14
despite a thesaurus, alice is rendered wordless— the naked truth—the bechdel test is failed—spy central—just desserts—knock on wood—lectio interruptus
It is better to have kissed and been interrupted than never to have kissed at all. This Alice reminded herself as she rebuttoned her bodice. Even so, her heart drooped miserably, despite the carefully nonchalant disguise upon her face. With a sigh, she reached for the emergency thesaurus she kept in a skirt pocket, seeking comfort. A quick, expert flick through the pages brought her to an altogether familiar list of words.
Chaste, celibate, pure, virtuous . . .
A knock on the door saved her from further sighing. She returned the thesaurus to her pocket and was proceeding toward the door when Daniel emerged from the washroom.
“Was that someone knocking?” he asked.
Alice stopped mid-step to stare at him. He was dressed only in trousers and shoes, his braces hanging loose, as he applied a towel to his naked torso. This was not the first time Alice had been made privy to what existed beneath a man’s shirt; after all, she’d been raised in a coeducational facility and had worked undercover as a chambermaid. But Daniel’s torso was not like all the other torsos. It was special. It had clearly been honed into a model of efficiency rather than brawn: not one inch was superfluous to its purpose of neutralizing whatever A.U.N.T. deemed a threat. Interesting ridges of muscle banded its tanned surface. An even more interesting patch of fine dark hair dusted between the pectoral muscles. And a vertical line of hair below the navel, descending into his trousers, was so extremely interesting, Alice’s brain had to go have a wee lie-down.
“Uughhngh,” was her response to his barely recollected question.
He gave her a bemused look. She did not see it, however, because she had fixated on his forearms and was busy trying to consult her internal thesaurus for just the right adjective . . . only the pages kept catching alight . . .
“Shall I answer it, then?” he said, and Alice dimly realized that the knock had sounded again.
“Um-hm,” she managed to say.
His expression deepened from bemusement to concern, but he crossed the room and opened the door. Veronica stood in the corridor.
“Yes, what is it?” Daniel asked in a brusque voice.
The junior agent stared at him. “Unghghn,” she said.
With a weary sigh, Daniel ran a hand over his brow. At the revelation of a hairy armpit, Veronica dropped her duster. Stepping aside, Daniel made way for the young woman to enter the room. As his back presented itself for Alice’s view, she dropped her own internal, metaphorical duster.
There was the tattoo that had been hinted at above his collar: a barbed rose vine winding up his spine, beautiful, elegant, vicious. That he had the symbol of A.U.N.T. etched into his skin troubled Alice, although she could not quite grasp why. A rose against his breast would have been one thing (she paused to imagine it); a tangled vine with more thorns than roses, superimposed on his backbone, suggested a deeper, harsher meaning than she dared to contemplate.
“What do you want?” he said.
Alice drew breath to ask if she could touch the tattoo, but then Veronica spoke, alerting her to the fact that Daniel’s question had been addressed to the junior agent, not her. Which was just as well. Further practice of marital touching might behoove the mission, but actually participating in the mission would no doubt behoove it even more.
“You must come at once, sir!” Veronica urged. “There is a calamity in the kitchen.”
“What kind of calamity?” Daniel asked, folding his towel serenely. “Has someone been murdered?”
“No, sir,” Veronica said.
“Has Mrs. Etterly’s tiger got free and gone on a rampage?” Alice asked.
Veronica frowned. “No, ma’am.”
“Has—”
“The cake for tomorrow’s morning tea has been ruined!”
Daniel looked at her until she flinched. “Please, sir. Just come and see.”
“Fine.”
As Daniel returned to the washroom to dress again, Alice and Veronica shared a speaking glance. “Oh my giddy aunt,” Veronica whispered.
“Your giddy A.U.N.T.?” Alice whispered back, confused.
Veronica’s eyebrows gave a suggestive dance. “I’ll bet that man has a golden gun, if you know what I mean.”
