Rue’s stomach sank. Was he going to try to kiss her? She was both terrified and curious. Rue had allowed herself to be kissed before, of course she had, she wasn’t that old-fashioned. But not by Quesnel.

He bent down, face more serious than she’d ever seen it, looking actually handsome instead of boyishly cocky.

She opened her mouth to protest but found she hadn’t any words.

He leaned in closer.

And then she was hurtling through the air to land with a tremendous splash on her posterior in the duck pond.

Rue emerged sputtering but feeling in more control than she had since she first entered Countess Nadasdy’s abode. “Mr Lefoux, this dress is a Worth.” Her lovely grey gown had been through quite a lot that evening, what with the boiler explosion earlier and now this.

“Had to be done, mon petit chou. If you’re to be my captain shortly, I can’t spend weeks cooped up on an airship with you, constantly faced with the mad temptation to dump you overboard. You must see the necessity of getting such things out of the way now?”

Oddly, Rue did. “I understand your reasoning.” She waded out of the pond with as much dignity as possible, trailing lily-pads. Uncle Rabiffano’s lovely hairdo sagged and the seagull hat was a non-starter. It floated away, looking as if something monstrous had drowned.

Quesnel stepped up to help her out of the pond. Rue took his hand warily. But he acted the perfect gentlemen, just as if he hadn’t tumbled her in.

“I suppose I’ll have to leave Percy until tomorrow now, unless I’m lucky enough to dry out on the way back to town.”

“Percy?” Quesnel let go of her hand.

Rue almost slipped back into the pond. She recovered her balance and glared at him. He remembered his manners, embarrassed. However, when he tried to assist her in dumping water out of her boots, she issued him a sharp, “Shoo!”

Quesnel did not try again but he did not let the matter of Percy drop. “Professor Percival Tunstell? Are you in earnest? Please tell me you aren’t in earnest?”

“What, you thought you were the only impossible man I’d have to deal with? Much as I hate to admit it, Dama is as right about Percy as he was about you. He’s my best option. You two will have to get along. Without dunking each other in ponds, I hope. He’s unlikely to be as understanding as I.”

“But he’s so very annoying.”

Rue cocked her head. “Funny, that’s pretty much exactly what I said about you.”

Quesnel was so centred on the fact that he might be trapped on a dirigible for weeks on end with Professor Tunstell that he didn’t bat an eyelash at this insult. “I don’t know what anyone sees in that man.”

“I did hear a rumour that he inadvertently stole something from you last season. I hardly gave it credence at the time but I take it the rumour’s true? Care to elaborate?”

Quesnel bit his lip. “How on earth did you hear such a thing?”

“You forget about my father’s pack. Terrible gossips, werewolves. Worse than Dama’s drones.”

“Are they really?”

Rue nodded gravely. “Yes, less circumspect and louder about it. Plus the drones are actually more interested in politics and fashion than the liaisons of others. If he didn’t steal your waistcoat, hat, or social standing, they don’t give a fig. The werewolves, on the other hand, like to be tangled in relationships. And if they don’t know the details, they’ll make them up.”

“I see.” Quesnel, raised in a respectable sort of hive, clearly didn’t see at all. “But if Pompous Percy’s coming I don’t know if I…”

“Oh no, you can’t back out now. I have your word. And you dumped me in a pond. Fair dues, Quesnel.”

“You called me Quesnel. How nice. Now, how about calling me sweetheart? Wouldn’t that be even nicer?”

He was incorrigible. Sensing the imminent return of her customary urge to poke Quesnel Lefoux in the eye, Rue decided to make good her escape. She gave the man an insultingly brief curtsy before lifting her damp skirts high and saying, “I bid you good evening, Chief Engineer Lefoux. We leave in three days, with the aether current. Do tender my regards to your mother and beg my leave of the countess? I should be getting on.”

Quesnel bowed, taking the hint for once. “Lady Prudence. I look forward to our next meeting.”

Rue sniffed. “So do I, as long as it’s a good deal less soggy.”

CHAPTER THREE

RUE’S PROBLEM WITH REDHEADS

Professor Percival Tunstell moved out of his mother’s hive in Wimbledon and accepted a post as Oxford don the moment he came into his majority. After being summarily dismissed from Oxford for his radical theories on the transcendental sprout-shaped nature of the aetherosphere, he rented a decrepit bedsit behind the British Museum, off Rustle Square. “The better to facilitate my studies,” he explained to his aggrieved mother.

Nor would he tolerate vampire guards. Primrose, his dearly beloved and barely countenanced twin, might secretly enjoy the status conferred by a persistent supernatural escort but Percy spent the lion’s share of his days cooped up in his library researching the breeding habits of sand fleas. He did not require a vampire nanny. Nor, for that matter, did the fleas. After the third of his mother’s minions returned to the Wimbledon Hive with slashes from a wooden letter opener, Baroness Tunstell stopped sending them. Percival Tunstell was nothing if not a great fan of learning. If that education involved sharp pointy sticks, he applied himself just as diligently as to other forms of research and with far more uncomfortable results to those around him. In the end, Queen Ivy gave up mothering her son, and Percy stopped poking her vampires with letter openers.