The elegant, red-doored townhouse set halfway along the street did not respond. Whatever Lady Armitage was doing inside it, she failed to realize she was about to be blown into a thousand pieces.
Mrs. Chuke popped a bonbon into her mouth. “I wonder where Charlotte is?” she mused.
Miss Plim shrugged. Hard-eyed, her jaw clenched with a brutal silence, she waited impatiently for the explosions, as if they would satisfy the well of emotion plugged up tight within her body.
For Mrs. Ogden, resident of 23 Anchor Road, Tuesdays meant a supper of bangers and mash while reading the latestWomen’s Penny Paper, perhaps with a bit of pudding afterward if she’d had a hard day and needed a treat.
Mrs. Ogden usually had a hard day. Life in Clacton-on-Sea was difficult indeed. For instance, yesterday she had gone to the store for dandelion wine, but they were all out of stock. And just this morning she’d nearly been knocked down by a pretty strawberry-blonde-haired girl waving a map and saying, “North, I tell you! North!” as she strode ahead of a man, clearly her husband, whose expression was far more irritated than you wanted to see on someone carrying so many weapons.
Mrs. Ogden sighed, spooning herself another heap of pudding. It never used to be like this. Back in the days Mr. Ogden was still alive, it used to be a whole lot more boring. He did not condone pudding, for one thing. Bad for the bowels, he’d said. Mr. Ogden had been big on bowels, almost as much as he had been on bathing daily in seawater,which is why it was such a dark and terrible tragedy that he’d accidentally swallowed some unknown sea creature while swimming and died after a week of severe dysentery. “This is for you, Walter,” Mrs. Ogden would say in memorial every time she brought a sticky date pud out of the oven and poured custard over it.
Mr. Ogden had not liked sitting at the window looking out either, since it led to hemorrhoids; but in widowhood—to be precise, seventy-five minutes into widowhood—Mrs. Ogden had taken to tucking herself up on the cushioned window seat, bowl of pud or glass of wine in hand, and watching the various doings along Anchor Road. She could rely comfortably on being presented with some dreadful sight: young women and men perambulating together unchaperoned; hatless babies being taken out in cold breezes; Mrs. Witters next door chatting to the milkman even though she was married, the hoyden.
But this evening, as she settled down to watch the day fade into twilight, Mrs. Ogden was met with a sight more dreadful than any she had before experienced. She almost choked on pudding as she stared out at it, her lace curtains twitching.
Four pirate houses hovered in the street outside.
Pirates! In Clacton-on-Sea! Egads, howexcitingghastly!
The windows flashed in the lowering sunlight. The chimneys puffed little white clouds that floated away like sheep—er, flying sheep that slowly disintegrated. (In all fairness, living with Mr. Ogden would weaken anyone’s imagination.) The scene might have been quite picturesque were it not for the whopping great guns protruding from some of those windows.
Suddenly, Mrs. Ogden’s house shook with an enormous booming sound. The pudding spoon clattered against her teeth; her heart clattered against her ribs.
“Well I never!” Mrs. Ogden grumbled as a shiver of dust fell into her pudding. Just what did those pirates think they were doing?Anchor Road was a peaceful place (except when Mrs. Witters giggled loudly at the milkman). People couldn’t come around shooting cannons willy-nilly. Lucky for them Mr. Ogden was no longer alive, or they’d be getting the sharp edge of his—
Boom!
The house shuddered again. Mrs. Ogden nearly fell off the window seat. More dust was falling, and an unpleasant odor of smoke began to fill the room. Mrs. Ogden got unsteadily to her feet. A moment later, the window exploded as a small rocket howled through it, passing her at such proximity her puffy white hair sizzled, and then embedded itself in the far wall. Three clay ducks that had been flying perpetually toward the ceiling finally achieved their goal, albeit only briefly and in pieces.
“Oh I say!” Mrs. Ogden clasped her bosom with astonishment.
“Surrender!”
The demand roared out, accompanied by copious door-thumping. Mrs. Ogden reached automatically for her rolling pin.
“We know you’re in there!”
Mrs. Ogden’s eyes narrowed. She recalled Mr. Ogden saying those same words on their honeymoon as she hid in the outhouse, eating leftover wedding cake. She’d been squidgy back then, but marriage and widowhood had fired her spirit (and had a remarkable effect on her feces). Tugging on her cardigan to straighten it, she marched to the front door, yanked it open, and swung out wildly with the rolling pin.
“A Brit never surrenders!”
Several women in magnificent hats leaped back. They stared at Mrs. Ogden in horror.
“You’re not Isabella Armitage,” said one. The ostrich plume in her turban swooped as she surveyed Mrs. Ogden’s brown cardy and woolen skirt.
“I most certainly am not,” Mrs. Ogden replied, then noticed the wreckage of timber and roof tiles in her front garden. She looked up at the gaping hole that had been her spare bedroom’s wall. “What have you done to my house?!”
“It was an innocent mistake,” the plumed lady said. “Why on earth would a civilian paint their door red?”
Mrs. Ogden’s cardigan buttons strained against the swelling of her bosom. “I chose that color for the sake of my poor dead husband!” Mr. Ogden had always despised red.
“Oh. Er. Well.” The pirates shuffled awkwardly, rubbing the backs of their necks and casting embarrassed glances at each other. “Terribly sorry. Awful shame. I say, you haven’t happened to see another house around here with a red door? It has white shutters same as your house has—er, had.”
“No.” Miss Ogden’s eyes had begun narrowing again. She placed one fist against her hip; the other still gripped the rolling pin with all the determination of a Boudicca, or Queen Elizabeth, or the person who’d dobbed in the milkman for fraternizing with his married customers. “So what are you going to do about compensating me?”
The pirates murmured amongst themselves. The plumed one turned back with a dazzling smile. “Would three diamond necklaces suffice?”
“No,” said Mrs. Ogden.
