Up close to the high windows, it was like peeping into a jewel box: cream paneled walls with gold-leaf flowers and swags, and enough mirrors and crystal chandeliers to make your eyes sting. A handful of richly dressed ladies and gentlemen loitered about. A plump woman in a gray bun—a servant—stood against a wall. A frail young lady in owlish spectacles crashed away at the piano.
“There’s Eggy,” Prue said. “Maybe that’s the sister she mentioned.” A third young lady in a lavish green tent of a gown sat next to Eglantine.
“Same dark hair,” Ophelia said.
“Same mean little eyes.”
“A good deal taller, however, and somewhat . . . wider.”
“Spit it out. She looks like a prizefighter in a wig.”
“Prue! That might be your own sister you’re going on about.”
“Stepsister. Look—they’re having words, I reckon. Eggy don’t seem too pleased.”
The young ladies’ heads were bent close together, and they appeared to be bickering. The larger lady in green had her eyes stuck on something across the room.
Ah. A gentleman. Fair-haired, flushed, and strapping, crammed into a white evening jacket with medals and ribbons, and epaulets on the shoulders. He conversed with a burly fellow in black evening clothes who had a lion’s mane of dark gold hair flowing to his shoulders.
“Ladies quarreling about a fellow,” Ophelia said. “How very tiresome.”
“Some fellers are worth talking of.”
“If you’re hinting that I care to discuss any gentleman, least of all Professor Penrose, then—well, I do not, I sincerely do not feel a whit of sentiment for that man.”
“Oh, sure,” Prue said.
Ophelia longed for things, certainly. But not for him. She longed for a home. She longed, with that gritted-molars sort of longing, to be snug in a third-class berth in the guts of a steamship barging towards America. She’d throw over acting, head up north to New Hampshire or Vermont, get work on a farmstead. Merciful heavens! She knew how to scour pots, tend goats, hoe beans, darn socks, weave rush chair seats, and cure a rash with apple cider vinegar. So why was she gallivanting across Europe, penniless, half starved, and shivering, in this preposterous disguise?
“Duck!” Prue whispered.
There was a clatter above, voices coming closer; someone pushed a window open.
Ophelia and Prue stumbled off to the side until they were safely in shadow once more. They’d come to the second wing of the mansion. All of the windows were black except for two on the main floor.
“Let’s look,” Ophelia whispered. “Could be your ma.”
They picked their way towards the windows, into what seemed to be a marshy vegetable patch.
Ophelia stepped around some sort of half-rotten squash, and wedged the toe of her boot between two building stones. She gripped the sill to pull herself up, and her waterlogged rump padding threatened to pull her backwards. She squinted through the glass. “Most peculiar,” she whispered. “Looks like some sort of workshop. Tables heaped with knickknacks.”
“A tinker’s shop?” Prue clambered up. “Oh. Look at all them gears and cogs and things.”
“Why would there be a tinker’s shop in this grand house? Your ma married a nobleman. Yet it’s on the main floor of the house, not down where the servants’ workplaces must be.” A fire burned in a carved fireplace and piles of metal things glimmered.
“Crackers,” Prue whispered. “Someone’s in there.”
Sure enough, a round, bald man hunched over a table. One of his hands held a cube-shaped box. The other twisted a screwdriver. Ophelia couldn’t see his face because he wore brass jeweler’s goggles.
“What in tarnation is he doing?” Prue spoke too emphatically, and her bonnet brim hit the windowpane.
The man glanced up. The lenses of his goggles shone.
Holy Moses. He looked like something that had crawled out of a nightmare.
The man stood so abruptly that his chair collapsed behind him. He lurched towards them.
Ophelia hopped down into the vegetable patch.
Prue recoiled. For a few seconds she seemed suspended, twirling her arms in the air like a graceless hummingbird. Then she pitched backwards and thumped into the garden a few steps from Ophelia.