Secrets at Sea

by Richard Peck

  She folded back her scrap quilt, and up she rose.

  A thought occurred to me as it often does. Though I have my pride, it is not a foolish pride. I can go for advice when I need it—to Aunt Fannie Fenimore, of course. Where else? She was called the wisest mouse in both Westchester and Dutchess counties. Though she was no picnic to be around.

  Still—once I’d made up my mind to go to Aunt Fannie, I may have drifted into a fitful sleep. I must have slept, because I seemed to dream. In this dream, Beatrice sat silently up, two matchboxes over. Beatrice! She folded back her scrap quilt, and up she rose, slipping out of her nightdress. Then she was gone like a puff of smoke.

  But how could this be a dream since we mice dream of nothing but cheese and time running out?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Two Futures

  IT WAS ANOTHER busy week before I could tear myself away for a visit to Aunt Fannie Fenimore. Mrs. Cranston nagged Mr. Cranston until he had one of the new telephones installed under the front staircase, where it rang its head off. Another express wagon was forever bringing up a parcel from off the train. Bolts of fine silks. And cambric and lawn for new petticoats, long ones and short ones. Paper patterns. Buttons on cards. Skeins of ribbon.

  We were buried alive in all this newness that smelled of the shop.

  A chattering, complaining army of seamstresses fell on us, all sent by Mrs. Minturn. Pincushions on their wrists. Tape measures around their necks, and a welcome new supply of thimbles. Then here came the tailors for Mr. Cranston’s frock coat and morning coat and striped trousers and silk nightshirts with his initials sewed on. All these things he didn’t know he needed.

  Louise and Beatrice and I were up half the night every night, bringing down snippets of satin and serge that had fallen from the dressmakers’ scissors. And ribbon ends. And any spool of thread, rolled under their worktables. And all the pins and needles worked into the carpet. Because you never know what you’ll need. We think ahead, we mice.

  Through the kitchen wall Mrs. Flint and her daughters moaned over all these extra mouths to feed. The tailors ate like horses. Mrs. Flint banged pans until you couldn’t hear yourself think. But she made apple fritters for all, and we were up the other half of the night, bringing back all the peelings we could carry. We mice have a great use for apple peelings. They keep the curl in your tail.

  Time was running out, Louise reported. The steamer trunks were crammed full. The luggage tags tied on. She’d come back with the news from Camilla’s room, very droopy, tracking in cobwebs. Then she’d fling herself into her matchbox. She was very down in the mouth at the thought of losing Camilla to London, England.

  AND SO I set forth on a visit to Aunt Fannie Fenimore. Into a cloth bag I could carry around my neck I folded my best outfit. And I stuck in a morsel of apple fritter wrapped in waxed paper. Aunt Fannie is very greedy. Don’t go empty-handed to her.

  For good measure, I brought her a scrap of watered taffeta from off the floor under a dressmaker. One of Aunt Fannie’s nieces could make it up into a skirt and cape for her.

  Because a visit to Aunt Fannie was always educational, I wanted to take Beatrice. But she’d made herself scarce that afternoon. And Louise was Upstairs, collecting ribbons and rumors. Lamont was at school. We hoped.

  So I set off all on my lonesome, across the croquet lawn. The Upstairs Cranstons don’t play. And no young man calling on Olive ever stayed long enough to finish a game. But it is important to have a croquet lawn. With one eye on the sky, I rested under a croquet hoop to catch my breath and rest my bulging bag.

  The lawns were full of mice, coming and going. For every one of us you see, there are a thousand more. Ten thousand. But I had no time for idle chitchat. At least I didn’t have to cross the busy road. Mice like us live in the big houses between the river and the road. And the Fenimores were the next house over, a hedge away.

  Under their porch, I stepped into a new skirt, summery with sprigs. There was lace at my throat fixed with a glass bead. I looked nice.

  The Fenimore humans were away. I crept down the silent house, inside the walls to Aunt Fannie’s, dragging the sack along the narrow trail. It was well-trod. Mice come from all over to seek Aunt Fannie’s advice. When I came to her door, one of her nieces—Mona—was barring it.

