The Sixty-Eight Rooms

by Marianne Malone

  “We need to figure out how to tell him in just the right way, Jack. We can’t let Mr. Bell know how we really found it,” Ruthie said, brows knitted.

  “He wouldn’t believe us anyway,” Jack answered.

  Ruthie’s dad was so excited to be in the archives at the Art Institute that he behaved like a small child at an amusement park. Ruthie and Jack had no idea what to expect. When the research curator brought out stacks of material for them to look through, they began to feel like they were at the bottom of a mountain, about to start climbing. She said there were 569 drawings alone to look through, not including all the other files and papers.

  “How many?” Jack said, wincing.

  The curator smiled at Jack. “A lot,” she answered.

  They dug through lecture notes, blueprints, sketches, receipts and interviews. They stuck with it for hours. Ruthie’s dad even got involved.

  “Wow, Ruthie,” he kept saying excitedly throughout the morning. “Look at this one!”

  Since Ms. Biddle had told them that they could define the paper any way they wanted, Ruthie and Jack decided to be practical. They would find out as much as they could about the main rooms they had visited, especially E1, with Christina’s book; E24, with Sophie’s journal; and A1, with Thomas’s model of the Mayflower. If they could discover how those objects had ended up in Mrs. Thorne’s possession, they might have some answers.

  Ruthie figured out right away that she would need to quickly skim the archive documents for useful information, and she improved her speed as she read page after page. Jack was the official note taker. It would be easy for him to turn their notes into a paper. Writing was painless for Jack. They spent Friday afternoon there, slogging through all kinds of papers filled with details that couldn’t possibly be of use. They went home when the museum closed, discouraged.

  “It’s a big job,” her dad said on the ride home. “Obviously Ms. Biddle thinks you two are capable of pulling this into a great report. It’s quite a compliment. You’ll start again fresh in the morning.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Ruthie said weakly.

  At dinner that evening, Ruthie ate in silence. She had looked at so many papers and documents and drawings that she kept seeing them in front of her as she stared into her mashed potatoes. She was more than tired.

  Ruthie fell into bed earlier than usual. She had never before felt the kinds of ups and downs that she’d experienced this week. She almost didn’t want to go back to the archives tomorrow; what if it was a dead end, a waste of time? What if they looked at every single document in the files and came up empty-handed? What if they never found out how Mrs. Thorne had acquired those magic items? She told herself to stop thinking and just listen to the sound of her parents doing the dishes and talking.

  “I don’t want to tell her yet,” she heard her mother say. “Nothing is final.”

  “I guess you’re right,” her father said. “What’s a few more days?”

  What are they talking about? she wondered, but she was too exhausted to pursue the question before sleep claimed her.

  Ruthie spent almost the entire night dreaming. At first her parents’ voices mingled with her dreams as she drifted deeper into sleep. Soon Ms. Biddle appeared in front of her, saying the homework assignment would be to complete a jigsaw puzzle, and she handed Ruthie a box with more than ten million pieces. Ruthie tried to put the puzzle together, but every time she touched one of the small pieces it turned into an angry sheet of paper. It was as though she had stepped into a storm but instead of rain she was nearly drowning in a swirling sea of papers. They came at her from every direction, sometimes hitting her in the face so she couldn’t see. And no matter how many times she pushed them away from her, more sheets appeared. Then Jack showed up, armed with the tall candle stand that he had used to fight off the cockroach. He whacked away at the papers. Finally the storm of paper subsided and she found herself alone in a garden, but instead of flowers blooming, all the plants had shiny little bells on the ends of their stems. The bells started ringing, a few at first and then a beautiful symphony of tiny bells chiming. It was like the sound she had heard standing in front of Christina’s book, only here she could see that it was bells that were making the sound, not some invisible magic somewhere. It was definitely bells, bells, bells and the sound finally soothed her into a quieter, peaceful slumber.

