Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond by Jayne Barnard Page B

clerk at the booking office was firm: the only available space this week was a First Class parlour-stateroom (with balcony) on a White Sky liner leaving for Venice tomorrow morning. The money was available from unspent quarterly allowances, but it would cost Maddie more than she had earned during her entire Cairo stay. She shook her head.
    “What about the following week?”
    By then, the clerk informed her, the spaces were mostly booked for archaeological staff. Except, of course, for a First Class parlour stateroom . . .
    Maddie walked out, convinced the clerk was getting a fat commission on First Class parlour-staterooms (with balconies). How was she to get back to Europe without beggaring herself?
    A hawk’s cry overhead gave her a possible answer. She hurried back to Shepheard’s Hotel, ignored a wave from Clarice as she crossed the vast lobby, and took the stairs to her room. As the safragi came along, tapping at doors to warn of the imminence of luncheon, she summoned TD down from his perch on the armoire.
    “TD, listen to me. To Oberon O’Reilly via Tweetle-C. Obie, I’ve got to get out of Cairo. Can you get me a job on your airship by tomorrow? I don’t care what.” Heedless for once of anyone seeing—after all, she would be gone soon, one way or another—she sent the little bird out the window, up to the rooftop in a flash of brass wings, to await the first messenger-hawk that passed. She tidied her hair, tucked her pink sequined notebook into her handbag, and went down to lunch.
    When she came upstairs, with a few brief notes on end-of-season fashions that might make just one more Foreign Fashionista column, her steamer trunk stood in the middle of the room. She occupied the rest of the afternoon sorting her clothing, discarding those too light for spring in Europe and reluctantly parting with two of her five hats. The first chambermaid who came along would doubtless snatch her leavings but that was no matter when Maddie was determined to be in Venice within a week to start tracking down her imposter. With that chore out of the way, she sat in one of the hard, straight chairs and watched the sun-baked strip of blue sky above. TD had returned, his message transferred, but there was yet no sign of a hawk carrying a return message from Obie.
    The sky darkened. Those pedestrians below who had not already gone home for a nap fled to the nearest arched arcades. Maddie stuck her head out the window and looked up, just in time for a whirling dust devil to pepper her with upswept grit. She sputtered and pulled back as the first fat raindrops pelted down. The window banged on its hinges. A wet gust billowed the curtain and the bed’s mosquito netting. She grabbed the window and forced it closed. No hawks would fly in this. How could she go calmly down to dinner with her whole future in the air somewhere between the hotel and the aerodrome?
    She climbed into her only unpacked dinner dress, a simply-cut, pale green silk with matching cording around the neck and in two widening lines down her front. It was one she had worn as a debutante, thus two years out of date and readily identifiable as such by the miniscule puff in the cap sleeves. Downstairs she went, slowly, seeing for perhaps the last time the lobby lit for evening, with its gas wall sconces flaring and its brass floor lamps giving off their steady, steam-generated, electrical glow. The lights picked out every message-disc that crawled along the walls, and shone upon the monocles and oculii of the gentlemen as much as on the ladies’ jewels. Up in the highest windows, those barely more than vents for the day’s heat, small glimmers showed the window-automatons, already crawling along with their brushes scrubbing away any dust and streaks left by the storm. She hoped none had been hit by lightning; the ones that came off her father’s manor in storms died sparking and writhing, their bright metal blackened and warped by the powerful