Secrets at Sea Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE - Great Change

  CHAPTER TWO - Skitter and Jitter

  CHAPTER THREE - The Haystack

  CHAPTER FOUR - When Night and Darkness Fell

  CHAPTER FIVE - Two Futures

  CHAPTER SIX - A World of Steam and Humans

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Dinner Is Served

  CHAPTER EIGHT - The Law of the Sea

  CHAPTER NINE - A Royal Command

  CHAPTER TEN - Camilla’s Train

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Sebastian’s Secret Sweet Shop

  CHAPTER TWELVE - Secrets the Dark Night Keeps

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Dynasty and Destiny

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Waltz Time

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - A Fond Toodle-oo

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - A Palace Wedding

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Peck

  Also by Richard Peck

  Novels for Young Adults

  Amanda/Miranda

  Are You in the House Alone?

  Bel-Air Bambi and the Mall Rats

  Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death

  Close Enough to Touch

  Don’t Look and It Won’t Hurt

  The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

  Dreamland Lake

  Fair Weather

  Father Figure

  The Ghost Belonged to Me

  Ghosts I Have Been

  The Great Interactive Dream Machine

  Here Lies the Librarian

  The Last Safe Place on Earth

  A Long Way from Chicago

  Lost in Cyberspace

  On the Wings of Heroes

  Princess Ashley

  Remembering the Good Times

  Representing Super Doll

  The River Between Us

  A Season of Gifts

  Secrets of the Shopping Mall

  Strays Like Us

  The Teacher’s Funeral

  Those Summer Girls I Never Met

  Three-Quarters Dead

  Through a Brief Darkness

  Unfinished Portrait of Jessica

  Voices After Midnight

  A Year Down Yonder

  Novels for Adults

  Amanda/Miranda

  London Holiday

  New York Time

  This Family of Women

  Short Stories

  Past Perfect, Present Tense

  Picture Book

  Monster Night at Grandma’s House

  Nonfiction

  Anonymously Yours

  Invitations to the World

  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, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P

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

  Text copyright © 2011 by Richard Peck

  Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Kelly Murphy

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any

  responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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

  Secrets at sea / a novel by Richard Peck; illustrated by Kelly Murphy. p. cm.

  Summary: In 1887, the social-climbing Cranstons voyage from New York to London, where

  they hope to find a husband for their awkward older daughter, secretly accompanied by Helena

  and her mouse siblings, for whom the journey is both terrifying and wondrous as they meet an

  array of titled humans despite their best efforts at remaining hidden.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-53577-6

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Mice—Fiction. 3. Ocean travel—Fiction.

  4. Human-animal relationships—Fiction. 5. Social classes—Fiction. 6. Brothers and sisters—

  Fiction. 7. Atlantic Ocean—History—19th century—Fiction.]

  I. Murphy, Kelly, date, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.P338Sdm 2011

  [Fic]—dc22 2011001162

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To

  Sally Lloyd-Jones

  CHAPTER ONE

  Great Change

  THE FIRST WE heard of it was when my sister Louise came skittering down the long passage from upstairs. Louise skitters.

  I forget what Beatrice and I were doing when Louise flung herself among us. I believe Beatrice was crumbing the table. We were beginning to think about lunch, and I’d had some mending. Our brother, Lamont, would have been at school. We hoped.

  “Louise, pull yourself together,” I told her. I am Helena, the oldest.

  Louise had lost her breath and was trying to find it. Her eyes rolled all round the room. She’d tracked in cobwebs on the clean floor. “But wait till you hear—”

  “Louise,” I said, “did you take the front stairway?”

  “Yes,” she gasped. “I was in a hurry. Wait till you hear—”

  “Louise, we never take the front stairway during daylight. Never. No matter what. We don’t do that.”

  I tried to set a good example for Beatrice. Louise didn’t.

  “Nobody saw me.” Louise heaved. “Nobody ever does.” She meant the Upstairs Cranstons. They own the house, but we’ve been here longer. Generations. “I’m quick and I’m small, and they simply don’t see me.”

  “That younger Cranston girl Upstairs has seen you, Louise,” I reminded her. “Camilla Cranston has seen quite a lot of you. Many a time you’ve crept up to her bedroom in the dead of night. You sit on her bed, and she talks to you. She tells you things. Dead of night, Louise, when everybody is supposed to be asleep. When you’re supposed to be asleep.”

  “Yes, well,” Louise admitted. “But I haven’t come from Camilla’s room. And it’s not night.”

  “We know it’s not night, Louise,” I said, and Beatrice agreed.

  “I’ve been in her mother’s room,” said Louise. “The one with the cabbage roses in the wallpaper. Mrs. Cranston’s room.”

  Beatrice and I listened.

