The Case of the Perilous Palace Read online

  THE WOLLSTONECRAFT DETECTIVE AGENCY

  The Case of the Missing Moonstone

  The Case of the Girl in Grey

  The Case of the Counterfeit Criminals

  The Case of the Perilous Palace

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Jordan Stratford

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2018 by Kelly Murphy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780553536447 (trade) — ebook ISBN 9780553536461

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Precisely

  Chapter 2: The Polygon

  Chapter 3: Chopping

  Chapter 4: Petulant

  Chapter 5: No Mistake

  Chapter 6: A Woman of Efficiency

  Chapter 7: What Have We Got

  Chapter 8: Poppycock

  Chapter 9: Interlude

  Chapter 10: Lory

  Chapter 11: Eagle Mid Rho

  Chapter 12: Stir-Up Day

  Chapter 13: On Guard

  Chapter 14: The Watchers in the Walls

  Chapter 15: Fruit

  Chapter 16: A Glider Home

  Chapter 17: Enough

  Notes

  For Zandra

  PREFACE

  This is a made-up story about two very real girls: Ada Byron, who has been called the world’s first computer programmer, and Mary Shelley, the world’s first science-fiction author. Ada and Mary didn’t really know one another, nor did they have a detective agency together. Mary and Ada were eighteen years apart in age, not three, as they are in the world of Wollstonecraft.

  Setting that aside, the characters themselves are as true to history as we are able to tell. At the end of the book, there are notes that reveal more about what happened to each of them in real life, so that you can enjoy the history as much as I hope you’ll enjoy the story. Because the history bit is brilliant.

  –JORDAN STRATFORD

  The click of Ada’s door punctuated the end of one sentence and the beginning of another.

  The first was a sentence from Gran and came at the end of a long tirade. Ada had missed most of it, noting only that it concerned Ada’s having set off a bomb in the house, which was mostly but not entirely true. The bomb had not been a real bomb but merely a counterfeit, smoke-producing bomb, which she had to admit was bomblike enough to be convincing, which was rather the point.

  The counterfeit bomb had done its job and cleared the house of Ada’s enemies. Her archnemesis, Nora Radel, had mesmerized an alarming number of the household servants, and they had been advancing menacingly when Ada broke the spell and sent them fleeing with a bit of a bang, a lot of smoke, and a cry of “fire!”

  The commotion had also sent Gran running from the house, which had seemed like a bonus at the time. But now Gran was back. And she was not impressed with the way Ada had successfully wrapped up her last case. She was not impressed with the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency. Not impressed with Ada’s friends, her room, her dress, her anything…

  The final word of the final sentence of Gran’s tirade was “precisely.”

  “Precisely?” Ada asked, tuning back in, but unclear on what she was meant to be precise about.

  “I shall not repeat myself,” Gran said with finality, her snotty pug tucked firmly into her armpit.

  “You probably should,” Ada suggested, only realizing how cheeky that sounded after she’d said it.

  And so Gran did. At length. Using words like “unsuitable,” “banished,” and “forbidden.” And Ada still wasn’t sure of much except that all the people she had grown to know or love or care about were being brushed away like crumbs from the arm of a chair. And now even Gran herself was gone, not from the house, but from Ada’s avalanche of a bedroom.

  With the clicking of the door, a second sentence had begun. This sentence being a kind of imprisonment to which Ada was to be subjected.

  Gone—no, banished—was Ada’s dearest friend and co-founder of the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency, Mary Godwin, along with Mary’s stepsister, Jane. No word was spoken of Ada’s half sister, Allegra, because Gran hadn’t known she was even there. But if she had known, Allegra would have been banished too. Along with Peebs, her tutor and ally. Anna, Ada’s maid, whose name she had only known for a few months, was also dismissed, despite her many years of service.

  Ada bundled up the velvet of her gown in little balls in her hot fists and ordered herself not to cry.

  The results of this attempt were variable.

  * * *

  “What do we have.”

  It was not a question, and indeed Ada had no one to ask. The not-a-question was spoken aloud in Ada’s disastrous bedroom, which contained sliding piles of books and notes and drawings, tools stained with oil, gears, springs, spindles, and several small jam jars full of dirt, which needed to be sorted. Geographically.

  Ada sighed. What the room did not contain was Mary. If Mary were here, Mary could make sense of everything. Or at least ask the sort of questions that would lead to Ada’s making sense of everything, which made Mary happy, which made Ada happy. The lack of Mary resulted in a general unhappiness that clung to the damp room like a chill.

  The fire had gone out. Of course. Because Anna, tender of fires, was gone.

