by Will Taylor
But the wildest thing was, it wasn’t just one room. It was mini rooms, tons of them, all packed in together like one of those mega furniture showrooms.
Antonia and I were standing in a tiny entryway, marked out with four brass umbrella stands and more elaborate benches than was probably necessary. To our right was what looked like a sitting room, with two delicate couches drowning in velvet cushions flanking a table stacked with at least a hundred coasters surrounding a vase of dried roses.
On the left was a long, old-fashioned kitchen with a huge stove, a massive silver fridge, towers of shelves and drawers, and a lunch table–sized work island capped with black marble. It was super impressive, but I only managed to glance at it before my eyes bounced along trying to take in everything else. Just from where I was standing, I could see a hutch full of gold-lipped teacups, silver suits of armor peeking out from behind velvet-tasseled curtains, dramatic marble statues elbowing between bookshelves and ornamental screens, and a grand piano trying to look dignified under a flock of painted ceramic peacocks.
“Welcome to the Palace,” said Antonia, heading for the kitchen and setting her baskets down on a clear corner of the counter. “I expect you’ve heard all about it. You may run around and explore while I make tea. But then chores!”
She didn’t need to tell me twice. I dropped my bag on one of the benches and took off down the wide red-carpeted aisle running through the center of the Palace like a hallway. There was so much to see! Most of the mini rooms were easy to identify: bedrooms with four-poster beds, a tiny ballroom, a music room, a game room, a library. Others were more mysterious, like a room full of dusty trunks and boxes, and another that held nothing but paintings hung facing the wall, all of which turned out to be portraits of cats. And all these rooms were squished right in together, marked out with rugs, grandfather clocks, bookcases, and sometimes tapestries and banners hung from the distant ceiling.
But as I moved down the aisle, I started noticing only a few of the rooms were really clean. Most of them were dusty, and some were almost disappearing under cobwebs. It looked like Antonia needed some help in that department. I had a sinking feeling what my chores for the day would be.
Right at the far end of the Palace, I found a massive stone fireplace with a portrait hanging over it, surrounded by drooping flowers. The portrait showed a teenage girl. She had Antonia’s olive skin and round face, and was wearing a strange outfit, sort of a cross between a pirate costume and a Girl Scout uniform. She actually looked pretty cool. I headed to the fireplace for a better look, but Antonia’s voice came warbling down the aisle.
“Abigail?” she called. “The tea’s ready in the kitchen!”
I took a last glance at the flower-draped portrait, registering the cracked varnish and old-fashioned frame, and set off, thinking. Where had all this stuff come from? There was no way Antonia had built this up on her own. No way all this had washed up on shore, like the materials for the Shipwreck Treehouse had. There was a bigger story here.
Antonia was pouring two cups of tea as I walked into the kitchen area. “We used up the last of the chicken feed today, so we need to make more,” she said. “Later this afternoon you will clean and dust the entire Palace. Yes, you will!” My mouth was open in protest. “You deserve it for wandering the island without my permission. But for now, you may choose your first chicken-feed-making chore. Would you rather measure the oat flour and water or shape the mixture into small Os on the baking trays?”
I blinked. “Wait, that sounds exactly like Cheerios. You’re making Cheerios? From scratch?”
“We are making chicken feed, Abigail,” said Antonia.
“Out of oat flour?”
“Mostly. Also a hint of sugar.”
“And you shape the mix into little Os and bake it?”
“Yes, the chickens prefer it that way.”
“So how is that not Cheerios?”
“What is this word you keep saying?” Antonia said, pulling a bag of flour out of a cupboard with a grunt. “Are you trying to distract me? Stalling so you can avoid your chores?”
“No! I just—it sounds like we’re . . . you know, never mind. Where do we start?”
Antonia slid the bag and a mixing bowl toward me, and we got to work.
“So what do you think of the Palace?” asked Antonia, once we got into a mixing and oat-flour-O-making rhythm. “I assume you’ve heard many stories about it. Does it meet your expectations?”
Antonia was still convinced I knew all about her, and the island, and the Palace. But how could she think that, seeing as she lived here all on her own? I’d have to play along until I could get some real answers. And hey, with Maggie for a best friend, playing along was one of the things I did best.
“It’s even better than I ever imagined,” I said, hoping that was the right thing to say. “The grandest palace I’ve ever seen.”
Antonia smiled. “Oh, but it was much grander than this,” she said. “Back when I was young.”
“What was it like?” I asked. “Will you tell me everything? Every single detail?” Maggie would have been proud of my smooth secret-agent info-gathering skills.
“It was enormous, to start with.” Antonia gazed around. “This was only the basement, where the kitchens and everyday dining room were. The Old Palace rose many, many stories above. It had turrets and towers and balconies, and it was full of life. I am just old enough to remember. On sunny days we would fly kites from the roof and take the waterslide down to the lagoon, and on rainy days we played hide-and-seek in all the hidden passageways and performed plays in the great hall.
“But then the world changed, and the grown-ups said the planes would see us as they flew overhead, and they had a meeting and decided the Old Palace would have to come down.” She looked over at me. “I was just a little younger than you, I think. Imagine all the grown-ups in your life deciding to dismantle your home. Deciding to change everything you’d known, and not giving you any real say in it at all.”
