5
descent into madness—the worst-case scenario— tea and biscuits—a dangerous riddle— alice causes shock and dismay
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you choose to wear an enchanted petticoat just in case you fall from a flying cottage. As she plunged through icy, howling rain, Alice unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall away from her. With it went a pearl-handled revolver and an illustrated edition of Euripides’s plays, which had been tucked into a secret pocket—but there was no time for mourning this loss. Alice yanked on a ribbon and with a gentle thwomp the petticoat blossomed into a parachute.
Peering down toward the ground, she sighed. It looked terribly far away. She could have done with a little light reading of Euripides to help her pass the time. Looking up, she saw the A.U.N.T. cottage ducking and diving around the glasshouse. Its chimney had disintegrated and the roof would need to be retiled. But the egg beater had significantly damaged the glasshouse, and Alice felt certain Daniel and Snodgrass would be safe from further attack. Now they simply needed to maintain the fragile stability of the cottage, fly safely through the storm despite having lost the chimney, and land without crashing, flipping, or for that matter outright plummeting—all of which they would do in considerably warmer conditions than hers, given that one corner of the cottage was aflame.
Thus reassured, Alice turned to contemplating her own future. With no map or compass, she would be doomed to asking directions from strangers. “Fiddlesticks,” she muttered. Could this day get any worse?
At that very moment, a house glided into view below her. Tall and pale, with one round window in its attic like a baleful eye and smoke arising sedately from its chimney, it seemed to sally forth on a wind of its own self-importance. A black flag flapped jauntily above the roof.
Such a flag indicated a pirate’s premises—although unnecessarily so, considering only pirates (and secret agents pretending to be pirates) flew buildings. Witches would not lower themselves (er, metaphorically speaking) to use the magical incantation in such an obvious manner. And although pirates trained their servants to pilot, should any run away and use the incantation for themselves, they would either succeed—and thus be pirates—or die trying.
Alice knew that Her Majesty’s government had managed to secretly get hold of the incantation once, and had set up a committee to study it. Twenty years later, Parliament had tired of waiting and demanded results—only to discover that the committee had lost the incantation eighteen years ago and had spent the rest of the time discussing cricket over tea and scones. A.U.N.T. was aware of this because their agents had been the tea ladies.
Still pirates flew the black flag, although they did not need to. To them it was a matter of pride—much in the same way ferocious, man-eating lions had pride.
Alice supposed the house was headed for the Starkthorn Castle house party. “F-f-fabulous,” she said aloud, her teeth chattering from cold. Angling down toward the warm golden light shining through its windows, she landed atop a white wrought-iron fence surrounding a balcony. Her petticoat deflated, and, before she could unbalance, she jumped down to the balcony floor.
Doing her best to smooth her sodden, wrinkled petticoat, she then straightened the sleeves of her velveteen bodice and tried without success to squeeze all the water from her sagging hat feathers. Her pompadour, which had taken an hour to establish, drooped in an as-yet-unfashionable manner, but without a looking glass, she dared not even touch it. Finally, as presentable as she was likely to get after falling hundreds of feet through a storm, she stepped forward to knock on the balcony’s door.
Through a delicate lace curtain she could see shadowed figures clustered around a hearth fire. One approached and opened the door. It proved to be a stout, middle-aged woman in the mobcap and plain black dress of a housemaid. An enormous fluffy yellow feather swooped out from the top of the mobcap.
“Yes?” she said. “How may I help you?”
“I happened to be passing,” Alice said, “and wondered if I m-m-might presume upon your hospitality? It is d-d-dreadfully cold out here.”
The housemaid glanced back over her shoulder. “There’s a girl as wants to come in,” she informed the room’s occupants. A murmuring came from over by the hearth fire. Turning once more to Alice, the housemaid nodded. “You may enter. Wipe your feet.”
She stepped aside, opening the door wider and blinking against the damp chill of the wind. Alice brushed her shoes against the sodden doormat to no effect, then squelched in.
She found herself facing a bewildering cram of knickknacks and furniture, somewhere amongst which were theoretically four walls and a floor. Beside the hearth fire sat a finely dressed couple drinking tea and reading. The gentleman, gray-haired and with a face like a hatchet that has been struck repeatedly by another hatchet, looked up vaguely, but the woman continued perusing her novel. In one glance Alice added together precise ringlets, onyx earrings, and two shawls draped around a black bombazine dress, reaching a dire conclusion.
