She returned to the console table, avoiding lilies and the shattered vase as she did so. Taking up the envelope at the top of the mail stack, she considered its originating address with some interest.
“Did you say soup for supper?” she asked.
“Yes, miss,” Pleasance said, bending to straighten the mat. “And fresh eggs from the farm what we were camped in. I thought I might make an omelet.”
“Lovely,” Cecilia murmured. The purple seal of the envelope had already been broken, and a suggestion of fragrance wafted from inside. Cecilia frowned. She laid her purse on the console table and, retaining possession of the envelope, walked upstairs.
“We have a letter from the Wisteria Society,” she said as she entered the wheelroom.
This was her favorite place in all the house, for it contained not only the wheel and navigation array but the modest Darlington book collection. Many were the afternoons as a child she had tucked herself up in a plump velvet armchair beside the fire, reading dictionaries and old tales of derring-do while Miss Darlington flew across the countryside in pursuit of treasure. When she had her own house, she would fill every room with books.
As always, she paused now inside the chamber to inhale its musty, papery smell. Some of the books had tipped off their shelves, despite the net barriers that prevented most such accidents, and Cecilia itched to pick them up and restore them to their precise alphabetized positions. But clearly trouble was afoot and there was no time for fun.
Miss Darlington stood stiff-backed at the great oak wheel, staring out across rooftops. She had finished the phrases formomentum automatica, and the air itself seemed to whisper with ongoing magic as she moved the wheel to direct their course south over the city. “What were you doing all the way out here?” she asked without turning around.
“Attempting to visit the library,” Cecilia replied. “It was a walk of only two miles, and on such—”
“Two miles!” The house lurched as Miss Darlington threw Cecilia an alarmed stare. “Sit down, girl, before your heart gives out!”
“I assure you, I am well,” Cecilia said soothingly. “I can see there is trouble and surmise this letter has something to do with it?”
Miss Darlington glanced at the envelope Cecilia held forth. “Yes. An emergency meeting of the Society has been called.”
“Goodness,” Cecilia murmured. “I can’t remember the last time that occurred.”
“Eighteen seventy-seven, after your mother was—after she died.”
Cecilia blinked away a vision of light flaring against steel as a sword plunged down. In years past it would have made her weep or wince, butnow she simply looked at the envelope, wishing she could take out the letter and read it herself. But such a right remained exclusive to senior members, and while Cecilia had been waiting months for her induction to the high tea table, always there seemed some excuse to deny her promotion.
Being a Wisteria Society matron was the highest honor in the criminal world, and Cecilia had never imagined another goal for herself. She’d been born to the great privilege of piracy, and with that came great responsibility. She could not simply turn away to become a governess, a philanthropist, or even a two-bit thief in a shack that could barely fly a mile: she was obliged to be ambitious, if not for her own sake then for the sake of her foremothers. After all, they had sacrificed much to establish the Society (for example, long afternoons reading old hairdressing magazines and taking naps), so that whenever a lady felt depleted by the endless slog of plundering and marauding, she had someone with whom to share a cup of tea, a nice chat, and an invigorating mutual assassination attempt.
The early Society matrons, showing an aptitude for piratic ruthlessness, had quickly turned their social support network into an endless competition among themselves, and this had become so codified over the years that, by the time Cecilia entered, there was a complex system of promotions, demotions, demolitions, and tests to navigate before one was even allowed a biscuit from the tea table. Cecilia had passed all these tests. She had robbed several banks, blackmailed a marchioness, flown the Channel, and even gone dress shopping with Bloodhound Bess, who could take three hours in one store alone. Still they hadn’t raised her from the junior women’s division. But she was determined to succeed, even if that meant stealing the tea table itself to prove her worth.
Other possessors of Beryl’s incantation did exist outside theWisteria Society, of course. Witches. Introverted women. Men. But for Cecilia, the Society was her whole world. She would rise in their ranks if it killed her.
Which of course was always a possibility with pirates.
“What’s happened?” she asked as she watched her aunt read the letter. “Mrs. Rotunder didn’t blow up Hampton Court again, did she? Or has piracy been made a capital crime? Don’t say Mrs. Etterly’s pet tiger ate the Queen!”
“Worse,” Miss Darlington intoned direly. “Muriel Fairweather’s butler absconded!”
She widened her eyes in horror, then had to focus once more on steering as the house nearly collided with a church steeple.
“Well, that is unfortunate,” Cecilia said, “but not what one would usually suppose an emergency.”
“He absconded—with her house!”
“Oh dear.” A pirate’s house was her psyche made corporeal.
“I know they said the butler did it,” Miss Darlington continued, “but it seems unlikely he’d be so brazen. A more powerful hand is behind this, mark my words.”
“But surely a Wisteria Society member would not go so far as to steal the house of another?”
“We have only three laws in our Society, Cecilia. No killing civilians. Pour the tea before the milk. And no stealing each other’s houses. Anyone breaking those laws is cast out—literally, and in most cases from a very significant height.”
“So who might it be?”
She already knew the likely answer. Maliciously acquiring houses was a theme ofWuthering Heights, after all. But not daring to speak this aloud, she merely looked coolly at Miss Darlington, who replied with a cool look of her own.
