The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail

by Richard Peck

  “We stand before you, a childless widow, who must selflessly think of the future of the Throne. And so we have searched every branch and twig of the family tree for our successor.”

  Every royal in the room was her cousin, one way or another, a twig on her tree. But she had made her choice.

  “Indeed we have had to look to distant Denmark to find our perfect heir, and here he is: a younger son, related to us on both sides, and with no ideas of his own. Ideal!” She pointed out Prince Bruno, though he hulked over her.

  The Prince stared blankly out over the crowd, bulbous and beardless. You couldn’t see his feet. He looked hungry.

  “And so we take the opportunity of this Jubilee Court,” proclaimed the Queen, “to announce that our heir and Crown Prince is to be—”

  “Our grandson,” old Bela Chiroptera broke in. “Or rather your grandson, Your Majesty.”

  The Queen froze, then drew back. She sent a look like a death ray at old Bela. A question hung over her head: Had he gone completely batty?

  It was quite true she didn’t like surprises. Thunder rolled across her face. Her snout quivered, and she showed teeth.

  “We have no grandson, Bela,” she said in a dangerous voice.

  “In fact you have, Your Majesty,” old B. Chiroptera wheezed before the listening room. He was glad of the witnesses. “I have seen to his education personally in one of the top five schools of—”

  “Bela!” barked the Queen, “have you dared go behind our back to meddle in our personal family affairs? Have you plotted?”

  “Your Majesty, I have.” He wrapped his shroudly wings tight around him. “What use is a Royal Court without intrigue? And all in a good cause.”

  The eyes of the Mouse Queen narrowed. “In Hungary there’d be a stake through your heart by now, Bela,” she remarked. “And you may thank your lucky stars that we are not French. If only we were, you would be looking high and low for your head.”

  “Your Majesty,” he murmured, bowing his.

  “Conspiracy! That’s what this is, Bela, and we will not have it!” The old Bat Chancellor flinched. “If we have a grandson, produce him!”

  The Queen of the Mice towered with rage. The room held its breath. Not a tiara tinkled. Into this silence old B. Chiroptera raised a hand from his shroud and snapped his dismal digits.

  And I flew down from the nearest chandelier, hung by the underarms from a pair of bats wearing miniature goggles and small silk scarves, fringed, around their necks. They dropped me directly before the Queen. I nearly tangled in my sword, but did a little dance and lit on my feet. The bat pilots swerved away, their scarves flapping, their black wings churning the air.

  I flew down from the nearest chandelier.

  I know. I know. Things were happening too fast for me too. But that’s the way it was, with plenty of witnesses. I managed to whip off my feathered hat and bow from the neck. “Your Majesty,” I squeaked.

  Up close, she was a real rodent, Her Mystical Majesty was. She dyed her whiskers. You could tell. But of course my heart was in my mouth. I’d never looked such power in the face. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a worrying way. Only my tail kept me upright.

  “Grandmother,” I said, taking the plunge.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Hard Mouse to Convince

  THE VERY DIAMOND in the Queen’s crown flashed a warning. She was taller than I. Who isn’t? Looking far down her snout, she spoke in a low and worrisome voice. All Europe leaned nearer to hear:

  “You dare call me Grandmother? I have never been called…” Her voice wavered. She glanced away. “Imposter!” she snapped. “We have no grandson!” She looked far down me now. “And if we did have a grandson, he’d be bigger. Or are you not yet full-grown?”

  I sighed.

  Then out of the crowd rang a voice: “Oh yes, Your Majesty. That’s your grandson right there, small as life!” How well I knew that voice. My eyes grew misty.

  The crowds parted, and two figures approached. Ian was there, top hat in one arm and on his other arm a mouse of mature years in a starchy apron. Her whiskers were grizzled bristles, over the scissor teeth. She had never been a beauty.

  It was Aunt Marigold. Aunt Marigold, here. Though she was no stranger to the palace, with her mending basket, going about her business.

  Ian handed her nearer the dais. The Queen pointed a finger down at Aunty. “You too, Marigold?” she intoned in a voice like a bad dream. Aunt Marigold seemed to remove a bit of loose thread from her mouth. A pin glittered. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  The Queen glowered. “An overdressed, not-quite-life-sized imposter has been dropped from the chandelier as if from heaven at our feet, and we are to accept him as our grandson! How many kinds of a fool do you take us for? And what part in this miserable business do you play, Marigold? Remember, time and my temper grow short.”

  The pin worked round in Aunt Marigold’s mouth. Then she spoke. “I myself removed your grandson from his dying mother, before his eyes were open. They’re barely open now. I brought him home to the Mews in my mending basket and incubated him personally—baked him like tea cake. I fed him on goats’ milk a drop at a time, hand-reared him, and there he stands before you! Though he was touch-and-go right from the start.”

  Only then did Aunt Marigold remember to curtsy. She held out her apron in both hands and dropped a small one.

  The Queen reflected. She was a hard mouse to convince, and there was nothing sunny about her disposition. She looked down upon her dazzling butterfly skirts. “You should have kept to your needlework, Marigold. Now you are apt to find yourself sewing mail bags in one of our damper prisons.