“No, it’s metal, with—”
“And balls of steel.”
Alice felt like she had fallen entirely off the roller coaster of this conversation. “Do you refer to some variation of cricket?”
Veronica fanned herself with her apron. “I wonder if he would shoot me if I asked?”
Alice stared with concern at the girl. She was rambling incoherently and expressing suicidal ideation; clearly, A.U.N.T. had overworked her!
At that moment, Daniel returned to the room—alas, covered once again by a shirt. He was, however, affixing the link of one cuff as he walked, and at the sight, Veronica and Alice both gave rapt sighs.
Daniel looked up with impatient confusion. “Are you quite well?”
“Just dreamy, sir,” Veronica said, her eyes unfocused as if she was looking right through the white linen of his shirt.
“Hm. Kindly wake up, Agent V-2, and take us to this calamity.”
They left the room. “Besides,” Alice murmured to Veronica as they waited for Daniel to lock the door, “gold is too soft for a gun. It would explode in your hand as soon as you pumped the trigger.”
The maid choked on a laugh. “I didn’t know you had a ribald sense of humor, Agent A.”
Before Alice could explain that she most certainly did not, Daniel glanced irritably at the women, and they fell into a prudent silence.
Veronica led them along the corridor and down the narrow service stairs. Entering the kitchen, they found half a dozen servants at work amongst the benches, sinks, and worktables. Everyone watched furtively, whispering amongst themselves, while Alice and Daniel crossed the room.
“There,” Veronica whispered, pointing to a crumb-covered sideboard as if it were a ghastly murder scene.
An elderly butler in an impeccable black suit turned to skewer them with a casually despotic look as they approached. “What?” he demanded, his gaze flicking over Daniel’s lack of jacket and Alice’s unbound hair. “If you’re the musicians, you’re late.”
“No, sir,” Daniel replied. “We’re on a mission from A.U.N.T.”
“Mr. Cranshaw, this is Agent A!” Veronica said excitedly. “And Agent B! Can you believe it?!”
Cranshaw frowned. “Keep your voice down, girl! Not everyone in this room is an A.U.N.T. operative. Annie over there washing the pots is a spy for the Wicken League of witches. The sous chef is a spy for Mr. Bassingthwaite’s uncle. Daisy the scullery girl is a spy for the real estate institute. And Jen the dairy maid is an innocent dairy maid.”
“Sorry, sir,” Veronica said, abashed.
“And someone is the enemy of us all,” Cranshaw added, turning his frown to the sideboard.
“What happened?” Alice asked, stepping closer to inspect the mess of cake crumbs. It lay in an almost exact rectangular shape, littered through with raisins, cherries, and those gummy yellow blobs you find too late in a mouthful and are forced to swallow. A rich odor of brandy wafted up. Fruitcake, she thought, wrinkling her nose.
To her amazement, the cake had been entirely flattened. While Alice could not regret its loss from tomorrow’s morning tea table, she was curious about how this might have occurred. As an Englishwoman, she had been subjected to traditional fruitcake every Christmas, and therefore knew the near impossibility of digesting it, let alone crushing it as a whole. Furthermore, the cake had been large, and yet the effect on it entirely uniform. She looked about for an object someone might have dropped on it, but saw nothing except a few crumbs that had made it all the way to the ceiling, and a large cake knife lying on the floor.
“What happened is that we were ruthlessly attacked!” Cranshaw declared, stabbing a finger at the crumbs.
From the corner of her eye Alice saw a brief, weary flicker across Daniel’s otherwise inscrutable expression. “Perhaps someone dislikes fruitcake,” he suggested.
The butler scoffed with all the derision of a man to whom a digestive system is but a fond memory. “To dislike fruitcake is unpatriotic. Besides, this was more than cake; it was a work of art. A perfectly to-scale replica of Starkthorn Castle. You have no idea the amount of effort that goes into such things. I spent an entire week supervising it being made. This brutal violence represents a serious threat! Queen Victoria’s life is not the only one in peril.”
