Big Change for Stuart (17 page)

She picked up the least mothy of the four cloaks and draped it round her shoulders; it was miles too long for her. Then she slipped on one of the
rings,
picked up an orb and sceptre, and finally grabbed the top crown on the stack and placed it on her head. Then, feeling as if she were a contestant in a fancy-dress competition, she shuffled across to the throne, cloak dragging behind her, and sat down.

Her own face, pink with exertion, looked back at her from the portrait.

Nothing happened.

‘OK,' she said, ‘let's try another lot.'

She took off the jewellery and the cloak and dumped it all to one side, went over to start dressing herself in a whole new set – and then suddenly had a thought. An awful, chilling thought.

What if she'd been wearing the right crown, but all the other items had been wrong? Or what if it had been the right cloak, but the wrong crown, ring, orb and sceptre? Or the right orb, the right crown, the right cloak and the right ring, but the wrong sceptre? It was no good, she realized, just randomly going through the piles – she would have to try on
every possible combination
.

‘And there must be hundreds,' she said out loud. ‘Maybe thousands! It'll take hours and hours and
hours,
and Stuart's going to be upside down in the museum the entire time.' She could feel herself beginning to panic; her insides felt cold and hollow.

‘I must be doing it
wrong
,' she exclaimed, her voice a pathetic squeak. ‘I've missed something – I
must
have.'

She ran back to the treasury, and looked around desperately. The dog was still nosing about; its stumpy tail wagged when it saw her, and April scooped it up and gave it a quick cuddle. And then, since she definitely needed to do some proper thinking (and not just closing her eyes and waiting for inspiration, the way she normally did), she picked her way between the piles of treasure, sat down on the little footstool right in the corner of the room and put her chin in her hand.

And saw something.

On the wall right next to her, directly underneath the lowest shelf, invisible to someone standing up, were five lines of writing.

Clues. Clues that she would have seen if only, at the start, she had sat down for just
one
minute. April's groan of despair sent the small dog leaping off her lap, and she buried her face in her hands.
Crown crowning the column
presumably meant that the correct one was the topmost of the huge pillar of crowns on the table. And
Cloak close to the claret
must have been the cloak she'd found on the floor near the tipped-over goblet, since ‘claret' meant red wine.

But now it was too late – all the rings and crowns and cloaks and sceptres were completely mixed up and she had no idea which one was which. She would just have to work her way through every possible combination with as much speed as possible.

‘Stuart, I am
so sorry
,' she muttered, standing up. She stepped over the dog, which was licking something on the floor beneath the table, and then she paused, and peered down.

The thing he was licking was a dried wine stain.

It only took her a few seconds to gallop back into the throne room and start examining the cloaks, and she jumped into the air in triumph when she found a small stain on the second cloak. She tossed it onto the throne, and sprinted back to the treasury, where she sat back down on the stool, focused on the clues, and thought deeply.

Orb orbiting
.

Orbiting
meant going round something. Like a satellite orbiting the earth. Or the earth orbiting the—

‘Sun!' she shouted. There, in the centre of the treasury, was the golden candleholder shaped like the sun, and she'd found all sorts of treasure on it, including one of the orbs, balanced on a bracelet. She went over to the candleholder now, and noticed that odd drips of wax were scattered across the other objects on it, and then she made another dash to the throne room. It only took half a minute to find the orb whose ruby sides were similarly spotted with wax.

Ring around the rodent route
.

Rodent = mouse
, she thought.

So where had she seen the mouse go? She remembered that it had zipped across the room towards the tall gilded cabinet in one corner, and when she went over there and crouched down, she could see a tiny gap between the cabinet and the wall, and a trail of mouse poos indicating its usual route. But – and she felt almost certain about this – she hadn't found any of the nine diamond rings in this particular corner. She swept the patch of floor clean with one foot, then lay down full length and put her eye to the crack. And there, looking right back at her through what seemed to be a tiny circular picture frame, was a mouse, its eyes like drops of ink. It whisked away in a instant, and April was left looking at the miniature frame. And she realized what it was: a diamond ring, wedged sideways between wall and cabinet.

As she heaved the cabinet away from the wall, she was shaking; if she hadn't read the clues, she'd
never
have found the right ring. It tinkled to the floor, and she hooked it over one finger and carried on the search.

Sceptre in the central slider
.

‘What slides in this room?' she asked herself, and the answer was easy: a drawer. The cabinet that she'd just wrenched from the wall had five drawers – she'd searched it earlier and found at least two sceptres in there. She opened the middle drawer now and looked at the tumbled treasure inside. There was nothing to mark the contents – no wine stains, no wax – but as she stood looking, she saw a microscopic movement. A spider the size of a grape seed was dangling on a near-invisible thread between a ruby coronet and an opal bracelet, and April remembered something. When she'd taken one of the sceptres out of the cabinet, it had felt
sticky
, and she had brushed some grey thread off her fingers.

This time, as she careered from treasury to throne room, the little dog ran at her heels, as if joining in a game. It watched as she picked through the sceptres, and its tail appeared to wag when she found one with a swathe of cobweb still wrapped around one end.

