When we reached the gate, we saw The Beard prowling up and down behind it like a caged tiger.
“That took forever!” he cursed us. “What do you think your mothers are going to do to me if they find out that I waited here obediently while you two went to meet a ghost in the middle of the night? And don’t give me your ‘he was just a little one’!”
“Mum won’t hear about this from me,” I answered, swinging my legs over the iron gate. “And it’s only ten o’clock.”
“Exactly,” said Ella. She passed me the urn through the bars. “Relax, Uncle Matt. We had the whole thing totally under control.”
Which was a big fat lie. But The Beard hadn’t heard anything Ella had said anyway. He just had eyes for the urn.
“You… you got it?” he stammered.
I nodded and squeezed the urn tightly to my chest. It was all good, even though my head still felt gunked up by Aleister.
“We have to tell Longspee,” I said to The Beard. “But you’d better not wait for us here. Aleister might still come after us.”
Ella and I steered toward the cathedral. The Beard came after us. Of course.
I stopped.
“What are you doing? You can’t come with us!” I really tried to sound nice. After all, he’d tried to save Ella’s life in Kilmington, even if he hadn’t really done much good.