The three culprits swung to face her, identical expressions of guilt on their faces.
She pointed to the kites’ trailing strings. “Pull the kites in first. Now!”
Her brothers leapt to obey.
“My lady.” Merriweather looked guilty, too. He waved at the chaos. “I’m afraid the contraptions got away from us.”
“No need to apologize, Merriweather. Please have”—Addie glanced at the footmen—“Tom and Trevor take charge of the kites and associated balloons. We don’t want them to get loose again. I suggest taking the contraptions”—that was as good a name for the things as any other—“to the kitchen, where I’m sure Cook will have an implement sharp enough to puncture the balloons, and she’ll want to retrieve her flour.” Addie caught Angie’s eyes. “I wonder if Cook even knows she’s missing several pounds of her best flour, hmm?”
Her expression reminiscent of a startled doe, Angie whirled to help her brothers gather in the kite-attached balloons with their dangling, dripping sacks of flour.
While her siblings dealt with half the problem, planting her hands on her hips, Addie stared upward at the significantly more intractable half. Six balloon-only sacks continued to randomly drip flour across the hall. Without kites attached, the contraptions seemed even more susceptible to every little breeze. They dipped and swayed this way and that.
The sound of a door slamming somewhere on the upper floors of the house reached her.
A second later, a gust of air blew into the hall. For an instant, the balloons dipped low, forced down by the sudden pressure from above. Tom leapt and caught one, only to have the sack of flour burst in his hands, showering him with fine white dust.
“Oh no!” burst from several throats.
Most eyes were on Tom, sputtering and gasping, but Addie’s gaze remained locked on the remaining five balloon-and-flour-sack combinations as they swept low across the hall and out through the tall front doors.
Not yet relieved, she hurried to the doorway. It would be a fine thing if the five contraptions escaped into the wide blue sky, but…
She halted on the threshold, looked out, and sighed in disappointment. Glancing back into the hall, she confirmed that the kite-attached flour bombs had been retrieved and were being carted off to the kitchen in the arms of the maid, Trevor, and poor flour-bedecked Tom.
“Right, then!” Imperiously, she beckoned her siblings to join her.
All three responded with an alacrity that suggested the outcome of their latest “experiment” had not, thus far, been a disappointment. Along the way, Mortie and Benjamin swooped and picked up their bows and arrows, apparently set aside on the floor while they’d leapt to catch their contraptions.
Merriweather followed rather more cautiously.
When the children clustered about her, Addie pointed into the porte-cochere, directing their gazes upward into the high, deep-raftered roof. The five contraptions were now lodged between the rafters and crossbeams and, despite the quite gusty breeze, showed no sign of moving again.
Far from being downcast, Mortie, Angie, and Benjamin clattered down the steps. Their faces alight, they peered upward at their handiwork.
Addie studied the contraptions, noting that, from the level of the drive, the attached strings were nowhere near long enough to be caught. She followed her siblings down the steps and onto the gravel and joined them in staring up at the five flour bombs.
“I say!” Mortie exclaimed. “What an excellent notion!” Eagerly, he turned his wide-eyed gaze on Angie and Benjamin. “If our enemies come calling and we have this already set up, we can shoot holes in the sacks and rain…well, something nasty down on the attackers’ heads.” He looked up at the porte-cochere’s ceiling. “They’d never guess the bombs were there.”
Addie refrained from pointing out that any archer would have to be visible in the doorway or, worse, down on the drive to shoot at the sacks. She crossed her arms and studied her siblings. “What, exactly, was this in aid of?”
They turned ardent faces her way. “We thought,” Mortie explained, “that if the house was under siege—”
“Like it was during the War of the Roses,” Angie put in, and Benjamin nodded solemnly.
“Then,” Mortie continued, “we could use flying bombs to defend the place. That was our original idea.”
Benjamin brandished his bow. “We were going to let the kites and balloons free over the front lawn, then shoot holes in the sacks.”
“As a trial,” Mortie said, “to see if the idea would work.”
“But I tripped in the hall,” Angie morosely admitted, “and lost hold of the strings, and the kites and balloons flew up, and we couldn’t catch them.”
Having witnessed the outcome, Addie fought to keep her lips straight. She looked up at the errant balloons. “Very well. One has to acknowledge that defending the house is a laudable enterprise. But how are you going to get those down?”
All five remaining bombs were intermittently dripping flour.
The trio studied their no-longer-flying bombs, then offered several half-hearted and distinctly improbable suggestions, all of which obviously would not work.
