Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger

he’s turned up. We can decide who to tell what before breakfast.”
    Dimity blanched. “By which time Sidheag will have been out with
him
all night.”
    Agatha added, looking down the table at Preshea, “And if anyone but us finds out, her reputation really will be in tatters.”
    “Can’t be helped. At least we know Sidheag can handle a werewolf no matter his mood or form.”
    Dimity put down the roll she was buttering. “Good thing we have Mademoiselle Geraldine after cards tonight.”
    The other two nodded.
    The headmistress was part of their training at the academy. She was kept in complete ignorance as to the clandestine nature of the lessons, so when they had a class with her it was
real
finishing. Mademoiselle Geraldine instructed them on manners, social niceties, tables of precedence, tea sipping, and the like. Any espionage techniques were assigned to them before they met with the headmistress, usually by Lady Linette. Luckily, tonight they already had instructions, so all Sophronia, Dimity, and Agatha had to do was avoid answering any uncomfortable questions as to their friend’s whereabouts during the course of the meal.
    They managed all the way through to the sweets course, orange pudding with Naples biscuits and sherry. Then, by dint of running a boisterous and absorbing game of speculation after the pudding, they avoided any kind of private conference during cards.
    They dawdled as much as possible while the mechanicals cleaned up, so that they had to glide with extreme rapidity on to Mademoiselle Geraldine’s class, on the far side of the airship. They utilized some of the lesser-known passageways, disturbing more than one servant mechanical. If she had known what was really going on, Lady Linette might indeed feel that she had trained her students too well. Or she might be proud. In any event, she couldn’t be too worried about Sidheag or they never would have gotten away with it.
    Safely ensconced with Mademoiselle Geraldine, who was instructing them in how to flirt at a hunting party, tweed jodhpurs notwithstanding, they made it through to bedtime unencumbered.
    By the time Lady Linette came around to check that lights were out at two in the morning, they were all three solidly asleep.
    Sidheag’s bed was empty.
    After Lady Linette closed the door to their parlor, Sophronia was out of bed with a glass to the jamb so quickly she managed to catch Lady Linette saying to Sister Mattie in the hall, “Unfortunately, Sister, I believe we have one missing—Lady Kingair. It’s going to be messy if we’ve misplaced an aristocrat. Even if she is Scottish.”
    Sister Mattie, who had been checking on the debuts, said something sympathetic in a low tone. They moved down the hallway, out of eavesdropping range.
    Sophronia’s nightgown was so voluminous she could pull it on over her preferred after-hours attire—a pair of her brother’s old breeches, with a corset under a gentleman’s shirt and a waistcoat over the top. Sophronia didn’t like to dress as a boy, not the way her friend Vieve did, but it was awfully practical for climbing. She scooped up Bumbersnoot, dressed in his frilly reticule disguise, and slung him over one shoulder. Bumbersnoot usually came with her to engineering. He liked to eat fallen bits of coal, and Sophronia thought it only right he go down to the boiler room and visit the mechanical gods. As Dimity had once said, “I wonder if engineering, for Bumbersnoot, is like church. Or am I being apocryphal?”
    Sophronia was on her own. Dimity, after a few ill-fated jaunts, had elected to leave that dirty, smelly, greasy place to Sophronia and Sidheag. It was too rough for a
real
lady, she claimed. Dimity wanted to be a lady rather more than she wanted to be an intelligencer. She liked the idea of practicing charitable works on the sooties, but gave that up in favor of filching nibbles at tea and sending them down with Sophronia to the unfortunates, as she called them, with her