Maddie Hatter and the Timely Taffeta Read online

  The Maddie Hatter Adventures:

  Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond

  Maddie Hatter and the Gilded Gauge

  Maddie Hatter and the Timely Taffeta

  Maddie Hatter and the

  TIMELY TAFFETA

  Penned By

  Jayne Barnard

  Maddie Hatter and the Timely Taffeta

  Published by Tyche Books Ltd.

  www.TycheBooks.com

  Copyright © 2017 Jayne Barnard

  First Tyche Books Ltd Edition 2017

  Print ISBN: 978-1-928025-76-4

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-928025-77-1

  Cover Art by Robin Robinson

  Interior Art by Robin Robinson

  Cover Layout by Lucia Starkey

  Interior Layout by Ryah Deines

  Editorial by Adria Laycraft

  Author photograph: Kevin Jepson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage & retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third party websites or their content.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead would be really cool, but is purely coincidental.

  This book was funded in part by a grant from the Alberta Media Fund.

  This book is dedicated to the colourful and erudite members of Calgary’s Steampunk Arts & Sciences Society, especially Sarafina Kain who first inspired the character of Lady Serephene way back in Deadly Diamond; and, always, to Kevin.

  Chapter One

  TREACHEROUS AS A fairy’s kiss, the gossamer silk slithered through Maddie Hatter’s fingers. As the soft folds fell against the gilded window-frame, she pooled the opalescent fabric in her palms and let it slide all over again. Nobody need know she’d stood at this dark window two early mornings already, encircled by the silk-chiffon, revelling in its delicacy upon her cheeks, her neck, her hands. Or that she’d gone around the room countless times to stroke the silk-brocade upholstery or straighten the silk-damask tablecloths, smooth a silk tassel against the silk-satin bed-hangings. This was Venice, Europe’s undisputed Queen of Silk, and although fashion reporting was a dead-end job that Maddie was determined to leave behind as soon as possible, she intended to enjoy every luxurious fabric the fabled floating city offered.

  First, though, she must undertake the final step to establishing her undercover persona. She shut out her darkling reflection by drawing a butter-yellow, silk-velvet drapery that oozed across her palm like thick cream. “Hop on,” she told her clockwork sparrow as she donned the black straw bonnet that matched her woollen cloak. When Tweetle-D had rustled his way among the midnight-purple blossoms, she threw a black lace veil—cotton, not silk—over her head and picked up her black kidskin gloves. In another minute, she was crossing the deserted lobby of the Hotel Gritti Palace toward the landward exit. The yawning night porter opened up for her.

  “Another sleepless night, signora?” He shook his head as she passed, doubtless wondering if the too-young widow’s broken heart would ever recover. Carnevale, he would surely decide, must cheer her if anything would.

  Maddie managed not to stiffen, but the assumption still made her uncomfortable. She’d been careful not to actually lie to the porter, or to anyone else, but merely let her shabby black clothing proclaim her supposed bereavement. Her Old Nobility mother would faint at the crassness of faking such a state, of playing on strangers’ sympathy. But a single woman could not pull off this role—not in Venice—and a married one, traveling alone, would be continually questioned about her mythical husband. Rather than invent a spouse and have to keep a false story straight, a widow she must appear, and rely on people’s reluctance to intrude on grief with blunt questions.

  She stepped outside, shivering as the chill wind off the lagoon chafed her cheeks. A flambeau fizzled its last by the hotel door, abandoning her and the campo to the darkness. Impossible to believe that, in one more week, this desolate square and many others would be brilliant with torches and fireworks, the narrow streets choked with dancers and revellers in dazzling costumes. Now the place was deserted.

  Not far off, a church bell tolled five times. She pulled her black cloak tighter and made her way toward the Grand Canal.

  Something skittered on the stones near her boots. She raised her veil for a closer look: a water rat, its body as long as her foot. She stepped back to let it go on its way. Venetian rats, she had been politely told by the hotel’s day concierge, might attack if annoyed. This one circled her boots and went on about its business. TD chirped a wordless question.

