Magic in the Mix

by Annie Barrows

  Get away from me, thought Miri. She sidled to the left again.

  Again, Carter echoed her step.

  Huh, thought Miri. Interesting. She took another tiny sideways step.

  Carter followed, describing her short future in unpleasant detail.

  Miri didn’t dare look toward the shattered rim of the floorboards, but she could almost see it, hovering at the edge of her vision, a dark, empty crater on her left where the porch had been shelled. The important thing was to get close enough, but not too close. She took another tiny shuffle sideways.

  Carter grinned, believing that she was shrinking with fear. Pleased to inspire terror, he pressed closer. “My sister had the misfortune to anger me, as you have …”

  The dark hole yawned nearby; she could see it now. Just one more tiny step and they’d be in position. Miri stepped sideways.

  Carter stepped sideways. “… a desperate fear of fire, I knew …”

  Gazing deep into Carter’s yellow eyes, Miri cleared her throat. “Swarm,” she said.

  For a split second, nothing happened. And then Miri heard a collective intake of breath, a shuffle, and a rush, and they were there—Ray, Robbie, and Molly, dashing at Carter, weaving, jabbing, and pushing at him.

  “What—stop, you—get away—” Carter, aggravated by the press of children, swatted at them wildly with his gun. “I’ll get—hold still!”

  “Ooooh, yah, Nick Car-tah!” squalled Ray.

  “Yo, Nicky! The freaky monkey man!” hooted Robbie, darting forward to poke Carter in the neck.

  “Stay back from the edge!” called Miri, as she bobbed up and down and stepped on Carter’s foot.

  Ray and Robbie began to kick at Carter’s legs enthusiastically.

  “Get away! What the devil?” Carter lifted a leg to kick back, got jabbed—this time by Robbie—lost his balance, and seesawed on the edge of the hole, flapping his arms. “You—” Carter’s voice cracked with surprise as he felt the first pull of time’s force.

  The boys jogged toward him and back, poking with needling fingers, screeching like insane owls.

  But they were too close! “Get back! Guys, get back!” called Miri, turning to push them to safety.

  Carter saw his opportunity. His hand flashed out and seized her, a counterweight to the power pulling him in. At once, as his iron fingers curled around her arm, the fear that had stood to one side returned to Miri in a rush. Her heart began to pound, her breath coming in gasps. Helplessly, she twisted in Carter’s grasp. With a mighty shudder of panic, she tried to wrench her arm away and felt herself stumble, forward and down, toward the hole beneath the floor.

  “Miri!” screamed Molly, and Ray and Robbie froze, paralyzed by the sight of their sister and their target locked together, swaying on the ruined edge of the floor.

  “Gotcha!” roared Carter as he wavered, one hand holding his gun aloft, the other holding her tight. Miri was bent toward him, unable to resist the drag of time and man together.

  An arm circled her waist, pulling her back.

  But Carter, holding her wrist, was stronger.

  She teetered, tried to balance, failed, and began the slow, irresistible fall forward. The arm around her middle tightened, strained, loosened, broke painfully open—

  And there were just the two of them, Miri and Carter, falling together.

  Then—

  Ping. A bright gold coin—a ten-dollar eagle—spiraled up, twirling between her and Carter. For a split second, their eyes tracked it together, watching it rise, reach its apex, and begin to drop, sparkling, brilliant as fire—

  Carter’s hand shot up to grab the coin, releasing his hold on Miri’s arm. As his fingers closed around the gold, Robbie grabbed Miri’s freed hand and yanked with all his strength, pulling her back from the chasm. Turning, Miri caught a glimpse of Carter, saw his pale eyes open wide with the knowledge of what he’d just done, saw his mouth open in a silent O of shock—and then he tumbled, knocking back and forth like a rag in a hurricane as he dropped away into the darkness beneath the house.

  Miri, saved, collapsed against Robbie, who collapsed in turn against Ray, who smacked into Molly, who dropped with a thud to the floor.

  For a moment, they lay in a heap. Then, slowly, Robbie sat up. He leaned forward to gaze at the ragged rim of wood. “Et tu, Brute,” he said solemnly.

  There was a pause.

