Secrets at Sea

Table of Contents

 

 

Also by Richard Peck

Amanda/Miranda
Are You in the House Alone?
Bel-Air Bambi and the Mall Rats
Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death
Close Enough to Touch
Don't Look and It Won't Hurt
The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp
Dreamland Lake
Fair Weather
Father Figure
The Ghost Belonged to Me
Ghosts I Have Been
The Great Interactive Dream Machine
Here Lies the Librarian
The Last Safe Place on Earth
A Long Way from Chicago
Lost in Cyberspace
On the Wings of Heroes
Princess Ashley
Remembering the Good Times
Representing Super Doll
The River Between Us
A Season of Gifts
Secrets of the Shopping Mall
Strays Like Us
The Teacher's Funeral
Those Summer Girls I Never Met
Three-Quarters Dead
Through a Brief Darkness
Unfinished Portrait of Jessica
Voices After Midnight
A Year Down Yonder

 

Amanda/Miranda
London Holiday
New York Time
This Family of Women

 

Past Perfect, Present Tense

 

Monster Night at Grandma's House

 

Anonymously Yours
Invitations to the World

Dial Books for Young Readers

 

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Text copyright © 2011 by Richard Peck

Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Kelly Murphy
All rights reserved

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data • Peck, Richard, date.
Secrets at sea / a novel by Richard Peck; illustrated by Kelly Murphy. p. cm.
Summary: In 1887, the social-climbing Cranstons voyage from New York to London, where
they hope to find a husband for their awkward older daughter, secretly accompanied by Helena
and her mouse siblings, for whom the journey is both terrifying and wondrous as they meet an
array of titled humans despite their best efforts at remaining hidden.

ISBN : 978-1-101-53577-6

[1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Mice—Fiction. 3. Ocean travel—Fiction.
4. Human-animal relationships—Fiction. 5. Social classes—Fiction. 6. Brothers and sisters—
Fiction. 7. Atlantic Ocean—History—19th century—Fiction.]
I. Murphy, Kelly, date, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.P338Sdm 2011
[Fic]—dc22 2011001162

To

Sally Lloyd-Jones

T
HE FIRST WE heard of it was when my sister Louise came skittering down the long passage from upstairs. Louise skitters.

I forget what Beatrice and I were doing when Louise flung herself among us. I believe Beatrice was crumbing the table. We were beginning to think about lunch, and I'd had some mending. Our brother, Lamont, would have been at school. We hoped.

“Louise, pull yourself together,” I told her. I am Helena, the oldest.

Louise had lost her breath and was trying to find it. Her eyes rolled all round the room. She'd tracked in cobwebs on the clean floor. “But wait till you hear—”

“Louise,” I said, “did you take the front stairway?”

“Yes,” she gasped. “I was in a hurry. Wait till you hear—”

“Louise, we never take the front stairway during daylight. Never. No matter what. We don't do that.”

I tried to set a good example for Beatrice. Louise didn't.

“Nobody saw me.” Louise heaved. “Nobody ever does.” She meant the Upstairs Cranstons. They own the house, but we've been here longer. Generations. “I'm quick and I'm small, and they simply don't see me.”

“That younger Cranston girl Upstairs has seen you, Louise,” I reminded her. “Camilla Cranston has seen quite a lot of you. Many a time you've crept up to her bedroom in the dead of night. You sit on her bed, and she talks to you. She tells you things. Dead of night, Louise, when everybody is supposed to be asleep. When
you're
supposed to be asleep.”

“Yes, well,” Louise admitted. “But I haven't come from Camilla's room. And it's not night.”

“We know it's not night, Louise,” I said, and Beatrice agreed.

“I've been in her mother's room,” said Louise. “The one with the cabbage roses in the wallpaper. Mrs. Cranston's room.”

Beatrice and I listened.

“They were all in Mrs. Cranston's bedroom, except for Mr. Cranston, of course.” Louise made big eyes at us. “They wouldn't have seen me if I'd been sending up flares. They were all talking at the top of their lungs. They were practically running into each other.”

“The mother
is
rather loud,” I remarked. “And Olive, the older daughter.” The family is from somewhere west of here. Cleveland, I believe.

“You couldn't hear yourself think,” Louise said. “Even Camilla was aflutter. They were trying on all their hats.”

“Hats?” Beatrice piped up. “ Why?” She stood there, holding crumbs.

Louise drew herself up importantly. Mother's portrait on the wall looked down upon us. We waited.

“They're going away.” Louise's eyes were bigger than her head.

Away?
Where? Where did the Upstairs Cranstons ever go? And it was springtime, not summer. In the summer, people went to the mountains and the shore and Saratoga for the races. But not the Cranstons. It took Mrs. Cranston three days to decide to go into Rhine-beck to buy a pair of button gloves.

“Going where?” Beatrice wondered. “You don't mean
moving away?
Packing up and leaving us high and—”

“I'm not sure what I heard, exactly.” Louise wavered. “It's something about the girls. About Olive.” Louise's mind was in a muddle. “I didn't understand most of it. But Mrs. Cranston went on and on about giving Olive Her Chance. ‘We
must
give Olive Her Chance,' said Mrs. Cranston.”

The eyes in my mind narrowed. I am Helena, the oldest, and I needed to understand everything. “ Where are they going, Louise?”

“ Europe,” Louise said. Just that one word like the crack of doom.

“Where's that?” Beatrice was agog.

Louise said, “Europe is across the—”

“Never mind where it is,” I said before Louise could tell Beatrice that Europe is across the ocean. Water is not a happy subject with us, and I wouldn't have Beatrice worried. I glanced up at Mother there on the wall, looking down on us from the frame and her grave. “They are going to Europe to find Olive a husband,” I said. “They are going to marry Olive off.”

“Is that what I was hearing?” Louise said, astonished.

“That's exactly what you were hearing,” I said, because it was.

“But
why?
” Louise and Beatrice gibbered.

“Because no young man around here ever comes to call on Olive twice.”

That was another true fact.

“You know yourselves, Mr. Cranston has looked as far as Rockland County for young men to call on Olive,” I said. “Mr. Cranston has crossed the
river,
looking for a young man for Olive.”

We stood sobered by the thought.

“And do we ever see any of them but once? No. They shy like horses and gallop off. The Cranstons will never get Olive off their hands by staying home. Olive is pushing twenty-one without a man in sight. And so they're going to have to try Europe.” As soon as I said it, I knew I was right.

“Aren't the young men of Europe as particular as the young men here?” Louise wondered.

“As I understand it, they're not,” I said. “Besides, in Europe, money buys everything. But with us, it's family that counts.
Family.
”

That was another true fact. I let it soak into Louise and Beatrice.

Then Louise said in a small voice, “Well, I hope it works out for them. I wouldn't miss Olive, particularly. As long as they bring Camilla back.”

“Would they shutter the windows and shut up the house?” Beatrice said. “Then where would we—”

“We'll manage,” I said. “Life will go on.”

But I saw change coming, and that's always a worry, especially if you are the oldest.

Beatrice blinked hard at Louise. “Honestly, Louise, put on some clothes. You're home now.”

And Louise, still muddled, looked around for her skirt and something for on top. When we are Upstairs, or out and about, we naturally wear nothing but our fur. We wear clothes only in our quarters, here within the walls. I make most of them myself and was wearing my apron with the frill. Beatrice was wearing her polished cotton, very girlish with the smocking across the bodice. But of course we don't dress like this when we're out someplace where we might be seen. How could we? We're mice.