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “But be quick.”

  The hat-brim shifted as the clockwork sparrow hopped to the side. A faint whirr sounded as his new dragon-eye camera, mounted on his breast like a war medal, focused on the departing rat. Click, shift, whirr, repeat, until a dozen images were recorded. That was all Madame Taxus-Hemlock had been able to coax from the combination of Russian automaton technology and TD’s power cells. With each shot he’d be adjusting the night-sight filters. When the images were dot-dashed onto pages, he would learn what settings got which results at this level of darkness, and store that knowledge for future use.

  A slipper moon sprang free from scudding clouds. The water shimmered silver before her approaching gondola. Adjusting her veil to hide TD once more, Maddie stepped into the craft as soon as it touched land. It moved on immediately.

  Behind her, the gondolier swayed on the metal tripod that replaced his missing legs. His powerful shoulders leaned on his long oar, propelling them along the canal. After three days of his services, she still didn’t feel it suitable to ask outright why he had not replaced the limbs with automaton legs. Lady Serephene had explicitly selected Fantoccio to help her, and Serephene should know, for her mother’s family was one of Venice’s most venerable. Fanto had met Maddie’s airship and taken her to her hotel, toured her around the city in daytime twice, and she felt safe enough with him on this pre-dawn excursion. But not comfortable enough to ask about his legs.

  They followed the sweep of the Grand Canal silently past deserted landing stages and gondolas rocking between their mooring poles. Then the boat veered toward a black gap between two buildings. When the carved prow vanished into darkness the gondolier backed the oar, holding the boat’s latter half in the silvery moonlight.

  “Are you sure of this, signorina? If you are found out, it will be a grave offense to a powerful family. You could be arrested.”

  Maddie stared into the narrow side canal, willing her eyes to pierce the shadows. All Venice dreamed except for herself and Fanto, his broad torso locked onto its stand, his thick arms holding the gondola effortlessly on the stark line between moonlight and midnight. The shimmer off the Grand Canal faded back to impenetrable darkness. Did she really want to enter? She could return at once to her hotel and worry in daylight about how to get access to the best fabrics, the most marvellous Carnevale costumes. Except she had promised Serephene, and Maddie Hatter always kept a promise.

  “I’m sure,” she said, gripping the worn, walnut gunwales with her black-gloved hands. The blackness closed over her.

  Away from the moonlight, her eyes adjusted quickly, spying out a steam-launch’s hull against the left wall, and a rowboat on the right,
with a passage between them barely wider than her gondola. On one side was damp stone rising to a walkway, on the other ancient bricks four floors high. Further along were more boat-shaped shadows that shifted as the gondola’s wavelets reached them, murmuring of water, rope, and oarlocks.

  Her nose recoiled from the dank scents of sea wrack and household wastes. The tide had not yet swept away floating debris. No wonder all the lightless windows were shut and shuttered. Who would want that stench seeping into their house? Serephene would say the miasma reflected the corruption of the old Venetian noble families, including her grandmother’s, and the tide that washed the filth away was the artisan-and-artificer class to which her father’s family belonged. There was no question which ancestry Serephene honoured more.

  Fanto eased the black gondola between the moored boats as Maddie strained to see further along the narrow canal. From their preliminary survey, in daylight, there would soon be an arched bridge and, before it, the correct water-gate. Not long now.

  From the darkness ahead came a motor-boat’s engine, the sound rebounding between the high walls. No lights showed. They had none either. It would crash straight into them. The noise would be tremendous. Shutters would be flung open. Heads would peer down. Carabinieri would be summoned. All secrecy would be shattered. Behind her Fanto churned the water, backing as fast as he dared. Beyond him the silvery expanse of the Grand Canal seemed unreachable.

