Perhaps tracking down her father had just become easier than she’d anticipated.
Suddenly the house swooped, causing a dictionary to topple, its pages creasing appallingly against the floor. Cecilia stepped forward to lay a gentle hand on her aunt’s arm. “Why don’t I drive for a while?” she suggested. “You are understandably upset. Sit down, have a cup of tea.” She eased the elderly lady away from the wheel, supplied her with her cane, and then took the wheel herself. She murmured the pilot phrase, and the magic seemed to grow warm as it adjusted to her mental presence. “Miss Fairweather’s territory is Devon, I believe?”
“Yes, Ottery St. Mary. The coordinates are all mapped out.” She sank into the fireside chair and laid a hand against her brow. “I cannot believe it,” she murmured fretfully. “Two miles, and in the bright sun!”
Cecilia scrutinized the chart that lay on the shelf angled between wheel and window. She saw at once that her aunt had plotted a rather circuitous route so as to avoid the Blackdown Hills and she said nothing, only smiled a little to herself at her aunt’s old-fashioned attitude to navigation. The idea that air currents over that region were disturbed by fairies, and forlorn ghosts of people who had seen those fairies, had long been put to rest by rational thinking. Nevertheless, Miss Darlington remained stoutly antiquated. Cecilia reached for the sextant.
“You could have twisted an ankle!” Miss Darlington persisted from the fireside. “Or become suntanned!”
“I am quite all right, Aunty,” Cecilia said, aligning the sextant with the horizon and making mental calculations. Her mind, however, kept slipping back to thoughts of Captain Lightbourne. Would he seek her in Ottery St. Mary? What if he lost track of her and they never met again? The prospect of that was miserable—for the sake of her career, of course, and not at all because of his tight trousers and smiling blue eyes.
Clearly, revealing their tête-à-tête to her aunt was out of the question. Never mind his being a wicked piratical assassin; he might have been infected with measles or whooping cough, and Miss Darlington would know no peace for weeks. Besides, a brief exchange with a fellow pirate was inconsequential compared to this stolen-house business. Cecilia would look silly if she mentioned it. Thus she managed quite thoroughly to convince herself that remaining silent on the matter was her only recourse.
“Shall I call Pleasance to bring tea?” she asked.
There was no need. The maid appeared that very moment bearing a tray laden with tea and digestive biscuits, after the consumption of which Miss Darlington snoozed. Cecilia flew them on peacefully toward Ottery St. Mary, watching out for bird strikes, wondering if the village would have a public library, not at all thinking about the provocative blond pirate whose fingertip had slipped briefly, gently, across her wrist when he returned her bracelet in an inconsequential moment that in no way made her feel electrified.
She was gazing at the horizon and thus not thinking, Miss Darlington was challenging someone to pistols at dawn in her sleep, and Pleasance in the kitchen below was hunched in a corner, peeling turnips and chatting with her great-great-grandmother, who liked to call in on her for a pleasant half hour of haunting every week or so; therefore, the great spiked shadow pursuing them over the villages and fields of southwest England went unnoticed by all.
5
stealing o’er the fading sky in shadowy flight—gunfire—the end ofwuthering heights—cecilia is shot, supper is postponed—the trousered girl—a lost tiger—unexpected mountains
It was foolish to wish for beauty, at least in Miss Darlington’s opinion. She had a well-cultivated mind, a well-disposed heart, and tinted goggles that kept out the brightness of the sun; anything else was extravagance. The soft fields and purpling woodland shadows of Devon offered her no more than navigational points. The elegiac light of late afternoon, love-colored and quiet, caressing the wheelroom window, was a hazard that made her squint. When a white swan glided like a tender poem into her path, she considered ramming it, and only the swan’s swiftness kept it from being added to Pleasance’s soup pot. As Ottery St. Mary came into view beneath, she orated the descent stanza of the flight incantation, turned the wheel to port, and aimed her front door toward a cluster of houses set incongruously in a field beyond the village.
“Coming in to land,” she roared into the brass trumpet beside the wheel. Pleasance, in the kitchen, hastily tossed loose cutlery into the sink. Cecilia, reading in the parlor after having spent several hours atthe wheel herself, rose and went to the window to see the view. WithWuthering Heightsheld closed against her heart, she reached out to shift the curtain—
Crash!
The window cracked violently and Cecilia was thrown back off her feet. Pain shot through her. She crawled to shelter behind a sofa and then stared at her book, lying where it had fallen from her hand. It bore a gaping black bullet hole.
“That was my only copy,” she said aloud in irritation. She then checked her bodice. A seared rip marked where the bullet had ricocheted off her metal corset stay. The lace was ruined and she would have a bruise to be sure. Peering carefully over the back of the sofa, she saw that the window, which they’d only just had repaired, was now shattered again.
“Shots fired!” came Miss Darlington’s belated observation, echoing through the parlor trumpet. “Cecilia, secure our landing zone!”
Cecilia swung into action. She rid herself of her dress, and then, clad only in knee-length chemise, petticoat, long lace-trimmed drawers, corset, stockings, and slippers, she hastened from the parlor. Another shot smashed through what remained of the window, rebounded off Lady Askew’s silver samovar, and whistled so close past Cecilia’s head that her hair seemed to flutter in its passing. It flew through the open parlor door and embedded itself in the grim, painted face of Black Beryl, making her as one-eyed as, well, a pirate.
“Everything all right, miss?” Pleasance asked, glancing out from the dining room.
“Perfectly fine,” Cecilia answered, taking a rifle from the umbrella stand in the foyer. She spun it on her index finger to cock it. “Would you open the back door for me, please?”
“Of course.” Pleasance jogged down the hall.
“We may be a little late for supper,” Cecilia called after her. “I hope you will not be inconvenienced.”
“Not at all, miss,” Pleasance said, opening the door and glancing out. “Four feet,” she called, standing aside.
Cecilia kicked off her slippers, then sprinted the length of the hall and threw herself out the door into the cool dusk air.
Flipping in midair, she landed neatly on the grass. Without a pause she ran along the breadth of the house in her stockinged feet and, rounding the corner, came upon a convenient hedge that provided further shelter. Miss Darlington must have been watching through one of their several rear- and side-view mirrors, for as Cecilia disappeared behind the hedge, the house swerved in the opposite direction, drawing fire away from her position. Cecilia could see a young woman standing behind a tree with a Winchester rifle in her hands. She crept toward her.
It was not easy to be surreptitious when wearing all white, but the shooter was focused on her target, and Cecilia managed to get behind her without being seen. As Miss Darlington swooped the house to avoid another broken window, Cecilia set the muzzle of her gun to the girl’s neck.
“Lower your weapon, if you would be so kind,” she said. “I’d be most dismayed at having to kill you.”
The girl dropped the rifle and spread her hands into view.
“Thank you. Step forward, please.”
