Ministry Protocol: Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Read online

  A Feast of Famine

  By Karina Cooper

  Galway, Ireland

  Winter, 1879

  Miss Lobelia Snow was a natural. As providence would have it, she had been born with the best of all the world about her: the exquisite appearance inherently guaranteed by excellent breeding, the effortless carriage of one confident with her place in the world, the fortunes of a well-heeled family, an intellect considered to be both clever and engaging, and an uncanny grasp of social interaction.

  She was, in a word, gifted, and well did London’s society know it.

  So it was the great scandal of 1865 when at the accomplished age of fifteen, Miss Snow announced at her coming out that she would not be marrying at all, and would all the fuss about it please turn to her four sisters?

  What furore this caused became the toast of the gossiping town, yet there was no hoped-for announcement of marriage that year, nor at the next. After three elegant but remarkably unsuccessful seasons, Miss Snow was declared with some heartache to be firmly on the shelf.

  Some years later, only a fortnight from her thirtieth birthday—and the highly anticipated label of hopeless spinster—Miss Snow could claim herself in possession of three rather notable accomplishments. The first being her role as indulgent aunt to seventeen nieces and nephews, the lot of which appeared to be rather more agile, precocious, and sticky than society would have led her to believe children to be. All the better to visit with gifts and spun sugar, then leave them with their rightful parents.

  The second accomplishment being the ring worn upon her right hand. With no insignia in place, nor any particular marker upon it, none but those who knew what to look for would recognise it as a tracking ring from the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences—her truest and most lasting love.

  The third accomplishment, Miss Snow reflected as she alighted from the one-man mail-coach kind enough to carry her from Dublin to Galway, was her history. Comprised of a long string of successes, Miss Snow’s resume was a laudable one, her reputation that of an agent who could be trusted to get a job done. This would explain why she found herself in possession of the name of a man who was to be her partner in this current endeavour, written inside a mandate from Director Fount:

  Have received word of plague in Galway. Mirrors historical activities, research enclosed. Travel immediately. Rendezvous with resident agent T. Kensington Kennedy.

  Director Fount, if indeed he had written the letter, was taciturn to the point of rudeness. More likely, this had been transcribed by another, and delivered post-haste.

  Nevertheless, Miss Snow was not an agent who questioned her orders. So prepared, she waved cheerfully at the skeletally thin old man who’d manned the levers guiding the mail coach and twitched her coat more firmly into place about her neck. The cold in Galway was bitingly refreshing, and she expected her cheeks to bloom as rosy as that of the hearty Irish folk who lived here.

  If a majority of said hearty Irish folk staring at her seemed to be doing so rather too hard, Miss Snow acclimated it to the slim line of her trousers and the impact of her smile—a force to be reckoned with on any day, or so her many suitors had claimed.

  That she was British, and therefore the enemy in these trying times, was all part of the game.