“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”
“I do not know, Captain O’Riley. But if you don’t get out of my way, they will be calling it murder, plain and simple.”
He laughed. “I like you, Miss Bassingthwaite.”
“And yet here you are, still standing in my way.”
He hurried back, bowing to her, and she strode off without another glance.Men!she thought irritably as she went. Their hysterical nature was a trial to any rational creature.
A footman met her at the castle door, and after another cold stare and a few choice words from her, he humbly begged to escort her to the thirty-second bedroom. But they never made it that far. Halfway up the wide marble staircase of the castle’s main hall, they found Miss Darlington coming down. At first Cecilia thought it was a ghost, for her aunt was dressed in a voluminous, blood-spattered white nightgown, her hair floating about her shockingly pallid face, her eyes wide and staring as she descended at a precipitous rate; furthermore, Pleasance chased her, crying, “Don’t go! Don’t go!” in the same tone she’d used when the Darlington House parlor ghost had taken a new, more distressing job with Baroness Reve.
But Miss Darlington exuded vitality as she budged past Cecilia. “Don’t just stand there, girl!” she said in a decidedly unspectral voice (although it did send chills down Cecilia’s spine). “We must leave at once!”
The fear and tension eased from Cecilia’s body in a long breath. She had a wild, uncouth inclination to hug her aunt, but then tension abruptly returned. Would Miss Darlington guess what she had been up to beyond the woods?
Apparently not. Her aunt stormed down the stairs without a backward glance. Cecilia hurried to follow. The footman who had been accompanying her kept pace with a crisp, professional stride, being well used to the dramatics of elderly ladies.
“What is wrong, Aunty?” Cecilia asked as they went.
“I have been assaulted!” Miss Darlington declared. She flung an arm out in emphasis and the footman only just caught the antique vaseshe knocked over. “I will not remain in this den of iniquity a moment longer!”
Cecilia glanced questioningly at Pleasance.
“There was a doctor,” Pleasance explained.
“Oh dear.”
“After he tended to her wounds he wanted to inject her with morphine for the pain, and she called him a pervert.”
“Degenerate!” Miss Darlington specified. She swooped onto the polished floor of the grand entrance hall, then abruptly stopped, causing the others to collide in a jumbled halt. She glared at a set of knight’s armor.
“It’s not a real person, Aunty,” Cecilia assured her.
“Tsk,” Miss Darlington replied. With one firm tug, she yanked the knight’s lance from his grip, then cracked it across her knee. The footman moaned. Miss Darlington tossed aside half the broken lance and proceeded to use the other half as a cane to support herself as she strode along the strip of red carpet that ran down the length of the hall.
“Oh, my poor bones,” she moaned unconvincingly.
The footman opened his mouth to protest this treatment of Her Majesty’s antiquities, but Cecilia caught his gaze and he wisely silenced himself. They hurried to keep up.
“What happened with the doctor?” Cecilia whispered to Pleasance.
“He told her not to be a silly old woman and to take the morphine,” Pleasance whispered in reply.
“So he had a death wish, then?”
“Apparently. The blood on her nightgown belongs to him.”
“If he is dead it’s his own fault,” Miss Darlington said, proving herself to have the hearing ability of bats and elderly aunts everywhere. “I merely used his own injector on him.”
“In his—er—” Pleasance lowered her gaze, waggling her eyebrows eloquently.
“Oh dear,” Cecilia murmured again.
“Yes, well,” Miss Darlington said, “if you are going to threaten to stab me with a metaphorically phallic instrument, prepare to be stabbed yourself in your actual—”
The castle doors slammed open. Everyone staggered to a halt as a bulky, gray-haired figure loomed in the exposed sunlight.
“You again?” Miss Darlington huffed with exasperation.
