by A. M. Morgen
Ada blew air into her cheeks and threw her hands in the air. “Fine! What do I know? I’m only your best friend in the whole world.” She marched over to George and put the piece of yellowed paper into his palm. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
George unfolded the brittle parchment.
It was a letter worn with age, its middle deeply creased from being opened and closed many times. The bottom right corner was singed brown. George’s skin prickled with nerves as his eyes scanned the words.
Dear George,
Should I call you Lord of Devonshire? I think not. Alas, clearly you think yourself deserving of the title. You have stolen everything from me: my house, my possessions, my family. My dearest treasure.
Every time you think of me, I hope you burn with disgrace. No legacy is so rich as honesty; therefore, your legacy will be shameful poverty, as it was always meant to be. My prison is made of iron and stone; yours is all around you.
I curse your true name, 1st Lord of Devonshire.
For now, do not fear. I’ll keep your secret—until I can have my revenge.
Signed, truthfully,
There was no signature. Nobody had signed it.
At first, George thought the note was addressed to him, but it was addressed to his grandfather, with whom he shared a name. Secret. Burn with disgrace. You have stolen everything from me. The words made bile rise in his throat.
Whoever had written them was very, very angry at his grandfather.
George closed the letter carefully, then slipped it inside Useful Needlework and gently closed the cover.
“Are you all right, George?” Ada asked softly.
George smiled. His mind had exploded into a whirlwind as he read the nasty words in the letter, but now it had settled down into perfect serenity. “Of course I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be all right?”
Ada blinked rapidly. “Are you sure? Aren’t you—I mean, didn’t you read the letter? It’s addressed to your grandfather.…”
George rapped his knuckle against the book’s cover. “It’s all part of the puzzle my grandfather left behind. Perhaps he was working on it when he suddenly passed away and didn’t have the chance to hide it properly. You see, he never made anything simple. Simple doesn’t build character, as he always said.”
Ada crossed her arms. “Why would he write a letter like that to himself? If you add this piece of evidence to what we know about the map and what is happening across the street, a reasonable person might conclude that your grandfather stole something very valuable. Look, I have a theory of my own.” She tried to wrest Useful Needlework away from him, but he dodged her. Sighing, she said, “That letter specifically mentioned he stole a house and a treasure. And then it mentioned revenge. The Society has already tried to take your treasure map, and we just saw that the owner of No. 10 is intending to attach it to yours. Which means that the Society is probably working for whomever those things originally belonged to—”
“Don’t be absurd! My grandfather never stole anything in his life. He certainly didn’t steal a house or possessions or any dearest treasure,” George said ruefully.
Ada sighed. “I knew you’d act like this. Why do you think I didn’t want to tell you about this letter? If you hadn’t knocked over Useful Needlework, you never would have known. Let’s just pretend you don’t have the worst luck in the world and forget all about it.”
George’s mouth twitched. “This letter has nothing to do with our new neighbor or my luck, you’ll see. There’s another explanation. I’ll go to the registry office tomorrow and prove it.”
Ada stepped over the mess on her floor, and soon her cool hand fluttered against his cheek. “You’re in shock.”
George backed out of her room into the hallway, narrowly avoiding tripping again. “I’m not in shock. I feel fine. Stop looking at me like that.”
“Your face is pale, and you’re cool to the touch. The same thing happened to me when I found out my father was really, truly dead. Come back in and sit down. You could faint at any moment.”
George took a deep breath to steady his voice. “Stop it. I’m not going to faint. I’m brave now, don’t you remember? And I’m sorry that your father lied to you and abandoned you, but this is an entirely different situation. I know who my grandfather was, and nothing you or anyone else says will ever change that. He was a hero, plain and simple. He was the 1st Lord of Devonshire. His legacy is not shameful poverty.”
