The Book of Secrets

by Cynthia Voigt

  But first Max had to think. “Let’s meet up again tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

  “Where are you going?” Pia protested.

  “To get my beret,” Max said. “And my paints,” he added, grinning at their various expressions. “And easel,” he laughed. With or without his secrets, he was still the Solutioneer.

  And the Solutioneer had a problem to solve. Two problems, really, because there were two kings. And he would need the assistance of one—King Teodor, due to arrive shortly in Queensbridge—to have any hope of saving the other—King William, and his dear Queen, impatiently awaiting rescue in Andesia.

  The Arrival

  Max had been at sea for three weeks when he could finally put his feet down on the soil of South America.

  He might be standing on dry land, but it seemed to Max that the ground under his feet was still rocking. He walked uneasily along the dock to the customs shed, where Ari and Mr. Bendiff were presenting credentials and answering questions about the members of their traveling party. Max’s attention was turned inland, eyes looking toward Caracas, although he couldn’t possibly see it for the low hills and thick woods. That didn’t matter. He knew that Grammie, who stood quietly beside him, was also picturing the map they’d spent so much time looking at, a nearly heart-shaped mass of land that tapered down to a narrow point, and the long spine of mountains running from the north to the south of it, on which a tiny worm of a country perched. In that country, huddled together for warmth and comfort, two minuscule figures, half the size of ants, were waiting. He tried not to urge them all to hurry, hurry, get into the coach waiting to take them into Caracas, stop wasting time.

  On arrival in Caracas, the party went first to the Hotel Magnifica. They planned to take two days to arrange passage to Andesia and ready themselves for a long journey under harsh conditions, to write letters home and walk down city streets, looking in shop windows, eavesdropping on conversations, stopping to eat local foods.

  Those plans changed immediately.

  Max, in his role as Alexander Ireton, heard the news first, because he happened to be in the writing room setting out stationery and pens for Ari while the doorman gossiped outside a window opened to let in the morning air. Max heard it and his hands stopped moving and he fell out of character entirely, concentrating on the Spanish words. It was the name of Andesia that caught his ear and not many words later—struggling to understand—he heard los reyes, which he thought meant “the king and queen.” He heard more words but couldn’t string them together: tiro, “shot”; cocinera “cook”; anarquista, which he guessed had to mean “anarchist,” one of those people who opposed any sort of government at all, any order imposed on society.

  Max stumbled back into character and into the reception area, where the rest of the party was waiting for the desk clerk to give them their room keys. It was Alexander Ireton who came quietly up to his employer to say, “I think something has happened, sir. In Andesia. I overheard a conversation which I only partly understood.…” But he couldn’t go on and he glanced desperately at his grandmother.

  “Oh, M—” she started to say before his quick head shake stopped her.

  “M-my goodness.” Mr. Bendiff took charge. He sent Colly to find a newspaper. “In our own language, for preference.” But Colly could bring them only a Spanish edition, which Grammie translated, in the privacy of the suite Ari had been given.

  As soon as the door closed behind them, Max asked, “Did the palace cook shoot them?”

  “Give me a chance to find the article,” she snapped. When she had, on the back page where news from such an unimportant place is reported, her translation was not smooth, or complete—“a word I don’t know,” she often interrupted herself to say—but the bare facts were clear. There had been an explosion in the palace kitchen in Apapa; a serving woman had been killed and the cook wounded. The article reported that a large confection had appeared in the kitchen that morning, set out on a silver tray. Nobody knew where it came from, but it was obviously intended for the royal table. A bomb had been hidden within the many layers of a cake that had been frosted with chocolate and decorated around the edges with wildflowers. The cook had no reason to question its presence, or so she said. The great houses often sent gifts of food to the King and Queen. This cake was larger and more elaborate than most, the cook allowed, but why should that make her suspicious?

  “They must have mistimed the explosion,” Mr. Bendiff said.

  “Who are they?” Max asked miserably.

  “There’s something else here,” Grammie said.

  At the end of the article, the writer mentioned an incident that took place a few months earlier, a shot that had been fired as the newly crowned royal couple was coming out of the cathedral. “That’s the photograph we saw,” Grammie reminded Max, who didn’t need reminding. He went to the window and looked down onto a busy street, where ordinary carriages filled with ordinary people wandered up and down, and women carried parasols against the strong sun.

