The Derring-Do Club and the Empire of the Dead Read Online Free PDF

room was not at the stern. Instead there were signs for ‘Damen’ and ‘Herren’. The doors to the cabins on either side were all identical, each with two numbers. The room she’d come out of had been ‘19/20’. The doors weren’t numbered like a street, but rather clockwise starting, and ending, at the front with ‘1/2 3/4’ on her right and ‘13/14 11/12’ on her left. Wait, it was an air ship , so the big numbers were on the ‘port’ side. These end cabins were obviously quadruples. The door towards the ‘bow’ – see, she wasn’t glocky – was blank.
    Charlotte could hear voices from the room beyond. There were several men talking; the walls, thin presumably to save weight, let through every word. Unfortunately they were speaking in a Germanic language.
    Well, she thought, what to do?
    She’d have to wait until they descended and then sneak off while they were tying up. It wouldn’t do to have ‘stowaway’ added to her school report, which was already going to rack up another ‘absent’ to its collection.
    There was another noise, this one from cabin ‘1/2 3/4’ – someone was inside. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be outflanked.
    She put her ear to the panel and heard a girlish whimpering, so it was unlikely to be Earnestine or Georgina. It was possibly another girl from the school, although her classmates had been singularly reluctant to climb out of the dormitory window when she’d suggested it.
    Charlotte tried the handle: it turned and the door clicked open, but then jammed on a bolt. Strange that it was locked from the outside. Charlotte unlocked it and looked inside.
    The cabin beyond was more opulent than the one she’d first hidden in, with a fine table and four chairs commanding the centre. There were bunk beds on either side, enough for four people, with the walls striped in blue and ochre with gold patterns matched by the curtain drawn across the window. Charlotte could not tell where the murmuring was coming from, until she stepped inside and looked over one of the expensive travelling cases.
    It was another girl, not one from the school, who was backed into the gap between the table and the bunk bed, her legs and arms rigid like spears, and she gripped a butter knife in her hand. Her expression was a mix of terror and grim determination.
    “Shhh, shhh,” said Charlotte closing the door behind her. “I’m Charlotte, Lottie… Lottie.”
    “Lottie?”
    “Yes, Lottie,” said Charlotte. “And you?”
    “No–one!”
    Charlotte smiled: “I can’t call you no–one. How should I address you?”
    “Your… nothing. Just Fräulein…”
    “Just Fräulein?”
    There was no sense of movement and the whirr of the propellers was distant. They could be two girls hiding in a cabin anywhere and not, as they were, flying.
    The other girl relaxed a little.
    “I’m to… it’s worse than death.”
    “Is it?”
    Charlotte had heard the phrase ‘worse than death’ before. Miss Jones had used it in one of her tirades when she’d warned the girls against going down to the village where there might be boys. Charlotte suspected that this was going to turn out to be one of those foolish things that adults kept from children, men kept from women, and everyone kept from Charlotte.
    Considering Miss Jones’s, and now this Fräulein’s, reaction, it was most likely to be more important than, say, brandy or cigars, but in her bones, Charlotte suspected it would turn out to be something dreary like a lecture on workhouses or sewerage. For her own good, apparently, Charlotte had had to sit through visiting speakers droning on about solving poverty, supplying clean water and building sewers. Old men, bearded and reeking of brandy fumes and cigar smoke, seemed to be inordinately interested in sewers.
    Charlotte never wanted to go anywhere near sewers, but she knew far more about the passages under London than she did about interesting subjects like Fusiliers, Cavalry Officers and… and…