  “As for you, Ian Henslowe, your career at this court is concluded.”

  Ian bowed, as for the last time, from the neck, as you do.

  Now it was my turn. She looked just over my head and gave her dyed whiskers a twitch. Into the awful silence drifted the strains of distant music. It was a marching band of humans playing “Rule Britannia.” The jubilee parade was returning to the palace. Queen Victoria and all her court and her forty grandchildren. Time was running out. For mice it always is.

  And so the Queen was to make short work of me. “You are banished from this court,” she said briefly. “Whoever you are, be gone.”

  Never say no to power, but I had not particularly liked how the Queen had spoken to my aunt Marigold. And my mind was already scampering ahead, which was not like me. “Your Majesty,” I inquired, “may I keep the uniform?”

  She boggled. “The uniform?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. It’s Aunty’s best work. And it would come in handy if I found a job as doormouse at the Ritz Hotel. I understand that the hotel is infested with us. And once I am employed, I shall send for Aunt Marigold. We will not trouble you further.”

  I can’t tell you where this plan came from. It was looking ahead, and I never had: And where did I get the nerve to blurt it out? It must have been the royal half of me, squeaking up.

  As nobody talks back to her, the Queen looked somewhat at sea. “We do not concern ourselves with such matters. Uniforms are bat business. Withdraw. Go.”

  What choice did I have? Besides, the Others were practically at the palace gates now. Still, in that moment I managed to make my worst mistake yet. You see it coming, don’t you? I’d meant to drop down from the dais, to Aunt Marigold and Ian. And I was hurrying, never a good plan.

  I turned my back on royalty.

  Yes. What was I thinking?

  This sent the room into uproar. Even the chandeliers cheeped. You never turn tail on your Sovereign Queen. Europe didn’t know where to look. Greeks gasped. Croats cried out.

  I was almost in the air when the Queen called out behind me: “Halt!” I scrabbled at the dais’s edge.

  To all our Royal Rulers we are spineless, but I was showing mine. Well-tailored, but still…

  “Revolve,” the Queen commanded. Carefully, I turned back to her. The doors of damp prisons clanged in
my head.

  Somehow my feathered hat was still in the crook of my arm. I slumped before my Sovereign. My posture was completely gone.

  “Your tail,” she said. “It falls in the form of a question mark.”

  It was too late to tuck it away. Besides, it had a mind of its own. I was very nearly at the end of my string.

  “Why do you suppose you have a question mark tail?” The Queen’s eyebrows were high, though she hardly had any.

  “Is it because I am of a curious and questing nature, Your Majesty?”

  “We shouldn’t think so,” she said. “But every male mouse of the Royal Line has a question mark tail, right back to 1066 and all that. It is an inherited trait and comes with the job.”

  The human band was blaring “Rule Britannia” in the very forecourt of the palace.

  “We may have been hasty,” said the Queen of the Mice. “Tails never lie. It would appear that you are our grandson.”

  I DROPPED TO one knee before her, as I supposed you do. My tail asked a large and looping question across the red carpet. The Queen reached down and touched my forehead with a royal finger.

  “Arise, Prince Ludovic,” she proclaimed.

  The room erupted. The humans were practically upon us. But at the last moment—the eleventh hour—the Successor to the Mouse Queen’s Throne had been revealed. Everyone here had heard it first. Applause broke out, though mice applause is not deafening.

  Throughout the entire proceedings you could hear Prince Bruno’s breathing. He hulked beside us, his tail any old way, his feet invisible.

  Looking around sadly at all this vanishing splendor, he asked in quite a whiny way, “Does this mean I have to go back to Copenhagen?”

  Everybody was ready to bolt now. The ladies-in-waiting began to dither. The bats were about to unfurl and fly. The Yeomice of the Guard were considering retreat. The choristers had scrambled off the throne already. In mere moments Her Human Majesty, Queen Victoria would be settling onto this throne. Though it took an act of Parliament to get her out of her carriage and a block and tackle to drop her on her dais.

  By then all the Best Mice of Europe would have melted like the dew on the morning, into the walls, beneath the floors, through every crevice and crack. But only a whisker away, as we always are.

  Time ticked away, but I had a final question. The Queen, my grandmother, read it in my eyes, or perhaps my tail. You can imagine what it was.

  “You will want to know about your father.” The Queen’s hands worked before her. “He was not royal, and he was not our choice. Two strikes against him. Big ones. Our Daughter, your mother, had married for love, not duty. And that we could not have.”

  The Queen’s eyes were glistening now and about to brim.

  She looked out over her disappearing audience. Her Jubilee Court was drawing to a close. The Throne Room floor was no longer a solid gray with tiaras and tails. Patches of blank marble were appearing. The chandeliers were making final cheeps.

  “But your father is of good family,” the Queen said. “The Stiltons, with a proud history of service to Mousedom and the Crown. There were Stiltons in the Crimean War. A Stilton rode in the saddlebag for the Charge of the Light Brigade, we believe.”

  “And where shall I find my father?” I asked, knowing now what a big world it is.

  “Beside you,” said the Queen of the Mice.

