The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail Read online

  Also by Richard Peck

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  Invitations to the World

  A NOVEL BY

  Richard Peck

  ILLUSTRATED BY

  Kelly Murphy

  Dial Books for Young Readers

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group

  Published by The Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA/Canada/UK/Ireland/Australia/New Zealand/India/South Africa/China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  Text copyright © 2013 by Richard Peck

  Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Kelly Murphy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data • Peck, Richard.

  The mouse with the question mark tail : a novel / by Richard Peck ; illustrated by Kelly Murphy. p. cm.

  Summary: A very small mouse of unknown origins runs away from school in the Royal Mews of Buckingham Palace shortly before the celebration of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, celebrating her sixty years on the British throne.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59226-7 [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Mice—Fiction. 3. Identity—Fiction. 4. Social classes—Fiction. 5. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. 6. Buckingham Palace (London, England)—Fiction. 7. Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 1819–1901—Fiction. 8. Great Britain—History—Victoria, 1837–1901—Fiction.] I. Murphy, Kelly, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.P338Mp 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012027992

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For

  Carl Pritzkat

  &

  Tony Travostino

  Contents

  A ROYAL REMINDER

  PART ONE: THE ROYAL MEWS

  1. The Smallest Mouse in the Mews

  2. Mouse Minor at School

  3. Two Crimes

  4. Evening Stables

  PART TWO: THE ROYAL PARK

  5. Peg’s Ear

  6. A Life of Drum and Trumpet

  7. Yeomice on Parade

  8. Snatched and Dispatched

  PART THREE: THE ROYAL PALACE

  9. Midnight

  10. Eyes and Spies

  11. A Rush of Black Wings

  12. Fate Unfolds

  13. A Field of Gray

  14. A Hard Mouse to Convince

  15. Ludovic the 237th

  A Royal Reminder

  EVERY TIME A human walks out of a room, something with more feet walks in.

  Mice, of course, who are only a whisker away and everywhere you fail to look. It’s true of the room where you’re sitting. It’s truer still of Buckingham Palace.

  How busy the scampering world of mice within the palace walls, through that mousehole just behind the throne. How busy the Royal Mews next door where the royal carriages are kept and the royal horses stabled. Beneath the clattering cobblestones of the Royal Mews a whole private honeycomb of mouse passages crisscross and connect. One of them leads into the palace itself.

  How busy these royal places always are—where you can see and where you are not allowed. And never busier than that distant June day when Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee: sixty years upon the throne!

  Remember that great day when all the horses of the Royal Mews stamped across London in the proud jubilee parade. And the mice of Buckingham Palace swept out of the walls in a great gray tide that flowed across marble floors.

  Remember that day, for it bears upon the story of my life.

  PART ONE

  The Royal Mews

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Smallest Mouse in the Mews

  WE WHO LIVED in the Royal Mews next door to Buckingham Palace—horses, humans, mice, one cat, a cow for the milk, and the occasional goat—were in the service of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, Queen of England and Empress of India.

  The sun never sets on her empire, and there we were, right under her palace windows.

  The Mews is a private world within four high walls that smells of horse and what horses leave behind. THE PUBLIC IS NOT ADMITTED, as the Mews is full of official secrets. And just possibly I was one of them.

  I, the smallest mouse in the Mews, not grown nearly enough to match my ears or my eyes or my appetite. Always hungry as boys are, human or mouse.

  And another thing about me. My tail. It was regular and standard-issue. Gray. About the right length for flailing. And naturally very useful for covering my tracks.

  But there was something unusual about my tail. If I wasn’t whipping it about or tucking it round me for the night or using it for balance as you do, it fell naturally into the shape of a question mark.

  I was the mouse with the question mark tail. Perhaps because I was full of questions, many of them about me.

  Who was I?

  Who was I to be?

  I didn’t even know where I was born. All the other mice in the Mews seemed to be born within these walls. But something inside me almost remembered another place.

  And why hadn’t I a name? Surely Runt won’t do as a proper name. How would you like it?

  My question mark tail clearly meant that I was of a curious and questing nature. Curiosity killed the cat, which is no bad thing. But for a mouse, curiosity might open many doors. And some of those doors might just have cheese on the other side.

  You never know.

  YOU WON’T STARVE in the Mews. If you’re nowhere near your nest by teatime, there’s always what falls out of the horses’ nosebags: oats and bran and bits of carrot. On a good day, a lump of sugar.