  Ruthie’s mom always said things seemed better in the morning, and this morning proved her right. Ruthie woke up ready to get back to work. Even though she knew they might not find any answers, somehow after a good night’s rest she was willing to try again. She and her dad picked up Jack and they were at the museum when it opened.

  While they worked, Ruthie asked her dad about Christina of Milan.

  “Oh, she’s a wonderful character in history,” he started, a gleam in his eye. Her dad loved it when she asked him any kind of historical question. “She was very tough.”

  “What do you mean?” Ruthie asked.

  “Well, she was being courted by the king of England, Henry the Eighth, who was one of the most powerful men in the world. He had just had his last wife beheaded and was looking for a new bride. At that time Christina was a sixteen-year-old widow.” Ruthie listened attentively; it was exactly as she had read in the book. Exactly as Christina had read to her!

  “In those days, long before photography, painted portraits were used to show what someone looked like. When Henry the Eighth saw Christina’s portrait, he proposed marriage. But she wasn’t interested in being wife number four and told him that if she had two heads she would have risked it but she only had one.” Ruthie’s dad gave a little chuckle.

  “Would she have spoken English?”

  “Oh, certainly. She was most likely fluent in many languages, because she was part of the nobility. She probably used English a lot,” he answered.

  “Wasn’t she from Denmark?” Jack asked, remembering this fact from her book. Up to this point he had been utterly absorbed in the document in his hands.

  “She was indeed,” Ruthie’s dad answered. “Very good, Jack,” he added, as though Jack were a student in his class.

  “Then this might be something, Ruthie,” Jack said, handing her the paper, an intent expression on his face. “Look.”

  It took her a few minutes to figure out what he had seen. It was an interview that Mrs. Thorne had given along with one of her craftsmen, a man named A. W. Pederson. It said Mr. Pederson had been born in Denmark. He’d not only worked as her main craftsman but had also helped her find sources for antique miniatures. Jack had even found a list of pieces she’d received from him.

  The list included a leather-bound book with a matching key that fit the description of Christina’s book and key perfectly. A note written next to the entry for those items read, “Special care to be taken with these.” In the interview Mr. Pederson said these were the first two pieces he had come across and that they’d come from an antique dollhouse that had belonged to a girl in Denmark over a century before. He was quoted as saying that the items contained powerful “magical qualities” that would last a long, long time.

  “That’s it, Jack! That must be how her book got there!”

  “Her book?” Ruthie’s dad asked.

  “Oh … it’s just what we’ve been calling it: Christina’s book. We saw a really beautiful book in room E1 and we started wondering where it came from. Since her portrait is hanging in that room, we called it her book,” she said, hoping that sounded believable.

  It worked. Her dad said, “Now you know what research is all about!”

  This small but important bit of information was the encouragement the two of them needed to continue working. Page after page of seemingly useless material passed in front of them. Yet as the morning wore on they were able to compile more and more information, piecing together at least some answers. For instance, Mrs. Thorne had hired a craftsman named Eugene Kupjack to build many of the American rooms with her. His cousin, a young woman named Lee Meis
inger, perfected needlepoint tiny enough to make many of the rugs and tapestries. Mr. Kupjack documented everything; his papers contained endless lists, mostly of materials that he had purchased and measurements of furniture.

  However, they also found a letter he had received from a dealer of antiques in Boston. It described a very special antique model of the Mayflower that had come into the dealer’s possession from the estate of the great-great-great-grandson of a man named Thomas Wilcox, who had built it. The letter explained how the family had moved to Boston in 1698 and opened a business building the best model ships in New England. Ruthie felt relieved when she read this; it meant his family hadn’t been harmed because of their visit. The letter also described Thomas as an early-eighteenth-century inventor. When they read the words man and inventor Ruthie and Jack looked at each other. Learning that Thomas had lived a full life actually made the hair go up on the back of Ruthie’s neck. He grew up! He became an inventor! He had descendants! “Cool. Very cool,” was all Jack could say.

