Angel of the Battlefield

by Ann Hood

  “In the movies, robbers use credit cards,” Felix said. His stomach grumbled.

  “Even better!” she said. “We’ll wait till Mom goes to sleep, and then you can sneak into her wallet—”

  “Me?” Felix said.

  “Well, why do I have to do everything?” Maisie asked.

  “But I don’t even care what’s in there. And even if I did, I’m going to find out in two days when we get our tour,” Felix responded.

  They glared at each other.

  The stairway felt like it had no air at all.

  “Maybe she’ll get lemonade,” Felix said hopefully.

  “She did get lemonade,” their mother said, appearing on the stairway below them. “Are you two snooping around?”

  “We’re not,” Felix answered.

  Their mother’s flip-flops shuffled up the stairs until she loomed in front of them, her arms full of grocery bags. Her ponytail drooped, and her face glistened with sweat.

  “Upstairs,” she said, handing each of them a bag. “Now.”

  “But it’s so boring—” Maisie began.

  “You have been here all of what? A few hours?” their mother said, stepping aside and waving her one free arm for them to get moving. “You haven’t had time to get bored.”

  Felix gave her a big smile when he walked past her, but she did not smile back.

  “How am I going to trust you two when I start work on Tuesday?” their mother said as they climbed up, single file. “This is a new job that I wouldn’t even have if I wasn’t Phinneas Pickworth’s great-granddaughter. Do you think law firms in Newport, Rhode Island, are desperate for lawyers? They are not,” she answered before they could. “I have to prove myself, you know, and not worry that you two are going to get into all kinds of trouble.”

  “I didn’t know we had to stay locked up all day like Rapunzel or somebody,” Maisie said.

  When they reached the top of the stairs and the door to their apartment, their mother turned to face them. The heat had made her mascara melt and leave black smudges around her eyes so she resembled a raccoon.

  “This is hard,” she said. “Hard, hard, hard. But we have to put one foot in front of the other. All of us do.” For an instant it looked as though she might cry. But she took a deep breath and collected herself. “There are eighty acres of grounds out there,” she said. “You can spend the next six days until school starts exploring them.”

  She opened the door to their tiny, hot apartment.

  “Your great-great-grandfather was an explorer, you know,” she said, unpacking the shopping bags.

  Felix smiled as he watched her take out turkey and a package of American cheese.

  “Why, he sailed down the Nile,” she continued, “and visited the tombs of Queen Hatshepsut and—”

  Maisie watched her unpack, too. “I bet they don’t even have the ham I like here,” Maisie said miserably.

  “They do,” their mother said. She held up a neatly wrapped package of deli meat. “See? We’re not exactly in the middle of nowhere.”

  That was when Felix told his mother about the gazebo. He thought it might make her happy that they had indeed explored a little.

  “The inside ceiling is painted light blue with clouds,” he said. “And there’s a little bench in there with the back shaped like a heart.”

  “Phinneas Pickworth was a romantic.” Their mother sighed.

  After they finished their sandwiches and potato chips—barbecue for Maisie, ripples for Felix—their mother brought out a pound cake.

  “Let them eat cake,” she said.

  They looked at her, puzzled.

  “That’s Marie Antoinette’s most famous line,” their mother told them. “She said it when—”

  “Mom, who cares what some lady who died a million years ago said?” Maisie asked.

  Their mother sighed again. “It wouldn’t hurt you to learn a little something about history and people you’ve never heard of.”

  “Mom?” Felix said, his mouth full of cake.

  “Swallow first,” she said.

  Felix swallowed. “Why aren’t we allowed in the mansion? I mean, isn’t it technically ours?”

  She shook her head. “It belongs to the preservation society. As long as heirs of Phinneas Pickworth are alive, they can rent this apartment for a dollar a year.”

  “A dollar?” Maisie gasped. “For this whole place?”

  “The money is kind of symbolic. That’s the agreement Great-Aunt Maisie made when she couldn’t afford the upkeep on Elm Medona any longer.”

  “Why didn’t she just sell it?” Maisie asked.