‘And now just the crown,' said April, an idea already forming. ‘Do you like cheese?' she asked the dog. She went and found the slab of bread and
cheese
that had been resting on top of the stack of crowns, broke off a crumb or two and offered them to the dog. It hoovered them up. Then she arranged the crowns in a long line, picked up the dog, and carried it along the row, nose downwards, just a few centimetres from the crowns.

The dog sniffed violently at the fourth one, and when she repeated the exercise, going from the other end this time, the same thing happened again. Triumphantly she stuck the crown on her head, and hurriedly dressed herself in the enormous cloak. Then she put the dog under one arm, picked up the sceptre and the orb, and staggered over to the throne, feeling as if she were running a marathon. And she was just centimetres away from completing it when she tripped over the hem of the cloak, lurched sideways and dropped both dog and orb.

She flailed in the air, missed the dog, caught the orb, and landed on the throne on one hip, glimpsing her pink, horrified face in the oval mirror. Over it, a scarlet letter T suddenly appeared, and then the world gave a sudden shiver and she found herself back –
where?

IN TOTAL DARKNESS
. In stifling heat.

She reached out a hand and felt a wall that was somehow soft and warm – a heavy cloth, she realized, draped right over the Reappearing Rose Bower, and she grabbed a fold of it and pulled. It slid away, letting in cooler air, and she saw that she was in a shed of some kind, with chinks of late-afternoon light shining through the plank walls, and odd shapes looming in the shadows nearby.

‘
Oi!
' shouted a desperate, cracked voice from directly beneath her. ‘Is that you, April? Are you back?'

‘Stuart!'

She jumped off the seat, grabbed the Magic Star, and waited anxiously for Stuart to reappear. The lever clacked and ratcheted three times and
the
twining silver stems relaxed, revealing a small slumped figure on the throne.

‘You were
ages
,' said Stuart huskily.

‘I know. And I'm so, so sorry. But do you know where we are? Has the trick been stolen, or is this a museum store … or what?' She was searching the shed as she spoke, and her fingers found and rattled at a locked door. ‘And we can't even get out!' she added, trying not to panic.

‘I don't know anything,' said Stuart. ‘I've been under that throne the whole time, and I couldn't really hear what was going on. I know there was a lorry journey, and lots of moving around and crashing and banging, and then' – Stuart's mouth was so dry that his words turned into a series of coughs – ‘and then it went totally quiet,' he continued, catching his breath, ‘and it's been quiet for ages now.'

‘But why didn't you use the lever to get out of there for a while?' asked April. ‘Just for a quick explore, or some fresh air? I would have done.'

‘Because I didn't know what would happen if you came back and I wasn't in the right place.' It had been so horrible and hot and claustrophobic,
and
his head had begun pounding so badly that a couple of times he'd nearly pulled the lever – his fingers had curled around it – but each time he'd had a dreadful vision of April completing her puzzle at exactly the same moment, and getting horribly squashed in the insides of the mechanism. ‘I didn't dare, just in case something went wrong.'

‘Oh,' said April. ‘Thank you.' There was a pause. Stuart couldn't see her expression, but he could hear her taking odd, irregular breaths.

‘What's the matter?' he asked.

When she spoke, it was in a very small, un-April-like voice. ‘You're braver than I am,' she said. ‘I couldn't have put up with that. I wasn't even brave enough to go on the adventure on my own. I took the dog with me.'

Stuart's stomach seemed to do a flip. ‘You took Charlie? Where is he?'

‘Still there,' said April. ‘I tripped over and dropped him just as I was coming back. I'm so, so sorry.'

In the terrible silence that followed, there was the sudden sound of a key turning. Stuart jumped up and April stood tensely beside him.

The door opened.

Two identical heads were silhouetted in the low summer light.

‘I told you so!' shrieked one of them. ‘I
told
you they hadn't left that exhibition room.'

‘May!' shouted April. ‘And June! How did you find us?'

‘How did you get in there?'

‘How do we get out?'

‘Where were you?'

‘Where are we now?'

A million triplet questions seemed to fill the air, all of them unanswered, all of them incredibly loud. Stuart's head began to hurt rather a lot and he sat down again. The questions changed tack.

‘What's wrong with Stuart?'

‘Why's he so blotchy?'

‘What's he been doing?'

‘Are you all right, Stuart?'

‘Do you need fresh air?'

‘Are you thirsty?'

Stuart nodded to the last question, and one of the triplets ran outside again.

‘Where
are
we?' asked April, for about the fortieth time.

‘In the big shed in the corner of Dad's builder's yard,' said the other girl. ‘It occurred to me that he might be able to store the tricks for a while, so I rang him up. And he happened to have a van coming back from a job, so they went straight to the museum and picked up everything. Rod Felton was very grateful.'

‘So all the illusions are in here?' asked April. She pulled a tarpaulin away from some veiled lumps in the corner. ‘They've dumped the Book of Peril on its
side
,' she said indignantly.