by Ann Hood
A butler opened the enormous front doors of Elm Medona, and Maisie and Felix walked inside. But Felix paused in the doorway and spun around quickly, as if he would find someone standing there. But all he found were the towering elms and the low, almost eerie whistle of the wind.
“There’s so much to be done!” Great-Uncle Thorne said impatiently as soon as Maisie and Felix got home.
He had been pacing in the foyer ever since three fifteen, when he had expected them to return. It was now almost six.
“Your mother’s going to walk in the door any minute, and then we’ll have to have dinner, creating yet another delay in opening the egg. And you two lallygaggers don’t show up for three hours!” he continued.
“We’ve been studying Imperial Russia,” Maisie told him, which was, in fact, mostly true.
Felix smiled at his sister’s excuse. “Preparing,” Felix added.
“You always tell us to prepare, don’t you?” Maisie asked sweetly.
Great-Uncle Thorne glared at her from beneath his voluminous eyebrows.
Aiofe appeared in the foyer, looking confused. Her black-and-white maid’s uniform, complete with the odd poufy bonnet she wore, seemed hastily put on, a bit lopsided and crooked.
“I thought Maisie and Felix were going to be home hours ago,” Aiofe explained. “I had their snacks ready at three thirty, but now . . . well . . . the staff ate them.”
“That’s all right,” Felix told her. “We’ve had a lot to eat this afternoon.”
“Blini and pirozhki,” Maisie said to Great-Uncle Thorne, who glared harder.
“So, I’m excused?” Aiofe asked hesitantly.
“Yes! Go!” Great-Uncle Thorne thundered.
As Aiofe scurried off, Great-Uncle Thorne raised his eyes to the ceiling and groaned, “I’m surrounded by nincompoops!”
He lowered his gaze, landing it right on Maisie and Felix.
“You two,” he muttered, shaking his head, “follow me.”
“Where are we going?” Felix asked nervously. After what he’d learned today about the fate of the Romanovs and revolution, this was not a trip he was eager to take.
“The Map Room!” Great-Uncle Thorne said, slapping his own forehead. “Isn’t that where we’ve been trying to go ever since your mother barged in on us?”
Maisie and Felix followed him up the Grand Staircase. But halfway up, Great-Uncle Thorne stopped.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Who?” Maisie said, confused.
“Why are you bumfuzzled?” Great-Uncle Thorne bellowed.
“Bumfuzzled?” Maisie repeated.
Great-Uncle Thorne raised his arms in the air and barked, “The Ziff twins! Where. Are. The. Ziff. Twins.”
“Buenos Aires,” Felix answered.
“Argentina? They’ve gone to Argentina?”
“Their father was sent there,” Felix explained.
“CIA,” Maisie added.
Great-Uncle Thorne’s face twisted and contorted with indecision ever so briefly.
“Onward!” he finally announced.
Then he turned around and began up the stairs again, pounding his walking stick against each one as he climbed.
Maisie and Felix walked with Great-Uncle Thorne through the long corridor outside his room, Great-Aunt Maisie’s, and a suite of guest rooms. They didn’t usually come down this far, since Maisie had insisted they go inside every guest room months ago. Even she got bored with them eventually. Each room was spacious, with a sitting room and oversize bathroom. The beds were so high that small footstools were provided so the guests could climb up into bed. And each room had a color theme: lavender, aqua, sea-foam green, lemon yellow, eggshell. The bedspreads and pillows, the small sofas and wingback chairs, the towels, and even the soaps were all in that room’s particular color. For all the whimsy and quirks of the rest of Elm Medona, the guest rooms—though fancy with gold-trimmed this and silver-accented that—were remarkably dull.
Now Great-Uncle Thorne was leading Maisie and Felix farther than they had ever ventured, past the Lavender Room, the Aqua Room, the Sea-Foam-Green Room, the Lemon-Yellow Room, the Eggshell Room. He flung open the next door, and a cloud of dust exploded from it.