  “What?” asked Ray.

  “Julius Caesar,” said Robbie.

  There was another pause.

  “Shut up,” Ray said.

  Miri lay in silence, staring at nothing. She was alive. She was safe. Her arm was throbbing where Carter had gripped it, but she was alive and safe. With an effort, she rolled over onto her stomach and reached for her sister’s hand.

  Molly’s hand clutched hers tight. “Wow.” She turned her head to the boys. “Good swarming.”

  Ray sat up. “I thought we were all goners.”

  “Me too,” said Robbie. “I almost had a heart attack.”

  “The coin,” murmured Miri. “Tossing the coin was brilliant.”

  “We knew how much he loved gold,” Molly said, wiping her forehead with her sleeve.

  “He loved it so much he died,” said Robbie.

  Miri and Molly looked at each other. “He’s not dead,” said Molly. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Robbie winced. “He’s not coming back, is he?”

  Miri shook her head. “He can’t. I’m almost sure he can’t.”

  “Good,” said Ray.

  Miri sat up, finally, and looked from brother to sister to brother. “All of us did it. It was all of us that made it come out right. All of us together.”

  “It hasn’t come out right yet,” Ray pointed out. “There’s still Mom.”

  “Compared to Carter, I’m not worried,” Robbie said, smiling.

  “Me neither,” said Miri. In fact, she was longing to see their mother. “But let’s do it together.”

  Ray and Robbie limped to their feet and gave their sisters a hand up. The four of them paused, facing the door, and then Robbie bowed to Miri. “After you.”

  Miri pushed it open. “Hey, Mom!” she bellowed. “We’re home!”

  Six days and one hundred and fifty years later, their mother stood in the doorway of the living room. “What are you doing?” she asked, eyeing her four older children, who were strewn, in angles ranging from fifty to hundred and eighty degrees, over the sofas and chairs.

  “Math,” mumbled Miri, her head bent over a tangle of numbers.

  “Yeah,” sighed Molly.

  Her mother stared at Robbie. “Are you reading?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” A second passed and he looked up. “What?”

  “Is it for school?”

  He glanced at the spine. “Uh. No.”

  “It’s for fun?” she pressed.

  He nodded.

  “What is it?” she asked, incredulous.

  He looked at it again. “History book.”

  “A history book?”

  He gave an exasperated sigh. “Yeah. A history book. Which I was, like, reading until you came in.”

  “Don’t be sassy,” she said, but absently. “A history book,” she repeated. “About what?”

  “Mom!” he yelled. “The Civil War! I’m trying to read!”

  “The Civil War,” she echoed in wonder. “You’re reading a book about the Civil War.” There was a pause. “We should ground you guys more often.”

  Silence.

  “I mean, here you are, reading with your brother and sisters. Isn’t it great? Isn’t it cozy and nice?” She came in to peer over Robbie’s shoulder. “History is fascinating, isn’t it?”

  Ray snorted. “Sometimes.”

  “And I’m so glad to see that you’re taking an interest in the larger world,” she went on enthusiastically. “Maybe it’s because you’ve had some time and space for reflection, for thinking, you know?” She gave Robbie’s shoulder a loving squeeze. “Being grounde
d is almost like a vacation in a way, isn’t it?”

  The four children lifted their heads and gave their mother four long, level stares.

  “Well, fine,” she said, taking a step backward. “But it was your own fault. It’s a completely reasonable punishment, considering.” She took another step backward. “Eleven thirty at night! Of all the ridiculous, impossible, irresponsible …” Her voice faded as she strode toward the kitchen.

  Silence fell upon the living room again.

  Some time later, Robbie lifted his eyes from his book. “It says here that no one ever saw him again. Carter, I mean. After the war, they don’t know what happened to him.”

  “Good,” said Ray. “I hope it hurt, whatever it was.”

  Again, silence.

  Miri looked up. Cookie rounded the doorway and padded with businesslike efficiency to the sofa where Miri and Molly were curled. A quick leap put her in the middle of their legs, their papers, their pillows, and there she paced, carefully choosing the best available seat, which turned out to be atop Miri’s open math book. She settled herself across the pages and waited expectantly.

