by Holly Webb
Then there was a crash, and a thudding of footsteps. Maisie gasped. The thief was coming! She grabbed determinedly at the great heavy figure that went blundering past her down the stairs. But whoever it was pushed her back, and Maisie felt herself waver on the edge of a step. She reached for the banister, but it slid away from her fingers as though it was greased, and she began to fall, bumping down the hard wooden stairs after the burglar.
“Ohhhh!” she wailed, and Eddie yelped, scrabbling down the stairs after her.
Maisie landed with a thud at the bottom, her head ringing where she’d banged it against the banister. She felt dazed and sick, and her candle had gone out. She couldn’t see a thing. She could feel Eddie sniffing at her, his damp nose on her cheek as he tried to see if she was all right. Then Eddie yapped and darted away through the open front door after the thief. Maisie watched the faint white blur disappear into the darkness, and then she leaned her aching head against the wall and closed her eyes.
“Maisie! Maisie! Wake up, dear child!”
Maisie blinked, and squinted her eyes to shut out the painful lamplight.
“Ah, you’re awake. Don’t worry, Mrs Hitchins, she’s coming round. Whatever happened, Maisie?” It was the professor’s voice, sharp and anxious. “Did you fall down the stairs? What were you doing up at this time of night?”
“A burglar…” Maisie looked up at him, and saw Gran and Sally and Miss Lane all leaning over her, their faces worried.
“A burglar!” Gran gasped. “She’s right, the front door’s half open! My silver teapot!”
“No… He was in the professor’s room. Oh! Where’s Eddie? He went after the thief – I should have stopped him, but my head was all dizzy and I couldn’t really think. Is he back? What if the burglar hurt him?”
“It’s all right.” Miss Lane, the actress who rented the third-floor rooms, pointed at the front steps. “There he is.”
Maisie turned carefully to look. She was trying to keep her head as still as possible, to stop it hurting.
Eddie heaved himself up the front steps towards her, one paw at a time, and Maisie took in a worried breath. Usually he raced up steps, full of energy. “Eddie!” she cried. “Did he hurt you?”
“I think he’s just tired, Maisie,” the professor said, running a hand over Eddie’s back. “He’s panting.”
Eddie’s tongue was hanging out as he slumped on to the step next to Maisie, and she patted him lovingly. “Good boy! Did you chase that burglar?”
Eddie seemed to nod, as though he understood, and then he spat out a mouthful of something reddish and slobbery on to Maisie’s nightdress.
“What on earth has that dog gone and done now?” Gran sighed. “What is that disgusting mess?”
“Feathers…” Maisie murmured, pulling out one damp feather and examining it.
“Oh no, Professor, did the thief take one of your stuffed birds? Or Jasper? The feathers are the same colour, that bright red…” She stopped, trying to remember where else she had seen red feathers recently. It was hard when she felt so dizzy. She could see a face, hook-nosed and dark-eyed, somehow mixed up with the feathers. But it wasn’t the thief – she hadn’t really seen his face. In fact, she couldn’t remember anything about him, except that he’d pushed her out of the way as if she’d weighed nothing at all. It must have been the bang on the head that did it, Maisie thought.
Professor Tobin leaned over and picked up another of the feathers, running it between his fingers and frowning. Then an expression of horror came over his face.
“The mask! The feathered mask!”
The professor had looked so upset that Gran sent everyone upstairs to sit down while she went to make a pot of strong tea.
Now he was sitting huddled in his armchair, cocooned in his emerald-green dressing gown, with his nightcap on sideways. His hands were wrapped around his tea cup, and his face was pale and pouchy-looking.
“I shall have to go to the police tomorrow. That mask is one of the treasures of my collection,” he explained wearily, staring at the empty spot on the wall where the mask had been. “Incredibly rare, you see. In fact, there isn’t another one like it – not outside of the Amazon, anyway.”
“The Amazon?” Maisie breathed. “That huge river? Where they have the fish that eat people?”