  “They were all in Mrs. Cranston’s bedroom, except for Mr. Cranston, of course.” Louise made big eyes at us. “They wouldn’t have seen me if I’d been sending up flares. They were all talking at the top of their lungs. They were practically running into each other.”

  “The mother is rather loud,” I remarked. “And Olive, the older daughter.” The family is from somewhere west of here. Cleveland, I believe.

  “You couldn’t hear yourself think,” Louise said. “Even Camilla was aflutter. They were trying on all their hats.”

  “Hats?” Beatrice piped up. “ Why?” She stood there, holding crumbs.

  Louise drew herself up importantly. Mother’s portrait on the wall looked down
upon us. We waited.

  “They’re going away.” Louise’s eyes were bigger than her head.

  Away? Where? Where did the Upstairs Cranstons ever go? And it was springtime, not summer. In the summer, people went to the mountains and the shore and Saratoga for the races. But not the Cranstons. It took Mrs. Cranston three days to decide to go into Rhine-beck to buy a pair of button gloves.

  “Going where?” Beatrice wondered. “You don’t mean moving away? Packing up and leaving us high and—”

  “I’m not sure what I heard, exactly.” Louise wavered. “It’s something about the girls. About Olive.” Louise’s mind was in a muddle. “I didn’t understand most of it. But Mrs. Cranston went on and on about giving Olive Her Chance. ‘We must give Olive Her Chance,’ said Mrs. Cranston.”

  The eyes in my mind narrowed. I am Helena, the oldest, and I needed to understand everything. “ Where are they going, Louise?”

  “ Europe,” Louise said. Just that one word like the crack of doom.

  “Where’s that?” Beatrice was agog.

  Louise said, “Europe is across the—”

  “Never mind where it is,” I said before Louise could tell Beatrice that Europe is across the ocean. Water is not a happy subject with us, and I wouldn’t have Beatrice worried. I glanced up at Mother there on the wall, looking down on us from the frame and her grave. “They are going to Europe to find Olive a husband,” I said. “They are going to marry Olive off.”

  “Is that what I was hearing?” Louise said, astonished.

  “That’s exactly what you were hearing,” I said, because it was.

  “But why?” Louise and Beatrice gibbered.

  “Because no young man around here ever comes to call on Olive twice.”

  That was another true fact.

  “You know yourselves, Mr. Cranston has looked as far as Rockland County for young men to call on Olive,” I said. “Mr. Cranston has crossed the river, looking for a young man for Olive.”

  We stood sobered by the thought.

  “And do we ever see any of them but once? No. They shy like horses and gallop off. The Cranstons will never get Olive off their hands by staying home. Olive is pushing twenty-one without a man in sight. And so they’re going to have to try Europe.” As soon as I said it, I knew I was right.

  “Aren’t the young men of Europe as particular as the young men here?” Louise wondered.

  “As I understand it, they’re not,” I said. “Besides, in Europe, money buys everything. But with us, it’s family that counts. Family.”

  That was another true fact. I let it soak into Louise and Beatrice.

  Then Louise said in a small voice, “Well, I hope it works out for them. I wouldn’t miss Olive, particularly. As long as they bring Camilla back.”

  “Would they shutter the windows and shut up the house?” Beatrice said. “Then where would we—”

  “We’ll manage,” I said. “Life will go on.”

  But I saw change coming, and that’s always a worry, especially if you are the oldest.

  Beatrice blinked hard at Louise. “Honestly, Louise, put on some clothes. You’re home now.”

  And Louise, still muddled, looked around for her skirt and something for on top. When we are Upstairs, or out and about, we naturally wear nothing but our fur. We wear clothes only in our quarters, here within the walls. I make most of them myself and was wearing my apron with the frill. Beatrice was wearing her polished cotton, very girlish with the smocking across the bodice. But of course we don’t dress like this when we’re out someplace where we might be seen. How could we? We’re mice.

  WE ARE MICE, and as Mother used to say, we are among the very First Families of the land. We were here before the squirrels. The squirrels came for the acorns. We sold them the acorns.

  And we were here ages before the Dutch came up this river. Ages. We made room for them, of course. They were well-known for their cheeses—Edam, Gouda—these Dutch people. And they built good strong stone houses, gabled and stout to keep winter out.

  We came indoors then, in through the Dutch doors. We came in from the cold and were field mice no more. We hardly needed our winter coats once we’d settled among the Dutch—behind their walls, below their floors, beside the Dutch oven. There were crickets on their hearths. But we were not far behind, gray as the shadows, between one loose brick and another. Here we hollowed out our homes. Just a whisker away, only a nibble from the cheese in their traps.

  We wear clothes only in our quarters, here within the walls.

