Bookweirder (3 page)

“Penny says that I was born to ride Dandy,” Dora bragged. “He’s very naughty with other girls, but he’s
brilliant
with me.” Recently Dora had begun to use these British words and phrases that she’d picked up from her friend Penny. Everything was now “brilliant” and “super.” If Norman had been paying attention, he would have taken time to make fun of Dora’s fake British accent, but he was busy with his own thoughts.

“Dad, is there a particular reason that animals can’t talk?” He was thinking about the rabbits he’d imagined seeing back in the folly, and in a sideways way about Undergrowth.

Edward Vilnius nearly spat out a mouthful of coffee, but he managed to stifle the laugh. “Is this a commentary on your sister or the horse?”

“Uh!” Dora cried shrilly, exaggeratedly offended. Her father winked at her.

Norman pressed on. “I mean, is there a physical reason they can’t talk—like their mouths can’t make the sounds?”

“Almost all animals communicate in some sort of language,” Norman’s mother pointed out. “Whales have huge repertoires of songs, for example.”

“No,” Norman elaborated, “I mean, could they speak a human language, like English?”

“Well, parrots can be taught to mimic human language. Is that what you mean?” his father asked.

“I guess so.” Norman didn’t know why he’d bothered asking. It wasn’t like he could explain it.

“Is there a particular animal you are thinking of? Are you thinking of having a conversation with this horse, Dandy, to ask him what the trick is to getting along with your sister?” his mother asked.

“What about a rabbit?”

“That’s an interesting one—talking rabbits,” his father mused, putting his coffee down and pulling up a chair. “Lots of talking rabbits in literature, you know—
Alice in Wonderland
,
Watership Down
, those horrible Beatrix Potter books. I wonder what that’s all about.” Edward pondered this for a while. “Might be worth a paper on the subject: “Talking Rabbits in English Literature.” You think the department would like that, Meg?”

Meg Jespers-Vilnius had made a career out of motivational speaking, but even she couldn’t quite sound convincing when she replied, “I think that’s a brilliant topic for a paper. You’ll be the star of the English Department.”

Edward Vilnius smiled like a man who was used to being mocked.

“Right, are you coming, Norman?” Meg asked.

Norman contorted his face as if this was a difficult question. “Can I use your laptop when you’re gone?”

“Yes,” she agreed patiently, “just be careful with it.”

T
hat was something, then … but it wasn’t like having his own computer. There was no Internet, and his mother’s laptop had none of his games. He was stuck playing Minesweeper and Hearts. It killed a few hours, though. He played in “the library,” the room where his mother worked. His father had “the study.” The Shrubberies wasn’t like their house back home. It had dozens of small rooms, each with its own specific name and purpose. There was a real dining room rather than just a space off the kitchen, and there was something called a “morning room,” as well as a “drawing room.” Like most British things it all sounded a little ridiculous. When they had arrived at the house at the beginning of the summer, Norman and Dora had seized on the room names as if they were playing Clue, and now the game had extended to any British word they thought was funny—“Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the clotted cream!” or “Miss Scarlet in the lift with a lorry!”

Of all the rooms, the library was Norman’s favourite. After a few frustrating games of Minesweeper, he closed the laptop and surveyed the bookshelves one more time. How could it not have a single book worth reading? Three of the room’s four walls were covered in books. It was just like a real library, with huge floor-to-ceiling shelves and a little ladder that slid on wheels across the face.
Everything about it promised adventure and excitement. A long, carved wooden tube leaned in one corner. Norman’s dad said it was called a didgeridoo, but Norman thought he might be making that up. In the middle of one shelf was a brass statue of some crazy six-armed dancing goddess. There were statues and strange carvings in every nook and cranny, but his favourite thing in the room was a painting of a fox hunt. There were dozens of hunters riding around in the woods, falling off their horses into ponds and hedges. The dogs all looked lost or bored. Back at the stables a fox was stealing sausages from a picnic hamper. It wasn’t just a library full of books. It was like a library out of a book.
There has to be
, Norman thought,
at least one decent book in here
.

The ladder was tempting, but he’d found out weeks ago that the higher shelves held the most boring books—old science books, histories, whole shelves of Latin and Greek. Norman lay on his side on the carpet and surveyed the lowest shelf. It made sense that kids’ books would be down there, didn’t it? He ran his finger across the spines of an
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. He had resorted to this before, and it was a decent last resort. This encyclopaedia was ancient and full of articles on places and people that no longer existed—Finnveden and Pengwern, Wallachia and Tamburlaine. Beside the encyclopaedia was something called
The Illustrated History of the Imperial Wars
, which contained pictures and stories of wars in places called Boer and Crimea. Norman often imagined that the encyclopaedia and the history were partially made up. The next shelf had a series of books called the Harvard Classics, which was about as boring as it sounded. Norman pulled a volume out and leafed through it. Sophocles—boring; Plutarch—boration; Seneca—boremungus.

He was about to slide the volume back when he noticed through the gap left in the series that there was another row of books behind. He removed more Harvard Classics to get access. It revealed a row of thin hardcovers, their red dust covers torn and faded. He reached in to remove two—
Terror of the Intrepid Trio
and
The Clue of the Coughing Dragon
:
An Intrepid Trio Mystery
.

