He looked up as she approached. “Ah, there you are,” he said mildly.
“What is Dr. Snodgrass doing?” Alice asked in a wary voice. “And do I really want to know?”
“This is an anti-theft device!” Snodgrass himself answered, turning to gesture excitedly with his screwdriver. Alice took a step back in case it exploded. “The small black box has been embedded with anchoring phrases from the incantation. All I have to do is press this button and—”
Eeeeee-ooooooo-eeeeee-ooooooo!
Alice and Daniel clasped hands over their ears at the sudden high-pitched scream emanating from the device. Frantic, Snodgrass smacked the button repeatedly, without success. Smoke began to gush from the box. The cottage shook. In the houses all around, faces appeared at windows, presumably shouting, although it was impossible to hear beyond the alarm.
At last, Snodgrass managed to restore silence. As the smoke dissipated and the air seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the cottage to collapse entirely from shock, Alice dared to lower her hands.
“Fiddlesticks,” she said, the word hissing at its end much like the fuse of a bomb hisses when lit. “Fiddlesticks. F-f-f—”
Daniel took hold of her, firmly clamping her arms, his expression impeccably sober. “Miss Dearlove,” he said in a voice as firm as his grip. “Willows whiten, aspens quiver.”
The shuddering of Alice’s senses was immediately diverted, easing into the course of Tennyson’s rhyme. “Willows whiten, aspens quiver,” she said.
“Little breezes dusk and shiver,” Daniel continued.
“Thro’ the wave that runs for ever.”
His expression softened; he released his grip. “By the island in the river.”
Alice resisted the urge to rub the tingling warmth in her arms where he had grasped her. “Flowing down to Camelot.”
Breath calmed, tossing back its metaphorical hair and brushing the wrinkles from its surface as if the momentary panic had been intentional, thank you—merely a test of the system. Her constitution reasserted itself without even one tap of a finger.
Behind them, Snodgrass tittered. “I say, say what?”
The agents ignored him. Daniel reached out to touch Alice’s hat.
“Your butterfly is wingless,” he said softly.
And just like that her pulse shook again. She swallowed, and Daniel withdrew his hand. They both looked away into the middle distance.
“All right?” he asked.
“All right,” Alice confirmed, and he smiled briefly, efficiently. As his expression shut down again like a library catalog card slotting back into place, Alice felt her heart give a dreamy sigh...
But her brain strode forth to stop that nonsense at once. It snapped out a ruler and pointed to the fact that not only had Daniel recognized her sensory crisis, he’d known the exact Tennyson poem guaranteed to settle her—the one Academy tutors had used for that same purpose when she was growing up. This suggested only one conclusion.
He had gathered a data file on her.
Alice’s heart gasped. The nerve of the man! She would have to punish him for such a breach of privacy! No doubt there was something in the data file she had gathered on him that would suggest a suitable penalty.
She narrowed her eyes to stare at him as if she might be able to discern the truth from his eyelashes and cheekbones and the perfect curve of his lips that must fit just right against a woman’s mouth—buteven as she hastily looked away again, blushing, he himself turned with flashing eyes to glare at Snodgrass.
The scientist flinched. “Sorry. That was rather unexpected, what? But I say, no one will want to steal the house now.”
“No one would want to steal it in the first place!” Daniel countered with uncharacteristic anger. “It’s a wreck. We’ll be taking the train back to London.”
“Oh, jolly good! I love a train ride.”
The anger in Daniel’s mood cooled abruptly, hardening to ice. “Doctor, no. When I said ‘we,’ I meant the lady and I. Perhaps you can—I don’t know—invent a wheeled plank of wood to transport you back, or some such.”
Snodgrass caught his breath—but not in offense, Alice realized. He reached into his jacket pocket for a notepad and pencil and began writing furiously. She heard him murmur, “A board to skate across the ground...”
Daniel’s hand clenched. Turning away from the scientist, he caught Alice’s gaze unintentionally, and she blinked at the cold wrath in his eyes. But almost instantly expression faded from his countenance, leaving him inscrutable once more. She sensed Snodgrass had narrowly averted assassination for the third time that day.
