Stealing Magic

by Marianne Malone

  She sighed deeply.

  “Thank you both so much,” she said, smiling again. “I think we can leave now. That was good for me.”

  “I’m glad,” Ruthie said. “But before we go, I want to check one more thing.”

  JACK AND DR. BELL FOLLOWED Ruthie along the ledge. “I’ve been thinking about Louisa and her family photo album,” she said. “I think we should take a look at it, to see if the pages have been filled in.”

  “Good idea!” Jack said, already turning toward E27.

  When they reached the room, Ruthie stepped through the framework and into the roof garden. She looked through the door into the room. The moment was right; she grabbed the album from where it rested on the coffee table and was out again.

  “Let’s see it!” Jack said excitedly. They thumbed through the first half quickly until they found the photograph that had been the last one, of the Meyer family in front of 7, rue Le Tasse. There were Louisa, her parents and Jacob, all smiling for the camera.

  “Turn the page, Jack.” Ruthie was too nervous to do it herself.

  “Oh,” Jack said, seeing the next page.

  The album was just as it had been before, with dozens of empty pages. There were no new photographs—and no proof that the Meyer family had left Paris! Ruthie put her hand to her mouth, like a dam to stop the emotion that was about to flood out of her.

  “Hey, don’t worry,” Jack said. “This doesn’t mean anything. They couldn’t take much with them; they probably left this behind.”

  “I suppose,” Ruthie said. “But I just wanted to know for sure.”

  “Maybe you two could do some genealogical research and find out what happened to them,” Dr. Bell suggested.

  Ruthie nodded, trying to cling to some hope. “We could also check the Thorne Room archives to see if Mrs. Thorne left any notes about this album.” She tried to sound optimistic, but worry remained in her voice.

  They left the rooms by the usual route, going halfway under the door, waiting for the coast to be clear and then coming all the way out. Holding Jack’s hand, Ruthie dropped the key to the floor. In a moment the three of them stood in the alcove at full size as though nothing at all had happened.

  At the front door to the museum, Ruthie felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. The caller ID showed it was Mrs. McVittie.

  “Hello?” Ruthie answered. “Sure, why? … Okay.” She hung up. “Hmmm. Mrs. McVittie wants us to come over, Jack. Right now. She wouldn’t say why.”

  Jack shrugged. “Okay.”

  “I have a question,” Dr. Bell began as they walked down the steps outside the museum. “If Dora Pommeroy had stolen the key, how did you shrink?”

  Jack looked around to see if anyone would notice and then took the dimly glowing square out of his pocket. “With this. It works just like the key. We don’t know what it is, though.”

  “May I?” Dr. Bell was about to lift the square from his palm but stopped. “Will it make me shrink?”

  “Not out here,” Jack explained. “You have to be close to the rooms.”

  She picked up the square. “Hmmm, warm, isn’t it?” She observed how it flashed in the sunlight. “I know what this is. It’s a slave token, a tag.”

  “A what?” Ruthie asked.

  “It’s a tag that slaves in a few places in the South were required to wear. C-h-a-r must be Charleston, South Carolina, and v-a-n-t is probably servant. The numbers are most likely the slave’s number and the year the tag was made. I think they were worn around the neck.”

  “Whoa!” Jack exclaimed.

  “Maybe that’s why we met Phoebe! I bet this belonged to her!” Ruthie declared.

  “They’re highly collectible. Some families who are descended from slaves have them, often kept in family Bibles through the generations. You don’t see them very often. If you need any help researching the tag, I know some people.” Dr. Bell looked at the tag some more before handing it back to Jack. Then she hugged them both and said goodbye. “And thanks again for today. It was … amazing.” She hailed a cab and hopped in.

  They stood on the sidewalk looking at the metal square—the slave tag. In spite of its rough appearance, Ruthie and Jack had assumed that it must be something of importance to have been imbued with the magic. The key had come from a young woman of the nobility, a duchess; this tag had come from someone on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. So how could a slave have acquired this power? And why?

  “I wonder how it ended up in the beaded bag,” Ruthie said.

  Jack shook his head. “Just when we get a bunch of puzzles solved, there’s something else to figure out!”

  Mrs. McVittie opened the door to her apartment and ushered them in. “Darlings, look! This was in yesterday’s mail. I only just opened it.”

  She handed them a sheet of paper with the emblem of the U.S. Postal Service on the letterhead. It was a letter of several paragraphs, but the most important part said:

  We at the postal service pride ourselves on providing the best mail delivery in the world, and yet not every letter finds its way to its addressee. Our inspectors periodically review the contents of the Dead Letter Office so that no accurately addressed letter is overlooked. Once in a great while, the post office comes across a letter incorrectly deemed “dead.” We have no explanation as to how this letter—with a clear and accurate address—came to be labeled as such, or how it sat unnoticed all these decades. We are happy to deliver it to you now with our heartfelt apologies for any inconvenience from the significant delay.

  “What letter?” Ruthie asked, thoroughly perplexed. Mrs. McVittie handed an envelope to her.

  It was yellowed with age, addressed in perfect script:

  Miss R. Stewart,

  in care of Minerva McVittie,

  408 Walnut St., Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

  The postmark read 1937!

  “Look on the back,” Mrs. McVittie said.

  Ruthie turned it over. In the same lovely handwriting it read:

  Louisa Meyer, 7, rue Le Tasse, Paris, France

  “It’s addressed to you, dear. Open it!” Mrs. McVittie urged. She handed Ruthie a letter opener. Ruthie made the slit and pulled out a letter, folded once.

