The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “No, no. Outa the question!” insisted Hector Hoon, despite being outnumbered, despite not wanting to contradict the Queen’s cockamamie beliefs. “I’d never forgive myself if I loosed this fiend on Her Majesty. Would be like setting a hound on a infant! Shoot him, Sheriff! Shoot him in the head like the dog he is!”

  The Sheriff patted at his holster—then re-membered his gun had been confiscated at the station, and instructed the crowd in general to give it back. The crowd was too spellbound to oblige.

  “Nonsense,” replied the Queen sternly. Everett felt her hand enter the pocket of his trousers . . . “No, Ciss—!” . . . and fetch out the pearl-handled pistol. This she presented, handle first, to Cyril Crew. “Given these men seem fixed on killin’ you, sir, maybe you’d care to make your everlastin’ mark on history ’n’ shoot the Queen of England.” A smoldering building takes in one gigantic breath before it explodes into flame. The town took such a breath now.

  Eyes shut, swaying on his knees, Cyril cradled the pistol to his chest with hands that were shaking too much to use it, fingers too large to fit the trigger, in any case. She watched him then, with superhuman effort, pull together the scene inside his head, shut out the audience, disregard the heat of the stage lighting, and listen for his lines from the prompt corner.

  “I could not . . . ,” he began falteringly. “I could not shoot a fox that was stealing my chickens, ma’am. I’ve never fired a gun in anger in my life. I am a Quaker by upbringing and a Quaker by resolve and a craven coward by nature. But I would sooner die here like a dog in the street than take a life by violence myself.” And he offered the pistol back on the flat of his two hands. His brother took it instead, and they exchanged the courteous nod of two genteel strangers. The Queen graciously invited him to rise, but Cyril found his legs would unaccountably not hold him, and he fell against the American Ambassador, who caught him and held on until Cyril was on a steady footing.

  By now, if the Sheriff had moved to hang the prisoner or the Mayor to horsewhip him, the crowd would have shot or horsewhipped them both. Most were intrigued by the idea of phrenology, the rest with the charm of Cyril’s voice. The romance of an innocent man saved from the gallows by a Queen’s hand was already transforming itself into the happy workings of fate, into the Legend of Roper Junction.

  While discussing the transfer of the prisoner into English custody, Mayor Hoon demanded assurance from Everett that he would keep the Queen safe, come what might: “’Cause she’s one mighty fine lady you got there, and we’ve grown real fond of her.”

  Everett vowed on his life not to let Cyril Crew out of his sight until the felon had proved himself “as sound a man as my own brother.”

  Then the sun dipped below the housetops, and the royal entourage headed back to the station through the dusk. Actually it set off and had to back up again, to collect Queen Victoria. Everett bent his face so close that Cissy could feel his breath. “You did it. It’s done,” he whispered. “We can go now.”

  “Yeah, but can you steer me? Cain’t see nothing no more in this danged veil.”

  “I’d be proud to lend you my arm, ma’am. I’d be more than proud.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Homecoming Queen

  The first thing Everett did, as they boarded the train, was to pull down the blinds and put his own

  hat on his brother’s head.

  “Is Kookie aboard?” asked Cissy.

  “Sure am!” called Kookie from the carriage next door.

  “So! Let’s go home!”

  But the train stood obstinately still, and the crowd began to regroup. A quick check by Oskar revealed that the train engineer was not in his cab. Oskar came back holding the man’s denim jacket. “If he been washin’ teeth in whiskey ’n’ talking outa place . . . ,” he said, and did not need to finish. The engineer had been told to stay at his post, expressly to keep him from careless talk in the local saloon.

  “What to do, sir? Presently we will be overrun,” said Henry.

  “They keep trying the door!” piped Miss March in a terrified whisper, poking her head through from the second carriage. Everett Crew sat, one hand on his brother’s shoulder, one hand over his face, trying to think.

  “Everett and I stole a train once, didn’t we, sir!”

  The schoolmistress gave an involuntary gasp. “Habakkuk Warboys, you will come to nothing but a bad end!”

  “What, hanged, you mean?” said Everett sharply, and stood up, taking off his Prince Albert coat and putting on the sooty denim. “We did, Kooks, we did, though you were never on the footplate, I think. Now’s your chance. Come on, son.”