“Hmmm,” Norman muttered. He was afraid of getting his
hopes up, but he stripped the Harvard Classics shelf bare, and sure enough there was a whole shelf of them.
Intrepid into the Night
,
The Intrepid Three at Sea
,
The Scourge of Malbranche
:
An Intrepid Trio Mystery
. Okay, this was worth trying.

Norman wasn’t so finicky as to need to read a series in order. He knew that it didn’t really matter. He just grabbed the title that jumped out at him and descended to the kitchen to finish off the scones. He couldn’t have explained why he picked
Intrepid Amongst the Gypsies
. He didn’t reflect on it. All he cared about was reading something that he hadn’t read before.

Edward Vilnius was in the kitchen when he arrived. Norman’s father had had the same idea about the scones and was making coffee again to go with them.

“Hullo, Spiny, how goes it?” Edward asked. Since they had been in England, Edward had taken to using a rather comical British accent around the house. Unlike Dora, he knew he was doing it and thought he was rather funny. Norman wondered whether he used it with the other professors at the university, and whether they thought he was crazy or just insulting.

“Found a book,” Norman managed through a mouthful of scone.

“Huzzah!” Edward cheered ironically, raising his scone in a toast. It was his new favourite word, apparently a British way of saying “Yay.”

“Huzzah,” Norman repeated, but less enthusiastically. “You ever heard of this?” He held up
Intrepid Amongst the Gypsies
for his father to see.

“Nope,” he said. “It’s probably one of your mother’s old books.”

Norman opened the front cover to see if she’d written her name in it. There was a name, but it was not his mother’s. Written very exaggeratedly, in cobalt blue ink, as if somebody was trying out a new pen or just very proud of his handwriting, was the following inscription:

Property of Christopher T. Jespers

“Ah, your mysterious uncle,” Edward intoned.

“Why don’t we ever see Uncle Kit?” Norman asked. “I thought he’d be here.”

“Off travelling the world, I expect. Your mother probably wouldn’t have agreed to stay here at the Shrubberies if your uncle weren’t away.”

Norman had no idea what Uncle Kit did for a job. He imagined him as some sort of international explorer, crossing a desert on camelback or hacking his way through some jungle to uncover a hidden Aztec temple.

Norman paused before asking a question he’d never before dared to. “Why don’t they talk anymore? What happened?”

Edward Vilnius paused for a moment and considered the question. “I don’t know, really. Probably started as a little thing and snowballed. It doesn’t sound like they ever got along.” He took a last bite of his scone and wiped the crumbs from the goatee he had decided to grow this summer. “Better be nice to your sister,” he warned, rising from the table. “She might decide never to see you when she grows up.”

Norman opened his mouth but left the obvious reply unspoken. He loaded a plate with scones and carried them and the book up to the small room that served as his bedroom and lay down on the bed, propping himself up on his elbows to read.

I
ntrepid Amongst the Gypsies
didn’t exactly grab Norman right away—it was slow to start and full of old-fashioned British slang, but after a while he started to get into it. The Intrepid Three were three kids. George Kelmsworth was tall, dark-haired, with something called an “aristocratic nose.” He was only fifteen, but somehow he lived alone in a hunting lodge at the edge of Kelmsworth estate. The estate’s main house, Kelmsworth Hall, was George’s family home, but it had been commandeered and was going to be turned into a First World War army hospital. The other two Intrepids were Pippa Cook, a red-headed girl George’s age, and her younger brother, Gordon. Their mother worked for the new administrator, Mr. Hepplewaithe, making arrangements to convert the hall into a hospital, but that did not stop the Cooks from befriending George.

The three kids seemed to be able go wherever they liked and do whatever they wanted. Their parents hardly appeared in the book at all. Pippa and Gordon’s father was with the army in France. George’s own father, Lord Kelmsworth, was being held in prison for a crime he did not commit. Lord Kelmsworth had worked for the Admiralty before the Great War and was being held responsible for the disappearance of some important papers.
As far as Norman could tell, George had been trying to prove his father’s innocence since the beginning of the series. Since there were at least twenty books, it didn’t look as though Lord Kelmsworth was coming home any time soon.

At the opening of
Intrepid Amongst the Gypsies
the Cook children snuck out after dark to meet George at the ancient stone lodge. Cloaked with moss, the lodge blended into the dark woods behind it, but the thick leaded glass of its windows flickered orange from the light of the wood fire that burned inside. George strode back and forth in front of the great stone hearth, waving his hands as he’d seen his father do when practising a speech. Pippa sat quietly, her brow furrowed. She had a serious look to her in her school uniform with her hair tied back in a tidy braid. Gordon fidgeted in his seat. He was shorter than his sister with more obvious freckles and excitable features beneath a head of unruly ginger hair.

The Intrepids were faced with two problems. Two nights ago there had been a break-in at the hall. One of the back doors had been forced and the larder raided. The intruder had taken a ham, a wheel of cheese and several carving knives. The burglary had stalled their latest plan to exonerate George’s father.

The Intrepids had planned to take the train to London to search the offices of the Kelmsworth family lawyers. George was certain that the family solicitor had something to do with the plot against his father. Pippa wasn’t convinced but was too loyal to disagree very loudly. Young Gordon believed everything his idol told him and was ready for an adventure at any time.