Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger Page A

apparently, but Felix has always been there. I told him to wait in the gazebo. I knew he’d remember it from before.”
    The gazebo had been the location of all the fuss with the prototype and Monique the first time Dimity and Pillover had attended a party at the Temminnicks’. It burned down as a result, but Sophronia’s mother had had it rebuilt bigger and better. Sophronia had used the reconstruction to hide her stolen airdinghy. The small aircraft seemed a part of the roof structure, hidden in plain sight like a basket figurehead on top.
    Sophronia looked around at the excited young ladies. “We’ll never escape unseen. Too many people at too close quarters.”
    Dimity nodded. “I think he mainly needs to talk to you. I’ll create a distraction. If the message was meant for both of us,he’d have told me himself while you were flirting with Felix. It’ll be easier for you to get around with all the borrowed mechanicals. In that outfit you might be taken as staff, so long as you avoid family.”
    Sophronia reached below the settee, grabbed Bumbersnoot, and shoved him under the throw rug in one corner of the room with an encouraging “Go ahead.”
    Bumbersnoot began to explore, a moving lump under the carpet.
    “There’s your distraction. You can keep him safe?”
    Dimity smiled. “In this crowd? Of course. Most of them will faint, and the others are silly.”
    It was a fair assessment. “Yet you still want to be one of them?”
    “It’s not the deceit I object to, Sophronia dear, it’s the danger.”
    With which Dimity made her way to the settee. For a short moment she stared fixedly at the rug where the Bumbersnoot lump moved. Then she threw her head back and shrieked at the top of her lungs. “Rat! Eeeeeek!” With which she hopped up onto the settee, upending the mound of discarded clothing onto the floor and on top of poor Bumbersnoot once more. “Eeek! There it goes, get it! Eeeeeee!”
    Without even seeing the alleged rat themselves, the girls in that corner of the room all fainted. Those near to a couch or chair got up on top of it, screaming themselves. This proved challenging on the cushier furniture and with longer skirts. One or two fell over; a few pushed others off in order to gain the high ground. This caused more shrieks. Still others cried out insympathy, for the sake of exacerbating the hysteria. The chaos was instant and intense. With all attention on Dimity, Sophronia slid out into the hallway, closing the door behind her.
    After a year and a half of ghosting about a finishing school for intelligencers, a place riddled with tracks and malevolent mechanicals of all kinds, she found her own house easy by comparison. Most of the human staff were already downstairs attending to early guests and dressed gentlemen. A few mechanicals trundled along, under orders, none of them equipped with proximity alarms or remotely interested in Sophronia. She belonged here; why should it matter that she was out and about?
    Her parents and sundry older siblings were already at the ball. Petunia was upstairs screaming at Bumbersnoot, so there was only the twins to worry about. They must be off causing mischief for her mother, as Sophronia made it through the house and out into the garden without attracting attention. Or perhaps she had learned more than she thought at Mademoiselle Geraldine’s.
    “I have a message from Lady Kingair,” said Pillover, without the courtesy of a greeting. He was slouching on a rail of the gazebo, plucking dolefully at a camellia bush.
    Sophronia respected brevity. “I was hoping someone might.”
    “I’m the best and most trustworthy option of a bad lot, I suppose.”
    Sophronia held out her hand.
    Pillover shook his head. “Naw, it came via Vieve, verbal only. Too dangerous to keep written, scamp said.”
    Sophronia flipped up her hand, looking about to makeabsolutely certain they were enjoying complete privacy. A few stable hands walked toward the front of the house from