by Ellen Potter
“Where, then?” Lucia asked, using Otto’s sign language.
Otto paused. He looked around the vestibule, his pale eyes flitting from hallway to hallway. There were five in all.
“That one,” Otto said, pointing to the narrowest hallway to the immediate left of the stairs.
“What’s the matter?” The woman had realized that the Hardscrabbles were not behind her and was now glowering down at them from the stairs. “Come along, I haven’t got all day.”
“Leg it!” Max cried.
They dashed toward the narrowest hallway on the instant. They had seen Otto find so many hidden things in the course of their lives, that it never even occurred to them he might be wrong this time.
“Hey!” the woman shrieked after them. They heard her footsteps clapping heavily down the stairs, so they ran even faster. Otto was in the lead, wending through the hallway. They turned off at a juncture and flew down yet another hallway, past three tall windows that looked out toward the sea, then through a pair of double doors, whereupon they stopped and looked around in surprise.
They were in a courtyard, open to the sky and surrounded on all sides by a high stone wall. Cobblestone walkways meandered through the courtyard, swaddled by flower beds and young trees in boxes, giving a little shade to several long tables with benches beside them. A small fountain stood at the center of the courtyard with a sculpted angel in the center of it.
It was so wonderful to feel the sun on their necks after their journey through the murky tunnel and their night imprisoned in the restroom that they stood there for a moment, with their faces raised to the sky.
“Lovely day, Chippy, yeah?” a voice said.
The Hardscrabbles turned in alarm and spotted a very fat man sitting at one of the tables, watching them. His head was lowered and cocked to one side, the way people peek at something beneath their curtains when they don’t want to be seen themselves. On the table in front of him was a plate on a tray, with a large sandwich, two glasses of milk, and an apple.
“Yes, very nice day,” Max said nervously. The Hardscrabbles all wondered if this was Dr. Azziz. They waited, frozen where they stood, to see what he would do next.
The man turned his head away so that he appeared to be looking over his right shoulder. “No Harriet about today, yeah?” he said. “We’re safe as houses, Chippy. Nothing to worry about.”
This was rather confusing.
“Who’s Harriet?” Max asked.
The man didn’t answer. He only plucked off a corner of his sandwich and placed it on his right shoulder.
The Hardscrabbles were baffled but not quite as scared anymore. The large man seemed in no hurry to sound an alarm. He didn’t even seem particularly curious about where they had come from. He just stared at his right shoulder, occasionally wiggling his fingers at it.
“Oh, look!” Max said. “He has a little mouse on his shoulder.”
The others looked and saw it too—a little black mouse that was sitting on its tiny haunches, holding a bit of sandwich between its paws and nibbling on it.
The man looked at the Hardscrabbles in his behind-the-curtain way. Then he put out one finger toward the mouse and the little thing scampered onto it, gripping it tightly as the man brought his finger down to the table. With a leap, the mouse jumped down and stared up brightly at the Hardscrabbles.
“Kill the spider, yeah?” the man said, and he wiggled his pudgy fingers in front of the mouse. The mouse lunged at the man’s fingers and batted at them with his tiny paws.
“Oh, he’s clever!” Lucia said. Otto crouched down in front of the table to look at the mouse eye to eye.
“Ride on the horse, Chippy,” the man said, pressing his fingertips against the table and cupping his hand above it. Nimbly, the mouse leapt onto the man’s hand and held on while the hand pretended to trot, then gallop, then rear up.
“Revolting!” a woman’s voice came from behind them. The man quickly scooped up his mouse and held him under the table. The Hardscrabbles turned to see that two women had entered the courtyard. One had the sort of curly blond hair you see on a toddler, but she was probably close to fifty years old. The other woman was much younger and was tall, slim, and terribly pale. Her hair was pale too, almost pink, and it was pulled back in a long, limp ponytail. She held a tray with two sandwiches on them and two cups of coffee.
“There’s a rule about rodents, Frank!” The curly-haired, blond woman stormed up to the man and smashed a fist down on the table. “That’s what I do if I see that thing on the table again. Squash! That’s what I do!” She looked at the Hardscrabbles now, noticing them for the first time.
