24
one small step—sky high—daniel loses control— charms and forearms—the suffering of women— alice commits a heinous crime— our heroes are threatened with torture
There was something at work in Alice’s soul that she did not understand, but she suspected pretty strongly was horror. At the sight of Snodgrass’s grinning face, she lost all grip on rationale, since what else could be happening but that his dreadful ghost had arisen to seek vengeance against her?
The only flaw in this conclusion was that Snodgrass was not rising but descending—and, as Alice stared, he continued to do so, slowly but surely, until she realized he was clinging to a rope net. And this net originated from the window of a brick cottage that was gradually filling her view through the window, replacing the sight of Snodgrass. She glimpsed Cecilia Bassingthwaite through a gable window and blinked dazedly as the pirate woman nodded a greeting to her, before the cottage lowered further—
And then her soul sighed. This feeling now, she understood.
Daniel stood on the roof of Puck House, one shoulder leaning against its chimney, ankles crossed, hands in his trouser pockets as he looked calmly across at her.
“Fiddlesticks,” Alice whispered with love.
Daniel waited until Alice had opened the flight window, then he smiled. “Sorry I’m late.”
Alice gave him a pale, sober look. “Did you remember the bread and milk?”
“No. I can go back for them—?”
“That’s fine,” she said. “I should probably save the world before having breakfast. Snodgrass left a bomb here, inside the crate. It’s set to detonate as soon as the cottage touches down. I plan to fly south and ditch the building in the sea. I’m ready to dutifully sacrifice my life for the sake of England’s safety, and ask only for a small mention in the next intra-agency gazette as my reward.”
“Hm,” Daniel said. “Or—just brainstorming, you understand—you could jump over here and we’ll shoot the building down into an empty field.”
Alice shook her head. “What if some girl is lying unseen in the long grass, thinking of her wedding day and wishing it was going to be with the butcher’s son rather than the wealthy but heartless viscount?”
Daniel stared at her. “What?”
“What?” she echoed defensively.
He gave it up. “Very well. Instead of crashing the house, I’ll come over and dismantle the bomb. If I fail to do so, we’ll revert to Plan A, and just hope gentlewomen in Hampshire are still a-bed.”
She considered this for a moment, then shrugged her mouth and nodded.
“Good.” He smiled at her, warming himself with the feeling of love in it. “Say ‘circumroto sinistram.’ ”
“Circumroto sinistram,” she echoed.
The cottage spun port-wise in response to the line of incantation, groaning with the effort and shedding a few roof tiles. As the door aligned with Daniel’s view, Alice opened it. With her disheveled hair and red petticoat, she seemed almost piratic.
“That Latin gave me a headache,” she complained.
“I’m sorry. Come over here and I’ll make it better.”
She disappeared inside the cottage, and a few seconds later re-emerged, running across its threshold. She seemed to soar between the buildings, her petticoat billowing, her face serene. Landing midway up the roof of Puck House, she climbed easily to the ridgepole.
“Nicely done,” Daniel said as she arrived beside him. She shrugged mildly, and in response he pushed her back against the chimney, grabbed her face, and kissed her.
Puck House jolted like a horrified chaperone, but Daniel barely noticed. Alice clutched his shoulders, trying to pull him even closer. Her petticoat swirled around them in the cool, gold-lit wind, and Daniel felt his heart’s blood swirl too. He could not restrain his anger that she’d been in danger, and his relief that she was safe now, and his vast, bright love; he almost thought he might step off the roof with her and the force of the emotions would hold them up, defying gravity. Every nerve and muscle in his body began to prickle. It was what he’d always feared, this loss of emotional control.
Damn. If only he’d known how glorious it would feel, he’d not have wasted so many years being frightened.
Breaking the kiss at last, he gave Alice a fierce look. She gave him one right back. Her skin was flushed, her eyes vivid, and if she had said Kill the world, he would have done it for her in that moment, he would have done anything; she had become his new and forever obsession.
“Headache gone?” he asked.
“I have a head?” she said dazedly in response.
