The Blackhope Enigma (2 page)

“You stood outside and drew these?”

Blaise nodded.

“Are you crazy? It’s freezing!”

The American boy just grinned. “Fingerless gloves,” he said.

The next pages in Blaise’s sketchbook were crammed with drawings of armor, statues, and portraits from around Blackhope Tower. The unfinished last sketch was of the Mariner’s Chamber, the room they were in. Blaise was painstakingly copying the painting and the tiled labyrinth on the floor. He had even drawn a section of the ceiling’s wooden beams, decorated with mermaids and sea monsters.

Sunni handed his sketchbook back. “You’re right,” she said. “You have done a lot already. More than me.” She halfheartedly offered him her sketchbook in return.

She cringed inside as Blaise studied her pencil portrait of Sir Innes Blackhope, the rich sea captain who had built Blackhope Tower. It had taken her an hour to copy his stern face and the white ruff around his neck.

“It’s terrible,” Sunni murmured, snatching the book back.

“No, it’s good,” said Blaise. “As usual.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No way. I don’t get you, Sunni. You want me to say it’s bad or something?”

They sat, silent and vaguely embarrassed, until Blaise began sketching again. Sunni made a tentative pencil mark on her blank page, but her eyes kept drifting over to watch him draw. She could sort of see why other girls thought he was cute. Several even went out of their way to be around him, but Sunni was most definitely not one of them. Blaise Doran already got more than enough attention from everyone else.

He caught her looking and grinned.

Don’t think I was looking at you, Blaise! I am not one of those giggly girls who always try to sit next to you in Art
. “So, what do you know about the skeletons you mentioned when I came in?” Sunni asked hastily. “Blackhope Tower’s big claim to fame.”

“Not much,” said Blaise, sniffing the air. “Except it definitely smells like bones in here, all musty and moldy.”

“Bones don’t smell.”

“They do when they have rotting flesh on them.”

“That’s disgusting!” Sunni’s short laugh echoed. “The skeletons they found didn’t have any flesh on them anyway. They were dressed up in clothes from centuries ago. They just appeared out of nowhere, right here in the middle of this room.”

“Somebody must have dug them up from the cemetery and dumped them here,” Blaise said. He scanned the windowless chamber. There was nothing else in it except the painting, the floor labyrinth, the bench they sat on, and the door. “Someone with a key to this room.”

“No, it couldn’t have happened that way. They appeared one by one over hundreds of years,” Sunni replied. Her grandmother had once told her that the skeletons were always laid out as if they were asleep — like they’d slipped from a long, deep sleep into death and all that was left was bleached bones and saggy old clothes. No one had ever even found out their names.

At this thought, a pang squeezed her heart, but she kept her voice steady so Blaise wouldn’t notice. “They found the last skeleton in the 1800s. It was a man dressed in clothes from a hundred years earlier. He was lying in the middle of the maze like the others.”

“Labyrinth,” said Blaise as he drew.

“What?” Sunni was trying to swallow the lump in her throat from thinking about Granny and lonely skeletons.

“That’s a labyrinth, not a maze. A maze has a lot of dead ends and you have to hunt for the right path to the center. A labyrinth has one path that twists and turns through all four corners, but if you stay on it, it takes you to the center eventually.”

“Oh, right. I stand corrected,” said Sunni sarcastically.

“Sorry,” said Blaise. “But I’m kind of interested, especially since Fausto Corvo designed this one. You knew that, right?”

“Yeah. Who doesn’t?” answered Sunni.

Blaise pulled a leaflet from his back pocket and handed it to her. Its title was printed in bloodred letters:
The Blackhope Enigma
.

“I read about it in here.” He rubbed his hands together. “The enigma of the skeletons — the mystery that can’t be solved. Excellent.”

“Horrible, more like.” Sunni skimmed the leaflet. “I probably already know all this. ‘
The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia
was Sir Innes’s prized possession.’ Yeah, I knew that. ‘He wouldn’t ever let anyone take the painting down’ . . . blah, blah, blah . . . ‘Sir Innes stated in his will that nothing in this room could be changed’.” She stopped and looked up. “That’s kind of weird. It’s not like there is a lot you
could
change, unless you take out the bench and the painting and chisel the labyrinth out of the floor.”

“Maybe he just wanted to keep everything the way it was . . . to protect it.”

“Of course he wanted to protect it. It’s worth a lot of money,” said Sunni.