“Well, yes. Though the stories of the piranha fish are very much exaggerated,” the professor said reassuringly, seeing Sally and Miss Lane turn pale. “Some of them actually prefer fruit.”
“So you’ve been to the Amazon?” Miss Lane asked him, wide-eyed. “That’s where the mask came from?”
“Yes…” The professor sighed. “I have to admit, I can’t pinpoint exactly where. I was rather lost at the time, you see. My canoe had been overturned by an enormous caiman – rather like an alligator, you know. I found myself washed up on the bank of the river, with only a small amount of my equipment and none of my companions. I later discovered that they had given me up for dead! In fact, several of my friends had raised money for a most handsome memorial plaque in the dining hall at my old university. They were quite annoyed when I turned up again.”
Maisie giggled. “How did you get back home?”
“Well, I went exploring along the river bank, and I happened to come across one of the forest dwellers, a tribesman who was out hunting.”
“Was he fierce?” Sally gasped. “I’ve heard some of these forest tribes use poison darts that make you fall down stiff as a board!”
“He probably would have been,” the professor agreed, “except that when I saw him, he was wrapped in the coils of a giant anaconda. That’s a snake,” he added, when everyone looked at him blankly. “And this one was twenty-two feet long – I measured it. Afterwards…”
“After what? What did you do?” Maisie asked excitedly. “Did you rescue the man?”
“I removed my cravat and tied it round the neck of the snake. Then I used it to pull the snake away from the man. Luckily, some of his fellow tribesmen heard me shouting and came to help. We managed to get the snake to let go, and the tribesmen cut its head off.” The professor sighed regretfully.
“Didn’t you want them to kill it? A monstrous snake?” Gran gave a horrified sniff.
“Well, yes. But it was such a grand creature, Mrs Hitchins. It seemed a pity. Anyway, it turned out that Achuchi was some sort of tribal elder – a chieftain. They were very grateful to me for saving him, at any rate.”
“And they gave you the mask to say thank you.” Maisie nodded. “Did they show you how to get home, as well?”
“Yes, but I stayed with them for a few months, first. My leg had been injured in the fight with the anaconda, and I needed to let it heal before I could travel. I enjoyed teaching them some English as well. And they were very welcoming. Even though I did get rather sick of roasted anaconda. When eventually I was ready to leave, there was a great ceremony with the whole tribe singing and dancing, and that’s when they presented me with the mask. I have a photograph, over there, on my desk.”
He started to get to his feet, but Sally jumped up first, and picked up the picture. Maisie had often polished the smart silver frame and looked at the figures, but she hadn’t known the story behind the photograph.
The professor stood in the middle, holding the mask. On one side of him was a wrinkled little man, with a piece of fabric wrapped around his waist like a skirt. That was all he was wearing, apart from a beautiful necklace that seemed to be made of feathers and teeth. On the other side of Professor Tobin was a boy, smiling widely.
“A very successful picture, bearing in mind that I had to teach one of the boys to use the camera, and then carry the photographic plate all the way back to London with me,” the professor said proudly. “It was just lucky that the camera was properly packed and wrapped in oilskins before the caiman attacked.”
“Who is the boy?” Maisie asked. He looked about the same age as her.
“Ah, that’s Daniel. Well, I called him Daniel. He was Achu
chi’s grandson, and my most keen pupil in the study of English. I told him the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, and he was so taken with it that he decided to adopt the name for himself.” The professor smiled. “You remind me of him, Maisie. So determined. I offered to take him back to England with me, you know. So he could be educated. But he was too close to his tribe, and the forest. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.”
The professor sighed as he gazed at the empty spot on the wall again. “That mask was the pride of my collection. So beautifully carved and delicately painted. I wanted other people to see it, to see the art that had gone into making it. So many people in our country talk about those who live in South America as savages, you see, when they’re no such thing.”
Maisie saw Sally and Miss Lane exchange doubtful glances. Hunting in forests and living on roast snake clearly sounded like savage behaviour to them. But the mask had been beautiful, and eerie. She could see what the professor meant.