  There was a note in Mrs. Thorne’s handwriting on the bottom of this letter saying the ship had been the inspiration for making the Topsfield room and that it would “animate” the room. Once these last facts had sunk in, another question came to Ruthie’s mind: how had the model become a miniature? The letter was from an antiques dealer, not a miniatures dealer. She looked at Jack and said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah. How’d he make the Mayflower small?”

  Ruthie’s dad chimed in. “I don’t see how they made any of these objects so small. Such skill!” He clearly didn’t understand what Ruthie and Jack were really talking about. They meant, how had Thomas’s ship model become small? They had not yet found an answer, and Ruthie was beginning to doubt they would.

  By the end of the day it was clear to them that there were two categories of objects: the very old ones that Mrs. Thorne had acquired from all over the world, and those that had been made in the 1930s and 1940s specifically for the rooms. Precise lists and receipts had been kept and filed. You could trace the origin of every single object—except for some very special pieces in the European rooms.

  As for Sophie’s journal, they realized by early afternoon that Mrs. Thorne had kept secrets. Ruthie had read in the catalogue about a secret shop in Paris that was one of Mrs. Thorne’s favorite sources and she hoped that they would find out more about it. They looked and looked in the files but all Mrs. Thorne had said was that she’d found a little shop in Paris, quite old, that sold truly “magical” miniatures. Included on the list of items from this mystery dealer were items from room E24: “a lovely Louis XVI writing desk that contained a locked diary with a key” was singled out as one of the most exquisite she had ever seen, with “special qualities seen only in the rarest of miniatures.”

  “These miniatures,” she wrote, “would truly animate a room.”

  That sentence jumped out at Ruthie. Mrs. Thorne had used the same word for Thomas’s ship. To Ruthie, animate meant “to make cartoons.”

  “Dad, what exactly does animate mean?” she asked.

  “It means to bring something to life,” he answered. Ruthie knew instantly that this was an important find. That must have been what Mrs. Thorne really meant by “special qualities.” Ruthie also thought it was those qualities that had drawn her into that room in the first place.

  The dollhouse of a young Danish girl, a descendant of Thomas Wilcox, a secret shop in Paris—that was how far they could trace the paths of these magic objects. Ruthie knew this was just the tip of the iceberg; after all, they had experienced only a few of the rooms. According to the archives, there seemed to be many more objects that could be as magical as the few they had come across. Now Ruthie wanted to know what other items in the rooms held the living, breathing secrets of the past.

  At least they knew where the objects came from. The how and why were still not clear. Could it be that Mrs. Thorne and her craftsmen actually knew about the magic that enabled Ruthie and Jack to visit these places in the past? Had Mrs. Thorne ever experienced the magic herself? She and all of her craftsmen mentioned “magic” and “special qualities”—but people used those words all the time as figures of speech. Mrs. McVittie had used the word magic the day she had come over and made Ruthie soup for lunch. Had it been only a figure of speech for her? Maybe—but maybe not; she was, after all, an awfully unusual person. Tomorrow they would pay her a visit.

  THE DUSTY OLD SHOP

  WHENEVER RUTHIE HAD COME TO Mrs. McVittie’s shop, it had been with her father. He would browse through the old books while Ruthie poked around and looked at the other objects for sale. She loved picking up the antiques, shiny or dusty, recognizable or foreign. Mrs. McVittie always had a silver bowl filled with caramels for her to eat.

  Ruthie and Jack showed up right after lunch on Sunday. The shop was open for a few hours every afternoon all year long, and by appointment at other times for special customers. Through the window they could see Mrs. McVittie sitting in a comfortable old chair in the back, reading by a lamp that glowed with a warm yellow light. They rang the doorbell since her shop was always locked. She looked up, her expression melting into a warm, craggy smile when she recognized Ruthie. She pushed a button near her chair to let them in.

  It was a very long, narrow space, lined floor to ceiling with sagging bookshelves. You could smell the age of the books. At the very back was a door that led to a storage room that Ruthie had been in several times. It too was filled floor to ceiling with half a century’s worth of boxes yet to be sorted through. Unlike the rest of the shop, nothing in there was organized. Sprinkled throughout the main space were antiques. China, silver, small bronze or marble statues—you name it, Mrs. McVittie had it.

