25
a fond farewell—not with a whimper but a bang— unexpected tea—a professional chitchat— an old beginning—the end
It had been the last dream of Alice’s soul that she escape from the Wisteria Society without further infliction of tea and entertainment. But when she saw the brick shed speeding low above the field toward her, unnoticed as yet by the rest of the company, with Agent M’s face visible at the flight window and salvation close at hand, she contemplated for one brief, vivid moment throwing away a lifetime’s duty and taking up the teapot of villainy instead.
Pirates were dreadful! raucous! endearing! They had shown her what it meant to be truly amiable. Over the past week, she’d been welcomed into company, asked her opinion, fussed over, and acknowledged as an individual more times than she had in her entire life.
(She’d also been threatened with torture and kidnapping, but that was beside the point.)
Having always believed herself contented alone, Alice was surprised now to realize the prospect of returning to the sober, isolating life of service did not seem as appealing as it had even one minute beforehand. But that was nonsense! If asked to repeat a mission like this one, she’d never say “again”—never!
And yet . . .
As the little shed raced closer, churning up grass and dirt, Alice glanced at Cecilia Bassingthwaite. The red-haired young pirate was reciting a Byron verse to her daughter and making amusing faces to accompany it while Ned stole the handkerchief from Evangeline’s tiny hand.
“Anytime you wish, you are welcome to visit me and borrow a book from my library,” Cecilia had told her. Alice’s heart gave a little flinch of wondering shyness at the memory. She quickly looked away—and caught sight of Miss Darlington picking Mrs. Rotunder’s pocket while the latter argued with Mrs. Ogden about the proper length of time to steep tea.
“You certainly display moxie,” the grand old pirate had told her, what seemed like weeks ago, as Alice sat wet and shivering in her lair elegant sitting room. I can’t leave, Alice thought suddenly. I still don’t know what moxie is!
But the shed was upon them, skidding as it swiveled on one corner of its foundation before coming to rest. The pirates all looked up with an astonished gasp. “Well I never!” someone cried, and Alice came very close to laughing.
The shed door flew open and Mia Thalassi appeared, dressed in servant black, dark eyes flashing. She held out her hand. “Come with me if you want to give—!”
Suddenly she coughed, having breathed too fast, and pressed a hand against her throat.
“—your mission report today, back at headquarters!” she concluded weakly.
Alice found herself moving without thought—primarily because Daniel was pushing her toward the shed. She stumbled, and Mia caught her arm, pulling her inside. Seconds later, Daniel was behind her, hauling Snodgrass with him. The doctor complained incoherently through his gag, but Daniel shoved him to the floor. Slamming shut the door, Mia dashed for the wheel. Chanting Latin, she guided the shed into a soaring ascent.
Alice and Daniel staggered. The building was only ten feet square, containing nothing more than a munitions box, two small windows, and, painted on the wall, the A.U.N.T. rose entwining a set of kitchen scales, below which was written “Fealty, Dignity, Laundry.” Alice and Daniel had no recourse to stability other than gripping the walls the best they could. Snodgrass wailed as he rolled into a corner.
“Hold on!” Mia advised, spinning the wheel. The shed veered steeply, and Alice set her feet farther apart, her fingers digging into the clay seams between bricks. Wind was howling through invisible gaps in the walls. The door rattled.
“How did you find us?” Alice shouted over the noise.
“I was heading for Starkthorn Castle when I noticed the gathering of pirate houses,” Mia shouted in reply. “Using my deductive powers, not to mention my telescope, I—”
Bang!
The shed lurched. Bricks exploded within clouds of thick, gritty dust, causing Snodgrass to scream.
“Cannonball,” Daniel reported calmly, looking out the back window. “It’s Rotunder in her glass conservatory again.”
“How narratively appropriate,” Alice said as she stumbled across to the munitions box.
Opening it, she discovered inside several rifles, flamethrowers, and a rather nifty portable rocket launcher. Taking out a machine gun, she tossed it to Daniel. “Load this.”
Then, with a decidedly piratic smile, she reached for the rocket launcher.
“We won’t outrun them,” Mia reported almost cheerfully, as if she had nothing better to do that day than be shot at by pirates.
“We won’t have to,” Alice said. Pulling on a string that hung from the ceiling, she drew down a ladder, which automatically opened the trapdoor above. As she climbed one-handed, the rocket launcher propped on her hip, boots catching on her skirts with every step, she thought fondly of the Turkish trousers Mrs. Rotunder had loaned her. Lovely lady, really; shame about the unrepentant criminality. And the cannonballs, she added as the shed rattled from another blow.