  “The police blamed anarchists for the shot. They never caught anybody. And the newspaper says this explosion in the kitchen happened almost two weeks ago. The reporter got the story from one of the soldiers in the occupying army. One of Balcor’s soldiers,” Grammie concluded.

  “Is this Balcor one of those military strongmen?” Mr. Bendiff asked.

  “Was Balcor behind the bomb?” Colly wondered.

  “We don’t know anything, do we?” Grammie observed.

  It was Tomi who said what they were all thinking. “We’d better get there as fast as we can.”

  They spent two days and one long, wet night on the open deck of the packet that took them along the coast and up into Lake Maracaibo, where the houses stood on stilts, out in the water. Then followed two long days and longer nights jouncing in a coach from Maracaibo to Cúcuta. After a night in a rough country inn, where the entire party slept on cots set out in one room, they joined the wagon train on its regular biweekly run between Cúcuta and Apapa. There followed four days of walking a well-traveled wagon track from damp dawns until gray evenings with only a brief midday rest, moving at the pace of mules on rough ascending roadways. After the first morning, Ari insisted that Grammie ride on the tailgate of the wagon that was carrying their luggage.

  A squadron of soldiers accompanied the wagons, at the front and rear, but the wagon train boss was a loud, stocky Andesian named Stefano, who spent much of the journey cursing at the muleteers and porters when anything went wrong. They all wore loose trousers, rough shirts, and heavy boots, but the soldiers carried rifles on their backs, and their chests were crossed with bands of ammunition, while the Andesians, even Stefano, wore woven ponchos against the rain and wide-brimmed chupallas against the sun.

  The soldiers didn’t mix with the Andesians or the strangers, the Andesians didn’t mix with the soldiers or the strangers, and so the rescue party learned little during the long trek—except more than they cared to know about the insect and animal life of the landscapes through which they moved, the lowland tropical forests and the barren uplands. They all slept with their boots on.

  They had not understood how close they were to their destination, and nobody had warned them that this was the day of arrival, so when the wagon train rounded a long curve of ridge and the valley opened out before them as suddenly as if they were emerging from a long tunnel, every member of the rescue party inhaled sharply, but whether for the unexpectedness of the scene or its beauty, none of them could have said. The valley that lay before them was surrounded by jagged mountains, their crests still white with snow. The lower slopes of the mountains were bright with white and yellow flowers, and occasional one-room earth-colored houses were scattered on the foothills, where movement could be seen, some of it human, some animal. The strong midday sun washed over the whole narrow valley, at the heart of which a small city had grown up on both sides of a fast-flowing mountain river.

  Max stared down at the city where his parents had been hel
d for almost five months. His heart beat fast and he did not dare look at his grandmother.

  On the side of the river beneath the three peaks, the small houses crowded around an open space so perfectly square it had to be a piazza. There was one long, low, brown-roofed building among the houses, and he couldn’t see any real streets, just twisting alleys. A single bridge crossed the river. On that western shore, the buildings were fewer and larger, three with gardens behind high walls, one a big stone building with a short square tower at its side, and, built at a distance from the others, a long, whitewashed one-story building with next to it a wide dirt rectangle, the edges as clear as if it had been cut out of the grass with a sword’s blade.

  “Do you think the one with the tower is the royal palace?” Max asked Ari.

  “Where’s your hat, Alexander?” Ari answered, reminding Max of the role he was supposed to be playing. “This occasion requires hats.”

  Max dusted off the detested bowler and decided, “The white building is probably the barracks. How many soldiers are stationed in Andesia?” he asked.

  Ari settled a plumed tricorn on his red hair and answered, “We’ll find out. Enough to protect us, I’m sure.”

  Not too many to fight our way out through, Max hoped.

  Going slowly, the wagon train followed the road down steep hillsides scattered with low adobe buildings, some set among terraces that were plowed and ready for planting, others standing solitary in grassy pastures where wildflowers grew thick. They passed herds of woolly-coated animals that grazed close to some of those houses, but they saw no one. No one came out even as far as a doorway to greet their caravan, soldiers marching smartly at its front and rear, or even to stare curiously at the foreigners.

  From closer up, three mangy blotches on the mountainsides could be identified. “Must be the mines,” Mr. Bendiff said. “See those railroad tracks leading into the mountain?”

  Ari pointed out three narrow dirt roads winding down to meet theirs not far ahead. “They must bring the ore down in carts, to be stored.” When he looked, Max could identify a low building surrounded by soldiers at the point where the three tracks intersected with the roadway.