  “Come here, dear!”

  Ruthie walked down the narrow aisle, careful not to knock anything over. She gave Mrs. McVittie a small hug. “Hello. I bet you didn’t think I’d come to visit you so soon!”

  “You’d be surprised what I expect to happen!” Mrs. McVittie said somewhat mysteriously as she slowly worked up to standing. Once she was fully out of the chair, she peered over her reading glasses at Jack. “Who is this young man?”

  “This is Jack Tucker. He’s in my class at school. We’re working on a project together.”

  “I see,” she said, looking him up and down. “Tucker, you say? Is your mom the painter?” she asked.

  “Yes, she is,” Jack said, surprised. It wasn’t as though his mom was well known.

  “Are you a good student?” Mrs. McVittie asked him, raising one eyebrow.

  “Most of the time, especially in history,” Jack answered.

  “Excellent! Most important subject you can study!” She put away the book she was reading. She lifted up the bowl of caramels that sat on the table, offering them with a smile. “Now, what brings you both here? You have something for me to look at?”

  “How did you know?” Ruthie asked.

  “Why else would you be here?” she said with a sly look in her eyes. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Jack had wrapped the journal in an old pillowcase. He gently lifted it out of his backpack and then out of the pillowcase and handed it to Mrs. McVittie. Ruthie noticed a flash of emotion cross Mrs. McVittie’s face as she saw the old journal. Ruthie wasn’t sure what emotion it was, but Mrs. McVittie quickly masked it.

  “My, my … my!” She closed her eyes and rubbed her hands over the leather binding. She seemed to be learning about the journal from the feel of it as much as the look of it. Then she sniffed it. “Yes, yes …,” she said. Ruthie even thought she saw an expression on Mrs. McVittie’s face that erased her age; for a split second she almost looked younger. Then she said softly, “It’s been a very long time since I’ve been in the presence of something like this. A long time indeed.”

  Mrs. McVittie lifted the ornate gold watch she wore on a chain around her neck and checked the hour. “Dear,” she said, looking at Ruthie, “would you please p
ut the Closed sign in the door? We don’t want any interruptions.”

  She put the journal on the table next to the chair, where she could see it in the light. “Now, let’s see what we have here.” She opened to the first page. She had no difficulty reading the fancy French script. “Very interesting … hmmm … ah,” were her only comments for a few minutes. Then she sat back down in the chair, absorbed. Jack and Ruthie could do nothing but wait. They chewed the caramels quietly.

  Finally, after reading many pages, Mrs. McVittie looked up at Jack, peering over her reading glasses with an intense gaze. “How did you come across this journal?”

  The two of them had decided on a story, which Jack proceeded to tell. “My mother has a friend who brings us things whenever he travels. He just came back from France and brought us this. He said he bought it in a flea market in Paris.” Jack’s mom did, in fact, have a friend who brought them stuff from a flea market in Paris; that’s why he thought this might be a believable story.

  “I see,” she said, and returned to the book. Ruthie had the distinct impression that Mrs. McVittie did not believe Jack. Not one bit.

  “We’re doing a research project for school,” Ruthie added. “We might include this book in it but we need to know what it says.”

  “I see,” was all she said again. She continued reading, absorbed in the book.

  Finally—after they had eaten many caramels—she looked up at Ruthie. “Well, you’ve been having quite an adventure with your ‘project,’ haven’t you?”

  Ruthie wasn’t sure what she meant by this. “Well, we’ve been doing a lot of research.”

  “You’ve done more than that, I would say.” She waited for them to say something but neither Jack nor Ruthie knew what that should be.

  “What does it say?” Ruthie finally asked. “It’s a journal, isn’t it?” Then she thought she should tell Mrs. McVittie more. “We—Jack and I—we’re pretty sure it’s from the time of the French Revolution and we think we read the name Sophie Lacombe. But that’s all.”