22 ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY TEACUP—LADY ARMITAGE WINS—BLOOD, SMOKE, AND TEARS—TAKING FLIGHT—TOM HAS AN AWAKENING—ALEX DOES THE FORBIDDEN THING—CHARLOTTE IS NO HEROINE—THE MOMENT OF CHOICE Charlotte knew her own happiness. She wanted nothing but the amulet—or, to give it a more fascinating name, total dominance over the fate of England. Granted, she intended to be good in the most outrageous fashion by destroying said amulet, but that did not detract from the central fact: as Prophesized Heir of Beryl Black, the choice was hers to make. It would be the pinnacle of her duty. And if she represented it as a magnificent victory over the Wisteria Society, it might just appease witchy tempers that were bound to erupt when the Wicken League discovered that not only had she been in cahoots with a pirate but she hoped to go on cahooting with him in the future. Absolutely, she needed that amulet. Unfortunately, Lady Armitage disagreed. They wrestled and slapped each other until the lady pirate managed to stab a teacup shard into Charlotte’s arm. Pain rushed through her like a cold wave, smashing everything in its way. At first she could not understand what had happened; she saw the shard protruding from her arm but did not recognize it; she forgot entirely about amulets and maniac pirates. A moment later, Lady Armitage yanked the shard away and the pain rushed back out, dragging any last fragments of sense with it. Charlotte collapsed onto the floor. Her vision went white, then red, then stayed red. She realized dimly that she was looking at flames. Lady Armitage hauled herself up, muttering something about annoying girls who did not respect their elders. “You’re worse than Cecilia!” she yelled at Charlotte. “At least she did not stain my favorite dress with her blood!” Charlotte laughed. At last, she had bettered Miss Bassingthwaite! She sat up rather dizzily, wincing at the pain. Her wound did not seem too terrible, but she frowned upon seeing the astonishing amount of blood. Bixby was going to be most displeased when he came to do the laundry. An unhappy butler posed the least of her problems, however. The sitting room was worryingly alight. Alex had smashed the tables to which Tom and Vicar Dickersley had been chained, and both pirates were dragging the vicar toward the door. Lady Armitage pushed past them, intent on escape. Charlotte tried to incantate a braking phrase to stop the old pirate, but smoke swirled into her mouth, making her cough. Lady Armitage pulled open the door and ran out. “Alex,” Charlotte called out roughly. “She’s getting away!” Alex looked up. Upon seeing her blood-stained form, his eyes blackened with emotion. Charlotte would have found it wonderfully flattering were they in more pleasant circumstances. As it was, she might swoon, but not from romance. Alex dropped his side of the vicar and, with three great strides, was across the room and crouching before her, grasping her arms urgently. “Are you all right? Where are you hurt? Charlotte?” She grimaced. “I’d be better if you weren’t squeezing exactly where she stabbed me. I’m fine. Let me go; I need to chase her. She still has the amulet!” For a moment she thought he would argue. She watched emotions wrestle with his countenance until at last something dark and fierce triumphed. Looking at it, Charlotte did not know whether to be awed or frightened. He brought her to her feet and started pulling her toward the door. “I’ll go after Armitage,” he said. “You get out. Take Tom and the vicar to safety. Promise me, Lottie.” It was a sensible plan. He had more chance of overcoming Lady Armitage than she did. As a witch, she approved it. As a woman, she clutched his coat, trying not to cry. “Promise me you will stay safe too.” He grinned with his usual flippant wickedness. “Of course. I know what I’m doing. This is a regular day’s work for me, darling. Now out!” He gave her a little shove, and for once she obeyed without further debate. Rushing over to the vicar, she took up the shoulder Alex had dropped, and disregarding her pain, began helping Tom to haul the man out of the room. The effort was made difficult by the weighty chains, not to mention the sight of Alex dashing up the stairs in pursuit of Lady Armitage, smoke swirling behind him. Charlotte forced herself to just focus on breathing. A footman ran past, his arms full of silverware. As he barreled down the stairs toward the ground floor, Charlotte realized there was no hope of getting the unconscious vicar down those stairs in time. “We’ll