Mouse Mission

by Prudence Breitrose

  “That’s great!” said Susie. “Though I’m not sure he’ll want to eat with us when he finds out we don’t have anything like the right clothes! Joey, did you bring a single shirt with buttons?”

  Sir Quentin spun around to face her.

  “Let not sartorial deficiencies sabotage this social opportunity,” he said, “one that may have been previously enjoyed by no human from the city of Cleveland—nay, from the whole state of Ohio. With your customary skill at adaptation, I feel sure that adequate garments may be contrived.”

  “What about us?” asked Ken. “Anyone think about food for us? Bit of nosh, eh?”

  “Have no fear,” said the director. “You and your colleagues are invited to dine with us below stairs, at the invitation of the Brigadier, leader of our clan.”

  “Below stairs!” wailed Sir Quentin. “We are to dine adjacent to the servants’ quarters?”

  “Aw,” said Joey, who often found Sir Quentin a pain, “and you were expecting to maybe eat with the duke?”

  “You may mock, sirrah,” said Sir Quentin crisply, “but I must confess that the opportunity to view a person of his rank at close quarters would indeed be a high point in my poor life.”

  “Oh, let Sir Quentin come with us,” said Susie. “He can hide in my bag. It’s already got a good viewing hole, for when Savannah comes to work with me. Is that okay with everyone?”

  There were no objections—and indeed Megan had a hunch that Trey and Julia might be glad of an evening free of Sir Quentin.

  “We shall take our leave,” said the director, as Trey translated. “And remember, if you want anything, anything at all, just pull the bell and a human will appear. It’s like magic!” he added. “Happens every time.”

  The director vanished behind the tapestry, leaving the humans gazing at the bellpull hanging near the fireplace. Tug on it and a human appears?

  It was Joey who gave in first. He just couldn’t resist. And indeed a maid appeared bringing a tray of tea and cake, followed by a footman who lit the fire in the grate, followed by another maid asking if the ladies required any help in dressing for dinner with the duke. And right behind her was a valet offering to lay out the clothing that the gentlemen would wear for the occasion. Even if there really wasn’t much. Jake’s only jacket was the leather one he lived in most of the time, and all the valet could lay out for Joey was a clean T-shirt and a tie borrowed from his dad.

  fter the humans and Sir Quentin set off for their dinner with the duke, a guide led Trey, Julia and Ken down through the walls to Mouse Hall, the headquarters of the Buckford clan—all thirteen hundred and eighty-one members of it.

  “Stone the crows!” Ken whispered, as the three were led into the hall. “Knock me down with a feather.”

  Mouse Hall was located in the crawl space near the kitchen. It was an imposing room, lit now by a string of white Christmas tree lights that the mice had patched into the main electricity supply.

  The walls were lined with pieces of rich, dark fabric.

  “I see you are admiring our tapestries,” said the Brigadier as he stepped forward to greet his guests. “We were fortunate in that the late duchess was fond of turning unwanted fabric into bed coverings—into quilts. Mice from my Department of Interior Decorating were always on the lookout for pieces that would serve our purposes.”

  In the center of the room was a table made from a piece of stiff cardboard, propped up on old spools that had once held thread and covered now with a white human handkerchief. It was laid for dinner, with bottle caps for plates. The Brigadier sat at the head of the table, while Julia was shown to the place at his right, and Trey and Ken sat to his left. Although the food was good (with a cheese called Cornish Yarg that was the best Julia and Trey had ever tasted) the conversation was stilted. Small talk, of the type that American mice usually don’t bother with. The Brigadier chatted about the weather, and the best types of local cheese, and the goings-on of the British royal family, and the Brigadier’s hobby of collecting bottle caps.

  “We’d love to see your collection,” Trey lied, and as he’d hoped, a guide mouse was summoned to rescue them from the dining room. He led them to a side chamber where several hundred bottle caps gleamed in the half light, and from there the three could escape to the IT room. Here, a half-dozen Thumbtops were linked to an antenna that snaked up through a ventilation grille to communicate with a satellite.