  “It’s where she lived her whole life,” their mother said. She collected the paper plates and wiped the crumbs from the table onto them. “You should hear her stories about growing up in this place. Her father built it as a summer cottage, but the family liked it so much they ended up living here full time. She and her twin brother used to slide down the Grand Staircase and hold tea parties on the lawn.”

  “Great-Aunt Maisie is a twin?” Maisie said, surprised.

  “You have more in common with your namesake than you thought.” Their mother grinned. “She has a twin brother, Thorne, who lives in London. Growing up, they used to be as close . . . well, as close as you two. According to Great-Aunt Maisie, they had adventures like no one else. Adventures they could have only at Elm Medona. She seems to believe there’s something so special about this place that she can’t let it go.”

  Maisie shook her head. “I can’t imagine anything that special here.”

  “Wait until you get the VIP tour,” their mother said. “Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Maisie said, cutting another piece of pound cake.

  “Maybe we’re in for a big surprise,” Felix said.

  He said it to make his mother feel better. But secretly he hoped something amazing did lay in store for them in Elm Medona.

  The Woman in Pink

  On Monday morning, Felix felt his mother kiss him good-bye. Or maybe he dreamed it. But either way, when he got out of bed, she was gone, and a note lay on the kitchen table that said: Have a great day! I’ll be at work setting up my office! Enjoy the tour and stay out of trouble!!! Love, Mom. A giant box of cereal and two bananas sat on top of the note. Felix took a paper plate from the counter, cut himself a big piece of leftover pound cake, and poured a paper cup full of milk. Over the weekend, his mother had unpacked all the real dishes and glasses and carefully arranged them in the cupboard, but if he used something, he would have to wash it himself. Unlike their apartment in New York, there was no dishwasher here.

  He had already finished his first piece of cake and was working his way through half of a second one when Maisie walked into the kitchen. She didn’t bother getting a plate. She just cut a piece of pound cake and bit into it, letting crumbs fall everywhere.

  Outside, thunder rumbled.

  “Great,” Maisie said. “It’s going to rain, and we’ll be stuck inside forever.”

  “We have the tour today, anyway,” Felix reminded her.

  The phone rang, startling them. They’d lived here three whole days, and the phone had not rung even once.

  “Hello?” Felix said tentatively.

  His father’s voice said, “Felix? Felix?”

  “Dad!” Felix shouted.

  Immediately Maisie tried to pull the phone away from him. “Dad!” she yelled.

  Felix turned the receiver so they could both talk and listen.

  “How’s Newport?” their father asked. “How’s Elm Medona?”

  “Hot,” Felix said.

  “Boring,” Maisie said.

  “Sounds like Doha.” Their father laughed.

  “Maybe you shou
ld come—” Felix stopped himself. He almost said home, but where was that exactly? “Back,” he finished.

  “Well, the museum is great,” their father said. “And I like the job a lot. I just miss you guys, and hot dogs and—”

  “Mom?” Maisie said.

  “Like I said. I miss you guys,” their father said softly. “But once you get your computers going, we’ll set up Skype and—”

  “We can’t get Internet here,” Maisie said. “Something about the walls.”

  “Oh,” he said, disappointed. “Well, I’ll be back at Christmas, and that’s practically around the corner.”

  Felix and Maisie knew Christmas was far off, but they both mumbled, “Sure.”

  “I love you, guys,” their father said.

  He had his hanging-up voice on now, and Felix wanted to shout for him not to.

  “Love you, too,” Felix said.

  Then came the sound of hanging up and the eerie silence of disconnection.

  The clock on the stove said 9:24. Maisie tried not to think about what she would be doing on Bethune Street right now.

  “You know,” she said, “adults always tell us we can have anything we want if we just work hard and try our best. But all I want is to turn that clock back to . . . to . . . 9:24 AM last year or . . . or . . . any year really that was happier than this one. And that’s the one thing I can’t have.”

  Felix couldn’t remember exactly what he had been doing a year ago, but he agreed with Maisie. Whatever it was, he had certainly been happier then.

