CHAPTER 22

THE AIR INSIDE THE HATMAKERS’ HALLWAY WAS cool on Cordelia’s burning face as Aunt Ariadne slammed the door behind her.

“I can explain,” Cordelia began.

“For shame!” Aunt Ariadne gasped. “Cordelia, I am deeply disappointed in you.”

Cordelia shook her head. “No!” she protested. “I was only trying to—”

“There are principles of Hatmaking that you have no idea about. Principles of balance, of equanimity. Do you understand them? No!” Aunt Ariadne snapped.

“I wanted to help! I wanted to do something!” The tadpole of shame in Cordelia’s belly squirmed and she felt sick. “It was the only way I could think of to get to the princess—I had to do it—”

“You heard Lord Witloof,” her aunt went on. “These are treacherous times. The Makers’ fates hang in the balance. We cannot afford to have the Hatmaker name smeared by scandal! How many hats did you add things to that afternoon?”

“Only that one, I promise!”

“Cordelia, this is very serious.”

“YES!” Cordelia found herself shouting. “It is serious! My father’s life is at stake! And nobody cares! Nobody except me has done ANYTHING to try to find him!”

A terrible silence filled the hall. It ate up all the air. The kitchen door opened a crack and Cook peeped through. Miss Starebottom craned over the bannister upstairs.

Cordelia felt the squirm of shame again. It bloated into a gloating toad, crouching heavy in her belly.

“I’m the one who tried to get a boat from the princess!” she cried. “I’m the one who went to find Jack! I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO’S TRYING TO GET MY FATHER BACK!”

Aunt Ariadne’s lips flattened into a line as straight as a cane.

“Jones told us last night that he woke up the old seadog in the sickbay,” she snapped. “He said there had never been a cabin boy there at all.”

“What?”

“You wasted our time with a made-up story, Cordelia, and you made us hope for a moment—”

“But it’s true!” Cordelia wailed. “He gave me my father’s tel—”

“ENOUGH!” Aunt Ariadne shouted.

More silence followed, frayed by Cordelia’s ragged breathing.

“I care very much about your father, Cordelia,” her aunt finally managed to say, though it seemed to take a great effort. “And it may be some time before you accept that he is—”

“He isn’t dead!” Cordelia howled. “He isn’t!”

Hot tears welled up in her eyes. She pushed them angrily off her cheeks. She wanted her aunt to shout back at her, but she just stood there, so still and so gray-faced that she seemed to be made of stone.

It was a long time before Aunt Ariadne spoke. When she did, it was in a whisper so thin and sharp that it cut the air like a blade. “The Peace Hat demands complete calm and utter tranquillity until it is done. You are creating discord and atmospheric strife in this house, so you will go to your room. You will stay there quietly until noon tomorrow, when we have finished our work and delivered the Peace Hat.”

“No! I don’t—”

The front door swung open. Uncle Tiberius pushed a dozing Great-aunt Petronella into the hallway. He paused when he saw Cordelia, her cheeks wet and fists balled, facing the implacable statue of Aunt Ariadne.

“Ah,” Uncle Tiberius whispered. “Everything all right?”

He sidled past them and laid a sad handful of things on the hall table: the tattered remains of the Loquacious Lily, the bent feather from the Upstart Crow and the three star sequins.

“All cleared up!” he announced. “I managed to convince Sir Hugo to let me look at his hat. As soon as he took it off, he fell asleep on the steps of the church. The nuns are looking after him now. Mother Superior has been persuaded to take pity on the poor fool, though she did try to lock him in the confession box.”

Ariadne and Cordelia ignored him, still glaring at each other with identical expressions of fierce stubbornness on their faces.

Uncle Tiberius milled around the hallway, attempting to dispel the tension.

“You know, I Made a hat without permission when I was eight,” he said conversationally. “I gave it to a stable boy. He started clucking like a chicken, ran around backward reciting rude poems, and then tried to pick a fight with a donkey. I got into such trouble.”

Nobody said a word. Great-aunt Petronella snored gently in her chair.

“So!” Uncle Tiberius cried, overly jovial. “Naughty Cordelia! But no harm done! Tell you what, let’s see if Cook has made some tea—”

“Upstairs, Cordelia. Now,” Aunt Ariadne ordered. “And when you come down tomorrow, I will expect a very sincere and well-thought-out apology.”

Cordelia considered putting up a fight. But her aunt glowered so ferociously that she knew she had no choice. She turned and marched straight up the stairs, head held high and fingernails digging into her palms.

Behind her, Uncle Tiberius sighed. She thought she heard Aunt Ariadne let out one small, stifled sob.

In her room, Cordelia pushed away thoughts of remorse for Making the hat without permission. She knew she should not have done it: it was forbidden.

How unfair that the forbidden things were always the most interesting.

“It was the only way I could think of to get to the princess,” she said to herself. “I had to do it.”

She threw herself belly-down on the floor, reached under her bed and pulled out a tattered hatbox. It was the hatbox that had been her cradle when she was born. Her father had saved her from the sea in this hatbox and brought her home to London nestled in it. Its paper was puckered from the salt-water, curling at the edges. She stroked the crinkled lid.