“We’ll get it back…” she said, trying to sound encouraging.
The professor smiled at her, but he didn’t look very hopeful. In fact, he looked downright miserable.
Gran patted his shoulder. “Go back to bed, Professor. We all should, for that matter. There’s nothing to be done until the morning, after all.”
The professor nodded. “You’re right, of course, Mrs Hitchins,” he said with a sigh.
Maisie gritted her teeth. The professor thought there was nothing to be done, she could tell. But she was going to do whatever it took to get the mask back for him. No one in the house had seen the thief, which meant it would be a tricky test of her detective skills. If only she could remember more about what had happened.
Halfway up the stairs Maisie sat down and sighed. She was just where she had been in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t helping her remember anything. Gran had told her to rest after her fall, but Maisie had been eager to sweep and polish the stairs, for once. She had been hoping that being there would jog her memory, and she would suddenly remember what the thief had looked like. Or something he had said. Or anything.
She hadn’t been able to find a single clue in the professor’s rooms – just that bare space where the mask had been. The policemen who had examined the rooms earlier that morning hadn’t found anything either. Maisie had lurked on the landing and listened.
She looked around again hopefully. But the stairs were just the stairs, and they looked exactly like they always did. Except that there was a scratch on the wallpaper, next to where Maisie was sitting. Gran seemed more worried about that than she was about the loss of the mask, as the wallpaper was quite new. Maisie thought it must be where the thief had bumped against the wall, when they collided with each other on the stairs. But the scratch wasn’t telling her anything useful at all.
Maisie shook her head. Why couldn’t she remember anything? It didn’t help that she was so tired from getting up in the middle of the night. By the time she had got back to bed again it had been five o’clock, and she and Gran and Sally usually got up at six. Slowly, Maisie clambered to her feet, and walked back up to the top step to begin polishing the banisters.
It seemed to take her hours to get all the way down the stairs, and now she had to polish the dratted newel post. Maisie cursed the thing whenever she had to clean it. It was full of fiddly bits that trapped the dust, and it was a beast to get shiny. She sighed as she scooped up a bit of beeswax polish on her cloth.
She was just about to wipe it over the newel post, when a flash of colour caught her eye. Maisie peered at the carved wood. There was a scrap of fabric caught in it. She gasped. A clue! It had to be! Gran made her polish the banisters at least twice a week – she was very particular about them, as she said the lodgers were up and down all day, dirtying them up with fingermarks. The fabric definitely hadn’t been there the other day – so it must belong to the thief, surely.
Maisie stared at it for a second, wide-eyed, and then raced back up the stairs and up the next two flights, to Miss Lane’s rooms. She knocked loudly, and there was a moan from inside.
“Who on earth is that? It’s the middle of the night!”
“Sorry! It’s me, Maisie! Miss Lane, do you have some tweezers I could borrow? And it’s actually ten in the morning.”
“Ten! Exactly! That is the middle of the night! Yes, Maisie, if you can find them, you can borrow them. But only if you’re completely silent so I can go back to sleep.”
Maisie crept inside the sitting room and peeped round the door into the actress’s bedroom. Miss Lane wriggled further under her pretty satin coverlet, so Maisie could only see her curling papers, and Maisie tiptoed across to the mirrored dressing table. Ah, there were the tweezers, just as she’d thought. She seized them and darted away, hopping over discarded shawls, piles of playscripts and abandoned cups of tea. She cleaned Miss Lane’s rooms twice a week, but they were still always messy.
Back at the bottom of the stairs, Maisie used the tweezers to pull the scrap of fabric away from the carved wood without tearing it. It was tiny, no bigger than a penny, and very fine. Maisie frowned. It was almost like summer-dress fabric. Not like something a man would wear. It was patterned, she thought, although it was hard to tell from such a small piece. Yellow, with red shapes, perhaps? It wasn’t really like anything she’d seen before.
