Brave Warrior

by Ann Hood

  Maisie did not want to ask Great-Uncle Thorne. In fact, she didn’t want to involve him at all. Finding the writing in that trunk had been just the thing to bring Felix back into her orbit. He was finally paying attention to her again. Once they told someone else, she would become the third wheel again. And Maisie was sick of being the third wheel.

  “I don’t know,” she said, dipping a fry into mayonnaise, which Cook approved of; apparently everyone in France dipped their frites in mayo. “I think we can solve this if we just stick to it.”

  Felix looked doubtful.

  “Maybe we’re missing something,” Maisie said.

  “Obviously,” Felix said with a sigh.

  He chewed the eraser of his pencil, an old habit that he’d mostly lost. It made Maisie feel nostalgic watching him. She remembered when all the pencils in his pencil box had gnawed bottoms. Their second-grade teacher, Miss Lupa, had put Tabasco on his pencils, and when their father found out, he’d gone to the school and demanded she be fired. Of course she wasn’t. But Maisie and Felix had enjoyed the drama of their burly father in his paint-splattered clothes defending Felix’s right to chew his pencils.

  “What are you smiling about?” Felix asked.

  “Miss Lupa,” Maisie said.

  “The pencils,” Felix said, nodding.

  “Remember when Dad said, ‘Who’s named Lupa anyway? It means wolf!’”

  Felix walked over to the giant stainless-steel refrigerator and peered inside.

  “There’s chocolate pudding,” he reported.

  “Yum,” Maisie said happily.

  “Except, of course, Cook calls it pot au chocolat,” Felix said as he brought two ramekins of pudding and two spoons to the table.

  “She has a French name for everything,” Maisie said.

  “Great-Uncle Thorne does it, too,” she added. She took a taste of the thick chocolate pudding. “Mmmm,” she said. “Heavenly.”

  “And Great-Aunt Maisie. The whole lot of them throw French words into everything they say.”

  “Bon appétit!” Maisie said, imitating the way Great-Aunt Maisie used to speak.

  “À demain!” Felix said with a giggle.

  “Pourquoi!” Maisie said.

  “Mon dieu!” Felix said.

  Maisie looked at her brother.

  “Elm Medona,” she said.

  “That’s not French,” Felix said.

  “Maybe,” Maisie said, studying the anagrams she’d written.

  “What are you thinking?” Felix asked.

  He looked down at his own anagrams. None of them made any sense.

  “Wait a minute. Do you think Elm Medona is an anagram for a French word?” he asked suddenly.

  “Well,” Maisie said, “it sure isn’t an anagram for an English one.”

  Felix seemed to be concentrating really hard on something.

  “What?” Maisie asked impatiently.

  “I know you won’t want to do it,” he said.

  “Spit it out already,” Maisie said.

  “Avery Mason speaks fluent French,” Felix said. “She went to a French American school until last year.”

  “No,” Maisie said.

  “I told you that you wouldn’t want to do it. Even though she might be able to help us.”

  “Well,” Maisie said, considering.

  “All we have to do is have her look at the trunk.”

  “Well,” Maisie said again.

  “Or our lists,” Felix offered. “We could go to her house right now. It’ll take an hour, tops.”

  When Maisie didn’t say anything, Felix said, “Or I could go by myself.”

  “No!” Maisie said quickly.

  She was not about to lose Felix again so soon after she’d gotten him back.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said reluctantly, because what else could she say?

  Despite their mother’s insistence that they never ask Charles the chauffeur to drive them anywhere, they had both readily decided that since their mother was out on a date with her boyfriend, they could do whatever they wanted. Maisie enjoyed pushing the button that beckoned Charles to the mansion. And she liked how quickly he responded, walking into the foyer already dressed in his black chauffeur uniform with his cap pulled low on his forehead.

  “Miss Robbins?” he said, as cool and calm as if she beckoned him every day.