He laughed. “Go downstairs and let them know our plan. But be warned, they’re friendly pirates, which is a great deal worse than fiery ones. I’m afraid nothing is going to stop Ned Lightbourne from giving you a warm welcome.”
She frowned. Daniel wanted to kiss her again, to taste that wonderfully prim disapprobation and take it with him across the sky, but the A.U.N.T. cottage rocked and groaned in a manner that suggested it was going to fall at any minute.
“Right,” he said. “See you soon.”
Running down the roof of Puck House, he flung himself without hesitation into empty air. The A.U.N.T. cottage lurched away from him, and only by extending his arm to the maximum degree was he able to catch hold of the doorstep. He hung painfully in a one-handed grip as his body re-established an internal balance. Pain ripped through his body. Gravity tried to introduce him to its friend, the solid ground several hundred feet below.
Swinging wildly, he pushed a finger against the bridge of his spectacles to straighten them. Then he hauled himself up over the doorstep, into the cottage. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Alice’s unimpressed face and discovered in himself a depth of impatience he’d never experienced before. Even five minutes was going to be too long away from this woman.
The cottage shuddered, reminding him that it would be an eternity if he did not dismantle the bomb and get the building landed safely.
“Stabilis sicut vadit,” he chanted as he shut the door and strode over to the crate. The cottage immediately began to settle. Incantating a holding pattern, he lifted the crate’s lid and stood quietly with his arms crossed, contemplating the device therein.
The triggering incantation seemed straightforward enough, but this being a Snodgrass creation, Daniel knew he needed to be even more cautious than usual. One touch in the wrong place—or perhaps even in the right place—and he’d go up in flames faster than an erotic novel in a Puritan community.
“Hm,” he said eventually. Unbuttoning his cuffs and folding up his sleeves, he obtained a paring knife from the kitchen supplies and, leaning one hand on the edge of the crate (which had an interesting effect on the muscles of his naked forearm, not that he was aware of this), he used the knife’s pointed tip to alter the engraved incantation. He changed an i to a t, an n to an m, then paused, trying to recollect Latin declensions. A ticking began inside the device, which was both alarming and helpful—for it suggested he’d tripped a timer, but also sounded so much like Professor Michaels tapping a fingernail against a chalkboard that anxiety instantly tossed up the word he needed. He returned to etching—
Suddenly, the cottage rattled, sending a shower of dust down over him. Daniel caught his breath, not wanting to accidentally turn the i into a j and blow the whole place up. After a moment, it calmed, and he was able to etch one final serif. Rapping a knuckle against the metal cylinder, he heard only silence within. Satisfied, he closed the crate lid.
And the cottage plunged.
Thrown off-balance, Daniel staggered against the crate. “Subsisto!” he shouted over the thundering of his pulse.
The cottage jolted to an uncertain halt. Splashing sounded in the water closet; noxious soot billowed from the fireplace. Daniel sighed at the thought of all the cleaning that would be necessary for the place to be habitable again.
But this was no time for indulging in fun. “Descendeo lente,” he commanded with the authority invested in him by several pages of insurance contracts. To his relief, the cottage began a more gentle descent. It landed near Puck House in a field of grass, and Daniel began incantating the anchor phrase.
He managed two syllables before the entire building fell apart.
For a moment it felt as if the world had become a ball of thunder. Walls toppled; the roof clattered down; the wheel broke free from its stand and rolled out of the wreckage. At last, quiet settled, and Daniel rose from where he had crouched beside the crate, pushing aside fallen roof beams and what appeared to be an ossified opossum. He brushed dust from his hair and shoulders. Bringing forth a handkerchief from a trouser pocket, he employed it to clean his spectacles. His shoes needed an urgent polish and he’d murder someone for a jacket, but there was nothing to be done about it at this moment. Stepping over shattered bricks and plaster, he departed what was now only nominally the cottage, and went in search of Alice.
“I really must go in search of Mr. Bixby,” Alice said, frowning at her reflection in Cecilia’s looking glass. Dressed in yellow frills and blue lace, she wouldn’t have recognized herself were it not for her fingers tapping with a desire to assassinate the pirate’s housemaid.
