by Richard Peck
I must take my fate into my own hands. Now it was time to make my smallness work for me. Somehow I made myself even smaller still. My shriveling arms slipped out of my sleeves. Down I dropped, slick as a whistle, out of my uniform and the grasp of my webby abductors.
We mice live by quick wits and pure instinct, or you wouldn’t be reading this.
They flew on, my captors, clutching my Yeomouse uniform. I caught only a glimpse of red and gold and wondered one last time if Aunt Marigold had sewn it. But now I was tumbling, tail over teacup, into the midst of royalty gathered for the jubilee. I dropped like a furry stone, my tail making one last inquiry of the unforgiving sky.
A fall from this height would do me in.
PART THREE
The Royal Palace
CHAPTER NINE
Midnight
YOU CANNOT DROP through space and think clearly at the same time. Cigar smoke rose in a fog from the gentlemen below. The tiaras on the ladies’ heads were pointed and diamond-sharp. But I had only a whiff and a glimpse.
I splashed down and was drenched to the skin.
The lake? But the lake was nowhere near the terrace. I hit shallow bottom with a painful thump and rose through bright redness. Blood? Mine? I swallowed some. Very strong medicine with a strawberry flavor.
I’d dropped directly into a bowl of punch and even now was learning to swim.
Surfacing, I cracked my head on a lump of ice. My cap, the black velvet mushroom with ribbons, floated off my head. I’d dropped directly into a bowl of punch and even now was learning to swim.
Directly above, a human towered over the punch bowl and me. A very superior palace servant of some sort. His wig was powdered. In his gloved hand a heavy silver ladle. On his face a look of horror and disgust when our eyes met. I was peering out of the bowl, paddling punch. He hadn’t seemed to see me fall in.
With a quick look to either side, this servant ladled me up, along with a fresh strawberry.
I lolled in the ladle, helpless, my whiskers flat against my snout, my tail over the edge. What next?
With considerable presence of mind, the towering servant had me by the tail, pinched between his great gloved thumb and finger. I was trapped in the suede cage of his loose fist. Then he stuffed me behind himself, down an inside pocket in one of the tails of his coat. Still waxy and now slick with punch, I skidded to the pocket bottom and fetched up in a wadded handkerchief, none too clean.
I was wet through. There’s something especially penetrating about strawberry punch. Still, I was out of sight and out of mind, here in the linty pocket bottom.
And here I bounced till all hours as the servant in his flapping tailcoat bobbed and weaved among the guests with his punch cups on a tray. Bowing. Scraping.
With all this tossing about I began to feel peaky and bilious. I had the awful feeling that the beetle flambé might reappear. My whiskers were bent. My tail any old way. My head splitting. I was close to despair and no nearer my goals.
But at long last the orchestra struck up “Auld Lang Syne,” a gentle reminder that the evening was drawing to a close.
The footman or whoever he was stood to attention. And there in his tailcoat, a tiny spark of hope kindled within me.
He was a palace servant, was my footman. Buttons gleaming and wig powdered. And we were this close to the palace.
A moment later and we were in the palace itself, heading down a spiral of stairs, bearing the sloshing punch bowl to the kitchens. I was under the same roof as Queen Victoria!
My heart didn’t sing, but it began to hum a bit.
We seemed to be near the sinks. Crystal clinked. Very damp these underground kitchens. The footman sneezed. It was like a volcano erupting above me. He reached for his handkerchief, and here came his monstrous gloved hand. I shrugged out of the handkerchief and snatched back my tail in the nick of time.
His handkerchief seemed to reach his nose for the second sneeze. I was breathing hard, but he’d forgotten I was there! If he’d remembered, he’d have had me up with the handkerchief. He’d have flung me on the kitchen fire. Hope flared in my pounding heart.
Then gunfire seemed to break out. Serving maids shrieked. But they were corks popping out of champagne bottles left over from dinner. The servants seemed to be helping themselves. I gathered that my footman had a glass in his hand.
“To the Queen, God bless her,” he called out. And all the maids replied, “To the Queen!”
