Maddie Hatter and the Gilded Guage

by Jayne Barnard

  Emmeline snapped at her, “Nobody tried to steal it. You let it slip into my mother’s coat pocket.”

  “It fell from my wrist,” the countess countered. “I will take it and go. If you refuse to restore my property, I will call for the Russian Consulate to assist me in its immediate recovery.”

  Maddie raised an eyebrow. The countess was desperate enough to summon Russian security forces? They’d have no compunction about storming the house. Even if nobody was injured—an outcome by no means certain—the resulting diplomatic incident would draw a great deal of attention to the Gatsby-Gauges, to the gauge itself, and to everyone in the house. While the dragon was surely sent to spy, and the chance to examine its complex mechanisms was hard to let go, she could not call the countess’s bluff.

  From the corner of her eye, she could see Emmeline’s mouth opening. Cutting her off, she said, “Take it and go. We will escort you to the door ourselves, to ensure it does not slip from your wrist again.”

  She stepped aside from the file box, beckoning Emmeline to do the same, and meanwhile covering TD and TC with her skirt. The hem tugged faintly as both birds’ claws hooked into the underside, where they would be safe from damage by anybody’s hands or feet.

  When the front door shut behind the unwelcome visitor, Emmeline sagged. “What an afternoon! What did she hope to gain by that?”

  The dragon’s eyes could very likely capture images as readily as TD’s did, and were carrying away a partial layout of the main floor, but Maddie didn’t say that lest it set Emmeline to wondering about the abilities of the clockwork birds.

  “It might have been an excuse to get into the house for a good look around. Russia is not above using its aristocrats as willing spies. Woodrow, please don’t let her past the door if she returns. I’ll speak to your mistress about dropping the acquaintance. We must report this intrusion to Mr. Gatsby-Gauge as well. He may want to take additional security precautions.”

  “The master is not yet returned from upstate,” said Woodrow. “I will take all necessary steps to secure the house and inform him immediately on his return.”

  Maddie thanked him and, grateful Mrs. G-G had remained unaware of the commotion, hurried upstairs to her chamber. Once in her chamber, the clockwork sparrows scrambled out from under her skirts and flew to the windowsill. She spoke a quick message to Obie, asking him to follow the countess, and let TC out. TD she set up in the desk to dot-dash his images of the dragon. Madame Taxus-Hemlock would, she felt sure, be intrigued by anything he had learned about the clockwork creature’s capabilities. The soft, cool bed whispered to her but she turned her back and tidied her hair. Mrs. G-G and Mrs. Handy were waiting downstairs to plan a library benefit, and a good social secretary must be at hand to take notes.

  “I’m sorry, little bird, but I will have to close the desk on you again. I promise to let you out sooner this time.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  MADDIE DRESSED HURRIEDLY for supper, once more in her aging green evening gown, and hurried down to the dining room while everyone else was still tying cravats or bodice-strings in their respective bedchambers. Under the tortured eyes of the dying stag on the wall, she shifted the table settings around so that she was no longer under Father’s eye. Tired as she was, she couldn’t be sure of keeping a neutral expression if he glared at her. At a sound she turned.

  Emmeline stood in the doorway, her head tilted and one eyebrow raised. “What are you up to, Maddie?”

  “Um, switching places so I can keep an eye on the German secretary.”

  Emmeline’s other eyebrow went up. “Indeed? Do you think I didn’t notice in the drawing room last night, how you avoided sitting where you could see Lord Main-Bearing? Has he been uncivil? Or is he perhaps another ex-employer?”

  By the Cog, that girl was too observant. Maddie hurried to her. “Shhh. Don’t even hint that where anyone might overhear.”

  “You didn’t work for him?”

  “Never.”

  Emmeline’s head tilted the other way. After a moment she said, “There’s some connection. I’m sure of it.”

  Here was the clash of loyalties Maddie had feared from her first sight of Father on the stairs. She could not tell the truth at this moment, but she must keep Emmeline’s confidence too. She took a deep breath, thankful that her green gown still fit without a corset cinching her waist.