  When they were Dutch upstairs, we were Dutch down here. We learned their tongue. We are excellent at languages. Excellent. And we took their names. I had an ancestress with a long gray tail and eyes as beady as mine, and her name was Katinka Van Tassel. How Dutch can you get?

  After the Dutch came the English. Yes, the English, and very high and mighty. They brought taxation without representation. Tea—oceans of tea—and a ridiculous nursery rhyme called “Hickory Dickory Dock.”

  The English built a grander house around our Dutch cottage. And they cut the trees for a sunset view down to the river. Though water in any form is not a happy subject with us mice. The best reason for a river I can think of is for drowning cats.

  But all of this was long ago, and our Upstairs humans are the Cranstons now, from Cleveland. And so we too are Cranstons, we mice, though of a longer tradition. We have the background they lack.

  So there you have the history of our Hudson River Valley. A rodent view, naturally, and the short version.

  “THEN I’D HATE to hear the long version,” as my sister Louise always says. But that is Louise all over: snippy and skittery, though always first with the news, whether she understands a word of it or not.

  We three were still there around the crumbed table, dizzy with what she’d heard from Upstairs. Louise was fastening her skirt at the waist, though she has no waist. In the quiet you could hear something like thunder from high in the house.

  It must have been Olive and Camilla and Mrs. Cranston running into each other as they tried on all their hats. It was the thunder before the skies opened to wash our old lives away.

  Then our brother, Lamont, stormed into this thoughtful moment. Lamont—home in the middle of the day! Our hearts sank. Lamont—underfoot and everywhere you turned. His lashing tail swept two or three items off the shelves and the cheeseboard off the table.

  Being a boy, he sowed the seeds of destruction wherever he was. And he was home now, hungry for his lunch because mouse school had closed at noon and all the scholars sent home. A cat had been sighted in the vicinity.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Skitter and Jitter

  ALL MICE HAVE sisters, and you have met mine. I am Helena, the oldest. But I was once the mouse in the middle when it came to sisters. There were two older: Vicky and Alice. But they are no longer with us and can play no part in the great adventure coming in our lives.

  Theirs is a painful story that we need not go into just yet. Mother is no longer with us either, which is part of the same sad story. As you may imagine, it involves water.

  But now we needed to settle Lamont to his lunch, or he’d pester us to death. Yesterday was baking day for the Cranstons’ cook, Mrs. Flint. She has a heavy hand for pastry, but she bakes a passable corn bread. And a simple farmhouse cheese is not beyond her.

  We lived in the kitchen wall, and our back door was a crack in the plaster nobody had noticed since the days of the Dutch. It opened behind the big black iron stove, just to the left of the mousetrap.

  Mrs. Flint was an indifferent cook, but there were two good things about her. Her eyesight was poor, and she did not live in. Either she couldn’t see us or she wasn’t there. So we were pretty free to browse her kitchen for our meals.

  And you may take my word for it: We had every right to our share. We were here first. Besides, mice can come in very handy to humans. Times come when mice more than pay their way. Just such a time was coming. Read on.

&n
bsp; But now it was time to feed Lamont his lunch of corn bread crumbled into a thimble of milk. We tied a napkin around his neck, for all the good it will do.

  “Do not bolt your food, Lamont.” I stood over him. Somebody has to. “Those teeth are for chewing. Think of the many mice who must forage for their food, Lamont. Mice who would be glad to be sitting at your place.”

  Lamont’s stomach grumbled unpleasantly as he tore into his corn bread. His stomach is a bottomless pit.

  Then this bothersome boy looked up, twitched his whiskers at us, and said, “Will they be taking Mrs. Flint with them when they sail for Europe? The Upstairs Cranstons?”

  I slumped. Louise stared. At school Lamont learned everything but his lessons. How provoking that he’d heard the news as soon as we had. Maybe before.

  “Sail? Sail?” Beatrice clutched her throat. “Is Europe across water?”

  We were in a tizzy then until Lamont escaped out into his free afternoon. We barely got the napkin off him. He’d dropped down to all fours and scampered for the front door. He was half wild, was Lamont. Boys are.

  “Keep one eye on the sky, Lamont,” Louise called after him. Because any number of things can swoop down on a mouse. Things with wings and talons. Beaks. Especially upon a mouse who does not think. “And remember who lives in the barn!”

  “And in the haystack,” I added. Louise and I exchanged glances. What lived in the haystack didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Water?” Beatrice said in a strangled voice. “Europe is across water?”

  CALM FINALLY SETTLED as we drew up chairs for our lunch, and a spot of coffee afterward. Mrs. Flint always left a pan of breakfast coffee at the back of the stove. We had a cunning little dipper we could send down into the pan on a length of picture wire.

  We lingered over our coffee as the kitchen clocks struck, and then again. We are not good about time, we mice. For us, time always seems to be running out.