Jewel of the East (5 page)

“No way,” Felix said.

Across the Grand Ballroom, he caught sight of their nemesis, the awful Blond Woman. She had on a too-tight navy-blue gown that showed the small rolls of fat around her middle and pink lipstick on her thin, tight lips. Worst of all, her beady, blue eyes scanned the room as if they were lasers looking for Maisie and Felix.

“Look over there,” Felix told his sister.

Maisie followed the lift of his chin. “Oh no,” she groaned. “Not her.”

“I have to wait for Lily,” Felix said. “We’ll meet you at the buffet.”

Maisie’s heart sank. Just as she feared, Felix would be with stupid Lily Goldberg, and she would be off on her own.

“Fine,” she muttered, pushing her way through the crowd toward the dining room. Maybe, Maisie thought, she would just have to go up to The Treasure Chest alone.

“You
live
here?” Lily Goldberg said as soon as she found Felix in the Grand Ballroom.

“Not exactly,” he said, blushing. “We live in an apartment upstairs. We don’t even use this door to get to it.”

“But it’s a mansion, right?” she said, tilting her head back to stare at the giant chandelier.

“Well,” Felix admitted, “yeah.”

Lily tried to take it all in: the marble floor, the gold trim along the ceiling, the butlers and fancy people. She shook her head. “But why do you live upstairs?”

“My great-great-grandfather built Elm Medona,” Felix said, feeling embarrassed. Maybe this was a bad idea after all.

Lily stood beside him, speechless.

“There’s food,” he said. “In there.” He pointed in the general direction of the dining room.

“Okay,” Lily said.

She had on a black dress with a big, red petticoat beneath it that made the bottom of the dress stick out and rustle noisily when she walked.

“You look nice,” Felix told her.

Lily only nodded and looked more perplexed than usual.

The dining room table was heavy with food. A man in a tall, white chef’s hat carved fat slices of beef. Shrimp glistened on silver platters. Long,
thin spears of asparagus nestled beside slices of bright yellow and red peppers. Cheeses and olives and rounds of baguettes sat beside oysters and clams gleaming in their shells. Felix saw that the Pickworth china, with its interlocking, ornate
P
s, was actually being used.

“Why was your grandfather—” Lily began.

“Great-
great
-grandfather,” Felix interrupted.

“Why was he so rich?” she said.

“Banking,” Felix said. Then he added, “We’re not rich. At all.”

“Do you think
my
great-great-grandfather, I mean my Chinese one, was like an emperor or something?” Lily said.

“Maybe,” Felix said. “Probably.”

“Wouldn’t that be something? If I went back to China and my great-great-grandfather was in a castle or something with servants and fancy things?”

Felix studied Lily Goldberg’s face for a moment. She didn’t look perplexed at all. Instead, her face was soft, her eyes dreamy. That was when he decided.

He took her hand. “I want to show you something,” Felix said.

Felix and Lily stood in front of the green
wall on the second floor, right at the spot where, behind the enormous wreath, he could press lightly to reveal the hidden staircase. It had been hard to get Lily up here because she kept stopping to stare at the tapestries, the paintings, the statues, the murals, and the furniture behind the red velvet ropes. But finally they’d climbed the Grand Staircase and arrived at this spot.

Felix glanced around to be absolutely certain no security guards or wayward guests or the Blond Woman were anywhere nearby. Satisfied, he reached his hand through the wreath’s greenery until it hit the wall. Then he pressed lightly, and sure enough, the wall magically moved and the hidden staircase appeared.

“That is so cool!” Lily shrieked.

“Just wait,” Felix said, motioning for her to come along.

“A secret wall! A hidden staircase!” she said as they climbed up the stairs. “You have the coolest house ever!”

Felix unclasped the red velvet rope that hung in The Treasure Chest’s doorway. With a sweep of his arm, he beckoned inside, where Lily’s shrieking and gasping grew even more intense.

“What is all this stuff?” she kept asking as she picked up and then put down one item after
another. A feather. A round ball of alabaster. A fountain pen. A locket.

“Phinneas Pickworth was a collector,” Felix explained.

He watched the curiosity and excitement in her eyes, trying to decide if he dared do what he wanted to do. After all, he had the shard in his jacket pocket. If he and Maisie could time travel by picking up an object, why couldn’t he and Lily? Imagine what she would think if he could take her back to China. Felix knew that he couldn’t find her ancestors, but being there might make her feel better, might fill that hole she’d described to him.

Felix’s eyes darted across the room, searching for something that just might be Chinese. That red lantern? The swath of embroidered silk? The curved dagger?

“Felix?” Lily said, holding something out to him. “Do you think this is from China? It’s jade, I think.”

She held out her hand where a small, pale-green box sat on her palm.

“Maybe,” he said.

“I wonder if there’s anything inside,” she said. “Like jewels!”

With her other hand, Lily opened the box.

“Dirt?” she said.

Felix nodded. The box was filled with nothing but dark soil.

When he looked back at Lily, there was something in her eyes that made his heart jump.

