cheek.

  Shifting her grip, she swung for Emmy’s knee. The parasol connected instead with the wooden bandstand support. A shock ran up past her elbow. She leaped clear, shaking out her arm. The brolly swung away from her face. Emmy flung herself heels overhead, up the bandstand’s shallow steps on her left hand. Her right maintained the Snub. When her feet landed, Maddie rammed her weighted tip toward the toe of one preposterous shoe. Emmy leapt into the air, landed neatly atop the bandstand’s wooden railing, and grinned.