She’d barely arrived inside Puck House when Pleasance had taken one shocked glance at her stained petticoat and torn bodice and declared a makeover necessary. Cecilia happily offered her wardrobe. Pleasance impressed as an insightful woman. And so Alice agreed, for she seemed to be in sensible hands.
Ten minutes later, she was prepared to surrender her Expert Intelligence Officer card in disgrace.
“All done!” Pleasance said cheerfully—then held yet another dress against Alice’s body and contemplated its effect. This was the seventh, or possibly the seventieth. Its combination of green and pink made Alice’s brain ache. Its high collar was an itch waiting to happen, its waist sash derided any foolish notion of breathing, and its floral print just begged to be obsessively examined for any tiny flaw. This was, in short, not so much a dress as a torture device.
“Beautiful!” Pleasance declared. “You could be proud to wear this in your coffin! And with a few ribbons in your hair, and face powder, and perhaps we could pluck your eyebrows just the slightest bit, your husband will be all adoration!”
“You are too kind,” Alice said in a tone that suggested a whole lot less kindness would be appreciated. These people were so friendly, and so concerned with her happiness, she wondered if she’d entered an upside-down world. Her heart kept growing and shrinking, and altogether she felt not quite herself. “However, duty calls. I am sure Mr. Bixby will not care what I’m wearing.”
“Oh, he’ll just love to see you in a pretty dress,” Pleasance enthused. “Take it from me and the Blood Countess.”
“The who?” Alice asked, perplexed.
Cecilia, sitting nearby, touched her temple discreetly. Pleasance, however, would not have recognized discretion even had someone pointed to it in a dictionary.
“A ghost what possesses me,” she explained. “She says the flowers go perfectly with your eyes.”
Alice looked at the sprigs of pink and wondered if she should feel offended.
“To be fair,” Cecilia said, “Miss Dearlove should dress for herself, not for her husband.”
“Precisely!” Pleasance agreed. “It will be for herself when he kisses her because the dress is so pretty.”
“Kisses me,” Alice scoffed, pretending to inspect a satin bow so as to hide her blush.
“I should hope Miss Dearlove’s husband wants to kiss her no matter what she is wearing,” Cecilia argued. “It is her soul that matters, not her attire.”
“Don’t mind the mistress,” Pleasance whispered loudly to Alice. “She’s one of them feminininists. While I agree that women suffer and we should rage about it—”
“Suffrage,” Cecilia corrected her gently.
Pleasance shrugged with all the carelessness of a woman who has to tidy away her employer’s voting rights pamphlets at the end of the day. “—that’s all the more reason we should have fun looking pretty. And I declare, if Mr. Bixby does not miss a step upon first seeing you in this dress, I will eat my hat.”
“Good heavens!” Alice exclaimed, staring at the woman. “Don’t do that, it would be dreadful for your digestive system! The straw—let alone the ribbons—!”
Pleasance blinked. “Er . . .”
Sighing, Alice considered the dress. Hideous thing, absolutely hideous.
“Miss a step, you say?” she murmured, stroking a swathe of lace across the bodice. Its texture was much like Daniel’s unshaven jaw had felt that morning against her cheek . . .
“Absolutely,” Pleasance said, sensing weakness. “He might even stumble. In fact, it ain’t impossible he could outright trip, and end on his knees before you.”
Three minutes later, Alice was encased in itchy, cumbersome layers of taffeta, with her waist cinched as tight as an antiquarian’s grip on Shakespeare’s First Folio, and with no possibility of undressing unless someone else released the dozen buttons down her back. Never in all her years of undercover work had she looked so . . . so . . .
Ridiculous, she thought.
“Adorable,” Pleasance said with a happy sigh.
“Hm,” Cecilia added, frowning. “Tell me, Miss Dearlove, why Mr. Bixby married you.”
Alice stared at her blankly. Because Mrs. Kew ordered him to did not seem an appropriate response.
“Because he loves you,” Cecilia replied on her behalf. “You. Is this ensemble representative of you?”
