Brave Warrior (5 page)

Slowly, Maisie and Felix made their way upstairs. The air smelled of wax and some spicy scent.

“This must be what it was like here before they got electricity,” Maisie said, her voice hushed.

Felix could only nod. He didn’t like this storm, and he didn’t like the way the shadows moved.

And he didn’t like that now that they were upstairs, he couldn’t see a single light on.

The door to the Aviatrix Room flew open and in the doorway stood their mother, her hair loose, her nightgown glowing eerily in the candlelight.

“Were you two out in this?” she said, her eyes blazing.

“When did you get home?” Felix asked.

“It’s a genuine nor’easter out there,” their mother said. “Came out of nowhere and it’s wreaking havoc all over. Bruce and I were having a lovely dinner on Thames Street, and they made us evacuate.”

At the sound of the name
Bruce
, Maisie decided to stomp off to her own room.

“Be careful of the candles,” her mother called after her.

Felix looked at his mother. She was pretty in the candlelight, which made her face glow and soften.

“Were you two out somewhere?” she asked him.

“No,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes.

“You’re wet,” she said.

Felix looked down at his wet clothes.

“We stepped outside to see if anybody else had electricity,” he lied.

His mother kept staring at him for a long minute. Then she shook her head and turned to go back in her room.

“Mom?” Felix asked.

She paused.

“Is Bruce Fishbaum still your boyfriend?”

“Yes,” she said gently.

Felix sighed, a long, sad one. Then he followed the path the candles lit for him back to his room.

Even though the next morning arrived sunny and bright, school was cancelled. Debris littered the streets of Newport, and two-thirds of the city still didn’t have electricity. Felix and Maisie sat in the Dining Room eating croissants and trying to figure out what to do with their freedom.

“Maybe we could take a little trip,” Maisie said, her eyes sparkling. She spread some strawberry jam on her croissant and took a big, sweet bite.

At first Felix didn’t know what she meant. He was too busy separating the flaky layers of the pastry and eating each thin one before moving on to the next.

“Lame demon,”
Maisie said.

“No,” Felix said when he realized his sister wanted to go into The Treasure Chest.

“Wasn’t Phinneas Pickworth clever?” Maisie said as if Felix hadn’t spoken. “Not just an anagram but
an anagram from a French book about time travel. Anyone could figure it out, really.”

“We didn’t,” Felix grumbled. “Avery Mason did.”

Maisie spread extra jam on her next piece of croissant, as if that could take away the bad taste in her mouth for all things Avery Mason. “She’s a snob.”

“She helped us,” Felix reminded his sister.

“Inadvertently,” Maisie said, happy to use both an adverb and a vocabulary word from last week’s list.

“Don’t those look good?” their mother purred as she came into the Dining Room.

Great-Uncle Thorne had decided that they absolutely had to stop eating in the Kitchen. “Pickworths don’t dine in the basement!” he’d roared earlier that morning. Cook had scurried to move breakfast upstairs, setting up everything on the sideboard, which was really just a long table against the far wall.

“And isn’t it nice to have everything laid out like this?” she added as she floated over to the sideboard and poured a cup of coffee from a silver pot with two interlocking
P
s etched into it.

“Oh, cubes of sugar!” she said, as if cubes of sugar were a marvel.

When she took a seat across from Maisie, Maisie saw that her mother was dressed for work. She had on a khaki-colored suit with a faint stain on the jacket lapel.

“Mom,” Felix said, “Newport is basically closed.”

“Not Fishbaum and Fishbaum,” she said in her new, happy voice. She picked at some fresh fruit, all of it cut into exactly equal-size pieces. “Mmmm. How did Cook find such delicious strawberries in March?”

“I had them flown in from Guatemala,” Great-Uncle Thorne roared. “Pickworths do not eat flaccid fruit.”

“They are delicious,” their mother said dreamily. Then, “Well, I’ve got to get to the office.”

She had on lipstick and some kind of blush that made it look like she had a slight tan. Maisie studied her more closely. Her mother actually kind of sparkled.