have to go out the window!” she shouted to Tom over the crackling of the fire. The young pirate glanced at the window then back at her, his eyes wide. “It’s too high!” “Not for a witch.” “You don’t mean to use magic? But you’re a woman; we’ll be too heavy for you.” In lieu of answering that, Charlotte threw a dark, sorcerous word at the window. Glass exploded outward, along with a portion of the wall. As Tom stared agog, she gave him a smile as polite as a witch’s besom with every device extruded. “Out you go, young man.” “I think you should—” Alas, his manly opinion was lost to posterity as he suddenly jolted up from the floor and, along with the vicar, swept on out the window. Charlotte waited, counting in her mind, as Tom’s scream informed her of how long the descent took. She gazed up the stairs to where Alex had gone. Everything in her yearned to follow him. But smoke was filling the corridor, and she knew she would be foolish to remain inside. Running to help Alex would be like Tom telling her how to do magic. And yet, leaving him was agony. She should have persuaded him to come with her. Never mind the amulet—nothing mattered, nothing, if Alex was not safe. But such thoughts were neither sensible nor dutiful, and although Elizabeth Bennet might sympathize with her, Charlotte knew most heroines would not. They would tell her to run away and let the man save the day. And so she climbed onto the windowsill, muttering magic reluctantly. Smoke billowed around her. Heat stroked her back. The house was shuddering as it began to rise, and Charlotte clutched the window frame lest she fall before she could fly. The world had become a blur—she was capable of tears after all, it seemed, for they filled her eyes, blinding her with grief and terror. I do love him, she thought. Damn. She could not leave, regardless of good sense. If love made a pyre for her this morning, then so be it. Turning back carefully on the windowsill, she prepared to run upstairs—to save Alex, and herself along with it. But magic was not sentimental. It had no heart or heroism. With a witchy calm that felt altogether callous, it tossed her out to the wind.
Alex staggered, colliding with a wall. The house was rising—and at the same time he could have sworn something was falling, dragging his heart down with it. Let it be Charlotte, he prayed. Let her be leaping to safety. And then he continued on along the corridor, because he’d been a pirate all his life and he knew the fate of the world (not to mention the fire consuming Armitage House) was not going to take a break, drink a cup of tea, read a magazine, while he managed his emotions. Lady Armitage had locked herself in the cockpit. He could hear her voice declaiming the incantation and he winced, for she sounded like an opera singer with laryngitis. She was also mispronouncing the incantation in a manner that would be funny had she not just said accendo instead of accedo, thereby causing the fire to further inflame. Alex began to kick the cockpit door with his boot heel. “I am not taking callers at the moment, thank you!” Lady Armitage called out. “But I think you’ll really appreciate what I have to tell you about life insurance!” he called back. The door proved more durable than he expected. Smoke thickened the air. Suddenly the house rocked, almost tipping him off-balance, and Lady Armitage’s chanting devolved into a mad cackle. Damn. She was going to crash the bloody building—amulet, him, and all. He kicked more urgently at the door. It swung open suddenly, causing him to stagger through, falling to his knees. In his surprise he dropped the gun Kitty, and it scattered away across the tilting floor. Lady Armitage, holding the door ajar, looked down at him with the kind of smile that really ought to be put in a straitjacket. “You needn’t kneel to me, sir,” she said. “A mere bow would suffice.” Alex clenched his teeth so as to prevent a reply that probably would have doomed them both. Out the cockpit window he could see the town’s rooftops bobbing like boats on a smoke-colored sea. Keeping Lady Armitage as stable as possible was his best chance of keeping the house stable until he could take charge of its steering. He pushed himself upright, inhaling heated air, groping for calm inside himself. His makeshift weapons would be inadequate against a wily old villain like Isabella Armitage, but he did still have one powerful force in his array. He was smiling even before he turned to face the old pirate. “Madam,” he drawled charmingly. She punched him in the mouth.