Ada frowned. “Now, George,” she said sternly. “I know you loved your grandfather, but you might have to accept—”
“Accept what? Accept that everything I know about my grandfather is a lie? That he was a common thief, no better than the Society?” George squeezed the book in his hand until his knuckles were white. “I’ll admit that strange things are happening, but they’ve got nothing to do with the sort of person my grandfather was.”
“George, I’m only trying to help—”
“You think you know everything, Ada Byron, but you don’t. You made up stories about your own family because you couldn’t accept that your father was a scoundrel and a leech and he treated you terribly. That’s just not true of my grandfather. My stories aren’t made up.”
Ada’s lip quivered. Regret filled his chest—he’d only meant that Ada’s father was wrong and that she deserved a far better one than a scoundrel like him. “Ada…”
But it was too late. Two pearl-shaped tears appeared in the corners of Ada’s eyes. She wiped them away furiously as George watched, stunned that his words had hurt her. Suddenly, the pain in her face transformed to anger. “Of course you don’t believe that anything could tarnish the precious Devonshire name. You’re as stubborn as an ox and just as thickheaded. Get out of my house. And don’t come looking for my help when you return to your senses.”
Before he could stop her, Ada stepped back into her bedroom and slammed the door behind her, leaving George with nowhere to go but home.
Chapter Four
The sky opened and pelted George with raindrops as he slumped across Dorset Square to his house. If it was possible, the gap between No. 8 and No. 10 seemed to have narrowed. Could the Society invent a house that moved? George wiped his feet on his doormat, imagining No. 10 crawling across the grass on hundreds of tiny mechanical legs like a centipede. He glanced back at Ada’s window, but she had closed her curtains.
You don’t know everything, Ada Byron, George thought grumpily. His father had told him that he had porridge for brains on many occasions, but George was no longer the scared boy his father had once known. He was a hero now. He had found the Star of Victory. He was an adventurer who flew through the skies in a mechanical bird. He was a business owner with royal clients. He could solve his grandfather’s puzzles.
It was true that he’d done those things with Ada’s help, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do other things without her. At the very least, he could try.
George stomped to his desk in the library, where Ada had found him earlier that evening. He slammed the slip of yellow paper onto the polished wood in front of him, determined to prove Ada wrong. She’d missed something about the letter. It was a code or a cipher. He lit a candle and got to studying it. It had 108 words, four things his grandfather was supposed to have stolen, eight letters in the word treasure. But none of the numbers made any sense. He could think of a thousand rational explanations for how that letter had come to be hidden in one of his grandfather’s books—and nine hundred and ninety-nine of those explanations did not involve his grandfather stealing a house or a family or a treasure and lying about it to his grandson.
The Star of Victory, his grandfather’s lost treasure, was perched on the corner of his desk, sparkling in the candlelight. George picked it up using only the tips of his fingers so as not to smudge the gleaming surface, which he polished every day. The Star had been created from two gems that fit together: an egg-shaped blue sapphire set inside a spray of silver, blade-shaped rods. In fact, what George had learne
d was that the Star itself was not the treasure, but rather another clue in a larger mystery.
When he looked through the Star at the tiny piece of the map he still had, the ink on the page seemed to stretch and lift, rising up into the air like a mountain or an island. The Star was a lens that was supposed to help him decode something hidden in his grandfather’s map.
But he still didn’t know what.
That was the wonderful part of his grandfather’s puzzles. One prize led to another, like a trail of discovery. For example, when George originally set out to find the Star of Victory, he had not only returned home with the Star, but also with happiness and fortune and friends.
He had doubted his grandfather once before when they were searching for the Star of Victory, and it had been a mistake. He wasn’t going to doubt him ever again.
His grandfather was not a bad person.
He had never stolen this house or anything from someone else.
The house belonged to the 1st Lord of Devonshire, fair and square. And now it belonged to George.
Tap. Tap. Outside, something was striking a sharp, rhythmic beat. Tap. Tap. It sounded like a woodpecker or Ada’s mechanical bird. George jumped to his feet and rushed to the window, hoping to find his friend’s face beaming back at him. Across the square, Ada’s curtains were still shut tight—but there was a flickering glow reflecting off the cobblestones in front of No. 10.
