Secrets at Sea Read online

  “Well, yes,” I said. What a gossipy place a ship is.

  “They have already made an unfortunate impression in the first-class dining saloon.” The Duchess bent still nearer. “My dear, those dresses.”

  Oh, we were in over our heads now. Heads and ears. “But how could you know—”

  “Our waiters overhear their waiters,” the Duchess said. “The world is a much smaller place than it seems.”

  Her eyebrows rose high, though she didn’t really have eyebrows. “And what is the purpose of their journey, these Cranstons? To attend the Queen’s great jubilee?”

  Everybody at our end of the yardstick was naturally all ears. “Well, I’m not sure they know about the . . . jubilee,” I said. “They are ’usband—husband-hunting for Olive.”

  “They are off to a very poor start, I’m bound to say. They have fallen at the first fence.” The Duchess shook her head. “Moreover they’ve picked the wrong ship. We are sailing very short of rank. There are only three unmarried Englishmen of title on the entire passenger list. Three only. I will name them for you. There is Lord Sandown, who will be the Earl of Clovelly. But he is presently only five years old.”

  Well, I don’t suppose he’d do, I thought.

  “And there is the Marquess of Tilbury, but he is eighty years old and has to be fed by hand.”

  Strike him off the list, I thought.

  “That leaves Lord Peter Henslowe, who is twenty-four years old. But he’s good-looking and will be hard to catch.”

  I was lost among these lords. “I don’t think the Upstairs Cranstons are looking for a title for Olive. Lords? Earls? I doubt it, Duchess. They may not know what titles are. For Olive, they’d settle for just about any—”

  “They have not set their sights high enough!” The Duchess tapped the yardstick. “They have not been well-advised. You have your work cut out for you.”

  We started and stared.

  “You will have to take steps. You are their mice. Your fates are intertwined with theirs. You cannot leave important decisions to humans. Their heads are in the clouds. Times come when mice must pay their way. Your time draws nigh.” She stared past me at Louise and even at Beatrice. She meant business.

  We didn’t know what to think. Our brains buzzed.

  “How fortunate for you that you have met us,” the Duchess remarked. “We take an interest in your situation. We can’t think why.”

  She snapped a finger in the air, and three waiters nearly fell on her.

  “Take away this soup!” she commanded. “It is entirely too clear!”

  CAMILLA WAS ASLEEP when we came in under her door. Our dinner had run to twelve courses. The remains of the flaming pudding churned inside me. The night stretched before us.

  The steamer trunk was gone, and Camilla’s lavender dinner gown was wadded on the floor with all her underthings. She was tidier than this as a rule, but she may have had a miserable time in the first-class dining saloon. Louise crept over to examine the crumpled handkerchief with violets on it.

  “I could sleep on her bed,” Louise muttered. “She’d be glad to see me when she—”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, Louise,” I said. I talked her into sleeping in the chamber pot under the bed. Beatrice and I went into Camilla’s jewelry case. It stood open on her dressing table and was tufted inside. It was the best we could do. I wouldn’t sleep a wink anyway, not this near a human. But I wanted Beatrice where I could see her.

  You are wondering about Lamont? So was I. Nigel had taken charge of him. He spirited Lamont off to an airing cupboard he ran as a dormitory for traveling mouse boys.

  “You’ve ’eard of the Boy Scouts?” Nigel had said. “They were invented in England. ’Ere at sea we’ve got the Mouse Scouts. My invention.” Nigel jerked a thumb at himself.

  “It’s better to watch boys,” he remarked, “and to keep ’em busy.”

  Lamont went gladly. Too gladly, if you ask me.

  BEATRICE AND I lay curled in the jewelry case, in a loop of Camilla’s pearls. They were the string her father had given her last year for her sixteenth birthday. How lumpy our bed was with all her lockets and bangles and her garnet ring. The hatpins were sharp. There was barely room for the two of us. Beatrice was asleep at once, breathing directly into my bent ear. What a provoking girl. The ship wallowed, and the ocean was a mile deep. She ought to be terrified. But she was sawing logs in my ear, and dreaming.

  I can read her mind, tiny though it is. Mice dream of nothing but cheese and time running out. But she was dreaming of Nigel. She sighed.

