Secrets at Sea (11 page)

Just as the music stopped, Camilla's string of pearls broke. Pearls leaped from the hollow of her throat, bounced off her bodice, and peppered the floor. Pearls pattered along with the applause. Lord Peter Henslowe was on one knee before her, fishing for pearls at the hem of Camilla's pink skirts. “Oh,” breathed Camilla, her hand on her throat, her feet crossed at the ankle. And Louise back in her orchids. Quick-thinking, sharp-toothed Louise. You have to hand it to her.

Lord Peter held up a kid-gloved palm full of pearls like an offering. Camilla blushed to match her dress. And like a galleon on stormy seas, Lady Augusta Drear barged down the room. She sailed past the violinists, scattering sheet music. She was gunning for Mr. and Mrs. Cranston. Everyone seemed to look their way, showing the way.

They were marooned in the midst of the room. Purple-faced Mr. Cranston on his feet, half strangled by his collar, miserable in his spanking new tailcoat with the too-long sleeves. Below him sat Mrs. Cranston, overflowing a gilt chair. Her hair was dressed high above the great moon of her face. The cameo at her throat was the size of a stove lid. Her mountainous bare shoulders gleamed in the candlelight, and the top part of her ball gown struggled to contain her. She was a very generously built woman. A terrible shadow fell across her before she even noticed in her dithering way that something might be amiss.

In all innocence, she looked up at the awful visage of Lady Augusta. Not a handsome woman. The room held its breath. Fans froze. Again we heard the ship's engines throb.

Lady Augusta unclenched her mouth to speak. “Madam—”

But at that moment—that exact moment—Beatrice suddenly appeared out of Mrs. Cranston's ball gown. The front part, right in the middle, if you can picture it. There was hardly room, but Beatrice fought her way upward into open country. Her little pointed, bewhiskered face popped up like the cork out of a bottle. Two perky ears pointed north against Mrs. Cranston's bare flesh, below the cameo.

Saucy Beatrice looked up, beady-eyed, to catch Lady Augusta's attention. Lady Augusta was mortally afraid of mice, and there one was in the last place you'd think to look. Beatrice twitched her whiskers and batted her eyes.

The guest list dropped from Lady Augusta's hand and swooped to the carpet. Her eyes rolled back, and she fainted in slow motion, revolving as she went. Gunmetal corded silk crumpled. Quicker than he looked, Mr. Cranston scooped her up just before she landed. She hung, openmouthed, in his big gloved hands, out cold.

He was the hero of the moment.

“I have an idea it's the heat,” Mrs. Cranston told everyone. She dithered for her fan. “The poor old thing,” meaning Lady Augusta. “Somebody ought to loosen her stays and cut her out of her corsets. I'm hotter than a firecracker myself, and wringing wet!”

Mrs. Cranston tapped herself with her fan, just where Beatrice had been. But Beatrice had made herself scarce.

 

THAT CONCLUDED the musical portion of the evening. A collation of light refreshments followed. Lord Peter Henslowe brought a small gold-banded plate of supper to Camilla where she sat demurely with her loose pearls in her purse and a corsage watchful on her shoulder.

T
HE CANDLES GUTTERED, and the fire burned low. The party glittered to a close. The Princess rose, and all the room rose with her, except for the Marquess of Tilbury and me. His valet fed him one last spoonful of supper and dabbed his chins. Then we were rolling off down the passageway.

Beatrice and Louise could ride their humans home. I'd have to watch for the moment to spring out of the Marquess's breast pocket and find my own way.

Alas, I lingered too long.

Straight ahead of us at the end of the corridor was a thing called an elevator. It was a small, electrified room that moved up and down between decks. I never saw such a thing and wondered how it worked. And so I stayed on the Marquess too long. Curiosity killed the you-know-what.

A small male human in a bandbox hat and many buttons operated the elevator. There was barely room for us inside, as the Marquess was immense. We dropped from deck to deck. My stomach was up around my ears. Finally we were being pulled backward out on the Marquess's deck.

Then he sneezed.

A big wet one. I was ready to leap, but he reached for his pocket handkerchief, the paisley foulard, and seized on me instead.

He drew me out, leaving the handkerchief behind. I was in his great soft hand. A gold ring circled his smallest finger. One of my feet braced on that. He lifted me up, and we were nose to nose. He was one sagging wrinkle after another. But rank is more important than appearance.

His watery old eyes widened. His snowy eyebrows rose. Somehow he had me by the tip of the tail, holding me up. Never in my life had I been held up by the tail. Never. I was terrified, and embarrassed to death.

He dangled me. My hands scrabbled in thin air. My feet hung.

“Hee, hee,” the Marquess said. “Hickory Dickory Dock!” He held me up for the valet to see. The wheelchair swerved.

“Oh, my lord, I should let it go,” said the valet. “You don't know where it's been.”

