Not a Thing to Wear
Dismounting the cab, she entered the first stall, turning, looking up and down to see if there was anything that might serve her purpose.
“Nice shawl perhaps, Miss, or a hat maybe?” the owner asked.
“Looking for a frock, actually,” she said.
The woman looked her up and down, quite frankly and shook her head. “Nothing your size, Ducky. Not for a lady.”
“Anything that might be altered or let out to fit me?” she asked.
“Sorry, my dear, doubt putting two of them together would cover a—fine sturdy lass such as yourself.”
The woman pointedly turned her back on her and began straightening men’s braces.
“Wasn’t anything here I fancied, anyway,” Verity mumbled and tried her luck at the next stall.
It appeared to be devoted to men’s clothing; however, shirts with frayed cuffs and collars, pants and jackets often let up or down at the hems, faded waistcoats in brocades with a lot of snagged threads and moth holes.
The third stall was much like the first, and the fourth featured mostly children’s wear and some alarmingly stained things for babies.
The fifth stall looked promising, however. It was wider and deeper than the others, and while the items in the front, nearest the street, were of poor quality, she saw the gleam of nicer fabrics, sunlight catching bits of bead trim and colorful embroideries. Not that those were for her, since she was in mourning, but perhaps they had something in the back?
An artfully lettered sign hung from the awning: Madame Marsha’s Re-Imagined Finery.
A small, genteel looking lady sat at the sewing machine placed where she could oversee the shop.
Shyly, Verity asked her question. “You would be Madame Marsha?”
The lady nodded.
“Do you have anything nice, ladylike, in black that might be made to fit me?”
Madame Marsha shook her head. “Sorry. I just filled a large order for five gowns that took all of the finer garments I had on hand plus yard-goods to supplement them.” She nodded toward a bed sheet pinned around a bulky bundle in the corner of the shop.
Verity nodded and sighed, and was about to turn to go when a shadow momentarily blotted the sunlight, though none of the dust, from the street and the stall was suddenly redolent with a spicy, exotic scent that quite overcame the smell of second-hand cloth, leather, a hint of mold, and a fainter hint of leftover body odor.
“Arrr,” said a voice and Verity beheld—well, it had to be a pirate, surely? She had never met a pirate, but this person wore a tri-cornered hat with long greasy matted braids entangled with clay beads and silver trinkets, huge silver earrings, big black boots with embossed gilt scrollwork, a burgundy colored coat with gold buttons and tarnished braid along the deep cuffs and collar, open to reveal a blousy shirt of scarlet silk.
“There you are, Captain Lewis!” the seamstress said with a nod to the pirate. “Your order has been ready for a week. This young lady was just trying to talk me out of it, so it’s a good thing you came in when you did.”
The pirate shot Verity a warning look and hastily moved to the sheet-wrapped bundle, patting at it with possessive eagerness. “They all be here, do they? Ye had no trouble locatin’ the peacock feathers to trim the blue number with the aqua bustle, train, and neckline?”
“The room in the back is available as always, Captain,” the little woman said. “It was difficult, of course, finding enough cloth in the proper colors to fit your measurements…”
The pirate retreated to the fitting room, carrying the sheet-wrapped bundle high so the skirts peeking out beneath their covering didn’t drag on the floor.
The proprietress turned her attention to Verity, who said, “I wish I’d come sooner. I’m having the same problem myself.”
“If you can give me a couple of weeks and describe what you need, I’m sure I can accommodate you, dear,” Madame Marsha said, “but I’ve spent the last two months working on the captain’s order. Your statuesque build presents a few unusual challenges, but I fancy I’m up to them. Just wait and see. What is the occasion or occasions for which you desire your gown?”
“It’s not exactly for an occasion—I’ve been in boarding schools for the last four years and I grew rather quickly so the only thing I have that fits me is this old uniform and I need to see the magistrate about releasing a prisoner. I doubt he’ll listen to me when I look like an overgrown schoolgirl. You know how much store some people set by appearances.”
“Arrr,” interrupted the cooing and oohing and ahhing noises from the room in the back.
