Magnificent Devices [5] A Lady of Resources (5 page)

“Lizzie—no, you mustn’t,” the Lady said, laughter trembling on her lips. “You cannot wear the antigravity corset to your graduation ceremony—it simply won’t do.”

Lizzie smoothed her hands over the new corset, which she’d finished mere hours before having to demonstrate it for her physics final. The twins’ white fifth-form graduation robes hung upon the wardrobe door, waiting to go on over their school uniforms. Unlike the Lady’s more glamorous graduation, no empress was likely to brighten the auditorium at the
lycee
, nor was there to be a ball. But that did not lessen their jubilation any—the Dunsmuirs were putting on a fete in honor of all three of the graduates … and who would want to stand about in the school gymnasium with a lot of awkward boys from the Lycee des Jeunes Hommes when the Dunsmuirs were throwing a party?

“Why not? I’m rather proud of it,” she said, and just for fun, threw herself to the floor.

Her hair swung over her shoulders and brushed the carpet, but her body itself did not touch it. Instead, she bounced back up again, and flung a hand out to catch herself against the dresser. The corset wanted to keep on bouncing, but she’d got the hang of it in the few days since she’d made it, and had learned to control at least some of the movement.

“Lizzie!” The Lady laughed out loud, unable to keep it in any longer. “If you trip over your skirt and take a tumble on the way up to the stage, I can’t answer for the consequences. There will be no walls or chests of drawers to stop you, and then what will you do? Spend the afternoon dusting the ceiling with your petticoat?”

She had a point.

“Oh, very well.” Lizzie unhooked the corset—in deep green brocade, and trimmed with lace—and tossed it on the bed, where it found only a little resistance. After a couple of tiny bounces, it settled on the soft duvet with a sigh. “But I am proud of it, Lady. No one in my physics class had anything like it. Everybody’s gravity experiments seemed to involve miniature airships or flying machines. Mine was the only wearable thing—and once I’d figured out how to melt it down and make the bones, the fact that I’d actually made something relatively useful out of repenthium pushed my grade up by one.”

Which was the only reason she’d managed to pass the class, but the Lady was too sensitive to the feelings of others to bring that up.

“Come along, Liz,” Maggie said impatiently, having been dressed for half an hour. “Get your togs on—we’ve got a graduation to go to.”

Lizzie could barely contain herself in her seat in the auditorium as the headmistress called one name after another. What a lucky thing they’d chosen a surname that began so close to the beginning of the alphabet!

“Elizabeth de Maupassant, eighteenth in her class, with firsts in German, French, and mathematics.”

There, now, that wasn’t such a bad show, was it, for a girl who had begun life as a street sparrow? The Lady beamed with pride as, up on the stage, Lizzie bobbed a curtsey to the headmistress and took the rolled-up diploma. She and Maggie had given the Lady a rough go of it sometimes, but to see the tears of happiness in her eyes now, you’d never know it.

“Margaret de Maupassant, twelfth in her class, with firsts in Home Management, English, and chemistry.”

Lizzie clapped as Maggie followed her onto the stage, waiting for her so that they descended the steps together, holding hands that were slightly clammy from nerves. When they returned to their seats, they could see the Lady sitting next to Davina Dunsmuir and Willie in the audience, clapping madly.

“I’m so proud of you,” she mouthed to them. “Well done!”

Maggie slid her program out from under her skirt and looked at what was coming next. Awards and a prayer and then they’d be
free!
Lizzie unrolled her diploma and gazed at it with a sense of satisfaction she’d never experienced before. It wasn’t much different than getting a report card, really, so why did she have this quiet glow that went deeper than merely the happy fact of passing into another form?

“We done it, ent we, Liz?” Maggie whispered in the vernacular of their childhood. “All our own selves, we proved we could. Imagine us with firsts in anything!”

And maybe that was the key. Yes, between Lady Claire and Count von Zeppelin, they’d had opportunities that even Snouts and Tigg had not had. But they had taken those opportunities and applied all the brain power they possessed to catch up on five years of schooling that all the other students had undergone and they had not. Summer school. Tutors. Extra classes. It had been a grind at times, but they’d stuck to it, determined not to let the Lady down.