“Uh . . .” Alice said. A childhood in institutions, followed by a career as a spy, left her unequipped to answer the question. The fact that someone was asking it at all threatened to short-circuit her mental processing system.
“Never mind.” Cecilia’s eyes glinted with piratic determination. “Based on my understanding of you, gained over the twenty minutes I’ve spent in your company—and furthermore my knowledge of Mr. Bixby, which comes from having glimpsed him now and again in Captain O’Riley’s kitchen—I consider myself eminently qualified to make this decision on your behalf. Take off the dress. I have a better idea.”
Daniel had survived a house crash. He had survived several days in company with the Wisteria Society. For that matter, he’d spent ten years as an elite agent, undertaking missions so dangerous they made his debriefers cry, and had survived that with ease.
But making small talk with Ned Lightbourne might just be the final straw.
The pirate bounced his daughter on his hip as he chatted away merrily, undaunted by Daniel’s lackluster replies. At their feet, Dr. Snodgrass lay bound and gagged. Behind them, the red door of Puck House remained closed. Daniel frowned at it. He’d been waiting bloody forever ten minutes for Alice and could not understand the delay. By now, they should be on their way to London. Instead, he was being forced to smile and nod to a man who seemed to think that amiable conversation was perfectly reasonable behavior.
“Such nice weather,” Ned remarked, and Daniel wondered if stabbing him just a little would shut him up. But at that moment the red door of Puck House finally swung open.
And every thought in his brain spontaneously combusted.
Alice appeared in the doorway. She paused, fingers flickering and eyes scanning for danger, before stepping out. Daniel’s eyes, heart, groin, ached as he beheld the vision drifting toward him. Her head bore a nimbus of golden sunlight, her feet seemed to barely touch the grass, and she had been clothèd—not just clothed, insisted his reverent brain, but clothèd—in a plain white dress. Altogether, she looked like one of the angels on the prayer cards Daniel had collected when a child. Her brown hair was smoothed from a central parting to a chignon at the nape of her neck, and it provided the calmest, simplest, most perfect frame for her face—a face such as Byron must have envisioned when he wrote of beauty, a pure and dear dwelling place for her serenely sweet thoughts . . .
“What an appalling mess!”
Daniel blinked, his reverie shattering. Alice jammed her hands on her hips and frowned at the tumbled remains of the A.U.N.T. cottage. “Could you not have managed things more tidily?” she demanded.
“Um,” he said.
“Is that all you offer in your defense, Mr. Bixby? While you dallied, I have been wrangled into various states of fashion and ruthlessly interrogated as to my opinions on jewelry. My fingers remain sticky even though I washed them, I had a splinter in one, and this dress smells of lavender.”
“Oh dear.” Taking her hand in his, he kissed its fingers softly, brushing his tongue against a tiny scratch he found.
Alice’s frown deepened. “Wrong hand.”
He looked up at her from beneath an arched eyebrow. “Really?”
She shrugged, her expression irreproachable. “Perhaps.”
So he took her other hand and kissed that too, and she rolled her eyes, tsking through a barely repressed smile.
“There,” he said at last, keeping hold of the hand, pressing it tightly within his grip. “All better, I hope. And the bomb is disarmed, and the day saved. I believe a degree of relaxation would not be inappropriate.”
“You speak too soon.” She pointed skyward, and Daniel looked up, squinting against the sunlight. A sudden chill went through him.
A swarm of pirate battlehouses was descending upon the scene like seagulls at a picnic, albeit enormous seagulls, wooden, architecturally designed, and—
Just give up, his brain advised wearily.
“How did they know where to find us?” Alice asked.
“Pirates have an unerring internal compass for drama,” Ned told her, and both Daniel and Alice jolted, belatedly recollecting his presence. Daniel released Alice’s hand and she stepped back.
Ned did not smirk, but his whole demeanor exuded such a smirkful attitude, Daniel felt tempted to punch him. The pirate shifted his daughter from one hip to the other, and Evangeline reached toward Alice, grasping for something to steal.
