“Absolutely,” he said.
Flinging her hem down again, Alice turned and unlatched the window, then pushed it ajar. Cold rain pelted her; the wind howled. Grimacing at the force of it, she leaned against the side of the window and took aim with the egg beater.
The pirate’s conservatory hung above the cottage, silent and steady despite the storm. Alice found she could not line up the egg beater effectively at this angle, so she hoisted herself onto the windowsill and leaned out. The sky was a tumult of darkness. The ground was so far below as to be but a dream.
Propping her feet against the far edge of the window, wedging herself as securely as possible, Alice took a deep breath. Then she let go of the windowsill and turned the beater’s rotary handle.
A stream of tiny missiles shot from the end of the beater, flaring with storm light as they flew. Hitting the conservatory, they triggered a series of explosions with unexpected force. Flames burst through the gloom; glass shattered. The conservatory lurched and began to topple sideways. Daniel steered the cottage away, but the beater’s incantation jostled with the flight incantation, causing an imbalance. The cottage veered right into the conservatory.
As a fierce jolt went through her, Alice dropped the egg beater, sending it plummeting hundreds of feet to earth. Instinctively she reached for it. Daniel shouted something, but she did not hear him, for her balance went the same way as the egg beater and then she herself followed, tipping headfirst out the window into the storm.
5
descent into madness—the worst-case scenario— tea and biscuits—a dangerous riddle— alice causes shock and dismay
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you choose to wear an enchanted petticoat just in case you fall from a flying cottage. As she plunged through icy, howling rain, Alice unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall away from her. With it went a pearl-handled revolver and an illustrated edition of Euripides’s plays, which had been tucked into a secret pocket—but there was no time for mourning this loss. Alice yanked on a ribbon and with a gentlethwompthe petticoat blossomed into a parachute.
Peering down toward the ground, she sighed. It looked terribly far away. She could have done with a little light reading of Euripides to help her pass the time. Looking up, she saw the A.U.N.T. cottage ducking and diving around the glasshouse. Its chimney had disintegrated and the roof would need to be retiled. But the egg beater had significantly damaged the glasshouse, and Alice felt certain Daniel and Snodgrass would be safe from further attack. Now they simply needed to maintain the fragile stability of the cottage, fly safely throughthe storm despite having lost the chimney, and land without crashing, flipping, or for that matter outright plummeting—all of which they would do in considerably warmer conditions than hers, given that one corner of the cottage was aflame.
Thus reassured, Alice turned to contemplating her own future. With no map or compass, she would be doomed to asking directions from strangers. “Fiddlesticks,” she muttered. Could this day get any worse?
At that very moment, a house glided into view below her. Tall and pale, with one round window in its attic like a baleful eye and smoke arising sedately from its chimney, it seemed to sally forth on a wind of its own self-importance. A black flag flapped jauntily above the roof.
Such a flag indicated a pirate’s premises—although unnecessarily so, considering only pirates (and secret agents pretending to be pirates) flew buildings. Witches would not lower themselves (er, metaphorically speaking) to use the magical incantation in such an obvious manner. And although pirates trained their servants to pilot, should any run away and use the incantation for themselves, they would either succeed—and thus be pirates—or die trying.
Alice knew that Her Majesty’s government had managed to secretly get hold of the incantation once, and had set up a committee to study it. Twenty years later, Parliament had tired of waiting and demanded results—only to discover that the committee had lost the incantation eighteen years ago and had spent the rest of the time discussing cricket over tea and scones. A.U.N.T. was aware of this because their agents had been the tea ladies.
Still pirates flew the black flag, although they did not need to. To them it was a matter of pride—much in the same way ferocious, man-eating lions had pride.
Alice supposed the house was headed for the Starkthorn Castle house party. “F-f-fabulous,” she said aloud, her teeth chattering fromcold. Angling down toward the warm golden light shining through its windows, she landed atop a white wrought-iron fence surrounding a balcony. Her petticoat deflated, and, before she could unbalance, she jumped down to the balcony floor.
Doing her best to smooth her sodden, wrinkled petticoat, she then straightened the sleeves of her velveteen bodice and tried without success to squeeze all the water from her sagging hat feathers. Her pompadour, which had taken an hour to establish, drooped in an as-yet-unfashionable manner, but without a looking glass, she dared not even touch it. Finally, as presentable as she was likely to get after falling hundreds of feet through a storm, she stepped forward to knock on the balcony’s door.
Through a delicate lace curtain she could see shadowed figures clustered around a hearth fire. One approached and opened the door. It proved to be a stout, middle-aged woman in the mobcap and plain black dress of a housemaid. An enormous fluffy yellow feather swooped out from the top of the mobcap.
“Yes?” she said. “How may I help you?”
“I happened to be passing,” Alice said, “and wondered if I m-m-might presume upon your hospitality? It is d-d-dreadfully cold out here.”
The housemaid glanced back over her shoulder. “There’s a girl as wants to come in,” she informed the room’s occupants. A murmuring came from over by the hearth fire. Turning once more to Alice, the housemaid nodded. “You may enter. Wipe your feet.”
She stepped aside, opening the door wider and blinking against the damp chill of the wind. Alice brushed her shoes against the sodden doormat to no effect, then squelched in.
She found herself facing a bewildering cram of knickknacks and furniture, somewhere amongst which were theoretically four walls and a floor. Beside the hearth fire sat a finely dressed couple drinking teaand reading. The gentleman, gray-haired and with a face like a hatchet that has been struck repeatedly by another hatchet, looked up vaguely, but the woman continued perusing her novel. In one glance Alice added together precise ringlets, onyx earrings, and two shawls draped around a black bombazine dress, reaching a dire conclusion.
“Miss Darlington,” she said.
“Hm?” The woman raised her head as if only now noticing Alice’s arrival. “Oh, hello there. Competence, close the door, we are about to perish from eczema.”
Competence did as ordered, and Alice blinked as the latch clicked into place with the same sound a bone makes when it snaps. Her teeth began to chatter even more violently. Of all the flying houses in England, she had fallen into the worst. Miss Darlington and her husband, Jake Jacobsen, scrutinized her in a silence that felt honed and polished on account of having pierced countless people before encountering her. Only by dint of two decades’ ruthless training did she manage to neither blush nor lower her chin nor run screaming out the balcony door.
“What is your name?” Miss Darlington asked.
“M-M-Mrs. Alice B-Blakeney, ma’am.” She considered curtsying but did not think her frozen knees would support the endeavor.
“Do you like black tea or green, Mrs. Blakeney?”
This had to be a trick question. No reasonable person would consider there to be any real choice, and the only dilemma was exactly how unreasonable a pirate was expected to be. “Black,” she said—and held her breath, waiting to see if Miss Darlington would throw her back out the door because of it. (Mind you, plummeting to earth was preferable to drinking green tea.)