  The Queen’s adoring public had begun to venture off the platform onto the rails, onto the track side of the train. Some must have seen her American Ambassador and a redheaded boy run to the engine’s footplate and mount up. Everett slipped the hand brake and opened up the throttle. The jarring shock disturbed the crowd about as much as banging a table disturbs flies from a plate of meat. He slammed the engine into reverse.

  “How in tarnation did you get here, Kooks?” he said, as the boy flung coal into the furnace using his bare hands. (The shovel was too big for him to swing.) “I went to great pains to leave you behind, where you’d be safe.”

  “Caught the morning train like a good Christian. Miss May says punctual’s next to godly.”

  “Then remind me to buy you a gold pocket watch when I have the wherewithal.”

  “Why are we going backward?”

  “Because I have a yen to go home, don’t you?”

  “Not if we meet a train comin’ up behind, I don’t. This is the northbound track.”

  So Everett heaved the lever forward, and the train, with a massive jolt, hauled itself north, while Kookie hung off the whistle pull, and the royal train swore at a deafeningly high pitch. The errant engineer came out of the saloon at a run, felled a few passers-by like a skittle ball, and shoved his way to the front of the crowd, cursing. Seeing his train leaving without him, he found more speed than he had imagined possible in a man of fifty and managed to leap on board.

  They traveled north to the points at Connor Junction, where they were able to reverse the order of the train and mount the southbound—homebound—track. Cyril Crew was left to sleep, stretched out in the “royal” carriage, using the wadding out of Queen Victoria’s bosom for a pillow. Meanwhile, Kookie held court in the crowded second car, describing what a damn fine job he had made of hoodwinking Roper Junction’s entire population. He had to talk with his hands on his head, because Miss March was punishing him for saying “damn fine.”

  “What does an ambassador do, Mr. Crew?” murmured Cissy, pinned in tight between Everett and Benet.

  “Let me think. Oh yes. I believe, when the Queen’s away from home, he provides a lap for her to nap in.”

  So Cissy laid her head on his knees. “When I wake up, I won’t be Queen Victoria anymore, will I?”

  “No, child,” said Everett. “Someone much more wonderful.”

  Free at last of the veil and hat, her hair was darkly matted with sweat. “But I’ll still be an actress?”

  Everett was not sure what he was supposed to say. He exchanged glances with Benet, who was the only other person who could hear. “That’s in the blood, child. Like the dreaded Missouri sweating sickness. There’s probably a medicinal remedy for it. If it gets too much.” He could feel hot tears soaking the cloth of his trousers. “What did the telegram say, Cissy?”

  After a few moments she whispered: “Poppy’s dead.”

  Kookie rattled on, bright as magnesium ribbon: he was burning off the fear he had felt all day. Three fourths of the quartet plucked at three banjos. The train passed through two stations.

  “Hush up, loud boy,” Benet told Kookie. “Cecelia here is sleeping.”

  But she was not.

  “I wish the Bright Lights could come to Olive Town,” she whispered. “Give Poppy a send-off, like you done for Cole Blacker.” She got no respo
nse and felt bad. She should not have spoken. Mr. Crew had worries of his own. And remembering that reminded her of what horrors might lie in store when they finally got back to the mansion at Golden Bend. Those did not bear thinking about—any more than a boiler explosion or a runaway silo or a dead father.

  They rode through the night. As rail and river fell into step alongside each other, the royal train passed by the Sunshine Queen. Huddled against the canyon wall, pinioned on some submerged snag, one stack down, the hulk lay at such a tilt that one bull rail was underwater. The sun was just rising, kindling the windows of the mansion on the other bank, turning the canyon rose red. Everett stood at the train door, looking as if he might jump out, the sooner to reach the Captain’s mansion.

  As the miles piled up, separating Cyril from the horrors of Licorice and Roper County Jail, he filled out like a sail. His voice ripened into fruity urbanity. “Now and then, the trial judge would refer to a large book on his desk, to settle a point of law. When I saw it was Volume Two of a medical encyclopedia, I knew I was in the hands of American justice at its finest.”