The three of them watched her drift out of the room.

“What’s wrong with her?” Great-Uncle Thorne asked Felix and Maisie.

“She has a boyfriend,” Felix said.

“Do you mean she’s in love?” Great-Uncle Thorne said, his impressively voluminous eyebrows waggling.

“No!” Maisie said.

“Maybe,” Felix admitted.

“A peculiar state,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, cutting his
croque-monsieur
in the unusual way he always cut things: Fork in his left hand, knife in his right, he cut and took a bite, cut and took a bite, never putting the knife down.

“Can’t say that I recommend it,” he continued between bites. “Look what it did to my poor, foolish sister.”

“Have you ever been in love?” Felix ventured.

“Of course I’ve been in love,” Great-Uncle Thorne bellowed. “But I didn’t let it get the best of me like that nitwit sister of mine.”

“Who was she?” Felix asked.

“My sister? Why, you nincompoop, your great-aunt Maisie!”

“No, no,” Felix said. “Who were you in love with?”

Great-Uncle Thorne’s face softened. He put down his fork and knife and stared at some far-off
place that neither Felix nor Maisie could see.

“Penelope Merriweather,” he said finally.
“Mon amour.”
He shook his head and resumed eating.

“What happened to her?” Felix dared to ask.

“Interesting story,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “I assumed she was dead. After all, she’d be ancient by now. But at your great-aunt Maisie’s…” He faltered for an instant, then cleared his throat and continued. “At her funeral, the Merriweathers’ footman handed me a calling card from none other than Penelope herself. Alive and well, after all.”

“What’s a calling card?” Maisie asked.

“One more lost piece of civilization, my dear niece,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, shaking his head sadly. “Everyone used to have them. And your footman would bring your calling card to the person with whom you wished to visit, and they would send their reply back.”

“So Penelope Merriweather wanted to visit you?” Felix asked, tickled at the idea of meeting the woman Great-Uncle Thorne had loved.

“Indeed,” Great-Uncle Thorne answered.

The clocks in Elm Medona chimed nine o’clock with their various bells, bongs, and tunes.

“In fact,” he added with a grin, “she should arrive just about now.”

Aiofe, the maid, hurried into the Dining Room, looking quite upset. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were wide.

“Mr. Pickworth,” she began. “There’s…well…she…I mean…”

“Spit it out, you ninny!”

“I…”

But Aiofe didn’t have to say anything more. A strange shuffling sound came from outside the Dining Room. They all stopped eating to listen as it grew slowly, slowly closer.

Aiofe pointed to the doorway, and everyone turned their gaze there.

After what seemed like forever, a figure appeared.

It took Maisie and Felix a moment to realize it was an actual person standing in front of them. Maybe the tiniest person they’d ever seen. It took another moment for them to realize that the person was a woman. A woman with probably the most wrinkly face in the whole world and a cap of oddly blue curls. She wore glasses that seemed to magnify her eyes a billion times, so that they appeared bright
blue and enormous in her tiny face. She was like a bird in so many ways, that if she had actually taken flight, Maisie and Felix would not have been surprised.

By now, Great-Uncle Thorne was on his feet, a look of delight written all over his face.

The woman kept moving toward them, slower than the slowest living thing moved. Her tiny feet, encased in jeweled slippers, shuffled forward. She wore so many bracelets on her thin wrists that her bony arms seemed to be weighed down by them. She positively clanged as she made her way into the Dining Room. She wore a cardboard-brown wool suit, and the jacket had fat bands of black trim along the edges and in slashes across the front, with big gold buttons in the middle.

After what felt like forever, the tiny woman was standing in front of Great-Uncle Thorne.

She tilted her head coquettishly upward.

“Thorne,” she said in a strange, girl-like voice.

Great-Uncle Thorne’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

“What I was trying to say,” Aiofe announced, “is that you have a visitor, Mr. Pickworth.”

Aiofe curtsied slightly.

“May I present Miss Penelope Merriweather?”