  “Can we e-mail?” asked Julia, who felt the special pain of mice separated from their clan and longed to be in touch with Larry and Curly.

  “Better than that,” said Ken. “Look!”

  The IT mice had already made a video connection on one of the Thumbtops, and three familiar mice had appeared on its screen—Savannah, plus one mouse with one dot on his ear, and another with three. Curly and Larry.

  “Greetings, Mouselings,” said Savannah, pushing her nose at the webcam so it looked huge. “How’s my Treyzy Weyzy?”

  She gave the webcam a big, wet kiss. Trey took a step back and looked around, as if she must surely be talking to someone else, but saw that the damage had been done. Every English mouse in the room was making the “Laughing out loud” sign.

  “Enough of that,” Trey said as crisply as he could. “We have urgent business to conduct. First, Julia would like a brief chat with Curly and Larry. And while that is going on, Savannah, could you please take a message to our leader? Tell him we need to know if he has any special orders for us.”

  There was just time for Julia to tell her clan brothers that she was fine, and for them to tell her that Larry’s sports report had been changed into a comedy routine—which was odd because Larry had never shown much sense of humor. Then Curly and Larry were nudged out of the way by the Big Cheese’s personal guard of muscle mice, and he took their place.

  “Greetings, mouse!” he said to Trey. “When you return, we will discuss your behavior. I was most displeased to learn that you had left your post here without permission. For now, however, you may give your humans some good news. I can confirm that they will meet at least one member of Coconut Man’s family soon after the experts arrive at Buckford Hall the day after tomorrow. Meanwhile the humans can relax, and enjoy that extraordinary place.”

  Relax? Enjoy? Well, yes and no.

  It was a workout for the four humans, following a footman to dinner, with Sir Quentin tucked into Susie’s handbag. Down the stairs of the South Tower they went, then through an even longer parade of rooms than before, all with the red velvet ropes to keep visitors from mauling the artifacts—a pink breakfast room, a green morning room, a gold salon, a blue drawing room. Finally they reached the main dining room, where a table big enough for fifty guests gleamed under the eyes of past dukes, looking hungrily out from their paintings.

  At the far end of the table, five places were set, with two footmen stationed where they could help the honored guests to sit and eat. And as the four Americans reached their places, a man with white hair and a bristly white mustache came barreling into the dining hall in an electric wheelchair, much too fast. He jammed on the brakes and skidded to such an abrupt stop that his glasses flew onto the table.

  “Dratted contraption!” he roared. “My advice to you, don’t get old. Soon as I hit seventy-eight my legs stopped working.”

  Sir Quentin peered eagerly through the hole in Susie’s handbag for his first sighting of a real British aristocrat, the subspecies of human that he considered superior to all others.

  More than any other American mouse—quite possibly, more than any mouse in the world—Sir Quentin knew his dukes. He knew they were almost at the top of the pecking order of British nobility, below kings and queens but above earls and way, way, way above barons. And though he knew, deep down, that this duke would be wearing none of the outward signs of nobility—no ermine robe, no coronet—he hadn’t expected this. Not a wheelchair out of control. Not the pink face. Not glasses flying off. Not a suit that was a little shiny from wear in some places.

 
The duke had turned his protruding blue eyes on his guests, and they seemed to protrude a bit more when they reached Joey, whose overlong tie hung from his bare neck over his Oregon Ducks T-shirt. Surely, thought Sir Quentin, this must be the time for the duke to show his stuff. To exercise some authority.

  And indeed the duke made a sound like “harrumph,” half astonishment, half laughter—perhaps the cue for the footmen to do something. Maybe remove the young human from the gracious presence? Banish him from this magnificent room and provide him with sustenance in the servants’ quarters?

  But what the duke said was, “Jolly good show, what? Trust you Yanks to be ‘with it.’ Isn’t that what the young sprogs say these days? Bit hard to keep up with the lingo.”

  And what the duke did was—in Sir Quentin’s view—even less appropriate.

  “Ralph!” he called out to the nearest footman. “Be a good chap and fetch me a shirt from the gift shop. One like his,” he added, pointing at Joey.