George bumped his forehead against the windowpane in shock. Somewhere inside the house next door, a candle was burning.
George looked at the portrait of his grandfather that hung over his desk. The stern, loving gaze gave George courage. He pulled on his inherited sailing jacket and marched over to No. 10.
The sky was dark and the ground was slick from the rain. His gut kicked. His heart seemed to beat the words turn around, turn around, turn around. But the mysterious house drew George in like iron to a magnet.
He approached the side opening they had discovered earlier. The sheet of tin was still propped open, and after George pulled himself up through the opening in the wall, he tiptoed down the short hallway into the strange, open room for the second time that night. Someone had placed candles on the windowsills and a lantern on the unfinished fireplace mantel. Its halo of light illuminated a painting hanging above the fireplace that hadn’t been there earlier.
George drew closer. The painting was a portrait of a young boy and girl holding hands on a windswept seashore. The children must have been brother and sister, because they bore a striking resemblance to each other: smooth black hair, arched brows, and skeptical expressions adorned both pale faces, which were quite round but tapered to a pointed chin. The boy’s buckled shoes and knee-length pants were decades out of fashion, but the paint was as crisp and vibrant as the rich colors Oscar mixed on his palette. The blues were particularly brilliant, none more so than a spot of blue in the girl’s hand near the center of the painting.
George stepped into the circle of the lantern’s light to see what she was holding—and gasped. It was a gem that was as blue as the sky, as bright as the sun, and as radiant as the stars.
The girl in the painting was holding the Star of Victory. The very same treasure that sat on his desk in No. 8.
“See anything familiar?” a voice boomed from behind George.
George spun around. He pressed himself against the fireplace to hide. In the far corner of the room, beneath the second-floor balcony, a man was hovering in midair in the darkness. The man took a step forward and George realized he was not hovering—he was just impossibly tall, with a long black cloak that hid his ankles and feet. His neatly trimmed white hair nearly scraped the ceiling, and his dark cloak made his body seem to melt into the shadows.
George knew he should say something brave, but all he managed was “You—you stole Patty’s arm.”
The man took another step toward George on his tremendously long legs, crossing the vast room in two strides. Before George could dodge him, the tall man whipped a long, black walking stick from beneath his black coat and banged it into George’s knees, splaying him out on the cold marble floor like a rag doll.
“You haven’t answered my question, George,” the tall man said. “Do you see anything familiar in that painting?”
George staggered to his feet, confused tears stinging his eyes. The man knew his name. How did the man know his name? “I see the Star of Victory,” he mumbled.
“I can’t hear you all the way down there. Speak up, boy,” the tall man said, cupping his hand to his ear.
George cleared his throat. His confusion was heating up into a blazing fire of irritation. This was the man who was trying to take his house. “You heard me. If you know who I am, then you already know that’s the Star of Victory. It was my grandfather’s treasure, and I found it.”
The tall man threw his head back and laughed. His silver hair gleamed in the lantern light. “Ha! It’s a sentimental trinket. Nothing more. If you think that treasure is what it appears to be, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed when you learn the truth,” he said, drawing out the word greedily.
George’s cheeks burned. “Why would I believe a word you say?”
The tall man looked deeply offended by the question. “Because I’m the smartest man you’ll ever meet. And the tallest and the most powerful. I’ve been out of prison less then a month, and look what I’ve been able to accomplish. Who else could build something this quickly? I didn’t even have to go inside your house to line everything up perfectly to connect it. Aren’t you impressed?”
Though George’s mind spun, his anger focused his thoughts onto the single task of defending his home. “I don’t care how smart or tall you are. I’m the 3rd Lord of Devonshire, heir to my grandfather’s estate. The Star of Victory is mine. No. 8 is mine. You’re just jealous of what I have.”