  All mice of Aunt Fannie’s years have nieces, and she used hers to fetch and carry for her.

  Mona looked me up and down and saw my finery was new. She twitched. “Oh, it’s you, Helena. I don’t know if she—”

  “Who is it?” Aunt Fannie cried out from the depths of her gloomy room.

  “It’s only Helena Cranston from across the hedge,” Mona cried back. Aunt Fannie says she’s deaf, though she hears everything.

  “I’ve been expecting her,” she bellowed.

  She expects a lot. And she always claims she knows when you’re coming. She claims she knows everything.

  Mona led me forth into the dreary, hollowed-out chamber, into Aunt Fannie’s presence. Her throne was an old cast-off powder puff. She sat on it, draped in shawls, though it was hot as August in here. You never saw an older mouse. She’d gone past gray to bald patches. Though she only had one tooth left, it was a big one.

  Spectacles are rare on a mouse, except in some silly children’s book. But Aunt Fannie wore a pair. They were made out of bent wire and chips of lens from a human’s reading glasses. They seemed to work for her. I’ll say this for Aunt Fannie: She sees better than she looks.

  She gave me and my finery the once-over. “Humph,” she remarked.

  If I wanted any advice out of her, it was time for the presents. She stuck her nose in the apple fritter and handed it over to Mona, who was hovering. Mona hovers.

  Aunt Fannie waited for more, so I drew out the scrap of watered taffeta.

  She fingered it. “Not best quality. Somebody’s been selling your Upstairs Cranstons short. Somebody’s been taking advantage. What color do you call it?”

  “It is changeable,” I said, “back and forth between purple and green.”

  “I hope it’s not for Olive Cranston,” Aunt Fannie said. “It’s all wrong for her coloring. Olive is sallow. And it’s too grown-up for Camilla, being youngest. Camilla should be in white and pale pastels. Lavenders. Pinks.”

  Aunt Fannie is full of judgments.

  “I believe it’s for the mother, for Mrs. Cranston,” I said. “A ball gown.”

  Aunt Fannie Fenimore grappled with her shawls. “Mrs. Cranston in a ball gown? I hope she isn’t planning to show her shoulders!”

  “You and me both,” I murmured.

  “Who is giving her this advice?” Aunt Fannie narrowed her eyes at me. Her lenses sparked.

  “An old woman up from New York City on the tr—”

  “The Minturn woman?”

  I shrugged. You can’t tell Aunt Fannie anything. She slapped her powder puff throne. Powder rose in the room.

  “They have fallen into the hands of a crook and a fool. They would. She will put them in the wrong clothes and give them the wrong advice. She takes her cut from all the worst seamstresses and milliners and tailors in New York. And she’s never been out of this country. She’s lucky to be out of jail. The woman knows no more about how to behave in the Great World than a . . . McSorley.”

  Mere mention of this ragtag family from the wrong side of the road made all the nieces titter. Mona smirked.

  I just stood there.

  “The Minturn woman will sell your Upstairs Cranstons down the river. They are lambs led to the slaughter. They are not the first fools she’s fleeced.”

  “I don’t know what I can do about it,” I mumbled. “They are packing to go this minute. The labels for first class are on the trunks. They’re away across the you-know-what to marry Olive off. And leaving us high and dry. What can I do? What’s to become of us?”

  I let a note of pleading creep into my voice. This was to remind Aunt Fannie that I was only a poor orphaned girl with nowhere to turn for advice ex
cept—

  “Well, you did right to come to me.” She adjusted her shawls. “We must look carefully into both your futures.”

  Both futures?

  “Everybody has two futures,” Aunt Fannie said. “The future you choose. Or the future that chooses you.”

  She snapped her fingers in the dusty air. “Bring forth the crystal ball!”

  Her nieces scattered in search of it. I sighed. I’d never been sure about that crystal ball. It was only a marble lost from some human child’s game. An aggie. But Aunt Fannie swore by it.

  Presently the crystal ball was before her, on its own pedestal. She made circles of it with her hands, and stared into its depths. I’d never believed in that thing, but now I wondered.

  “Oh bother!” She looked aside. “It’s going in the wrong direction. It’s your futures we’re worried about, but it’s gone back.”

