“Why don’t we tell you a story and you tell us what you think?” Jack suggested.
“Please!” she responded.
“Once upon a time,” Jack started, his storyteller’s gift in high gear, “there was a girl who lived in a place called Chicago.…”
Jack got up from his chair and walked around the room, spinning his tale and weaving all the threads as he spoke. He began with the King Tut exhibition at the Field Museum, in the year 1977. “But the girl was more interested in another museum—the Art Institute. She had made an amazing discovery about the enchanted rooms there. She’d found a magic key, and with that key she could enter the rooms.” Jack paused for dramatic effect. “But she could also exit her life—and her time. And one day she left and never returned to Chicago.”
Rivy hung on his every word, her cheeks suddenly wet with tears. Ruthie too sat listening in awe as Jack put all the details in place.
“Yes!” Rivy said through great gulps of air, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. It took another cup of tea for her to be calm enough to speak. “I thought it had to be a dream because it’s all … impossible! I couldn’t tell anyone. Sometimes I even thought I might be insane or possessed. Are you sure I’m not dreaming now?”
“Positive,” Jack answered, taking a seat again.
“Tell us everything you remember,” Ruthie said gently. Rivy set her teacup on the table. “I’m from … Chicago? It was so different than it is here. I had a younger brother named Oliver. Our parents died in a plane crash just after he was born—I think I must have been about eight. That part is very foggy. I haven’t thought about airplanes in who knows how long. We don’t … have them now.” She shook her head in disbelief and Ruthie imagined a sky never marked with the thin white crisscross of contrails. “One summer day he begged me to take him to see the King Tut exhibition—I was often his babysitter because our aunt and uncle worked a lot. We went to the Field Museum but I told him he also had to go to the Art Institute with me to see the Thorne Rooms.”
“Did you already know about the magic?” Ruthie asked.
“Yes … yes, I did.” Her hands—which had been clenched—finally rested in her lap while she told her story. “My aunt and uncle knew a man who worked at the museum and somehow had the key. I remember he said there was a legend that it held some kind of special power. No one believed that. We all thought it was simply a charm, like people put on bracelets. He gave it to me as a necklace, a pretty piece of jewelry. At the museum one day, by myself, I discovered that it really was charmed. Then, that day with Oliver, I made him come with me, to explore.”
“Did you know the rooms were portals to the past?” Jack asked.
“Yes, I did. I discovered that by accident the second time I visited the rooms. I stayed a little longer and realized I heard sounds coming from outside. I remember it was a fancy English room with red walls and a checkerboard floor. I turned and saw a horse and carriage pass by the window.” She sipped her tea. “And I remember … a ring.”
Ruthie reached into her bag and took out both rings.
Recognition registered on Rivy’s face. She pointed first to the mood ring. “I wore that one; just a fad at the time. But this one,” she said picking up the real jewel, “this is what brought me here.”
“How? Why?” Ruthie wanted to know.
“It was a family heirloom. My real family—the Browns—are descendants of the Brownlows; our name was simplified when the family came to the United States. When I discovered that Mrs. Thorne had copied a room from the Brownlow estate, I wanted to go there, back in time, to meet my ancestors! I thought it would be almost like having my parents again. What a silly girl I was!”
“I don’t think that’s silly at all,” Jack said.
Ruthie remembered how much it had meant to him to meet his great-times-six grandfather. “But why did you decide to stay?” she asked.
“I didn’t.” Her eyes welled with tears again. “I was stranded.”
RUTHIE AND JACK LISTENED TO Rivy—the missing Becky Brown—while she told her story of what had happened. Almost forty years earlier, when she was fifteen, she brought her seven-year-old brother with her into the past. They found themselves in late seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, England.
“Oliver was acting like little boys sometimes do,” she explained. “He ran around and was impatient. First he wanted my rings. I let him have the mood ring, but when he was bored with that he wanted the antique one and the key too. He wanted to carry all of them, and I finally gave in and let him. Once he’d seen Belton House—this one, not the miniature—he wanted to explore more rooms, especially the castle rooms. I was growing short-tempered with him and he ran off. When I went to look for him, the door—the portal, as you call it—had disappeared, and … I never saw him again.” She blinked hard. “He never came back for me. Ever.”
Ruthie shuddered. She remembered the feeling she’d had just a few days ago when Jack had removed the animator from room E6 and she was cut off from her life for all of fifteen minutes. What if he hadn’t come back and she’d been trapped?
And then it occurred to Ruthie: “Jack—we never figured out what the animator is.”
“The what?” Rivy asked.
“It’s the object in the room that makes the outside world alive. So far the animators have been old, from the time the room represents,” Jack answered. “Whatever it is, Oliver must have taken it. Probably without even knowing it.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Ruthie pointed out, “because we’re here now. The room is animated. And the portal didn’t close behind us.”
“Maybe he put it back,” Jack said.
“But then the portal would have reappeared for her,” Ruthie said. “Something doesn’t add up.” Ruthie felt a shiver at the possibility of an unexpected animator or rules they didn’t understand.
“Could it be the ring?” Rivy asked.