  One boat-length and another they retreated. Still the engine came on, its bow wave jostling the moored boats. The blacker shadow eased from beneath the bridge. Surely its driver could see Fanto up on his pillar, stark in the shimmer of moonlight? But it kept coming, its motor a rhythmic throb between the walls.

  Maddie braced for the impact.

  The engine stopped. Its last echoes rumbled past. The final burbles of its propellers broke the surface. Dying ripples bumped her gondola against another boat, making a faint scrape of wood on wood.

  A deep voice growled through the darkness. “Chi é lá?”

  Fearing discovery, Maddie slithered into the foot-well before her as Fanto swung the stern sideways, putting himself into shadow. With luck, the other boat’s driver would see only a gondola loosened from its bow mooring. Would he come to check? She held her breath, listening hard, but no further challenge came.

  A grating noise began. Barely visible, a section of the left-hand walkway angled slowly upward. Light burst from an archway behind it. Across the black water, golden ripples bounced off the wavelets. They danced up the wall of the opposite palazzo, exposing each aged bar of its water-gate, lighting up every flake of the ancient, creamy plaster on the walls, at exactly the place Maddie should have been floating by now.

  When the deep voice spoke again, it was muffled, calling to someone inside the archway. The motorboat floated into the light. As the walkway lowered with a groan of corroded gears, a conversation began between the men, not the mellifluous Italian Maddie expected but some language full of harsher sounds. How long would they stay? She would be caught by the dawn soon, all her careful plans destroyed. With one black-gloved hand, she signalled Fanto onward.

  They floated, silent as San Michele’s graves, along the narrow strip of water between the moored boats. The golden light vanished. In the sudden darkness, the voices moved away on a grumble of guttural consonants. The walkway settled with a last, painful groan. The gondola stopped with a tiny scraping sound, opposite the now-invisible archway.

  Overhead a shutter creaked. Something slithered down the wall to hit the gunwale beside Maddie’s hand. Stifling a start, she grabbed a thin, rough rope and shook it, two quick wobbles that would travel up the line. Two came twisting back. Bits of plaster dropped in a pattering rain over the boat, Maddie’s veil, and the inky water around her. She held on grimly while the rope squirmed and shook like a living thing in her gloved hands.

  At last a high, black boot stepped into the gondola. A body settled to the seat beside Maddie. The gondola ghosted forward immediately, without any command being given. It passed under the arched bridge and onward, farther from the Grand Canal with every twitch of Fanto’s pole. After three minutes’ distance and a couple of sharp corners, Maddie’s new companion spoke, satisfaction oozing from every syllable.

  “No problem, see?” said Lady Serephene. “Help me hide my hair before we run into anybody.”

  Chapter Two

  DAWN WAS CHASING the moon from the sky as they crossed the Grand Canal. The wider waterway was busy with vaporetti and traghetti ferrying workers to their jobs. Maddie noted with surprise that, after only three days in Venice, she was automatically using the plural -i at the end of words: more than one vaporetto (like a bus, but on water), or traghetto (like a gondola, but people stood up so more could fit in each one) were pronounced vaporetti and traghetti. Calle/street (or alley, making it easy to remember) turned to calli, and campo, or public square, became campi (although she couldn’t foresee a time she’d need to ask about multiple squares). She was becoming acclimated, which could only help with her Venetian assignment.

  Above the rooftops the first kite-baskets appeared, filled with workers from Sant’Erasmo and the other islands. They swooped toward Venice, their metal pulleys singing along the transit cables. Poling hard, Fanto pulled the gondola through the cross-traffic into Rio di Noale, which would lead them at last to the atelier run by Madame Frangetti, where they were to spend the morning.

  Lady Serephene, visible now in a plain, dark blue shirtwaist, hid the last of her lustrous black-and-teal hair under a simple, navy kerchief. She clutched Maddie’s hand in a fierce grip. “Almost there! Aren’t you too excited for words?”