  “We need to go somewhere,” Maisie said.

  “Yes, Miss,” Charles answered.

  Felix gave him the address, and in no time they were sitting in the backseat of the black limousine, cruising down Bellevue Avenue, grinning at each other.

  Avery Mason lived in a big, sprawling house that sat on a long spit of land that stretched out into the ocean.

  “Creepy,” Maisie pronounced when they arrived.

  “Wait here for us, please,” Felix said as he got out of the limo.

  “Yes, Master Robbins,” Charles said.

  “He’s like a robot,” Felix whispered to Maisie on their way to the front door.

  “He’s just a professional, that’s all,” Maisie said, as if she knew all there was to know about chauffeurs.

  Avery opened the door before they even rang the bell.

  “What’s this French emergency?” she asked, letting them inside.

  Her house was the complete opposite of Elm Medona—modern, all glass and sharp angles, open spaces, and cathedral ceilings.

  “We’re playing this…um…game,” Felix said. “And we need to find anagrams.”

  “That’s when you reorder letters to make a new word or phrase,” Maisie explained.

  Avery looked at her like she was a total moron. “I know what an anagram is,” Avery said, tossing her beautiful hair.

  “But we think this one is in French,” Felix said. “And you are fluent in French.”

  “Mais oui,” Avery said perfectly.

  She led them into a large room with one entire wall made of glass that overlooked the water. Waves crashed onto the rocks below and an almost full moon hung above them. All the furniture was white, which made Maisie uncomfortable, like she was going to get it dirty somehow.

  Once they’d settled onto separate white chairs, Felix handed Avery their lists.

  “The anagram is for Elm Medona?” Avery said.

  Felix nodded.

  “What kind of game is this?” Avery asked.

  But she went to work right away, moving her lips as she read to herself.

  “I can’t really find one,” she said after a long time.

  Maisie sighed with disappointment.

  “That’s okay,” Felix said. “Thanks for trying.”

  “Anything for you, F,” Avery said.

  F? Maisie thought grumpily.

  Felix grinned. “I appreciate it, A.”

  “Oh, please,” Maisie muttered as the two of them giggled together.

  Avery led them back to the front door, where she handed Felix the papers.

  “You know what’s funny?” she said when they stepped outside. “One of the anagrams is lame demon.”

  “I found that one,” Maisie said.

  “Le diable boiteux,” Avery said in perfectly accented French.

  “What’s funny about a lame demon?” Felix asked.

  “Well, not funny really, but curious. You know, it’s from that French book,” Avery said.

  “We don’t know,” Maisie said. Here was Avery, bragging as usual. Standing there in her glass house with her beautiful hair and some kind of classical music playing in another room and the waves crashing dramatically like she lived on a movie set.

  “Paris Before Man? By Pierre Boitard?” Avery was saying.

  Felix shook his head and shrugged helplessly.

  “It’s about time travel,” Avery said.

  Felix and Maisie looked at each other.

  In the background, like they really were in a movie, the music hit a crescendo.

  “Lame demon,” Felix said softly.

  “
An anagram for Elm Medona,” Maisie said just as softly.

  Just then, the lights in Avery’s house blinked once. Twice. Then they went out, leaving the three of them standing in total darkness. Avery gasped. But Maisie reached out into the black, found her brother’s hand, and squeezed it. To her great relief and delight, Felix squeezed back.

  “Isn’t it weird that the lights went out before the storm arrived?” Maisie said as Charles drove them through the dark streets back to Elm Medona.

  Felix squinted out at the blackness. He could not find a single light anywhere. It looked as if all of Newport had lost electricity. Rain pelted the windshield, and the wind blew so hard that he could actually feel it tugging on the limousine. Already branches had been ripped from trees and were being tossed around in the streets.

  “Lame demon,” Maisie said, and rested her head back against the long seat.