“Miss Darlington,” she said.
“Hm?” The woman raised her head as if only now noticing Alice’s arrival. “Oh, hello there. Competence, close the door, we are about to perish from eczema.”
Competence did as ordered, and Alice blinked as the latch clicked into place with the same sound a bone makes when it snaps. Her teeth began to chatter even more violently. Of all the flying houses in England, she had fallen into the worst. Miss Darlington and her husband, Jake Jacobsen, scrutinized her in a silence that felt honed and polished on account of having pierced countless people before encountering her. Only by dint of two decades’ ruthless training did she manage to neither blush nor lower her chin nor run screaming out the balcony door.
“What is your name?” Miss Darlington asked.
“M-M-Mrs. Alice B-Blakeney, ma’am.” She considered curtsying but did not think her frozen knees would support the endeavor.
“Do you like black tea or green, Mrs. Blakeney?”
This had to be a trick question. No reasonable person would consider there to be any real choice, and the only dilemma was exactly how unreasonable a pirate was expected to be. “Black,” she said—and held her breath, waiting to see if Miss Darlington would throw her back out the door because of it. (Mind you, plummeting to earth was preferable to drinking green tea.)
But Miss Darlington nodded with approval. “Competence, a fresh teapot, if you please. And some digestive biscuits.” She flicked a glance at the floor beneath Alice’s feet. “And towels.”
As Competence bustled from the room, feather swaying, Miss Darlington returned to her inspection of Alice’s shivering form. “I do declare, the fashions of young ladies today leave much to be desired. Why aren’t you wearing gloves? Or a scarf and shawl? This late in autumn one must be on guard against sudden breezes.”
Alice glanced out the window, where the breezes were currently not so much sudden as squalling furiously. Yet Darlington House slid through them without the merest tremble.
“I was indoors until a moment ago,” she explained. The warmth of the room was beginning to seep into her body and she felt less in danger of breaking her teeth from clattering them together—although more in danger of various other body parts being broken by pirates. Miss Darlington’s mouth was tightening; Jake Jacobsen had closed his book without even marking the page. Alice nervously advanced a placating compliment: “May I congratulate your pilot on their skill?”
“Pilot?” Miss Darlington’s eyebrows swooped up like cutlasses. “Who says we have a pilot, as if we are pirates? Why would you make such an accusation, young lady?”
“Er, because we are currently several hundred feet above the ground? And because a black pirate flag flies from your roof? And furthermore I recognize that Gainsborough portrait over your mantel, which I last saw when visiting the London Art Gallery.”
“They gifted it to me,” Miss Darlington said. Her husband cleared his throat, and she shot him a look so supercilious it should have been outfitted with a crown and scepter. “They would have gifted it to me had they known I admired it,” she amended. “Therefore I saved them the effort. Besides, Fanny Andrews, therein portrayed, was a pirate, so the painting is rightfully mine.”
Alice did not even try to unravel this logic. “I myself am a pirate,” she said, shaking back her hat feathers. “Newly returned to England after an unfortunate sojourn in Amsterdam. Unfortunate, that is, for the people I robbed, ha ha.”
There came a decided lack of ha ha–ing from her audience. Alice’s insides spun. Twenty-four years, most of them spent in espionage training, and she’d still not learned how dialogue worked. Really, Mrs. Kew should have assigned her to be a maid so she need not speak with anyone.
She hastily reviewed the Three Primary Rules for Normal Conversation as drilled into her by long-suffering tutors at the Academy. Hold eye contact for five seconds, blink, glance away, repeat. . . . Do not speak until the other person has finished talking. . . . Do not fidget or climb on the furniture while listening. Thus mentally refreshed, she tried again.
“My husband and I are traveling to a house party in Hampshire.”
“Starkthorn Castle?” Jake asked.
“Yes.”
“We are attending the same party,” he said, giving her a smile that was clearly intended to be disarming, but which just made him look like a murderer planning to literally remove her arms. “Miss Darlington is the host’s great-aunt.”
