“Well, matey,” Coop said, and gave her hand an affectionate squeeze. “There’s them as don’t believe it, but it’s true. The Place was a pirate stronghold, an outpost of Barbary pirates! They terrorized the sea for miles around, and no one could stop them!”<br/><br/>Their ambling course was taking them across a broad sweep of lawn that extended to either side until the curve of the hilltop and the surrounding wall turned it out of sight. Off to their right, Cooper would have sworn they actually had a croquet - what did they call it, anyway? Court? Lawn? Pitch? Whichever it was, the stakes and wickets looked more like heirloom furniture than the cheap pieces of fencing wire and dowel he remembered from childhood.<br/><br/>“And so it was that one day they captured a beautiful maiden from … Wimbledon.” No, wait, that was tennis! Oh well. Too late now, it was out and he would just have to work around it. “She was the daughter of the ship’s owner, and the pirates decided to take her for ransom. So they held her prisoner in a tower right here, on the wall that looked out over the ocean.”<br/><br/>That part wasn’t completely implausible. The neat and ornate plots of flowers and topiary in this section of the garden butted up against a curve in the wall that could pass for the base of a tower with a little imagination. Better yet, the elaborate curves of the path that wound through the beds were  giving him ideas for brand new lies.<br/><br/>“Just to make sure she couldn’t escape, and the low-flung cutthroats out here would leave her alone, the pirate chief had a maze built outside the tower. Anyone who took a wrong turn would wander lost for hours, until Captain Melendez turned his dogs loose to flush them out.”