  Sea spray dashed at our portholes. Every rolling wave carried us farther from the only world we knew. I was almost homesick for the handkerchief drawer.

  I may have dozed just lightly when an unearthly moan jarred me awake. All the fur on my body stood up. Then another moan. Human.

  It was Camilla. I sat up. Beside me, Beatrice murmured, “Oh, Nigel, we mustn’t,” out of some ridiculous dream.

  I peered over the lock on the jewelry case. Camilla was struggling up in her bed, onto her elbows. She was in one of her flannel nightdresses. Her hair was a mess.

  “Oh heaven help me,” she said to the night. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  The cabin tilted. The hangers in the closets clashed and tinkled. Unknown things rolled around the floor. Camilla was looking everywhere for something to be sick into. She remembered the chamber pot and lunged for it.

  Panic rose in my throat. What a shock for them both if she was sick all over Louise.

  But in that instant, Louise bounded up on the foot of the bed, landing neatly. Camilla switched on her electrified bedside lamp. There was Louise, small as life, arranging her tail and cocking her little pointed face at Camilla.

  “Eeeeek! A mouse!” Camilla kicked in the bedclothes, drawing up her feet and her sheet. She didn’t know Louise from Adam’s off ox. How could she? We were miles from home.

  Louise lost her head and ran in circles, chasing her own tail. Which didn’t help.

  Except it did. Camilla was so startled, she forgot to be seasick. She was greener than a gourd, but she only swallowed hard. She lowered her sheet. Louise pulled herself together. They exchanged a long look up and down the blanket.

  Camilla stroked her own cheek. “But you couldn’t possibly be . . .”

  Louise drew back on her haunches and rearranged her tail. She cocked her little face again at Camilla, trying to look exactly like herself.

  “But how did you get here?” Camilla was thunderstruck. “How on earth?”

  Louise thought. Then she sprang off the bed and scrabbled around on the carpet, out of sight. But you could hear her if you listened. Then she soared back up on the foot of the bed. She had Camilla’s handkerchief in her teeth. It trailed behind her. The one with the violets. She nosed it forward for Camilla to see.

  “My handkerchief?” Camilla’s eyes widened.

  “You mean to tell me you came aboard in the handkerchief drawer of my steamer trunk?”

  That was exactly what Louise meant to tell her. How well they seemed to understand each other. Louise tilted her little head and shrugged her shoulders, though she doesn’t really have shoulders.

  Camilla was hardly green by now. “Oh, Mousie!” she exclaimed, which seemed to be her name for Louise. “How glad I am to see you. Nobody else on this ship is friendly in the least.”

  They were soon into one of their murmuring, one-sided conversations. As if they’d never left home. As if I wasn’t right here in this jewelry case, just out of earshot.

  I am too proud to eavesdrop, and so I could only wedge myself into the pearls, avoiding the hatpins, with Camilla’s garnet ring gouging into my back and Beatrice’s nose in my ear.

  They were soon into one of their murmuring, one-sided conversations.

  “Oh, Nigel,” she murmured from deep in a dream, “do we dare?”

  How I longed for home then. Our old home in the kitchen wall behind the stove, in our matchbo
xes with the scrap quilts and the human-hair mattresses.

  I had led us away from all we knew in order to keep us together, to be family. Now look at us.

  Louise (Mousie!) and Camilla as if I didn’t exist. And Beatrice, who was either terrified, lovesick, or sound asleep. And Lamont gone gladly off into the unknowable world of boys. Mouse Scouts indeed.

  I am Helena, the oldest, I reminded myself in the dark of that night. But I felt like Helena, the only.

  I could have wept.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Law of the Sea

  THERE IS NOTHING restful about an ocean voyage.

  At first light Louise’s shadow fell across our jewelry case. “Rise and shine, you two. They’ll soon be bringing Camilla’s breakfast.”

  Very bossy.

  Where were we three to go from here but under the bed? It was dusty down there. The English spit and they polish, but they do not dust. Beatrice sneezed.

  The breakfast came, on a table with wheels. The waiter’s big shoes were this close. I never could get used to being so near humans. Never. They are simply enormous. The maids burst in, and they were all over the cabin.

