by Ellen Potter
Sure enough there was a smooth rim of stone along the top of the wall that did not quite match the hamburger stone. It was paler and the lichen hadn’t mottled its surface.
“So?” Lucia said.
“And the crenellations on the castle’s towers are all crumbly.”
“And I repeat . . . so?”
“That means someone cared more about keeping people out than impressing people who might come in.” He paused. Then he added, “It’s just a guess, though. I may be completely wrong.”
He always said that when he knew he was 100 percent right.
Otto had been staring up at the castle, squinting. As they walked he kept turning around to see something up in one of the towers.
“What?” Lucia said finally.
Otto stopped walking and took one long look up at the castle. “The tower on the right. Third window from the top.”
They looked. They squinted. Then they saw it. There was a figure in one of the windows. It was hard to see the person very clearly at that distance, and the fog that drifted in front of their faces periodically made it even harder, but it appeared that he or she was staring straight back at them.
Max waved. The person did not wave back. They just kept staring.
“What if she’s being held prisoner?” Lucia said hopefully.
“Then she probably would have waved back,” Max said. “And it might be a he.”
“Ha! Not likely,” Lucia said. “Didn’t you notice them?”
“Them what?” Max asked.
“Her . . . you know. She has breasts, Max! What do you think that is on her chest?”
“I think it’s a pair of crossed arms,” Max said.
It was. Most probably.
Otto laughed, a little pop of air that sounded like a pickle jar being opened.
So Lucia temporarily lost interest in the person at the tower window and quickened her pace toward the water.
Soon they came to the edge of the cliff, which dropped down at an alarmingly steep angle to a shingle beach far below. The beach was now receiving a fine thrashing from the white-tipped waves, and the whole view—the sky, as slickery as blue rain boots, the rippling water, the milk white triangle of a taut sail on a distant boat—was all too gaspingly perfect. They stared at it for a while (during which Lucia thought up the blue rain boot description) until they became bored. So they looked for a way down.
There wasn’t one. The castle was perched on the very edge of a precipice, as castles often are, to keep off the foreign invaders. Installing a set of stairs from the cliff to the beach would naturally be counterproductive. What they did find, or rather what Otto found, was a perilously jagged path that more or less led down to the beach. It required some creative thinking to figure out how they were supposed to get from one ledge to the next when the two might be a good distance apart, but they did it, and suffered only minor abrasions and a tiny amount of blood loss.
Lucia and Max chucked their shoes and socks and chased the waves. Then they let the waves chase them as they ran backwards on the narrow strip of sand. It made them laugh like infants.
Otto, however, sat close to the edge of the cliff face and examined the smooth stones that covered most of the beach. Chester stayed with him, though Lucia could have sworn Chester was watching the waves with the most wistful expression.
“Come on!” Lucia called to Otto. “The water feels gorgeous on your ankles!”
But Otto refused until Lucia finally relented and left Max to chase the waves by himself. She ran over to Otto, still laughing, and collapsed on the ground beside him. She smiled at him but he didn’t notice. He was absently examining a white-streaked stone that he held in his palm. He was so solemn. So sad. Was he always like that and she had never noticed? It bothered her, especially because she had just felt the wonderful blood rush that comes from being silly and barefoot.
“When I grow up,” she said, because it was their special game, and she wanted him to stop looking at the stupid stone, “I’ll buy a lighthouse by the sea, for us to live in. At night we’ll watch for ships that are about to crash into the cliffs and we’ll shine the lights and save them. During the day we can throw things down at people on the beach.”
Otto balanced the stone on his knee and said nothing, just stared at it.
“What’s wrong with you?” She grabbed the stupid stone out of his hand and threw it as far as she could. Then she felt bad.
Otto stared after the lost stone, then looked at Lucia. There was something he wanted to tell her, something important. She kept very still, her eyes on his eyes, waiting. Then he turned away from her. He picked up another stone, one with black speckles, and began to examine it.