  The nieces were quiet as—mice. Mona hovered. I waited.

  “Come around here and look, Helena. It’s gone back to the past.”

  I edged around to gaze over her sagging old shape, into the crystal ball.

  I staggered. There in the depths of the crystal ball was . . . the rain barrel at the corner of our house. Clear as day. It was winter, with a skim of ice across the rainwater. I couldn’t face it. My hands were over my eyes.

  “Never mind,” Aunt Fannie said. “They’ve been fished out and given proper burials.”

  She meant my sisters, my late sisters, Vicky and Alice. Thoughtless girls who’d ventured out across the ice on the rain barrel on a fateful day of freeze and thaw.

  And Mother, who obeyed all her instincts and scrambled up the barrel to save them. And was lost herself. All three drowned in the rain barrel. Time is always running out for us mice, and water often figures in.

  Aunt Fannie thumped the marble. “I’ve been having trouble with this thing. It’ll go in reverse, but I can’t get it turned around to tell futures. Look there.”

  Though I dreaded another view of the rain barrel, I chanced a look. The crystal ball was crowded with humans in peculiar caps and wooden shoes.

  “Oh for pity’s sake,” I said. “It’s gone all the way back to old Dutch days.”

  “See what I mean?” Aunt Fannie pointed me to my place before her. “I wish I knew who to call to get it fixed.”

  She blinked through her specs and fingered her last whisker in thought. “Never mind,” she said. “I can see one of your futures anyhow. The future that will choose you if you stay put and do not act. Not a pretty picture.”

  I worked my hands. Aunt Fannie’s pictures were rarely pretty.

  “For one thing, that brother of yours needs a firm hand because he’s headed for trouble. He’s wilder than the wind, and nagging him does no good.”

  “Well, I try not to nag him,” I said, straightening my skirt.

  “You nag,” Aunt Fannie said. “We can hear you from here.”

  She missed very little. “Then there is Louise,” she said hollowly. “Once the Upstairs Cranstons are off across the you-know-what in all the wrong dresses, you will have Louise on your hands. She is entirely too attached to Camilla Cranston, and where does that leave you?”

  Where indeed. Was Mona smirking? I wouldn’t look.

  “Not to mention Beatrice.” Aunt Fannie’s lenses glittered. Every niece listened. Mona’s hand stole up to her mouth.

  Beatrice? “Well, I suppose I might have left her in mouse school to finish her senior year,” I explained. “But she was learning nothing. Absolutely nothing. She doesn’t know where Europe is. And her mouth moves when she reads. I thought I could teach her better than—”

  “Schooling is the least of Beatrice’s problems,” Aunt Fannie said in a voice of doom.

  No niece looked at me. They looked everywhere else. Their many eyes glowed in the gloom.

  “Beatrice is slipping out at night, as the whole world knows,” Aunt Fannie said, “except you.”

  Beatrice? As in a dream I saw her creep out of her matchbox. Off she went into the night on tiny feet. What if it was no dream? What if it was the awful truth?

  “Beatrice is seeing Gideon McSorley on the sly!” Aunt Fannie announced. Her nieces gasped at this . . . cat let out of the bag.

  Lamont’s so-called friend Gideon? A McSorley? I grabbed the lace at my neck. “We’re lost.” My voice broke. “And finished as a family.”

  “You can say that again,” Aunt Fannie remarked, removing a single loose thread from her shawl.

  I TURNED TO go, my mind blank, my eyes blurry. But then behind me Aunt Fannie said,“Ah, that’s better.” I looked back. Her nose grazed the crystal ball. Her specs gleamed. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Here’s your other future, Helena! Here’s the one you can choose, if you dare.”

  I stood there, between one future and another. The nieces edged up behind Aunt Fannie’s throne to glimpse the future I might choose.

  “Ohhhh,” they moaned.

  Mona too. How provoking that Mona would gaze upon one of my futures before I myself. That moved me.

  I elbowed her aside and peered down over Aunt Fannie’s humped shoulder, into the depths of the marble.

  No. Surely not. Anything but—

  “There it is.” Aunt Fannie tapped the crystal ball. “Plain as the nose on your face.”