“Do you have any rodents in your pocket?” she demanded. It was hard to know which Hardscrabble she was talking to because one of her eyes was going in the wrong direction.
“Harriet, please, let them alone, you’re scaring them,” the other woman said in a soft voice. “Come, we’ll sit way over there. The mouse won’t come close, dear.” She spoke to Harriet so gently and sweetly, just like a very patient mother would speak to an unreasonable child. Harriet grumbled but she followed the younger woman to a table at the far end of the courtyard.
Now it began to occur to Max and Lucia that Otto may have been gravely mistaken. The sultan was nowhere to be seen. Other people began to come into the courtyard now. Who were all these people? Lucia wondered. They carried trays of food and paper cups of coffee or tea and they sat down at the tables and stared at the Hardscrabbles. Lucia stared back. Something was nudging at her hippocampus. I just learned this word in biology and it is especially excellent because it sounds like it might be rude, as in “Move your big fat hippocampus” whereas it actually means the part of your brain that helps you remember things.
“Excuse me,” Lucia said to the man with the mouse, “do you know where the sultan is?”
The man looked at her sideways, his mouse still cupped in his lap, but he didn’t answer.
“I said, do you know—” Lucia started to repeat but was interrupted by the sight of a black woman with her hair bound back by a yellow headscarf approaching the table very briskly with a heaping tray of food in her hands.
Lucia once again felt a nudge at her hippocampus.
The woman in the yellow headscarf stopped when she noticed the Hardscrabbles. “Who are they?” she asked the man with a cool, nod towards the Hardscrabbles.
“They want the sultan,” the man with the mouse muttered. Then he looked off to the right very suddenly as if someone else had said that and he was wondering who.
“The sultan? The sultan’s right over there,” she said, jerking her head toward the door before she sat down at the table with the man.
The Hardscrabbles turned and there, indeed, was the sultan in his white robe, entering the courtyard. In the bright daylight he seemed more fragile and yet more handsome than when Lucia had seen him in the woods. The light seemed to peekaboo through his skin, like sun through a seashell. His robe was sadly shredded and soiled around the bottom, Lucia could now see, and without his bejewelled mustard-lid crown from the sketch he looked like a rumpled teenager who had just woken up. Tucking his hands into the sleeves of his robe, he turned down one of the little paths, lifting his face to the sun, just as the Hardscrabbles had done when they first entered the courtyard. When he reached the fountain he hitched up his robe and stepped right in, sloshing through the shallow water, then stepped up onto the pedestal, and again up on the angel’s stone feet, bare like his own. He climbed up onto the angel’s shoulder and sat down on its curly head with his feet resting on the tipped water-jug spout. From out of his robe pocket he pulled a peeled hard-boiled egg. Then he looked out at the people in the courtyard and smiled.
Mr. Dupuis says, “Writers should avoid clichés like the plague.” He says that one way to tell if a phrase is overused is if you have heard it in an advertisement. For instance, the Drift-Away mattress company swears they will make you “sleep like a baby.” And “not a happy bunny” is
what the announcer says in the telly ad when the kid snaps off the head of Gromley’s Chocolate Easter Bunny. The Such Fun Chewing Gum company promises that their gum will give you a “dazzling smile,” so I suppose it is a cliché, but the thing is, the sultan’s smile was dazzling. It was the sort of smile that made you smile back before you even knew what you were doing. The sultan raised his egg in the air and the others in the courtyard raised their paper cups or their sandwiches or their forkfuls of salad.
“Cheers, m’dears!” the sultan called out.
“Cheers!” the others called or murmured or, in the case of the man with the mouse, simply mouthed silently with a sideways look.
It was then, while Lucia was gazing around the courtyard, that she realized why her hippocampus was being nudged. Her eyes went wide and she sucked in her breath.
“What is it?” Max asked.
“It’s them!” Lucia said under her breath. “All of them!”
“Them what?” Max asked
“Look around! Look! Look!” Lucia cried. “We’ve seen them all before.”
