Magic in the Mix (23 page)

“Good,” said Ray. “I hope it hurt, whatever it was.”

Again, silence.

Miri looked up. Cookie rounded the doorway and padded with businesslike efficiency to the sofa where Miri and Molly were curled. A quick leap put her in the middle of their legs, their papers, their pillows, and there she paced, carefully choosing the best available seat, which turned out to be atop Miri's open math book. She settled herself across the pages and waited expectantly.

“Hey, sweetie-Cookie,” murmured Miri, glad for the interruption. For the past few days, Cookie had been disappearing for several hours at a stretch, returning to Miri and Molly with a distinctly well-fed and well-petted air. “You're going to get fat if you keep eating two centuries' worth of dinner,” she whispered in the kitten's ear.

“What's that?” Molly said, leaning forward. “Around her neck?”

There was a small paper packet, attached in a yarn hammock around Cookie's neck. Miri held Cookie as Molly untied it and then unfolded the paper. Two delicate rings tumbled into her hand. She stared at them for a moment and then showed them to Miri. They were made of gold thread, braided together into a circlet, with a tiny flower tucked into the center.

Wordlessly, Molly handed Miri the paper they'd been wrapped in.
My dear little Gypsies, I don't know if these will reach you, but I think they may, and I hope you will accept them with my love. I have just received a ring myself, which I believe I must owe to some sort of enchantment cast by you girls and your darling kitten. My fiancé—you met him, I think—has named her Giddy, for the way she skitters out of his hands, but we are both very grateful to her and to you for introducing us. I have never been so happy! M

Miri slipped the ring on her finger. It was light and pretty, just like Maudie. She looked up at Molly and saw that she had done the same. With their eyes, they shared the picture of Maudie, shining and joyful, her graceful fingers braiding the gold threads. She was in the house somewhere, in one of the layers of time suspended within its walls. And there, she was rapturously happy. They smiled at each other and, together, reached for Cookie and rubbed an ear apiece.

Cookie closed her eyes and purred.

I was often hounded, as a child, by adults who wanted me to read educational books. Parents, librarians, and teachers—they all seemed to have some sort of obsession with making me learn while I was reading. “Here,” they'd say, handing me a book with an awful title like
Nakyt of the Nile: A Girl's Life in Ancient Egypt
, “here is a wonderful book that will teach you all about pyramids!”

Bleah. Who cared about pyramids? All I wanted was a good story.

So it is with some embarrassment that I find that I have written a book that has history in it. I would be a good deal more embarrassed if it were a book
about
history, but it's not, I promise. It's
about
some kids who live in this very odd house and … well,
you can read it yourself. But the story also includes some hunks of history, and though I have absolutely no intention of being educational, I have to confess: almost all of them are true.

If you are not interested in history, you can stop reading right now. But if you want to know more about the events and people mentioned in this book, here are the facts:

By the fall of 1864, the Civil War had been going on for three and a half years, and the United States—otherwise known as the Northerners, the Yankees, and the Union—was finally winning. In Virginia, the Confederates—otherwise known as the Rebels, the Southerners—had been pushed down into the southern part of the state, leaving the northern part under Union control. But Union control was not very controlled, due to the activities of Colonel John Singleton Mosby (the Colonel of our story), who had been given command of a cavalry battalion in 1863 for the express purpose of “annoying” the Union army in northern Virginia. Mosby was an expert annoyer, and by the fall of 1864, when our story intersects his, he and his band of several hundred Rangers had enjoyed fifteen months of sneaking
around, shooting up stray Yankee soldiers, robbing trains, and kidnapping Union officers for the fun of it.

In August of '64, the commander of the Union forces, General Ulysses S. Grant, ordered Major General Phil Sheridan and his army to rid the Shenandoah Valley, a long river valley that runs along the western border of the state of Virginia, of all Confederate troops, and, for emphasis, to burn crops as he went. Sheridan gladly obeyed. “The people must be left with nothing,” he wrote, “but their eyes to weep with.” By mid-October, Sheridan was triumphant: the Confederate army had been pushed south, and the finest farmland in the Confederacy was a scorched wasteland, leaving the locals hard-pressed to feed themselves, much less the Rebel army.

