Waistcoats & Weaponry

The man approached at speed. He had silver hair and a very authoritative demeanor.

Sophronia knew him.

She finished tying up Felix’s leg. “My dear Felix”—she risked the intimacy of his given name as she whispered—“please don’t tell him too much. I fear this plot is bigger than any of us suppose, and our safety is in your hands. Do, please, be careful, for my sake?”

Then she calmly straightened to face the Duke of Golborne.

“What a surprise. Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

If Felix’s father recognized Sophronia from their two previous encounters, he was very good at hiding it. Of course, the first time had been during a fight, at night, in a gazebo, and she had been wearing a ball gown. The second time she’d been dressed as a dandy drone at a carnival. This time, she looked like a scamp, with her cap pulled down and her body language that of a schoolboy, rather than a fop.

Besides which, the duke was understandably distracted by his son’s being shot. Fathers were like that, even Pickleman fathers.

He strode forward and struck Shaggy hard across the face with his cane. Without waiting to see the flywayman’s reaction, he bent over Felix. He did not kneel at his son’s side. Dukes do not kneel on train tracks for anyone.

“Boy, are you alive?”

Felix blinked at him in genuine surprise. Perhaps it was true and he had never fully believed in the intimacy between his father’s secret society and the criminal element. Here, however, the duke had come popping out of a flywayman craft. He was either their hostage or their accomplice. And he had not wanted his son to know, or he would have been the one to contact them.

Felix seemed startled enough to forget that he had been shot, or perhaps to think it slightly less important and put on a brave face.

“Father? What are you doing here?” he asked, tremulously.

“Oh, no, no. What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in school.”

“Technically,” answered Felix, “I’m supposed to be at a ball. Remember, I wrote you of the invitation?”

“Ah, yes, some two-bit country gentry. Odd acquaintance to cultivate, but you thought the father’s business interests valuable to the cause.”

Sophronia blinked, tempted to doubt all Felix’s attentions. Had he been courting her all along because of something Papa was up to in civil service? Then she realized—hoped, really—that Felix must have said this to get permission to attend the masquerade.

“Yes, but things change, as they do. It became necessary to borrow a train and head north.”

“Oh, it did, did it?” The duke did not look convinced. “And you interfered with our business why, exactly?”

“I didn’t know, Father. We took this train off a handful of drones.”

Sophronia risked a small squeeze of warning in the guise of checking his bandages: Please don’t tell the duke too much!

Felix ignored her and went on, “And they happened to be at a station near the ball, and headed in the right direction. So we took their train and bumped them off.”

The duke nodded. “And what happened at that ball?”

Felix frowned at this sudden change of topic. “Well, the two-bit country gentleman, I don’t think he’ll be all that useful.”

“No, I mean to say, boy, did anything unusual occur?”

“You mean the mechanical failure in all the papers?”

“Ah, so you read about it. Did you see it in action?”

Felix came over suddenly quite still and suspicious. “Father, what are you up to? What’s going on? Did you…? Was it…?” He trailed off.

But Sophronia put all the pieces together at that moment. The Picklemen had chosen her brother’s party on purpose because they knew Felix would be there. They knew he would give them a full report if asked. Perhaps they hadn’t known how wide-reaching the effect would be, or that the papers would pick it up. Or perhaps they had run that test again in the Oxford area, to see what would happen. But Felix’s father, these flywaymen, they were responsible for all of it. And the drones, Monique and the train, they had been tracking them: gathering data, staying out of the way. Sophronia and her band had come in and messed everything up.

The train hadn’t fortuitously been at Wootton Bassett, and the mechanicals hadn’t spontaneously chosen the Temminnicks for “Rule, Britannia!” As Lady Linette always said, there were no coincidences, certainly not with Picklemen, simply an endless stream of increased probability.

Because she wanted confirmation, and because she hoped Duke Golborne thought her one of Felix’s Piston cronies and thus safe, Sophronia asked, “You caused that entertaining malfunction, didn’t you, my lord?”

The duke focused his attention on her. And because he, too, had training, he didn’t give her the outright answer she wanted. He wasn’t loose lipped enough, or he didn’t have that kind of hubris. “Who are you? You’re not one of my boy’s regular associates. You do look awfully familiar, though.”

Sophronia said, “I have that kind of face.”

The duke’s eyes turned to Sidheag and the prostrate Dimity. Bumbersnoot had righted himself and was nosing her in the side in a worried manner. “None of your usual companions, boy,” he said suspiciously. “Are they even Pistons? You know I don’t like you fraternizing with the hoi polloi of the aristocracy.” He seemed genuinely angry about it; did he go so far as to control Felix’s friendships? How awful for Felix, thought Sophronia, briefly distracted from concerns over her immediate welfare.