The Secret of the Ginger Mice (22 page)

“But what are you doing here?” asked Alice, confused, as hope began to dawn. “Why are you helping us?”

“Augustus and I had our suspicions about Sophia from the start,” Julius confessed as he squeezed through a narrow gap between two stacks of crates, then folded his long thin body into a crouch, and crawled into a crate at the bottom of a stack against the wall.

“For a start, there's no way Beezer would have sent strangers to us without going through the regular channels. She's very cautious is Beezer. And then there was your rucksack. When I was moving it, I noticed an old label with your name, Alex, and the crest of Smiggins Public School. I doubt if even the most experienced Sourian spy would have bothered to find out what the Smiggins Public School crest looks like and sew it into a schoolbag. I only know it because Augustus and I went to Smiggins Public School ourselves.”

“You did?” They were crawling through a close, damp tunnel now, so low that Alice couldn't lift her head to see in front of her. She could hear Alex breathing heavily behind her.

“I was in the same class as Beezer,” said Julius. “And Augustus was in the year below.”

Alice was glad that he had kept talking. It took her mind off the feeling of walls closing in, off the slimy moss that coated the walls the further into the tunnel they went.

“Almost there,” said Julius as the earth beneath their
hands and knees became damp and sandy.

Within a few minutes, they were crawling out of the tunnel into a clump of dense thorny shrubs. Alice pushed her way through the unforgiving shrubbery and onto a path sitting a little way above a small deserted cove enclosed by high cliffs.

“Thank you so much,” she began, but Julius waved away her gratitude.

“You're not safe here. I imagine Sophia will be furious when she discovers you've escaped, and if she should catch you again . . .” He let the sentence hang and once again Alice remembered Sophia's silvery voice saying,
We'll get rid of them. Permanently
.

“You should get back to Smiggins as fast as you can,” Julius advised.

“But Alistair—,” Alex protested.

“We'll be on the lookout for Alistair,” Julius promised. “Not much happens in Shambles without us hearing about it. If anyone has seen your brother, we'll soon know. I'm sorry I can't give you back your rucksack, but it would be a dead giveaway that I helped you escape. I told Horace I was going out to buy some more sardines, so I'd better go buy them and get back to the tavern. I want to be there to act surprised when Sophia returns and finds out you've gone. She thinks she's outsmarted us by pretending to be from FIG, but two
can play that game. I'll let her think she's got us fooled, but I'm going to send a message to some FIG members in Souris suggesting they arrange to ‘accidentally' meet up with Horace and Sophia while masquerading as Sourian agents. Then let's see how much information our side can trick out of that despicable pair.” He smiled briefly. “You two wait till I'm out of sight, then follow this path up to that cliff. Where the path divides, you go straight ahead—it joins up with the coast road eventually. I'll be taking the right-hand fork back into town.” He shook them each by the hand solemnly and wished them luck, then hurried up the path.

As Alice watched him go, she wished she could call out her thanks; Julius had pressed a small wad of money into her hand as he shook it.

When they could no longer see Julius on the path, Alice and Alex set off at a run.

“Woohoo!” said Alex, who was leading the way. “That was close, sis. But I told you Julius and Augustus were all right.”

Alice, almost giddy with relief, refrained from pointing out that he had once thought the same thing about Sophia.

When they reached the top of the path, they paused to get their bearings. They were standing on top of a rocky headland, which jutted out over a cobalt sea. A smaller
cliff crouched at the other end of the small cove they had just ascended from, and beyond that cliff Alice could just make out the bright colors of the Shambles port, glowing in the sun. Turning her head, she saw a rocky coastline of coves and cliffs stretching away to the east.

“That must be the path there,” said Alex, pointing to a dirt track snaking away through the low scrub of rosemary, thyme, and gorse. There was no one around except for a lone figure in sunglasses further up the path, leaning against a rock and basking in the sun.

“That's not Julius, is it?” said Alice as they started along the path, squinting.

“Nah, too short.”

But as they drew closer Alice's legs began to tremble so violently she almost fell over. It couldn't be . . .

“Sophia!” she croaked, her throat dry with fright.

The silvery gray mouse turned and regarded them through her sunglasses. If she was surprised to see the two mice she had so recently locked in a cellar now wandering along a clifftop, she didn't show it.

“Really, you two,” she said. “Can't you stay where I put you for five minutes? I come up here for a nice private meeting with a colleague, and then you show up. It's hardly going to be a private meeting with you here, is it? I'm afraid you're starting to irritate me.” She moved toward them menacingly. “And I'm not very pleasant
when I'm irritated.” She lifted a hand as if to scold them, and with a flash of terror, Alice realized that she was holding a knife.

“Alex . . .” But a quick glance at Alex's pale face told her that he had seen it too.

The two young mice backed away carefully as Sophia advanced, the knife's blade gleaming.