  “What are they doing?” I muttered to Louise.

  “They are laying out Camilla’s clothes,” she muttered back. Hangers clattered. “It is a scandal that she and Olive and Mrs. Cranston aren’t traveling with their own maids. Everybody says so.”

  Their own maids? We recalled Mrs. Flint’s daughters. They’d have been hopeless at sea. They weren’t that much use at home.

  Bedsprings squeaked above us as Camilla struggled upright. The door fanned, and humans came and went. My stomach flapped lightly against my backbone. I thought I’d never be hungry again after that dinner last night, but I was.

  Then a human hand reached down, very near us. It was Camilla’s, thrusting a small plate under the bed, right in front of us. A point or two of toast, buttered. A small mound of scrambled egg. A morsel of bacon and two grapes. Louise’s breakfast, courtesy of Camilla. There was enough for three.

  BREAKFAST WAS NO sooner over than the maids were back, pulling Camilla’s traveling coat out of the closet, lacing up her shoes for her, rummaging for hatpins.

  “Now what?” I murmured to know-it-all Louise.

  “They are dressing her for the deck and putting her life preserver on.”

  My heart nearly stopped. “Are we sinking?”

  Though I whispered, Beatrice was all ears.

  Louise rolled an eye. “It is a lifeboat drill. All the passengers report to the open deck and stand by the lifeboats to be counted.” Louise looked very superior. “It is the Law of the Sea.” She preened.

  “Well, excuse me for not knowing, Louise,” I snapped. “We don’t all have humans to tell us things.”

  I sniffed. Louise sniffed. Beatrice was still all ears.

  Bells rang. A whistle shrilled. Camilla and the maids swept out of the cabin in a flurry of skirts.

  A little peace and quiet at last! I hadn’t drawn an easy breath that near humans. I never do. But busybody Louise was already making for the door, peering under it out to the crowded corridor. Though curiosity killed the cat, Beatrice and I followed. We could barely see above the pile in the carpet, but the Upstairs Cranstons were all out of their cabins, jostling each other and retying the ties on their life preservers.

  Mice rarely laugh, but I was tempted. Over their heaviest outdoor clothes they wore great, bulky, bulging things strapped around them. Mr. Cranston, a large, shapeless man anyway, in a bowler hat and his windowpane plaid greatcoat under his life preserver. Mrs. Cranston, bigger than he, in a gigantic feathered hat, her squirrel-skin cloak, and over that her life preserver, stretched to its limits.

  “She’d sink like a stone,” Louise muttered in my ear. “That life preserver wouldn’t float her hat.”

  Olive looked wretched. She’d anchored her hat with a pea-green veil that matched her face. She swayed sickeningly. Camilla looked the best of them as she always did. But a life preserver is flattering on nobody. Law of the Sea indeed. They looked ridiculous.

  Mrs. Cranston fussed over them all in that way she has, but they were heading off along the corridor to the open deck. I was just ready to duck back inside the cabin when I got a shock more surprising than I can tell you. Beatrice and I were cheek by jowl under the door when out of the blue she blurted, “Well, I for one am not going to be left behind! The Upstairs Cranstons are heading for the lifeboat! I’m going too. We are their mice. Our fates are intertwined with theirs!”

  I was so stunned by this outburst I could hardly utter. “Beatrice, it’s only a lifeboat drill. An exercise.”

  “You don’t know that,” Beatrice babbled right in my ear. “It could be the real thing! Besides, I bet ships have sunk before during lifeboat drills. You know nothing about it. You don’t know everything, Helena.”

  She was hysterical. I would have slapped her, but there wasn’t room. “Beatrice, they are making for the open deck,” I explained. “It will be miles and miles of ocean in every direction. You’ll be petrified. It’s water, Beatrice.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I want to see that lifeboat with my own eyes. You never know if we might need it!”

  And with that, she squirmed under the door and shot off down the corridor before Louise or I could think.

  We watched round-eyed as she bore down upon the dawdling Upstairs Cranstons. There’s nothing wrong with our eyesight, and we saw her take a flying leap at the dangling tails of Mrs. Cranston’s squirrel cape. She was swallowed up by squirrel tails and distance.