Rising through the trapdoor into the high, cold sky, she narrowed her eyes as wind rushed against her face. Now this was more like it. This quiet, this wild peace high above the grim and exhausting toil of spying, shopping, and making pleasant conversation. Here, a woman could be comfortable—pirates certainly had the right of it as far as that was concerned. Turning on the ladder’s upper rung, she wedged her skirt bustle against the rim of the trapdoor, propped one booted heel against the other edge, and lifted the rocket launcher to her shoulder.
“Ahoy there!” Mrs. Rotunder called jovially from the open flight window of her battle-conservatory, some thirty feet away. “You left without saying goodbye!”
“Goodbye,” Alice called back, and launched the rocket.
Boom! Flames and black smoke burst from one corner of the conservatory.
Crash! Glass shattered.
“Well done!” Mrs. Rotunder cheered, grinning. Beside her, Mr. Rotunder waved a greeting before lifting a rifle.
Alice ducked. Bullets ricocheted off the trapdoor roof. The A.U.N.T. shed rose abruptly, flew over the conservatory, then spun ninety degrees horizontally to face its rear. Pulling a rocket from her waistband, Alice reloaded the launcher, braced herself, and shot.
She only winged the conservatory this time, but it teetered wildly, the magic destabilized. Cool-faced, Alice dropped the launcher back into the shed and bent to take the machine gun Daniel handed up to her. The shed circled around once more to the conservatory’s front door, moving at a speed that sent wind rushing through Alice’s bones until she felt as though she was a bird cutting the airy way. Raising the machine gun, she took aim.
Mrs. Rotunder looked up from a dainty teacup to consider this new development. Her mouth shrugged. “Nice weapon,” she called out.
“Special issue,” Alice told her.
“Ooh!” Mr. Rotunder said eagerly.
“You must come to dinner one night and tell us all about it,” Mrs. Rotunder said. “I’ll send you an invitation.”
“You won’t know how to find me.”
The Rotunders glanced at each other and laughed. “Oh, I think I have a fair idea where you’ll be,” Mrs. Rotunder said. And as Alice fired the gun across her glass roof, shattering panels, the pirate saluted her with the teacup, cried tally ho!, and swooped away in a trail of flaming smoke and flaring magic.
Alice lowered the gun with a sigh.
That was that, then. The pirates were gone. The mission and its subsidiary perils were over. And the Alice she had been, leaping on furniture, dancing, eating mysterious stews, loving Daniel . . . that Alice needed now to shrink back down to size.
“All right up there?” Daniel called.
“Fine,” she told him, although her voice was too low for him to hear. “Time to go home.”
Everything was the same as it had always been. Alice felt oddly surprised by this, like one who wakes from lucid dreaming to discover the real world seems less vivid, feels less profound, than the one she’d visited in her sleep. The corridors in A.U.N.T. headquarters were still shadowy and quiet—not rich with sunlight from an unbounded sky. The plain black uniform of the staff was still orderly—but in a way that now struck her as rather dour. And not dour in the usual good way. Depressing. As she followed a senior valet toward Mrs. Kew’s office, she could not resist reaching up to one of the portraits displayed in a precise line along the corridor, tipping it ever so slightly.
“Hooligan,” came a whispered voice that she might have mistaken as her own inner monologue were it not for the presence behind her. She did not have to turn around to know that Daniel was giving her a sternly disapproving look—but that his gun-gray eyes were smiling. She stood a little taller, swayed a little more fluidly, just for him.
And perhaps for herself too. I am a professional woman, she thought. That at least was something she could carry forward with her, a secret in her inner dark.
Upon arriving at Mrs. Kew’s door, the senior valet turned to them with an expression like a clipboard. “Agent A, enter here,” he said pointing at the office door. “Agent B, continue following me.”
“Why?” Alice asked without thinking, and the man’s eyes widened. Alice imagined him writing a large red cross on his checklist of her character.
“I appreciate you have just spent time undercover, Agent A,” he said, “but I will remind you we are not ribald criminals here. We do not ask questions. Understood?”
She bit her lip, trying not to laugh. Behind her, a tight silence suggested Daniel struggled with the same impulse. Alice’s heart rose at the thought of it. She wanted to hug him (and kiss him, and perhaps bite him a little), but the valet was waiting, his eyes growing even larger, so she curtsied and said, “Understood.”
The valet huffed, then, without a further word, turned and marched away in the full expectation that Daniel would follow. Alice’s pulse began to shake inexplicably.
“We’ll talk later,” Daniel whispered as he passed her.
“Later,” she whispered in reply, extending a hand, her fingers glancing his in the lightest of touches before he moved out of reach.
Goodbye, she thought, watching part of her soul go with him.
“Alice?” Mrs. Kew called from inside the office. “Is that you? Come in, dear.”