  “I guess they just mean we can become doctors or astronauts or something,” he said. “Possible things.”

  “Well, I don’t care,” Maisie said. “I want an impossible thing.”

  As if this were all his fault, she stomped out of the kitchen, dropping crumbs behind her.

  “Hey!” Felix called. “What’s that? A trail to find your way back?”

  “Ha-ha,” Maisie said and slammed her bedroom door shut.

  At precisely noon, a lady wearing pink—lipstick, scarf, nail polish, too tight sweater—met them outside at the main entrance to Elm Medona for what she called a Grand-VIP-Private-Behind-the-Scenes Tour. She twittered like a bird with excitement about Elm Medona. People came from miles away just to examine its marble and wallpaper, she told them.

  “What lucky children you are,” the Woman in Pink chirped, “to live in a piece of history like Elm Medona.”

  “So we’ve been told,” Maisie muttered.

  The Woman in Pink cleared her throat. “Well,” she said. “I believe that by the end of this tour you will agree with the general consensus.”

  The thunder that had stayed off in the distance suddenly grew nearer. A loud clap burst through the sky, and the wind picked up, whistling eerily and shaking the branches of the large oak trees that lined the driveway leading to where they stood.

  All three of them glanced heavenward. The wind grew stronger. The Woman in Pink had to raise her voice to be heard above it.

  “Well, shall we begin? I’ve been a docent for the preservation society since 1998—”

  “A what?” Maisie said.

  “A docent. A tour guide of sorts. For museums and the like. Now, as you may know—”

  “Docent,” Maisie said under her breath. “D . . . o . . . s—”

  “C,” the Woman in Pink said impatiently. “D-o-c-e-n-t. Now where was I?”

  “You’ve been a docent since 1998,” Felix reminded her.

  The Woman in Pink closed her eyes briefly as if to collect her thoughts. When she opened them, she said in a measured voice, “As you may know, Phinneas Pickworth built Elm Medona in 1909 as a summer cottage for his wife, Ariane. Ariane Pickworth was from French royalty, and, in fact, Phinneas met her in Paris . . .”

  Maisie got bored immediately. But Felix didn’t. Phinneas Pickworth sounded like someone out of an adventure story. Felix was thrilled at the thought that he shared Phinneas’s DNA. Truth be told, Felix was a worrywart, a bit shy, and—as Maisie liked to say—afraid of his own shadow. He got in trouble only when he let Maisie talk him into doing something wrong. Teachers liked him for his enthusiasm for reading and the way he volunteered to wash down the chalkboards and put the chairs up on the desks on Fridays. Parents liked him because he remembered to say please and thank you. Yet a relative of his had sailed the Nile and climbed the Great Wall of China. Things Felix never imagined he would ever do.

  “And such a shame that Ariane died giving birth,” the Woman in Pink was saying, “having spent only two summers in Elm Medona. Her portrait hangs above the green marble fireplace in the Drawing Room.” She lowered her voice as if she were about to share a secret. “That fireplace is an exact replica of a fireplace in Versailles.”

  Again, the wind blew loud and hard, tossing Maisie’s hair into her face.

  “My goodness,” the Woman in Pink said, opening the massive front doors. “The weather report said nothing at all about a storm.”

  As if to disprove that, lightning flashed across the sky, which had gone from blue to gray while they stood outside.

  “We’d better get inside,” she said, waving her arms at them.

  Maisie and Felix walked into the enormous foyer, and both of them gasped. Never had they stood in a place so grand. Not even the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the American Museum of Natural History. They didn’t know where to look first. At the soaring ceiling painted with pink clouds and dancing nymphs? At the Grand Staircase that swooped and rose majestically upward? At the beautiful, stained-glass window above it? Through the back wall of giant windows at the ocean, which wildly tossed enormous gray waves topped with whitecaps? Felix glimpsed one room whose walls appeared to be made of red leather and another that glistened with what might be real gold.

  “Each one of these doors weighs one and a half tons, roughly the weight of a rhinoceros,” the Woman in Pink recited. She pointed at a carved face. “That’s Apollo, the god of the sun—Louis XIV’s personal symbol.”

