The Sixty-Eight Rooms (22 page)

“You’re going to love doing research!” he said to her over dinner on Thursday night. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that this was a special case; she probably wouldn’t love doing research if not for the fact that she had actually met living and breathing people in history. “Doing the research makes history come alive!” he exclaimed. She smiled at him. If only he knew!

Getting Sophie’s journal translated seemed to be a
problem at first. She couldn’t ask her mom, who, being a French teacher, could easily translate it. She would have too many questions about where it had come from.

But then Ruthie remembered something useful. When she finally got around to telling her father about the book Mrs. McVittie had brought for him to look at, it dawned on her: Mrs. McVittie spoke French. She was just the person they needed. Ruthie and Jack immediately planned a visit to her shop on Sunday.

The last and most important job would have to wait until Monday. Luckily, this being February, Monday was Presidents’ Day, a school holiday. They decided that would be the day to get the album back to Mr. Bell. Just how they would present it to him they weren’t sure. They talked about bringing it first to his daughter, Caroline Bell. But that idea seemed a little risky to them. After all, they’d never met her and couldn’t predict what her reaction would be.

“We need to figure out how to tell him in just the right way, Jack. We can’t let Mr. Bell know how we really found it,” Ruthie said, brows knitted.

“He wouldn’t believe us anyway,” Jack answered.

Ruthie’s dad was so excited to be in the archives at the Art Institute that he behaved like a small child at an amusement park. Ruthie and Jack had no idea what to expect. When the research curator brought out stacks of material for them to look through, they began to feel like they were
at the bottom of a mountain, about to start climbing. She said there were 569 drawings alone to look through, not including all the other files and papers.

“How many?” Jack said, wincing.

The curator smiled at Jack. “A lot,” she answered.

They dug through lecture notes, blueprints, sketches, receipts and interviews. They stuck with it for hours. Ruthie’s dad even got involved.

“Wow, Ruthie,” he kept saying excitedly throughout the morning. “Look at this one!”

Since Ms. Biddle had told them that they could define the paper any way they wanted, Ruthie and Jack decided to be practical. They would find out as much as they could about the main rooms they had visited, especially E1, with Christina’s book; E24, with Sophie’s journal; and A1, with Thomas’s model of the
Mayflower
. If they could discover how those objects had ended up in Mrs. Thorne’s possession, they might have some answers.

Ruthie figured out right away that she would need to quickly skim the archive documents for useful information, and she improved her speed as she read page after page. Jack was the official note taker. It would be easy for him to turn their notes into a paper. Writing was painless for Jack. They spent Friday afternoon there, slogging through all kinds of papers filled with details that couldn’t possibly be of use. They went home when the museum closed, discouraged.

“It’s a big job,” her dad said on the ride home. “Obviously Ms. Biddle thinks you two are capable of pulling this into a great report. It’s quite a compliment. You’ll start again fresh in the morning.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Ruthie said weakly.

At dinner that evening, Ruthie ate in silence. She had looked at so many papers and documents and drawings that she kept seeing them in front of her as she stared into her mashed potatoes. She was more than tired.

Ruthie fell into bed earlier than usual. She had never before felt the kinds of ups and downs that she’d experienced this week. She almost didn’t want to go back to the archives tomorrow; what if it was a dead end, a waste of time? What if they looked at every single document in the files and came up empty-handed? What if they never found out how Mrs. Thorne had acquired those magic items? She told herself to stop thinking and just listen to the sound of her parents doing the dishes and talking.

“I don’t want to tell her yet,” she heard her mother say. “Nothing is final.”

“I guess you’re right,” her father said. “What’s a few more days?”

What are they talking about?
she wondered, but she was too exhausted to pursue the question before sleep claimed her.

