“Thank you,” she said. “Please do pass on my compliments to Lady Armitage.”
She turned to depart, but he took a large step alongside, and it was clear he would stop her if necessary. So she paused and looked at him impatiently.
“My fountain pen, if you don’t mind,” he said.
Cecilia sighed. She tipped the pen out of her sleeve, handed it over.
For a moment he just looked at her, his smile still and his eyes intense, making the whole world seem to stop even while her heart fluttered as if he was thieving something from beneath it. Her blood began to race—
And then he blinked. “Thank you,” he said, bowing. “Tell your aunt I send my best wishes.”
“I shall,” Cecilia replied calmly, as if tiny bombs weren’t exploding inside her body. “Farewell, Captain Lightbourne.”
“See you next time, Miss Bassingthwaite.”
No you won’t, she thought as she left the footbridge and proceeded into the city center:I shall be nothing more overt than a silence, a shifting of the air perhaps gently scented with lilacs, when I come again into your presence. You will see only the knife I leave in your rib cage. Justwho shall assassinate whom, Captain Charming Ned Flirting Lightbourne?
Smiling at this thought, she nodded to a passing woman, veered away from some children scampering with a puppy, and called briefly in to Sally Lunn’s for an iced bun before continuing on to the library.
4
a ghostly distraction—when one door opens—cecilia loses her parasol—a mysterious envelope—trouble is afoot—miss darlington takes the wheel—measles and pertussis—tea and biscuits—onward!
There is nothing like the active employment of literature to console the afflicted, and so as Cecilia walked through Bath she gently restored the peace of her mind, which Captain Lightbourne had disturbed, by reading Mr. Lockwood’s encounter with the screaming ghost of Cathy Earnshaw. She was not particularly enjoying the novel, but her father had loved it with all the fervor he bore for his Brontë heritage, and so she studied it assiduously under the guise of being entertained. If Heathcliff and Cathy could give her any insight into the tragedy of Patrick and Cilla, her benighted parents, it was worth the toil. That she had to keep it secret from Miss Darlington only added a pleasant frisson of danger.
“You shouldn’t be asking questions about your father,” Miss Darlington said every time Cecilia attempted to do so. “He is not a subject fit for young ladies’ ears.”
“But—” Cecilia would argue, since she could not think of how shemight track down the man if she knew nothing more about him than what she recollected from her childhood.
“But me no buts,” Miss Darlington replied, and there the conversation ended every time. So Cecilia had turned to literature instead.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hallprovided some food for thought.Jane Eyreshe found tolerable (although she herself would have bashed Mr. Rochester over the head with his pipe), and she recognized in Thornfield what had clearly been the inspiration for furnishing her dour childhood home, Northangerland Abbey. But the madness ofWuthering Heightsinformed her best of all the Brontë novels. She became so drawn into its pages as she walked up North Parade that she did not see Darlington House standing in the middle of the road, black pirate flag waving proudly from the roof, until she was almost upon its threshold.
People were inching a way around the house and then striding on as fast as their fashionable clothing would allow—not running, mind you, in case the house chased them.
“Be careful, miss!” a man called to her. “Best turn back! It’s a pirate house!”
Cecilia thanked him with a nod, but secretly she sighed. She did not understand landlubbers. They were polite enough until you mentioned you were a pirate, or swooped down in your weaponized house, or creatively acquired some little knickknack of theirs that they couldn’t possibly care about. Then they blanched or cried, called the police, or insisted you sit where they could see you at the tea party or opera. Cecilia had tried making friends among their ranks but ultimately came away with nothing more than a bruised heart, an arrest warrant, and several pretty bracelets.
Did they not understand that pirates only stole from the rich to give to the—er, to themselves? Not once had she or Miss Darlington used the house to attack a civilian. It simply wouldn’t be ladylike. Althoughthey might insist upon acquiring the elegant cameo that young woman in green was wearing, Cecilia thought, eyeing it from beneath the shadow of her hat as the woman approached...
Just then, Darlington House began to clatter and creak. Cecilia abandoned thoughts of the brooch. Closing her parasol, slipping Cathy’s ghost away into her purse, she stepped up to the door, opened it, and walked through. She had barely made it into the hall when the house began rising.
“Good heavens,” Cecilia murmured with surprise at such precipitousness. She glanced at the plasterwork ceiling with its ornate rose, on the other side of which she knew her aunt would be standing at the wheel, feet apart and hairpins erect as she guided her domicile up over Bath.
“Aereo rapido!”
Miss Darlington’s voice echoed through the house. A large oil portrait of Beryl Black, hanging on the foyer’s east wall, suddenly went askew. Darlington House was banking so sharply, the stabilizing magic faltered.
Cecilia grasped a nearby console table to no avail: the table and its cargo of mail, stacked on a tray, slid westerly, and she went with it. A vase of lilies fell shattering to the floor, and on a sideboard at the far side of the hall a heavy crystal bowl began edging perilously forward. Cecilia recalled that the bowl had previously belonged to the Duke of Kent (and strictly speaking still did) and that its value was in the hundreds of pounds. Letting go of the console table, tucking her parasol beneath her arm lest it open indoors and cause bad luck, Cecilia laid a hand against the wall for balance and began hauling herself up toward the sideboard as quickly as possible before the bowl toppled. The door swung before her and, grasping its handle, she tried to push it shut.
At that inopportune moment the house lurched, the doormat slid beneath her feet, and Cecilia staggered. She found herself tilting outthe open door, saved from falling only by means of both hands around the door handle. With annoyance she watched as her parasol plummeted to the road below, where it shattered.
“Doors!” Miss Darlington shouted from somewhere on the first floor. Running footsteps echoed through the house; a door slammed shut. The building shook, and Bath’s rooftops seemed to sway beneath it. Cecilia feared the iced bun she’d eaten earlier might at any moment return to the city from whence it came. Footsteps sounded again, moving closer, and then Pleasance had her arms around Cecilia’s waist and was pulling her back from the doorway, into the safety of the hall.
“Good heavens, miss!” Pleasance cried, kicking the door shut. The house eased into a horizontal position once more. “I’m ever so sorry, it were all my fault! I was readingThe Mysteries of Udolpho, and what with my weeping and gasping forgot to close the kitchen door.” She shook her head fretfully and curls sprung from their clips. “Because of me, you were about sent falling to your tragical death hundreds of feet below!”
“Not at all, my dear,” Cecilia replied, smiling with reassurance. “It was ninety feet at the most.”