P
enelope Merriweather had been a silent movie star, a flapper, a survivor of the
Titanic.

“That was all so long ago,” she said in her funny, childlike voice.

She did not seem sad that she was no longer beautiful. Or that she was—according to Penelope herself—one of the oldest living people in the United States.

“Or is it the world?” Penelope wondered out loud.

Maisie thought it was entirely possible that Penelope Merriweather was indeed the oldest living person in the entire world. Her face had so many crevices and lines that it looked like the topographical map hanging on the back wall of Mrs. Witherspoon’s
classroom. When Aiofe poured Penelope a cup of coffee in one of the Pickworth china cups, it took her a full minute to get the cup to her lips, and most of the coffee had sloshed out of it by the time it finally reached her mouth.

Penelope’s mouth. That was an entire curiosity unto itself. Her lips were so thin that they seemed to hardly be there at all, like the lines of latitude and longitude on the globe that sat in front of the topographical map in Mrs. Witherspoon’s classroom. But Penelope wore lipstick—a color that was neither pink nor orange—as if she had regular-size lips.

But despite her decrepitude, her sagging flesh, her glacial movements, Penelope’s eyes shone bright and her mind seemed alert and quick.

“Thorne,” Penelope said, “you look decades younger than I. What is your secret?”

Maisie and Felix held their breath waiting for Great-Uncle Thorne’s answer.

“Well,” he replied after a pause, “I send these two back in time, and although I can’t explain the physics of it, every time they time travel, I gain back some of my lost vitality.”

Maisie and Felix exchanged a look of shock.
Wasn’t The Treasure Chest a secret?

Penelope Merriweather blinked several times.

“I don’t actually get younger, mind you,” Great-Uncle Thorne explained. “I just get, well, healthier.”

Penelope’s tiny mouth opened as wide as a baby bird’s when it’s about to be fed, and a girlish giggle let loose.

“That’s a good one, Thorne,” she gasped.

Great-Uncle Thorne smiled at her. “Isn’t it, though?” he said. “Why, before they moved into Elm Medona, I was in a London hospital, deteriorating at an alarming rate. I had no idea they’d been time traveling or I would have understood why I was suddenly healthier and more agile than I’d been in decades.”

Maisie gaped at Great-Uncle Thorne. Was that true? she wondered. Had he been in a hospital, like Great-Aunt Maisie?

“Good for you two then,” Penelope said good-naturedly. “He looks marvelous.”

“You do, too, Penny,” Great-Uncle Thorne said in a tone of voice that Maisie and Felix had never heard come out of him before: tender and—could they even use the word?—loving.

“That’s true,” Penelope said, “if you happen to like pachyderms.”

“No, no,” Great-Uncle Thorne insisted. “When I look at you I see that beautiful girl I gave my heart to so long ago.”

He reached over and took Penelope’s liver-spotted hand in his own large, strong one, and squeezed it.

Penelope looked at Maisie and Felix, who by now could do nothing but sit and stare at her and the changes she’d brought on in Great-Uncle Thorne.

“Could you two do some time traveling and work your magic on me?” she asked.

“I regret to have to tell you, Penny, that only Pickworths reap the benefits,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. He hadn’t let go of her hand, and it rested tucked into his.

“Sounds like Phinneas Pickworth, that scoundrel,” she said with a good-natured chuckle. “Of course he would arrange it thus.”

“Tell me,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, “where do you live these days? I hope it’s not in the same dreadful facility where the mother of these two stuck poor Maisie.”

Penelope looked surprised. “Why, I live at
Château Glorieux,” she said.

Maisie and Felix had passed Château Glorieux on Bellevue Avenue lots of times. It was just as its name suggested: an enormous stone château that looked as if it had been airlifted from somewhere in France and dropped on several hundred acres in Newport.

“But how can you manage?” Great-Uncle Thorne asked.

“Oh,” Penelope said with a dismissive wave of her hand, “the staff takes care of everything. I still tend to my roses, of course. I know the Pickworths are peony people, but the Merriweathers have always grown roses.”