  “I couldn’t,” I whispered. “We couldn’t. How could we?”

  THE MARBLE WAS awash, and water is not a happy subject for us mice. Stormy gray seawater crashed in waves. The marble filled to overflowing. Great, surging mountains and valleys of wicked water. I felt wet through.

  A ship too big for the marble to contain.

  Cutting through the seething sea was the sharp prow of a ship. A great iron ship, trailing black smoke. A ship too big for the marble to contain, rising and falling in the restless water.

  My stomach rose and fell.

  “Well, there you have it.” Aunt Fannie thumped the dimming marble. Still, I caught sight of the light from row after row of portholes rippling yellow across black water before the marble went dark.

  It was the great ocean liner carrying the Upstairs Cranstons to London, England.

  “How wide is that . . . water?”

  “It is called the Atlantic Ocean,” Aunt Fannie intoned, “and it is just at three thousand miles across.”

  My sisters Vicky and Alice, and Mother too, had all been dragged to their dooms in a rain barrel not three feet across. Not three feet.

  My throat was bone dry. “Mice don’t cross—”

  “Mice better,” Aunt Fannie answered.

  “But how in heaven’s name?” I pled. “And how could I convince the others?”

  Aunt Fannie adjusted her shawl. “That brainless brother of yours will welcome any reason to miss these last weeks of mouse school. He’d sooner drown than finish the semester.”

  True.

  “And Louise would risk her silly neck to be wherever Camilla Cranston goes.”

  True, true. But Beatrice—

  “And that boy-crazy Beatrice has kept Gideon McSorley a secret. She dare not refuse to leave him, or she will be found out!”

  Aunt Fannie looked particularly proud of her reasoning.

  Oh, I thought.

  “There is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep the family together,” I said in a voice gone weak as ... water. “Nothing. After all, I am Helena, the—”

  “Then you will have to go to great lengths.” Aunt Fannie fingered a final whisker. “Great lengths indeed. Across land and sea, water and the world!” She shook a fist at the heavens. “A world of steam and humans and long, long distance!”

  The nieces quaked and clung to one another. She waved the crystal ball away. “Sit down, Helena, to learn what you will need to know.”

  All the nieces flopped right down and arranged their tails. They were agog and waited wide-eared to hear. So did I, of course.

  But Aunt Fannie did a strange thing then. Mysterious. “Here is how you hold your family
together,” she said. Then she put out both her old hands, stretched wide open.

  “That’s how you hold on to family.” She thrust her wide-open hands right at me. Right in my face.

  But what could that mean? What in the world?

  CHAPTER SIX

  A World of Steam and Humans

  WE SAILED AWAY to London, England, Louise and Beatrice, Lamont and I. We began our journey by steamer trunk—that biggest trunk that had stood open for days in Camilla’s bedroom, filling up with her new finery. It had drawers inside.

  We packed a morsel of food, for we little knew where our next meal was coming from. But we took not a stitch of clothes, as we had no luggage. Mice don’t. Still, fur is perfectly suitable for traveling. Lamont naturally wanted to take everything he had. Boys collect things—anything useless. Lamont wanted to take all his collections: the birds’ bones and the collar buttons and that ball of twine that kept getting bigger and bigger in his room. He was a regular pack rat, though smaller. “No, Lamont,” I told him.

  We sisters were to travel in the handkerchief drawer of Camilla’s trunk, in among her sachets. Lamont went in the top drawer above us, in with Camilla’s gloves and garters. It was the best we could do.

  Before dawn, we swarmed up through the house, never daring a backward look. By the time the sun of that last morning crept across Camilla’s sleeping form, we were hunkered, lurking within the drawers. Beatrice and Louise and I were nose to nose to nose, under the lacy edges of Camilla’s handkerchiefs. It was a small drawer. There wasn’t room to swing a . . . cat.

  A scent of Mrs. Flint’s coffee wafted up from the kitchen, and the house woke around us. Mrs. Cranston dithered up and down the hall. Mr. Cranston barked commands nobody obeyed. Olive and Camilla chattered from room to room as they seemed to be tying on their traveling veils and fur tippets. We lurked in our drawer, all ears.