Since it was the day of the graf’s birthday ball, the whole front wing had to be spotless. Doncia and Isolde had set off all the robots, the sweepers and the dusters, into the grand entrance, the Great Reception Hall, the Hall of Art, the Audience Hall, and all the main passages of the front wing, and Doncia spent most of her time sneezing and emptying dust trays. Once Isolde saw that Doncia was becoming competent, she handed her the command anrenn.

‘I’m off to help Dugald,’ Isolde said, ‘You seem to have this under control. Start sending them upstairs in the dumbwaiter, and have them clean everywhere guests might go.’

‘Yes, Isolde,’ Doncia said. She hadn’t seen a pufferfish or any other spook all morning, and was feeling quite useful and important. She chased after a dusting robot in the Hall of Art, tapped its red button, held the command anrenn against its turret, and sent it to the dumbwaiter.

The dumbwaiter was in a service passage just off the green corridor before the dragonfly chamber. The robot waited for her there, and when she opened the door it went in. It must have known to do that by itself.

She closed the door, pulled out the lever that selected the next floor, and pushed in the clutch to send it up, but since the dumbwaiter was not for people, she had to go the long way, up the curved marble staircase in the Great Reception Hall. She’d only been on the second floor once before, and was still amazed by the different perspective, looking down from the balcony to the shiny floor, where robots still worked. Swirls of dust floated into the air, filling the evenly spaced shafts of light from the front windows, making bars of twinkling gold.

When she got back to the dumbwaiter she opened the door and the robot came out and stopped. Doncia didn’t have a good idea of the layout, so she commanded it to dust the corridor where they stood. It began immediately, gently tickling the walls and paintings with the dusters on its specially extended feelers.

‘Good boy,’ she mumbled at it, and left to get the next robot. One by one she got all ten to the second floor, and by then had to do another round of tray emptying.

Doncia was relieved when Isolde returned for a moment with more empty dust sacks. Doncia dragged the full sacks to the dumbwaiter and sent them down, then went down herself and towed them on a trolley to the bins out past the mermaid pool.

She was so filthy she dreamed of throwing herself in with the bronze mermaids, despite the chill of the clear, cold day, to clean off the dust, swim with the goldfish, and float with the water lilies. Instead she went back to work.

Doncia supervised the robots for a while before deciding the job was done, then started sending them all back down. She counted them off.

She got to nine; one was missing. She knew it was a duster, since she’d just emptied the trays of all the sweepers.

‘Where are you?’ she mumbled, and started along the corridor. At the balcony overlooking the broken dragonfly aircraft, she leaned on the wrought-iron railing and looked down, realising this was where she’d first seen Maynard looking down at her. There was no puka this time.

That made her remember her pocketwatch. She took it from her apron and squeezed it between her palms. The reassuring feeling suffused her, and she felt for echoes. It was a complex space with so many arches and balconies, it was difficult to get a sense of everything, but she concentrated on the kind of echoes she expected from the brassy surface of the robots, and felt the ones lined up in the corridor downstairs, all nine.

Where was the missing duster? She closed her eyes and concentrated harder. Nothing.

She gave up with the pocketwatch and retraced her steps back past the broad balcony around the Great Reception Hall, and along toward Countess Sabra’s chambers at the far end. She reached the countess’s antechamber and looked through the open doors at the arched entrance. There was no sign of the robot. She’d never been this far along, and probably shouldn’t be there, but she had to find the robot; she didn’t fancy another of Isolde’s scoldings.

She stepped into the antechamber. A wide row of windows looked to the lake over the spread wings of a silently screaming gargoyle. Late morning sunshine streamed onto complex patterned carpets which led to a rather dark private passage.

There was the robot! It was dusting the stripy papered walls.

‘What are you doing here?’ she whispered. She pushed its red button. It kept scuttling back and forth, dusting, and slowly rotating its turret, as if it was searching, and not really concentrating on the dusting at all, which it had obviously completed many times over.

She smacked the button harder. It kept going.

Was this just a malfunction? It had to be, otherwise why would it be lurking around in the countess’s private passage?

She smacked it harder still, twice. This time it stopped.

Finally. She held the anrenn against its turret and commanded it to return to the dumbwaiter. It twitched its dusters and scuttled off in the correct direction. Greatly relieved, and greatly perplexed at its strange behaviour, Doncia followed. Had it been spying? How much did it actually see with that telescope-like eye stalk?

She was just being silly and suspicious. It was more likely her original command had been too vague and it had gone too far and become confused.

🔸⏱️🔸 

After lunch Doncia, Piri, Moni, and a few of the others formed a small mopping army. Doncia had the green corridor, and she worked systematically from the servants’ end toward the Great Reception Hall. If any pufferfish appeared she was too busy to see them. At the dragonfly chamber she needed to change the dirty water, so she returned the mop to the wheeled bucket to push it back to the service room, but felt like she was being watched. She didn’t want to look up, fearing it was the ghostly puka, or perhaps a pufferfish, and not wanting to see them so she didn’t have to face the challenge of believing in them. Crazy people saw visions; if she didn’t see them, then it would mean she wasn’t touched like her father.

