The Friday Society Read Free Page B

then, with a sharp nod, she directed the man to open the door to bright daylight.

3
    An Unexpected Guest
    “ L ET HIM SLEEP it off,” instructed Cora as she and Lord White entered his darkened foyer. Barker nodded and took over escorting duties, leading his lordship up the grand staircase.
    Cora sighed and slowly removed her hat, gloves, and jacket. But she didn’t have time to relax yet. She still had to unpack that shipment which might or might not have arrived, and which she was obviously now doing alone, considering that his lordship could barely carry a conversation, let alone heavy boxes.
    She made her way along the dark hall to Lord White’s library.
    A modern addition to the Tudor home, it stood two stories tall, with bookshelves packed with every book imaginable covering all walls. It had a huge fireplace at one end opposite an equally huge double set of doors. A giant-domed, stained-glass skylight lit the place by day, and nearly a hundred lanterns by night. Rugs from all corners of the earth lay wherever they damn well felt like, covering one another and the floor. And in the center of the room was a giant globe that spun slowly on its axis.
    Cora loved his lordship’s library. Who could blame her? For someone who loved reading as much as she did, it was pure heaven.
    But what she loved even more was the lab beneath it. Only a handful of people knew of its existence, and of Lord White’s private business operation: his staff, obviously his lordship himself, and Cora. Anyone who commissioned an invention from his lordship did so through a third party.
    Cora made her way over to the stack of books at the foot of the globe. It looked like they’d been piled there without much thought. Hidden underneath a volume of The Origin of Species was an oversized copy of Dante’s Inferno . She opened the book. It was hollow and empty except for the giant brass button that stared up at her. And, as most giant buttons tended to do, it invited her, by its mere giant buttonness, to push it.
    She did.
    The globe beside her slowly stopped its rotation.
    There was a moment of nothingness.
    And then.
    A seam appeared in the middle of the globe, cutting the top hemisphere in two. Light poured out of it, up toward the darkening skylight. Slowly the seam grew wider as each side of the top hemisphere pulled apart and sank into the lower hemisphere until the latter was all that remained, open, like a giant punch bowl.
    Cora climbed up the stepladder that stood conveniently to the globe’s side and looked down into the depths. A curling wrought-iron staircase wound deep into the ground, leading to a white marble floor.
    Cora skipped lightly down the steps.
    Then she pulled her pistol from her purse and placed it firmly between the fifteenth and sixteenth vertebrae of the stranger standing in the middle of the room.
    “Is that a pistol you’ve placed firmly between my fifteenth and sixteenth vertebrae?”
The young gentleman’s voice was surprisingly calm, Cora thought, considering the situation.
    “It is indeed,” she replied.
    The young man didn’t say anything for a second—Cora assumed probably because he hadn’t been expecting the person who was threatening him to be, you know, a girl.
    Then:
    “I ask only because there have been occasions when an individual might pretend to be threatening a person with a pistol when really they are using something far more mundane. Like a finger, maybe.”
    “I suppose that could happen.”
    “And if I spin around and use a spectacular set of moves I learned while at school, and I disarm you of this instrument of death, I will indeed be removing a weapon and not, say, pulling your finger.”
    “I can assure you, sir, this is no finger.”
    There was a sudden flurry of activity as the young man spun on the spot, his arms a blur, and Cora found herself no longer holding on to her pistol. Why did he underestimate her like that? I mean, who threatens someone without a backup plan?