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inside.”
    “It’s starting to get dark.” Sophronia turned to their erstwhile headmistress. “She’s simply going to have to do her job.”
    Dimity took a deep breath, sat down on the bench next to Monique, and shook the older girl’s arm.
    “What do
you
want?”
    “We don’t know the academy’s location, and neither does the driver.”
    Monique de Pelouse said nothing.
    Sophronia crossed her arms and glared at the older girl. Dimity looked back and forth between the two for a moment, then crossed her arms and glared as well. Though perhaps not quite so fiercely.
    Finally, Monique relented. “Oh, very
well
!” She banged on the roof with her parasol handle. The cab door opened and the coachman stuck his head in.
    Monique said, “Take Shrubbery Lane to the Nib and Crinkle Pub, turn left, and follow the goat path behind the hedge. After an hour, the path ends in a thicket of trees. Go around to the right and then I shallimpthen I issue further instructions. And hurry. We must beat the sunset or we’ll never spot it.”
    “But madam, that’s straight out onto the moor.”
    “Of course it is. What could possibly have made you think we’d stop at the edge?”
    “There are stories about Dartmoor. People get lost in the mist and never return. Or are eaten by werewolves. Or are taken by vampires. Or are murdered by flywaymen.”
    At which juncture Monique proved she could do “commanding” far better than Sophronia. “Stop arguing, my man. You heard what I said about the sun.”
    Looking very uncomfortable, the put-upon coachman resumed his place. The tired horses started up once more.
    At first, everything seemed ordinary, but a few minutes up the goat path the carriage started to sway, buffeted by the most intense gusts of wind Sophronia had ever felt. She pressed her face against the window. Endless rolling grassland stretched around them, brown after a summer’s heat, waving in the wind. The moor was mist-shrouded in the distance. Here and there a coppice of trees or a small winding spring disturbed the monotony with a bright splash of green.
    “Is this all?” Sophronia was dubious.
    Dimity shrugged. “Windy.”
    “Don’t let it fool you,” Monique said with an unkind smile. “This is the
only
nice bit. Soon enough the rocks will sprout up like broken bones, and the mist rises so fast you can’t see where you’re going or where you’ve been.”
    Sophronia was not spooked. “You think you can scare me with doomy talk? I’ve older sisters, I’ll have you know.”
    Monique gave her a dirty look before rapping on the carriage roof again and issuing a new set of directions.
    The carriage turned, this time following some invisible path out onto the heath. The mist began closing in around them, or they were moving into it—hard to tell which.
    Sophronia actually began to feel a tiny bit of dread in the pit of her stomach.
What if there really are werewolves roaming the moor?
    And then, there it was. The mist broke. The last rays of the sun cast a long shadow out of the carriage and lit up Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy forYoung Ladies of Quality. And no, the school wasn’t dashing around the moor on hundreds of tiny little legs. It was bobbing above it in chubby floating majesty.

T HE C ORRECT C ONFIGURATION OF A F INISHING S CHOOL
     
    M y goodness,” said Sophronia. “It looks like a caterpillar that has overeaten.”
    And it did. It wasn’t so much a dirigible as three dirigibles mashed together to form one long chain of oblong, inflated balloons. Below them dangled a multilevel series of decks, most open to the air, but some closed off, with windows reflecting back the dying sun. At the back, a colossal set of propellers churned slowly, and above them billowed a massive sail—probably more for guidance than propulsion. A great quantity of steam wafted out from below the lower back decks, floating away to join the mist as if responsible for creating it. Blags.ck smoke puffed