Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy

by Karen Foxlee

  “You’re nearly sixteen,” said her father, very calmly. “You need to start acting like an adult. You’re to stay here and keep an eye on your little sister.”

  Alice slumped down in front of the mirror. She stared at Ophelia lying on the bed. “You always ruin everything,” she said.

  Ophelia wanted to say something, but she couldn’t. She felt weak and small. She coughed. She felt as though she were falling, falling backward a long way, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She watched the snow drifting past the window.

  She didn’t know how long she slept.

  In her dream her mother was calling her.

  Her mother’s voice was coming from deep within the museum, and Ophelia was running, trying to find her. Sometimes the voice seemed closer and she would think, I don’t have far to go. Then the voice would fade. Finally, when she was near the Gallery of Time, she heard her mother say her name so clearly that she stopped still.

  Susan Worthington was sitting on a chair near one of the windows just outside the gallery. She was sitting the way she always sat, with her legs crossed and a book in her lap. She didn’t look sick. She didn’t look sick at all, and that filled Ophelia with happiness. Her mother’s long brown hair was undone and blow-dried, just the way she wore it when she went to the movies or to dinner. She had lipstick on. Her mother never wore lipstick unless something very special was about to happen.

  “Mum,” Ophelia cried. “Mummy!”

  She rushed toward her mother and was embraced. She smelt her. Her cinnamony, rosy, clean-haired, ink-stained smell. Her mother smoothed back Ophelia’s hair and gazed at her face. She took Ophelia’s glasses and wiped the tears from her eyes. She cleaned the smudges from Ophelia’s glasses with the hem of her skirt.

  “Now, you have a busy few hours ahead of you,” said her mother, “if you are going to save this world.”

  “Do you believe it all?” asked Ophelia.

  “Of course I believe it all,” said her mother.

  “But I don’t know what to do.”

  “You do,” said Susan Worthington.

  “Should I think scientifically?”

  “You should think with your heart,” said her mother.

  “My heart?” whispered Ophelia.

  “Your heart,” said her mother, and she touched Ophelia’s chest with the tip of her finger. It was the tiniest of touches, but a warmth and new hope spread through Ophelia’s body. She began to smile.

  Then her mother looked behind her. There was another voice calling Ophelia, a very loud, very angry voice.

  Ophelia spun around and woke up with a start. Alice was sitting in a chair by the window, yelling.

  “Why wouldn’t you wake up?” Alice said. “You were shouting so much. Shouting out, Mum, mum, mum. And you were crying and then laughing.”

  “Sorry,” said Ophelia.

  She looked at her watch. She had been asleep for hours. It was nearly midday. Would the special sword have arrived at the museum? Her mother had been gone three months, nine days, and eleven hours.

  “I feel much better,” said Ophelia. She looked at her arm for the magical snow leopard scratch and it was completely gone.

  “Good for you,” said Alice, taking her place in front of the mirror again.

  “Have you heard of mutualism?”

  “Shut up,” said Alice. “You’re annoying me.”

  The old Alice would have never said, “Shut up.” The old Alice would have said, “You can tell me about mutualism if you let me braid your hair.”

  “Well, it’s a type of symbiosis,” said Ophelia. “Where two animals live together and help each other in a way that is mutually beneficial.”

  “I’m ignoring you.”

  “Like the red-billed oxpecker eating the ticks off an impala.”

  No response. Alice applied her lipstick now.

  “What I’m saying is, why should you have to miss out on everything?” said Ophelia.

  Alice raised her delicately arched eyebrows.

  She was paler now, paler than Ophelia could ever remember her being. So pale that fragile blue veins showed beside her eyes. Ophelia looked at her sister’s reflection in the mirror and saw she was very beautiful. Not the pretty, rosy kind of beauty that she had arrived with. This new beauty was much brighter and much cooler.

  “I’ll come back to the museum with you,” said Ophelia, “and you’ll get to have your hair and everything done, and I promise I won’t tell Dad if you don’t tell him that I am there.”

  Alice watched her with sparkling blue eyes.