That was when Lucia first began to suspect that Otto was keeping a secret. A big fat one.
They had spent several hours by the water, and had even discovered a cave, in which they looked for evidence of an old pirate hideout but all they found were some empty Coke cans and a vintage car magazine. By noonish, though, they were getting hungry and headed back to the castle folly. On the way back they looked for the person in the tower at Kneebone Castle but there was no one at the window now. The castle was so still and silent that they stood there for a few minutes, looking up at it.
Have you ever stared at someone while they were sleeping, and then realized that they were not asleep at all but were lying there with their eyes opened in slits, staring right back at you? It gives you a very squirrelly feeling. It was the same thing with Kneebone Castle. The Hardscrabbles suddenly all got the feeling that it was watching them through its arrow slits. Otto was first to start backing away from the place, then Lucia and Max did as well, and they hurried back over the meadow to the castle folly as fast as they could without actually running.
“Ho! Prisoners!” a voice called down from somewhere above them as they approached the folly’s moat. They looked along the walkway on top of the curtain wall, but they didn’t see a single thing.
The person whistled. It was a very loud and impressive whistle and it directed their attention to a pair of feet in flip-flops resting on the railing of the tall wooden tower that Lucia had climbed yesterday. The feet suddenly disappeared and Haddie’s face took its place as well as half her body. She leaned out farther than any sensible person should have. A pair of binoculars hung around her neck and on her head was a black baseball cap turned wrong side round.
“I was beginning to think you’d escaped!” Haddie called down.
“No, we were just messing about on the beach,” Max called back.
Max is amazingly literal for a ten-year-old.
There was a pause. Then, “Assuredly you lie! Your pant cuffs aren’t damp!” She began reeling in the bicycle from across the moat.
“We rolled them up,” Max called back.
“No back talk, thou spleeny canker blossom! You shall all be punished severely! Meet me in the Great Hall. It’s the second room on the right up the first passage.” Then she hopped on the bicycle and flew across the moat and into her bedroom window.
The severe punishment was a repulsive concoction of peanut butter and marshmallow cream in a sandwich, set out on a slabby wooden table with benches beside it.
“Try it, you’ll hate it,” Haddie said.
They did, and they did. But they ate the sandwiches anyway, because they were all starving. Max said he liked it, but he was also staring at Haddie in the most ridiculous way so I doubt he was tasting his sandwich at all.
The Great Hall was about the size of a smallish living room, with coffered wood ceilings that were carved with scenes of knights on horseback fighting dragons and knights on horseback fighting each other and occasionally a knight lying dead on the ground with a sword sticking out of his suit of armour. The walls were full of mouldy mounted deer heads, and above a huge grandfather clock was a collection of engraved archery bows. Hanging all around the edges of the room were banners decorated with educational information, like the periodic chart of the element
s and place value mathematical charts, and a plant classification chart with mosses, ferns, and angiosperms. The Hardscrabbles imagined that the parents of the Dusty Old Children (that is what the Hardscrabbles began to call the Kneebone children, who did seem like long-gone relics) must have thought they were being very crafty, and I’m sure the Dusty Old Children resented it thoroughly. Even now, the room had a dreary, deserted feel to it—the sort of room that you peer into on the way to somewhere else.
“Have you been in that tower all day?” Lucia asked Haddie, her voice sounding gaggish from the peanut-marshmallow sludge that was clinging to the roof of her mouth.
“If I say yes, will you want to know why?” Haddie replied.
“Probably.”
Haddie lifted the baseball cap off her head. There was a pink impression low on her forehead where the cap’s adjustable strap had bit into her skin. She slapped the cap back on her head, bill forward, and rubbed her knuckles across the bottom of her chin, considering things.
“What do people usually do in a siege tower?” Haddie said finally.
“They watch the enemy for signs of weakness as the army prepares to storm the castle.” Max answered this so promptly it was as though he’d been waiting forever for someone to ask that very question.