  “If you trust me at all, believe that I’d never let my past connections interfere with my work for you. Ask me this again when we’ve uncovered your kidnappers.” By then, she hoped, Emmeline would be grateful for a successful conclusion, and happy to swear eternal silence on Madeleine Main-Bearing in exchange for the same on Emmy Gat.

  To her relief, Emmeline gave a nod before turning away in a swirl of ice-blue and silver lace. “Mr. Coggington is in the parlour. Come protect me from his assiduous attentions.”

  Supper was a largely silent affair. The Steamlords had been together all day, riding aloft in Lord Main-Bearing’s runabout to visit Mr. G-G’s upstate factories. They had doubtless discussed any necessary business on their travels. Mrs. G-G told her husband she proposed holding a library benefit; he said, “Good, good,” and they both dropped the subject. Emmeline was almost asleep in her soup, which doubtless contributed to Mr. Coggington’s failure to entice her into conversation. Maddie too yearned for her bed, but she dared not appear less than professional, and quickly swallowed five refills of the tiny cup of after-dinner coffee.

  “You’ll not want your cocoa, dear,” said Mrs. G-G when they left the men to their brandy and retired to their parlour. Mrs. Handy, she explained, had told her all English houses followed the custom of sending up cocoa at bedtime. As this was mostly a nursery habit and Father abhorred cocoa, Maddie quietly told Woodrow that Lord Main-Bearing would prefer a glass of Scotch whisky and a siphon of soda water. Herr Mittwoch-Uhrwerk might also prefer a different drink, but that was his secretary’s lookout.

  Suppressing yawns, Maddie gratefully followed Emmeline upstairs to bed very soon after. This time, she remembered to let TD out of the desk as soon as Dora had left the room. The sparrow’s eyes, she was relieved to note, had retained their usual bright blackness despite the flying, warbling, and drawing he had been busy with. He had tapped out a slew of dragon images for her to review, but she was so tired she simply stacked them all tidily and shut the desk on them. TD took himself to the headboard and perched above her head as she squished the feather pillow into shape and sank into bluebell-scented sleep, completely forgetting about the tastefully arranged tray at her bedside containing a demitasse and a vacuum flask of hot cocoa.

  Some time later she woke with a start. She lay in the darkness listening, but the room, the house, lay wrapped in the hush of night. All that altered the silence was the shushing of steam as it snaked through the pipes, and that was more a comfort than a disturbance, like the heartbeat of her family home back in England. She should have been drowsy but she felt wide awake. Her mouth was dry, her skin hot against the sheets. Her heart beat faster than usual. All that coffee! She tried to will herself back to sleep. Her tongue felt sticky. Maybe a drink of water? Throwing back the sheets, she stood up and promptly gasped as TD landed on her shoulder. If she was taking a midnight stroll, he was coming with her.

  Two glasses of cool water from the bathroom tap rinsed the tacky taste from her mouth, but left her even wider awake, and restless. No matter how tired her body was after its very disturbed night of prowling and being kidnapped, her brain was fully alert and wanted something to work on. The dragon images in her desk provided a good distraction but revealed little she had not already discerned from watching the creature in action. It could not fly, exactly; its wings only served to steer when it leapt, allowing it to change direction in mid-leap. Its emerald eyes appeared to blink almost as often as TD’s. Was it too collecting images that the countess sat up late to analyze? Madame Taxus-Hemlock must be informed, for the secret of the birds’ abilities belonged to her family
alone.

  Could the dragon also record people talking, as TD sometimes did? Maddie tried to remember what she and Emmeline had said in the study. Nothing incriminating, she thought. Had the dragon left anything behind to help Madame Taxus-Hemlock in assessing it? Perhaps a self-camouflaging scale had loosened under the birds’ claws. She could go down and look right now, while all was quiet, before the maids went through with their sweepers in the morning.

  With TD on her shoulder and slippers on her feet, she left the bluebell room. Across the dimly-lit hallway was the hidden stair Emmeline had told her about, that opened opposite Mr. G-G’s study. With last night’s trek down the other hidden passage in mind, she soon found the catch to release this panel. From the lightless landing, she trailed her fingers along the walls and edged her feet forward, stair by stair downward until she reached the main floor. Before her groping fingers found the inner catch, something that stayed her hand: thin lines of light limning the panel.