  Ada decided she needed options, and time to think. Her room wasn’t perfect for this. It didn’t have either her bleh—her mechanical computer—or enough books in it. Taking a look around, Ada admitted that her room probably had the same number of books as the library, but they weren’t the right books to solve the problem at hand.

  Whatever that was, precisely. She hadn’t gotten that far yet.

  The library, then.

  Ada dared a tiptoe over to her door and turned the knob as silently as she could manage. Peeking out, she spied a footman, stationed just outside her door, preventing any sort of escape—even to the library.

  How to get a footman out of the hallway? Ada had very little experience with such things. She knew her way around her butler, the very tall and entirely silent Mr. Franklin. And she’d recently begun
to get the hang of maids. The less said about cooks the better, the last one having been under the uncanny influence of a master criminal. It was too much to think about, or at least the wrong time for thinking about it.

  She sighed, and returned her attention to her escape.

  What little she had observed about her grandmother’s footmen was that they were constantly fetching things, and seemed particularly animated after a door-knocking. But how to knock on the door? The windows of Ada’s room looked out the back of the house, so it was not as if she could tie a large wrench to a knotted bedsheet and dangle it out the window, in hopes that a good swing could make contact with the front door. No, she’d need to arc the bedsheet straight up and over the roof, hopefully not smashing out any windows in the process.

  She found herself sketching a rough diagram of how this might be done, which soothed her. She wondered if her bedsheets, blankets, and bed-curtains tied together would be long enough. Then she remembered that the large wrench she usually kept under her bed had been used to stir up her smoke bomb and sent tumbling down the stairs. So without the weight, the physics was wrong.

  A rocket, she thought. A rocket should be able to take a bedsheet up over the snow-covered roof and, its fuel spent, might fall on the other side of the house and knock on the door. But the only way Ada knew how to propel a rocket involved gunpowder, and she’d used all she had on the smoke bomb.

  She then realized that a knock on the door would be answered by Mr. Franklin as part of his butlerly duties, and not by the footman outside her bedroom. Ada sighed, and not in a ladylike way, but more like blowing air upward out of her bottom lip, which sometimes made a rude noise by accident.

  And that was when she noticed the bell rope.

  It had always been there, though she’d never given it much thought. Well, she’d given it enough thought to have, over the years, pulled it for experimental purposes, and swung from it, and tied things to it, and each time it had summoned someone from the depths of the house, usually Anna. She knew that if she pulled it now, a bell would sound belowstairs. The bell was one of many on a board, and each bell was labeled with the name of a room in which a bell rope could be pulled. She remembered seeing the board on her trips down to her basement laboratory. Of course, pulling her rope would ring her bell, resulting in an unfamiliar maid or footman in her room, and that would hardly aid in her escape.

  But now an altogether different sketch began to emerge from Ada’s pencil. One that mapped a network of bell ropes, cables between walls, and pulleys so that the cables could snake around corners and eventually make their way down to the bell board at the end.

  Standing, Ada approached the rope, noticing the point where rope became cable and disappeared into a small hole in a brass plate attached to the wall.

  Screwdriver.

  Yes, it was as she suspected. Behind the brass plate and inside the not-too-spidery wall was not merely one cable, but several. Ada reached into the wall to feel the taut cords of the bell cables and picked one that wasn’t attached to the bell rope in her room. She gave it a tug, and listened.

  There it was, a tinkling, down several flights of stairs, faint and distant in the wall’s dusty darkness.

  After a beat, she could hear doors and footsteps in the creak of the house. Someone was headed somewhere. She tried another cable and pulled, more sharply this time.

  Another tinkling, another moment, another set of summoned steps. It all seemed entirely ordered, which pleased Ada deeply, but what she required in this instance was chaos. She plucked at the cables madly, at random, sending the house’s remaining staff room to room, scrambling to find out what was being asked of them.

  And finally, there were footsteps right outside her door—the sound of her guard, departing. The bell-rope cables were a system, and Ada had overloaded it. She felt a brief rush of freedom, even though she was still in her room, still in fact up to her elbows in cables, lath, plaster dust, and other wall residue.

  Without even bothering to dust herself off, she ran to her door, exhaled, and opened it quietly. While there were many goings-on she could hear, there were no servants to see and, she assumed, none to see her. She stepped into the hallway.

  One, two, three steps to the library, and it occurred to her that, while its familiar and comfortable chair and familiar and comfortable books offered more options than her room—options were, after all, the objective of her mission—the basement laboratory promised even more options, including the option of escape from the house, escape, indeed, from her sentence.