And now, she held the result of all her past efforts in her own hand.

Even as she held the future.

She came out of her reverie as Maggie straightened beside her. “What do you suppose our chances are of getting an award?” she whispered.

“Yours are better than mine,” Lizzie whispered back. “I’m eighteenth, remember?” Out of a class of forty, that wasn’t too shabby, in her opinion. But it didn’t exactly put her in the running for awards.

Predictably, Sophie Bug Eyes carried off the sports trophy, but she was beaten out by Katrina Grunewald for the all-around academic award. Katrina was the most studious girl in all the school, so this was no surprise to anyone. Then, to Maggie’s astonishment, she was called up to receive a ten-guinea bursary from one of the Prussian lace-makers’ guilds, for her success in Home Management. “Fancy that,” she breathed, opening the little lace purse to examine the gold coins as if she’d never seen a guinea before.

“You’ve earned every one,” Lizzie whispered proudly.

The headmistress leaned into the amplification horn. “Our last award has been funded only very recently, and is awarded to the student who has overcome great barriers in the pursuit of her education, and has come further than any student in her five years at this institution through application and sheer determination.”

“Katrina,” Lizzie whispered to Maggie. “She’s an orphan, remember, and has to work for her tuition every summer.”

“The award is a very generous—a
very
generous—five hundred guineas, provided by a captain of industry known throughout the Empire, Mr. Charles Seacombe.”

Lizzie hardly registered the man’s name, so bowled over was she by the magnitude of the bursary. Five hundred guineas! That would buy a house. Or fund two years of finishing school with money left over for clothes, books, and skiing trips to Chamonix at Christmas. Goodness! But what was she even thinking about it for? It was Katrina’s name the headmistress was opening her mouth to call.

“I am very proud to announce that this bursary is awarded to Elizabeth de Maupassant.”

For a moment, all Lizzie could think was,
oh, poor Katrina, it’s gone to someone else.

Then Maggie’s elbow landed hard in her ribs. “Go on! That’s you!”

“What?”

“It’s you,
stupenagel!
Go on!”

She? She had won it? But that was impossible.

Maggie took her arm and hauled her up out of her seat, and gave her a push in the small of her back out into the aisle for good measure.

Lizzie never remembered getting to the stage. The only thing she could recall later were the gold embroidered lions on the waistcoat of the man handing her the bank draft for five hundred guineas. The man who had seemed to stare at her at the ball two weeks ago, and whom she had forgotten completely since.

“Congratulations, my dear,” he said as she took the envelope with fingers that felt numb. “You have worked hard and deserve such recognition. Your mother would be proud.”

He must have her mixed up with someone else. She didn’t have a mother—never had—unless he meant the Lady.

“I don’t think—” she began, but then the applause swelled and the gentleman stepped back and there she was in the center of the stage, a bank of flowers massed at her feet, accepting an award she didn’t deserve from a man she didn’t know.

*

After that, of course, the only polite thing for Lady Dunsmuir to do was to invite Mr. Seacombe to the graduation party aboard
Lady Lucy
.

“Which, of course, is a fine way to insinuate himself among people moving at our level of society,” his lordship said rather grumpily at the small dinner
en famille
that preceded the festivities.

“On what do you base your opinion, John?” the Lady inquired. “I must say, his singling Lizzie out for such an honor goes a long way to putting him in
my
good books.”

“But you tend to expect the best in people, and as a result you most often find it. I cannot say why I do not like him.” The earl frowned down at his
pflaumekuchen
, a country dessert of which he was particularly fond. “His business dealings are on the up and up, but there always seems to be a whiff of the predatory about them. He moves in good circles, but he is not completely accepted by the best. In short, I can find nothing to criticize about the man … but nothing for which I can like him, either.”

“I find five hundred reasons to like him,” Lizzie said, daring to speak up. “I won’t judge the man unless I discover that his bank draft is no good.”

At last the earl smiled. “Quite right, Lizzie. And anyway, after this evening, it is unlikely you will see him again, isn’t it?”

“True. I still think he got the wrong girl,” she said.