  We were shocked witless. Our chins would have been on the floor except they already were. Then into my other ear Louise muttered, “She might have a point.”

  “What?”

  “She might. I wouldn’t mind knowing where the lifeboat is. Besides, it didn’t take Beatrice long to infest Mrs. Cranston’s fur cape. What will she get up to next, do you suppose?”

  Then we were both squirming under the door and flying along the corridor. Our feet hardly grazed carpet. Louise was in the lead. I tried to keep up, but I’d had so little sleep. You try spending the night on a mattress of hatpins and pearls.

  I could see Louise closing the gap between herself and the sweeping skirts of Camilla’s coat—a gabardine duster.

  And that’s all I saw.

  Just ahead of me a cabin door opened. Two gigantic human figures stepped out—men. Right in my path. The whole world before me was a dark herringbone tweed. I tried to stop. I tried my best. I did a complete somersault and went whiskers over teacup, ending up on my back, facing the wrong way.

  Now panic gripped me. I scrambled up. But I could see nothing of the Upstairs Cranstons or Louise. I could see nothing but gentlemen’s boots and trouser legs. I leaped onto the trouser leg of the second man. Pure panic, and not a good place to be if he followed the other man off down the corridor.

  But above me he spoke. “Oh, sir, I quite forgot your lap robe,” he said. “You may require it on the open deck.”

  “Very well, Plunkett,” said the other man.

  With that, he—Plunkett—turned back to the cabin door. He strode inside, and I swung like a bell from his trouser without the sense to drop off. Besides, he could have mashed me into the carpet like that.

  The cabin smelled of bay rum aftershave lotion. The lap robe was a blanket in the ship’s colors, with fringe. He reached for it. I reached for the hem of his overcoat. Then I was traveling. You can get your nails into herringbone tweed.

  I swarmed up him, over the life preserver, spongy with all its milkweed inside. Now I was on one of his tweedy shoulders. If he’d glanced sideways, we’d have been eye to eye. This was no place to tarry.

  I was right by Plunkett’s ear, in the shadow of his bowler hat. I looked up. A short leap and a little luck, and I could swing up into his hat brim. Panic propelled me. There are forces stronger than gravity.

  Up I swung and lit in his brim. It was a
curly trough around the crown of his hat. I settled in, very supple. Of course, I was six feet off the deck on the head of a human—a perfect stranger and probably foreign. What a sudden place the world is.

  Out in the corridor my human kept a step behind the other man. Now we were on stairs. Now a heavy door swung and a sharp gust of damp ocean air hit us. Plunkett’s enormous human hand came up to grab the brim of the hat, trapping one of my whiskers.

  I hadn’t thought of this, of course. I hadn’t thought at all. What if this bowler hat blew off his head? I lay in the trough of the brim, paralyzed. What did I fear more, those four fingers, big as giant sausages, gripping the brim and my whisker, or sailing off his head and out to sea?

  It wasn’t a long walk to our lifeboat. By now I’d figured out that I was in the hat brim of a servant. Ladies travel with their maids, as everybody knows. I supposed gentlemen traveled with their valets, or whatever persons like Plunkett were called.

  Humans milled just below me. I hazarded a look over the brim. There upon the crowded deck was an ancient human in a flat cap and many lap robes. In his life preserver he looked like a beached walrus. He slumped in a wheelchair pushed by his valet. The Marquess of Tilbury, no doubt, who had to be fed by hand.

  Then out of the milling throng came another pair of quite a different kind, though also English. Striding along the deck was a woman, treetop-tall with the face of a disapproving prune. On her head a starched cap, with veils flowing down her back. A very superior servant, no doubt. A nanny, in fact, because attached to one of her hands was a small boy, in a sailor cap with ribbons. Well, not small, but about five years old in human terms. He carried a rubber ball that he wouldn’t be parted with even for boat drill. In fact, he looked like a rubber ball himself, wearing a life preserver.

  His small blue eyes were nearly lost above his enormous pink cheeks. He wore a sailor suit to go with his cap. His shoes buttoned up his fat legs.