“Hm,” Daniel said. Crouching, he withdrew a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and used it to pick up the cake knife. Veronica watched him avidly.
“Are you using the handkerchief so as to not transfer your fingerprints to the knife?” she asked.
“I am doing it because there is blood on the handle,” he told her, “and I do not wish to soil my fingers.”
“Blood!” Cranshaw said with dismay.
“Blood!” Veronica said with delight.
“Or perhaps only cherry juice,” Alice countered. “A good agent does not jump to conclusions.” Touching a fingertip to the knife, then to her tongue, she grimaced. “Blood. Ugh. Ugh.” She rubbed the heel of her hand against her tongue. “Can someone get me a glass of water? Ugh!”
As Veronica rushed to do so, Daniel passed the knife to Cranshaw, handkerchief and all. The butler took it gingerly.
“Do you have any suggestions as to suspects?” Daniel asked.
Cranshaw exhaled a laugh through his nostrils. “Boy, we are in a kitchen surrounded by double agents, in a castle filled with pirates. Everyone is a likely suspect.”
“Hm,” Daniel said. As a professional courtesy, he did not assassinate the butler for calling him “boy.”
“It seems unlikely a person could destroy a cake of this size, to this degree, without being observed,” Alice pointed out.
“We were all distracted,” Cranshaw explained, “watching the fireworks.”
Alice and Daniel blinked. “Fireworks?” Daniel asked.
“Yes, there was just now a fireworks show outside.” He paused, but the agents’ expressions remained vacant. “Lots of flashing light and noise? People cheering? You must have noticed!”
Alice and Daniel carefully did not look at each other. “We were busy,” Daniel murmured.
Cranshaw’s eyebrows rose in silent eloquence as he turned away to brush at a few raisins. Veronica returned with a glass of water, and while Alice gargled, Daniel surveyed the kitchen and its occupants.
“Nothing else was damaged? No actual—I mean no other suspicious incidents?”
“None.”
“Very well. Inform us if you have any further concerns.”
“Is that all?” Cranshaw practically vibrated with outrage. “Someone intends harm!”
“Trust us, sir. We will find the culprit.”
“So long as she isn’t standing in front of a fireworks display,” the butler muttered facetiously, but Alice and Daniel had already moved away. Veronica followed them back across the kitchen.
“What do you think?” she asked, her voice skipping like a little girl.
“I think we just wasted our time,” Alice said.
“Oh.” Now Veronica’s voice became a teenager in a black-walled bedroom listening to Leonard Cohen on the record player. “Mr. Cranshaw seemed so convinced.”
Daniel gave her a kind smile. “Perhaps, but we are the experts. Good night, V-2.”
They turned to the stairs.
“Hi-yah!”
A man dressed in black leaped wildly from the shadows, hands raised like weapons. Veronica yelped in shock. Daniel took a quiet step back, exasperation lining his brow. And Alice, being nearest, caught hold of the assailant, twisting his arm to restrain him.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“Ow!” he squealed. “I’m Hakim Evans, underfootman and junior A.U.N.T. agent. Ow, you’re hurting me!”
“Evans, are you mad?” Veronica whispered, jerking her head toward where the kitchen staff were watching in fascination.
Daniel crossed his arms and looked over the rim of his spectacles with the terrifying authority of a high-ranking agent and experienced butler. “Yes, please do disclose your mental status,” he said as Evans cowered. “Or give some other reason why you attacked a senior officer.”
“Mia Thalassi said you put her in a choke hold,” Evans explained tremulously. “She’s pretty much famous now because of it. I—I hoped you’d do the same with me.”
Alice released him with a disgusted exhalation. Daniel muttered something about twits. They turned away, heading up the stairs.
“Maybe just a punch to the jaw?” Evans called after them. “Or a bruised rib?”