“Why should you think that?” Her ladyship’s eyes sparkled with pride. “You deserve this award—everything the headmistress said of you was true.”

“Maybe, but he said the oddest thing to me on stage. He said my mother would be proud.”

“Perhaps he meant the Lady,” Maggie said, having already heard Lizzie’s thoughts on the subject and agreeing with them.

“I hope not,” the Lady said, and laughed. “We are only seven years apart in age—biology would preclude such a supposition, if nothing else.”

“Perhaps he was speaking in generalities,” Lady Dunsmuir said in a comforting tone. “One can generally suppose that a young lady has a mother, cannot one? And that she might be proud of such accomplishments in her daughter?”

“It seems to me he would say,
your parents would be proud
, then.” Lizzie did not want to argue with Davina, whom she adored almost as much as the Lady, but at the same time, her logical mind had been offended by the comment.

But then, it was offended by many things. The need to wear a corset, for one, and the fact that a Blood Prime Minister had been voted into Parliament, and that the Black Forest was called black when trees were quite obviously green. The remarks of a stranger should not demand so much of her attention, when so many other odd things abounded in the world.

And then the first of their guests were announced, and they hastily abandoned the table and went into the grand salon, which had been cleared for dancing. By the time they returned to the small dining room, it would have been cleared and reset with refreshments for the dancers, along with a selection of the cakes and
petits fours
that Lizzie had seen being unloaded from the baker’s steam-dray earlier.

For the first time, she and Maggie were to be part of the receiving line. The Lady had coached them in what to do. “Simply listen for their names as they’re announced by the Chief Steward, greet them, and curtsey to everyone.”

“Are you going to curtsey to everyone?” Lizzie had wanted to know. Wouldn’t it be easier to curtsey when the Lady did? Otherwise her legs were going to feel as they did after a gymnastics class, worn out with all the bending.

“I shall if the person outranks me,” the Lady said.

“But everyone outranks us,” Maggie reminded her sister.

Lady Dunsmuir would have to do the least curtseying of all, unless the empress turned up, or one of the royal dukes. And none of them had been invited.

Ah well. She and Maggie knew better than anyone that the world was not fair. It was only on occasions like this that you felt a little extra grateful that it had gone your way at all.

The receiving line seemed to last ages, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour. By the time the guests seemed to have all arrived, Lizzie’s and Maggie’s curtseys had been reduced to mere bobs, and titles and faces had begun to blur. Even Mr. Seacombe hardly registered, though he shook her hand heartily and said nice things that went in one ear and out the other.

And then at last they were free. The orchestra struck up a lively waltz and the earl led Lady Claire out onto the floor. To Lizzie’s surprise, Mr. Yau bowed before her and took her hand, and Captain Hollys partnered Maggie as if they were proper young debutantes already.

Oh, what a good thing she had not come as close to failing dance class as she had physics! With only three couples on the floor, every misstep would be seen by the entire company. But Mr. Yau did not allow a misstep—and besides, she’d had enough practice at dodging and running that dancing was easy in comparison. In fact, it was, as the Lady had explained to her in her first year, a little like geometry patterns, one after the other, around and around the room. You just had to memorize the order they came in, and Bob’s your uncle.

When the opening waltz ended, the earl made a little speech of congratulations to the new graduates, and the orchestra struck up again. The guests flooded onto the floor, and Lizzie found herself being handed off to the earl, and then Captain Hollys claimed the Lady, and he must have forgotten she was to be next after that, because Tigg appeared for the schottische and bowed like a proper gentleman before taking her hand.

“I’m supposed to be dancing with the captain,” she said, and then wished she could unsay it. Tigg would think she didn’t want to dance with him.

“The captain’s distracted.” Tigg grinned and whirled her around when the steps of the schottische didn’t strictly call for it. “I waited for my moment, you see.”

“He proposed the other night, you know,” Lizzie confided as they skipped shoulder to shoulder down the length of the room. “She hasn’t answered yet. I hope he doesn’t press her.”

“The Lady is always being proposed to. I shouldn’t worry about it. If anyone can handle herself, it’s she.”

“What about you, Tigg?”