  I was nobody’s child. But all
mice have aunts, and I had rather more than I needed. I didn’t suppose they were my real aunts. But they nested me where they lived and worked, down below the cobblestones of the Mews courtyard, in the needlemice workroom.

  Here is the Great Truth and the Central Secret of the British Empire. I’ll just mention it now because if you’re human, you won’t have heard:

  FOR EVERY JOB A HUMAN HOLDS,

  THERE IS A MOUSE WITH THE SAME JOB,

  AND DOING IT BETTER.

  All my needlemice aunts sewed the day away, ate a simple supper from leftovers, and slept on their worktables at night, wrapped in remnants. They pleated. They patched. They took tucks and tailored. They wove nets to catch butterflies, for the wings. Their lace was finer than spiderweb.

  With gold and scarlet threads pulled from the upholstery of royal coaches, they sewed mouse-sized military uniforms. They had a small operation going in the making of leather belts and holsters. And once, mysteriously, they fashioned a very small saddle complete with cunning stirrups.

  They kept their beady eyes on me, especially the Head Needlemouse, my aunt Marigold: She had eyes in the back of her head, behind her listening ears. She was everywhere I turned.

  Her snout was spiky with gray bristles, and there were always pins in her mouth. Her fur had gone patchy. She had never been a beauty. But sharp? So sharp, you’d think she slept in the knife drawer. And like all aunts, she was full of sayings.

  One of them was: “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.”

  But I was full of questions.

  “Why haven’t I a name?” I inquired as soon as ever I had the words.

  “Nameless is Blameless,” Aunt Marigold answered briefly.

  “Where did I come from?” I dared ask, though she was apt to snatch me up by the tail if I began to whine.

  “I found you under a cabbage leaf,” she said, looking aside. She always looked aside when she wasn’t telling the exact truth.

  I waited. The pins worked in her mouth. “A stork was involved.” Again she looked aside.

  I waited some more. Then she said, “I brought you home one day in my mending basket because your mother had died.” This time she met my gaze.

  Then I had a memory of my own—almost a memory. “I remember someplace very warm. Toasty.”

  “That would be the stove,” said Aunty, starchy as her apron. “I put you in a ring box and slid you under the housekeeper’s cooker. Otherwise, you’d never have lived. You were touch-and-go, right from the start.”

  “I can’t remember before the stove.” I allowed my lower lip to quiver. “I can’t remember my mother.”

  “How could you?” Aunt Marigold replied. “Your eyes weren’t open. They’re barely open now. And your mother wasn’t from the Mews. She wasn’t one of us.” Aunt Marigold’s pins bristled. “But never mind about all that now. Least said, soonest mended.”

  This was her favorite saying. And there was nothing wrong with her mending. She mended for the palace itself, and her buttons never came off.

  She could sew a fine seam. You had to give her that.

  When she packed me off to school, the Royal Mews Mouse Academy, she stitched up my uniform herself. On her own time, late into the night down in the needlemice sewing room.

  The Royal Mews Mouse Academy was absolutely the last place I wanted to go. It would take up my valuable time.

  “I don’t see no earthly reason for school,” I remarked unwisely.

  “That’s reason enough for going right there,” Aunt Marigold responded.

  I was beginning to whine, always a mistake. She removed a bit of gold thread from her scissor teeth and snatched me up by the tail, quicker than I could think. I was small for my age, or any age. She hoisted me aloft to look me square in the eye. My tail was no question mark now. It was taut as a fiddle string. You could have played “The Blue Danube” waltz on it.

  When she had my undivided attention, she said, “Your head’s empty. You’re to learn how to read.”

  But what was there to read here in the Mews except the horses’ names over their stable doors? I knew those names already. Jason, Xenophon, Morning Star, Bucephalus. Names like those.

  Wisely for once, I hung there in silence.

  “And remember,” Aunt Marigold said. “No fighting at school. You’re too little to win.”

  Ah, she had me there. Silently I swayed. My tail turned tingly in Aunty’s mighty grip. Her ebony eyes bored into me. Then she reached for my uniform, and I dropped down on all fours.

  Out of her grasp, I dared to squeak, “Surely you won’t pack me off to school without a name.” I looked up at her, all ears and eyes, very pathetic.

  “They’ll think of something to call you,” she said.

  And so they did. In fact, they thought of several things to call me. But mostly Mouse Minor because even then I was always the smallest. But you could hardly call it a name.

  “And remember who you are,” said Aunty, stuffing me into my new school uniform with the smart gold thread crest on the pocket.