  “I have a lot of things that I have to do, important things,” said Ophelia. “Just like you. All I’m saying is, why should we both miss out?”

  “I’ll be toast if Dad finds out,” said Alice.

  “He’ll never know,” said Ophelia.

  Alice started to hum her tuneless song and continued painting her lips. Ophelia climbed out of bed. The word toast had made her hungry. Her stomach grumbled. She made toast and sat at the little breakfast table. She opened a new tin of sardines and carefully placed some on her toast. She knew she would need every ounce of strength. She wondered what Lucy Coutts ate the day she rescued the baby in the runaway stroller and became a hero.

  After her toast she found the hotel sewing kit in the bathroom, and even though she wasn’t sure how to stitch properly, she turned her blue velvet coat inside out and sewed up the hole in her right-hand pocket. She had a feeling she would need a pocket. It was jagged stitching, but it made her feel good.

  Alice came to the door, and Ophelia waited for what she would say.

  “Let’s go,” her sister said.

  14

  In which the Great Sorrow is delivered to the museum, and Ophelia does not realize that Alice is about to be placed in the Snow Queen’s machine

  Alice and Ophelia trudged toward the museum. Alice wore a white fur coat and white jeans and silver heels that were way too grown-up for her. Ophelia was in the clothes she had worn all night and all the day before. Her braids were coming undone, and her glasses were very smudgy. The snow was falling so hard and fast that they could barely see. Ophelia wheezed in the frozen air.

  On the wedding mosaic floor they parted ways.

  “Promise me you won’t tell,” said Ophelia.

  “I promise,” said Alice, but she was already staring past her sister as though she were hardly there at all.

  Ophelia went to the sword exhibition hall and crept carefully along the corridor. She wanted to see this arriving sword firsthand. It might just be the boy’s sword. She felt cross, not having thought of that before. She could hear her father’s voice as she entered the room and pressed herself behind one of the heavy velvet drapes that covered each window.

  There was her father, waiting as a large wooden crate was wheeled into the gallery. He was breathing into his gloved hands, stamping his cold feet inside his boots in the huge, freezing room. Miss Kaminski, who did not seem to feel the cold, watched as the crate was brought to the center of the room to the raised platform.

  “Now, shall I show you our prize?” said Miss Kaminski.

  The crate was broken open, and the great and glorious sword was revealed.

  “She is beautiful, is she not, Mr. Whittard?” said Miss Kaminski. Ophelia saw that at first her father couldn’t speak. The sword shimmered with the brilliance of a million diamonds. It sparkled and glinted, and the light danced and spun around it.

  “Why have I never heard of this sword?” her father whispered at last. “I have studied the great swords of the world since I was a boy, and not once has such a magnificent sword been mentioned.”

  “It has been our little secret.” Miss Kaminski smiled, walking around the glass case, the light of the sword playing on her skin. “And tonight the world will learn of her at last.”

  What would the world learn? Ophelia stayed hidden behind the curtain as Miss Kaminski passed, high heels clicking across the marble floor, shouting in
structions to the men as she went.

  What do you think? Ophelia’s mother said quietly.

  “I think she’s very, very bad,” whispered Ophelia in return.

  You must find the boy and find the sword and find the One Other, said her mother. You don’t have much time.

  “I know,” said Ophelia. “I know.”

  She slid out from behind the curtain and sped across the gallery to the exit. She was prepared for getting lost on the way. Even with a map the museum was impossible.

  As she raced along the corridors, she saw that the guards had gone back to knitting and dozing. But the museum had also started to fill with people, more people than Ophelia had ever seen before. Tour groups were being led up and down the staircases. A long line was growing outside the Gallery of Time. She squeezed herself through and saw that the little window at the base of the clock still contained the number 1.

  She wasn’t too late. She still had time.

  She took a squirt on her puffer and climbed a small staircase two steps at a time to where she thought the elevator to the sixth floor normally stood, but instead found a gallery of dresses. It was a very large gallery, with chandeliers blazing, and ball gowns and wedding dresses and tea gowns hanging everywhere behind glass.