Alice startled as she entered the room, although only someone with a microscope would have noted it on her countenance. Beside the Chief Servant on the plump, lacy sofa sat Hazel Coombley, the agency’s clinician. Pale-haired, dressed in flowing robes, and bedecked with such a plethora of jewelry she must live her life in dread of magnets, she did not look up from her teacup at Alice—but the sense of absolutely having her attention made Alice want to turn around and run screaming from the room.
“Welcome back, my dear!” Mrs. Kew trilled, gesturing with a lace-gloved hand for Alice to occupy the armchair opposite. “Sit down, sit down, come tell us all about it!”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Alice said as she crossed the room. “Please excuse my appearance.”
“Your appearance?” Hazel asked in the soft, stroking voice she employed to lull her patients while dissecting their psyches. Every nerve in Alice’s body immediately donned armor and helmet. In a state of perfect tranquility, she lowered herself into the chair, busily straightening her skirts and aligning her sleeve cuffs so as to have an excuse for not looking up. Meeting Hazel’s lush gray eyes would be like willingly diving into quicksand.
“My hair is rather windblown,” she explained, “and this dress was not quite so covered in brick dust when I began my journey home. We encountered some lively pursuers who needed dissuading from shooting us out of the sky.”
Hazel leaned forward, long earrings clattering as she regarded Alice intently. “And how did that make you feel?”
Alice reached into her mind for an appropriate response but found only silence. She twisted the wedding ring on her finger, then became engrossed in getting it to an exact ninety-degree angle. Mrs. Kew chuckled.
“Really, Hazel dear, I don’t know why you bother. You know they don’t talk about their feelings. I’m not even sure they’re capable of it. Tea, dear?”
Alice glanced up for long enough to ascertain Mrs. Kew was asking her, not Hazel. “No, thank you, ma’am.”
Mrs. Kew poured a cupful anyway. “We have received a report of the week’s events from Agent V-2, who called us up on her hairbrush.”
That made Alice raise her head again. “V-2 had a communications device?”
“Indeed,” Mrs. Kew confirmed. “And luckily so, considering the urgency of her report. Remind me, dear, do you take one sugar or two?”
“None,” Alice said. “I fail to understand the urgency.”
“Failure is uncomfortable for you, isn’t it?” Hazel asked, and Alice glanced at her fleetingly in confusion.
“V-2 was concerned by some aspects of how the mission played out,” Mrs. Kew explained, handing Alice a cup. She took it numbly. Something was wrong here—very wrong. Trying to calm herself, she sipped the tea.
And almost spat it out.
“There is no sugar in this tea,” she said in a stark voice, staring into the black liquid. A faint, wavering reflection of her face stared back.
“That’s right, dear,” Mrs. Kew said with a bewilderment so delicate, so gentle, it was patently false. “You just told me you don’t take sugar.”
“Interesting,” Hazel murmured. “Can you share with me your thoughts on sugar, Agent A? Does it remind you of something from your childhood, perhaps?”
“I didn’t have a childhood,” Alice answered before she could stop herself—and then thought, Damn.
“Uh huh,” Hazel said slowly, significantly. “Tell me more.”
Fiddlesticks. Alice inhaled with deliberate calm, lowering the teacup and its saucer to her knee. “V-2 needn’t have been so concerned. The mission went exact—mostly as planned. Not only was Jane Fairweather’s trap thwarted and the safety of the Queen assured, but we uncovered Snodgrass as the true villain, disarmed his bomb, and have delivered him to the cells downstairs.”
“Yes, the cell keeper just now rang up on my sugar canister to inform me of that,” Mrs. Kew said. “Shocking business! A perfectly good fire extinguisher, ruined! I had Snodgrass investigated when he signed himself onto your mission without authorization, but I’d never have guessed he held such extreme intentions. Luckily our crack team of intelligence analysts managed to locate his diary.”
“Hm, hm,” Hazel Coombley said, nodding sagely.
“Where was it?” Alice asked.
“Lying open on his desk,” Mrs. Kew said, “containing a note scribbled in red pen: ‘I shall blow them all up on the ninth of November in London!’ Our analysts decoded this moments before the diary self-destructed! (Or had tea spilled all over it, I’m still not sure of the exact story there.)”
“Amazing detective work,” Hazel murmured, her voice breathy.
“It’s unfortunate that my efforts to advise you over the shoe-telephone did not work,” Mrs. Kew continued. “Obviously someone in the lab was a loafer on the day they set that incantation—once we find out who, we’ll give them the boot—but you saved the day nonetheless. And you may also be sure Snodgrass will get what he deserves.”
“Several years in prison,” Alice suggested, remembering Daniel leaping for the cottage and almost missing. She struggled not to tap a finger against the teacup.
“Several years!” Mrs. Kew exclaimed. “No, such genius as his cannot go to waste! He will be receiving a promotion—perhaps even a medal!”
