Chapter 16
They were.
“Hasn’t spontaneous combustion been pretty well debunked?” Beau wondered, still breathing hard. “Scientifically speaking?”
“Not when Dickens wrote Bleak House, it wasn’t.
” I was still wondering exactly what Chad and Chester were, or to be more exact, what Library Security was when it wasn’t dressed like something from my memories.
Where was it now, stuck out in some nebulous parchment sea like the one I’d flown over dragon-back with the Librarian?
I imagined the vast page turning over, the tidal eddies of words and paragraphs swirling, giving birth to Chad in his stained shirt and Chester in his aviators all over again.
The two of them emerging from the pages like monsters, but dripping words instead of water .
. . “Better get out of here,” I said, shaking off the uneasy image.
“I don’t know if they can find us twice in the same book, but I’d rather not have to margin-travel in a hurry.
” It had taken me absolutely forever, jabbing and swearing at the tablet by the light of a West Egg moon, to jump us from Fitzgerald to Dickens correctly.
“How many versions of Chuck and Charlie—”
“Chad and Chester.”
“—do you think we’re going to have to keep dispatching?
” Beau neatly avoided tripping over the hissing cat who streaked across the crowded shop floor.
Give Charles Dickens credit where it’s due: he had some shifty plot twists like spontaneous combustion, but at least he didn’t kill off the cat. “How many times can they come at us?”
“I have no idea.” I’d already asked the green tablet as much, but it just made cranky electronic noises at me.
I started pushing buttons on the touch screen—the Librarian had made it look easy, jumping from one book to another, but I had to navigate the search function and the selection bar and a pop-up that kept asking if I was sure I didn’t want to bookmark this chapter, and I was fairly certain the tablet was just screwing with me, but I couldn’t afford to piss it off.
“Please-please-please, just work,” I begged, and pages folded around us again.
Chad and Chester 3.0 found us in Treasure Island, where we managed to shove them off the deck of the Hispaniola into the heaving sea.
Versions 4.0 took quite a bit longer to find us in The Bride of Lammermoor, long enough that Beau and I had a chance for a few hours’ rest in the Highland heather before we had to engage in a little cliffside scuffling and shove the pair over the side of a Scottish crag.
“You are the only person I have ever met who’s read Sir Walter Scott,” Beau panted as the tablet whisked us off to our fifth book.
“Nobody reads Sir Walter Scott. The only reason I . . .” His voice trailed off as he got a gander at our new surroundings.
I was too busy doing a full-body squirm at the slithering feel of my clothes dissolving around me into a different period outfit, from the underwear (hello there, new corset) to the sudden weight of heavy skirts. “Czarina, you didn’t!”
I straightened my new plumed beaver hat over my equally new velvet mask.
“Welcome to The Three Musketeers. Plenty of palace guards around here we can shove Chad and Chester into once they show up.” Library Security very definitely kept learning with every creative new way we dispatched them—they now knew about swords, cars, fire, cliffs, and oceans—but I figured they didn’t know yet about French pikes.
“Take my arm, milady,” Beau said with a deep bow. “From the looks of things we’re in the H?tel de Ville in Paris, the king’s masked ball. The party of the year.”
“You’re always at the party of the year,” I retorted, taking Beau’s arm and trying not to gape around me.
This Alexandre Dumas shindig put our recent Gatsby bash to shame: the branching candelabras overflowed with fine beeswax candles; the fountains in the corners overflowed with champagne; the courtiers parading past overflowed with pearls and diamonds.
I smelled perspiration that had been covered up with perfume rather than deodorant; I smelled wine and hair oil and hot wax; heard the whisper of satins and the sibilant hiss of gossip.
Somewhere around here Milady de Winter was plotting devilry, d’Artagnan was thundering off to return the queen her diamond studs in the nick of time, and the book plot was unfolding, but this was a bubble of pure beauty.
Not the kind of bland, Disney-fied beauty you saw flat on a screen in a costume drama—the three-dimensional kind, full of sweat and verve and life.
I saw a pair of courtiers flirting up a storm without uttering a single syllable; I saw a footman surreptitiously swigging out of a champagne bottle while the aristocrats who underpaid him weren’t looking, and I couldn’t help a huge smile.
What a miraculous thing a book was, when you stopped to think about it: whole worlds springing to life from nothing more than squiggles on a page.