Verity inquired in a low, discreet voice if he was buying something for his wife or maybe a lady pirate, but the seamstress had just smiled a little tight-lipped smile.
The captain, however, had been listening to her just as she was listening to him, for he called out, “Prisoner, ye say, lassie? What prisoner might that be?”
Her voice trembled a little and she sometimes forgot what she was saying as she described the balloon accident and her rescue by the dragon wrangler and his small charge. “And now they blame him for Papa’s death, they’re going to execute him, but nobody has asked me what happened, so I want to go tell them.”
“Oh, my dear,” said the shopkeeper sympathetically, but the door to the fitting room crashed open and a person of a quite unfamiliar appearance swept out of it wearing a lovely black taffeta with crepe overlay, a train and bustle on a jet-bead fringed skirt that parted in the front to reveal a daringly short skirt, similarly trimmed and revealing in its turn long legs clad in black net stockings, serving to disguise knobby knees. The bodice was cut fairly deeply, but the gap was partially covered with black beaded lace. The large woman wearing the ensemble had luxuriant locks artlessly twisted into a tall up-do, pierced with slender rapier-like daggers to compel it to remain as it had been arranged.
She posed with one hand on her hip, the lace ruffle of her sleeve cascading halfway down the skirt. “Arrr,” she said, her voice melodic and cultured, even though her diction still resembled the pirate’s to some degree. “This might be a bit old for you, my duck, and a bit theatrical for their eminences at the palace, but as you’re in mourning and I’m not at present, I could rent it to you for a small consideration. Accessories are extra, but I’ll throw in the matching shawl to make it more appropriate for one of your tender years. What size shoes do you wear?”
Verity told her and the lady clapped her hands, which had short, rather grubby nails and calloused palms. “Oh, lovely! We wear the same size! You must try on these dance slippers I found.” She turned to Madame Marsha. “What about jewels?”
“Mourning, Captain, I mean, Madame,” the seamstress shopkeeper said. “No ornaments for at least three months.”
“Oh, of course! What was I thinking? I’ve been at sea far too long, that I have, my dear. Forget the niceties, I do.”
Madame Marsha addressing her customer as Captain confirmed Verity’s suspicion that the well-dressed lady was also the bearded, mat-haired piratical gentleman. After another trip to the fitting room where the black outfit was exchanged for a scarlet gown trimmed with sparkling crystals, Captain Lewis and the shopkeeper hustled Verity back to the changing room, where she donned the black gown and shawl. By the mirror on the back of the wall, she saw that on her, the ensemble looked far more sedate and with the shawl looked like proper mourning, and very stylish at that, as long as she let down the longer skirt, formerly draped bunting style over the shorter one, for a more sedate silhouette.
“Go speak for the boy now, lassie,” the pirate lady told her. “Let me know how it goes when you bring the frock back to me.”
“Shall I bring it back here?”
The fashionable pirate reached into her little drawstring beaded bag and handed Verity a piece of paper with a picture of her wearing a hair style held in place with clips in the shapes of voluptuous mermaids. It bore an advertisement: The Changeling Club is proud to present for an exclusive limited engagement, Madame Louisa, Siren of the Seven Seas.
“No need for that,” the captain said. “I hope you like music?”
“Very much,” she said.
“If your business is concluded by then, come to the matinee.”
“Matinee?”
“Yes, as you see, I’m performing at the Changeling Club, two shows a day.”
Feeling a little stunned, Verity in her new finery climbed into a cab the chanteuse had summoned with a piercing whistle.
“The castle, driver,” she said.
“Yes, Madame,” he said in a perfectly respectful tone. Verity grinned to herself.
The Queenston Dungeon (and Wine Cellar)
At the palace she identified herself to the guard and asked to see the magistrate.
“You have an appointment?” he asked, unimpressed with her credentials. “Magistrate’s a busy man.”
Verity drew herself up so that she loomed about a foot over the top of the guard’s helmet. She was nervous about talking to official people, but reminded herself that her experiences in the finishing school portion of her education had to be good for something and this seemed an appropriate occasion. She asked herself who she knew who always got what she wanted and how did she get it, a question which turned into how would Malady Hide handle this situation?