“Jealous?” The tall man gripped his walking stick tightly. The veins on his forehead bulged, while his face flashed a dark shade of red. “The house is not yours. It didn’t belong to your grandfather. Nothing belongs to him. He stole it all.”
“Oh, and I suppose you think it belongs to you instead because you happen to have a painting of a famous treasure that now belongs to me?” George countered. “How very convenient for you to show up out of the blue and take it all for yourself. What gives you the right to say that? Who are you?”
The tall man’s lips arched into a wicked smile. “I go by many names. Das Niemand. Signore Nessuno. There are some who call me Don Jefe. Since you asked, I prefer to be called Don Nadie. It reminds me of my favorite poem, Don Juan. But in all languages, I am a Nobody.”
An icy jolt of terror stiffened George’s spine. His worst fear was coming true. He was alone. Defenseless. His enemy was going to steal not only his family legacy, but his life as well. “You’re part of the Society of Nobodies. They sent you here to kill me.”
A low chuckle bubbled up from the man’s throat. “They don’t send me anywhere. I send them.” The man made a casual wave of his hand. “I sent them to your house. I sent them to Miss Ada Byron’s house. I’ve sent them to other scientists’ houses. To Geneva. To Venice. Even to Spain to follow a certain policeman to reclaim a map that’s rightfully mine. Don’t look so scared. If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already.”
George swallowed the fear tickling his tongue. “You can’t have my house. And you can’t have my map.”
Don Nadie leaned far over, until he was so close to George that he could reach out and strike him if he chose. His dark eyes glinted in the candlelight. “And what are you going to do about it?”
“I—I’ll get the map first,” George mustered, trying to sound brave even though he felt anything but.
The man called Don Nadie sighed; then another wicked smile curled across his face. “If you must.”
George thought that now would be a very good time for Ada to come swooping in to provide a distraction so that he could leave. He cast a desperate glance at the windows, b
ut saw only the reflection of a candle sitting on the sill. Next to the candle were stacks of cream-colored paper and golden sticks of sealing wax. George’s eyes caught on a familiar name printed at the top of the paper. “C.R.U.M.P.E.T.S.? Why do you have…”
But before George could finish his question, his own mind supplied the answer. Memories of their beach battle against the Nobodies flashed in front of his eyes. The Society had a legion of horrible machines. Airships that hid within clouds. Mechanical bats that sliced through wood. Metal fish with sword-sharp fins that could hold a battalion of soldiers inside their bellies. Inventions, Ada said, that the Society had stolen from the world’s greatest scientists.…“You sent these invitations out? You organized C.R.U.M.P.E.T.S.?”
Looming above George, Don Nadie howled with laughter. “I will be a spider and let my prey come to me, just as you did. You walked right into my web, and you are stuck there, even though you don’t realize it. Just like those scientists coming to C.R.U.M.P.E.T.S.”
He darted his walking stick over George’s shoulder, but instead of striking him, he pressed a button hidden on the fireplace behind him. With a sickening clang, iron bars slid over the windows. Before George could scream, Don Nadie pressed the button again, letting the bars up. “An impressive trap, is it not? I’ll use their inventions to create the greatest weapons the world has ever seen. Nothing will be able to stop me from reclaiming what’s rightfully mine.”
“You’re…” Absurd. An unpleasant memory popped into his head—he’d called Ada absurd when she first told him about the Society of Nobodies, on the very first day they met, when she thought it was called the Organization. Her words came back to him clearly now, as if she’d just spoken them into his ear. The Organization will eat at the foundations of society like termites until the whole kingdom crumbles to dust.
George cast another desperate glance out the window, hoping to see Ada on the other side of the glass. He wished he could fight this man, but he was too tall and George would only get tripped by his walking stick again. George’s words would have to be braver than his actions. “We stopped you once. We’ll stop you again. My friend Ada knows all about C.R.U.M.P.E.T.S.”