“I need a tabard,” Beau whispered. “I need a plumed hat and a lot of needle lace.” He’d managed to swipe a mask from somewhere; it didn’t hide his Regency attire, but the Library was doing its usual job of making us semi-invisible to all the courtiers with whom we were pressed into this big ballroom.
The French king was tut-tutting his way across the marble floor toward his queen, the sinister Cardinal Richelieu oiling along behind .
. . Beau’s eyes, I saw, were wide behind the mask’s eye slits, drinking in every flare of silk and glitter of crystal.
“I’m in Paris,” he said softly. “I always wanted to go to Paris.”
“Sorry it’s not the version with Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent on the Champs-élysées.”
“No, no, it’s this version I always wanted to see. Dumas’s version. I’d take a trip to modern Paris too, sure, but I always wanted to see the Paris that had royal balls and lace-topped boots and swashbuckling.”
“Beau Sato-Jones.” I looked at him behind the feather fan, which was also doing a nice job of hiding the green tablet. “Don’t tell me I’ve found your favorite book!”
“When I was nine, I persuaded my two older brothers to dress up with me as the Three Musketeers for Halloween.” His smile was tilted. “The one time they were ever willing to dress along with me.”
I started to ask why when his eyes drifted over my shoulder and he went stiff. “C and C incoming.”
I turned with a swish of satin skirts, seeing the familiar arrow of motion as French courtiers moved unconsciously out of the way of Library Security coming straight for us. “Right, I’ll draw them off toward the nearest royal guards, and then you quietly—”
But Beau was not in a mood for quiet. He threw his mask aside, drew his sword from his walking stick with a flourish of what I could recognize as an invisible musketeer’s tabard, howled, “One for all and all for one!”—and charged.
“Well,” I said afterward, “I’m sorry we won’t get to see more of Dumas’s Paris while we’re in town.”
We were in the clink, sort of. Even the Astral Library’s veiling anonymity couldn’t entirely hide from the king’s guards that a fight had broken out on the fringes of the ballroom floor, so after a royal pikeman dispatched Chad and Chester 5.
0 down to empty suits (that caused a certain amount of muttering, followed by complete amnesia), everyone had looked up to see Beau (disheveled, grinning, sword in hand) and me (disheveled, dismayed, corset busk in hand) and decided we needed to be marched from the premises before the king’s ballet was disturbed.
We’d probably have ended up in some dank cell shackled to a rack if things went by strict historical accuracy, but the guards seemed to get hazier and hazier on who we were the farther we got from the ballroom, so we finally got stuffed into what looked like an unoccupied anteroom and locked in with a mutter of We’ll see what the Cardinal has to say about this.
(No trouble on my part understanding the seventeenth-century French. Accelerated linguistic osmosis for the win!)
“I think you may have lost your sword,” I told Beau. The royal guards hadn’t had any trouble confiscating that before he could conceal it inside its innocuous cane sheath.
“A small price to pay for king and country.” Beau was still fencing up and down the little anteroom with the sheath. “Vive la roi!”
“Let me margin-travel us out of here,” I said, getting out the green tablet, which everyone’s seventeenth-century eyes had skipped right over, but Beau turned mid-parry.
“Can’t we stay a little longer? I don’t want to skip out of Dumas’s Paris just one chapter in.”
“You want to stay locked in a closet?”
“I’m betting we can see the dancing from here .
. .” Beau pointed up at a knob near the top of the wall.
Pulling a cushioned bench over, he hopped up and gave an experimental tug.
A panel slid to one side, and he crowed, “Ha, I was right—I bet the servants use this to spy on the courtiers. We’ve got a prime view and the king’s ballet is just kicking off. ”
I hesitated. I was tired—margin-traveling was getting to me, even after the rest we’d had in Walter Scott’s Highlands—and even if this was just a stuffy little anteroom, there was a tray on the nearest table that some maidservant or footman had clearly stashed away for later, with a bottle of Burgundy and an entire platter of little almond cakes.
My stomach growled under my boned stays, and I realized that outside the Astral Library’s suspension of appetite, I was hungry again.
Besides, it wouldn’t hurt to know how fast it took a resurrected Library Security team to catch up with us without jumping to a new book.
“I’m in,” I said, grabbing bottle and platter.