  One footman left the dining room and the other leapt forward to remove the duke’s jacket and unbutton his shirt.

  And Sir Quentin turned away from his hole, because you could now see much more duke than any mouse would care to, a pudgy expanse of duke, until the footman came rushing in with a T-shirt reading, “I ♥ Buckford Hall,” and pulled it down over His Grace’s head.

  “Much better, what?” said the duke, after he’d fought his way into the T-shirt and the footman adjusted his tie on top of it. “Ridiculous rules we have. Made to be broken, don’t you know. Can’t have you Yanks thinking I’m an anachronism, living in a place like this.” He turned to Megan. “You know what anachronism means, young lady?”

  Megan silently thanked Sir Quentin because it was indeed a word he used quite frequently. “Out of date,” she said.

  He laughed. “Good show. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Didn’t do anything to earn all this.” He waved his hand around the magnificent room and the ceiling where cupids flew through the air, their bare bottoms gleaming in an unearthly light. “Just a matter of luck, getting born here. But I’ll take it,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, “because I get to choose my own grub. Whatever I want to eat.”

  And the grub—the food—turned out to be the duke’s old favorites from his days at boarding school. Brown soup that tasted mostly of salt. Roast beef cooked until it was dry and dark brown through and through. Mushy Brussels sprouts and lumpy mashed potatoes.

  As a footman leaned over to offer him the Brussels sprouts, Jake approached a question that had been hovering in Megan’s head too.

  “When people come to conferences, er, do you…”

  “Feed them this stuff? Good heavens, no.” The duke put a Brussels sprout on the table and flicked it at Joey. “Don’t want to waste it on them! Peabody hired a French chef for the conference business.”

  “Do you have conferences all year round?” asked Jake.

  “If I can,” said the duke. “Two or three at a time. Helps me keep the old place up, what? I need the lolly. Conferences, and the day-trippers tramping through the house in summer. Lucky I have my tower. One place I can hide.”

  “Two or three conferences?” asked Susie. “So will there be others here at the same time as ours?”

  “Only some quilters,” said the duke, scraping some gravy off the heart on his shirt. “Coming in tomorrow. My late wife was fascinated by quilts, so we often have groups of them, quilting away. Harmless, what?”

  Megan saw Jake and her mom look at each other and smile. Yes, quilters sounded harmless. You never heard of quilters spying.

  “Your group’s the most interesting I’ve had for a while,” said the duke. “Your Sir Brian, I saw him on the telly, talking about the forests in Brazil. Saving the seas now, is he? Good for him. I don’t like what’s happening to the climate, don’t like it at all. Storms like we never used to have. New pests in my wheat fields. Cuckoos coming earlier and earlier.”

  “Well, let’s hope Sir Brian can fix it, Your Lordship,” said Jake.

  “Your Grace,” said Susie.

  Then the duke said something that almost made Sir Quentin faint. “Let’s forget that ‘Your Grace’ nonsense. My name’s William, and you can call me Billy.”

  Sir Quentin sank down to the bottom of the handbag while his worldview on dukes rearranged itself. T-shirts? Brussels sprouts? Billy? When he peered through the hole again, the topic of conversation had changed and His Grace—Billy!—was talking to Miss Megan and Mr. Joey.

  “What are you youngsters going to do while your parents are saving the planet?” he asked. “Do you ride?”

  “Ride what?” asked Joey. “Skateboards?”

  The duke leaned back in his chair to laugh, looking up at the footmen to share the joke. “Zebras!” he roared. “Elephants! No, horses, of course. That’s what we ride around here.”

  “Megan knows how to ride,” said her mom. “She had her own steed for a couple of years. Good old Charlie.”

  Charlie. Yes, you had to say “steed” because Charlie wasn’t exactly a horse but the old mule who’d worked for them on the Atlantic island, bringing supplies up to their hillside cabin from the little port.

  And, yes, Megan had often ridden on Charlie as he wandered around looking for new patches of grass to munch. If you could call it riding, when you were sitting on an animal who didn’t take commands from anyone on top but only from humans in front (a pull on the halter) or behind (a sharp slap on the rump).

