The Mystery Queen by Fergus Hume — Read

In the chill grey gloom of the fields--damp, depressing, and misty--with the wreckage of the airship piled up around him, and the insensible woman lying at his feet, Dan stood bewildered, his nerves jangling like ill-tuned bells. The twenty feet fall had not harmed him in limb or body; but the violent contact with the earth, broken in some measure by the fact that his enemy's aeroplane had been underneath, resulted in a displacement of his normal powers. He felt battered and bruised, deadly sick and wished to lie on the wet grass, indifferent to everything and everyone. But with a dangerous creature at his elbow, this was not to be thought of, even though that same creature was unable to exercise her wicked will. Moreover, The Grange was only a stone's throw distant, and doubtless Mrs. Jarsell had been watching for the coming of her friend. If this were the case, she would come out with help--for Queen Beelzebub that is. How Halliday would be treated he was much too muddled in his brain to consider. Finally, he dropped on his knees, longing for brandy to pull him together, and began to think with difficulty.

This woman was not Mrs. Jarsell, but Miss Armour. Seeing that he knew her to be old, feeble, and paralysed, this was most remarkable. Curberry had called her Queen Beelzebub, so Miss Armour, and not Mrs. Jarsell, was the head of the Society of Flies, and the cause of all the trouble. In a weak way, Dan considered that she evidently was not so old as she had made herself out to be, and certainly she was not paralysed. No woman without the use of her limbs could have escaped so swiftly, or have worked the aeroplane so dexterously. Miss Armour, the delicate, kind-hearted old lady, was the infernal Queen Beelzebub who had spoken behind the mask when in the darkness the scarlet light had made an accursed halo round her head. And now she was dead--stone dead.