Daniel said nothing, merely paused between one stair tread and the next.
The two younger agents fled.
“Juniors these days certainly are excitable,” Alice said as they continued up the stairs.
“I imagine you are used to it,” Daniel said. “Being A.U.N.T.’s second best agent and so beau— Um, I suppose you are often surrounded by admirers.”
“First best,” she answered automatically. But in fact she doubted anyone beyond Mrs. Kew and the Academy assessors had regarded her long enough to form an opinion of her, let alone an admiration. Some undecipherable emotion trembled within her at the thought, and she repressed it with brutal tranquility. “However, I am a master of disguise, so—”
Thwack!
Both agents drew their guns at the sudden sharp sound from the corridor above. They hurried up the stairs. At the top, Daniel placed a cautioning finger on his lips before stepping into the light of the corridor.
“Watch out!”
He ducked. A crossbow bolt flew over him and buried itself deep in a framed portrait of Queen Victoria hanging at the end of the corridor.
Thwack!
“Bull’s-eye!” someone shouted.
Alice turned, raising her gun in a double-handed grip—
And lowered it again as she saw a group of pirate ladies farther along the corridor.
At their forefront, Mrs. Etterly casually propped a pink, bejeweled crossbow against her hip. “Good heavens! What are you two doing on the servants’ stairs?” she asked, and turned wide-eyed to the other pirates. They murmured that this was indeed utterly, utterly déclassé behavior.
“We just went down for a late-night snack,” Alice said.
“Did you rob the kitchen?” Millie the Monster asked, eyeing their guns.
“No, of course not.”
“Huh.” The pirates exchanged meaningful glances again; apparently this had been the wrong answer. Mrs. Etterly loaded another bolt into her crossbow.
“What are you doing?” Alice asked warily. She noticed several bolts impaled in the corridor walls at random.
Millie grinned. “Testing for secret hiding pl—”
“Sh!” Mrs. Etterly hissed. She smiled at the agents. “Testing for dry rot. Old castle like this, terrible problem. Would you like to help?”
“No, thank you,” Daniel said. “It’s been a long day. I am quite stiff. Coming, Mrs. Blakeney?” As the pirates inexplicably laughed, he grasped Alice’s wrist and tugged her along the corridor. The crossbow seemed to veer in their direction, but that may just have been a trick of the lamplight. They edged past the group and managed not to outright run toward their bedroom.
“Have a good night, Mrs. Blakeney!” someone called out.
“Thank you,” Alice said without daring to look back. “You too.”
The pirates laughed again. Thwack! went a bolt into the wall behind them.
Locking the bedroom door, the agents looked at it for a moment, then Daniel silently wedged a chair beneath its handle. Alice pushed one of their book-filled suitcases over and Daniel hauled the other on top. Standing back, they regarded the barricade wearily.
“We probably should continue searching for the weapon,” Daniel said with reluctance. “We could try the library—”
“No point,” Alice told him. “According to my literary sources, at night during a house party the library is always occupied by trysting lovers.”
He glanced at her sidelong, and Alice shrugged. “What?” she said defensively. “I like to be familiar with a breadth of literature.”
“I—”
“It is misogynistic of you to take that attitude toward romantic novels, Mr. Bixby.”
“I—”
“They are rich with psychological and sociopolitical themes pertinent to—”
“I was merely going to say that you’re right. Let’s just go to bed, and preserve our energy for tomorrow.”
“You mean the sofa,” Alice said.
Daniel frowned a little. “Mrs. Rotunder seemed to find it odd that we were on the floor this morning. Perhaps married couples never—er, lie together anywhere but a bed.”
“That is a concern,” Alice conceded.
“As professional people, I believe we can manage sharing one bed.”