“Give that man a Pixy Stix,” Haddie said.
“A what?” Lucia asked.
“Hold on.” She left then returned a moment later with a handful of colorful straws, one of which she threw at Max like a dart. He caught it in midair. That impressed Haddie and she tossed him another, just to see if he could do it again. He fumbled that one.
“So are you going to storm Kneebone Castle?” Lucia asked.
“Me? Oh, no. I’m just the brains of this operation. I’ll have my brave knights storm the castle for me.”
“But you don’t have any brave knights,” Max pointed out.
“A small glitch. Not to worry,” Haddie replied.
“So who’s the enemy?” Lucia asked as Max tore open one end of the straw, poured a blue powder in his hand, and smelled it. Chester walked across the table to sniff at it too, took a small lick, and sneezed.
“The enemy lives in Kneebone Castle, of course,” Haddie said, her voice taking on the tongue-rolling ye-and-thee-and-thou tone. “The scurvy fiend shall feel the wind of my arrows graze his cheek before the moon wanes full.”
“The moon waxes full,” Max corrected.
“Wanes.”
“Waxes.”
“Do you know what happened to Galileo when he said that the earth rotates around the sun?” Haddie asked him sternly.
“He was put under house arrest for the rest of his life,” Max said with perfect certainty.
“Really?” Haddie raised her eyebrows. “I just thought no one ever talked to him again.”
“What did he do to you? The enemy, I mean,” Lucia asked.
Haddie eyed her warily. She popped the last bit of sandwich in her mouth, then scraped a glob of marshmallow cream off her thumb with her teeth. “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”
“But we’ll only be here for a few days,” Lucia protested.
“I’m a fast learner,” Haddie said.
“Was it really dreadful?” Lucia pursued. She sniffed out a noble quest, with revenge at the center, and that was a subject worth pursuing.
“Let’s put it this way,” said Haddie. “I left an air-conditioned apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with a take-out Japanese noodle shop on the corner to come to Snoring-by-the-Sea for the summer.” Haddie looked around at the Hardscrabbles who were staring blankly at her. “So, yes, it was really dreadful.”
And her face was now pinched into an expression that left them in no doubt that it really was.
Max finished licking the blue stuff off his hand. He stared at the blue stain on his palm for a minute and then said, “Lucia thinks our mum is dead. I say she’s not.” He looked up at Haddie. “Who do you say is right?”
For an instant Haddie looked gravely alarmed. It was just an instant before the look vanished.
“What does your father say?” she asked, her voice pointedly nonchalant.
“He says she’s gone missing,” Max told her. “He says he’s quite sure we’ll find her someday, but in the meantime we need to carry on with our lives.”
“Carry on with your lives? Oh, good one, Casper!” Haddie snorted, then said, “Sorry. That just popped out.”
“Well, I think he’s right,” Lucia said staunchly. “We should carry on with our lives.”
“Of course you should,” Haddie said without any sincerity at all.
“Were you very close with her? What was she like?” Max asked Haddie. His voice was so keen it was nearly breathless.
“Tess and I . . .” Haddie took a deep breath and let it out. “We were like sisters.” She said no more, lost in her own thoughts. But then she realized that all the Hardscrabbles were staring at her, eagerly waiting, so she told them this:
“We lived down the road from each other, you know, back in the States, when we were kids. Tess was three years older but she was an only child so she settled for hanging around with me. She was . . .” She shook her head and her eyes drifted to the corner of the room, just as though Tess Hardscrabble were standing there listening. “Wherever Tess was, something interesting would happen. I think it was because she wasn’t afraid of anything, so the World just said, ‘All right, kid, what do you think of this?’ and ‘Well, if that was fun, how about this?’ Just like it was trying to impress her.