  In fact, the caravan stopped there, leaving off two of the wagons, their empty beds covered tightly by tarpaulins, and all of the soldiers, who took with them a small locked chest. Stefano’s own two covered wagons were the only ones to make the final slow descent, through darkening air, into the city.

  Night fell fast and hard in this high valley. By the time Stefano’s goods had been unloaded and their suitcases piled into a handcart, his single lantern was the only light to guide the party along winding dirt alleys lined with small adobe houses to a stone bridge, its railings no higher than a man’s knees. The only sounds were their footsteps and the creak of cart wheels and the rush of water. The entire city lay in dark silence.

  The embassy was too busy being sure of their footing to find anything to say to one another, during these final steps of the journey, and too tired, and especially too eager to, at last, arrive. When they came up to it, they sensed rather than saw the dense shape. Behind them, the three jagged peaks blocked most of the star-studded sky.

  Stefano dropped the luggage and walked off, without a word of farewell, pushing the cart ahead of him. As his footsteps faded away, the party banded closer together, facing a mass that seemed to loom in front of them, and above them. Nobody had anything to say. The surrounding silence grew deeper as the darkness thickened.

  Then a door was thrown open and a tall, silhouetted figure stood in the blinding burst of light.

  Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.

  The light from the doorway also revealed two armed soldiers stationed in the shadows at each side of the entry. The silhouette called, “Come! Come forward! Envoy of the King, Teodor, welcome!”

  They looked quickly at one another, like actors about to step onto the stage and begin the play, and Ari moved into the light, resplendent in a red military jacket, a short row of medals at his breast, gold epaulets on his shoulders, gold trim at the sleeves and hem of the jacket itself as well as gold stripes down the sides of his black trousers. He carried his plumed hat under his arm. A sword hung at his side, and he did not smile or extend his hand. Instead, he clicked the heels of his shining boots smartly together. “Andrew Robert Von Bauer Cozart, heir of the Barons Barthold,” he announced stiffly, and bowed. “To whom do I present myself?”

  The man was taller than Ari and attired with equal formality in a black suit that fitted him close around the chest, with silver buttons down the front of the short jacket and silver trim at the military collar, the sleeves, and the flared hem of his trousers. His sword’s scabbard gleamed silver. He was a long-nosed man, with no spare flesh on him and a restless cleverness on his face. “I am Juan Carlos Carrera y Carrera,” he announced. His dark hair shone and his thick, dark mustache glistened. “I am your welcome here, into the royal guesthouse. You must enter. It will be warm, there is food.” He stood back and swept an arm, to usher Ari in.

  Max had a sudden melodramatic impulse to shout at Ari Don’t do it!

  Ari stepped into the house, but stopped just inside the entry to wave Mr. Bendiff forward and introduce him as “a man adept in the field of business, whom King Teodor has named to this embassy.”

  Mr. Bendiff, his homburg in his left hand and a wide smile on his face, reached out his right hand to shake the Andesian’s. “Señor, it is a pleasure.”

  “Señor,” echoed Juan Carlos Carrera y Carrera with a smile and a bow. “Delighted, welcome, enter, enter.”

  Oily. Max could almost hear his father’s voice pronouncing the words An oily feller, that’un.

  “My secretary,” Ari announced.

  A properly-suited Alexander Ireton received a brief nod of the head and a slight gesture of the hand from the Andesian as he stepped eagerly into the light, to see …

  He didn’t expect to see his parents waiting. Not really. He did know better. But still, he looked all around, down to the staircase at the back of the entryway and into the two rooms he could see, both lit by oil lamps and chandeliers, and both empty of people. One was a long sitting room, furnished with a sofa and chairs, desk and bookcase, where nobody waited. The other seemed to be a small dining room, where a round table offered loaves of bread and thick wedges of cheese, as well as a roast of some kind, ready to be sliced. Tall silver goblets and long-necked silver ewers were also set out, and no royal couple stood at the table, ready to laugh at the surprised look on their son’s face.

  CYNTHIA VOIGT is the author of many books for young readers. Accolades for her work include a Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song (Book 2 in the Tillerman cycle), a Newbery Honor for A Solitary Blue (Book 3 in the Tillerman cycle), and the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults. She is also the author of Homecoming (Book 1 in the Tillerman cycle), the Kingdom series, the Bad Girls series, and Young Fredle, among others.

  You can visit her at cynthiavoigt.com.