Oh, gods, thought Wren. She had never imagined that her careful plan could go as wrong as this. What would they do to her? Send her back to Shkin, probably, and demand a refund…
Everybody was talking excitedly Pennyroyal raising his voice above the rest. “Plovery must have recruited her to help him rob me, only she murdered him for the loot instead! And no doubt this Mossie devil was in it with her!” he added, pointing at Theo. “Well done, Orla, my angel! Without your quick thinking, they’d have made off aboard the Peewit with the… ah… contents of my safe.”
“Rubbish!” said Boo-Boo, in a voice that made them all fall silent and turn nervously to look at her. She had drawn herself up to her full height and turned the color that mayoresses turn when they hear their husbands refer to attractive aviatrices as “my angel” right in front of them. She put her arm around Wren. “What Wren told Miss Twombley was entirely true. I did ask for the Peewit to be refueled. I was planning to go shopping in Benghazi tomorrow, though I don’t suppose I shall feel up to it now. Anyway, Wren and Theo were with me when poor Plovery cried out; neither of them could possibly have done this dreadful deed.”
Wren and Theo stared at her, astonished that Boo-Boo would lie to protect them.
“But if it wasn’t them,” asked Pennyroyal, “who… ?”
“That is not for me to find out,” said Boo-Boo haughtily. “I am returning to my quarters. Please search for your murderer quietly. Come, Wren; come, Theo. We have a busy day tomorrow.”
She turned and strode out of the room, past the chastened aviators. Wren curtsied to Pennyroyal and hurried after Theo and her mistress. “Mrs. Pennyroyal,” she whispered as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “Thank you.”
Boo-Boo seemed not to hear. “What a dreadful business!” she said. “That poor, poor man. My husband was to blame, I am sure.”
“You think the mayor killed him?” asked Theo. He sounded as if he didn’t believe it, but Wren knew Professor Pennyroyal was quite capable of murdering someone if it suited him. Look at how he had treated Dad! She could see now how he had fooled everyone in Anchorage for so long, for he was certainly a good actor. How shocked he had looked, standing over Plovery’s body…
“Old Tech!” sighed Boo-Boo. “It is never anything but trouble. Oh, I do not say that Pennyroyal wielded the fatal blade himself, but I expect he has set up some nasty booby trap to protect his safe. He would stop at nothing to protect that ridiculous Tin Book. What is so special about it, anyway? Do you know, child?”
Wren shook her head. All she knew was that the Tin Book had been the cause of yet another death. She wished she had never taken the horrid thing from Miss Freya’s library.
Outside the doors of her bedroom, Boo-Boo shooed away the guard and turned to Wren and Theo. She studied them both with a sad smile, taking Wren’s hands in hers. “My dear children,” she said, “I am so sorry that your attempt to fly away has failed. I’m sure that is what you were doing, Wren? Having my husband’s yacht fueled so that you and Theo could fly away together?”
“I—” said Theo.
“Theo had nothing to do with it!” Wren protested. “I ran into him in the corridor. We were both coming to see what had happened—”
Mrs. Pennyroyal raised a hand; she would hear none of it. She had done her best to stop this happening, but now that it had, she found that it was all rather thrilling and romantic. “You need not hide the truth from me,” she said, and tears came into her eyes. “I hope I am your friend as well as your mistress. As soon as I saw you together, your tryst interrupted by the death cry of that unhappy man, I understood everything. How I wish that I had known a burning passion like yours instead of getting married off to Pennyroyal to please my family…”
“But—”
“Ah, but yours is a forbidden love! You remind me of Prince Osmiroid and the beautiful slave girl Mipsie in Lembit Oriole’s wonderful opera Trodden Weeds. But you must be patient, my dears. What hope of happiness do you have if you escape? Runaway slaves, penniless and far from home, pursued by bounty hunters wherever you turn. No, you must stay here awhile, and meet only in secret. Now that I know how much you long to leave, I shall do all that is in my power to persuade Pennyroyal that he must set you free.”
Wren could feel herself blushing. How could anyone imagine that she was in love with Theo Ngoni, of all people? She glanced at him and was annoyed to see that he looked embarrassed too, as if the very idea that he might be in love with Wren were ridiculous.
“Patience, my lovebirds,” the mayoress said, and kissed each of them upon the forehead. She smiled, and opened her bedroom door. “Oh, by the way,” she murmured, “not a word to anyone about poor Mr. Plovery. I will not allow this terrible event to upset our MoonFest celebrations…”
Chapter 23
Bright, Brighter, Brighton
Moonfest! A buzz of expectation rose from the raft city as the sun came up. Actors and artists who usually never stirred before noon leaped from their beds at gull squawk and began putting the finishing touches on decorations and carnival floats, while shopkeepers rolled up their shutters with a gleeful air, dreaming of record takings. Brighton was not a religious city; most of its people thought that religion was at best a fairy tale, at worst a con. To them, the rising of the first full moon of autumn, which was a solemn, sacred night in other cities, meant only one thing: It was party time!
Actually, it was almost always party time aboard Brighton. When Wren arrived, the Estival Festival, a six-week celebration of the gods of summer, had been petering out in a slew of firework parties and parades. Since then there had been the Large Hat Festival, the Cheese Sculpture Biennale, the Festival of Unattended Plays, Poskitt Week, and Mime-Baiting Day (when Brightonians were allowed to get back at the city’s swarms of irritating street performers). But MoonFest still had a special place in the hearts and wallets of Brightonians, and the growing cluster of towns on shore seemed to promise a bumper harvest of visitors. Even the editor of the Palimpsest, who would usually have been delighted to print the rumors he’d been hearing about a mysterious death on Cloud 9 during the night, relegated the story to a small column on page 4 and filled his front page with Festival news instead.
Boo-Boo’s Bevy of Beauties Boosts Brighton!
Lady Mayoress Boo-Boo Pennyroyal predicted yesterday that this year’s MoonFest celebrations will be Brighton’s best ever. Mrs. Pennyroyal (39)— pictured at left posing for the Palimpsest’s photographer along with a bevy of her most beautiful handmaidens—will tonight play hostess to the Middle Sea’s richest partygoers when the Pavilion opens its doors and dance floors for the Mayoral Ball.
“Everybody who is anybody is on their way to Brighton!” said Mrs. Pennyroyal. “What better place to celebrate Moon Festival than in this white city, adrift on an azure sea?”
Of course, it wasn’t really a white city on an azure sea at all; that was just how it looked from the observation platforms of Cloud 9. Down at deck level, Brighton was an off-white city, its rooftops streaked with gull droppings, its streets sticky with abandoned snacks, adrift on a slick of its own litter and sewage. But the weather was perfect: a soft onshore breeze to waft the air taxis across to Benghazi and Kom Ombo and cool their passengers on the journey back; the hot sun baking the metal pavements and releasing complex odors from the puddles of grease and vomit that last night’s revelers had left behind. As the day wore on, the city settled lower in the water, weighed down by the crowds of visitors who filled the streets and artificial beaches, and splashed and shrieked along the fringes of the Sea Pool. By midafternoon all the rubbish bins were overflowing, and the gulls fought one another for scavenged scraps of meat and pastry, swooping low over the heads of the long queues that had formed beneath the Pharos Wheel and outside the entrance to the Brighton Aquarium.