“Try to fit it back on,” Jane suggested.
“We’re going to die!” Frederick wailed.
“It’s completely broken,” Ned said, trying without success to reattach the handle.
Cecilia frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Kick the door down,” Jane suggested.
“I don’t want to die a virgin,” Frederick wailed.
“For God’s sake!” Ned rolled his eyes.
Cecilia stepped forward, nudging him aside. With her tiny knife she began levering the exposed locking mechanism.
“Gently!” Jane suggested.
“I feel faint,” Frederick wailed.
“Marry me,” Ned whispered to Cecilia.
“Over Freddy’s dead body,” she muttered in reply.
“This afternoon, then,” Ned said. “The poor chap is about to expire from hysterics.”
“That’s what happens when you live in a luxurious ancestral castle instead of a house that someone pushed off a cliff.”
“I’m going to kiss you for saying that. I’m going to kiss your mouth and your throat and your brea—”
“Language, Captain Lightbourne.” She looked up to frown at him; then her expression slid into a sly, half-sided smile. She pushed the door open. Ned grinned, his eyes bright with admiration.
“Quickly,” Jane urged, flapping her hands at them.
“Huzzah!” Frederick cheered.
Ned and Cecilia stepped aside to let them go through first. “What do you think?” Ned murmured. “Should we shut the door on them and run away, steal some offices, become lawyers?”
Cecilia sighed and shook her head. They entered the secret garden.
Cilla’s garden was the literal heart of Northangerland Abbey—and the psychological one too, judging from its dark, dripping tangle of overgrowth. The shadows were clammy, the walls black with mold. From somewhere among the dead roses, an owl hooted. Or perhaps it was the ghost of a long-lost arborist, drifting mournfully through his ruined heaven. The pirates shivered.
“Alas, your mother would surely be heartbroken to see this,” Frederick whispered to Cecilia.
“Why?” Cecilia asked. “It looks exactly as I remember it.”
“Oh.”
The houses of the Wisteria Society loomed silently about them. They had been crammed in however they could fit: some angled against a wall, others piled three deep. Darlington House sat like a throned queen atop Millie the Monster’s cottage.
Ned stated the obvious. “We’re going to have to climb.”
“I don’t think I can,” Jane admitted, growing pale as she eyed the heights.
“I shall remain here with you, dear maiden, and protect you with my very life,” Frederick declared, his own face so white he looked like one of Pleasance’s ghosts.
“That house is on the ground.” Ned pointed to a narrow four-story Georgian town house with pink lavender growing in its window boxes.
“I’ll take it,” Jane said promptly.