  The foyer darkened as booming thunder, followed by more crackling lightning, erupted. Rain splashed against the stained-glass windows, hard and fast.

  The Woman in Pink frowned. “My goodness,” she said. “How strange. I’m certain the weatherman called for another hot, sunny day.”

  Felix noticed that, despite the warmth of the house and the pink sweater the woman wore, she shivered.

  “Elm Medona,” she said softly.

  “What about it?” Maisie asked, studying the woman’s face carefully.

  “People say strange things go on here,” the Woman in Pink said.

  “Like ghosts and stuff?” Felix asked, worried.

  Just then came the sound of something falling upstairs, and a loud crash reverberated through the house.

  The Woman in Pink said, “Oh! Dear!” She ran across the marble floor and up the Grand Staircase.

  Maisie took off after her, calling to Felix over her shoulder, “Come on! This might be an actual ghost!”

  “Exactly,” Felix said, pressing himself against the sturdy door. “That’s why I’m staying right here.”

  At the top of the stairs, Maisie bumped smack into the Woman in Pink, already on her way back down.

  “I have to call the preservation society,” the woman said, taking a pink cell phone from her bag. Her hands trembled as she punched in the numbers. “One of the Ming vases broke.”

  Maisie peered past the Woman in Pink and saw shards of blue-and-white porcelain scattered across the rug.

  The rain beat down harder still, and the sound of the wind grew even louder.

  “Hello? Hello?” the Woman in Pink shouted into the phone. Her panicked eyes met Maisie’s. “I lost them,” she said. She glanced at the phone in her still-trembling hand. “I don’t have a sign
al anymore.”

  “Do you think it’s Phinneas Pickworth’s ghost?” Maisie asked hopefully. “Do you think he’s causing all this trouble?”

  “Don’t be silly,” the Woman in Pink said, forcing a laugh. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  By that phony laugh and the way the Woman in Pink looked away from her, Maisie could tell she didn’t believe that.

  “Has anyone seen his ghost?” Maisie said in a whisper.

  “Well, some people swear they’ve seen a man with a big handlebar mustache dressed in explorer’s gear up here. And some claim they’ve seen Ariane’s ghost in the nursery, but surely that’s just a case of overactive imaginations,” the Woman in Pink said unconvincingly.

  “Maisie?” Felix asked from below.

  “It’s nothing!” Maisie yelled. “Just a fancy vase.”

  “A priceless fancy vase,” the Woman in Pink said as she tried to call the preservation society again.

  “Well,” Felix said, “are you coming back down?”

  The Woman in Pink snapped her phone shut. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s just continue with the tour.”

  She took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and began down the stairway. Disappointed, Maisie hesitated. With the Woman in Pink out of the way, she could see that the pieces of the broken vase lay in an almost-straight line. She had broken enough glasses to know that the shards didn’t fall neatly. They scattered. Everywhere.

  How peculiar, Maisie thought. She remembered what Felix had said just this morning when she’d spilled pound cake crumbs. A trail to find your way back. Was someone—or something—trying to find its way back here? But that didn’t quite make sense. Whatever caused all this ruckus was already here, wasn’t it? Maybe, Maisie thought—and she grew excited at the very idea—maybe this trail leads to something. Maybe it is intended to lead me to something.

  She could hear the Woman in Pink downstairs exclaiming about the Dining Room. “Why, it is considered the most beautiful dining room in the world!” she gushed.

  Maisie walked over to the broken vase. She swore the pieces glistened despite the darkness from the storm. But to her utter disappointment, the line of shards led to nothing except an ordinary wall—if a wall covered in some kind of lush green fabric could be called ordinary. Maisie ran her hand over the wall as if she might find something surprising there. But all she felt was the smooth fabric and the hard wood underneath it. She could hear Felix, and although she couldn’t make out the words, from the rise and fall of his voice, Maisie knew he was asking questions. Millions of them. She sighed. For a moment it had seemed that something special was indeed about to happen. But there was nothing up here except a broken vase.