  It had to be coming from the study directly opposite. Had Herr Gehirn come back for the gauge? She eased open the panel barely wide enough to peer across. A shadow flickered past the study’s half-open door. Someone was in there, moving silently, but who? Lifting TD from her shoulder, she whispered his stealth-imaging command and sent him across the corridor. He’d get the proof, but how could she prevent a theft? She could not tackle the intruder on her own.

  Mr. G-G must be consulted, she decided, for he could rouse the household and call the police. Tiptoeing up the hidden stair, she burst into the upper hall and hurried straight along to his room. Rapping softly and immediately opening the door, she saw the bedclothes heaped over a sleeping body.

  “Mr. Gatsby-Gauge? Sir, please wake up! Someone is snooping in your study!”

  Mr. G-G could not be roused. His head lolled horridly when she tugged his shoulder. For a terrified moment she feared he was dead. Then a snore issued from between his parted lips. She shook his shoulder again and yelled into his ear. He was beyond waking. Perhaps he took a sleeping draught. Emmeline would know. She could rouse the servants as well as her father could.

  Maddie sped back along the hall. She flew into Emmeline’s room, stumbled over a chair left out of place, and fell heavily onto the bed. Emmeline didn’t wake up yelling. She didn’t wake up at all. After calling her name and shaking her ferociously to no avail, Maddie came to a sickening realization: Emmeline, her father, and probably all the other adults in the house, were in a drugged sleep.

  At any minute the thief might succeed in uncovering the secret panel and flee the mansion with the Gatsby gauge tucked under his arm like a sack of potatoes. Panicking about that would do no good. She forced herself to stand still, inhale deeply, and think.

  First, the drugs had to be in something everyone but she had eaten or drunk. She could remember no dish from supper that she had not sampled. Nobody in the parlour had showed signs of fatigue save herself and Emmeline. What did everyone else have after supper? What but the bedtime cocoa? Her flask sat untouched by her bed, but Emmeline’s was open and the demitasse on her nightstand was sticky. Likely her father had drunk his too, and the guests.

  Wait! Father drank whisky at bedtime, not cocoa. She had ordered it sent up to him. Was that drugged too? Some sleeping drugs, when mixed with alcohol, could stop the breathing. Was Father sleeping himself to death at this very moment?

  Charging into his room, she yelled, “Father, Father, wake up!”

  To her great relief, he sat up immediately. “Madeleine? Is the house on fire?”

  “No. Oh, Father. Someone’s sneaking around in the study and Mr. Gatsby-Gauge is drugged. So is Emmeline. Please, you must come and help me capture this thief.”

  She intended that they should sneak down the hidden stair and surprise the intruder, but Lord Main-Bearing was a man of action, not stealth. He leapt from his bed, snatched up his eagle-headed sword-cane and dashed from the room. He bounded down three steps at a time and charged into the study corridor. As she reached the hallway a few paces behind him, the light in the study vanished. Lord Main-Bearing stormed into the darkness, brandishing his cane.

  “Show yourself, you blaggard.”

  A resounding crash shook the room. Fearing he’d been struck down, Maddie groped for the light dial. Before she could twist it, a shadowy figure pushed past her. It ran not toward the dimly lit central hall but away, toward the library and games room. She could not give chase while her father might be lying wounded in the study. She flooded the room with light and was relieved to see him struggling to his feet beside Mr. G-G’s heavy desk chair, which had lain across the doorway.

  “Which way did he go?”

  “This way.” By the games room was a servants’ stair down to the kitchens, that exited close to the alley door she had used as Emmy Gat. She hurried toward the central hall, the more direct route to the kitchens. “We can cut him off at the back door.” Over her shoulder she added, “It’s the only door that’s not on an alarm, and the key is kept on a hook beside it.”

  For a wonder, Lord Main-Bearing did not push past her, but followed when and where she beckoned. The kitchen corridor was wrapped in midnight gloom. Not a sound, not a breath, disturbed its slumber. She pulled Father aside when they reached the scullery door.