“Lucia, get a grip,” Max said. “You’re imagining things.”
“Shut up, and yes, we have seen them before,” Lucia said. She glanced at Otto but he was mesmerized by the sultan.
“Look, Max,” Lucia said, looping her arm through Max’s and pulling him close so as to whisper in his ear. “Look really carefully. They’re all here.”
She pointed at the gloomy, handsome young man who leaned lethargically against a tree, sipping a cup of tea. “Prince Wiri. The one whose family was suspected of witchcraft. And Harriet, the woman with the curls—” Harriet was dipping the corner of her sandwich into her coffee while the young woman with the pale hair read the newspaper out loud to her. “Look at her wonky eye. It’s the Duchess of Hildenhausen. She doesn’t have the cornflowers in her hair but apart from that she’s exactly like her. And the woman sitting with her, the one with the long blond hair, you’ve seen her face, Max, come on, you know you have. Look at her, for heaven’s sake.”
He looked at her. He looked at her for a full minute, which really is quite a good long time to look at someone whom you don’t know, and finally he saw her.
“Empress Amalie of Schwartzenstadt-Russeldorf,” he said very quietly.
“Yes!” Lucia said, barely able to keep herself from squealing. “And this man here, with the lovely mouse. I had to think about it, because he has a beard in the sketch and he doesn’t now”—the man was listening sideways—“but it’s Prince Andrei and his black fox, only it’s a mouse not a fox, but he does tricks just like the fox did.”
“But I don’t understand,” Max said. “Does Dr. Azziz keep them all here against their will?”
“He keeps some of us against our will,” said the black woman with the yellow headscarf. She had been watching them with interest as she chewed on her sandwich. “Others of us choose to stay.”
Lucia gawked at her. She couldn’t help it. Although Princess Uzima’s hair was carelessly bound back and she was dressed in a plain navy blue T-shirt and jeans, she seemed only a hairsbreadth away from daring a lion to scrape its teeth against her splendid throat.
“We’re all quite insane, of course,” Princess Uzima continued, “but some of us are still sensible enough to realize it. Go.” She waggled her long cherrywood fingers in the direction of the fountain. “Your sultan is waiting.”
They obeyed, walking uncertainly up the stone path toward the fountain. They had counted on being the heroes, sweeping in, much to the sultan’s joy, and setting him free. But now they found themselves perplexed and nervous and unsure what it was they had actually done.
When the sultan spotted them his smile evaporated. He chewed once in order to swallow his bite of egg, then swiped his lips with the back of his hand and dropped his egg into the stone angel’s lap. He climbed down, more soberly than when he had leapt up, and walked through the fountain’s pool once again, not bothering to lift his robe now. He stepped onto the path, looking at them, one at a time, with wonder in his eyes. For a good minute or two he said nothing at all. Then finally he spoke in his clear voice:
“I once had four advisors, all wise and good. They loved me and I loved them back. But of these four advisors, there were three whom I thought I’d never see again. Or if I ever did see them, I wouldn’t know them and they wouldn’t know me. So I gave one of them something of mine.”
The sultan reached out with his slender fingers. His right hand had a curious spray of freckles on its knuckle that from their angle looked uncannily like a dog with floppy ears. Slowly, the sultan began to untie Otto’s scarf. Lucia and Max stiffened, ready for something awful to happen, but Otto stood there calmly. He even lifted his chin to make it easier for the knot to come undone and in a moment the scarf was removed. Lucia and Max looked away. It was the same courtesy you would give to a person who has just had their hospital bandages taken off.
With a flick of his wrist, the sultan snapped the scarf in the air so that it made a popping sound and smoothed its folds. Then he—no, I’ll say she now, because you have probably guessed that the sultan was none other than their mum, Tess Hardscrabble—wrapped it around her waist and tied it over her white robe. And there it was—the sultan’s old mourning sash—the very one that Lucia had seen thousands of time in the sketch hanging on her bedroom wall, cinched around the sultan’s waist. The very sash their father said had been left behind when the sultan disappeared.