  Everett, though, drooped like an empty sail. “How shall we get from the rail yard to the house?” he asked Henry more than once.

  Not knowing what time to expect the royal train, no Boisenberry was waiting at the sidings. But with ferocious determination, Henry raided the nearby livery yard and came up with a classic chaise-and-pair. With two passengers on each running board and Kookie hammocked in a fold of sunshade, the horses earned their sugar lumps toiling up to Golden Bend.

  Not a soul appeared as the wrought-iron gates swung open, or at the crunch of wheels on the gravel. “What day is it? Thursday? Thursday is ferreting-for-rabbit day,” said Henry, though his voice was tinged with disquiet.

  Under the weight of so many passengers, the wheels sank into the deep gravel of the driveway and stopped the carriage in its tracks. All but Cyril abandoned it as they would a burning ship and set off at a run—across the lawn, over the brick forecourt and up the shallow steps, through the pillared portico and across the skiddy marble floor of the hallway. The stairs, the endless carpeted stairs, sapped the energy out of their legs, but it was the bedroom door, the door to the white bedroom and the fear of what they might find beyond it, that brought them to a halt. Henry opened it at last, the only sound the panting of thirteen people who have run up five flights of stairs.

  The great white bed stood empty, its candlewick covers smooth as snow and pulled up tight over the pillows. A silence thick as milk curded around them.

  Farther down the corridor, Everett pushed open the next bedroom door and gave a sharp cry, as if someone had punched him. That room too was empty: immaculate and empty. He backed to the banister and called down the stairwell, “Lou? Loucien!”

  As they tumbled back down the stairs, they surprised the Thursday hunting expedition, every member of staff along with Chad, Boisenberry, and Medora, standing in the hall, a rabbit or a ferret cage dangling from each hand. Sheepish, caught in the act of breaking house rules, they hung their heads.

  “I am gone for twenty-four hours and you are using the front door!” Henry reproached them.

  “Slicha,” said the cook. “To come in the back way seems not so good, what with the shfanim.”

  The servants struggled out of their duster coats, torn between being improperly dressed and putting dead rabbits down on the marble floor. It was Cissy who noticed first, as their magpie-smart uniforms emerged. “Oh! Oh! Oh! They got no black armbands!”

  Out on the sun terrace, overlooking the knot gardens and the canyon rim, Loucien, Elder Slater, and Elijah Bouverie sat, eyes shut, faces turned upward to the warmth of the sun. She was in a borrowed nightdress and wrapper, Elijah in an exotic turban of bandage. The ferreting party had used the front doors sooner than disturb them. The drone of the electric generators had covered the sound of the chaise and the shouting. The dozers did not stir until Tibbie Boden came running through the house with a cage, calling out, “I done ferreting, Miss Loucien! I done ferreting!”

  “Well done, but you keep well clear of my little one, if you please. I’d like her daddy to meet her before she gets eat by some polecat.” Loucien yawned, made to get up, but thought better of it. “You put that demon creature back in the shed, and then dredge up what cooking I taught you in school, and help Cook make a rabbit pie or twelve. I divine we have company for dinner. Hello, Everett. You brought Cyril home to dine, by any chance?”

  Cyril Crew was still seated in the chaise, hands crossed on the top of a walking cane, as regal as the viceroy of India. His younger brother, calling from the steps of the house, looked adolescent by comparison. “It’s a girl, Cyril! I got me a daughter!”

  Cyril touched the brim of his borrowed hat. “How foresightful, dear boy. The company was in need of new blood. Do you think we may negotiate to pay her in rusks?”

  Though miracles grow thick on the ground along the Numchuck River, the accident had not suddenly restored Elijah to perfect, youthful genius. Being hit in the head by a piston rod rarely has that effect. But he knew himself to be Captain Bouverie of Golden Bend, and he knew himself to be at home, among friends. At the end of a half-forgotten voyage of a life, he had sailed safely back into harbor.

  He was thrilled and honored that his friends named the baby after him: Ellie. But he never fully realized how much he owed to his loyal staff, having no notion of the time he had been gone or the hardships his disappearance had caused them.

  Henry made sure it stayed that way.

  Mercifully, Elijah was still fit to sign checks, which made life vastly easier for the household. In commemoration, no one at Golden Bend ate rabbit for a year.