It was at this point that the Battle of Cedar Creek, gleefully reenacted by Ray, Robbie, and Ollie the Rot King, occurred. A cranky old Confederate general named Jubal Early (really!) decided to stage a surprise attack on Sheridan's troops at a spot called Cedar Creek. In the middle of the night of October 18–19, while Sheridan was absent in Washington, twenty thousand Confederate troops snuck into position around the sleeping Yankees at Cedar
Creek and struck at dawn. The Union soldiers, waking to find themselves under attack, ran like rabbits. At the same time, about fifteen miles to the north, Sheridan was making his way back to camp, enjoying an early morning ride, when he heard the sounds of gunfire. Perplexed, he urged his horse to a trot—and then a gallop—toward Cedar Creek, and was greeted by the sight of his own army streaming toward him in full retreat.

Upon seeing their commander, the defeated soldiers began to cheer, and this threw Sheridan into a monumental rage. “God damn you, don't you cheer me! If you love your country, come up to the front!” he screamed, in addition to a whole lot of others things that can't be put in a book for kids, all the while tearing toward what was left of his camp. Inspired by his courage—and also probably afraid of what he'd do to them if they continued to retreat—his men turned around and followed him back to the front lines, where they fought again and succeeded in turning a humiliating defeat into a major Union victory.

Mosby did not take part in that battle, but he was fully aware of Sheridan's other activities. Throughout August, September, and October, as Sheridan rampaged through the Valley, Mosby's
attacks on Union soldiers, trains, and supplies were frequent, violent, and successful. In mid-August, several weeks into his Valley Campaign and angry that his hard fighting hadn't produced more control over the conquered territory, Sheridan decided to take action. He assigned a special unit, called the Scouts, to the task of “cleaning out Mosby's gang.”

What followed was a month of raids, gunfights, attacks, and counterattacks. Usually, the Union got the worst of it. Mosby was a brilliant strategist, his men were outstanding fighters, and all of them knew the territory far better than their opponents.

But it was during one such attack that the Rangers made a fatal error: they shot a Union soldier as he was surrendering. Though this might seem like a minor consideration in the middle of a war, when the whole point is to kill the enemy, it was, on the contrary, seen as a shocking breach of the rules of combat: a soldier who surrendered was to be made prisoner, not killed.

When Sheridan's officers heard of this, they decided on their revenge: they would treat any captured Ranger as a criminal, rather than as a soldier. This meant that the Northerners would execute any Ranger, any suspected Ranger, or anyone helping
a Ranger immediately and without investigation. No questions, no trials, and no prisoners.

On September 23, 1864, in the small town of Front Royal, they put their new policy into action, taking six captured Rangers out of the makeshift jail where they were held and swiftly executing them, four by firing squad and two by hanging. One of the victims was a seventeen-year-old boy who was not a member of the Rangers at all.

Mosby in his turn was outraged and swore vengeance. As he wrote to General Robert E. Lee in late October, “It is my purpose to hang an equal number of Custer's men whenever I capture them,” a plan he made good on November 6, when five Union soldiers were hanged by a group of Rangers.

It is into this context—the late-October collection of Union soldiers for Mosby's revenge killings—that I dropped Robbie and Ray and let them fall into the hands of Nick Carter.

I regret to report that Nick Carter was a real person and evidently just as foul as I have portrayed him here. His true name was Loughborough Carter, but everyone called him Nick, a name his father bestowed upon him because he behaved like Old Nick; that is, the devil. According to John Munson, a
Ranger who wrote a memoir of his service entitled
Reminiscences of a Mosby Guerilla
, Nick Carter and his pal Charley McDonough were “outlaws who accompanied us only by the tolerance of the Colonel. … Nick Carter belonged to one of the oldest and most aristocratic families in Virginia, but he accumulated such a load of undesirable responsibility and notoriety during the war that he thought it best to leave the country mysteriously at its close.” Though Carter cannot be definitely traced after the war, local legend has it that he went to Mexico, where he made a living shooting bandits.

