Free The Derring-Do Club and the Year of the Chrononauts by David Wake Page A

start her homework.
    There were mysteries here too: that horrid man’s arrest and the disappearance of Uncle Jeremiah. It would be exciting to solve the puzzle and it could even be an adventure, providing Earnestine didn’t find out, forbid it and thus spoil everything.
    However, her main worry was that she was really hungry.
    Macaroons wouldn’t be too much to ask for, surely?
    Or Garibaldi’s?
    Or cake?

Chapter V
    Miss Deering-Doolittle
    And they didn’t see her off the next day.
    Cook had made bacon and eggs, which she wolfed down.
    Earnestine walked to work again.
    The newspaper vendors were full of news of a Member of Parliament, who had been arrested.
    Earnestine asked one: “What’s happened?”
    “It’s Foxley, Miss. They’ve only gone and nabbed him.”
    “Foxley?”
    “The Right Honourable, brother of the Earl no less, and his were a safe London seat.”
    “What for?”
    “Crimes, Miss, dreadful crimes. And they act all high and mighty and better than us, going on, he did, about family values, but that’s their class for you, begging your pardon, Miss.”
    She bought a paper, folded it and tucked it under her arm and marched to Queensbury Road feeling quite the important business woman, if such a thing could exist.
    When she arrived, she glanced right and left. The street was empty, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched.
    Boothroyd was already making the tea.
    “Shall we have biscuits?” he said.
    Earnestine wasn’t sure he realised that she’d left, been away the night and returned.
    “Please.”
    Her first task was to remove the piles that Boothroyd had moved back onto the desk and generally return things to that state they’d been when she’d finally called it a day yesterday. Next, there being no other plan, she simply picked a place and selected the first application. As she worked through, she found various objects to use as paperweights: a brick, a rather beautiful crystal that had been encased in rock, a trilobite and a piece of metal that looked like an important part of something else.
    One sculpture she uncovered was a teak box with a strange removable handle on the top and a dial on the front. It didn’t work as a paperweight because it was attached to the wall by a twisted cord.
    “Oh, the telephonic apparatus!” said Boothroyd. “At last, I know what that ringing noise was.”
    Earnestine’s system was simple: a place for everything and everything in its place.
    After a while the room suggested a gallery displaying sculptures and object d’art, which was quite pleasing.
    “Mister Boothroyd, may I suggest the fire for this one?”
    “Miss Deering–Dolittle, it may be important.”
    “One can buy this item at a good hardware store.”
    “Can you?”
    “Indeed, we have a cast iron one ourselves at home.”
    “The fire then,” Boothroyd conceded. “What would I do without you?”
    “I’ve only been here a day, Mister Boothroyd.”
    “And already you’ve made yourself indispensable, my dear.”
    “Thank you, Mister Boothroyd, one tries one’s best.”
    “I think you should take a break,” Boothroyd suggested.
    Earnestine realised that she did fancy a cup of tea, but Boothroyd instead suggested the Duelling Machine in the warehouse.
    “An excellent way to blow off steam,” he said and he left her to it.
    Earnestine examined the instructions, squinting at the spidery additions in the margins. The Jacquard cards, hard and made from a material Earnestine didn’t know, went in a slot at the back… no, this way round and the handle wound the internal springs. There were three: back, right – quite stiff – and the front, which whirred away until she realised that there was a catch. Finally, the instructions said it was started by dropping a gauntlet on the Activation Plate, see Fig 1. There was a heavy leather glove supplied for the principle, which had been loaded with lead shot and sewn shut. To deactivate it, all one had to do was