As they drew closer to the cliff's edge, Alice cast around desperately for an escape route. Sophia was blocking the path that would take them either to the coast road or back to Shambles. What about the cove? But she quickly discarded the idea. The cove was fully enclosed with no way out, other than . . . the tunnel? Looking back down the path, she could no longer tell which bush concealed the tunnel's mouth. Anyway, to lead Sophia to the tunnel would mean betraying Julius and Augustus. No. There was only one way of escape—though success was by no means certain.

“Alex,” said Alice, swallowing hard. “What was it Uncle Ebenezer said about jumping off cliffs?”

Alex glanced over his shoulder and then looked at her questioningly. Alice gave a small, resigned nod.

“He said to close your eyes so you can't see how far you've got to fall.”

That sounded to Alice like the most sensible advice Ebenezer had ever given them.

“Okay then,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Let's do it.”

And the two mice turned, ran, and leaped . . . straight off the cliff.

16

G
inger mouse!”

As one of the giant hunter's talons closed around him Alistair screamed, “Run, Tibby!” But even as he spoke, the owl's second talon had snatched up his friend. After that, Alistair had no breath to scream, for the talon was wrapped around his body like a vice, and it was all he could do to breathe. He tried to turn his head to see Tibby Rose, but the owl's grip was too tight.

With a few beats of the owl's powerful wings, they were airborne, the ground far below a blur as they sped through the golden rays of the sun setting to their
right. Alistair mostly kept his eyes closed, his thoughts full of trepidation, for surely the owl must soon reach its destination. Alistair was surprised that it hadn't killed and eaten them instantly. Perhaps it was taking them home to feed to its chicks? He began to wish that the owl
had
killed them instantly. Anything would be better than this horrible suspense. . . .

But as sunset turned to dusk and dusk to dark, Alistair began to wonder just where the owl was taking them. Surely owls didn't hunt so far from their own territory? Opening his eyes, which immediately began to water because of the wind, he tried to get some idea of where they were—no easy task considering his grasp of Sourian geography was based on a quick glimpse of a map in Great-Aunt Harriet's library and a diamond scratched in the dirt by the river's edge in Templeton. A tremor of fear and nausea racked his body as the owl banked to the left. Squinting at the dark land below, he saw a great cluster of lights. Could it be Grouch, all the way on the other side of the Eugenian Range? Could they really have flown so far?

They banked again, to the right this time, and the lights vanished beneath them. Alistair closed his eyes and thought of all the things he would miss in his life. Alice's quick mind and Alex's loyalty. Uncle Ebenezer's stories and Aunt Beezer's dry wit. He thought of Ms. Emily the
librarian and Mr. Russo, his favorite teacher. Of Mrs. Zetland and her biscuits and Mr. Grudge's garden. Of his best friends at school, Linus and Betty. Then he thought of Tibby Rose, who had never known her parents, never had brothers and sisters or friends and neighbors, growing up alone in that big old house with her two elderly relatives. It was sad that her life was going to be cut short before she had ever really lived.

Some time later, they banked once more and Alistair opened his eyes. The first thing he saw in the dark was the moon, and he felt disoriented. Why were they flying upside down? Then the moon rippled, and he realized it was a reflection, that they were flying over water. Then the moon disappeared, and they were soaring over a clifftop. For one terrible moment, Alistair thought that the owl might be planning to release them, and that they would be dashed against the rocks below. Maybe that would be preferable to being eaten? He didn't know; both options seemed too hideous to contemplate.

Then the owl hooted once, and they were coming in to land in a small clearing hidden among the dense coastal scrub. Suddenly the owl loosened its grip on Alistair's body and he was falling. . . .

“Where am I?” he asked as his fall was broken not by hard ground but by something furry and wriggly.

“On me,” gasped Tibby Rose. “Haven't we been
through this before?”

Alistair had a flash of memory to when he and Tibby had first met. He had fallen—from nowhere it seemed. Was it possible . . .?

Alistair jumped to his feet and turned to face the owl, who was standing nearby calmly grooming his feathers.

“It was you!” Alistair cried. “Wasn't it? I heard a tapping on the shutters in the middle of the night, and I opened them, and I think I must have bumped my head—and the next thing I knew I was in Templeton.”

The great grave face stared back at him impassively.

“And you were calling ‘ginger mouse' back there when neither of us are ginger anymore. Why?” Alistair demanded. “How did you know?”

“That would be our doing,” said a voice behind him.

His heart racing, Alistair spun around to see the faint silhouettes of two mice.

“We asked Oswald to take you from Smiggins to Templeton, Alistair, and when Timmy the Winns told Oswald he'd seen you, Oswald told us. We asked him to find you and bring you here.”

“Who—who are you?” Alistair stammered. “And how do you know my name?”

“Come closer,” suggested a second voice, “and we'll explain. You too, Tibby Rose. I can barely see you in the dark.”

As Alistair and Tibby Rose hesitated, the first voice spoke up again. “Don't worry—we won't hurt you. We have your best interests at heart, I can assure you.”