Maisie wrapped it up carefully in a leaf of paper that she tore from the little notebook she kept in her apron pocket. She would give it to the professor later, and he could pass it on to the police. But she would keep it to herself, just for a little while. She was the only witness, after all. It might jog her memory.
Could it have been a woman who stole the mask and barged into her on the stairs? Whoever it was must have been thrown off balance, and then bumped into the newel post at the bottom and caught their skirt, or the hem of their coat… No. Maisie eyed the newel post. Their sleeve. It was quite a tall post, and the fabric had been caught high up.
Well, at least it was something. But Maisie couldn’t help feeling that her first – and only – clue had made the whole mystery more confusing, not less…
“Maisie! There you are!”
Maisie stared at Gran in surprise. Why was she looking at her so strangely and fiddling with her apron strings like that? Perhaps she’d forgotten something? It was the middle of the morning, and Maisie was still feeling sleepy. She had just come in from fetching the vegetables from the greengrocer so Gran could cook the midday meal, and she had been quite quick about it, she was sure. “What’s the matter?” Maisie asked. “I’ve got the potatoes.”
Gran jerked her head towards the table, which was set with the best teacups and her silver teapot. And in the middle of the table was an envelope. A letter.
“It’s for you.”
Maisie recognized the scrawly writing, even though she’d only ever had three letters penned in it – this would be the fourth. She had read the letters over and over, so that the paper was almost tearing where it had been folded and unfolded so many times.
It was from her father.
Maisie hadn’t seen him for two years, not since she was seven. He was the first mate on a steamship and he travelled round the world, carrying cargoes to and from all kinds of exotic places. He would probably enjoy talking to the professor, Maisie thought suddenly. They must have been to some of the same countries.
“Open it, Maisie,” Gran begged. “What does he say?”
Maisie blinked. She had forgotten for a moment that as well as being her dad, he was Gran’s son. Gran must miss him, too. Carefully, she tore open the envelope and pulled out the letter, frowning as she tried to make out what it said. “He sends his love, and he saw dolphins. Um… And he’s bought you an embroidered shawl for best, he’ll bring it with him when he— Oh!”
“What? What? Is he ill?”
Maisie’s hands trembled, and the letter shook. “He’s coming home. He’s going to retire from the sea, he says. At the end of his time on the Lily Belle. He�
�s saved some money and he’s going to go into business – selling ships’ stores. He says he’s written to you, too, to tell you all about it.” She put the letter down on the table and stared at her gran. “The letter for you must still be on a ship somewhere. Or lost, maybe. He wrote this” – she checked the date – “weeks and weeks ago. Will he come back and live here?”
Gran slipped into the chair opposite her, dabbing at her eyes with her apron. “Yes, I should think so. Oh, my goodness!”
“He’s never lived here that I remember,” Maisie whispered. “He’s always been at sea.” She couldn’t imagine seeing her father every day. Sitting opposite him to have breakfast. What if he wanted to move – somewhere closer to the docks, perhaps? What if he wanted Maisie to go with him?
She looked up at Gran, not sure what to say. Maisie could see how excited her grandmother was, how happy at the thought of her son coming home. And Maisie was, too, of course she was. It would just be – different. That was all.
“Gran?” she murmured. “You haven’t minded looking after me all this time, have you?”
“Oh, of course not, Maisie.” Gran reached across the table to squeeze Maisie’s hand. “You know it’s no hardship. Especially when you’re such a help, leaving school to come and work in the house. But perhaps when your father returns, and there’s a little more money, you’ll be able to go back to school.”
Maisie swallowed. She couldn’t imagine it. Being a schoolgirl again. What about her detecting? She frowned down at the letter. What would her father think about that, anyway? She’d written to him, telling him about the cases she’d solved – the stolen money at the butcher’s, the mystery at the theatre, and her stay with Alice at the haunted house. But with the way it took letters so long to get overseas, and not even knowing where her father would be in port next, it was unlikely he’d had her letters yet. Sometimes it felt like she was sending letters to a ghost.