“Yes, Ottery St. Mary. The coordinates are all mapped out.” She sank into the fireside chair and laid a hand against her brow. “I cannot believe it,” she murmured fretfully. “Two miles, and in the bright sun!”

Cecilia scrutinized the chart that lay on the shelf angled between wheel and window. She saw at once that her aunt had plotted a rather circuitous route so as to avoid the Blackdown Hills and she said nothing, only smiled a little to herself at her aunt’s old-fashioned attitude to navigation. The idea that air currents over that region were disturbed by fairies, and forlorn ghosts of people who had seen those fairies, had long been put to rest by rational thinking. Nevertheless, Miss Darlington remained stoutly antiquated. Cecilia reached for the sextant.

“You could have twisted an ankle!” Miss Darlington persisted from the fireside. “Or become suntanned!”

“I am quite all right, Aunty,” Cecilia said, aligning the sextant with the horizon and making mental calculations. Her mind, however, kept slipping back to thoughts of Captain Lightbourne. Would he seek her in Ottery St. Mary? What if he lost track of her and they never met again? The prospect of that was miserable—for the sake of her career, of course, and not at all because of his tight trousers and smiling blue eyes.

Clearly, revealing their tête-à-tête to her aunt was out of the question. Never mind his being a wicked piratical assassin; he might have been infected with measles or whooping cough, and Miss Darlington would know no peace for weeks. Besides, a brief exchange with a fellow pirate was inconsequential compared to this stolen-house business. Cecilia would look silly if she mentioned it. Thus she managed quite thoroughly to convince herself that remaining silent on the matter was her only recourse.

“Shall I call Pleasance to bring tea?” she asked.

There was no need. The maid appeared that very moment bearing a tray laden with tea and digestive biscuits, after the consumption of which Miss Darlington snoozed. Cecilia flew them on peacefully toward Ottery St. Mary, watching out for bird strikes, wondering if the village would have a public library, not at all thinking about the provocative blond pirate whose fingertip had slipped briefly, gently, across her wrist when he returned her bracelet in an inconsequential moment that in no way made her feel electrified.

She was gazing at the horizon and thus not thinking, Miss Darlington was challenging someone to pistols at dawn in her sleep, and Pleasance in the kitchen below was hunched in a corner, peeling turnips and chatting with her great-great-grandmother, who liked to call in on her for a pleasant half hour of haunting every week or so; therefore, the great spiked shadow pursuing them over the villages and fields of southwest England went unnoticed by all.