“Sir, I am Verity Magdalene Amberwine Bronwyn Songsmith Rowan Brown,” she said, hoping to suggest by repeating all of her names that she was somehow more of a crowd than one person, “I am the only surviving witness of a tragedy and disaster for which an innocent man is being held in durance vile. I have come with important evidence to impart to His Honor.”
From inside the castle walls came hammering noises. Peering over the guard’s head and turning slightly, she saw three men pounding together the unmistakable structure of a gallows.
“He’s very busy just now, clearing the docket—or something,” the guard said, his voice trailing off after she frowned at the word busy.
She didn’t need the twinge of pain above her left ear to tell her he was lying.
“In that case, I’d like to see the accused while I wait,” she said.
“Yes, well, I’d like a lot of things,” he said, evidently having reminded himself that he was armed and the giantess before him was not.
“No doubt,” she said, in the icy voice she had learned, if nothing else, from Sister Velocity. “However, I was the victim of the accident for which the accused is being held and I am alive only because the poor man pulled me out of the sea. It was my father who died and if I say it was an accident, it was a bloody accident.”
A light seemed to go on beneath his helmet. “You’re that Miss Brown!” he said, as if it were a great revelation to him.
“I believe I said so when I introduced myself.”
“Your dad owns the Dragon Works.”
“He did,” she said grimly. “And a few other things as well. So, I think I’m entitled to speak to the magistrate about this if I want, don’t you?”
“Indeed I do, Miss, and quite right you are, but the magistrate is, like I said, busy.”
Still lying. She bit her lip and began the countdown from ten to one.
“But there’s no harm in letting you see the lad,” the guard continued, “It will be a comfort to him, I’d think, to know you’ve forgiven him.”
“There’s nothing to forgive!” she said. “As I mentioned, I owe him my life which makes up for a lot. Where is he, please?”
The guard marched noisily ahead of her through the castle’s iron-hinged and studded doors, across the cavernous entry foyer bedecked with shields, banners, and pictures of toothy government officials past and present. Off to one side, hidden by the curve of a grand stairway, was a heavy iron-hinged oaken door. The guard held this for her and paused to snag one of a pair of torches beside the landing, leading her down an increasingly dark and forbidding staircase to the dungeon of the old castle, which served as a jail.
It stank of mold, mildew, the body odor of unwashed men, and human waste, as well as a nastier underlying smell that she thought might have been the bodies of prisoners who had starved to death or been tortured to death and left in their cells to rot until they were too ripe to totally remove all of the odor. Dragons smelled considerably better.
It was not nearly as big as she thought it might be, only three doors with tiny barred windows faced into an evil-smelling chamber with walls of stained and slimy looking stone and a sticky stone-flagged floor piled in the corners with refuse she didn’t even want to think about. The furnishings consisted of a rack and a table accessorized with an assortment of what she assumed were instruments of torture—rather rusty. Chains draped from the ceiling.
If the prisoner didn’t succumb to the torture, he or she might die of a nasty infection, thought Verity, whose domestic training had included The Theory and Strategic Application of Home Hygiene. She had learned how to clean a wide variety of surfaces and objects with formulas composed of various substances concocted in specific, complex formulas to banish ill humors from the home and therefore from the bodies of the residents.
A modicum of practical application was included on the premise that in order to lead one’s staff effectively, one must be intimately acquainted with the tasks required of them. In schools where there were scholarship students or charity cases, those girls became quite proficient in that part, though the girls from wealthier and more prestigious families were better trained in how to supervise and inspect the efforts of staff while imparting to them the necessity of banishing such insidious threats.
It didn’t help that the dungeon had not been modernized with dragon-gas lamps, but still used smoky torches, which stank and produced nose-burning smoke along with shadow-haunted, inadequate light, also full of ill humors if she wasn’t mistaken.
Sister Hoover would have been appalled.
“Lady here to see the prisoner,” the guard announced to another one playing with a deck of cards laid out on one end of the torture table.
