“I’m sure it can be arranged, Your Majesty,” Constantinopla said.
“She may attend our Jubilee Banquet,” the Queen proclaimed airily.
If she survives, Constantinopla thought, and winced again as the cannons roared.
It was not altogether certain that Miss Darlington would honor the Queen with her presence at the banquet. Not only did she suspect Victoria was rather unhygienic, considering all those children the Queen had conceived, but there was also the slight impediment of Miss Darlington herself being half-dead.
Pleasance huddled with her in the tiny bedchamber they had limped into after an agonizing escape from the melee. Pleasance’s knee was gashed, her ribs bruised, and a serrated knife protruded from her left bicep.
Yet she had carried her mistress along several corridors, up a flight of stairs, and into a room where they could hide behind a narrow, rusting bed. Miss Darlington was deathly pale where she was not deathly blood-soaked, but still she strained against Pleasance’s arms, wanting to rejoin the fight.
In fact, Pleasance had no idea where the fight had gone. After Morvath stabbed his mother and then barely escaped the skirmish himself as a dozen enraged ladies descended upon him, people scattered and the melee spread into smaller private battles. The clash of metal and flare of sudden, brief screams echoed through the abbey as henchmen pursued pirates and pirates pursued henchmen, depending on who happened to be in the lead at the time. Explosions rang out, causing the whole building to shudder. Pleasance could smell smoke, andshe knew if fire was headed their way, they would have no escape from it.
She had always thought that, when she died, she would like to haunt a nice cobwebbed attic or perhaps a mysteriously locked cellar in a duke’s country house. She would be the moan that chilled an otherwise stoic man, the whisper that drew children into eerie games, the last thing a forlorn wife saw before sliding into death from heartbreak. The idea of dying in Northangerland Abbey distressed her. Here, she would need to get in a very long line of ghosts, wights, and strange-glimpses-of-something-white before being allowed any haunting opportunity.
“Pleasance,” Miss Darlington murmured through blue lips. “Leave me, dear girl. Save yourself.”
With a cry, Pleasance grasped the elderly lady more closely to her bosom. “I will never leave you, miss,” she vowed. “We will die togeth— Um, that is to say, we will survive together, and be rescued, and later this evening drink a cup of tea together in the comfort of your own home. At least, I shall serve the tea, and you shall drink it, and I shall wash the cup afterward.”
Miss Darlington reached up weakly to touch Pleasance’s humble, shining face. “I would drink tea with you any day,” she whispered.
Pleasance flushed with pride. She clutched the bed to haul herself up, then stood for a moment trying not to swoon as several ghosts came close to gibber at her. She blew them away with a determined exhalation. Miss Darlington would not die in this dismal chamber! Pleasance would rescue her even if the cost was her own paltry life.
In the back of her mind, several ghosts rubbed their spectral hands with gleeful anticipation. Pleasance ignored them. She needed a weapon if she was to secure freedom for Miss Darlington, and there was only one available in this room. So she clenched her teeth, her limbs, her very toes—and with a sudden, harsh movement she pulled the blade from her arm.
Pain almost threw her to the ground. But Pleasance was a heroine, and she remained standing. Brushing back her wild curls, ignoring the blood pouring from her arm, she took the rotting blanket from the bed, lifted Miss Darlington as gently as she could onto it, and began dragging the elderly lady toward the door.
She almost made it.
Suddenly the door crashed ajar and a rough-faced man with a heavily bandaged shoulder charged into the room. His pistol lifted, and before Pleasance could even think of the knife in her hand, he snatched it from her.
“Well, well, what have we here,” he said with grim delight. “Miss Jemima Darlington.”
Fury erupted within Pleasance. It blazed through any last barrier she had between reality and interesting fiction and smoked her inner mad baroness out.
With a bloodthirsty scream, she leaped at Jacobsen.
Northangerland Abbey was breaking apart. Houses rose from its courtyard garden as pirates escaped the fight to join the greater action beyond. The abbey’s cannons roared and its machine guns clattered, but they could not angle up to shoot the houses swarming above, nor could they reach the royal troops, whose own cannons had a longer range. Fires grew. Gables shattered. Henchmen began running out, hollering their surrender, hands held high.
In the attic of Darlington House, Cecilia watched the destruction with a cold gaze. Almost everyone she knew in the world was in that building. Nonetheless, she dutifully aimed the cannon once more and fired—
A corner of the abbey’s west wing erupted. It was her most successful shot so far; with such a gaping hole in its side, the stabilizingcomponent of the flight incantation would never hold. Northangerland Abbey was going nowhere. Cecilia took a deep breath of relief—
And her relentless composure finally cracked, sending emotion slamming through her mind. She stumbled back, gasping.
Had she just killed Aunt Darlington? What if the old lady had left the fight, crossed the abbey, climbed several stairs, and entered the west wing?
“Oh God,” she breathed. “Oh God.”
God, however, did not respond, and the ingrained dictates of piracy pulled her out of black panic. With a further deep breath, she forced down the terror, loaded another cannonball, and took aim.
And shook so violently she could not light the fuse.
Fire flew across her vision. Smoke poured out of the abbey’s facade. She might not be shooting, but other pirates were, in addition to the troops on the ground. It was all beyond her control. She could not stop trembling. Turning away from the cannon, she grasped the copper trumpet and shouted into it.
“Land the house!”
There followed a moment of astonished silence; then Ned’s voice echoed up from the wheelroom below. “Cecilia? Are you all right?”