“Lily,” he said quietly. “I want you to take this box and hold really tight to it. I’m going to hold on, too. And then pull on it. Okay?”

“Okay,” Lily said slowly.

She put her fingers with their chipped, baby-blue nail polish around the jade box, her gaze steady on Felix. He put his hand on it, too, his fingers brushing right up against Lily’s. Lily yanked.

The two of them stood like that for an instant, waiting.

A voice cut through the room.

“Felix!” Maisie exclaimed. “How could you?”

She stomped up to them, pushed Lily hard enough for her to lose her grip on the box, and glared at her brother.

“Maisie,” he began.

But before he could say another word, Maisie grabbed the jade box filled with dirt and yanked, hard.

The room filled with the smells of spices, river water, and wet soil. A wind rushed past Maisie
and Felix, carrying the sounds of voices and music. Felix caught a fleeting glimpse of Lily Goldberg’s perplexed face. And then, they were gone.

Maisie and Felix landed with a thud.

Where are we now?
Maisie wondered as she struggled to get her bearings. It was dark and smelled like the produce stand at the natural food market. She pushed her arms upward and struggled to the surface, moving the small, hard grains that surrounded her out of the way as she did. Was she in a sandpit? When her head popped out she came face-to-face with an old, wizened Chinese man. His face was weathered and deeply wrinkled, and his wispy, white hair was tied back in a pigtail.

The old man began to shout at her in Chinese, waving his arms and jumping up and down.

Maisie looked down. She had landed, she realized, in a giant basket of rice. That basket of rice stood next to many more baskets of rice, which stood in a row of small stalls selling vegetables. From her perch, Maisie could see green beans and radishes and green cabbages. What she didn’t see was Felix.

Still shouting at her, the old man took her arm and pulled hard. Maisie tumbled from the basket in a shower of rice.

“I’m sorry,” she said, getting to her feet and wiping dirt from her chocolate-brown party skirt.

The old man practically picked her up by the nape of her neck and carried her like a kitten through the crowded marketplace, Maisie’s legs kicking the air in protest. He kept screaming at her until they reached the end of the market, where he deposited her harshly on the ground.

Maisie sat a moment, rubbing the back of her neck where he’d held on to her. In front of her was a riverbank and a muddy river with boats moving slowly along it. Some of the boats had white sails, others were painted bright colors. She smiled. They had come all the way to China! A surge of excitement coursed through her as she looked around. Men and women in cotton tunics and pants with triangular straw hats carrying small
baskets of food passed, staring openly at Maisie and whispering to one another in Chinese.

China!

Slowly, Maisie got to her feet and went back into the marketplace.
Felix has to be in here somewhere. Doesn’t he?
she wondered. Stalls lined both sides, and people haggled over prices in loud Chinese. The first stalls had piles of live crabs and high heaps of small silver fish and piles of ugly, flat fish. Next came stalls that sold glistening, brown ducks cooking on spits over coals, their long necks tucked against their wings. Maisie paused over the mountains of chilies—red, green, yellow, skinny, fat, round, long—and then at the baskets of spices. Cinnamon sticks and whole peppercorns, gnarly ginger root and clusters of purple garlic.

At the vegetable stalls, Maisie crossed to the other side of the market to avoid the old man whose rice she had landed in. Although she could recognize most of what she saw, she stopped and picked up a long, squash-type thing with a reddish-brown skin. The woman who ran the stall slapped Maisie’s hand and took the vegetable from her, speaking rapid Chinese to her.

“Sorry,” Maisie said again. Would she spend her whole time here apologizing?

The woman pointed to a row of the vegetables. She lifted one, pointing to the white interior dotted with holes. It looked like lace. Maisie understood that the woman was trying to convince her of its freshness.

Maisie nodded politely, then moved on, past red peppers and melons in all sizes and shapes and colors.

“Were you even going to try to find me?” Felix said from behind her.

For an instant, she forgot how angry she was at him for taking Lily Goldberg to The Treasure Chest and just felt relief that he was all right.

“We’re in China!” she said with delight.

But then she remembered what he had done, and she spun around angrily, pretending to be fascinated with some watermelons.

“I landed in a cart filled with radishes,” Felix said. “The woman selling them laughed so hard she cried when she saw me.”

Maisie ignored him.

“She gave me some,” Felix said. He opened his hand in front of his sister’s face, revealing five pinkish-red radishes with skinny stems still attached.

When she didn’t answer him, Felix said, “I just wanted to impress her.”

“
Impress
her?” Maisie said, her eyes flashing angrily. “The Treasure Chest is ours.
Ours.
”

“It’s just that she’s—” he began.

But Maisie would have none of it. “You can keep your stupid radishes. In fact, you can do anything you want. Alone.”

With that, she pushed him aside and joined the crowd in the marketplace, letting herself get carried along past yet more stalls until she reached the exit at the other end. Tears stung her eyes, but Maisie refused to give in to them. Felix had betrayed her. And she wasn’t sure if she could ever forgive him.