My footman must have been standing very near one of the maids. An apron swished starchy over skirts. He was muttering something in her ear.
“Cheeky boy!” She sniffed. Boy? He was tall as a tree even without the powdered wig. “I haven’t the time for that. I must take up a cup of chamomile tea to Her Nibs.”
I was listening hard. I was all notched ears.
“Have a care how you speak of the Queen,” said my footman, stiff as his shirt. “Her Nibs, indeed.”
“Then what do you suggest?” asked the maid, very saucy.
“‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ ‘Of course, Your Majesty,’ ‘Three bags full, Your Majesty,’” replied my footman.
“As if I don’t know how to address ’er. And, ’ere, you leave my apron strings alone.”
My head swam. Were they talking about Queen Victoria? Was this serving maid about to take a cup of tea to Her Majesty the Queen of England and Empress of India?
I don’t know where I got the energy after the day I’d put in. But I was all over that pocket at once, my heart racing on ahead. Now I was scrabbling up and out of the pocket. Chill air rushed at my damp head, my plastered whiskers. I hung, swaying from the inside of the footman’s coattail. There were servants all about, washing up and helping themselves to the champagne. I worked my way to the other side of the coattail. Oh how easily the footman could brush me off—into a drain, into that open salt box, into the crackling hearth.
But he stood still and very near the saucy serving maid. “I could, of course, assist you in carrying up the tea to Her Majesty’s quarters,” said my footman. “Very dark, those corridors, and full of twists and turns.”
“You?” said the maid. “You’re full of twists and turns yourself. Wot do you think you’re playing at?” And then she flounced away. Off she went with a pot of chamomile tea on a tray for the Queen. And it’s true, the footman had pulled loose the tails of her apron, the cheeky boy.
And I hung from one of them like the clapper in a bell, clinging for dear life.
HIGH IN THE palace at the end of a dark and twisty corridor is Queen Victoria’s bedchamber. You will never see this room because THE PUBLIC IS NOT ADMITTED but I can tell you a bit about it as it was on a certain June night.
The bedchamber was nothing like as fine as the State Rooms below, or the Picture Gallery. Cobwebs clung to the corners. The hangings on the Queen’s bed could do with a good shaking out. Her counterpane had bald patches.
So did she, but Her Majesty was nowhere near bed yet. She sat at her writing desk in a rather tatty old dressing gown and four shawls. Her nightcap clung to the back of her head with streamers hanging down. A cheery fire glowed in the grate. Her spectacles were on her nose, reflecting the flames.
She had opened her diary and taken up a pen to write words the world would later read:
How well I remember this day sixty years ago when I was called from my bed by dear Mama to receive the news of my accession.
That meant it was past midnight now. The day of her Diamond Jubilee had come at last. Sighing, she set her pen aside and worked the worn wedding ring on her pudgy hand. A memory of her long-ago husband, Prince Albert, hung in the room like the cobwebs in the corners.
She sighed again and scattered a little sand to dry the page. Then she reached for the cup of chamomile tea the serving maid had brought to her.
Up went the cup in her pillowy hand. And there was I who’d been peering around it, one hand drawn up to my front fur, and my tail questioning the saucer.
She saw me. Her vision was dim ev
en with spectacles. Her milky old eyes looked so loose in their sockets, they seemed ready to drop out and roll around the writing desk.
But she saw me. Her eyes followed the turning of my tail.
“Ah,” said the Queen of England, “we rather thought we weren’t alone.”
Mice have died from less shock. But I drew myself up, as tall as I would go. I showed her my posture. Then I bowed, crisply from the neck, as you do.
CHAPTER TEN
Eyes and Spies
YOU NEVER LAID eyes on an older human than Queen Victoria. There may not be any. She bent nearer till she was all I saw. Her many chins drooped. Her dewlaps dangled. I remembered the picture that hung in our schoolroom—how her old eyes followed you everywhere. And I saw it was true, that she was all-seeing, no matter how saggy her sockets.
She leaned so near me I felt the breeze off her breath. We were suddenly back in the cheese course of her supper. I was frozen with fear, my head cramped in its bow.