Great-Uncle Thorne sneezed, waving his hands to clear the air.
“No one has been in here for quite some time,” he said.
“I guess not,” Maisie said.
From the doorway, the three of them stared into the Map Room.
Dust motes danced in the light that came through the row of tall windows that made up the far wall. The other three walls were murals of the continents, each country painted in bright colors, each river a vivid blue, the mountain ranges dark green and snowcapped, the oceans a shimmering turquoise.
Maisie recognized some of the countries Mrs. Witherspoon had talked about this morning in class. She saw Rhodesia and Abyssinia and the Belgian Congo on the continent of Africa.
“My goodness,” Great-Uncle Thorne said in a low voice. “This room has been closed off for years, since Maisie and I studied geography and history over there.”
He pointed to two wooden desks in the center of the room, facing the mural of Europe.
“My goodness,” he said again, his voice even softer this time.
Great-Uncle Thorne stepped inside, almost reverentially, and walked over to the desks. Maisie and Felix watched as he traced something carved into the top of one of them, his face wistful. He dipped his finger into a hole in one corner, then held it up to examine.
“The ink,” he said. “All dried up.”
Slowly, he lifted the top of the desk.
Great-Uncle Thorne gasped when he peered inside it.
Maisie nudged Felix to follow her into the Map Room, but he hung back. Something about the way Great-Uncle Thorne looked made Felix feel like they should stay out here. But of course Maisie marched right over to Great-Uncle Thorne.
“Old notebooks,” she said, also peering inside.
Carefully, Great-Uncle Thorne lifted a pale blue notebook from inside the desk.
Maisie saw THORNE PICKWORTH written on the cover, and beneath it WORLD HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY.
Felix watched as Great-Uncle Thorne opened the notebook and began to read to himself, his lips moving ever so slightly.
After what seemed a long while, Great-Uncle Thorne closed the notebook and lowered the top of the desk, once again tracing something carved in the wood there.
“It seems like yesterday,” he said to himself.
Maisie watched his finger as it traced the shape of a heart. Inside that carved heart were the letters TP + PM.
“Great-Uncle Thorne!” Maisie said. “That’s you, isn’t it? TP is Thorne Pickworth!”
Great-Uncle Thorne, maybe for the first time since Maisie had known him, blushed.
“But who’s PM?” Maisie asked.
“Penelope Merriweather!” Felix blurted from the doorway.
“Oh!” Maisie said. “You’ve loved her forever!”
“Poppycock,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, but he smiled as he said it.
Maisie turned her attention to the other desk. Although nothing was carved there, Great-Aunt Maisie had drawn a picture that covered the entire top of her desk. The colors were so faded that it was difficult to make out the images. But slowly, as Maisie stared at it, they began to take shape. A wooden roller coaster. A Ferris wheel. A boardwalk. Blurry figures on what appeared to be a beach with a wave washing up against it.
“Coney Island!” Maisie exclaimed.
Great-Uncle Thorne sighed.
“Yes,” he said begrudgingly, “that’s Maisie’s drawing of Coney Island. I’m glad to see the thing fading away.”
“That’s where she met Harry Houdini,” Felix said.
“The beginning of the end,” G
reat-Uncle Thorne said with another sigh.
Finally Felix walked into the room, too. Almost immediately he caught sight of an enormous globe in the corner. The globe stood taller than him, taller than Great-Uncle Thorne, and so wide that Felix wouldn’t be able to fit his arms around it. What really struck him, though, even more than the sheer size of the thing, was how part of it was in shadow and part was in light.
Felix blinked.
“Hey!” he said. “This globe . . . It’s . . . spinning!”
Great-Uncle Thorne let out a whoop.
“Still? After all these years?” Great-Uncle Thorne said with delight.
He went and stood beside Felix to watch the globe turn almost imperceptibly on its axis.
“Is it rotating like we are?” Maisie asked as she joined them in front of the globe.
