12

7

The prison yard, excuse me, courtyard was not so small that the girls hadn't planted a tidy garden of herbs and a few vegetables, like carrots and tomatoes. And there was, behind a sort of false wall, an area for flowers being tended to the following noon hour by the princesses with all the sleepy pride of flat lionesses on a south-Saharan plain.

Lady Winifred guided together a handful of pink roses and took a big whiff.

"Girls, aren't they sublime?"

Lena and Lucy tipped forward - so forward Lena emptied her watering can on Lucy's foot as Lucy nodded off with her nostrils on a pillow of soft petals.

"And look!" Winifred cried, moving over to the begonias. "We have new buds! Where's Judy? She just loves the babies."

"Popsees," Lana said, shoveling a trowel full of soil into her own apron.

"By the poppies?" Winifred asked, a quizzical look behind the mesh of her hat.

"In them," Lana yawned, pointing to where Judy had curled up.

Over by the vegetables, Betty raked a patch of grass bald. Ginger pulled a radish out of the dirt and passed it down to Dorothy. Dorothy dusted it off and passed it down to Ava, who handed it over Rosalind, who planted it again.

Spying from their room above, Danny and Francis watched as Katherine dulled her pruning shears on the wall, while wisps of ivy fell onto Marilyn's sunhat, even as it tilted slowly towards the ground.

"That's all of them accounted for except Rita," Francis said.

"How can we be sure she's not it her room?"

"Well, professor, we'll knock, and if she doesn't answer, we'll snoop."

"What if Fred catches us?"

"He knows why we're here. Besides, he's busy dumping a bucket of shoes out back. C'mon."

Rita was not in the princesses' room, and there was no fear a maid would come up to tidy their hastily made beds and strewn frilly things because Fred was too cheap to hire one. Francis and Danny went straight for the wall that had led to the secret staircase, looking for a crack or seam which might open it again. The wall was simply a wall.

"It's the craziest thing," Danny said, scratching his head.

Francis held out his size-shifting key and watched as nothing happened.

"Maybe you're not using it right."

"I'm no scholar, but I do know how to use a key. There's just nowhere to stick it."

"Here," Danny offered, pulling a chop of meat from his belt as if it was no more unusual than a dagger or purse. "Maybe slide this under the door and see if old Rupes down there will open it from his side."

"I ought to slide you under the door. But there is no door. What is that?"

Danny tried to wiggle the tough tip of the grey-ish meat."My guess is it's either overdone lamb or really old pork."

"Where did you get it?"

"From the larder last night. Is that cook holding out or what? Hoarding that huge stash down there. It's criminal."

"Rupret said cake."

"I just thought we'd bring him a token of good faith."

"I don't think pork chops and applesauce are going to cut it. Neither will bringing him a sack of flour and some eggs and telling him bake his own."

"Leave it to me. I got a good night's sleep and all that extra porridge this morning, so now I've got a plan for the cake. I'm just not sure how I'm going to get around that pink icing though."