  “In here,” she whispered. “He’ll have to come past us.”

  Though they waited through the next full quarter hour by the kitchen clock’s chimes, nobody came. At last Lord Main-Bearing stirred.

  “He’s not coming this way. Could he have slipped out some other door or window?”

  “They all have security measures. It must be someone in the house. How else could they drug the cocoa earlier, and elude us without leaving the building?”

  Father set off toward the nearest stairs. “We must check on the whereabouts of every resident.”

  “We can leave the servants to the last. Most of them have been with the family for several years, and this is a recent trouble.” She led him up the scullery’s hidden stair to the bedroom corridor, and let him take the lead into Herr Mittwoch-Uhrwerk’s chamber.

  The German’s snores could be heard from the instant the door opened, but Father twisted the light on, crossed the room and shook the man anyway. The snores continued, jerking in time to the shaking. Not this Steamlord, then. His secretary, in the room next door, was likewise insensible under an immense nightcap of virulent green flannel. Beyond his room was that designated for Mr. Gnave. He had fallen into slumber face down across his bed, with his coat cast aside and his cravat untied, but otherwise fully dressed. Lord Main-Bearing didn’t bother to shake him.

  “Now the women,” he told his daughter.

  “Emmeline’s out cold. I’ll check on her mother, and then we must make another attempt to wake Mr. Gatsby-Gauge.”

  “Indeed,” Father said, his face grim. “If someone is concealed in the house, Gauge is the man to take charge.”

  Neither Mr. nor Mrs. G-G could be roused. Their slumbers infected Maddie with a deep desire to do likewise. Drugging she had escaped, but the coffee had long since worn off and only adrenaline was keeping her moving. She yawned widely.

  “You should be in bed,” said Father. “I will keep watch in the study until dawn. If Gatsby can’t be roused then, I’ll send the first servant I see for the police and a doctor.”

  Maddie protested, but went to bed while he strode off to the main stair again.

  . . . A midnight plot from within the Steamlord’s well-guarded walls came near to success. Had not a sleepless houseguest surprised the would-be thief, the story would end here.

  She was about to crawl between the bluebell sheets when she remembered she had not retrieved TD from the study. She could not do so while her father was there. Trusting the little clockwork to conceal himself until her return, she flipped off the bedside lamp and drifted into an uneasy doze in which shadowy villains lurked in hidden stairways, alternately pouncing and fleeing. Sometimes the face was Herr Gehirn’s, sometimes M
r. Gnave’s, and once the smiling visage of Mr. Coggington appeared from the gloom, leering and waving the gilded gauge. Even in her dream she wondered, had it already been stolen?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE NEXT TIME Maddie opened her eyes, golden sunlight streamed in the windows. Dora was restoring a freshly pressed dinner dress to the armoire.

  “Good morning, miss,” she said cheerfully. “How’s your head? Miss Emmeline’s sick as an Irishman on a Sunday morning, and the missus is worse. Such doings in the night I never did see. An intruder, and we all slept through it. He might have murdered us in our beds.”

  “Was the—was anything stolen?”

  “Not as much as a teaspoon, if you can believe it. The family and guests all drugged and nothing taken. The master’s furious and there’s a detective prowling the house. We’ve already been questioned below-stairs, but we all share rooms and would notice if anyone crept out. The men secretaries had their turn too. That Mr. Badmin will want to see you quick as anything. I brought your breakfast up. Will you be wanting a bath first?

  Maddie hurried through her bathing and ate a quick breakfast of eggs and fruit still wrapped in her bathrobe, while Dora combed out and pinned up her hair. She donned her linen walking suit with the blue trim and took up her large blue hat. If she could get anywhere near the study unescorted, TD would hop into his nest and nobody need suspect he had spent the night there collecting images of intruders.

  At that moment she realized TD might already have images of the first intruder, and they might point at Father. Not he himself, since he had been in his bed when she entered, but Pennwiper could have entered the study on Lord Main-Bearing’s orders. Pennwiper: the only adult man in the house they had not seen sleeping. Father had said, “Now the women,” and Maddie had gone blindly along, completely forgetting that he, too, had a secretary in the house.