The outrage of that Darlington woman displaying herself in plain view (that is, to anyone with binoculars) in such a noble district as Mayfair, when she was no better than a common fingersmith! Lady Armitage could not abide it.

Granted, such outrages had been occurring for a decade, but familiarity was no impediment to Lady Armitage’s wrath. As a daughter of the Hollister family from York, none of whom had knowingly spoken to any denizen of Lancashire in the four centuries since the Wars of the Roses, she felt no difficulty sustaining a mere ten years’ indignation.

Even so, she’d tried all she could to smooth troubled waters. But Darlington had rudely persisted in avoiding the knife (and gun, poison, rabid dog, fall from a great height, garrote, flaming arrow). The time had come for different tactics. As a daughter of the Fairley clan on her distaff side, Lady Armitage had all the wit and flexibility that had seen her ancestors survive the civil war by deftly switching sides, religions, and marriages, whenever circumstances required. She needn’t try a seventeenth time to exterminate the Darlington woman. She would transition promptly to a new plan.

Killing Cecilia.

The pirate had promised to help. “Just rest, and I’ll assassinate her for you,” he had said, smiling in a lithe, melting way that reminded Lady Armitage of her second husband before the slow-acting poison began bloating his tongue. She’d been wary about hiring an outsider, but within five minutes of their meeting, the pirate had filled her with murderous excitement. They’d sipped wine, exchanged a few jokes about poison, before getting down to business, and she’d felt deep in her heart (or at least somewhere) that he was the one for the job.

“How would you like it done?” he’d asked. “Gun, garrote?”

Lady Armitage had shrugged. “I leave that up to your artistic discretion, Signor de Luca. But killing only. Nothing impolite. I am an ethical woman, and Cecilia is after all innocent.”

He’d raised an eyebrow in dispute of anyone’s innocence, and Lady Armitage had felt so gently chided, so tenderly assumed to be naive, just like a sweet and adorable woman, that she had actually blushed for the first time in seventy years. Murdering three husbands (and misplacing a fourth) tended to inure a woman to masculine charm, and yet as this man had looked at her over the rim of his wineglass, she’d found herself unexpectedly aflutter and trying to remember dizzily where she’d stored her wedding ring.

“Miss Darlington will be prostrate with grief at the loss of her niece,” she’d said. “It’s even better than killing the woman herself. And then of course I’ll kill her too, but Cecilia’s death will soften her up for assassination.”

“It’s an interesting plan,” the signor had agreed. “Tell me about Cecilia. What do I need to know?”

“Oh, she’s a dear girl.” She’d sighed, remembering a quiet, somber child who called her Aunty Army and was fascinated by her dagger collection. That was back in the good old days, down at the docks and along the golden shores, when the Wisteria Society still met regularly to discuss knitting patterns and the latest explosives catalog. How long ago had it been? Long enough that little Cecilia was all grown up and eligible for assassination.