Maybe it was just Maynard again, or one of the other maids, up on the balcony. She dared a glance—no one. Not crazy! She had to get on with her work. She grabbed the mop handle and started pushing the bucket.

The feeling of being watched intensified, but she ignored it and kept pushing. The normally beige striped walls of the corridor turned a murky looking yellow. She stopped to take one hand from the mop handle and slip it into her apron pocket. She found the comforting cool metal of her pocketwatch.

A little way ahead a figure appeared. It was the beautiful boy, with his dark purple coat and bald head. His night-dark eyes stared from beneath his eyebrows, and he was biting into his bottom lip.

She stopped and stared back. Piri had seen the beautiful boy also, so Doncia didn’t think she could just wish him away with her pocketwatch; he was definitely real.

‘Wait,’ she said quietly. She wanted to talk to him, to ask him why he kept appearing. She left the bucket and hurried towards him.

He pressed his hands together like she’d seen him do before, but then held one palm toward her, and shook his head rapidly.

She stopped. He looked left and right, then back at her, and blinked once. Dark green vines appeared around him, with dank, heavy leaves. Then he and the vines and leaves vanished. Doncia was left standing there, holding her pocketwatch.

At least the feeling of being watched had stopped. Had he been responsible for it stopping, or had he been the one watching her?

She looked around, daring any pufferfish or puka to show itself. The corridor was silent and empty. She went back for the mop and bucket, feeling somehow cheated.

🔸⏱️🔸 

Steam issued from the silverware, misting the polish and carrying a rich aroma of waterfowl and leek. With one gloved hand, Doncia steadied the tureen on the trolley as the wheels bumped from the timber kitchen floor onto the stone of the colonnade, and again at the threshold of the Great Reception Hall. The quartet played Straube, and the shrill violins seemed to twist through the air. She ignored the artfully costumed guests who were milling about and chatting with wine glasses in their hands, unless of course they actually got in the way.

Thankfully the serving table was close, and she’d almost reached it, when someone did get in the way. She looked up. It was Maynard, and beside him another older boy, and a tall girl with an incredible amount of dark hair and a silk gown with lines of pearls.

‘Doncia,’ he said. ‘I was just telling Otis it was you who gave me the idea which helped me finish my invention. He wanted me to point you out, but here you are!’

Otis had a round face and a broad white smile. Like Maynard he wore a black velvet dinner suit and white cravat. Doncia wanted to shrink, but managed to smile back.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Otis Delgarde. Well done with your idea. Maynard explained it to me, and we finally got the thing working.’

‘Hi,’ Doncia said, tightening her grip on the trolley. Otis must be the son of Mr Delgarde.

‘And this is Carmen,’ said Maynard. ‘Otis’s sister.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Doncia said, thinking what a stupid boring thing to say, and wanting to reach for her pocketwatch. Carmen smiled like a fairy-tale princess, loose ringlets framing her face. Doncia imagined the walls had turned green, but didn’t dare glance at them to check.

‘You are Doncia Beltran,’ Carmen said, ‘the professor’s daughter, aren’t you?’

Doncia nodded.

‘You poor thing. It must have been so very difficult.’

Doncia nodded again. She had to say something, anything, not stand there with her mouth open.

‘It’s all right. I was very little. I never really knew him.’

‘Perhaps you’re as clever as he was,’ Otis said.

‘I’m glad to have been able to help Maynard,’ Doncia said, ‘he’s been very kind, but though I’d like to, I don’t really know anything about technologics, so I guess it was a lucky guess. It’s been great to meet you, and I’d like to be able to stay and talk, but I’ve got to get on, or this soup will go cold, and I’ll be in trouble.’

She sounded very stiff and unfriendly, and wanted to draw the words back, and stay and chat with Maynard and his important friends, who did seem like they could be fun, but she’d grown up the daughter of a laundress, not the daughter of a famous professor, and she had to serve, not enjoy a life of privilege. She pushed the trolley to the table, imagining just for a moment she could throw off her apron and have other people wait on her.

She put on the second glove, and lifted the tureen and the smaller dishes from the trolley to the table, then took both gloves off and started to pull the trolley back out to the colonnade. She saw Maynard, Otis, and Carmen still standing together and laughing. Obviously the laughter was about her, and the light from the chandeliers seemed to go a sickly greenish brown. She kept her eyes averted and somehow made it to the colonnade. In the shadows she stopped for a moment to grope in her apron pocket for her pocketwatch. She held it tight, closed her eyes for a moment, and breathed. They weren’t laughing about her—she just wasn’t even that important to them. When she got to the kitchen threshold she realised they had actually been praising her, and they’d all been friendly and charming. Why she was her own worst enemy?

She made way for Piri, who was coming past with a trolley of entrees.

‘You all right, Doncia?’ Piri said. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

Doncia laughed. ‘I’m just glad to have you as a friend.’

Piri rolled her eyes and grinned. Doncia headed into the kitchen to load her trolley again.