Confidential Secretary to the Dux Bellorum

I almost told Eldridge MacKinnon he couldn't print that shite about the Academy, but I don't honestly know that they could have come up with anything less damning and maybe it'll light a fire under the collective arse of the Board of Governors. I need to get the meeting materials ready and of course Dracaena doesn't have anything yet for me because somebody tried to murder one of her boys this weekend. Galina says Nicodemo Malaspina isn't even coming in till maybe noon. And I know Gabrielle Thibault is going to try something. Dammit.

Also, could he have picked a worse day to have that infernal machine delivered? I know it will make Mrs Scalara's work a thousand times easier, but she is going to spend the entire morning fiddling around with it setting up programmes for drawing her charts. And she has been gone half the weekend to Trevena, and she did not do any baking this weekend. (She probably couldn't get sugar, although I know she must have apples, whether or not she has pears. It has been hard to get sugar all week.) It's a difference engine. They have another one in Bletchley. And that is all well and good, but I'm in no mood to put up with Howard Lovelace today. Charlotte Rennell is a bloody fucking saint.

Morning comes too early in the day. I wonder if Bran and Galina are having the same kind of day that I'm having. Probably. Galina almost certainly is. And I want a cooker like they have at Mysteries proper, but when I said that Bran just stared at me as though he were trying to decide whether to have me exorcised or committed.

As with all personal logs, under the strongest possible protection:

Oh bloody fucking hell. I do not get paid enough to have to go over Light of the Home pre-publication as well as the bloody Herald. I've got the analysts on the damn thing, but Lalage Parkinson owns it, and she's a bitch, not a traitor, so I don't expect them to find anything except that damn letter.

As with all personal logs, under the strongest possible protection:

(  I really didn't want to have to take this seriously. )

As with all personal logs, under the strongest possible protection:

Honoria Lady Delgardie just sent me three copies of The Tatler. It’s really not a secret that I don’t much care for Mrs Scalara. And I think the Boss knows that if I had a woman like Priscilla Chattox, I’d never in a million years let her go. But over the past few weeks I’ve been forced to admit that he was never really very good for Pris, mostly by Pris herself.

And even if I hated Lavinia (which I can’t, as much as I’d like to sometimes; she’s too damned useful), no-one in the world deserves this. Someone also seems to have gone to a great deal of trouble to dredge up all the dirt they could find on the Dashwood kid, implying without ever directly saying that he was a very expensive rent boy. And implying that he had something to do with Nicodemo Malaspina, who of course buys boys, all the time—the fact that he’s had dozens of mistresses he’s been seen with in public, all female, is immaterial, anyone who’s in love with Lady Leffoy must secretly be a great shirt-lifter, because she’s such a boy, she is. Idiots.

And the ton always want to buy kids who belong to people they know, who wear glasses a foot thick and reek of wormwood half the time. Someone out there has a very poor grasp on the difference between asking people to suspend disbelief and asking them to hang it from the neck until dead. Dashwood a whore? Making money at it, even? I truly don’t think so.

Thankfully all these accusations are sharing space with an article on Stalking The Elusive Bandersnatch, which (hopefully) should give people an idea of how seriously they’re to be taken. Nonetheless, Lady Delgardie’s having them confiscated (which I don’t think is a very good idea, though I do understand her logic in doing so). And I don’t look forward to the moment when the Boss actually sees this garbage. Though I’m turning them over to the analysts anyway; somebody might have hidden something important in the really ridiculous shite.

Marcus Pendry has a bright career in basket-weaving ahead of him. The only real question at this point is whether it’ll be on the intractable ward at Priscilla’s Resort for the Dangerously Eccentric or out on the Forgotten Isle. Hopefully, he’ll stay put and not run.

So I got the latest load of crackpot letters back from the divinatory pool. I saved the best ones to read to the boss and Mrs Scalara at luncheon tomorrow. It's free entertainment, which we can all use these days. The big page of quotations from Revelation? The guy who sent it didn't put any wards on it. It came from Aristotle Mablin.

Boss is going to love this. Just love it. I know it's a crack at Mrs Scalara. But if Mablin thinks Mrs Scalara is the Whore of Babylon...who does he think the beast she's riding is?