Ned looked at Cecilia, an eyebrow raised. Chastity belt, she mouthed, and his face contorted in horror.

Lady Armitage turned back, smoothing her skirts and holding up a small, golden, slightly damp key. “We sail at once,” she pronounced in a ringing voice. “No one kills Jemima Darlington but me.”

13

hell on earth—a lost opportunity—semi-starvation—lady armitage gets a taste of her own medicine—a shot in the dark—the psychology of pneumonia—albert and victoria, bible students, not mannafrom heaven—fade to black

One can be happy in eternal solitude: a book, a cup of tea, and no company; that was Cecilia’s idea of heaven. Having spent the past week surrounded by people, and thwarted at every turn in her efforts to locate a library, she was now feeling as if she had endured an upper circle of hell.

As a consequence, she stood at the window of Lady Armitage’s dining room with her arms crossed and her mouth tight as she stared out across the lush green fields where they had finally moored for the evening. “Blackdown Hills,” she said—alas, not for the first time. “Hills. We have seen nothing but meadows for hours now.”

“There was that hill in Stockland,” Ned reminded her as he set a plate of cold meats on the table. She glanced at it unhappily.

Without servants in the house, they had been forced to contrive a dinner from whatever they could find in the kitchen, so whilst Lady Armitage mapped out a plan of reconnaissance for the morning, and Jacobsen shouted from the room in which they had him locked, Ned and Cecilia had searched cupboards and pantries for food.

This had presented an ideal opportunity for charming comic scenes that would increase their rapport—a little explosion of flour, a splashing back and forth of water, a bumping of hips and gazes as they maneuvered the small kitchen spaces and reached awkwardly for spoons—but since Ned was queasy from airsickness, and Cecilia had just about reached the end of her tether, they had wasted said opportunity and managed to lay a dinner table in sadly efficient time.

It was slim pickings, with only two types of sliced meat, cold roast potatoes, smoked fish, scallop fritters, bread rolls with sweetened butter, asparagus, artichoke hearts, and a braised apple dessert that Ned had whipped up while Cecilia prepared the guns for possible battle and Lady Armitage bunny hopped the house across farm fields before finally coming in to land.

Cecilia didn’t think she had an appetite even for such meager offerings. Every time she tried to rest her thoughts, they turned into a sword slicing through sunlight, Cilla screaming at her to run, Morvath laughing as he ripped her world apart. She grew unbearably tense with memory and fear. Was Aunt Darlington being killed that same way, even now? Ned had promised not. And yet, which Ned exactly had promised? The charming assassin, the Queen’s noble Captain Smith, or the man who had been working with her father? Could she trust anything he said? Her brain advised not, but her heart whispered otherwise. As for her stomach—it was more taut than Lady Armitage’s hair.