“You did?” Ophelia said.
“Who is Hansel? Sounds like a peasant,” Henrietta said.
“I’ll say good-bye to Dalziel when we get to Paris,” Prue said. “I couldn’t do it last night on account of he was in a stew trying to help Lord and Lady Cruthlach find their stolen spell book.”
“It was stolen?” Ophelia asked.
“Right out of their chateau chamber last night.”
Professor Penrose would be mighty interested in that. Come to think of it, maybe he had stolen the spell book himself . . . but Ophelia realized she ought never think of the professor again.
“After I break the news to Dalziel,” Prue said, “I’m shutting myself away.”
“What has gotten into you, Prudence?” Henrietta turned to Ophelia. “Prudence never made a peep as a baby. I put her in a drawer in the corner of my dressing room—”
“A drawer?” Ophelia said.
“Well, of course I cracked it. And it was filled with old bits of costumes and such, and she would sleep through everything. Such a little bonbon.” Her eyes went hard, and she poked Prue with the toe of her shoe. “Allow Mommy to take care of things, all right?”
Prue sighed.
Griffe snorted himself awake. “Quelle heure est-il?”
“Count,” Ophelia said. “I’ve got something important to tell you.”
“Eh?”
“Don’t you dare muddle up my plans,” Henrietta hissed in Ophelia’s ear. Henrietta smiled sweetly at Griffe.
Griffe beamed at Ophelia. “I have been meaning to say, Mademoiselle Stonewall, I do hope your delightful aunt, Madame Brand, might come to our wedding. I have just had a dream of her, all in white.”
Mercy.
The coach joggled along. Ophelia looked out at the stretching brown fields and rows of bare trees, and wondered exactly how she was going to pry herself out of this one.
Keep reading for a preview of Maia Chance’s next Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery . . .
Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna
Coming February 2016 from Berkley Prime Crime!
1
Beware of allowing yourself to be prejudiced by appearances.
—Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, “Beauty and the Beast” (1756)
The day had arrived. Miss Ophelia Flax’s last day in Paris, her last day in Artemis Stunt’s gilt-edged apartment choked with woody perfumes and cigarette haze. Ophelia had chosen December 12, 1867, at eleven o’clock in the morning as the precise time when she would make a clean breast of it. And now it was half past ten.
Ophelia swept aside brocade curtains and shoved a window open. Rain spattered her face. She leaned out and squinted up the street. Boulevard Saint-Michel was a valley of stone buildings with iron balconies and steep slate roofs. Beyond rumbling carriages and bobbling umbrellas, a horse-drawn omnibus splashed closer.
“Time to go,” she said, and latched the window shut. She turned. “Good-bye, Henrietta. You will write to me—telegraph me, even—if Prue changes her mind about the convent?”
“Of course, darling.” Henrietta Bright sat at the vanity table, still in her frothy dressing gown. “But where shall I send a letter?” She gazed at herself in the looking glass, shrugging a half-bare shoulder. Reassuring herself, no doubt, that at forty-odd years of age she was still just as dazzling as the New York theater critics used to say.
“I’ll let the clerk at Howard DeLuxe’s Varieties know my forwarding address,” Ophelia said. “Once I have one.” She pulled on cheap cotton gloves with twice-darned fingertips.