“What pretty posture,” she remarked. “Are you a military mouse? And squeak up. I am quite deaf in both ears.”
I quivered. Squeak up? Squeak up? Did we share a common language? Could it be that Ian was wrong and I could communicate with a human? Yes!
I quivered into speech. “Yes, I am a military mouse, Your Nibs—Your Royal—Your Majesty. As recently as dinnertime I was a Yeomouse of the Guard.”
“Indeed,” said the Queen. We were nearly nose to nose now. I saw me twice in her spectacles.
“Then why, might two ask, are you not uniformed in our presence? We trust you do not merely happen to be passing.”
My spine throbbed with good posture. I swallowed hard.
“It is difficult to say where my uniform has got to, Your Majesty,” I said, squeaking up. “My cap is in the punch bowl. My sword is in the lawn, but my uniform—”
“Is in the palace attics.” The Queen pointed a bent, blunt finger to her bedchamber ceiling. “Hanging from a splinter in the rafters.”
I gaped. How could she know such a thing? Unless…she was all-knowing as well as all-seeing.
“Ah, we hear everything, deaf as we are. And see everything, even in our blindness.” The Queen sat back in her chair to examine me from all angles. She worked a thoughtful finger over her chins.
“Talking of uniforms, were you or were you not late a scholar of the Royal Mews Mouse Academy?”
I nearly sagged.
“We have not clung to the throne for sixty years without eyes and spies everywhere. So be careful in your answer. We recommend the truth.”
The Queen sat back in her chair to examine me from all angles.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” I confessed. “I did attend the Royal Mews Mouse Academy. While I did not care for it, it is one of the top five schools in your empire.”
“Yes, yes.” Her Majesty waved the teacup. “Aren’t they all. But are you not the scholars who wear those cunning blue flannel uniforms with the gold-thread crests?”
“We are, Your Majesty. My aunt Marigold ran up my uniforms personally.”
The Queen nodded. “Yes, I believe Marigold does very fine work. The Mouse Duchess of Cheddar Gorge swears by her. You mice are fortunate to have her. Human help is almost impossible to get nowadays. No one wants to work. You see what lazy hounds the footmen are, swilling our champagne in the kitchens.”
The Queen drew herself up from the tangle of shawls. Her dewlaps swayed. “But the question before us is this: Are you the same mouse who appeared before our granddaughter Princess Ena of Battenberg during her riding lesson? And were you not in your school uniform, causing the poor child to take a nasty tumble and seem to talk out of her head? Ena, for whom we have such high hopes?”
I squeaked bleakly and could only nod.
“Have you learned nothing at school, indeed the First Rule? Never appear clothed before humans. It raises too many questions.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“And the Second Rule of which you seem equally ignorant: Never appear before any Sovereign Queen out of uniform.”
I nodded, near despair. I don’t think I ever had heard that Second Rule, actually.
What a lot of trouble I had gone to in order to stand before my Queen and Sovereign. Then it was the same as being called into the headmaster’s office to hear old B. Chiroptera telling you about all your failings and shortcomings.
“You have got off entirely on the wrong foot in life,” the Queen was saying. “You have gone about everything exactly backward. Ena should have seen you in fur and four-legged if she need see you at all.”
The Queen pointed to her royal bosom. “We rule. And so we must know the truth about mousedom—every little thing about you little things. But Ena is only an impressionable girl who must be protected from the truth.”
I was growing smaller than I was. But the Queen had only begun. “There is a time and a place for everything. In our presence—should you be summoned—you are to be turned out in appropriate uniform. Mice, like men, look better in uniform than out of it.”
“I fell out of—”
“Then you should have fallen into another one. And why, by the way, are you such an unhealthy color? It is a pink suitable only on a piglet. And why are you spiky with black bits? You look like a misdirected chinchilla.”
“We—I am pink from the strawberry punch, Your Majesty,” I said, hopeless. “And the black bits are lint from the footman’s pocket.”
As if she didn’t know.