  I went blank, then I looked up, and my heart turned over. I had last seen him laying a wreath on a grave in the mysterious and mournful graveyard at the far end of the Palace Gardens. My mother’s grave.

  Now he had stepped up beside me, summoned by my grandmother. He was more imposing off his chipmunk than on it. He towered over me, all muscle like a hummingbird beneath his gold-fringed uniform. For my father was the Captain of the Yeomice of the Guard.

  My heart sang, and my posture returned. He looked down at me in wonder, for I was as sudden a son as he was a sudden father.

  It was important that I get this first bit right. And so I drew myself up as far as I would go. Then I gave him a smart salute, my spindly fingers splayed flat against my forehead.

  He towered over me, all muscle like a hummingbird beneath his gold-fringed uniform.

  Smiling, he returned the salute.

  Then he bent down and opened his arms, and I scampered into them.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Ludovic the 237th

  ALL’S WELL THAT ends well, as some mouse surely said first.

  But there is more than you’d think to being the future Mouse Monarch. More than a quick tap on the forehead and an “Arise, Prince Ludovic.” Far more.

  I first have to be made Rodent of Wales, and there will be a ceremony of Investiture. The Yeomice of the Guard band will play, and the choristers of the Palace Choir School will sing. A cheese board is planned. I hope you can come.

  Aunt Marigold is at work on my outfit for this occasion. Something without pinfeathers in quiet good taste with grosgrain waistcoat. Rather in Ian’s style, with a tailcoat: two tails plus my own. And a shiny top hat for the crook of my royal arm.

  I’d hoped Aunt Marigold would come to live with Grandmother and me in Buckingham Palace. That’s the best of living in a palace. There’s always room for one more. Though I can’t reveal precisely which walls we live within. Never let too much light in upon the Mystery of Majesty.

  We could have made Aunt Marigold very comfortable, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Very set in her ways is Aunty and wouldn’t budge from her burrow. But then she is Head Needlemouse of the Mews, and you can’t go higher in her world, that world that smells of horse and what horses leave behind.

  Much the same is true for my father, the Captain of the Yeomice of the Guard. I could put his name up for a title, perhaps a Baron or even an Earl. Maybe a Duke if I could get it past Grandmother. After all, he will be a King’s father one day.

  But he has said no thank you, being proud of his rank as captain. Captains are more useful than Dukes anyway.

  There are limits to a Crown Prince’s power. I cannot pass out titles or anything else without going through the bat courtiers. Bats! And now that I am no longer scholar of the Royal Mews Mouse Academy, my old headmaster has returned to his post as full-time Bat Chancellor and Air Marshal. He is everywhere I turn.

  But the great thing about being a Prince is having a Mouse Equerry, and I chose Ian. Everybody should have one. An equerry is a chum who always agrees with you, isn’t he, Ian?

  An equerry is a chum who always agrees with you, isn’t he, Ian?

  “Just as you say, Your Highness,” says Ian.

  Right now we’re busy about our plans for the Rodent of Wales Investiture. It’s meant to be the biggest event since Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. On the guest list are my old schoolmates Trevor and Fitzherbert—the Four Fists. How surprised they will be by a Royal Command. But I am all for letting bygones be bygones, and I want to see them bow, from the neck, as you do.

  And so the future unfurls, though we are in no hurry to see the end of Grandmother’s reign. Long Live the Queen of the Mice. May she live for months and months to come.

  But one day I shall be on the throne, and Ian reminds me that I will be Ludovic the 237th. So there have been a great many more than twelve Ludovics before me.

  “I shan’t make much of a showing,” I say to Ian, “being small.”

  But he says, “Never mind, Sir. The crown will make you just as tall as you will need to be. It’s what crowns are for.” Ian always says the right thing.

  It will be a very modern reign, the reign of Ludovic the 237th.

  Flight is the way forward, so we mean to make great advances in our Royal Air Force, for patrolling our perimeters and ceremonial fly-overs. It will keep the bats busy, and it’s better to keep them occupied or they are apt to burst into bad verse, teach school, or hang about in attics upside-down.

  As for the pictures that move and the moving-picture camera that captured Queen Victoria’s jubilee parade,
this too shows promise. Watching Queen Victoria over and over will grow tiring, but why not a moving picture that features a mouse?

  I know. I know. But it could happen.

  A Royal Reign raises such issues—the future of flight, the flicker of film, and more. And do not expect to find all your answers in the first asking. But I have a history of looking for answers:

  Who am I?

  And who am I to be?

  You may have wondered much the same about yourself.

  So why wouldn’t every one of our tales end with a question mark?

  About the Author

  DESCRIBED BY The Washington Post as “America’s best living author for young adults,” Richard Peck is the first children’s book writer ever to have been awarded a National Humanities Medal. His extensive list of honors includes the Newbery Medal (for A Year Down Yonder), a Newbery Honor (for A Long Way from Chicago), the Edgar Award (for Are You in the House Alone?), the Scott O’Dell Award (for The River Between Us), the Christopher Medal (for The Teacher’s Funeral), and the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in young adult literature. He has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Mr. Peck lives in New York City.