“Hello,” Alice said with mild reproof . . . then withdrew from her sleeve a lace-trimmed handkerchief embroidered with Latin and roses. This she handed to Evangeline, who scrunched it in her tiny fist.
Beeeeep! Beeeeep! Beeeeep!
Now Ned was the one to jolt as the handkerchief began screeching. But Evangeline giggled and flapped the cloth. Beeeeep! Beeeeep! Beeeeep! Ned whipped a deadly look at Alice, who gazed back with the placid ignorance of everyone who gives a noisy present to a small child.
“Atrocious!” someone shouted over the clamor. They turned to see Mrs. Rotunder striding across the field, her enormous pink bustle swinging from side to side and her skull-and-crossbones earrings a-clatter. She jabbed the tip of a furled lace parasol into the grass ahead of every step, testing for cow pats. “Why did you not wait for us before blowing up your cottage?!”
“Actually—” Daniel began.
“And what do you think you are doing, Mr. Lightbourne, exposing The Baby in such careless fashion to the Great Peril?!”
“Captain,” Ned said automatically, but Mrs. Rotunder ignored him. She flicked her wrist, and the parasol opened with a thwomp that sounded like disdainful commentary on Ned’s parenting ability. Reaching out with her free arm, she removed Evangeline from him.
“There now,” she murmured to the child. “No risk of freckles under Aunty Gertrude’s shade.” Casting a black look at Ned, she marched away.
Ned blinked rather stupidly. Daniel and Alice exchanged a glance that didn’t know whether to be amused or anxious, but that mostly wished it could go sit in a corner somewhere and read a book.
“Dear,” came Cecilia’s cool voice. Everyone turned to see her exit Puck House. “Did you just allow Mrs. Rotunder to kidnap my child?”
“I—” Ned began.
Beeeeep! Beeeeep! Beeeeep!
“Good God!” Mrs. Rotunder could be heard exclaiming. “Give me that at once, Evangeline.”
“Waaaaahhh!”
“No, don’t cry . . .”
Beeeeep! Beeeeep! Beeeeep!
Five seconds later, Ned had Evangeline back in his arms and Mrs. Rotunder was hastening away, muttering something about going for a nice quiet cup of tea (splashed with rum).
Glancing again at Alice, Daniel noticed her eyes glazing over in a way that alerted him to her overwhelmed state. He was not feeling particularly calm himself under the barrage of noise. “Shall we leave?” he asked.
“Oh, you cannot go yet,” Cecilia interjected. “Not when there is tea on offer.”
Daniel looked around in bewilderment, uncertain when anyone had offered him tea.
“May I mention the Wisteria Society’s efforts last night to capture us?” Alice said.
“Oh, that was yesterday,” Cecilia told her blithely. “Today you have provided new entertainment, and so all will be forgiven. The Wisteria Society are—”
“Volatile,” Ned said.
“Mad,” Alice and Daniel chorused.
“Whimsical,” Cecilia told them with a delicate frown. She turned to where Pleasance stood in the doorway. “Dear, would you put on the kettle? Mr. Bixby and Miss Dearlove are joining us for morning tea.”
Morning tea? Alice mouthed behind her hand to Daniel. He shook his head, nonplussed.
Elsewhere in the field, pirates began drifting from their houses, servants laden with tea tables and parasols behind them. Cows watched in fascination; at a nearby farmhouse, someone was frantically barricading windows.
“Just a cup or two,” Cecilia said with a smile, “and then we will fly you back to London. After all, we have you to thank for saving my life, and—”
Beeeeep! Beeeeep! Beeeeep!
Cecilia’s smile tightened. “Evangeline dearest, can Mummy see your new toy? In return, you may play with my pearl-handled dagger.”
As a scuffle ensued between child and parents, Daniel took Alice by the elbow and led her aside. “Tea,” he said in a low voice.
“Conversation,” she added direly.
“Badminton!” Mrs. Ogden shouted from a short distance away, holding up a racket and a basket of grenades.
Daniel and Alice shared a panicked look.
And then, just in the nick of time, the cavalry arrived.