Alice considered just how professional they had been half an hour before on that bed, and started blushing. But the mission was all, so she relented. Allowing Daniel first use of the washroom, she then took her turn, and when she emerged, dressed in a nightgown and robe, he was already in bed, propped up against the pillows and reading a book. His spectacles were off and once again he wore his sleeveless vest. Gritting her teeth and girding her loins, Alice climbed in beside him.
He did not look up from his book as she arranged herself rigidly against the pillows.
He did not glance her way as she pulled the quilt up high and smoothed it.
Nor did he even blink as she untied her robe and attempted to wrangle it off beneath the quilt, in the process smacking his book with her elbow, almost knocking a pillow to the floor, before at last liberating herself from the wretched thing. She attempted to fold it but ended up in a wrestling match with the silky material until finally Daniel set down his novel, took the robe from her, and folded it into a precise square with what appeared to be only three moves. He placed it at the end of the bed and went back to reading.
Alice sat for a moment considering whether or not to shoot him. Then she took her own book, Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, from the bedside cabinet.
There, she thought as she opened the book and felt the familiar calm of typeset words seep through her. We are just two people sitting on an item of furniture, reading. It is perfectly fine.
Daniel shifted slightly. His scent of fresh soap wafted about Alice. She frowned determinedly at her book.
“Man is enemy to virginity. How may we barricado it against him?”
Her frown deepened. Just then, Daniel turned the page in his own book. Alice glanced at him for the merest second. His right hand cradled the book. His left hand, with its wedding band, lifted to scratch his jaw, where a promise of beard shadowed the firm curve. Alice swallowed hard.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, and she realized her brief glance had become a long, intense stare.
“No, no, not at—no, nothing,” she said and returned to her reading.
“There is none. Man setting down before you will undermine you and blow you up.”
Alice slammed the book shut so forcefully, Daniel jolted.
“Those women in the corridor were mocking us,” she said. It was the first thing that had come to mind but would suffice as reasonable conversation.
“Mockery is part of a pirate’s job definition,” Daniel answered. He turned the page in his book.
“I fear they still don’t believe us happily married.”
“Well, we are. Professionally speaking, I mean.” He turned another page.
“Our practice must have been inadequate.”
“It was perfectly adequate.” He turned the page with more vim this time.
“You are going through that book remarkably fast.”
His hand paused in the process of reaching for the next page corner. “I’ve read it before. I am a speed reader. It is only boring description of sunset. I don’t see why you are interrogating me in such a manner.” He smacked the page back against the preceding one.
“What book is it?”
He held up the cover for her to see. Madame Bovary. Alice’s heart flipped and did a nosedive into her stomach. “Did you read in bed with Princess Louise?” she asked before she even realized what she was saying.
The question startled her, but apparently startled Daniel even more: he tore the page he was in the process of turning. Alice gasped. Daniel stared bleakly into the middle distance for a moment, his jaw twitching as if he had just killed a man. Then he closed the book and turned to look at her with eyes that had become so dark she could see herself reflected in them.
“That is a rumor.”
Alice waited, but he did not further explain that it was a baseless rumor. As the silence lengthened, growing heavy with overtones, undertones, and implications, the air between them blushed, made up an excuse, and departed the room in awkward haste.
“You’re right,” Daniel said at last. “We ought to further our marital practice, due to safety concerns.”
“Uh huh,” Alice answered—which represented a high degree of eloquence considering the storm of blood thundering through her. “Perhaps a few more kissing exercises would be wise,” she managed to say.
“Not kissing,” Daniel said. “Lie down.”
Alice frowned in suspicion. “Why?”
“Lie down, Agent A.”
The cool authority in his voice strangely delighted her. She wriggled lower, clutching the quilt against her with one hand while trying to keep her nightgown from rising up with the other. Staring at the ceiling—goodness, they ought to bring in a long mop and give it a thorough wash—she waited, hoping she did not drift asleep before Daniel began doing whatever it was he intended. It had been such a long day . . .
Then his hand slipped under the quilt to her thigh, and she was abruptly wide awake indeed.