“Indeed?” Alice inquired—although in fact she could have recited Miss Darlington’s family connections back six generations. The lady was related to several villains, each of whose A.U.N.T. dossiers could have filled a bathtub, should someone inexplicably wish to store them there. Her former ward, Cecilia Bassingthwaite, tried to assassinate the Queen, stole an invaluable amulet from the British Museum, and was seen flying a bicycle over London. Cecilia’s husband, Ned, was infamous for his meltingly gorgeous smile, one glance at which would persuade even the most sensible lady to remove her drawers (her cabinet drawers that is, to submit the valuables stored therein; Ned had surrendered his libertine ways upon marriage). And Darlington’s niece, Cecilia’s mother, had been known as the Queen of Pirates. They were a wicked lot, and Jemima Darlington the wickedest of all.
“Pudding!” the lady declared.
Her husband and Alice stared at her blankly.
“Pudding,” she repeated, as if this made all clear. “I forgot to have Competence bring some chocolate cream pudding. Bother.”
At that moment, Competence entered, bearing a tray of tea, biscuits, and pudding. Alice eyed her with interest. With perspicacity like that, could she be an A.U.N.T. agent? Or did Miss Darlington often desire pudding at midmorning?
Setting down the tray, Competence brought out several thick white towels that had been tucked under her arm and handed them to Alice.
“Thank you, I am glad for any server in a port,” Alice murmured, which was code for Are you a representative of the agency that is the true effective (albeit highly secret) government of England and has licensed me to kill you if these towels are not what they seem, or are you just a regular housemaid?
“Hm,” said Competence in a brusque tone before turning on a heel and marching away—which either answered that or completely did not.
While tea was poured and biscuits dunked into pudding, Alice dried herself as best she could. At last, Miss Darlington motioned for her to take a seat by the fire.
“Where is your husband, Mrs. Blakeney?” she asked as Alice laid a towel on an armchair and lowered herself gingerly, wincing a little as her wet clothes clung to her skin. “Not loitering on the balcony, I hope?”
“N—”
“Not unwell?”
“N—”
“Good God, Jake, she’s brought illness into the house!”
“Dear, I’m sure that’s not the case,” Jake murmured soothingly. “She seems perfectly healthy to me.”
Alice tried to quell the remnants of her shivering, lest Miss Darlington conclude she had malaria. “The last I saw Mr. Blakeney, he was flying west with a glasshouse in pursuit,” she explained. “I imagine we’ll catch up at Starkthorn Castle.”
“That’s very bold of you!” Miss Darlington said.
Alice blinked. She was starting to realize no one had taught this woman the Three Primary Rules for Normal Conversation, let alone the several dozen secondary ones. For the first time in her life she seemed to be playing on an even discussion field—that is, a field full of potholes, prickles, and discarded rakes just waiting to be stepped on so they could fly up and smash someone in the face.
“Your house might have been shot down, after all,” Miss Darlington continued. “Struck by lightning. Exploded. Your husband’s body might have been flung into treetops, every bone shattered—or perhaps a bottomless lake, from whence he will never be recovered.”
Alice considered this. “True. The bottomless lake would be most convenient—no funeral costs.”
Miss Darlington regarded her for a long, cool moment, then smiled and passed her a dainty, wisteria-painted teacup. “I have not added any sugar. Terrible stuff, quite rots one’s gluteus maximus.”
“I think you mean teeth, dear,” Jake murmured.
Miss Darlington lifted her chin in much the same way another person might lift their battle-axe. “I have no teeth in my gluteus maximus,” she declared, and it was all Alice could do to retain her mouthful of tea. Miss Darlington gave her a sharp look.
“I can plainly see who you are, young lady!”
Alice swallowed the tea and set the cup onto its saucer without the slightest tremble. Eight steps to the balcony door, she thought calmly. It will be locked, so kick it open and climb onto the fencing, and then up to the roof if you can. Or jump, and hope the petticoat’s incantation will work a second time. “Oh yes?” she said in a neutral voice.
“If I asked you about ravens and writing desks, what would you answer?”
“I would say a raven should not be allowed anywhere near a writing desk. Think of the mess it would make. Not to mention the germs.”
She returned Miss Darlington’s bright gaze without blinking.
Jake held his breath. Competence, standing by the hallway door, held her breath. Even the sky outside seemed to hold its breath, the storm winds suddenly dying away. Alice watched firelight and shadow writhe over the pirate lady’s face. I’ll never make it to the balcony, she realized. I’ll be dead before I even get out of the chair.
Abruptly, Miss Darlington laughed. “Clever girl.” She waggled a crooked, bejeweled finger at Alice. “I was right, you are a scoundrel, no doubt about it. I wager you could talk the Queen herself into letting you steal her necklace.”