Whoa. I could totally imagine that.
“A few insisted on staying, my parents among them,” Antonia continued, “and they decided on this compromise.” She waved a hand at the compact spaces around us. “Every important Palace room was re-created in miniature, and we moved down here and went on with our lives, living according to Captain Emily’s wishes as best we could. The others took the Palace apart story by story, disguised where it had been with the rocks, and left. None of them ever came back. And now, seventy-five years later, I am the last.”
Wait. This happened seventy-five years ago? Antonia was old. And, from the sound of it, lonely. Although, really, who wouldn’t be, living like this? This was way too much space for someone on their own.
“Hey, that’s a lot,” I said, trying to keep the conversation moving. “But what was that you just said about Captain Emily’s wishes? Who’s Captain Emily? What’s the story there?”
Antonia put down the baking tray she was holding with a clang. Her eyebrows came together, just like Director Haggis’s when he was yelling into his megaphone. “Are you being serious, Abigail?”
Shoot. Wrong thing to say.
“Yes?” I said. Just keep playing along, Abby. There’s gotta be a clue here that’ll help you get home. “Would you mind, you know, maybe, talking about that . . . some more?”
Antonia snorted. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. They don’t teach the story properly anymore, do they? Would you like to hear it? It’s been a long time since I’ve told it to anyone else.”
“I’d love to!”
“It’s a very long story,” Antonia warned. “It may run into lunchtime, and you will still have to clean and dust the entire Palace afterward.”
“Got it,” I said.
Lunchtime? Hey, being Maggie’s best friend had taught me a thing or two about stretching out a story. If I could keep Antonia talking, maybe I’d never actually have to dust at all.
“Then get your heart ready,” my strange n
ew old lady friend said, “for the tale of Captain Emily.”
Ten
Abby
Long before you were born, when the 1700s were fifteen years old, there lived a pirate captain named Emily Fairchild, and she was fifteen years old, too.
She was a captain by rank and a pirate by birth. Her mother had been a pirate, and her father, and her great-aunt, the famous Argenia Grimsworth Monty Anna Bee, before that. But although she loved her family, and she loved sailing and navigating and chantey singing, she never felt right about the other parts of the pirate life. Namely stealing. From sailors. On ships.
She didn’t mind collecting treasure from the captains of the ships she caught, or from the wealthy nobles who sometimes rode in them to get from one of their palaces to another, but the friendly, hardworking sailors were another matter. Raids could involve a certain amount of pushing and shoving, and sometimes members of her crew came back with nasty bruises. She upheld the family tradition faithfully, but on long nights when she lay awake watching the moon kiss the tops of the waves, Emily secretly admitted to herself that the whole business left her feeling rather empty.
And then there was her secret. Captain Emily’s heart was split. The sweeping sea sang in her soul, that was certain. But sometimes, just sometimes, she longed for a room that stayed put. A view that stayed still. A house on the land she could live in.
But Emily Fairchild was a pirate by birth and a captain by rank, and she knew it was one or the other.
One spring day, Emily and her crew set their sights on a decadent-looking confection of a ship from the French Royal Navy. But they had misjudged. The ship proved surprisingly strong, and they were outgunned in a major sea battle. The pirates barely escaped, limping away into the Atlantic. They sailed for days and weeks, and the food ran out and then the water, and everyone was miserable. Just when it seemed all hope was lost, the desperate pirates came upon an island.
It was a very small island, uninhabited, and crowned with a grove of strange and ancient-looking trees. It was also packed with treasure: a freshwater spring, shellfish blanketing the rocks along the beach, and schools of slow, delicious fish wandering sleepily around the little lagoon. So everyone ate and drank and was happy again, and they stayed on the island while the pirate carpenters cut down some of the trees and set about repairing the ship. The captain’s cabin, in particular, needed a whole new door and frame, owing to a cannonball that had passed right by Emily’s head during the battle.
At last the ship was as good as new, and they set sail, all waving goodbye to the hospitable little island. Captain Emily announced she was retiring to her cabin to plan their revenge on the French Royal Navy ship, but as she walked through the newly installed doorway, she vanished in a blink. The horrified crew dashed around, calling her name and peering under barrels and behind coils of rope, but there was no sign of her. Finally they spotted the captain’s red-feathered hat waving from the shore of the island behind them, and they sent out the rowboat to get her back.
As Captain Emily climbed aboard, she told her astonished crew how she’d been stepping through the doorway one moment, then was back on the island the next, standing in the center of a huge stump. Just as if she’d grown there.
I looked up from my oat-flour mixing, feeling a wave of tingles run up my spine and along my scalp. That was exactly what had happened to me!
I opened my mouth to ask for details, but Antonia was barreling on with her story.
It was the carpenters who figured it out. They put their heads together and realized that Captain Emily had been transported to the stump of the very tree they’d cut down to make her new cabin door in the first place. Somehow the tree and the stump were still connected, like they couldn’t bear to be separated. And walking through the door had brought their captain in a blink from one to the other.
Obviously, it was magic.