  Ophelia was about to turn to race back down the steps when she heard Alice’s voice, followed by Miss Kaminski’s laughter.

  “Really, Alice,” said Miss Kaminski. “You are delightful.”

  Ophelia moved forward quietly into the gallery.

  Alice was sitting before a mirror, and a hairdresser was fixing her hair into loops and curls, strung with shining beads, as Miss Kaminski watched. Alice wore a white gown covered in crystals, which glittered and gleamed in the chandelier light.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “And it fits me perfectly.”

  “I am very pleased,” Miss Kaminski said.

  Ophelia saw a man enter the room from a far door. It was Mr. Pushkinova—she knew straightaway. His milky eyes made her shudder. In his hands he carried a cushion, and on the cushion was a delicate tiara.

  Ophelia didn’t like the way he bowed and sneered at her sister.

  “One of the prettiest yet, ma’am,” he said, and bowed again.

  “She is beyond pretty,” said Miss Kaminski. “Has her painting been hung yet, Mr. Pushkinova?”

  “I have just hung it this very moment,” said Mr. Pushkinova.

  “Very good.”

  “Can I look at it yet?” asked Alice.

  “Soon,” said Miss Kaminski.

  The museum curator nodded at Mr. Pushkinova and the hairdresser to leave the room. Ophelia’s feet stayed rooted to the ground. She should leave. Her head told her to leave. Time was counting down. The hands on the Wintertide Clock were tick, tick, ticking. She should leave, but she just couldn’t make her feet move.

  “Would you like to have everything, Alice?” asked Miss Kaminski. “Everything that you ever wanted?”

  “Like clothes and stuff?” asked Alice.

  “Anything and everything.”

  “Yes,” said Alice. “I mean, who wouldn’t?”

  It was like being in a dream, thought Ophelia, this inability to move. She knew something bad was going to happen. She was going to hear Alice say something terrible.

  Miss Kaminski said, “Can you forget your family, Alice?”

  Alice opened her mouth to speak, then stopped.

  Ophelia watched her stare into her reflection. Alice was meant to look after her. Susan Worthington had spoken to Alice before she died.

  “You must always look after Ophelia,” she had said. “You don’t have to be her mother, but you have to look out for her. This is, above everything else, what I need you to do.”

  Alice hadn’t wanted to listen. She had put her hands over her ears and shouted: “You are not going to die.”

  Ophelia watched Miss Kaminski watching Alice thinking. Time slowed down. Ophelia forgot to breathe.

  “Yes,” said Alice. “I can forget them all.”

  To which Miss Kaminski laughed.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “You must come with me, then. There is something I would very much like to show you.”

  15

  In which Ophelia has a feeling

  So there it was. Alice’s words rang inside Ophelia’s ears and made her cheeks burn. She wiped angrily at the tears that kept wanting to appear when they had no right. Alice had changed. She’d been changing for months, but now it was as though the process had hastened. Alice was freezing; her heart was freezing. That’s the only way Ophelia could think to describe it.

  Alice doesn’t mean it, said her mother in her ear. She’s not herself.

  “Don’t make excuses for her,” said Ophelia aloud.

  She went back down the stairs, slowly this time. Gathering her strength. She opened her map, looked at it, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it in the nearest garbage receptacle.

  She turned and ran back up the stairs again. She ran back up the stairs like someone about to miss a bus. She ran back up furiously, and the gallery of dresses was gone. In its place was the small silver elevator that would take her to the sixth floor.

  “I knew it,” Ophelia said.

  This time she was prepared for the polar bear. She sped past the flags of the world, the artwork stacked in teetering heaps, the mountain of sewing machines, and the several stuffed parrots.

  Parrots! She stopped still. It had changed back again. She looked for the windows and the carriage, but they were nowhere to be seen. There was the anchor, and there was the locomotive, and there was the pile of jewelry boxes.

  “Boy,” she said, and the word echoed in the silence.

  But she knew she wouldn’t be able to find him.