“Exactly,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, nodding.
He walked right up to the globe and picked up a long wooden pointer like Mrs. Witherspoon used, except even longer.
“So it’s six thirty here in Newport, Rhode Island,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, pointing to the speck on the east coast of the United States, “and we’ve still got some light. But over here in . . . Let’s see . . .”
He walked around to the other side of the globe and grinned, pointing the pointer.
“In Paris it’s after midnight and therefore, completely dark.”
“How is it doing that?” Felix asked.
“Only Phinneas Pickworth himself could explain that, I’m afraid,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “He brought this home from Florence, Italy, on one of his expeditions. I can’t believe the old thing is as good as new.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Maisie caught sight of Imperial Russia stretching across the wall nearest her.
“Well,” she said, turning toward it, “I suppose it’s time for you to tell us about this.”
Great-Uncle Thorne squinted at what she was studying.
“Ah,” he said, “yes, indeed. Imperial Russia. The Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra. It’s best you two are prepared before we open that egg and find out what exactly you have to do.”
Maisie’s head was spinning with Russian history, hard-to-pronounce and harder-to-remember names, and all the other details and facts that Great-Uncle Thorne was giving them. The room had grown dark, and Great-Uncle Thorne had turned on lamps that gave a golden glow to everything. She wondered where her mother was. Her stomach growled with hunger. Would Great-Uncle Thorne ever stop talking?
“You could end up here,” Great-Uncle Thorne was saying. “Every March the royal family left the cold and snow of St. Petersburg for the warmth of Crimea, on the northern coast of the Black Sea.”
Felix’s eyes shone with excitement as he watched Great-Uncle Thorne’s long wooden pointer land in Crimea on the mural.
“Of course,” Great-Uncle Thorne mused, the pointer hovering in the air, “you could land on the Imperial train, en route to Crimea. Approximately a two- or three-day trip. Or you could land here in the villa on the Baltic . . .”
The pointer landed again with a sharp rap, causing Maisie to jump.
“Villa,” she said when Great-Uncle Thorne frowned at her with disapproval. “Baltic.”
He turned back to Imperial Russia.
“I’m hungry,” Maisie moaned.
“The Standart,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, more to himself than to Maisie and Felix. “They could land on the Standart.”
Maisie followed the pointer as it moved up to Finland and traced a curving path along the fjords there.
“Is the Standart a boat?” Felix asked.
Isn’t he hungry? Maisie wondered as her stomach growled again.
“Ha!” Great-Uncle Thorne said, facing them again with his cheeks flushed red. “Hardly! The Standart is the Imperial yacht, and every June the royal family cruised the Finnish coast on it.”
“Royal yacht. Royal train—”
“Imperial train,” Great-Uncle Thorne corrected.
“Same thing,” Maisie said miserably. “We get it. They moved around all year on their royal stuff, from villa to castle.”
“It might save your life to know these things,” Great-Uncle Thorne said sternly.
He held Maisie’s gaze until she rolled her eyes and looked away.
Great-Uncle Thorne still stared at her for a long moment before he began pointing at other places on the mural.
“August would find you in the lodge in the Polish forest. September, back to Crimea. Winter . . .”
He stopped speaking and pointing.
Silence filled the room.
“Are we done?” Maisie finally asked hopefully.
“Winter,” Great-Uncle Thorne said again.
He slowly turned to face them.
“Winter in St. Petersburg,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “From November till March, the city remains extremely chilly, with temperatures no higher than minus ten Celsius. With no more than twenty hours of sunshine per month.”
Maisie converted Celsius to Fahrenheit in her head. Fourteen degrees. That was cold. She shivered.
“In other words, I can’t send you without the proper clothing. Even if you land in beautiful Crimea or on the Standart, it’s entirely possible you’ll stay through several seasons—”
“But we’ll leave before July 1917,” Felix added quickly.
