The Sixty-Eight Rooms (15 page)

“I thought you had to be an old lady to be a duchess,” Jack said as he looked at the portrait.

“I guess not. The catalogue said something about how she was almost ‘offered in marriage’ to the British king,
Henry the Eighth!” Ruthie turned around to point out a small portrait on the wall behind her. “That guy.”

“He’s the one who chopped off the heads of some of his wives, I think,” Jack added.

“Do you know every person in history who was beheaded?” Ruthie asked.

“Look, I don’t write the history, I just read it, okay? What else does it say?”

“You turn the page,” she directed him. She wanted to see what would happen if he touched the book. “Do you feel anything? Is it warm?”

“Nothin’,” Jack said. “Stone cold.”

The next page contained even more elaborate colors and decorations. Ruthie read on.

“Do you have any idea what she’s talking about?” Jack asked, perplexed.

“I’m not sure. I’ll have to read it again.” Ruthie read it over a few times to see if it would sink in. Her father had
taught her to do that with riddles, and this seemed sort of riddle-like. She took the sentences apart to make sure she understood each word.

“Well, it’s obviously her life she’s writing about,” Ruthie began.

“And she’s sixteen years old—just two years older than Sophie.” Jack was also working hard on this. “But what about these ‘friends’ she mentions?”

“It sounds like they taught her something, I think. Let’s keep reading.”

Jack turned the pages and they read on. Some sentences were easy to understand, but others were pretty complicated. The book was thick, but much of it was decoration, with only a few sentences on each page. The actual written part would have made about a ten-page story.

Ruthie and Jack learned that Christine came from Denmark and as a very young girl had been married to the Duke of Milan in Italy. But she had never actually lived with him. He died when she was thirteen years old. Ruthie could hardly believe that people ever married at such a young age! Then King Henry VIII of England was looking for a new wife and tried to marry Christina. She did not want to marry him, because (Jack had remembered correctly) he had already beheaded one of his wives.

“It’s just like how Sophie was going to have to get married so young!” Jack said.

“I guess that’s what they all did back then. Maybe that’s
why she wrote that she is ‘young and powerless,’ ” Ruthie suggested. They continued reading.

At this point in the story Christina wrote about meeting some “friends versed in alchemy and charms” through whom she “came to understand powers that set her free.”

“Why didn’t she write in plain English?” Jack complained.

“I wonder why it’s in English at all,” Ruthie said. “What do they speak in Denmark?”

“I think Danish, maybe,” Jack guessed. “And is she talking about magic when she says ‘alchemy and charms’?”

“I think so. Let’s look at the last pages.”

Decorations like the ones on the key and the cover of the book appeared all over the margins of these next pages. What they read explained a lot, although it took them quite some time to understand the complicated words. One phrase, however, stood out. It was written larger than all the other lines and it said simply:

Below that, the last entry in the book read:

“Wow!” Jack exclaimed. “Does that say what I think it says?”

“The ‘conjuring friends’ must mean magicians,” Ruthie said. “And she calls the key a ‘wish giver.’ ”

“That’s so cool,” Jack said.

“It’s true, Jack! Before I shrank for the first time, I was wishing so hard that I could actually be in the Thorne Rooms. But I didn’t make the connection between what I was wishing and what happened. And then I was wishing that it would work for you too! I felt so bad that you would have to wait in the corridor all night.”

“Thanks. I guess you’d better be careful what you’re wishing for when you’re holding the key!” They both read the lines many times over until they understood more.

“I bet the magic is only about shrinking; to be ‘unseen yet ever near’ means she could make herself almost disappear, but not completely. That was her wish. I don’t think everything I wish for would come true,” she theorized. “I mean, I couldn’t make the cockroach disappear even though I really wanted it to.”

“That makes sense,” Jack agreed. “Or you’d have to be holding the cockroach’s hand for it to work. Yuck!”

“And the ‘only
she
who possesses’ it line explains why it
works for me and not you—the magicians made it just for girls!” Ruthie thought a bit more and added, “What do you think she meant by that last line, ‘To be free’?”

“I dunno, but if I were a girl back then getting married off all the time to creepy old guys like him,” Jack said, nodding toward the portrait of Henry VIII, “I might want to disappear every once in a while, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I would.” This was one of the things Ruthie admired about Jack—he could always see things from someone else’s point of view. “This key is five hundred years old … and so is the magic or charm or alchemy or whatever you want to call it!” Ruthie continued, trying to comprehend it all. She looked up at the portrait of Christina on the wall. “I wish she told us more, like how they made the magic and if there are any other rules.”

“I think we just have to figure it out as we go,” Jack said. “I wonder …”

“What, Jack?”

“I wonder what would happen if you held the key now, here, in front of her book. There must be a reason why it was warming up in your pocket.”

“Well, all I can tell you is that something is definitely different in this room. I’m a little afraid to touch it.” She knew he was going to try to talk her into it.

“Yeah, but you can drop it if something bad starts to happen. Like if you begin to grow—or even shrink again,” he added, smiling.

“Okay. Let me have it.” She had a hunch that this
young woman hadn’t wanted her “conjuring friends” to create something bad or destructive. It was hard to explain but somehow she trusted the face in the portrait hanging on the wall above her.

“Here,” Jack said, holding the key out to her.