Ruthie spent almost the entire night dreaming. At first her parents’ voices mingled with her dreams as she drifted deeper into sleep. Soon Ms. Biddle appeared in front of
her, saying the homework assignment would be to complete a jigsaw puzzle, and she handed Ruthie a box with more than ten million pieces. Ruthie tried to put the puzzle together, but every time she touched one of the small pieces it turned into an angry sheet of paper. It was as though she had stepped into a storm but instead of rain she was nearly drowning in a swirling sea of papers. They came at her from every direction, sometimes hitting her in the face so she couldn’t see. And no matter how many times she pushed them away from her, more sheets appeared. Then Jack showed up, armed with the tall candle stand that he had used to fight off the cockroach. He whacked away at the papers. Finally the storm of paper subsided and she found herself alone in a garden, but instead of flowers blooming, all the plants had shiny little bells on the ends of their stems. The bells started ringing, a few at first and then a beautiful symphony of tiny bells chiming. It was like the sound she had heard standing in front of Christina’s book, only here she could see that it was bells that were making the sound, not some invisible magic somewhere. It was definitely bells, bells, bells and the sound finally soothed her into a quieter, peaceful slumber.

Ruthie’s mom always said things seemed better in the morning, and this morning proved her right. Ruthie woke up ready to get back to work. Even though she knew they might not find any answers, somehow after a good night’s
rest she was willing to try again. She and her dad picked up Jack and they were at the museum when it opened.

While they worked, Ruthie asked her dad about Christina of Milan.

“Oh, she’s a wonderful character in history,” he started, a gleam in his eye. Her dad loved it when she asked him any kind of historical question. “She was very tough.”

“What do you mean?” Ruthie asked.

“Well, she was being courted by the king of England, Henry the Eighth, who was one of the most powerful men in the world. He had just had his last wife beheaded and was looking for a new bride. At that time Christina was a sixteen-year-old widow.” Ruthie listened attentively; it was exactly as she had read in the book. Exactly as Christina had read to her!

“In those days, long before photography, painted portraits were used to show what someone looked like. When Henry the Eighth saw Christina’s portrait, he proposed marriage. But she wasn’t interested in being wife number four and told him that if she had two heads she would have risked it but she only had one.” Ruthie’s dad gave a little chuckle.

“Would she have spoken English?”

“Oh, certainly. She was most likely fluent in many languages, because she was part of the nobility. She probably used English a lot,” he answered.

“Wasn’t she from Denmark?” Jack asked, remembering
this fact from her book. Up to this point he had been utterly absorbed in the document in his hands.

“She was indeed,” Ruthie’s dad answered. “Very good, Jack,” he added, as though Jack were a student in his class.

“Then this might be something, Ruthie,” Jack said, handing her the paper, an intent expression on his face. “Look.”

It took her a few minutes to figure out what he had seen. It was an interview that Mrs. Thorne had given along with one of her craftsmen, a man named A. W. Pederson. It said Mr. Pederson had been born in Denmark. He’d not only worked as her main craftsman but had also helped her find sources for antique miniatures. Jack had even found a list of pieces she’d received from him.

The list included a leather-bound book with a matching key that fit the description of Christina’s book and key perfectly. A note written next to the entry for those items read, “Special care to be taken with these.” In the interview Mr. Pederson said these were the first two pieces he had come across and that they’d come from an antique dollhouse that had belonged to a girl in Denmark over a century before. He was quoted as saying that the items contained powerful “magical qualities” that would last a long, long time.

“That’s it, Jack! That must be how her book got there!”

“Her book?” Ruthie’s dad asked.

“Oh … it’s just what we’ve been calling it: Christina’s book. We saw a really beautiful book in room E1 and we started wondering where it came from. Since her portrait
is hanging in that room, we called it her book,” she said, hoping that sounded believable.

It worked. Her dad said, “Now you know what research is all about!”

This small but important bit of information was the encouragement the two of them needed to continue working. Page after page of seemingly useless material passed in front of them. Yet as the morning wore on they were able to compile more and more information, piecing together at least some answers. For instance, Mrs. Thorne had hired a craftsman named Eugene Kupjack to build many of the American rooms with her. His cousin, a young woman named Lee Meisinger, perfected needlepoint tiny enough to make many of the rugs and tapestries. Mr. Kupjack documented everything; his papers contained endless lists, mostly of materials that he had purchased and measurements of furniture.