  She spun about on one stockinged heel and stepped back past her open door toward the door to the servants’ stairs. This, she knew well, led to the butler’s pantry. From there she could either escape to the back garden or go down farther belowstairs to the kitchen proper, and farther farther to the laboratory. Options.

  Not hearing any traffic behind the door, Ada opened it, only to discover an imposing grey woman clutching a snarfling and asthmatic pug.

  It was Gran, staring directly at Ada. Knowing precisely what she had planned, and merely waiting. In retrospect, Ada felt that the whole thing had been rather obvious, and felt slightly embarrassed by her impromptu scheme.

  “Back,” stated Gran, pointing.

  Ada sighed, again with her bottom lip, hoping it would not emit an accidentally rude noise. In this, at least, she was successful.

  Mary shook some coals from the scuttle into the fire, the bucket’s black weight suddenly gone, so that only hollow tin remained in her hands.

  That may have been the last of it, she thought too late, and then worried that the afternoon’s warmth would not last through evening. She tucked herself back into her chair by the window.

  The Godwins’ apartment in Somers Town, a few minutes east of Ada’s stately Marylebone townhome, was a cozy jumble of a place, with stacks of books long having outgrown the available bookshelves. Mary’s stepmother, Marie, was hunched over a manuscript at the table, editing pages with a goose quill. Mary’s father chuckled at the baby, who was holding tightly to Mr. Godwin’s nose.

  Mary looked out through the leaded panes of the snow-kissed windows. On her lap was her journal with a story emerging, although she wasn’t sure what it was about quite yet. There was also half a map, which had fallen out of a much older book, and while the place names were in an antique typeface, she suspected it might be a part of India. Unless that wobbly bit over there was the Pacific. She wasn’t sure, but she was enchanted just the same and wanted to go there wherever it was.

  There was something of a clamor in the street. Mary half rose and wiped at the frost to see a long carriage, more for goods than for passengers—trying to ease its way backward through rushing, bundled pedestrians, trying to get closer to her own building.

  “Someone is moving in,” said Mary. “A family,” she added, seeing a clan emerge from various carriage doors, each person burdened with bundles and boxes.

  “Chilly day for it,” said Mr. Godwin. The baby squeaked happily.

  “I do hope they won’t be loud,” said Mrs. Godwin, not looking up from her papers.

  Mary’s stepsister, Jane, sidled up to Mary’s shoulder for a look.

  “I say,” Jane said. “Isn’t that Charles?”

  “Charles is right here,” chuckled Mr. Godwin, speaking of the girls’ baby brother, who had yet to let go of his father’s nose.

  “Not that Charles, our Charles,” stated Jane. It was, in fact, their Charles, their friend and accomplice Charles, as Mary could plainly see. Both girls looked at one another and rushed to the door, opening it as they heard Mrs. Godwin’s cry of “Capes, gloves, bonnets! You’ll catch your death!”

  The girls did grab the above and, in a very unladylike display, more or less assembled themselves for the cold as they descended the staircase.

  “I wonder if he has a case for us,
” suggested Jane.

  “Doubtful, indeed,” said Mary. “I can’t imagine there’s much chance of that, what with Ada practically on house arrest, and the lot of us being banished from the Byron house altogether.”

  “Still, it’s a bit curious, don’t you think?” asked Jane.

  “I find myself eternally curious,” Mary laughed.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs had a glass front, but it was so frosted over it was impossible to see anything at all. Once open, the door invited December’s chill into the hall, which settled with a bite on the noses and cheeks of the Godwin sisters.

  Workmen were busy carrying a few worn items of furniture, and they brushed past the girls up the stairs and into their building. There were people who were clearly the parents of their Charles, along with an assortment (five, Mary counted) of children who must be brothers and sisters.

  At last, their friend made an appearance, with a knowing smile and the doff of his cap.

  “Miss Mary, Miss Jane,” said Charles.

  “Do keep your hat on, Charles. You’ll catch your death,” said Mary, taking his arm and steering him indoors.

  “Not today, Mary,” said Charles, smiling and following cheerfully.

  “Is it true, then?” asked Jane excitedly. “Are you moving in? To the Polygon?” The Polygon being the apt name for their polygonal apartment building.

  “Indeed, Miss Jane, and that is a most joyous fact.”

  “Your new job, is that going well?” asked Mary.

  “I begin first thing tomorrow morning. But the promise of my new employment has allowed my family to better their circumstances.” Charles had paused just for a heartbeat, and Mary was reminded that much misfortune had befallen the Dickens family (though of course they had never spoken of it). She was gladdened to hear of the improvement in their lot.