“Of course,” Great-Uncle Thorne said. “Of course.”
And unconvincingly, Felix thought.
Great-Uncle Thorne cleared his throat.
“The point is, you need to have the proper clothing, or you could freeze to death,” Great-Uncle Thorne said.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Maisie said, narrowing her eyes at her uncle. “You’ve never ever told us where to go, or helped us get there, or anything.”
“He’s only looking out for us,” Felix told her. “I think it’s nice.”
“But every other time, we landed in whatever we had on and made do—” Maisie began to protest.
“This time,” Great-Uncle Thorne boomed, banging his fist down hard on one of the desks, “you can’t just make do. This time, you must be prepared. For anything.”
“Why?” Maisie asked.
“Because this time is different,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, sinking onto the chair that was attached to the wooden desk. “This time you will be taking the lost Fabergé egg with you. This time something is going to happen. Something wonderful.”
Great-Uncle Thorne’s eyes took on the yellow light of the lamps.
He sighed. “I wish I knew what it was. But I don’t. I only know that the lost egg has been found. That Amy Pickworth has spoken to us across time and space. That something special, something unforgettable, is going to occur in Imperial Russia.”
Great-Uncle Thorne sighed again.
“It’s too complicated for me to explain,” he said, shaking his head. “Why, sometimes I’m not sure I completely understand it myself. But Phinneas called our ability to time travel and for events to happen simultaneously in different times and places the Pickworth Paradoxia Perpetuity.”
“The Pickworth Paradoxia Perpetuity,” Felix said in a hushed voice.
“Yes,” Great-Uncle Thorne said solemnly. “It’s so complex, so amazing, so . . . mind-boggling, that even I can barely understand it myself.”
Maisie and Felix’s mother’s voice cut through the heavy silence that descended after Great-Uncle Thorne’s words.
“Another secret room?” she said, coming inside.
Right behind her came Bruce Fishbaum, looking more nautical than ever in his Nantucket-red pants and navy blue belt with little white whales, and a white shirt with some yacht club logo on it.
“This house is huge!” Bruce Fishbaum exclaimed. His face was pink, his hairline receding even more.
&n
bsp; “Indeed,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, his voice dripping with displeasure.
“So this room is . . . ?” their mother asked, glancing around.
“The Map Room,” Felix answered, since no one else was going to. “Great-Uncle Thorne and Great-Aunt Maisie used to learn history and geography here.”
“Really?” his mother cooed. “That’s amazing. Isn’t that amazing?” she asked Bruce Fishbaum.
He laughed his guffawing laugh. “Amazing!”
“We were just talking about Peter Carl Fabergé,” Great-Uncle Thorne said.
“We were?” Maisie asked.
But Great-Uncle Thorne ignored her. “You’ve heard of him?”
“Sure,” Bruce Fishbaum said. “He made the fancy eggs.”
“Yes,” Great-Uncle Thorne said, “he did. Fabergé was the official court jeweler to the Tsar of Russia.”
“You don’t say,” Bruce Fishbaum said in a way that made it hard for Maisie to know if he was really interested or not.
“At the turn of the last century, he employed over five hundred people in his St. Petersburg workshop. Of course, he designed more than the eggs. Little cases and jewelry and his miniatures of flowers and animals and the like. My mother actually had a diamond-encrusted miniature Pickworth peony designed by Fabergé.”
“Is that so?” Bruce Fishbaum said in that same tone.
“But it’s the eggs that everyone remembers. The first one was made for Tsarina Marie as a gift from her husband, Tsar Alexander, in 1885. The brilliance of the eggs, of course, is that the egg is just a container for the surprise inside. For example, the peacock egg of 1908. The surprise is a mechanical gold and enameled peacock, sitting in the branches of an engraved gold tree with flowers made of enamel and precious stones. The peacock can be lifted from within the tree and wound up. Placed on a flat surface, it struts around, moving its head and spreads and closes its enamel tail.”