“The Queen, you say?” Alice’s instincts perked up.
“Yes, she is a close personal nemesis of mine, and I happen to know her neck—that is, her necklace—is ripe for the plucking if a girl has the moxie to try it. You certainly display moxie.”
Alice had no idea what moxie was. (Some kind of hairstyle perhaps? She excitedly anticipated consulting a dictionary later.) Nevertheless, she shifted her mouth into a mild smile, even while her mind hastily took out its list of suspects and circled Miss Darlington’s name, then drew stars and arrows around it. “How kind,” she said.
“In fact, you remind me a little of my niece, Cecilia. Such a dear young lass. Sweet temperament, beautiful manners, can kill a man with one swipe of a butter knife. You would like her, I’m sure. I tried to convince her to join us at the Bassingthwaite party, but she is currently—”
The lady paused to reach over and retrieve a piece of paper on the tea table. Raising a lorgnette that had been hanging on a gold chain about her neck, she read from the sheet.
“—in Windsor, making preparations to steal Princess Beatrice’s diamond tiara . . . had luncheon at the Singing Wattlebird teahouse on Tuesday, wore a suitably warm jacket, ordered tea and cream cake . . . was seen pushing an infant’s perambulator through the park on Wednesday with her husband at her side but no regard for the twenty-five percent chance of rain showers . . .”
“Dear,” Jake murmured, easing the paper from his wife’s hand. “I am sure Mrs. Blakeney has no interest in the minute particulars of Cecilia’s life. And nor should you, really.”
“Well I never!” Miss Darlington huffed. “Is an aunty not allowed to care?”
“Care, yes,” Jake said, smiling. “Employ a private detective to stalk her niece’s every movement and report back to you, not so much.”
“But I haven’t seen her or the baby for ages!”
“Cecilia brought Evangeline to visit us five days ago. And we met Ned in the street after that bank heist last Friday.”
“Ned,” she spat in such a mother-in-law tone that Alice rather feared for said gentleman’s well-being. It seemed evident Jemima Darlington was the one woman Ned Lightbourne could not charm with his smile.
Suddenly the house shuddered as if expressing Miss Darlington’s antipathy toward the man who had stolen her niece for the nefarious purpose of a happy married life. Teacups rattled; the hearth fire sparked.
“We’re here, ma’am,” Competence announced.
Glancing out the window, Alice saw that they had indeed landed. The world outside was green and gold, shimmering with a lingering residue of rain.
Miss Darlington sighed. “I suppose this means we have to go say hello to that pompous Bassingthwaite boy. How tedious. And Gertrude Rotunder is bound to be there—insufferable woman, I will never forgive her for stealing back her diamond bracelet. It took me three weeks to set up that theft, and she just waltzes in and takes it back overnight! Some people have no shame. Just whose idea was it to attend this party anyway?”
“Yours, dear,” Jake said.
“What on earth was I thinking?”
“About the twenty-four-carat-gold vase from the Ming dynasty that stands in the Bassingthwaite library.”
The lady’s expression cleared. “Ah yes. It’s going to fill that gap in the corner just perfectly.” She indicated an area of the room Alice could not see due to the clutter of at least half a dozen golden vases. “Bring my coat and hat, Competence.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The maid turned to leave.
“And Mr. Jacobsen’s coat and hat.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She took a step.
“And gloves, scarves, galoshes, muffs, and an umbrella in case the rain returns.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Pausing, one foot tilted slightly off the ground, she waited.
“Also bring a coat for our guest. One of those I keep for when Cecilia visits.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She hurried off.
“I’m sure you’re anxious to catch up with your husband,” Jake said pleasantly to Alice as they finished their tea.
“Not at all, sir,” Alice replied. “I am happily married, and my husband is very kind to me.”
“Er . . . I mean, anxious about being separated from him.”
“Oh no, he is Catholic and does not believe in divorce. I must say, this tea is excellent quality. May I inquire as to the brand?”
Jake frowned slightly in bemusement. “Earl Grey. But do you not fear—?”
“Leave her alone,” Miss Darlington intervened. “The poor girl is no doubt in shock at the thought her husband may have crashed their house and even now may be dying as all around him the walls burn.”
“I hope that is not the case,” Alice said fervently. “I have several rare books inside that house.”
She closed her eyes as she savored another mouthful of tea, thereby missing the fact that she became the first person ever to truly shock Jemima Darlington.