However, they also found a letter he had received from a dealer of antiques in Boston. It described a very special antique model of the
Mayflower
that had come into the dealer’s possession from the estate of the great-great-great-grandson of a man named Thomas Wilcox, who had built it. The letter explained how the family had moved to Boston in 1698 and opened a business building the best model ships in New England. Ruthie felt relieved when she read this; it meant his family hadn’t been harmed because of their visit. The letter also described Thomas as an early-eighteenth-century inventor. When they read the
words
man
and
inventor
Ruthie and Jack looked at each other. Learning that Thomas had lived a full life actually made the hair go up on the back of Ruthie’s neck.
He grew up! He became an inventor! He had descendants!
“Cool. Very cool,” was all Jack could say.

There was a note in Mrs. Thorne’s handwriting on the bottom of this letter saying the ship had been the inspiration for making the Topsfield room and that it would “animate” the room. Once these last facts had sunk in, another question came to Ruthie’s mind: how had the model become a miniature? The letter was from an
antiques
dealer, not a
miniatures
dealer. She looked at Jack and said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Jack nodded. “Yeah. How’d he make the
Mayflower
small?”

Ruthie’s dad chimed in. “I don’t see how they made any of these objects so small. Such skill!” He clearly didn’t understand what Ruthie and Jack were really talking about. They meant, how had Thomas’s ship model
become
small? They had not yet found an answer, and Ruthie was beginning to doubt they would.

By the end of the day it was clear to them that there were two categories of objects: the very old ones that Mrs. Thorne had acquired from all over the world, and those that had been made in the 1930s and 1940s specifically for the rooms. Precise lists and receipts had been kept and filed. You could trace the origin of every single object—except for some very special pieces in the European rooms.

As for Sophie’s journal, they realized by early afternoon that Mrs. Thorne had kept secrets. Ruthie had read in the catalogue about a secret shop in Paris that was one of Mrs. Thorne’s favorite sources and she hoped that they would find out more about it. They looked and looked in the files but all Mrs. Thorne had said was that she’d found a little shop in Paris, quite old, that sold truly “magical” miniatures. Included on the list of items from this mystery dealer were items from room E24: “a lovely Louis XVI writing desk that contained a locked diary with a key” was singled out as one of the most exquisite she had ever seen, with “special qualities seen only in the rarest of miniatures.”

“These miniatures,” she wrote, “would truly animate a room.”

That sentence jumped out at Ruthie. Mrs. Thorne had used the same word for Thomas’s ship. To Ruthie,
animate
meant “to make cartoons.”

“Dad, what exactly does
animate
mean?” she asked.

“It means to bring something to life,” he answered. Ruthie knew instantly that this was an important find. That must have been what Mrs. Thorne really meant by “special qualities.” Ruthie also thought it was those qualities that had drawn her into that room in the first place.

The dollhouse of a young Danish girl, a descendant of Thomas Wilcox, a secret shop in Paris—that was how far they could trace the paths of these magic objects. Ruthie knew this was just the tip of the iceberg; after all, they had experienced only a few of the rooms. According to the
archives, there seemed to be many more objects that could be as magical as the few they had come across. Now Ruthie wanted to know what other items in the rooms held the living, breathing secrets of the past.

At least they knew where the objects came from. The how and why were still not clear. Could it be that Mrs. Thorne and her craftsmen actually knew about the magic that enabled Ruthie and Jack to visit these places in the past? Had Mrs. Thorne ever experienced the magic herself? She and all of her craftsmen mentioned “magic” and “special qualities”—but people used those words all the time as figures of speech. Mrs. McVittie had used the word
magic
the day she had come over and made Ruthie soup for lunch. Had it been only a figure of speech for her? Maybe—but maybe not; she was, after all, an awfully unusual person. Tomorrow they would pay her a visit.