Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy (5 page)

The corridor had a very strange smell. It took her all the time to walk to room number 716 to remember what it was. It was exactly the smell of Mr. Fleming’s pigeon coop at 7 Bedford Gardens. Mr. Fleming lived right beside the
Whittard-Worthingtons in Kensington, London, and Ophelia could speak to him over the back fence if she stood on a garden chair. He bred and raced Danzig highflyers and blue dragoons, and he was very kind to Ophelia, sometimes opening the little gate between their gardens so she could look at the newly hatched chicks.

Yes, it was just the same here, a dank, moldy, feathery type of smell. There must be pigeons living in the ceiling, Ophelia thought, and then shivered. Her chin went numb with the cold. Her ears ached.

The corridor turned just after room number 721. She was surprised to see that at the end of the passage, not very far away, there was a small white cupboard against a blank white wall.

She felt very pleased. The whole exercise had been easier than she expected. The little white cupboard had only one little white drawer. She opened it very quietly and saw one small golden key. Everything was exactly as the boy had said it would be.

She took the key and put it in her blue velvet coat pocket. Her favorite right-hand coat pocket. She smiled to herself. She smiled to herself because the day had turned out to be very interesting and she had turned out to be really quite brave. The key fell through her right-hand pocket hole and clattered onto the floor.

There was silence at first, then a rustling, sighing, swishing, hushing sound.

The rustling, sighing, swishing, hushing sound was small
to start off, but then it grew louder. It grew so loud that it was the only sound that Ophelia could hear.

The sound came from behind the doors.

Then another noise. A noise more terrible than the first. The sound of something very sharp on the marble floor.

A
click, clack
.

A
scritch, scratch
.

The sound of talons.

The distinct sound of claws.

Ophelia scooped up the key and began to run. She ran and did not look back. She turned the corner and sped toward the elevator, waiting with its open mouth. Each room she passed, the sound grew louder. The click, clack, rustle, sigh, scratch, and now the rattling of the doorknobs. Something was trying to escape. She slipped on the marble floor in the large open room, skidded on her denim bottom into the elevator, scrambled onto her knees, slammed the number 3 with her fist, and fell backward as the door closed.

In which Miss Kaminski returns for Ophelia and looks at her suspiciously

Ophelia could not breathe. She couldn’t breathe when she stepped out of the elevator. She couldn’t breathe when she stood pretending to carefully study
Triceratops
. She couldn’t breathe when Alice and Miss Kaminski returned for her.

She took a squirt on her puffer.

Then another.

“Are you okay?” said Alice.

“Yes,” squeaked Ophelia.

“You’re as cold as ice,” said Alice, touching her sister’s cheek.

She wrapped her scarf around Ophelia’s neck. It reminded Ophelia of the old Alice. The Alice before their mother was ill. The Alice who took the stairs three at a time and sang into her hairbrush and laughed loudly on the phone to her friends. The Alice who held Ophelia’s hand and lent her hair-clips and offered kind and well-meant, if not utterly useless, fashion advice.

Ophelia could feel the key heavy in her left pocket, where she had carefully stowed it. She was sure Miss Kaminski must be aware of it. Surely there was a light shining from her pocket announcing to the world that she, Ophelia, was a thief.

Miss Kaminski looked at her rather suspiciously. She bent down and touched Ophelia’s cheeks with her very cold hands, which only made her feel more freezing.

“Look,” said Alice, and she turned her head to show an antique lace flower clip in her long blond hair. “Miss Kaminski said I could borrow it from the collection.”

Alice had put away her headphones. Her cheeks were flushed. She pointed to a little pink diamond brooch on her coat lapel and held out a turquoise ring on her finger.

Miss Kaminski smiled. The museum curator knelt down in front of Ophelia. “And did you enjoy the dinosaurs, Miss Amelia?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” Ophelia squeaked again, too scared to correct Miss Kaminski. “I did very much.”

Miss Kaminski deposited the sisters in the sword workroom and did not stay long. She said she was continuing preparations for the greatest and most remarkable sword of all to be unlocked from its city vault in two days’ time to take its place of pride in the exhibition.

“Mr. Whittard, when you see this sword, your heart will stop,” Miss Kaminski said.

Ophelia watched her father try to speak in the presence of the beautiful museum curator. He nodded, fumbled with his
glasses, then managed to knock over a cup filled with pens. Alice sighed loudly. As soon as Miss Kaminski was gone, Ophelia jumped up.

“I have to go somewhere,” she said.

“Aren’t we going skating?” shouted Alice.

“I won’t be too long,” said Ophelia, already halfway up the stairs.

She ran through the galleries until she found the narrow corridor that led to the room filled with teaspoons. Her feet led her then. Through the telephones, the mirrors, the elephants, the wolves. She slipped through the crowd ogling the Wintertide Clock in the
Gallery of Time
. She raced down the hallway filled with gloomy paintings of girls.