“You had the ring with you when you first came to Belton House?” Jack asked.
“I think it was in Oliver’s pocket.”
“So far, all the animators we’ve discovered have had to stay put in the rooms. If you move them from their place, the portal closes,” Ruthie explained.
“Maybe the ring works differently; maybe you can come out into the past with it,” Jack suggested. “If the ring is the animator, when Oliver went out to the corridor the portal would have closed up.” Jack scratched his head. “Maybe he came back to get her, but he didn’t have the ring anymore—”
“Because he’d left it in the box where we found it!” Ruthie interjected.
“Right. Room E4 would’ve been dead.”
Ruthie jumped up and ran to the window. Suppose, as Jack said, the ring as animator behaved differently than the others; suppose the portal closed later, when they were farther away from it …
“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.
“We were able to see Belton House from the patio; can we see the patio from here?” Ruthie said, looking through the glass panes.
Jack joined her at the window. “There it is—just past those trees at the bottom of the slope.”
Through a grove of trees Ruthie glimpsed the small patio next to a brick structure, but her heart still thumped even after the reassuring sight of the portal.
Rivy came to the window. From this perspective the portal looked only slightly larger than a small brick shed, with one door but no windows. “I’ve never seen that before. It’s been such a long time, but I don’t believe that’s what it looked like when I came through.”
“Could we ask someone—maybe the maid—to come in here to see if she can see it?” Jack asked.
Rivy went to the near wall and pulled on a long embroidered cord. “This rings downstairs in the servants’ quarters,” she explained.
The maid arrived shortly. “Yes, ma’am?” she said with a curtsy.
“Daisy, please come over here, and tell us what you see,” Rivy directed.
The maid crossed to t
he window, looking at Rivy and the visitors questioningly. “Why, I see the gardens and the lawn, beyond. Am I supposed to see something else?”
“Do you see a small brick structure down there, in that grove of trees?” Ruthie prompted.
Daisy looked and looked. “Can’t say that I do. Only the lawn, and a small sliver of the road that leads to the village.”
“Thank you, Daisy. That will be all,” Rivy said.
“Yes, ma’am.” The maid curtsied again and left.
“What does this mean?” Rivy asked Ruthie and Jack.
“It means you can see the portal because you’re here by magic,” Jack explained. “Only the three of us can see it.”
“Be prepared, Rivy; if you’ve never been able to see it before, it may disappear when we leave,” Ruthie added.
“You mean, if I want to go back, this may be my only chance? Can’t you leave me the ring?”
Ruthie shook her head. “We’re not sure why the room is alive now, but I have a feeling it’s something about the key and the ring combined.”
She took the key out of her bag. The metal glinted like icicles in sun. When she held the ring and key side by side, the ring began to pulse light just like the key. The key would glow in a burst and then the ring would mimic it, flashing in the same irregular beat, as though it were some kind of magical Morse code. They actually seemed to be communicating with each other. A beautiful tinkling sound began from far away and increased until it filled every corner of the room. They all watched and listened for several minutes.
“We shouldn’t separate them. We don’t know what would happen,” Ruthie pointed out.
“Will you take me down there?” Rivy asked. “Just for a look.”
“Sure,” Ruthie said.
They left Belton House through the garden door and walked past the roses and shrubs. “How did you become the governess here?” Ruthie asked.
“At first I believed that someone would come back for me. While I waited I lived on apples from orchards and snuck vegetables from gardens. I slept on the ground in places where no one would see me. Several days passed and I knew I had to have more to eat and a place to stay. After the shock of realizing that I might be stuck in this time for a while I thought about what I could do. There are very few professions for a young woman in this era.
“I worked in a nearby village as a cook and a maid. As time passed, first a few months, then a year, then two, I became accustomed to this world. Even though I was young, I was well educated for a girl in this time. I heard that the Brownlow family—my family!—was in need of a governess, so I wrote them a letter and they hired me. It was a long time ago; I was the governess for the father of the children you met. He grew up and married and had his own family. So I’ve been educating my own ancestors!”
“That’s amazing,” Jack said.
Rivy told them that since she never had children of her own, she could claim deep love and affection for all the Brownlows; they were, after all, family, in the mixed-up and inside-out way brought about by the time travel.
“But I missed my life—especially Oliver—frightfully. Slowly the pain lessened but it never went away. Over the years, I guess, I substituted this family for the one I had been missing. I love them very much.”
They reached the edge of the property and the three steps that led up to the patio.
Rivy took a deep breath. “This is not how Oliver and I … arrived.”
Ruthie reached out her hand, which Rivy clasped willingly.
They walked up the steps and across the slate tiles of the patio. The door was visible in front of them and Jack opened it a crack. Still standing in the English countryside, they peeked three centuries into the future, into the Thorne Room. No one was at the viewing window, so Jack slipped in first. In the doorway, Rivy turned and looked back up the hill to Belton House before crossing the threshold into the world she’d left behind so long ago.
“It’s almost the same, isn’t it?” She gazed around the room. “That painting is different, and some of the furniture as well.” Then she rushed over to the viewing window. “But that’s not as I remember it at all. How odd.”