He rose slowly, stiffly, reminding Verity of Sister Hinge, who stumped about the corridors half the morning until her arthritis limbered up. The cold and dankness of the dungeon can’t have been good for another sufferer, as the guard evidently was.
He rattled his keys, “Easy enough to find. He’s our only guest at present.”
“Low crime rate?” Verity asked.
“Speedy executions,” the guard replied proudly.
It might have been the smoke that was giving her a headache just then, but she hoped he was lying. “It’s quite a small dungeon, isn’t it?”
“Oh, the old dungeon extends way beyond that door there, but thanks to our expert elimination of crime, the rest of it is in excess of our needs, says the magistrate, and has been converted into a wine cellar and storage for old records and bits and bobs of other things. If we have too many prisoners, the nobs upstairs have to drink faster so we can clear out a cell.”
The first guard rapped on the little bars of the middle cell’s window. “You got a visitor, lad,” he said. “It’s a lady so you’d best be decent.” To Verity, he said, “You can see we’re taking good care of him. He’s got the room with the almost-a-view.”
Toby was probably the most decent thing about the dungeon, even though he was filthy and thin and had scrapes on his forehead and a cut on his chin, as she saw when the guard opened the door. He probably stank, too, but the rot, mold, urine, and human gasses so permeated the wood and masonry walls, ceiling, and floor of the place that his scent was totally overpowered. She caught a whiff of the slightly sulfurous, forest fire stench common to dragon wranglers.
The ceiling groaned with the weight of the heavy iron chains hanging from it. The iron exuded its own smell, though Verity didn’t pause to investigate.
The jailer blocked her way. “You’re not goin’ in there, Miss. It’s as much as your life is worth,” he protested. “This here is a dangerous criminal. Killed two people.”
Verity, pain stabbing through her at his lie, however unintentional, snapped, “Did not! I was there. I’ve nothing to fear from him. He saved my life!”
The guard who had accompanied her to the dungeon nodded to the jailer. “You heard the lady.”
The jailer spat a stream of Miragenian tobacco from a wad in his cheek (had to be Miragenian. That’s where tobacco came from, one of their most popular exports), clamped his lips together, and with much clanking from his skillet-sized ring full of keys the length of Verity’s fingers, retreated into the comparative comfort of the outer dungeon.
Toby sat up straight and said, “I’m sorry about Sir Gowen and the pilot, Miss. I got dumped out before I could help them.”
“Yes,” she said, not trusting herself to say more lest she choke up. “I actually wanted to come and thank you for saving me. I’m sorry it got you put in jail. Is there anything I can bring you?”
Although the cell was cramped, it nevertheless managed to be drafty and cold thanks to the view of a barred window about a foot deep by two feet wide. The view was the debris-clogged well dug into the ground to allow light and ventilation through the window. He followed her glance and said, “Oh yes, Miss. As the good officer said, this is luxury accommodation. I can catch the essence of the moat at any hour of the day. Also, it allows easy access for any rats and pigeons who might wish to keep me company.”
She smiled at his bravado.
“Have you heard if they caught Taz yet? My dragon?”
“I’ve heard nothing to that effect, no,” she said and he looked relieved. “It wasn’t her fault, you know. I checked that chain and all the ropes as soon as the gentleman made the arrangements for the flight and everything was in good working order.”
“I saw that it was the chain, too,” she said. “I’m going to try to get the magistrate to delay your execution until I can search for it.”
“That’s very kind of you, Miss. Taz was doing that when I was taken. She wanted to stay with me, but I ran her off. They’d kill her, too, and she’s young and did her best. She must be so lost,” Toby said. “She’s never been on her own. I hand-fed her as a hatchling. Please don’t let them kill her, Miss. She did nothing wrong. It was an accident.”
“I intend to sort it out,” she said. “I would have been to see you sooner, but there was the funeral and then I got sick. I’m trying to…”
“Oh, I was free up till yesterday. Should have just run, I guess, but I wanted to find the chains if I could and clear us.”
A voice boomed from outside the cell. “Where is Miss Brown?”