  She must have meant I was her nephew, so I wasn’t to shame her. But boldly I blurted, “Who am I?”

  Aunty’s apron crackled as she buttoned me into my blazer and gave a tug to my coattails.

  Aunty’s lips were tight and pursed, over her scissor teeth. Her apron crackled as she buttoned me into my blazer and gave a tug to my coattails.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Mouse Minor at School

  TWICE—EASILY TWICE— that pocket with the smart gold thread crest got ripped off in fights at school. The first time in a tussle with Trevor, the son of the Mouse Comptroller of Stores. He was overgrown, was Trevor, easily three times my size.

  “Who do you think you are, you miserable little git? You noxious nobody.” Trevor’s sneers drew a crowd. “One day I shall be Mouse Comptroller of Stores. My father cannot live forever. And what will you be, I should like to know. A seamstress?”

  Trevor’s face was in mine, and all around us the crowd of scholars exclaimed, “Ha-ha. Well said, Trevor. Jolly good. That’s telling him.” Etc.

  Noxious nobody indeed. I was of course not going to put up with that kind of talk. Not even from one who was virtually rat-sized. I looked far up at hulking Trevor, propped my spindly fists on my hips, and squeaked, “Listen, you great nincompoop. Your father, the so-called Mouse Comptroller of Stores, is a well-known crook and a thief in the night. He’s selling palace cheese on the side and pocketing the profit.”

  I don’t know where I got my information. But the gathered crowd was interested. Trevor’s eyes narrowed and reddened. “As for your mother—”

  Those were my last words in this first run-in with Trevor. He fell on me, and the day went dark. When I was conscious again, the crest on my uniform hung from a thread, and one of my eyes was far bigger than the other one.

  Then when I went a round of fisticuffs with Fitzherbert—son of the Mouse Permanent Superintendent of the Mews—he ripped off my pocket and loosened one of my teeth. One of the two front ones, naturally, one of my best teeth. He was easily four times my size, was Fitzherbert, and smelled of drains.

  When I pointed this out to him and remarked that he could be smelled from the far end of the Mews when the wind was right, he pinned me to the floor. He was all over me, and the smell was staggering. Now he was speaking moistly into my free ear. His knee was in my back.

  “You do not know your place, Mouse Minor, you unpleasant morsel of cat meat. Mere nephews ought not be allowed. Never nephews.” And once again the day went dark.

  From the first morning of my schooling to the last afternoon, I mixed it up with the sons of all the best families in the Mews: all the mice of merit, all the rodents of rank. One or the other of my eyes was blacked most of the time. Both my ears got notched. I was quick with my fists and a little undersized and nobody’s child. And I spoke before I thought. It didn’t help that I had a better-looking uniform than theirs.

  He was easily four tim
es my size, was Fitzherbert, and smelled of drains.

  With a heavy heart and a packed lunch somebody was sure to steal, I slumped each morning through the tunnel to school, dragging my question mark tail. I was stuffed into my uniform. Underground and within the walls and in the dark of night, we’re often dressed. It’s only where humans might see that we’re all fur and four-legged. The less humans know, the better.

  Time crept like a snail. The days limped by. Aunt Marigold had to let out my uniform, then make me a bigger one. Then a bigger one still. But I was really quite a runt unto the sudden end of my school days.

  I rarely met anybody on those sad underground journeys through the tunnel to school every blasted morning. Apart from the occasional slimy slug, leaving its silvery trail behind it. And once or twice a furry caterpillar. Twice, actually.

  THE ROYAL MEWS Mouse Academy kept in an airless burrow under the riding school for the human children of the royals up in the palace. We scholars sat below the thump of pony hoofs, occasionally pulling each other’s tail, through the long school days. Posture counted. We had to sit up straight on our haunches, which gave me a crick in the back and a pain in the neck.

  Our seats were alphabet blocks that had vanished from royal nurseries far above us. Our desks were foot-long rulers. We learned our letters by looking under each other, and we learned our numbers from the rulers. And of course mice are famous for our multiplication.

  Our ancient headmaster was peculiar even for a teacher. Not a fine figure either. He crouched on a platform before us with his silk robe black as night wrapped tight around him. He had a nasty habit of swabbing out his ears with his thumb. His fingers were like the spindly spokes of a miniature umbrella. When he pointed one of these dismal digits at you, you shrank and drooped. I did.

  Even his teeth were worrying. And you saw them when he sneered. Not big teeth at the front in the normal way, but a lot of teeth, crowding his mouth. Very worrying.