  “Hey, sweetie-Cookie,” murmured Miri, glad for the interruption. For the past few days, Cookie had been disappearing for several hours at a stretch, returning to Miri and Molly with a distinctly well-fed and well-petted air. “You’re going to get fat if you keep eating two centuries’ worth of dinner,” she whispered in the kitten’s ear.

  “What’s that?” Molly said, leaning forward. “Around her neck?”

  There was a small paper packet, attached in a yarn hammock around Cookie’s neck. Miri held Cookie as Molly untied it and then unfolded the paper. Two delicate rings tumbled into her hand. She stared at them for a moment and then showed them to Miri. They were made of gold thread, braided together into a circlet, with a tiny flower tucked into the center.

  Wordlessly, Molly handed Miri the paper they’d been wrapped in. My dear little Gypsies, I don’t know if these will reach you, but I think they may, and I hope you will accept them with my love. I have just received a ring myself, which I believe I must owe to some sort of enchantment cast by you girls and your darling kitten. My fiancé—you met him, I think—has named her Giddy, for the way she skitters out of his hands, but we are both very grateful to her and to you for introducing us. I have never been so happy! M

  Miri slipped the ring on her finger. It was light and pretty, just like Maudie. She looked up at Molly and saw that she had done the same. With their eyes, they shared the picture of Maudie, shining and joyful, her graceful fingers braiding the gold threads. She was in the house somewhere, in one of the layers of time suspended within its walls. And there, she was rapturously happy. They smiled at each other and, together, reached for Cookie and rubbed an ear apiece.

  Cookie closed her eyes and purred.

  Author’s Note

  I was often hounded, as a child, by adults who wanted me to read educational books. Parents, librarians, and teachers—they all seemed to have some sort of obsession with making me learn while I was reading. “Here,” they’d say, handing me a book with an awful title like Nakyt of the Nile: A Girl’s Life in Ancient Egypt, “here is a wonderful book that will teach you all about pyramids!”

  Bleah. Who cared about pyramids? All I wanted was a good story.

  So it is with some embarrassment that I find that I have written a book that has history in it. I would be a good deal more embarrassed if it were a book about history, but it’s not, I promise. It’s about some kids who live in this very odd house and … well, you can read it yourself. But the story also includes some hunks of history, and though I have absolutely no intention of being educational, I have to confess: almost all of them are true.

  If you are not interested in history, you can stop reading right now. But if you want to know more about the events and people mentioned in this book, here are the facts:

  By the fall of 1864, the Civil War had been going on for three and a half years, and the United States—otherwise known as the Northerners, the Yankees, and the Union—was finally winning. In Virginia, the Confederates—otherwise known as the Rebels, the Southerners—had been pushed down into the southern part of the state, leaving the northern part under Union control. But Union control was not very controlled, due to the activities of Colonel John Singleton Mosby (the Colonel of our story), who had been given command of a cavalry battalion in 1863 for the express purpose of “annoying” the Union army in northern Virginia. Mosby was an expert annoyer, and by the fall of 1864, when our story intersects his, he and his band of several hundred Rangers had enjoyed fifteen months of sneaking around, shooting up stray Yankee soldiers, robbing trains, and kidnapping Union officers for the fun of it.

  In August of ’64, the commander of the Union forces, General Ulysses S. Grant, ordered Major General Phil Sheridan and his army to rid the Shenandoah Valley, a long river valley that runs along the western border of the state of Virginia, of all Confederate troops, and, for emphasis, to burn crops as he went. Sheridan gladly obeyed. “The people must be left with nothing,” he wrote, “but their eyes to weep with.” By mid-October, Sheridan was triumphant: the Confederate army had been pushed south, and the finest farmland in the Confederacy was a scorched wasteland, leaving the locals hard-pressed to feed themselves, much less the Rebel army.