  Slowly they drove along Bellevue Avenue, each mansion as dark as the next. They looked like museums, Felix thought as he stared out the window. He supposed in a way they were museums of the Gilded Age. Of a long-ago time. A shiver ran through him as he thought of all the people who had built them and held parties and danced in the fancy ballrooms. Not many of them were still lived in.

  The car turned up the long driveway to Elm Medona, which loomed ahead of them.

  Felix blinked.

  “Look,” he said, pointing out the window.

  Maisie leaned over to see what he was pointing at.

  Somewhere upstairs, one light shone. All around them, Newport was in darkness. In fact, Elm Medona was dark, too. Except one small light.

  “Is that in Samuel Dormitorio?” Maisie asked.

  In his mind’s eye, Felix pictured the layout of the second floor, imagining each room.

  “No,” he said.

  The limo was in the circular driveway now, its tires splashing through puddles as it moved toward the entrance.

  “Ariane’s Bedroom?” Maisie asked, craning her neck to better see.

  “No, that’s on the other side,” Felix said.

  They had stopped. Charles stepped out into the rain and opened the door for them to exit. He held an enormous black umbrella for them to step under, and Maisie and Felix huddled beneath it, running inside.

  The staff had lit giant pillar candles everywhere. They flickered and sent long shadows across the floors and walls.

  Slowly, Maisie and Felix made their way upstairs. The air smelled of wax and some spicy scent.

  “This must be what it was like here before they got electricity,” Maisie said, her voice hushed.

  Felix could only nod. He didn’t like this storm, and he didn’t like the way the shadows moved.

  And he didn’t like that now that they were upstairs, he couldn’t see a single light on.

  The door to the Aviatrix Room flew open and in the doorway stood their mother, her hair loose, her nightgown glowing eerily in the candlelight.

  “Were you two out in this?” she said, her eyes blazing.

  “When did you get home?” Felix asked.

  “It’s a genuine nor’easter out there,” their mother said. “Came out of nowhere and it’s wreaking havoc all over. Bruce and I were having a lovely dinner on Thames Street, and they made us evacuate.”

  At the sound of the name Bruce, Maisie decided to stomp off to her own room.

  “Be careful of the candles,” her mother called after her.

  Felix looked at his mother. She was pretty in the candlelight, which made her face glow and soften.

  “Were you two out somewhere?” she asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “You’re wet,” she said.

  Felix looked down at his wet clothes.

  “We stepped outside to see if anybody else had electricity,” he lied.

  His mother kept staring at him for a long minute. Then she shook her head and turned to go back in her room.

  “Mom?” Felix asked.

  She paused.

  “Is Bruce Fishbaum still your boyfriend?”

  “Yes,” she said gently.

  Felix sighed, a long, sad one. Then he followed the path the candles lit for him back to his room.

  Even though the next morning arrived sunny and bright, school was cancelled. Debris littered the streets of Newport, and two-thirds of the city still didn’t have electricity. Felix and Maisie sat in the Dining Room eating croissants and trying to figure out what to do with their freedom.

  “Maybe we could take a little trip,” Maisie said, her eyes sparkling. She spread some strawberry jam on her croissant and took a big, sweet bite.

  At first Felix didn’t know what she meant. He was too busy separating the flaky layers of the pastry and eating each thin one before moving on to the next.

  “Lame demon,” Maisie said.

  “No,” Felix said when he realized his sister wanted to go into The Treasure Chest.

  “Wasn’t Phinneas Pickworth clever?” Maisie said as if Felix hadn’t spoken. “Not just an anagram but an anagram from a French book about time travel. Anyone could figure it out, really.”

  “We didn’t,” Felix grumbled. “Avery Mason did.”

  Maisie spread extra jam on her next piece of croissant, as if that could take away the bad taste in her mouth for all things Avery Mason. “She’s a snob.”

  “She helped us,” Felix reminded his sister.

  “Inadvertently,” Maisie said, happy to use both an adverb and a vocabulary word from last week’s list.