Emily tested it again immediately. Every pirate eye grew wide as they watched her vanish midstep in the doorway, and every pirate voice cheered as the red-feathered hat appeared on the beach.
The pirates were delighted. Now they would always have access to food and fresh water, which was often a problem at sea. But the practical first mate pointed out the connection only worked one way, and they couldn’t just sail around within rowboat distance of the island forever, and so a solution had to be found. While the carpenters added a second, nonmagical door so the captain could get into her cabin, Emily and the others threw a brainstorming party, and soon they had a plan to put into action.
Everyone returned to the island, where they cut down the largest of the remaining trees. The carpenters and the captain stayed on the island to work on its trunk, while the rest of the crew carefully dug up the stump, roots and all, floated it out to the ship, and hauled it up on deck.
The carpenters turned the trunk into a new door in its own sturdy frame and fixed it firmly into the earth amid the trees. Squaring her shoulders, the feathers in her hat rippling in the wind, Captain Emily stepped through and in a blink appeared on the stump aboard her ship, just as if she’d grown there.
The crew broke into applause, and Emily broke into her favorite jig. It worked! She danced through the cabin door back to the first island stump, then through the new door in the trees right back to the ship again. Soon all the crew joined in, a great circle of pirates dancing and whooping in a loop from ship to stump to door to ship. And the loop worked every time. “It’s an odd sort of magic, these inseparable trees,” Emily commented later that night, as their celebration continued under the stars. “But one can’t be picky.”
Now any of the crew—with the captain’s permission—could hop from the ship to the island and back, as often as they pleased.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m getting totally lost. Will you say that part about the doors and stumps again, please?”
Antonia frowned over her mountain of unbaked homemade not-Cheerios. “Have you never been taught even the most basic fundamentals of our history?” she asked.
“Oh, yes, sure I have,” I said quickly. Keep playing along, Abby. “Only I’d love to hear you tell it. You know, properly.”
Antonia sighed, but she scooped a handful of flour out of my bowl and clapped her hands over the counter, blanketing the dark marble. “The trees of the island,” she said theatrically, and maybe a little sarcastically, “are magical. They always lead back to their roots.” She drew a stick-figure tree in the flour, then an arrow pointing to a sort of scribble.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked.
“The stump and roots of the tree.”
“Really?” I peered at it.
“Yes.”
“Oh. If you say so.”
Antonia sighed again.
“But you see, yes?” she said, tapping the arrow. “The tree trunk always connects back to the stump and roots, no matter where they are. That is the way the traveling works.”
“Yes, good.”
Antonia drew a circle in the flour under the tree. “This is the island.” She drew a triangle below that. “This is the pirate ship.”
“You should add a little flag or something,” I said. “Maybe a skull and cross—”
“This is not fine art!” Antonia snapped. “This is flour drawing to illustrate the story!”
“Okay, okay.”
“Pay attention now. The first loop was created when part of a tree was used to repair a doorway on the ship. From then on, that doorway led to that tree’s stump back on the island.” Antonia drew an arrow from the triangle to the circle. “They became known as the Island Door and the Island Stump. Now, in order to get back to the ship, they needed to bring a different stump aboard. Because—”
“Because the tree always leads to the stump, and never the other way around,” I said, tapping the tree and squiggle pictures with my stirring spoon.
“Yes, well done,” said Antonia. “So they built the Ship Door on the island, which led to the Ship Stump on the ship.”
She drew another arrow leading from the circle to the triangle. “Clear?”
“Island Door is on the ship, Ship Door is on the island,” I said. “Door to stump, door to stump, around in a loop.” I looked up and smiled. “Neat!”
“Yes, it is neat,” said Antonia. “Now please get back to stirring, and I will continue with the telling.”
Being able to resupply whenever they liked was an enormous advantage, one any ship’s captain would dream of, but as they returned in triumph to their usual waters, Captain Emily felt her old sadness returning. She still didn’t feel right about traditional piracy. If only she could limit her raids to people who could afford it, like the lords and kings and admirals who had sent out that vicious French Royal Navy ship in the first place. The trouble was, most of those people didn’t sail. Those people spent their time on land, lounging around their palaces and castles, full of grand rooms and fancy furniture. . . .
And that was when the most glorious, perfect plan unfolded in her mind.
A small tree and its stump were collected from the island. The carpenters got busy making a beautiful chest from the stump, and a door in a frame from the body of the tree, and after thoroughly testing the connection and adding one important secret touch, the pirates put their plan into action. Captain Emily dressed up, and the crew dressed up, and they made a new flag and dressed the ship up and sailed to a rich port in a famous city, presenting themselves as ambassadors of a far country—which was true enough, since the hospitable island had become their home—and Captain Emily made a grand entrance and presented the exquisite chest as a gift to the king there.
Later that night on the ship, Emily put on a very different disguise made especially for creeping through palaces in the dark. She stepped through the new door—which they called the Palace Door—and found herself curled inside the chest, inside the palace. Success! She slipped out and went from room to room, sneaking trinkets and treasures and fine clothes and apple cider and good food from the kitchens. When she couldn’t carry any more, she wrapped everything in a wildly expensive carpet and returned to the chest.