“It’s a disaster!” Tom wailed, clutching at his hair. “An absolute disaster!” Charlotte frowned. “Pull yourself together, boy. I’m sure Constantinopla will forgive you.” Tom laughed with such a violent hysteria that Charlotte turned away from the swaying, smoke-belching house to stare at him. “No, no, she most definitely won’t,” he chattered, clutching at his hair. “I married another woman, three weeks before our own wedding!” “For heaven’s sake.” It was all Charlotte could do to not slap him. Cecilia Bassingthwaite had been right, a statement she never thought she would make, but it was irrefutably true—men could not be relied upon for rational behavior. “I am certain the marriage was not even legal. Did you say ‘I do’?” “Yes!” he wailed. “Oh.” Charlotte bit her lip. “Well. You shall simply have to not tell Constantinopla.” Tom gaped at her. “Not tell?” “That’s right. Keep it a secret. No one is going to believe Lady Armitage, and I’m sure the vicar can be convinced it was a delusion caused by too much smoke inhalation.” They looked down at the man who lay sprawled unconscious on the footpath. “Won’t I get in trouble?” Tom asked anxiously. Charlotte shrugged. “I would count it as the merest of sins, under the circumstances.” “I didn’t mean with God. I meant with”—his voice lowered—“Oply.” “Not if she never finds out.” He drew in a breath to argue—then comprehension began to dawn. Charlotte watched as his expression of dazed misery slipped into a new wonderment. She would have feared what this portended for Constantinopla but at that moment her attention was diverted by a sudden gasp from the crowd of residents who had gathered in their dressing gowns and slippers to watch the dramatic scene. She turned back toward the house just as something exploded in its sitting room. Flames burst from a window. Charlotte’s heart felt as if at any moment it would burst too. “No,” she said. “This is not acceptable.” She was no heroine, bravely facing whatever life sent her way. She was a witch, capable of inverting the laws of physics to get things done. She began striding along the road, half-undressed and splashed with blood, her deadly boots clicking against the road like a tsking tongue, her eyes as fiery as the hovering battlehouse overhead. All her life she had tried to restrain herself, to be like a woman in a paper world: a Plim with a teacup and impeccable posture; a nice, proper lady. But now she felt only a bone-deep relief to be Charlotte Pettifer, wicked witch. She did not even care that, as she walked, people scampered away from her, recognizing power when they saw it. Life had become messy, and Charlotte was going to clean it.
Alex waited to drop dead. He was sure it would happen, for striking a woman was a crime punishable by immediate divine retribution. Never in his life had he even contemplated doing such a thing. He may have sparred with Charlotte, but that was almost like dancing, and he certainly intended her no harm. But when Lady Armitage punched him, instinct responded faster than thought, and he smacked a fist into her midriff so hard, the old woman stumbled backward. The blow actually hurt him more than it hurt her, as she was wearing a steel-boned corset. But Alex waited on a thunderbolt from the heavens . . . for about two seconds, before receiving Lady Armitage’s less-than-holy fingernails clawing at his face instead. Grabbing her wrists in self-defense, he tried to restrain the woman without actually harming her, whereupon she kicked his shin and then kneed him in the groin. Or rather, she would have kneed him in the groin had not her crinoline petticoat prevented her knee coming within twenty inches of its goal. Instead, Alex found himself gently bumped. This miscalculation set Lady Armitage off-balance, and he took the opportunity to firmly (but carefully) push her back against a wall. “Why, sir,” she said, batting her eyelashes. The ones on the right eye fell off, leaving just a few white wisps. “You only had to ask.” Disgusted, Alex yanked the amulet from her neck and turned away, chanting the pilot stanza as he strode toward the wheel. The house began to tremble like a bashful girl at the sound of his voice. “Thief!” Lady Armitage cried, throwing herself upon his back. Her bony arms around his neck tried to throttle him, but Alex was undisturbed. He continued on toward the wheel, incantating loudly over the growing rumble of the fire downstairs. Lady Armitage groped at his mouth, attempting to gag him, and he tasted dust and old perfume before managing to pull her hand away. The wheel was attached to a plinth in front of a grand floor-to-ceiling window. Alex had just reached it, his fingers touching the wood and his body tingling with ancient magic, when Lady Armitage shrieked in his ear. As he winced away from the noise, she thrust out a leg, hooking it around one of the wheel spokes. The wheel jerked, and the magic stumbled wildly in Alex’s throat. “Stop it!” he yelled. “You’ll crash your goddamn house!” “I’ll crash you,” she replied, and hooked her other leg around