a ruffian. This is the role Keeffe customarily plays for my club, when we turn our attention to self-protection for ladies. However, thanks to you, Keeffe is hors de combat. He seems to believe you would do best as a murderous attacker.
Ashmont and Blackwood had been lounging under a tree by the riverbank when the letter was delivered. Express.
Ashmont’s heart, which had started a wild beating at the sight of the familiar handwriting, had not altogether settled. Her previous P.S. had given him a fit of the blue devils. Still, he managed a veneer of amused insouciance.
“She wants me,” he said.
Blackwood kept his gaze on the pages of a tattered volume of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman he’d found in a basket in the fishing house. “That I very much doubt, no matter who she is.”
As though there could be any other she. “Miss Pomfret. She says she wants a ruffian and a murderous attacker for her club.”
“Ah.” Blackwood set down the book.
“Assassins club, do you think?”
“Not quite. I assume she refers to the Andromeda Society. A ladies’ charitable club. They go to the rescue of Andromedas, as I understand it. From the myth.”
“From the . . .” Ashmont looked up at the clouds floating overhead and saw a clear night, stars blanketing the heavens. In the darkness, he’d nearly tripped over her. A small, elfin girl. She stood by the fishing house, gaping up at the stars, and turning round and round.
“You’ll make yourself dizzy and tumble down the riverbank and into the river,” he said.
“I sneaked out,” she said, coming to a rather drunken standstill. “Don’t tell.”
“I never tell.”
“Did you come to spin in circles, too? It’s fun.”
He’d forgotten something at the fishing house—a glove, a book—he couldn’t remember now what it was. But on an impulse, perhaps because she was misbehaving or perhaps because she was comical in her slow whirling and dizziness, he said, “I came to find the stories in the stars.”
Andromeda was one he’d pointed out to her. He’d told her how Andromeda had been chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster or dragon, but Perseus had killed the monster and saved her.
But soon a nursemaid had come and dragged the elfin girl away, and the next day he, Blackwood, and Ripley had returned to school.
It was the same girl, the one he saw the next year in broad day, bravely facing Godfrey Wills. That was why she’d seemed so familiar. The way she stood. The way she held herself, straight and strong, as though she were much larger than she was. And the voice, the youthful version of the cool, self-assured voice.
It was curious, wasn’t it, the way faces might blur or vanish from memory or get muddled with others, but a voice echoed so clearly, even years later.
“Andromeda,” Blackwood was saying. “Surely you remember the myth?”
“Yes. My mind wandered.”
“When does it do otherwise?”
Ashmont came back fully to the moment. The river below, burbling along. The quiet. The simplicity of the place. “A charity, you said.”
“Alice says the club’s meant to help women needing rescuing from ‘the dragons of poverty and ignorance.’”
Ashmont returned to the letter.
My club meets on Friday next at two o’clock in Chelsea at the Baron de Bérenger’s Stadium. The general meeting will take about an hour. During this part we usually discuss the subjugation of women, bills before Parliament relevant to our mission, letters to be written to the public journals, and progress in current projects. You will find it dead boring. The practical demonstrations come afterward, usually allotted half an hour. As I was reminded this morning by one of the members, I had promised a demonstration. This is where I require your services.
The club members are all women of some maturity. I am the youngest, admitted because my grandmother Lady Chelsfield is a founder and because I have useful skills, thanks to her and Keeffe. The ladies will be fully clothed and of large mental capacity. If you find the prospect too dull, too daunting, or inconvenient to your plans, and have no desire to make yourself useful—after having broken my tiger as well as my carriage, thereby curtailing the activities in which I take pleasure—kindly let me know by return post. Keeffe thought of you first, but I daresay he will be able to recommend somebody else in the event you decline.
Yours sincerely,
Cassandra Pomfret
* * *
Camberley Place
Saturday 29th Instant
Leaving first thing tomorrow. Will collect you at one o’clock on Friday