  “Don’t those look good?” their mother purred as she came into the Dining Room.

  Great-Uncle Thorne had decided that they absolutely had to stop eating in the Kitchen. “Pickworths don’t dine in the basement!” he’d roared earlier that morning. Cook had scurried to move breakfast upstairs, setting up everything on the sideboard, which was really just a long table against the far wall.

  “And isn’t it nice to have everything laid out like this?” she added as she floated over to the sideboard and poured a cup of coffee from a silver pot with two interlocking Ps etched into it.

  “Oh, cubes of sugar!” she said, as if cubes of sugar were a marvel.

  When she took a seat across from Maisie, Maisie saw that her mother was dressed for work. She had on a khaki-colored suit with a faint stain on the jacket lapel.

  “Mom,” Felix said, “Newport is basically closed.”

  “Not Fishbaum and Fishbaum,” she said in her new, happy voice. She picked at some fresh fruit, all of it cut into exactly equal-size pieces. “Mmmm. How did Cook find such delicious strawberries in March?”

  “I had them flown in from Guatemala,” Great-Uncle Thorne roared. “Pickworths do not eat flaccid fruit.”

  “They are delicious,” their mother said dreamily. Then, “Well, I’ve got to get to the office.”

  She had on lipstick and some kind of blush that made it look like she had a slight tan. Maisie studied her more closely. Her mother actually kind of sparkled.

  The three of them watched her drift out of the room.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Great-Uncle Thorne asked Felix and Maisie.

  “She has a boyfriend,” Felix said.

  “Do you mean she’s in love?” Great-Uncle Thorne said, his impressively voluminous eyebrows waggling.

  “No!” Maisie said.

  “Maybe,” Felix admitted.

  “A peculiar state,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, cutting his croque-monsieur in the unusual way he always cut things: Fork in his left hand, knife in his right, he cut and took a bite, cut and took a bite, never putting the knife down.

  “Can’t say that I recommend it,” he continued between bites. “Look what it did to my poor, foolish sister.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” Felix ventured.

  “Of course I’ve been in love,” Great-Uncle Thorne bellowed. “But I didn’t let it get the best of me like that nitwit sister of mine.”

  “Who was
she?” Felix asked.

  “My sister? Why, you nincompoop, your great-aunt Maisie!”

  “No, no,” Felix said. “Who were you in love with?”

  Great-Uncle Thorne’s face softened. He put down his fork and knife and stared at some far-off place that neither Felix nor Maisie could see.

  “Penelope Merriweather,” he said finally. “Mon amour.” He shook his head and resumed eating.

  “What happened to her?” Felix dared to ask.

  “Interesting story,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “I assumed she was dead. After all, she’d be ancient by now. But at your great-aunt Maisie’s…” He faltered for an instant, then cleared his throat and continued. “At her funeral, the Merriweathers’ footman handed me a calling card from none other than Penelope herself. Alive and well, after all.”

  “What’s a calling card?” Maisie asked.

  “One more lost piece of civilization, my dear niece,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, shaking his head sadly. “Everyone used to have them. And your footman would bring your calling card to the person with whom you wished to visit, and they would send their reply back.”

  “So Penelope Merriweather wanted to visit you?” Felix asked, tickled at the idea of meeting the woman Great-Uncle Thorne had loved.

  “Indeed,” Great-Uncle Thorne answered.

  The clocks in Elm Medona chimed nine o’clock with their various bells, bongs, and tunes.

  “In fact,” he added with a grin, “she should arrive just about now.”

  Aiofe, the maid, hurried into the Dining Room, looking quite upset. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were wide.

  “Mr. Pickworth,” she began. “There’s…well…she…I mean…”

  “Spit it out, you ninny!”

  “I…”

  But Aiofe didn’t have to say anything more. A strange shuffling sound came from outside the Dining Room. They all stopped eating to listen as it grew slowly, slowly closer.