Then the Marquess sneezed again, or this story would have taken a different turn. The corridor was drafty. He reached for his handkerchief. I dropped through space. I bounced off his knee, turned once in the air, and lit running. I ran for my life, on all fours and tail high. Wherever I was, I needed to be somewhere else.

I ran down one passageway after another, up decks and down. I was like a . . . rat in a maze. I ran toward music, an orchestra playing a ragtime tune. I swerved another way and heard the sound of pool cue against ball. I ran where humans were, beneath their very feet. A lady switched her skirts aside. “Eeeek,” she said. A walking stick swatted very near my throbbing tail. A polished shoe stamped. I bounded off of bulkheads. I raced through a fanning door, and skidded on open deck. I drew up by a coil of rope, very near the end of mine.

Damp wind cut my eyes. I huddled, shaking in my fur. There beyond the railing tossed the endless black and unforgiving sea. Water, water, everywhere. Above in the night the sparks from the funnels spiraled upward to join the firmament of stars. A terrible and lonesome beauty, and I was far from the tufted jewelry box of my bed.

I allowed myself a single whimper, but only one. The sea air whistled through my mind. My tail throbbed. My head rang. My hands wrung. Still, I pulled myself together, there in the shadow of the coiled rope.

In the next moment or the moment after that, I knew I wasn't alone. The sea made a swishing sound, but there was this other sound too. Nearer, much nearer.

My ears rose to perfect points. It was the sound of claws digging into rope, climbing. A nearly silent scraping, but there's nothing wrong with our hearing. I froze. Then above me a dark shadow loomed over the coiling rope, against the starry sky.

I dared look up at the awful outline of two ragged ears. Then—oh, the horror—a single burning eye, a sickening yellow. It was the ship's cat, one-eyed thanks to Nigel. And kill-crazy, as cats are.

I was numb, naturally, but alert. Another scrabble as the ship's cat gathered his back paws for a sudden leap. I sensed his hindquarters swaying in anticipation, his tail coiling like the rope. He was fixing to pounce.

Oh, the horror
—
a single burning eye, a sickening yellow.

And there I was just below, with nothing between us but thin night air.

A horrid hiss arched above me from the airborne one-eyed cat. His claws would be stretched wide, his fangs winking by starlight.

I went blind and deaf for an instant. In my mind's eye flashed an awful scene from out of the past. I saw the corncob Papa had been working on when the barn cat pounced, all that time ago.

Then I was traveling as the ship's cat dropped with a thump upon the deck where I'd just been. The deck was slick, but I am quick.

I had to get back inside the ship. Otherwise I could be chased off this pitching deck and into the fathomless sea. The cat lost a moment, wondering where I went. A door fanned, and I made for it, swerving. Trying to stay on the blind side of a one-eyed cat is uphill work. I shot through the door into the ship, hoping it would swing shut in that feline face—slam him one, right on the nose.

But luck was not with me. He was through that door and on my tail. Now I ran at random. My feet went faster than my thoughts. I might have been headed anywhere, even onto the ballroom floor beneath the heedless feet of all those milling humans.

Instead, I seemed to skim over the carpet of a corridor. It was a deck nearly as grand as the Princess's Royal Suite. Maids bustled from door to door, carrying bed linens. I fled too fast to be seen. But they couldn't miss the snarling cat. With any luck, a maid would fetch him a good swift kick in the other direction.

It wasn't to be. I picked the first closed door, and was under it in a furry flash. Without a second to spare. If cats could get under doors, there'd be fewer mice. Far fewer. Hisses issued from the corridor side. Claws scratched at the doorsill. I seemed to feel hot cat breath even through the solid door. His chattering jaws rattled in my head. I sagged there, gathering myself.

The cabin before me was shrouded and dim. But darkness is nothing to a mouse. Another door was cut into one of the walls, so this must be part of a suite, possibly a grand one. Starlight showed through a porthole. Beneath it was a bed, a small one. I crept my way there and jumped up on it, with just enough spring left to lift me. Maybe I thought I'd be safer there, this far from the hissing door. I wasn't.

All manner of strange shapes littered the bed. Before I could make sense of them, light flooded. A hand had switched on the electrified lamp.

Somebody was in the bed. I liked to have fainted.

I froze of course, one hand drawn up, my eyes staring.

Two eyes stared back, small blue ones above enormous pink cheeks. It was that boy from the lifeboat drill. Lord . . . Sandown, the future Earl of Clovelly. Five years old and possibly a handful. He may have sensed me leaping onto the foot of his bed. I didn't have Louise's light way of bounding up on humans' beds. I didn't have the practice.

We stared at each other, up and down the rumpled blanket. It was littered with his toys. The rubber ball. A drum with sticks. A nutcracker in the shape of a foreign soldier. A cast-iron royal coach with four horses. Boys live in this kind of clutter. I was reminded of Lamont's bedroom. The collar buttons, the birds' bones, the ball of twine. The mess.

Another hiss came from beyond the door. I nearly lost hope then. I'd spent the whole of my life keeping my distance from cats and humans. Now look at me.