“Hm,” Alice said without inflection.
“You are holding that cup very stiffly,” Hazel noted. “What is happening for you right now? This is a safe space for you to express your feelings.”
Alice repressed a laugh at that. Hazel’s concern for her was as well-polished as a pirate’s sword and just as deadly. She lifted the cup to her lips, then set it back into its saucer with an entirely reasonable, not-worth-analyzing clink. But Hazel smirked, no doubt interpreting her entire psyche from that one small sound.
“The job has been concluded in a very tidy fashion, as always,” Mrs. Kew said. “Well done, Agent A dear! You continue to be my star! I am certain there will be a bonus in your next pay packet! Having said that . . .” She shrugged apologetically, but her eyes were sharply focused, and Alice did not dare move for fear of being impaled by a direct question. “V-2 did feel you and Agent B might be struggling somewhat with the, uh, interesting particulars of the mission.”
“I assure you we were not,” Alice replied. “V-2 is a junior and not as perceptive as she believes.”
“Well . . . I would not describe V-2 as a junior, per se.”
“Oh?” Alice inquired with a tranquility that belied the sudden shuddering of her pulse as instincts, secrets, and wishes began urgently packing suitcases and consulting maps for getting the hell out of her brain.
Mrs. Kew winced. “She may be—just a little bit—our best assessor. Watches agents, checks they are obeying the rules, runs secret tests to reveal any flaws that may become an impediment to them doing their job properly.”
“I see,” Alice said, thinking of Veronica encouraging her and Daniel to share the bed, trying to make them waltz, talking about his golden gun . . .
Her stomach lurched. Hazel leaned forward slightly as if she could sense it.
“V-2 reports that you and Agent B clung to each other quite a bit?” Mrs. Kew winced for having to even mention it.
“Our disguise was a married couple,” Alice said. “It naturally required some clinging.”
“And last night you disappeared—”
“Hid from the pirates threatening to ransom us.”
“—and returned in the morning slightly disheveled.”
“Hmmm,” Hazel said, fascination tugging at her lips, and Alice almost threw the teacup at her.
“Of course, it is nothing,” Mrs. Kew said with a loose shrug, even as her gaze tightened. “I am fully confident you and Agent B didn’t contravene any regulations. After all, you are no silly, emotional fool, following her heart at the risk of serious consequences. You are a professional.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Alice said.
“You would never behave in a manner contrary to the agency’s Code of Conduct.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Because this is a thriller, not a romance, isn’t that so, Agent A?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Drink your tea.”
Alice lifted the cup to her lips.
Mrs. Kew turned to Hazel. “What do you think, dear?”
Hazel continued to regard Alice steadily. “I think Agent A is a good servant. She needs no reminder that, after all the resources poured into creating her, she belongs to A.U.N.T. and no one else. Her feet are firmly on the ground and her head nowhere near the clouds. I am certain A.U.N.T. can rely on her from here on.”
Alice listened to this praise and understood it for the warning it was. She half expected Hazel to bring out a birch switch for reinforcement.
At that thought, her back and thighs tingled, reminding her unnecessarily, but vividly, what it would feel like. She blinked, and tea trembled in the cup.
“Good, good,” Mrs. Kew murmured. “So we can confidently reassign her?”
“I believe so,” Hazel said. Alice swallowed dryly, for, in all her years as an agent, she’d never heard a death threat so clearly stated.
She imagined Daniel sitting in some other room in this building, getting the same message. She remembered his fingers hard on her jaw as he kissed her into peace. Just the two of them ensconced in a tiny, safe bubble of love, pretending it could last for longer than a bubble ever did.
“We care about you, A dearest,” Mrs. Kew was saying, her voice like a cuddle from someone wearing a cardigan—the soft, fluffy wool kind that itches your skin and leaves you with a rash. “We are doing this for your own good. You’ll leave straightaway. Agent O is waiting to accompany you to Bath, where he will introduce you to your new mission subject. First, though, you’ll need to be outfitted in servant garb. We’ll have that dusty dress burned.”
Alice nodded, not even glancing at the dress Cecilia had gifted her, not touching its soft material or inhaling the delicate scent of it. She set her teacup on the table and went to rise—
And then paused.
“My books?” she inquired. “I left them in V-2’s care.”
Mrs. Kew’s laugh fluttered through the lace-fretted lamplight. “Oh goodness, don’t worry about them!”
Alice exhaled in relief.
“They will be discarded once V-2 returns to London. Can’t have my star agent distracted on the job, can I? No, dear, better just to read the A.U.N.T. operations manual from now on.” She produced a smile as sharp and pitiless as the thorns along Daniel’s spine.
Alice curtsied to her.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.