“Folly Fennington in the flesh,” Melly murmured, and hurried to catch Griff up.
Eluned took a moment to steady herself before following. Here he was, this man, finally standing right in front of them. He might be a murderer. He might simply have commissioned an automaton. Or he might have had nothing to do with them at all. Now was their chance to find out.
Lord Fennington had a mournful face, floppy brown hair, and a booming sort of voice, and he rounded out his words as if playing with the way they sounded. “Come, come, come,” he said, beckoning them toward the pavilion and holding out an anxious hand toward the display he’d apparently been working on. School uniforms. There were a dozen mannequins, all dressed in dark blue and creamy-beige.
“Now tell me bluntly, no holding back. Should it be the double line of red, or the single?”
Eluned didn’t see any red at first, then spotted a pencil line around the cuff of one of the jackets. And the four-panel summer shendy had a plummy double line making a border around the two side panels.
“There’s hardly any difference,” Griff said, as Griff would. “But I like the double more.”
“One vote for the double!” Lord Fennington said. “Can we gain a consensus? Any champions for the opposing view?”
“Two is better,” Nabah agreed.
“One,” Eleri said immediately.
“One,” Melly said.
“A tie! But one last vote to settle the matter.”
Since he sounded so serious, Eluned took a moment to study the collection of uniforms, personally doubting most people would even notice the difference. Then she fished in the small pouch she had laced to her new day-belt, and found one of the coins Aunt Arianne had distributed earlier that week as an allowance.
A simple toss and catch, and then she said: “Two.”
Lord Fennington, fortunately, found this funny, his long face lighting as he laughed. “Yes, yes, the judgment of Sucellos! Two it shall be.”
“Lakshmi’s smile,” Nabah added, looking pleased.
“And how nice that the Daughters are taking an interest in Tangleways!” Lord Fennington added approvingly to Nabah, before saying to his companion, an excessively handsome blond man, “Matthiel, take these appalling one-line variations away.”
“My Lord,” said the man, then picked up two of the mannequins with effortless grace, and walked off.
“Have you been on the tour?” Lord Fennington asked then. “You mustn’t miss it. Hedley’s been with the estate for decades, and has endless tales of Lord Webley’s experiments and inventions.”
“Inventions?” Eleri said. “Engineer? Or scientist?”
“Both, in a manner of speaking. He called himself a deiographer and was devoted, you might well say, to the Science of Gods. What sparks them to Answer? Is there some unifying purpose or meaning? Can devices be constructed to quantify their energies and boundaries? A brilliant man, though, of course, more than a little mad.” He gave them a small, shy smile. “Speaking as an authority on the subject, quite potty.”
“Eccentric,” Griff corrected, before Eluned could decide if it would be rude to laugh. “If you have money, you get to be eccentric, which sounds a lot more fun.” Then he held out his hand with the grave formality that he sometimes produced to get his way, and said: “My name is Griff Tenning. These are my sisters Eleri and Eluned Tenning.”
Eluned held her breath, searching the man’s face for any hint of recognition, but all he did was shake Griff’s hand with matching formality and say:
“Dyfed Fennington. And do only two of your companions have names?”
“Melly Ktai,” Griff said slowly, a little too obviously still searching for some hint of reaction. Then he shrugged, adding: “Nabah hasn’t told us her last name.”
“Satkunan,” Nabah said. “Do you mean to say there are machines here designed to—to measure gods?”
“Indeed! Or there were. Unfortunately the Mini-T carted most of it off years ago, and handing over anything interesting left behind was part of the conditions of sale. Not,” he added, with a conspiratorial gleam, “that we didn’t give everything a good and thorough dusting before shipping it off. And you can see the housing of some of the larger pieces during the tour, since it’s not as if they could pack up the clock tower.”
“My Lord, the podium is ready,” said the man called Matthiel, returning with a sheaf of papers.
“Already? Where, where is the day going?” Lord Fennington took the papers and fanned his face with them. “My young friends, I must rush. Do, do enjoy yourselves.”
He was striding off as he spoke, and there was no more time for leading questions. They’d lost their chance, at least for now.
Eluned turned to the man called Matthieclass="underline" “Can we help you with the other mannequins?”
“Thank you, but there’s no need,” the man said. “Don’t miss My Lord’s speech, damini.”
Exchanging a glance with Eleri, Eluned decided that it would be best to wait for another opportunity before they tried the blunt approach. “We won’t,” she said, as neutrally as she could manage.
“What’s a Mini-T?” Griff asked, as the man lifted another two mannequins and departed.
“Ministry of Science and Technology,” Eleri said. “In charge of airships, the Patent Office, things. Let’s go find the Aunt.”
This proved less easy to do than to say. When they reached the central garden, they found it packed with people, apparently back from touring the school facilities. It gave some measure of how large Tangleways must be, that there’d been so many people about, completely unseen.
It took half Lord Fennington’s speech just to spot Aunt Arianne, and by the time they’d worked their way nearly to her the speech was over and everyone was streaming about chasing refreshments, lining up for other tours, talking to the teachers, or gossiping.
“Too many hats,” Melly said, standing on tip-toe as she tried to spot where Aunt Arianne had gone.
“Give it up,” Eleri said.
“Shall we try one of the tours?” Nabah suggested, and that’s what they did, and then stopped for refreshments before splitting up—ostensibly to hunt individually, but more so Eleri, Griff and Eluned would have a better chance of button-holing Lord Fennington again.
Tired of crowds, Eluned abandoned the chase altogether, and found stone stairs down into the sunken garden moat. There in cool quiet she found moss, lacy ferns, and a treasury of saxifrages clinging to rocks and tucked in hollows.
Memory of that morning soured her appreciation. What was wrong with her? It was silly and senseless not to have brought her sketchbook on a trip like this. But she loathed constantly trying and failing and not understanding what was wrong.
Hating that this was tying her in knots when she was supposed to be concentrating on finding Mother and Father’s killer, Eluned followed the high arch of the drainage channel out of the garden, trying to decide whether Lord Fennington had really not recognised their names, or was a very good actor. And what did they do if he simply denied everything?
The drainage channel ended in an ornate grate: interlinked hands, with oxalis growing up through it. Eluned crossed this and found a slope of green down to a river—a tributary of the Tamesas, according to Griff. To her left was a path and she followed it as it curved through a small patch of trees to, inevitably, another folly: a circle of columns with a domed roof.
There was a woman sitting alone on the steps, and Eluned started to turn away, then recognised the hair colour and reversed direction.
“You’re not wearing your hat,” she said, as Aunt Arianne turned her head at her approach.