“No, we do not know everything,” said the Queen, reading my mind. “But there is nothing we cannot find out. Take that for your motto. It has served us well.”
“But that’s just why I’m here, Your Majesty.” I had one more round of bravery in me, and I fired it. “I’ve come to Your Majesty to find out who I might be.” I tried to make myself look pitiful. “I haven’t even a name.” Poor me.
The Queen peered over her spectacles. “Ah well, ‘Nameless is Blameless.’”
“So they say,” I replied, “but I’ve never quite known what that saying meant.”
“Nor have we,” said the Queen, “but it rhymes, so that’s a comfort. Besides, the name that matters is the name you make for yourself in a life of struggle and success! Consider us. We are only a weak woman and a heartbroken widow, but we have become the most famous Monarch in Europe. Queen of Queens! Empress of Empresses!”
She was half out of her chair and quite magnificent.
“Can you have people’s heads off?” I asked, breathless now.
“No, you are thinking of the French,” she said. “But I am Victoria by name and Victorious by nature!”
She looked around her empty chamber as if it were thronged by an adoring crowd, cheering. She looked like she might burst into “Land of Hope and Glory,” if humans had heard of it yet.
And she wasn’t done either. “Our dominion extends over palm and pine, and the sun never sets on it. But once again, you have got everything the wrong way round.”
She looked me up and down in that way she had of seeing straight through you. “Of course, you’re very young. Are you not quite grown or just short?”
I whimpered.
“Never mind. You have forgotten the Great Truth. And how like you, since you have already forgotten the First and Second Rules.” Her eyes bored holes in me. “What is the Great Truth?” I heard a tapping that could have been her foot, if it reached the floor. “We are waiting.”
I stood there, pinker than a piglet and linty all over. My hands hung down. Then the Great Truth came to me, more or less, and not a moment too soon. Out it spilled:
“For every human on earth, there is a mouse doing the same job, and doing it better.”
Her Majesty blinked. “Well, we suppose that’s close enough.”
Then she waited as I came to a true understanding of the Great Truth. At first I thought, oddly, of the Danish Prince Havarti.
Was that dawn beginning to break at the bedchamber windows?
&nb
sp; At last I knew, just like that. The chamber seemed to flood with light. “There is another Queen of England and Empress of India,” I said, putting two and two together. “And she is a…mouse? A…royal rodent?”
“Quite,” said Queen Victoria, “though it took you long enough.”
I grew dizzy. My saucer seemed to spin.
“We are Queen of Queens and Empress of Empresses,” said Her Majesty. “But whilst we see everything, we cannot see to everything. Only imagine how much this jubilee alone tires us. All these foreign royals like a plague of locusts, eating us out of palace and home. The Belgians alone! Not to speak of the Danes. And the Russians—all that barbaric splendor! And I have had nine children, all of them troubling and troublesome. And forty grandchildren. Not a vast number for mice, but an absolute multitude for humans. A veritable infestation of grandchildren.”
Forty did sound like quite an infestation of grandchildren, however many it was.
“And so you must apply to the Queen of the Mice, not us. Her court is the Great Truth and Central Secret of the British Empire. All very hush-hush because were it generally known, it would raise too many questions. Still, we wonder you did not put two and two together before, as two do.”
My head pounded painfully. Should we have been singing “God Save the Queens” all this time? And why am I the last to learn anything?
“But is the Queen of the Mice as old as…Your Majesty?”
“As old as we?” The Queen’s spectacles flashed fire. “How could she possibly be as old as we? She’s a mouse. You are all rather here-today-and-gone-tomorrow, aren’t you? That’s precisely why she must keep her eye on her subjects and not we.
“And since you are one of her subjects, here is a word of advice. Do not cross the Queen of the Mice. She lacks our sunny disposition.”
I swallowed hard, one last time. “But where shall I find Her…Mouse Majesty?”
“We, sadly, are at everybody’s beck and call. She is not. Her whereabouts is a part of her mystery. But you might begin one flight up.” Again Queen Victoria pointed to her ceiling. “And now you may withdraw. Indeed, you must.”