The two women looked over at the window as it shattered. A grenade tumbled onto the carpet.
Cecilia expelled a sigh of tedium. She snapped the book shut, wended her way through the furnishings, pulled back the drapes, and deposited the grenade through the broken windowpane onto theterrace, where it exploded in a flash of burning light, brick shards, and fluttering lavender buds.
“Ahem.”
Cecilia turned to see Pleasance standing in the drawing room doorway, plucking a glass splinter from one of the dark curls that habitually escaped her white lace cap.
“Excuse the interruption, misses, but I have news,” she declared in the portentous tones of a young woman who spent too much time reading lurid Gothic fiction and consorting with the figments of her melodramatic imagination. “Luncheon is served.”
Miss Darlington pushed herself up from the chair. “Please arrange for a glazier to come as soon as possible, Pleasance. We shall have to use the Lilac Drawing Room this afternoon, although I prefer to keep it for entertaining guests. The risk from that broken window is simply too great to bear. My own dear cousin nearly died of pneumonia under similar circumstances, as you know.”
Cecilia murmured an agreement, although she recalled that Cousin Alathea’s illness, contracted while attempting to fly a cottage in a hurricane, had little real consequence other than the loss of a chimney (and five crew members)—Alathea continuing on in robust health to maraud the coastline for several more years before losing a skirmish with Lord Vesbry’s pet alligator while holidaying in the South of France.
Miss Darlington tapped a path across the room with her mahogany cane, but Cecilia paused, twitching the drapes slightly so as to peer through jagged glass and smoke at the garden. The assassin was leaning back against the iron railings of the house across the street. He noticed Cecilia and touched one finger to his temple in salutation. Cecilia frowned.
“Don’t dawdle, girl,” Miss Darlington chastised. Cecilia lowered the curtain, adjusting it slightly so it hung straight, and then followed her aunt toward the dining room and their Thursday lamb roast.
2
the lady anticipates her caller—a disappointment—the plight of cecilia’s digits—another explosion (figurative)—whiskey at white’s—barbarous o’riley—the looming abbey—two captains confer—betrayal is exposed
Isabella Armitage was no bird-brained girl; and no police force had ensnared her, despite their efforts over the years. Lately, however, she had found herself tempted to do something that would almost certainly see her imprisoned, regardless of her wealth and degree.
The outrage of that Darlington woman displaying herself in plain view (that is, to anyone with binoculars) in such a noble district as Mayfair, when she was no better than a common fingersmith! Lady Armitage could not abide it.
Granted, such outrages had been occurring for a decade, but familiarity was no impediment to Lady Armitage’s wrath. As a daughter of the Hollister family from York, none of whom had knowingly spoken to any denizen of Lancashire in the four centuries since the Wars of the Roses, she felt no difficulty sustaining a mere ten years’ indignation.
Even so, she’d tried all she could to smooth troubled waters. But Darlington had rudely persisted in avoiding the knife (and gun, poison, rabid dog, fall from a great height, garrote, flaming arrow). Thetime had come for different tactics. As a daughter of the Fairley clan on her distaff side, Lady Armitage had all the wit and flexibility that had seen her ancestors survive the civil war by deftly switching sides, religions, and marriages, whenever circumstances required. She needn’t try a seventeenth time to exterminate the Darlington woman. She would transition promptly to a new plan.
Killing Cecilia.
The pirate had promised to help. “Just rest, and I’ll assassinate her for you,” he had said, smiling in a lithe, melting way that reminded Lady Armitage of her second husband before the slow-acting poison began bloating his tongue. She’d been wary about hiring an outsider, but within five minutes of their meeting, the pirate had filled her with murderous excitement. They’d sipped wine, exchanged a few jokes about poison, before getting down to business, and she’d felt deep in her heart (or at least somewhere) that he was the one for the job.
“How would you like it done?” he’d asked. “Gun, garrote?”
Lady Armitage had shrugged. “I leave that up to your artistic discretion, Signor de Luca. But killing only. Nothing impolite. I am an ethical woman, and Cecilia is after all innocent.”
He’d raised an eyebrow in dispute of anyone’s innocence, and Lady Armitage had felt so gently chided, so tenderly assumed to be naive, just like a sweet and adorable woman, that she had actually blushed for the first time in seventy years. Murdering three husbands (and misplacing a fourth) tended to inure a woman to masculine charm, and yet as this man had looked at her over the rim of his wineglass, she’d found herself unexpectedly aflutter and trying to remember dizzily where she’d stored her wedding ring.
“Miss Darlington will be prostrate with grief at the loss of her niece,” she’d said. “It’s even better than killing the woman herself. And then of course I’ll kill her too, but Cecilia’s death will soften her up for assassination.”
“It’s an interesting plan,” the signor had agreed. “Tell me about Cecilia. What do I need to know?”
“Oh, she’s a dear girl.” She’d sighed, remembering a quiet, somber child who called her Aunty Army and was fascinated by her dagger collection. That was back in the good old days, down at the docks and along the golden shores, when the Wisteria Society still met regularly to discuss knitting patterns and the latest explosives catalog. How long ago had it been? Long enough that little Cecilia was all grown up and eligible for assassination.
Thinking of it, Lady Armitage had sighed again, melancholic. And Signor de Luca had reached over, one strand of hair falling across his eye roguishly, and patted her hand with gentle sympathy.
“Do it,” she’d said, staring at his long, swooping lashes, his curving lips. “Kill the girl. And then we’ll deal with Darlington.”
He’d laughed and drunk a toast to her brilliance, and she’d spent that evening sewing rosettes onto a garter and dreaming of the Italian hills bright with summer’s sun as she toured them on her (fifth) honeymoon.
The very next day, he’d set her plan into action. And it worked! Lady Armitage watched with bated breath, but after the dust of the explosion settled, she could discern no movement from the Darlington drawing room. Maybe a twitch of the drapes, but that would only be natural considering the great rush of air. On the street, neighbors were gathering in a state of panic, not so much from the explosion as from the realization that there were two pirate houses in their midst, but Lady Armitage had no interest in them. After all, pirates did the civic thing by displaying a black flag from their roof whilst going about pillaging and blowing things apart. If the public failed to look up, whose fault was that?
She turned away from the window, allowing herself a satisfied nod. Poor Cecilia, dead so young. And yet, the chit had been half a ghost already, pallid and quiet: a faint remembrance of her mother.
The thought tossed a memory up with it, a vision of bright billowing hair, flashing eyes... and a sword-pierced breast soaked in blood. Lady Armitage shuddered.
Then smiled. This was no time to be maudlin. She’d just killed a girl! Already the air seemed brighter (if literally darker, due to smoke from the bomb). Sweeping herself down upon a pink velvet divan, she reclined sensuously to await Signor de Luca’s arrival.