  It was at this point that the Battle of Cedar Creek, gleefully reenacted by Ray, Robbie, and Ollie the Rot King, occurred. A cranky old Confederate general named Jubal Early (really!) decided to stage a surprise attack on Sheridan’s troops at a spot called Cedar Creek. In the middle of the night of October 18–19, while Sheridan was absent in Washington, twenty thousand Confederate troops snuck into position around the sleeping Yankees at Cedar Creek and struck at dawn. The Union soldiers, waking to find themselves under attack, ran like rabbits. At the same time, about fifteen miles to the north, Sheridan was making his way back to camp, enjoying an early morning ride, when he heard the sounds of gunfire. Perplexed, he urged his horse to a trot—and then a gallop—toward Cedar Creek, and was greeted by the sight of his own army streaming toward him in full retreat.

  Upon seeing their commander, the defeated soldiers began to cheer, and this threw Sheridan into a monumental rage. “God damn you, don’t you cheer me! If you love your country, come up to the front!” he screamed, in addition to a whole lot of others things that can’t be put in a book for kids, all the while tearing toward what was left of his camp. Inspired by his courage—and also probably afraid of what he’d do to them if they continued to retreat—his men turned around and followed him back to the front lines, where they fought again and succeeded in turning a humiliating defeat into a major Union victory.

  Mosby did not take part in that battle, but he was fully aware of Sheridan’s other activities. Throughout August, September, and October, as Sheridan rampaged through the Valley, Mosby’s attacks on Union soldiers, trains, and supplies were frequent, violent, and successful. In mid-August, several weeks into his Valley Campaign and angry that his hard fighting hadn’t produced more control over the conquered territory, Sheridan decided to take action. He assigned a special unit, called the Scouts, to the task of “cleaning out Mosby’s gang.”

  What followed was a month of raids, gunfights, attacks, and counterattacks. Usually, the Union got the worst of it. Mosby was a brilliant strategist, his men were outstanding fighters, and all of them knew the territory far better than their opponents.

  But it was during one such attack that the Rangers made a fatal error: they shot a Union soldier as he was surrendering. Though this might seem like a minor consideration in the middle of a war, when the whole point is to kill the enemy, it was, on the contrary, seen as a shocking breach of the rules of combat: a soldier who surrendered was to be made prisoner, not killed.

  When Sheridan’s officers heard of this, they decided on their revenge: they would treat any captured Ranger as a criminal, rather than as a soldier. This meant that the Northerners w
ould execute any Ranger, any suspected Ranger, or anyone helping a Ranger immediately and without investigation. No questions, no trials, and no prisoners.

  On September 23, 1864, in the small town of Front Royal, they put their new policy into action, taking six captured Rangers out of the makeshift jail where they were held and swiftly executing them, four by firing squad and two by hanging. One of the victims was a seventeen-year-old boy who was not a member of the Rangers at all.

  Mosby in his turn was outraged and swore vengeance. As he wrote to General Robert E. Lee in late October, “It is my purpose to hang an equal number of Custer’s men whenever I capture them,” a plan he made good on November 6, when five Union soldiers were hanged by a group of Rangers.

  It is into this context—the late-October collection of Union soldiers for Mosby’s revenge killings—that I dropped Robbie and Ray and let them fall into the hands of Nick Carter.

  I regret to report that Nick Carter was a real person and evidently just as foul as I have portrayed him here. His true name was Loughborough Carter, but everyone called him Nick, a name his father bestowed upon him because he behaved like Old Nick; that is, the devil. According to John Munson, a Ranger who wrote a memoir of his service entitled Reminiscences of a Mosby Guerilla, Nick Carter and his pal Charley McDonough were “outlaws who accompanied us only by the tolerance of the Colonel. … Nick Carter belonged to one of the oldest and most aristocratic families in Virginia, but he accumulated such a load of undesirable responsibility and notoriety during the war that he thought it best to leave the country mysteriously at its close.” Though Carter cannot be definitely traced after the war, local legend has it that he went to Mexico, where he made a living shooting bandits.

  As for the other Rangers that make an appearance in Magic in the Mix, there was an “uncouth” Ranger named John Hearn, who served as the pattern for the Hern of our story. He was said to look “every inch a clumsy clown in a sea of trouble.” Charlie, on the other hand, is a fictional creation, inspired by a photograph of a Ranger with an enormous black moustache. The gunfight that occurs in Miri and Molly’s front yard is, likewise, fictional, but it is based on the descriptions of several typical Ranger engagements in 1864.