  23 June 1937

  Dear Ruthie,

  I was so happy you met my family yesterday. I was worried I might not see you again. I hope your trip back to America was smooth, and perhaps this letter will be waiting for you after your journey home.

  As I write to you, my family is about to board the SS Normandie. We will arrive in New York in four days! Father decided we will stay with our cousins in Brooklyn until we can return to our home in Berlin someday. We couldn’t pack everything, but I have Frieda, and my mother says this will be a big adventure. My brother is very excited, but I must tell you, had it not been for meeting you and Jack, I would be sad. Knowing that I might make a friend like you or that perhaps we could visit each other makes me less homesick.

  Please write to me in care of the Ginsburg family, 124 Hicks St., Brooklyn, New York.

  Yours truly,

  Louisa Meyer

  “I can’t believe it! How …” Ruthie was so astounded she couldn’t even finish her sentence. “It couldn’t have been sitting there for seventy years; wouldn’t the post office have found it a long time ago?”

  “It hasn’t been there that long. Think about it,” Jack said. “It probably just appeared there—not long after we met her family. That would have been after last Saturday, right?”

  “Like Sophie’s journal—how the last pages were filled in after we met her and warned her about the French Revolution!” Ruthie felt goose bumps all over.

  “Exactly,” Jack concluded. “That is so cool!”

  “You two saved her life,” Ms. McVittie said.

  Ruthie read the letter from Louisa several more times, wondering what kind of life Louisa had had after the photo album ended. She felt elated and relieved. They had protected the Thorne Rooms from Pandora Pommeroy, and t
hey had succeeded in convincing Louisa and her family to leave Europe. Together, she and Jack had done the right thing. Ruthie thought about Phoebe; giving her the notebook and pencils was such a small gesture. Could she and Jack do more for her?

  For safekeeping, Ruthie left the letter from Louisa in a special wooden box in Mrs. McVittie’s guest room, unable to imagine how she would explain such a letter if anyone in her family was to find it.

  But the key and now the slave tag—what should they do with them? Ruthie looked at the two side by side in the palm of her hand, one elaborate, the other plain, both emitting their unusual sparkle. They didn’t belong to her or to Jack, but Ruthie had a feeling that they were trying to tell her something, as though some secret still charged their glittering beauty.

  “What do you think, Jack?” Ruthie asked him, the lid of the box still open. “We can’t keep them forever.”

  He grinned. “We’ll figure out where to return them. Soon. Okay?”

  “Okay!” And with that, she dropped them into the box and shut the lid.

  Room E27, French Library of the Modern Period. Paris of 1937 can be seen outside, including a view of the Eiffel Tower. Louisa’s family album sits on the low round table.

  In a book like this, readers may wonder where fantasy stops and historical fact starts. It’s a very good question. Almost all of the characters here, like those in my previous book, The Sixty-Eight Rooms, came from my imagination. Ruthie and Jack, Mrs. McVittie and Dr. Caroline Bell, Louisa and Phoebe—even Dora Pommeroy—are invented. But as every writer understands, they are created out of snippets from lots of people in my life.

  Amelia Earhart was, of course, a real person whose life was filled with adventure. The French held her in high regard and awarded her the Légion d’Honneur, the highest honor bestowed in France. This medal was given to her after her successful transatlantic flight in 1932. She made that flight in the Red Vega, a model of which I imagined Jack receiving from the souvenir vendor. Earhart made her ill-fated flight exactly at the time that Ruthie and Jack visited Paris—early summer in 1937.

  The scene I describe outside Room E27 is historically accurate. One can find documentary photographs of the Exposition Universelle, and even archival film footage on YouTube. In 1937, Europe was on the brink of World War II, and thousands of people had been and would continue to be displaced from their homes and countries, the way Louisa and her family were.

  Phoebe is a character whom I imagined living in Charleston, South Carolina, long before the Civil War. The object identified as a “slave tag” is a real remnant from that era in Charleston.

  Dora—Pandora Pommeroy—is an invented character, to be sure, but her name comes from Greek mythology. The Pandora of myth was a woman on whom the gods had bestowed great gifts. She opened a box that humans were forbidden to open, and let all the evils of the world escape.

  I have imagined my story in the historical contexts prompted by the Thorne Rooms. I would suggest to any reader interested in or inspired by history to learn all you can and imagine yourself in faraway times and places. It may change your perspective on your own world.

  To my wonderful family—Jonathan, Maya, Noni and Henry. You know why. Merci beaucoup!

  To my sister, Emilie Nichols, and my best friend, Anne Slichter, thanks for happy diversions and support along the way.

  Thank you to Mican Morgan, the curator of the Thorne Rooms, for answering my questions and for saying when asked by a reporter that Ruthie and Jack’s adventures were only “a little naughty.”

  I’m grateful to Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for answering my questions about historical language usage.

  Huge thanks to Gail Hochman, my agent, who takes such great care of everyone she works with.

  Finally, I have written a lot about magic in this story. But my wonderful editor, Shana Corey, performed the real magic. She is tireless, patient and talented. She has my deepest gratitude.

  MARIANNE MALONE is an artist, a former art teacher, and the cofounder of the Campus Middle School for Girls in Urbana, Illinois. She is also the mother of three grown children. Marianne’s first book for children, The Sixty-Eight Rooms, was named a Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Book and a Parents’ Choice Recommended Award Winner.

  GREG CALL began his career in advertising before becoming a full-time illustrator. He works in various media for clients in music, entertainment, and publishing. Greg lives with his wife and two children in northwestern Montana, where he sculpts, paints, illustrates, and (deadlines permitting) enjoys the great outdoors with his family.