the wheel. The house tipped back and forth like a child’s toy. Alex had no choice but to relinquish his plan. If the mad old pirate wanted to go down with her battlehouse, he had little interest in debating the matter with her. He had a green-eyed witch to get back to, and soon thereafter Ned Lightbourne, to seek advice on how to woo Charlotte in the best, most romantic way possible. She may not like him now, but pirates always got what they wanted. He’d steal for her, recite sonnets for her, until she surrendered. Forcing Lady Armitage off with some difficulty, he pushed the old pirate onto one of her fainting couches and turned to leave. “Thank you!” she called out, laughing. Turning back, Alex saw her splayed on the couch, red shoes propped up, amulet dangling from her fingers. He cursed aloud. Somehow she had snatched the blasted thing from his hand without him realizing. While part of him could not help but feel a certain professional admiration for her skill, another part wanted to strangle her with the goddamn gold chain. “Give. That. Back,” he demanded through a clenched jaw. She rose from the couch, letting the amulet sway. “Come and get it, boy.” Alex strode toward her, but she moved unexpectedly, darting aside, and pulled a lever on the wheel’s plinth. The great cockpit window folded open. Armitage House lurched as its magic destabilized even further. Alex staggered, reaching for the nearest object to steady himself—a naked marble gentleman. It rocked beneath his hands, thus proving Charlotte, Cecilia, Miss Plim, and probably most women of England correct as to the unreliability of men. Alex was immediately pushed into a tripping gait toward the open window. He grasped at the window frame. His hands caught it firmly, and he almost breathed in relief. But the rest of his body kept moving, following the tilt of the house, tipping him out fifty feet above Clacton.
Charlotte was still some distance away when Alex tumbled through the window. For a moment her body seemed to fracture internally from the force of her horror. But then she saw he had hold of the window frame, and she pulled herself together in ruthless Plim fashion. This was no time to be emotional. Around her, the bystanders were gasping, pointing, and passing a bag of biscuits amongst themselves. Charlotte knew she could not levitate to Alex’s rescue in front of so many witnesses, but a subtle use of the incantation might still be possible. Don’t let go, she urged him silently. Aloud, she began to whisper in Latin. She could see at her periphery a man pushing his way through the crowd, but she ignored him. Only one man concerned her now, only one fear. As a consequence, the fellow was upon her before she realized, grabbing her arm. “What are you doing, sir?” she demanded, glaring at his pale eyes and bony face. “Unhand me at once!” He did not oblige. Indeed, his grip became firmer. He had a bandage on his forehead and an expression of revulsion on his thin, pallid face; looking at him, Charlotte felt she ought to know him, as if his presence had dwelled in her life since she was born, just awaiting this hour to become manifest. “Charlotte Pettifer,” he said, sniffing moistly. “You are under arrest for witchcraft.” Horror shocked her again. And yet also a strange, weary relief. I knew it would happen one day, her mind said, even while her heart began flapping itself in panic. At least the dread is over. But although her vision washed with light and she did not know when the next breath might come, she straightened to the full extent of Plimmish righteousness and gave him a cool, contemptuous look. “Don’t be ridiculous, my good man. Witches do not exist.” “Are you quite sure about that?” he asked, a smirk slithering across his lips. And then, with slow deliberation, he looked up. Following his gaze with her own, Charlotte choked on a cry. Lady Armitage was standing at the open window, bashing Alex’s hands with a telescope. One lost its grip, causing him to swing perilously, and the crowd gasped with excitement. Any moment now, he was going to plunge to his death. Oh God. This is no time for emotion! her brain reminded her sternly. Arrrgh! her body replied. The man leaned forward, snuffling at her hair. “You smell of smoke,” he said, and licked the words from his lips. “How appropriate.” His fingers around her arm were as sharp as sticks on a bonfire. His voice was flames. Charlotte wanted to scream now as she knew she would scream when they set a torch to the pyre. What should she do? She could not think—she knew only that she stood in smoke on a seaside road, inescapably caught between life and love, and nothing in any novel had prepared her for a moment like this. “I am not a witch,” she said out of old, witchy instinct. The man hissed a laugh. “Let’s see, shall we? I give it less than a minute before the pirate drops fifty, sixty feet onto this extremely hard road. Then we shall find out, Miss Pettifer, just exactly who you are.” “I am—” Charlotte began, but her words turned to fire and her heart to ash. Alex fell.