“Yeah, but maybe Sir Innes didn’t want to disrespect Fausto Corvo and his work. I wouldn’t want to. Corvo could do everything: paint, invent things, speak a bunch of different languages, fight with swords, ride fast horses, write poems. . . .”

“Poems?”

“Uh, yeah.” Blaise cleared his throat. “They were all for this one lady. But her family made her marry someone else. Apparently he was pretty cut up about it.”

I can’t believe it. Blaise Doran is blushing
. Sunni suppressed an amused smile. “Really? Corvo doesn’t seem like the poetry type. She must have been something special.”

“Guess so.” He suddenly slid from the bench and went up to the canvas. “You know, whenever I think I’ve seen everything in the painting, I catch something I missed.”

“Me too. It’s going to take me at least two weeks to copy it all.”

“See this guy?” Blaise pointed to a man on one of the ships in the harbor. “Do you think that’s Sir Innes Blackhope?”

Sunni shrugged. “Well, he’s much bigger and better dressed than everybody else around him. Sir Innes paid for the painting, so maybe it was part of the deal that Corvo put him at the front.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Blaise’s voice trailed off as he examined the picture, his nose practically touching its surface. “But something’s really been bugging me about this painting.”

“What?”

“You know how its title is
The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia
? Well, I looked up
Arcadia
, and it’s supposed to be a paradise, with mythical creatures and stuff like that.”

“So?”

“Look at this. And this.” Blaise pointed to a group of ragged, shackled men being marched onto a ship and a thief stealing oranges from an old woman on crutches. “Doesn’t look like paradise to me. More like the opposite.”

Sunni crossed the chamber and peered at the place he was pointing to. “That is odd. And look there — a little girl alone, crying, and an old man lying in a gutter.”

“The painting’s title doesn’t make any sense, but Corvo got away with it anyway, so Sir Innes must have liked what he did.” Blaise’s finger moved down to the painter’s signature: the symbol of a flying raven and the date, 1582. “Corvo painted this and made the labyrinth in the same year. But pretty soon after that, he disappeared.”

“I already knew he vanished, but that’s about it.”

“This book I read said he escaped from Venice, chased by some rich guy called Soranzo. He’d bought some of Corvo’s paintings, but then something happened between them, and all of a sudden Soranzo was out to get him. Corvo was never seen again.”

“I heard something else about him,” said Sunni, another of Granny’s stories about Blackhope Tower coming to mind.
I bet you don’t know this, Blaise
. “They say that Corvo made magical paintings.”

Blaise leaped on this idea. “You’ve heard about that, too?”

“Yeah, maybe that’s another reason he had to disappear — to save his skin from people who thought he was a sorcerer.”

Before Blaise could say anything, a figure in a padded jacket and red knitted hat clomped into the Mariner’s Chamber and planted himself between them.

Sunni grimaced. She had forgotten all about her stepbrother, Dean. “Take him with you after school. He’s been spending far too much time in front of a screen, playing those games of his,” her stepmother had said. “I’ll pick you both up at quarter to five.”

Sunni had been stuck with Dean more and more lately, as part of her stepmom’s quest to hook him on fresh air and educational pursuits. Her last good deed had been to take him to the Science Museum, where he’d hogged the interactive exhibits and trash-talked them loudly when he didn’t get the highest score. Later, in the café, he’d spilled his drink on her. At twelve years old, Dean was only two years younger than her, but to Sunni they seemed worlds apart.

She braced herself for something embarrassing to come out of his mouth now.

“You done, Sun?” Dean’s voice was like a horn blast. Then he turned to Blaise. “Who are you?”

“This is Blaise, and no, I am not done. I’ve barely started,” Sunni said.

“Huh? You’ve been up here for ages!” Dean sized Blaise up and said, “I’m Dean. She’s my stepsister,” in a man-to-man kind of way.

“Hey. Nice to meet you.”

“So, what’re you doing, supposedly?” asked Dean.

“Drawing that painting, supposedly,” said Sunni. “Why don’t you go and look around somewhere else?”

“I’ve seen it all twenty times before. Boring. I’m going to hang out here till Mom comes.”

“You’d better be quiet.”

“You won’t even know I’m here,” said Dean.

Blaise was back on the bench, scribbling in his sketchbook. Sunni sat down next to him and resumed sketching in hers.