  It would be a while before Loucien was fit to travel, but with the Sunshine Queen a crumbling wreck, the Showboat Company also began to disintegrate and float apart. Max, lacking a plank, went back to his previous trade of gardening and got at job at the Blackers’ place. Their worship of money did not trouble him, since he could not understand a word they said. Medora and her Photopia headed for St. Louis on a timber barge. But quickest to leave were the children and their schoolmistress, forlornly hoping to reach Olive Town in time for Hulbert Sissney’s funeral. Chad Powers tagged along, for he could not quite get it out of his head that Oklahoma was his home. Besides, he could hardly build a prairie sailboat without returning to the prairies.

  Elijah waved them all good-bye from the steps of the house, a frail, snowy-haired man in an alpaca dressing gown and lambskin slippers, leaning on the arm of a butler who was sneezing discreetly into a handkerchief. The mansion’s whole magnificent facade flickered with black and white uniforms, as though magpies were perched on every windowsill.

  A sign of luck.

  George the barber-surgeon went with them only as far as Blowville Station. “I’m going back up to Roper Junction,” he said, to their astonishment.

  “But they’ll recognize you!” said Miss March. “They will string you . . . I mean, they will tar and feather you for deceiving them!”

  But George had been thinking things over. Not only did Roper Junction have no barber, it had just had its eyes opened to the wonders of phrenology. He wrinkled his nose. “No one looks at their barber, ma’am. If they do, they’ll say I bear a passing ’semblance to someone they seen once, and I’ll say, ‘Oh yeah?’ and they’ll say ‘Yeah!’ and tell me about it. I’ll get to hear the story of the Queen’s visit twelve times a week. Sometime soon, even I won’t know if I was there or not.” It was the most they had ever heard George say. “Saw the perfect place. Right over the jam shop. Perfect.” And he stropped his razor absentmindedly on the tail of his leather belt.

  Cissy felt as small as a pea fallen out of the pod. From that packed midnight bedroom, with the maids, the music, the Bright Lights, she had shrunk back down to Cissy Sissney, one of three children in the care of their schoolmistress during an outbreak of diphtheria. Four changes of train distanced, by degrees, the heights and depths,
the shoals and shimmer of the Numchuck River. With every tedious jolting mile it became less real, less part of the real Cissy Sissney. A traveler’s tale.

  “If Mr. and Mrs. Crew come, Cecelia, they come,” said Miss May March, voice as sharp as chalk on slate. “If not, well, we have at least survived the epidemic better than some. We must give thanks.”

  “I got the sweating sickness!” said Tibbie, as if applying for permission not to give thanks. Miss May punished her for it with a dose of quinine. Time was winding backward. Miss May March was turning back into the snippy, unfriendly tyrant of the schoolroom.

  “They’ll come,” said Cissy. “When they can. Mr. Crew said.”

  “Men,” said Miss March brusquely. “As my mother says: when men promise something, even they don’t know if they mean it.”

  The interminable prairies rolled out now on either side of the train, just as they had the day Cissy arrived in Olive Town as a settler. No house, no town, just a small patch of land (Claim Nos. 3048—9) and a big dream. Her father had been able to picture the whole thing: banks and factories and homes. And now the bank and umbrella factory and homes existed—there they were, rising out of the prairie—but not Poppy Sissney himself.

  After the train pulled in, Kookie ran ahead, to the telegraph office, to the open arms of his huge family. The others trailed up Main Street, pausing only for Tibbie to be sick.

  “I didn’t mean to get off here,” said Chad Powers vaguely. “Meant to stay on to get off at Guthrie. Force of habit, I guess.”

  For Cissy, the space where the grocery store had stood had become a yawning chasm waiting to swallow her up. All her instincts told her to turn and run—not go closer—not to look. But the people of Olive Town had a make-do-and-mend philosophy. Why part with a perfectly good shirt when the hole in it can be patched? The hole in Main Street had been patched. Timber framing and a roof were already in place, and clapboard walls had risen high enough to take a door, the shop door. Someone had even reattached the old shop bell to the back of the door so that it jingled when Cissy pushed on it and stepped inside.