The Adventures of Tintin (3 page)

Aha!

“Here it is, Snowy!” Tintin said in a low whisper. Under the table, Snowy’s stubby tail thumped on the floor. Tintin read the entry.
“Sir Francis Haddock of Marlinspike Hall, the last captain of the ill-fated
Unicorn.”

Tintin paused to look closely at an illustration of the
Unicorn
under full sail on the high seas. It had sailed from Barbados in 1676, and was attacked by pirates shortly after leaving port. “All hands lost except for one survivor,” Tintin informed Snowy, who had crept up and put his front paws on Tintin’s lap so he could get a look at the book, too. Sometimes Tintin thought Snowy could even read.

Sir Francis himself had been the lone survivor, and when he returned home to Marlinspike Hall, he was convinced that the voyage had cursed his name. “A curse, Snowy,” Tintin whispered. “And listen to this:
The
Unicorn
’s manifesto stated that it was carrying a cargo of rum and tobacco bound for Europe. But it was long claimed the ship was carrying a secret cargo
.”

He dropped a hand to scratch between Snowy’s ears. “What was the ship carrying, Snowy?”

On the next page, the entry ended:
Historians have tried and failed to discover what happened on that fatal voyage, but Sir Francis’s last words hint at the difficulty of the mystery: “Only a true Haddock will discover the secret of the
Unicorn.”

Tintin closed the book. The secret of the
Unicorn
. His pulse quickened. He might not be a true Haddock, but Tintin was willing to bet that
he
could discover that secret. He had found the first outlines of a mystery. Now he wouldn’t be able to stop until he had filled in every last detail. “The secret of the
Unicorn
. . .” He looked down at Snowy. “What do you think?”

He heard something in the aisle behind him, but when he looked over his shoulder, the aisle was empty. Outside it had begun to rain, and the library was growing dark. Lightning flashed through the windows, throwing the shelves of old books into stark relief. Suddenly the library seemed spooky to Tintin. He felt as if he were being watched.

Tintin stood and Snowy came out from under the table. For a moment he listened, but if there was someone else in the library near him, that person was being perfectly silent. It was already a strange day, Tintin thought.
Two different people showed up the moment I bought the model. What do they want with it?
He did not believe the red-suited man’s excuse about Marlinspike Hall. He also didn’t know if he believed Barnaby’s warnings about danger.

But clearly something was going on. Tintin felt a little thrill. “I’ve missed something, Snowy,” he said quietly. “We need to take a closer look at that model.”

He and Snowy walked quickly back home through the rain. Tintin couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched, but he couldn’t see who might be watching him. Because of the weather, the streets were largely deserted. Those few people he did see kept their heads down under umbrellas or held their collars up against the rain. None of them seemed very interested in a young man and his dog.

The puzzle of the ship preoccupied him. Something about the hollow mast was important—or was it? Was he focusing on that and missing another clue? The only way to find out was to get another look at the ship. He would sit down with the model and examine it from stem to stern. Something important would present itself.

But when he opened the door to his apartment and shook the rain from his coat, he looked over and saw Snowy’s snout pointed at the sideboard.

The model ship was gone.

Strangers in the marketplace were one thing. Strangers breaking into Tintin’s apartment were quite another. The time had come to take action!

The question, of course, was what action to take.

Tintin knew that the
Unicorn
model was valuable to at least two people other than himself. One was the American blowhard Barnaby. The other was the strange bearded man from the market . . . who had just taken possession of Marlinspike Hall.

And Marlinspike Hall had been mentioned in the encyclopedia entry on the
Unicorn
. It was the ancestral seat of the Haddocks. The red-suited man from the market was not a Haddock—of this Tintin was certain, but he was equally certain that the man had something to
do
with the Haddocks. But what?

The answer might be found at Marlinspike Hall.

A short while later, after the sun went down, he was creeping along the shadowed base of a high brick wall toward a rusted iron gate with a full moon shining in the clear sky and Snowy skulking along at his feet. His white fur appeared almost fluorescent in the moonlight. It was windy, and dead leaves rustled in the nighttime breeze. Next to the gate, a plaque, streaked from age and weather, read
MARLINSPIKE HALL.

Tintin looked around. He and Snowy were a long way down a winding dirt road, far in the countryside. There was no sign of any other human presence. Tintin pushed on the gate. It didn’t move. Then he pulled on it. It still didn’t move.

How was he going to get in? The walls were too high to climb. Yet he had to get inside. Marlinspike Hall held the answer to the puzzle. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became.

“What do you think, Snowy?” Tintin asked—then realized that he was talking to Snowy through the gate.

Snowy was inside!

“How’d you do that?” Tintin asked him, grabbing the gate’s bars and shaking them. Snowy trotted a few paces away from the gate and stuck his head into a hole in the wall, wriggling through to emerge not ten feet from where Tintin stood. He hadn’t noticed the hole in the darkness. “Clever boy,” he said.

He squatted in front of the hole. It looked as if he would fit. He worked his head and shoulders in, using his elbows to pull and feet to push. He could feel Snowy snuffling around his feet. When he got through, Tintin stood and brushed the earth and leaves from his clothes. Snowy appeared next to him.

Between them and Marlinspike Hall itself, the grounds were mostly open, but there were clusters of trees and undergrowth here and there. If they hopscotched from cluster to cluster, with a little luck Tintin thought he and Snowy could get close to the door without being seen. He looked up. There were a few clouds, but the moon was very bright. Not the best circumstances for sneaking around, especially for Snowy.

