Felix, sitting opposite her, leaned all the way forward to read the fine print. Did he need glasses? That was sweet. He reached out to straighten a corner of the paper, brushing her fingertips. She caught his eye around the side and he gave one of his little half smiles. She was trying to decide how to respond when his attention diverted back to reading and his face went ashen.
“What did you find, Lord Mersey?”
“It could be nothing.…” He flipped the paper and pointed out an announcement box. Sidheag came around the other side of Sophronia, and the three girls read the small section together.
“Well, ladies?” prodded Soap from the door.
Sophronia read out. “‘The mechanical manufacturers Messrs. Brine, Boottle, and Phipps very much regret the minor malfunction of servant units experienced by the residents of northern Wiltshire last night. Housekeepers are advised that a return of the steam tax for the time period in question will appear during the next accounting cycle. Please accept our profound apologies for any inconvenience.’”
“That’s what they call a bunch of mechanicals singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and then dying? A minor malfunction?” Dimity scoffed.
Sophronia said, “I wonder if the breakdown has spread to Oxford and that’s why none of the station ones were working. If it happened after last night’s incident, this paper would already have been in production. We’ll have to check the evening rags for another apology.”
“There’s a proper article here.” Dimity pointed below the announcement.
Felix sat back on the bench, crossing his arms over his chest, face sinking into its customary expression of manufactured boredom.
Sophronia read the article out as well, for Soap’s benefit. “‘Members of the gentry and other key families in several towns in North Wiltshire experienced an unexpected performance at midnight.’” She paraphrased, “He describes exactly what we saw with the dancing, although he doesn’t name the song. Apparently, everyone’s staff did exactly the same. Certain older models, or those not recently upgraded, were immune. The manufacturer won’t say for certain, but inside sources hint at sabotage.”
Sophronia passed the paper over to Dimity. “Mumsy did say she’d recently had Frowbritcher serviced. I wonder if that service included extra unexpected protocols?”
She looked hard at Felix. He seemed upset—why? They had all seen the malfunction at the ball; he could hardly have hoped they would forget. The only new information was that the malfunctions had extended over a much larger area than only Sophronia’s house. What did that matter? What else had they learned? The name of the manufacturing company. Perhaps that was what had shaken him.
Casually she said, “Does anyone know anything about Messrs. Brine, Boottle, and Phipps?”
No one said a word.
Sophronia contemplated the initials BBP. Had she seen them somewhere before? At that moment, all forgotten in the excitement of the morning’s events, Bumbersnoot tooted smoke at her.
“Oh, dear me yes, poor Bumbersnoot, you haven’t had any breakfast. Anyone have something he could burn? His boiler will die down soon otherwise.”
Soap produced a lump of coal. He seemed to like having them stashed about his person for Bumbersnoot.
Sophronia picked up her little mechanimal, petting him affectionately, even though she knew he couldn’t feel it. While the others talked quietly about the implications of a wider-ranging malfunction, Sophronia fed Bumbersnoot coal. At the same time she surreptitiously checked the underside of one of his ears. There, branded into the leather, was a string of letters Sophronia had always thought some kind of illegible maker’s mark. Now she suspected the letters were BBP. Bumbersnoot was a mechanimal that’d come to her by way of the flywaymen, but she was sure he’d originally been made by Picklemen. After all, they had been around when she’d first acquired Bumbersnoot. Picklemen, in her experience, were very fond of mechanimals. Considering Felix’s reaction, she thought it pretty darn likely that the company of Messrs. Brine, Boottle, and Phipps was a Pickleman front. But what did that signify for the “Rule, Britannia!” malfunction? Had the vampires triggered it to sabotage the company and discredit the product, sort of like a character assassination on an industrial scale? Sophronia thought that if so, the sabotage could have been carried out by this very train. It had, after all, been in a station close to her house, in North Wiltshire.
Was the aetherographic machine being used to transmit protocols to multiple mechanicals simultaneously, telling them to sing “Rule, Britannia!”? Why would the vampires reveal their hand to the Picklemen like that? Character assassinations were supposed to be subtle. Vieve had specified that crystalline valves only worked point-to-point. By rights, that meant that for every mechanical commanded to sing, there would need to be one crystalline valve inside the mechanical and a sister valve to do the sending on board the train. She counted on her hand. For her brother’s party alone, with twelve mechanicals, that meant twelve companion valves on the train. Yet she had seen only one in the freight car. Perhaps the other freight carriage was absolutely full of valves?
Sophronia’s mind buzzed. She said, “It’s possible that the very train we are on is responsible for all this madness.”
Sidheag waved the paper about. “How do you figure that?”
“It’s too conveniently in the right place at the right time. Plus, vampires are open in their mistrust of mechanicals. I think the operatic performance may have been some kind of test.”