As for the other Rangers that make an appearance in
Magic in the Mix
, there was an “uncouth” Ranger named John Hearn, who served as the pattern for the Hern of our story. He was said to look “every inch a clumsy clown in a sea of trouble.” Charlie, on the other hand, is a fictional creation, inspired by a photograph of a Ranger with an enormous black moustache. The gunfight that occurs in Miri and Molly's front yard is, likewise, fictional, but it is based on the descriptions of several typical Ranger engagements in 1864.

I admit to a sneaking fondness for Colonel John Singleton Mosby, despite his poor taste in choosing
sides in the Civil War. I like him partly because he was so brilliant at what he did, and partly because he seemed to have such a good time doing it. I'm not alone in my partiality; even his enemies admired him. At the end of the war, when there was a price on Mosby's head as a fugitive criminal, Ulysses Grant himself intervened to save his life. Mosby, in return, became a supporter of Grant in the 1870s when he ran for president.

One final historical note: it may seem unlikely to twenty-first-century readers that anyone would take thirteen-year-old boys seriously as a soldiers, but teenage soldiers were common on both sides during the Civil War. The youngest registered Ranger in Mosby's 43rd was only fourteen years old, and boys as young as twelve served as drummer boys in both armies. In addition, despite all the current hand-wringing about our diets, they are a major improvement over the Civil War era in terms of vitamins, minerals, and protein. And, accordingly, height and weight. Colonel Mosby, who was about 5'7” and weighed 128 pounds, would be unlikely to consider the average-size Ray and Robbie too small to be soldiers.

A work of fiction that contains historical fact requires considerably more gratitude than one that's entirely made up. In researching the Civil War action in the Shenandoah Valley in general, and Mosby's 43rd Virginia Cavalry Battalion in particular, I have relied upon
Mosby's Rangers
, by Jeffry Wert;
Reminisences of a Mosby Guerrilla
, by John W. Munson; and
The Memoirs of Colonel John S. Mosby
, by Mosby himself. For Civil War–era expressions and slang, my source has been
The Language of the Civil War
, by John D. Wright. I have appreciated the maps and descriptions of various battles published by the Civil War Trust at
www.civilwar.org/
and the meticulous Order of Battle for the Battle of Cedar Creek, published by
the National Park Service at
www.nps.gov/cebe/historyculture/order-of-battle-battle-of-cedar-creek.htm

I am profoundly grateful to the librarians and researchers at the Ruth E. Lloyd Information Center (RELIC) for genealogy and local history at the Bull Run Regional Library of the Prince William Public Library System, where Tish Como, Beverly Veness, and Margaret Binning managed to track down in a matter of days a trove of information about Nick Carter that had eluded me for months. I salute their research skills. Further thanks are due to Joe Molinaro, who assisted me with matters pertaining to Civil War geography; to my sister, Sally Barrows, who helped with regional information; and to my daughter Esme, who provided authoritative linguistic advice about thirteen-year-olds.

As always, I am relieved and grateful to be able to conduct my primary research at the University Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Without the resources I find there, most of my books would never have seen the light of day.

The Magic Half

Copyright © 2014 by Annie Barrows

All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published in the United States of America in September 2014
by Bloomsbury Children's Books
Electronic edition published in September 2014
www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Bloomsbury Children's Books, 1385 Broadway, New York, New York 10018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barrows, Annie.
Magic in the mix / by Annie Barrows.
pages    cm
Sequel to: The magic half.
Summary: Life seems to be back to normal for “newly twinned” sisters Miri and Molly until their magical house sends them on a new time-traveling adventure to the Civil War, where they must risk everything to save two unusual soldiers and come to terms with the emotional truth about Molly's past.
[1. Twins—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction.
4. Magic—Fiction. 5. United States—History—Civil War,
1861–1865—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B27576Mb 2014     [Fic]—dc23     2014005032