He took a moment to look over the main house itself now that he could really see it. Once, it had been a grand-looking place—that much was apparent. It was built in the chateau style, with stone walls and lots of windows. Various turrets gave its roof a regal appearance, as if someone mighty had piled stone on stone to create a monument to the Haddocks and their seagoing legacy. But Tintin could also see that Marlinspike Hall was falling into neglect. Vines crept up the stones, and shingles were missing from parts of the roof. The grounds were becoming a tangle of untrimmed bushes and overgrown grass. Tintin wondered what the inside looked like. With any luck he would find out soon.

Scooting quickly from tree to tree, he made a zigzag approach to the front door. Along the way he kept an eye out for light in the windows or any sign that someone might be watching from within. But Marlinspike Hall looked as if no one had lived there since before Tintin was born.

At the base of the steps leading up to the front door, Tintin decided to risk a flashlight. The first thing he noticed when he turned it on was a coat of arms carved into the arch over the doorway. It was a medieval jumble of shields and an eagle and a—was that a unicorn? And there was a fish. Tintin puzzled over it. “A coat of arms,” he said softly. Sometimes when he was thinking hard, it helped him to speak out loud. “Why does that look familiar?”

Then the answer presented itself. The fish was a haddock.
Ah
, Tintin thought.
Of course
. Marlinspike Hall was the Haddock estate, and their most famous ship had been the
Unicorn
. “See, Snowy?” he said, starting to point out the elements of the coat of arms.

But just as Tintin spoke, Snowy ran off from the house. “Snowy!” Tintin called. What was he doing?

With a low growl, an enormous guard dog suddenly charged at Tintin from out of the shadows!

Tintin jumped off the side of the porch and sprinted back across the grounds in the general direction of the hole in the wall. He hurdled a fallen tree and nearly knocked himself out on a low-hanging branch. The dog was right behind him! Tintin cut through some brush, thinking it would slow down the dog, but his coat snagged. He struggled through the thicket as the great canine worked its way closer, head low and teeth bared.

Just before it could clamp its jaws on him, Tintin sprang free of the brambles and ran pell-mell toward the wall. The thicket was larger than he had thought. He ran along its edge, hoping to keep the large dog stuck in it as long as possible.

How he was going to get over the wall, though—that was going to be a trick. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the guard dog was free of the brambles and closing in on him again.
Uh-oh
, Tintin thought. He wasn’t going to make it to the wall, let alone have time to find the little hole and worm his way through it.

The dog was close enough that Tintin could hear its heavy breathing. He clutched the flashlight tightly and made a run for it.

But Snowy came to the rescue! He burst from the brambles and planted himself in the guard dog’s path, head low, barking furiously. “Snowy!” Tintin called, skidding to a halt and turning back to protect his dog . . . but there was no need. The guard dog had also come to a skidding halt and was . . . cowering before Snowy? It was! It even licked Snowy’s muzzle while Snowy stood stiff-legged and still growling.

Tintin couldn’t believe it. A dog that big, scared of a little terrier! “Well done, Snowy,” he said, coming up to pet Snowy’s head. “Good boy.”

He wished he knew what to call the other dog, which looked like a Rottweiler. It wore a collar and Tintin debated whether he could look at its tags. It sure didn’t seem to be much of a guard dog anymore.

Just as he reached for the Rottweiler’s collar, the two dogs abruptly began a chase again, but this one was playful. They swerved and leaped through the brush and over the fallen trees, emerging out onto the lawn as Tintin watched.
Amazing
, he thought. All that guard dog needed was a little fun and it lost all of its meanness.

He took advantage of Snowy’s cleverness to get closer to the house again. With all the noise from the dogs, anyone inside would know something was up—but Marlinspike Hall was still dark and quiet. Perhaps no one was there. Tintin decided that he wouldn’t try the door; either it would be locked if no one was there or it would give him away too quickly if someone was. He skirted the edge of the lawn, looking for a potential window he could climb through, and found it around the side, in the shadow of a huge fieldstone chimney.

The window was latched, but Tintin flipped the latch up with his pocketknife and slowly pushed the window open. It made only a quiet creak, and he climbed into a darkened room, clicking his flashlight on again to get a better look around. The room was full of furniture covered in white sheets, with a thick layer of dust over everything and great tangles of cobwebs in every corner. The house smelled musty, as if no one had lived there in quite some time. He wanted to explore it and discover the secrets it held. If the red-suited man from the market had purchased Marlinspike Hall, surely there should be some sign of his presence. Tintin moved across the room and through a doorway into another room, nearer the front of the house. Through an archway ahead, he could see a large open space. That was the grand foyer inside the front door. It was dark and quiet.

Tintin didn’t want to go out there just yet. The room he was in looked to be some kind of sitting room or study. Here, too, most of the furniture was covered, but he could discern the shapes of the different chairs, tables, and couches. Tintin caught glimpses of paintings on the walls, seascapes and portraits of Haddocks throughout the history of Marlinspike Hall. Shelves of carved wood displayed old books and antiques, including a couple of small ship models.

Getting warmer
, Tintin thought. And just as he had the thought, he spotted a long, narrow shape under a sheet, with a couple of high points causing peaks and drapes just as the masts of a model ship might. Tintin reached out and lifted away the sheet in one swift motion, revealing the model
Unicorn
!

There it stood, looking good as new. “Well, well, well,” Tintin said softly. “It seems we’ve caught our thief.”

He picked up the model ship and started to turn, planning to leave Marlinspike Hall the way he had come, through the window. But as he turned, his flashlight beam fell on a hulking figure standing between him and the door! Tintin only had time to gasp before the figure raised a candlestick and conked him on the head. He sank to the floor, feeling the
Unicorn
lifted from his hands as his eyes crossed and his flashlight went out.