“My fourth advisor,” Tess Hardscrabble said, “is in London. I had to send him there on urgent business this week. He’s having my crown mended.”
At that moment, the courtyard door opened and Casper Hardscrabble entered, carrying a pale yellow hatbox with a white ribbon on top.
It’s just in time too. He has a lot of explaining to do.
Chapter 24
In which Casper explains
Dr. Azziz was short and dumpy. He had very pretty white teeth and apart from pockmarked skin—which always looks so sinister but, if you think about it, simply means that the person was probably a very spotty, unattractive teenager—he was not the slightest bit terrifying. He arrived in the courtyard soon after Casper, tipped off by a nurse who had spied the Hardscrabbles. Dr. Azziz had looked at the stunned and confused face of Casper and then at the confused and stunned faces of the Hardscrabble children.
“Would you like a nice, quiet place to chat with the children, Mr. Hardscrabble?” he asked.
Dr. Azziz recognized a giant muddle when he spotted one, and giant muddles are best tackled in nice, quiet places.
“Yes, that’s probably a good idea,” Mr. Hardscrabble said faintly. He turned to his wife and handed her the hatbox. Then he bowed.
“Excuse me, Your Highness,” he told her, “but with your permission I need to confer with . . . with the other advisors just now.”
Tess Hardscrabble waved away his appeal. “Of course, I understand.” She turned her eyes on her children and smiled so sweetly at them that they wanted to run straight into her arms. Max was the only one who actually did, though. He threw his arms around her waist and pressed his head against her chest. She just stood there, her arms at her side, not moving.
If you don’t hug him back, Mum, Lucia thought, I will hate you forever, I will hate you forever, I will hate you forever!
Tess’s arms slowly lifted and then, as though she were afraid she would hurt him, she gently wrapped them around her youngest child. A tiny sigh came from Casper, but whether it was of relief or sadness or joy, no one will ever know.
They stayed that way for a long time until Tess finally drew back, her hand stroking Max’s hair (oh, Lucia remembered how wonderful that felt!).
“You will all come back and visit me again,” Tess told them. “This palace is not as luxurious as the palace at Juwi, of course. The gardens are not so large, the views are not so beautiful. And of course, there are no peacocks. You do remember my peacock, don’t you?”
Otto, Luci
a, and Max all nodded.
Tess smiled again, satisfied. Then she turned and stepped back into the fountain, climbing the angel to the tippy-top and grabbing her egg on the way.
The Hardscrabbles followed Dr. Azziz into the hallway and up three sets of stairs to his office. It was all lovely with caramel-coloured walls and chocolate-coloured armchairs and a huge messy desk. Dr. Azziz offered Casper his desk chair and Otto, Lucia, and Max sat in the chocolaty chairs.
“Before I leave,” Dr. Azziz said, “I would love to know how you children managed to sneak into the castle.”
They told him. They didn’t need to exaggerate a single thing, either. At the end Dr. Azziz whistled in appreciation.
“Extraordinary,” he said.
Casper, however, was not so impressed. He had regained his composure somewhat, and now his eyebrows mashed together as he said, “I can’t believe Haddie let you go. That was completely irresponsible of her.”
“She didn’t know that we were going,” Max said, which we all know is a bold-faced lie, including Casper.
“She most certainly did!” Casper shot back. “When I arrived this morning and asked her where you all were, she told me you were ‘storming the castle.’ Called you her ‘brave knights,’ or some such rubbish. I honestly think the woman is completely mental.”
Considering that they were sitting in the Snoring-by-the-Sea Psychiatric Hospital (they found that out later, of course), this was probably not a stellar choice of words. Still, Dr. Azziz patted Casper on the shoulder, smiling very kindly.
“Well, it’s all come out right in the end, Mr. Hardscrabble,” Dr. Azziz said brightly. “Let’s focus on that.”
He left them alone then. For a full minute there was utter silence in the room. No one knew where to begin. It was Lucia who asked the first question.
“So has Mum been here the whole time, ever since she went missing?”