Dean managed to be quiet for about two minutes, while he glanced over
The Mariner’s Return to Arcadia
. Then, in a mocking voice, he started reading the information card aloud.

“Dean!” Sunni hissed. “Quit it!”

“I’m helping you,” he replied, and kept reading. “‘Fausto Corvo was a prominent sixteenth-century Venetian artist’ . . . blah, blah . . . ‘This painting is a fine example of . . .’ Hey — how do you say this? C-H-I-A-R-O-S-C-U-R-O.”

“It’s ‘kee-ar-oh-skoo-roh,’” said Blaise. “Mr. Bell says it means ‘light and dark’ in Italian. Like the way artists paint highlights and shadows. See how Corvo put highlights on the people and animals to make them pop out against the dark background?”

“Don’t encourage him,” said Sunni. “You don’t care what chiaroscuro is, Dean. You’re just trying to get attention.”

“No, I’m not. I’m helping,” said Dean, strolling over to the edge of the labyrinth. “‘This painting is a fine example of kee-ar-oh-skoo-roh!’ Kee-ar-oh-skoo-roh!”

He skipped along the winding path through the first quarter of the rectangle and into the second, chanting loudly as he went. “Chiaroscuro, chiaroscuro.”

“Dean, stop it!” Sunni said. “I can’t concentrate with you doing that.”

Without pausing, Dean turned into the third corner and then into the fourth, repeating “chiaroscuro,” now under his breath, and looking slyly at Sunni.

She glanced up from her sketch and noticed her stepbrother nearing the middle of the labyrinth, still muttering.

“You’re blocking my view, Dean!” she said, furiously erasing a line on her page. “And you’re incredibly irritating!”

There was no reply. She looked up, ready to tell him off again, but the labyrinth was empty. Dean had disappeared.

Something in the painting seemed to glow for a moment, near the center, as if a firework had exploded.

Sunni blinked and turned to Blaise. “Did you see where Dean went?”

“What do you mean? He’s right there.” Blaise looked up and stared at the place where Dean had been. “Oh.”

“He’s gone.” Sunni scanned the four corners of the room.

“He would have had to pass by us to get to the door,” Blaise said. “Maybe he snuck out.”

“It’s the sort of thing Dean would do to make me mad, but he didn’t go out that way.”

“Come on, Sunni. How the heck could he have left without going through the door?”

“Well, he was there. We both saw him. I only looked away for a split second,” Sunni said, her voice taut. “And now he’s gone. There’s nowhere to hide in here except for under this bench, and he’s not there.” Just to make sure, she bent down and peered below the seat. Then she jumped up and darted out the door.

Blaise followed as Sunni hunted through the other rooms that opened off the long corridor. There was no sign of Dean or anyone else. Blackhope Tower was almost empty on this snowy Tuesday afternoon. At the spiral staircase that led down to the exit she called, “Dean!”

Her voice echoed in the dank air.

“This is pointless,” she said. “He didn’t leave the room. I just know it.”

“There’s no way he just disappeared.”

“He did — I know he did. Come on.” Sunni scurried back to the Mariner’s Chamber with Blaise at her heels and stopped in front of the painting, searching for the place where she had seen the explosion of light. “Help me look.”

“For what?”

“For Dean!”

“In the painting?” Blaise stared at her as if she had a screw loose. “You’ve totally lost me now.”

“I saw something flash in the painting right after he disappeared.”

“It was just an optical illusion or something. And anyway, what’s it got to do with Dean?”

“I don’t know — everything!” Sunni pulled her hair back from her face and yanked it into a tighter ponytail. “Look, are you going to help me or not, Blaise?”

“OK, whatever,” Blaise muttered, and moved closer.

Sunni located the man they assumed was Sir Innes on his ship, the
Speranza Nera
. He was resplendent in crimson, a sword dangling from under the black cape draped over his shoulders. One hand was raised before him as if to show off his magnificent ship to viewers, while the other rested on his hip. All around him, sailors hauled bundles of goods and worked in the rigging. Ladies waved fans from the dockside as hawkers sold oranges from baskets.

Sunni followed one lane from the docks to a busy square with an ornate fountain. Each person wore a different-colored outfit, and she felt overwhelmed at the sheer number of them.

Then she thought she saw one of the splashes of color move. She was sure it had.

“Blaise, in there, around that crowd by the juggler,” she said, pointing at a man in a jester costume tossing three golden balls in the air. “Right there!”