  “Hardly.” Maddie smiled, though, and didn’t pull her hand away. Today marked more than an exciting fashion assignment for her; it was the true start of Serephene’s fashion-designer dream. Her Steamlord father had not found out. He in London and her maternal grandmother here, both believed she was in Venice to seek a husband during Carnevale. If they only knew. And if they knew Maddie was helping her with the deception, in exchange for insider access to a fashion house filled with fabulous costumes for noble visitors . . . well, a formal complaint to the Kettle Conglomerate newspapers would be the first, and least, consequence she could expect. When Fanto had said, “You could be arrested,” she’d suddenly realized she was, in fact, helping a girl escape from her home. When she’d fled her family rather than marry, she’d done it unaided, getting nobody else into trouble.

  “Um, Serephene? Is there some Venetian law I don’t know about, that could get me arrested for helping you?”

  Serephene’s fingers, in the act of patting a dull matte foundation over her lovely bow of a mouth, paused. “You’re interfering with the family’s plans for a beneficial marriage, so I suppose my Nonna could sue you for whatever profit she thinks the family has lost. But that can’t happen until there’s a serious Venetian suitor being thwarted, and I’ll take care there is not one.”

  “Then why could I be arrested? Fanto?”

  The gondolier’s tan cheeks turned pinkish, mirroring the blush of dawn in the sky overhead. He shrugged, opened his mouth, and shrugged again.

  Dabbing more dullness onto her lips, Serephene said, “Pretending to be my cousin. You could be taken up as an imposter if Nonna found out. But she won’t.”

  Maddie sat back. She’d been thinking of this charade as simple undercover reporting, combining fashion column material with helping her friend against unreasonable parental restrictions. But she was in truth pretending to be someone she was not: a relation to a noble Venetian family. In the law’s eyes, she’d be no better than her old nemesis, Lady Sarah Peacock, who had tricked Baron Bodmin and his nephew, both under names that weren’t her own. Lady Sarah was still wanted in England, and possibly in America too. Would Maddie beat her to the Wanted posters in Venice? Well, she was in it up to her chin now. She rubbed her chilled face with her gloved hands.

  “Let’s not get caught, then. But do you have to
start at six in the morning?”

  “Of course.” Serephene checked her hair and face before tucking away her little mirror. “I must put in my apprenticeship hours before I’m expected to be out of bed. Thankfully Nonna believes girls need their morning beauty sleep.”

  “The better to catch a husband in the evenings?”

  Serephene’s lip curled. “Stop reminding me. It’s bad enough at home. Tomorrow night is the Russian Consulate’s dinner, although why we must attend when Papa would never let me marry a Russian, I don’t understand. Will you come along to help deflect the suitors?”

  “I don’t even know where the Russian Consulate is.”

  “Just along the Grand Canal from Nonna’s. You could walk to it, if there was a sidewalk.”

  That explained the Russian voices in the motorboat. “I can’t go. If they suspected who my father is, I’d be too valuable as a hostage.” She would not force Lord Main-Bearing to trade British Admiralty secrets for his only daughter’s safety.

  The gondola swept up to a stone pier, and Maddie realized then that Fanto had not spoken a word since Serephene landed in the boat. He clearly made a distinction between the noble granddaughter of a Venetian family and her supposedly working-class friend.

  “Thank you, Fantoccio,” Serephene said, “for your early start, and your discretion. Be back here at eleven.”

  “Assi, signorina.”

  The girls clambered stiffly up the three steps to the quay, passing workers crowding toward the few available gondolas. More workers funnelled down a spiralling metal-strut stair from the rooftop kite-basket stop. Not all came to the pier. Seamstresses, lace-makers, and a few burly men with the stained hands of dyers turned toward the fashion palaces of the Cannaregio. Overhead, the basket-cable veered and went on, propelled by the kite-sails on each basket, delivering workers from the far islands to their jobs in the centre of Venice. In the evening during the onshore breeze it would run in the opposite direction, taking them home.