“The two of us used to talk all the time about what we were going to do with our lives. We had so many plans! We were going to explore live volcanoes and train elephants in Indonesia and live with the Inuit for a year and eat whale blubber, and oh, I can’t remember all the things we were going to do. People should have all their big adventures while they’re still under the age of fourteen. If you don’t, you start to lose your passion for big adventures. It just begins to fade away bit by bit and then you forget you ever wanted adventures in the first place . . . it’s criminal the way that happens.” She tore open a Pixy Stix and poured the green powder onto her plate, then drew in it with her pinky. The Hardscrabbles watched snakes and dancing figures and elephants appear on the plate.
“Then, one summer,” Haddie said, “Tess moved to England with her parents and everything interesting in the World went with her. I saw her years later, but by then it was too late. She was already . . .” Haddie studied the pictures on the plate.
“Already what?” Max asked.
Lucia could have kicked him. If he had just stayed quiet, Lucia was certain that Haddie would have kept on talking. Instead Haddie looked up at them, her eyes finally stopping on Otto.
“Well, you must remember your mother, Otto,” Haddie said. “You were old enough.”
Lucia and Max turned to Otto. He glared at Haddie and then lowered his chin, as though he were suddenly walking into a strong wind. Lucia watched his hands to see what he would say, but he had tucked them beneath his scarf.
“He doesn’t remember her at all,” Lucia finally answered for him.
“Really? How weird,” Haddie said, still watching Otto with interest. “Are you sure she’s not lurking somewhere”—Haddie reached across the table and touched the middle of Otto’s forehead with her finger—“somewhere in there?”
Otto drew back sharply.
“Well, enough lollygagging.” Haddie stood up and turned her baseball cap wrong side round again. “Off with ye! Go search for the secret passageway, like normal kids.”
“Is there really one?” Lucia asked.
“It said so in the ad, but I suspect they were lying. I haven’t been able to find it. If you can’t find it either, it will officially be a scam and I can ask for a partial refund. So don’t search too hard.” She stood up and tossed the rest of the Pixy Stix to Max. “I’m off to the siege tower again. If you chew on it, you’ll get a sugar clog.” This last part was sa
id to Max, who was watching Haddie strangely again while chewing on the end of the Pixy Stix contemplatively.
“She’s off her trolley,” Otto said when she was gone.
“Maybe,” Max said, working a clog of coagulated sugar out of the Pixy Stix. “But haven’t you noticed something else about her?”
And then they were right back at the conversation they’d started in the dungeon and had never finished.
“What?” Lucia asked.
Max tapped the Pixy Stix against his hand. “Well . . . haven’t you noticed that she looks an awful lot like someone?”
“Tell us already!” Lucia grabbed the Pixy Stix out of his hand.
“Haven’t you noticed that she looks exactly like Otto?” Max said, grabbing the Pixy Stix back.
Once it was said, Lucia realized that it was perfectly true. Looking at Otto, Lucia instantly saw the lines of Haddie’s face sketched within his own. The pointed cheekbones, the wide upper lip that was thicker than the lower, the high forehead.
“How funny,” she murmured.
Otto, however, did not find it funny. Not at all. Even Chester raised his head as though he could feel a tensing-up in Otto’s muscles.
“So we look alike,” Otto said. “She is our aunt, after all.”
“Great-aunt,” Max corrected. “If you believe her story.”
“You don’t?” Lucia asked him, surprised.
“No.”
There was a space of silence.
“Who is she then?” Lucia asked.
“I’m not sure,” Max said. “But I think she may be Mum.”
It was amazing how a person who was so clever about most things could also be so silly about others, thought Lucia. She looked at Otto and rolled her eyes, then waited for him to roll his back at her. But he didn’t.
Lucia turned back to Max and said, “Why would she call herself Haddie Piggit instead of Tess Hardscrabble then?”
“Haddie Piggit is Mum’s name,” Max said. “Theresa Haddie Piggit-Campbell. Tess for short, Haddie for middle and Piggit-Campbell is her maiden name. It says so right on our birth certificates.”
“Haddie is probably a family name,” Otto said.