Granted, she might cut that net with her dagger, fashion a hammock from it, and lie in said hammock reading books and drinking lemonade someplace no one would bother her, but that is beside the point.

She remembered with discomfort her early years running barefoot and undisciplined through the forest of rooms in Northangerland Abbey while Cilla indulged in romantic ideas about parenting. “Frolic!” she had urged Cecilia. “Sing! Dance! Only don’t disturb your papa when he’s machinating evil in his study.” Other pirate children were allowed to learn map reading, and write out the dictionary, and develop their posture by means of walking with a sword balanced on their head. But Cecilia had been forced to play with dolls.

Her father hadn’t approved, which was one of the reasons Cilla left him (that and his penchant for trying to destroy the world). But he hadn’t exactly been on Cecilia’s side either.

“I will not have a daughter with a coward soul,” he had declared, his eyes lit with the passion he felt whenever echoing one Brontë or another. He’d caught her reading a textbook in the sitting room, thus embarrassing him in front of the embezzler he was about to beat up. “Throw that book into the fire and go hunt for ghosts or draw eerie pictures on the wallpaper,” he’d demanded.

“But it’s arithmetic,” Cecilia had said in a small, mournful voice.

Captain Morvath had rolled his eyes at the embezzler, who’d shrugged sympathetically. (He would have sympathized even if the captain had told Cecilia to go play with a crocodile, so desirous was he to appease Morvath and avoid a thrashing.)

“Arithmetic,” the captain had scoffed. “What nonsense! I won’t allow it. You need to live your life like wild poetry!”

He’d snatched the book, tossed it on the hearth fire, and given her a toy gun instead.

The memory tugged on her as she tried to haul herself out of drugged unconsciousness toward a familiar smell of old dusty wood. She felt cold against her face. She heard the wuthering of strange breezes through solemn corridors. Northangerland Abbey had been a spruce, well-lit, modern building until her father took possession of it. He spent years transforming it to a state of mournful gloom. It was, he liked to say, his tangible opus.

He was, everyone else said, a pretentious idiot.

A pretentious idiot with a whole lot of guns and the willingness to use them.

Whether Cilla had chosen to live with him or been forced into it, no one now would ever know. But there had come a time when, unable to bear the thought of yet another miserable day anchored on dreary, uninhabited moorland while her husband tried to find inspiration for a novel, she’d finally escaped.

Cecilia did not want to remember. She fought to wake completely, but memory got its scarred claws right around her and dragged her back down. She became a small child again, cold and frightened, clambering out a window into her mother’s arms . . .