“Better not stand there.” Ruthie took her hand again to guide her away from the glass. “We might be seen.”
They lingered for a minute or two, while Rivy made a 360-degree turn, taking it all in.
“Look at that kitten in front of the fireplace!” they heard a young voice squeal from the gallery, referring to the room right next to them.
“Quick! This way,” Jack said.
They sped out the other door, through the framework, and into the corridor. As soon as she was through the framework Rivy stiffened.
“I know, the scale can make you dizzy. Don’t look down,” Ruthie said.
“It’s not that. It’s just … completely different. Is this some kind of trick?”
“No,” Ruthie promised.
“I don’t like this at all! Everything feels all muddled. Please, take me back.”
“All right,” Jack replied.
When the viewers in the gallery had moved on, the three returned to the room, Rivy going directly to the far door and passing back across time.
They rushed to keep up with her. Out on the patio she said haltingly, “I don’t understand.…”
Ruthie reached out to stroke Rivy’s forearm, not knowing what to say. This reaction was so unexpected, more than just the vertigo that she and Jack had felt when they first experienced the colossal scale in the corridor.
At last Rivy’s breathing eased and she asked them how they had come to possess the ring. They explained about the box in the Wentworth room that contained the two rings. When they had finished, Rivy sighed. “I have so many more questions—I don’t know where to begin. It’s almost too much for me.”
Ruthie wondered what was next. Moments ago she had assumed Rivy felt rescued and wanted to come back. But suddenly Ruthie wasn’t so certain that Rivy would choose to return.
With tears in her eyes, Rivy asked, “Could you do me a favor?”
“Sure,” Jack said.
“Do you think you could find Oliver? Or at least find out what happened—why he didn’t come back for me?”
“We can try,” Ruthie said. But the question implied that there was something big about the magic that Rivy might not understand. Ruthie had assumed Rivy knew this rule of how the magic worked, and once again she realized how mistaken assumptions can be.
Ruthie looked at Jack and could tell he was thinking the same thing: would Rivy have been so careless as to let a seven-year-old boy keep the key if she’d known how it worked? Ruthie imagined the young boy impulsively slipping away and out of the corridor, growing big once more and having no way to shrink again without his sister. She pictured a little boy alone in the museum, crying for his lost big sister.
Yes, Mrs. Thorne, Ruthie thought, this is a most serious and dangerous matter.
“I think we need to tell you something,” Ruthie said.
“What is it?”
“The magic of the key … the shrinking part. Did you know it only makes girls shrink?”
She stared at them, not comprehending. “But …”
“Boys can shrink only if they are holding a girl’s hand. And once a boy puts the key down—back out in the museum—he regrows,” Jack explained.
“You mean …” She choked up again. Finally she said. “He couldn’t come back for me.”
They nodded.
“Then you must find him!”
When they arrived at the shop Mrs. McVittie had a client in the front room. Ruthie and Jack went to the storeroom to try to get some work done, but they were both too preoccupied.
“I can’t stop thinking about the animator,” Ruthie said, sitting on a box. “We have to find out if we are right about the key and the ring working together. If the ring was passed down in the Brown family, then that room would never have been alive until 1977, when Rivy—Becky Brown—walked into i
t with the ring and the key.”
“That’s possible,” Jack said, nodding.
“And so far, all the other rooms have gone dead when we’ve moved the animator.”
“Like the vase in E9; just picking it up shut the whole thing down.”
“Right. But that didn’t happen to Rivy and Oliver, and it didn’t happen to us today. I have a hunch Mrs. Thorne left something else in there, so the room was alive when Rivy and Oliver visited. Something that’s not there now—”
“Because Oliver pocketed it on his way out!” Jack completed Ruthie’s thought.
“Exactly. And that’s why the key and the ring flashed so much when we showed them to Rivy.”
“Why?”
“I think they were showing us that finding Rivy was what they … wanted us to do; that was their job. They’re not exactly animators, but they worked in place of one.”
Jack nodded, mulling over the idea. “Let’s see what they’re doing now.”
Ruthie took them from her bag and held them in her open palm while they watched and waited. The key and the ring glowed in a gentle, synchronized pulse. But the show they had seen in Belton House was over for the time being.
“It’s like they’re turned on but in power-saver mode,” Jack said. “And another thing—did we arrive in 1726 because Rivy had been back in time for almost forty years?”
“That must be right,” Ruthie said. “We know for sure that she went back in time starting in 1977; the math works.”
The shop door closed and they rushed into the front room.
At the same time that Jack exclaimed, “We have to find a missing person!” Ruthie pronounced, “We found a missing person!”
“What happened?” Mrs. McVittie asked, having heard their conflicting statements. “What did you discover?” She made them sit and handed them each a wrapped sandwich from the deli.
“I don’t know if I can eat,” Ruthie said.
Jack unwrapped his sandwich without hesitating. Between bites, he began the story of going to find out something about the missing girl from the article and instead meeting that very girl. Only now she was in her fifties.
The Secret of the Key Page 9