Ruthie opened her hand and Jack let the key fall into it. Immediately it began to feel warm in her palm, almost too hot to touch but not quite. Then it began to glow a brilliant combination of orange and yellow and shimmering silver. But she didn’t feel the signs of shrinking or expanding.

“So far so good, right?” Jack asked.

Ruthie nodded. She didn’t want to speak because, in fact, something
was
happening. Ever so faintly Ruthie began to hear something. As she stood there with the key glowing and glinting in her hand she realized what it was: a voice.

“Do you hear that?” she asked Jack, although she was pretty certain he couldn’t hear it. “What? I don’t hear anything.”

“Wait … shh.” She held a finger to her lips. The voice was getting gradually louder. Then something happened that they both witnessed: the book—which they had left open to the last page—turned its own pages back to the beginning. And Ruthie heard, quite distinctly, a girl’s voice saying, “Gentle reader.”

“It’s her … it’s her voice! I can hear her reading to me!”

“I knew it’d be something awesome like that!” Jack declared.

There was no doubt about it: Ruthie was being read to by Christina, Duchess of Milan. With a voice accented by her native Danish, the young duchess spoke the words that were written in her diary. Ruthie read along, occasionally looking up at the portrait, which seemed more and more lifelike as she listened. Ruthie liked Christina’s voice. In a way it reminded her of meeting Sophie; she guessed they might have been friends if they had lived in the same time. When the voice reached the last lines, it spoke with such passion and insistence that Ruthie stood frozen, a shiver running from her head to her toes.

And then it was quiet. The voice stopped; Christina said nothing more than what was written. Then the pages began to turn themselves back to the beginning again, like some invisible rewind button had been pushed.

Jack watched and waited.

“That was amazing!” Ruthie said, handing him back the key. “It was all so real, Jack. She sounded like she was standing right behind me, reading over my shoulder. And she sounded so young—younger than Claire.”

Jack closed the book. “I wonder how Mrs. Thorne ended up with it.” Jack was about to say more when Ruthie suddenly put her finger to her lips.

“Shh! Jack, I hear something else now,” she said quickly.

Jack listened briefly and then, as he went toward the entrance to the corridor, said, “I hear it too. That’s not magic. It’s your cell phone!”

“Ugh!” Ruthie rolled her eyes at the interruption but knew that she’d better get to her phone fast. “I was supposed to check in with Claire! It must be later than I think. I should hurry. I don’t want her to call your house!” She ran out of the room, relieved that she had left the phone on the ledge. As she approached the unshrunken phone she could actually see the vibrations as it rang, since it was almost as large as her twin bed. She saw the giant-sized phone number of the caller ID that told her it was, in fact, her sister calling. The buttons were easily the size of pillows. Ruthie had to push hard with both hands to depress the green talk button and put her mouth up close to the microphone hole to answer.

“This is a terrible connection,” Claire commented. “Your voice sounds really weird.”

“Really? Yours sounds fine.”

“Mom and Dad just called me to check on us. Everything okay with you?” Claire asked without too much interest.

“Yep. Fine.” Ruthie thought short answers would be best. “How did the SAT go this morning?”

“Fine, I guess. Who knows? I’m just glad it’s over.”

“I bet you did great.” Ruthie could tell Claire didn’t have anything more to say. “So just call my cell if you want me again, okay?”

“No problem,” her sister answered.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” Ruthie said.

“Yeah, but not too early, all right? I’m sleeping as late as I can!” They said goodbye and Ruthie put all her weight on the end-call button.

Her head was spinning. Three minutes ago she had been listening to the voice of a long-dead teenage duchess and the next moment she was listening to her sister over her cell phone. The reality of the situation hit her: she had lied to her family in order to spend the night somewhere without their knowledge or permission. While she’d been in the rooms she hadn’t thought about it—the adventure was too great. But standing on the ledge in the darkened corridor, having to stay put all night with no one knowing she and Jack were there, she felt a little unnerved and guilty. She was just a girl in the city doing something she shouldn’t be doing.

The huge space loomed around her, and for a moment Ruthie contemplated the distance between her real life and this adventure, which now seemed greater than the span of years between her life and Duchess Christina’s life. Somehow that distance seemed like nothing now. She had the feeling that the five hundred years that had passed since this young woman had sought out a magic potion didn’t even exist. At least, not in room E1.

O
N HER RETURN TO ROOM
E1, Ruthie found Jack completely dressed in the knight’s armor, practicing sitting down and standing up without falling over. He was having little success. She watched him for a minute before he realized she was there. Anyone else would have been embarrassed, but not Jack.

“Man, this is hard,” he said. “I don’t see how they actually fought battles in this stuff!”

“I guess the knights were all at an equal disadvantage,” Ruthie theorized.

“Exactly. Hey, who called? Everything okay?”

“Just Claire checking on me. I’m glad I told her to use my cell and not call your house.”

“That could have been a disaster,” Jack said in a muffled voice from under the visor, which kept slamming shut.
Disaster
sounded like “dziszazcher.”

“Help me out of this stuff.”

Now that they knew the source of the magic, they both felt somewhat satisfied even though they still had lots of questions. It was time to do more exploring; perhaps other rooms contained important bits of mystery and magic.

While Jack was putting the armor back together—which took him a few minutes because it is always harder to put something together again than it is to take it apart—Ruthie browsed around the room, wondering if she had missed anything on her first look. She walked to the other side of the room and opened the cabinet. It looked empty. Then she checked the far end of the room, behind the wooden screen.