She stopped there because she was out of breath.

And because she thought it must be sad to be a painting of a girl that no one ever stopped to look at.

She walked slowly down the corridor, gazing at each girl or almost every girl—there were so many of them, and they all looked very similar. They were all very pretty, and they all looked very disappointed. She saw that at the bottom of each gold frame there was a name.

Tess Janson, Katie Patin, Matilda Cole, Johanna Payne, Judith Pickford, Millie Mayfield, Carys Sprock, Sally Temple-Watts, Paulette Claude, Kyra Marinova, and Amy Cruit. She stopped reading after that because she’d got her breath back.

“Goodbye, Amy Cruit,” said Ophelia. “Can’t stay. Got to rush.”

“Breathe,” said the boy through the keyhole.

Ophelia knelt with her hands on her knees.

“There are things up there on the seventh floor,” she said finally.

“Of course there are things up there,” the boy replied.

“But what sort of things are they?” said Ophelia angrily.

“They’re the misery birds,” he said. “They are a type of bird and a type of monster. You’re very brave.”

“You should have told me they were up there.”

“I did tell you they were up there. You didn’t believe me.”

Ophelia shivered. She was just beginning to thaw. She rubbed her hands together, cupped them over her mouth, and breathed into them. She looked through the keyhole.

“I’m not meant to have bad frights,” she said. “It’s my asthma.”

“Did you get the key?” asked the boy.

“Yes,” she said, and slipped it from her pocket. She went to place it in the lock hidden in the door of the turquoise sea.

“No,” said the boy. “It doesn’t open that.”

“Pardon?” Now Ophelia felt really cross.

“This key opens a small box on the sixth floor. I haven’t seen it, so I cannot say at all what it looks like, but I know it’s there.”

“How do you know?” asked Ophelia. The mention of a floor so close to the seventh made her queasy. Suppose those miserable birds woke up again? What must they look like if just the sound of them had made her hair stand on end?

“Mr. Pushkinova has told me some. He is the keeper of
the Queen’s keys, and while he has guarded this cell for many years, he has always been very kind to me. Also there is Mrs. V., who does the cleaning and sometimes brings me breakfast and supper. She never says much, but when she does, it is very useful. She has been coming for seventy years, almost as long as Mr. Pushkinova. And before Mrs. V., there were others. I have gathered the information over many years. You must go to the sixth floor and find the box and open it with this key. There will be another key inside.”

“Seventy years? But you don’t look any older than me,” said Ophelia.

“I am much older,” said the boy. “I began my journey three hundred and three years ago. It is only as a result of a blessing bestowed on me by a great magical owl that I shot through the heart with my arrow that I appear this way.”

“Now you’re really being silly.”

But she looked through the keyhole at his clothes. She had to admit they were very old-fashioned-looking. His coat was embroidered with gold birds with emerald eyes. It must have once been a splendid thing. Now it was unraveling at the sleeves.

“The things I could tell you,” he said quietly.

He was looking away, she could see, looking intently at his hands, perhaps to hide his disappointment. It made her feel terrible, such talk: wizards and magical owls and arrows through the heart. But he looked so sad and lonely.

Ophelia Jane Worthington-Whittard crossed her arms. “Tell me, then,” she said.

And so the boy began.

I ran the way the wizards had always shown me. Well, I mean, they always showed me the way by walking—they don’t run, as such; their bones are too rickety. They always took me out through the south gate and then through the fields and into the forest. They said if I followed the compass south, I would pass through the belly of the mountain and then across the sea. I would go through the meridian, the point of no return. They never told me how I was expected to cross the sea, even when I asked. When I got to the other side, I would find a just and noble king.

So that was the way I went, out through the south gate and through the fields, which were covered in frost. There were people everywhere that morning, people with their whole lives tied up and teetering on top of wagons, heading out of the kingdom to escape the Snow Queen’s invasion. And everywhere there were boys and men rushing this way and that with their horses and their newly forged swords. But that is another story.

I didn’t want anyone to see me that morning. I didn’t want them to shout, “Ay, there’s the boy chosen by the wizards, running in the wrong direction, away from the Snow Queen. How will that help us, boy?” I slipped into the rows of frosted corn as quickly as I could and then soon into the forest.

The quiver, even though it only held one arrow, hurt my back. And the sword! It was so heavy. It banged against my thigh and made it ache. And I stepped in a puddle and my shoes got wet, and I knew right away they’d dry and give me blisters.

I ran the way the wizards and I had walked in the forest together. Keeping close to the stream and then crossing it where the great oaks stood. Running and running until I touched the first of the Herald Trees.

Why are you looking at me like that, Ophelia? Surely they are in your scientific books? Herald Trees are the messenger trees, terribly magical. Wizards talk for miles through them.