Inside lay all her treasures: her baby blanket made from a piece of sailcloth, a shiny knot of nutmeg her father had brought back from Ceylon, the fragile orb of a Venetian glass song-bottle, a clear quartz crystal that scattered shards of rainbow light across the floor, a bowl made from a polished coconut shell, an ancient book that her father loved to read aloud from called The Mythmaker, an iridescent feather from an Elysian Eagle, and her jar of Sicilian Leaping Beans.

She felt tears sting her eyes and wanted, more than anything, to outrun the wave of misery threatening to engulf her.

“I know you’re alive, Father!” Cordelia burst out. “You’ve got to be!”

A door slammed downstairs.

“And it’s no good being stuck in here!” she groaned. “There’s no time to waste!”

She snatched up the jar of Leaping Beans. They hopped and bounced against the glass and she felt the patter of them in her fingertips …

“I’m finished with waiting for help,” Cordelia announced to the empty room. “I can’t get a boat from the princess, and Jack’s disappeared, so I’ll have to find another way.”

Goose believed she was the thief, her aunt was furious with her, and she had no allies left. So she would have to take matters into her own hands.

“If I get to the coast at Rivermouth, that’s a start,” she said. “There must be one boat there I can use.”

She chewed her lip, thinking.

“I’ll have to wait till nightfall. And before I leave London I will make sure at least Goose knows the truth—that I am not a thief!”

She put the Leaping Beans carefully back into the hatbox with her other precious treasures. Then she lay down and tried to sleep. She would need to be wide awake tonight, so sleeping in the daytime seemed sensible.

But she could not stop her mind snicking and circling like a wound-up clock as she went over and over her (rather flimsy) plan.

Eventually, she fell into a doze as the sun was sinking among the chimneys. When she woke again, velvety night had gathered outside.

“Dilly?”

Her uncle was at the trapdoor. Cordelia kept her eyes shut even when he whispered her name again.

“Dilly? Are you asleep?”

She did not answer. The smell of roast chicken wafted through the room and made her mouth water.

“I’ve brought you some dinner,” Uncle Tiberius said gently. “And there’s a chocolate pudding too—your favorite. I asked Cook to make it for you, secretly.”

Sickly shame about Sir Hugo’s hat bubbled in Cordelia’s stomach again and she squeezed herself tighter into a ball to try to smother it.

“It’s probably a good thing you’re up here, little Hatmaker,” he whispered. “Not much fun downstairs. Lots of stress and a fair bit of strain … and Ariadne used a very rude word when the grosgrain wouldn’t lie flat.”

Cordelia kept clenched in a ball.

Her uncle sighed. “For both our sakes, Dilly, please eat the chocolate pudding. Best get rid of the evidence before your aunt finds out about it.”

She heard the trapdoor shut and opened her eyes.

The chocolate pudding was delicious.

And it was the perfect meal to eat before an adventure.

The hat hoist was large for a hat but small for a person.

Cordelia knew her aunt and uncle would be up until dawn, bent over the Peace Hat in the workshop. Her uncle would be stitching ribbons with his delicate silver needle, pins clamped between his lips. Her aunt, gilded with lamplight, was probably coaxing the felt into an elegant shape.

Cordelia banished the thought.

They don’t believe my father is alive! She made her voice as fierce as she could inside her own head. I’m going to prove them wrong.

Being fierce seemed to help burn away the feeling of clammy guilt that chilled her. She refused to imagine how her family would feel when they found her bed empty. She slipped down her ladder onto the landing. Great-aunt Petronella was asleep in her chair, face lit palest mauve by the embers from her fire.

Cordelia knew that there were several squeaky stairs right outside the Hatmaking Workshop, and she also knew that sliding down the bannister to get past them would be very risky. Aunt Ariadne’s hearing was as keen as an owl’s. There was only one way down to the ground floor. …

She sneaked past the door to the Alchemy Parlor, slunk into the Hat-weighing Room, and folded herself into the hat hoist. She perched on the purple velvet cushion, knees under her chin. A tiny brass crank glinted on the wall next to her.

This was the tricky part.

Cordelia reached for the crank and turned it. The hoist jolted, she pulled the door shut and, for a breathless second, nothing happened. Cordelia opened her eyes wide but it was black as ink inside the hoist.

The dark lurched—then she felt herself sinking smoothly downward. She breathed a small sigh of relief.

Outside, anybody who might have been watching would have seen an elegant wooden box, large enough to hold the most flamboyantly feathered hats, slowly descending to the ground floor of Hatmaker House.

Ding!

The tiny glass bell pinged as the hat hoist came to a stop on the shop level. Had Aunt Ariadne’s owl-ears heard it?

Cordelia waited a hundred heartbeats to make sure nobody was coming to investigate, then she opened the little door.

The shop was shadowy and strange in the dark. Hats threw weird shapes on the walls. Dove feathers became the crests of monsters and frilled ribbons were suddenly dragons’ tails.

Cordelia took a deep breath. She squeezed herself out of the hoist.

With steps as soft as velvet, she moved across the shop.

She unlocked the door and eased it open slowly so the brass bell didn’t ring.

Foggy London was framed in the doorway. A church bell donged quarter to midnight.

She went out into the night.