  “Well, good for you,” said the duke, and turned to a footman. “John, set it up with the groom, there’s a good chap. Tell him to find a suitable mount for this young lady tomorrow. And a nice quiet pony for her brother.”

  Looking at Joey’s anxious face, Megan thought that for once this might be something she could do slightly better than he could, because as far as she knew he’d never been on any sort of horse in his life. And at least Charlie had been the right shape.

  hen dessert came (something called spotted dog, a doughy lump decorated with raisins) the duke was asking Susie about her own work.

  She got so excited describing her research on wild sheep and endangered wombats that she knocked her handbag off the back of her chair. A footman picked it up and hung it from the chair-back again. But now it was the wrong way round, and Sir Quentin could no longer see through his spy-hole.

  This happened just as the topic changed from endangered wombats to the endangered nobility of England.

  “Not sure how long we’ll be around, don’t you know,” the duke said. “You hear a lot of grumbling these days. People think it doesn’t make sense to get a title just because your daddy had one. And I must say, some of my ancestors didn’t exactly deserve it. Like that chap.”

  He pointed at the portrait of a man in a curly white wig, surrounded by hunting dogs.

  “He was a rogue, if ever there was one. Some sort of scandal at court. And that chap.”

  He pointed to a duke in a naval uniform who was clutching a three-colored spaniel as if it were a stuffed toy, his gaze seemingly fixed on distant horizons.

  “A bit soft in the head, that one,” said the duke. “He was the twelfth duke, but—EEEEK!”

  Determined to see the ancestors in question, Sir Quentin had stuck his head out of the top of Susie’s bag, only to find himself gazing straight into the pale blue eyes of the duke. Then Sir Quentin felt himself being wrapped in fingers. Gloved fingers. Footman fingers.

  “Little devil,” said the duke. “Gave me quite a turn. Must have climbed into your bag when you weren’t looking!”

  “Don’t worry, Your Grace, I’ll put it down the toilet,” said the footman, but Megan was quick, oh so quick, to jump up and grab the footman’s arm and say that the mouse was her pet, she was sorry, so sorry, for smuggling him in.

  “Pet mouse, eh?” said the duke. Megan held Sir Quentin out so they could gaze at each other, mouse and duke, and Megan could feel the mouse heart beating faster than usual, racing with the excitemen
t of what? A near-death experience? Or being formally introduced to a duke, even if it was a duke in an “I ♥ Buckford Hall” T-shirt?

  “Dear little chap,” said the duke. “I don’t mind them myself. Must have hundreds of mice in this place. Cook wanted a cat, but I wouldn’t allow it. Cats make me sneeze.” He lowered his voice and peered at the four Americans. “The other day, Peabody found a mouse in his shoe! I thought he might resign!”

  Megan was still cradling Sir Quentin, ready to hold his jaws shut if he forgot the routine for What Would a Pet Mouse Do, and maybe came out with something he’d learned at the Talking Academy, like smiling, or a burst of Shakespeare.

  But she needn’t have worried. Sir Quentin was wriggling around in her hand, doing a convincing imitation of a mouse who was trying to get away.

  “Expect he’d like some of our spotted dog, would he?” asked the duke.

  “We could try,” said Megan, and put Sir Quentin down on the table with a piece of her spotted dog in front of him, corralling him with her arms. A chance, finally, for Sir Quentin to dine with a duke, even if it was only on spotted dog, and even if he couldn’t say a word, pretending to be trapped in Megan’s encircling arms, pretending to like the food in front of him.

  Two minutes after the humans made it back to the sitting room in the South Tower, there was a slight swaying of tapestries before three mice came hurtling out to greet them.

  “You. Would. Not. Believe. What it’s like down there,” said Trey, as Megan bent down to pick him up.

  “Yeah, bit of all right, wasn’t it?” said Ken who had hung back, with no human of his own to welcome him. “Lovely nosh, that was.”

  “Not just the food,” said Trey. And he described the table with its sparkling white cloth. The tapestries. And best of all, the satellite connection.