Besides, her elders knew what they were doing. After all, they had managed to keep control over the incantation for almost two hundred years, ever since Black Beryl introduced it to England.

Beryl had not originally been a pirate. She’d been the hardy young wife of Jeremiah Black, failed explorer—the failure being illuminated when he smashed their ship into an island in the Indian Ocean while seeking passage from London to Mexico. But on the shore of that island Beryl had found an old washed-up bottle containing a Latin poem. When she realized speaking the poem aloud created a magic that could move objects, regardless of weight, the possibilities had become readily apparent to her in a way they were not to her husband (mainly on account of him having been bashed to death with a compass by “persons unknown”). She’d commandeered a local’s hut and flown back to England, where she shared the incantation with the ladies in her book club. They had turned from casual literary criticism to piracy with remarkable ease, establishing a class of magnificent women in flying mansions, thus causing a collapse in the hot-air-balloon picnicking industry—and a whole new meaning to the phrase “groundless fears.”

Cecilia had grown up on stories about those exciting days. Miss Darlington’s history lessons had been full of gunfire and brimstone. And villains had abounded, such as the book club members who found a devious use for the incantation, surreptitiously moving people and things rather than buildings, thereby committing vulgar witchcraft. The more honorable members had been forced to separate themselves from these degenerates by forming the Wisteria Society, a noble coterie of ladies who were virtuously open about their crimes.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow-wallpapered room, and we pirates took the better one,” Miss Darlington had told ten-year-old Cecilia, brandishing the dagger she liked to use to direct her lessons. “Anyone who dislikes pirates needs to blame those wicked witches in the first place!”

Then there had been the army. If His Majesty’s troops had not responded to the advent of airborne crime by trying to put the Wisteria Society back in their proper place—i.e., on the ground and preferably in the kitchen—the ladies would never have learned how to fight. Thus weaponized piracy was clearly the army’s fault.

“The war ended over a hundred years ago,” Miss Darlington had explained to Cecilia when the little girl had offered to rush out and join the battle. “Land-based guns were useless against flying houses, and the army finally gave up. But we can never relax. Anti-smuggling patrols and arrest warrants for minor infractions like armed bank robbery are only some of the indignities the government continues to perpetrate against us. It is nothing more than misogynistic bullying!”

But the worst villains of all were the insurance companies and bodyguard services who made a fortune off an anxious public. And none of this even began to touch upon real estate agents. A nefarious lot, they were forever trying to steal the flight incantation so they could sell houses based on “location, location, and location.”