  “Where are you?”

  The merry-go-round horses watched her with their glossy, sad eyes.

  But there was no reply at all.

  Ophelia left the sixth floor and returned to where the corridors were filling with people. She moved through the crowds. They were waiting in snake lines at the entrances to galleries. They were peering into display cabinets; at brains floating in yellowish liquid; at medical devices, sharp and silvery; at rabbits’ feet amulets and ivory lockets and four-leaf clovers, hundreds of them inside smudgy glass cases.

  Near the Gallery of Time the crowd was surging. It was moving one step forward and two steps back as people tried to push their way in to get the best view. The guards were shouting.

  “Move back!” they yelled. “There is space for all. Microphones have been placed near the clock. You will hear it chime everywhere.”

  And indeed the ticking of the clock was magnified. It was everywhere in the corridors, like a dreadful heartbeat.

  Where would they put the boy? Where would they hide him?

  She rushed first to his room, 303, but the door was open there, the room swept clean. She had to find the boy, she just had to. Wherever they had hidden him, she hoped he was warm. He had nothing but that old, thin coat.

  She raced through rooms, pushing against the tide of the crowd. Through a room filled with buttons. A room filled with beetles. A large, circular room with a dome-shaped roof, filled with nothing but broken toys. Jack-in-the-boxes that wouldn’t jump, dolls without legs, teddy bears without stuffing, and dollhouses, all of them empty, without a single stitch of furniture. Ophelia shivered in that place.

  Oh my, her mother whispered in her ear.

  “I knew you’d like it,” said Ophelia angrily.

  Think, said her mother. Where haven’t you been yet?

  She knew what her mother was going to say. She was going to say, You haven’t been to the seventh floor, to the right-hand corridor to the Queen’s chambers.

  “Don’t even say it,” said Ophelia. “What about the gardens? On the map there was a Winter Garden. And I saw a sign for it near the refectory. Perhaps they’ve put him outside. I have a … feeling.”

  A feeling! She hated saying that
. Psychics had feelings. Fortune-tellers and clairvoyants had feelings. Not amateur scientists from the Children’s Science Society of Greater London.

  But she couldn’t ignore the feeling, the feeling that the boy was cold. There, she’d said it. That thought made her heart hurt.

  “It’s his stockings. They’re full of holes. Oh, I can’t explain it,” said Ophelia.

  I understand, whispered her mother.

  Ophelia could feel her smiling beside her ear. She pulled down on her braids.

  The Winter Garden, then, whispered her mother as Ophelia began to run.

  She went past the pavilion of wolves and stared through the pillars at them. They didn’t move. They didn’t breathe. Down corridors and up staircases and down again. Through the refectory to where a very faded sign above a stairwell pointed to PREHISTORIA and the ROYAL WINTER GARDEN.

  The stairwell was very dim, and Prehistoria was even dimmer. It was filled up with nothing but rock and stone, bones laid out in grimy display cabinets and skulls all in a line. Someone had left their bag of chips there right in among them. And at the very back of Prehistoria, there was a very nondescript door with the words WINTER GARDEN written in very small letters—only the G had been lost, and she found it down on the ground. She felt the handle. It was stiff with age, but it turned. And Ophelia stepped from the museum into the outside.

  16

  In which Ophelia finds a Herald Tree

  There was something about the outside that made Ophelia want to cry. Perhaps it was the snow. Perhaps all the trees, or the skeletons of the trees, with their spindly arms raised to the white sky. Or the statues, statue after statue, standing motionless. There were girls dancing and boys with arrows aimed at the clouds. Perhaps it was their stillness that made her feel so bad.

  Perhaps she should go inside.

  Perhaps she should give up.

  She could turn and walk back inside. She could find her father.

  She could say, “I’m sorry, I’ve been so silly. I feel better now. We aren’t in danger at all. Tonight the Wintertide Clock will chime, and there will be an exhibition about swords. The world will not end. The boy was all in my imagination. I never knew my imagination was good. I think it’s all the snow.”