The Glass Castle (14 page)

That night, more than a dozen girls crowded around Avery to compliment her skill and ask what other instruments she played and whether she would teach them.

Suddenly, she no longer felt useless and talentless, the odd girl out.

She was still homesick and worried to death about Henry, but it felt good to smile again and mean it. When she crawled into bed and pulled the quilt up to her chin, as usual she waited until the room was still before she quietly reached into the torn seam of her pillow to retrieve the ruby necklace.

Tonight she found nothing but feathers.

Avery dug deeper, feeling for the gold chain, the ruby flower. She shook the pillow, feathers flying, hoping to hear a rattle.

Nothing.

Avery whipped off her quilt and dropped to her knees on the cold floor, no longer caring who might be awake or watching. She felt all around by the bed and underneath.

It couldn’t have just slipped out. Someone had to have taken it. But who even knew where she hid it? And did they also know it had once belonged to the queen?

Being caught with royal jewels is punishable by death.

After several more frantic minutes of searching, she crawled back into bed and did the only thing she knew to do. She squeezed her eyes shut against the sting of tears and prayed God would help her find everything she had lost.

The next morning, with puffy eyes and pasty face, Avery knew she needed to appear casual so that whoever took the necklace wouldn’t even know she knew it was gone yet.

She wanted badly to employ Kate’s help, but she wasn’t ready to tell her the whole story yet—especially about what she had seen in the painting of the queen—not without more facts first. Another thought occurred to her—

What if Kate took the necklace?

Avery swatted the idea away. Despite Kate’s many peculiarities, she was a friend.

Yet Avery remembered with clarity her first night in the castle when Kate had removed the necklace after she had passed out. And there was the night Kate watched her stuff the necklace into her pillow. No one else had seen it.

Avery pasted her best smile over her brittle confidence as she entered the dining hall and hoped no one would talk to her during breakfast. She sat and filled her plate when Tuck stood suddenly at his spot at the center of the table and commanded the attention of the crowd.

The whole room quieted.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I have just received some news I want to share. I know you will all be excited with me.”

Tuck kept looking at Avery, making her wish she felt better than she did. She had to muster all her strength to maintain her fake smile.

“The king was so pleased with the music yesterday that before he and the queen left on their honeymoon, he commissioned the organist”—and here he mimicked the king’s deep voice, “‘whoever he was’—to write the theme song for the Olympiad. Of course, we all know who ‘he was’!”

Tuck gestured for Avery to stand, and he began clapping. Soon the others joined in, and several called out their congratulations. Avery stood, but in a moment that should have been one of the best of her life, she had to fight to keep her eyes wide open so she wouldn’t burst into tears.

At a cabinet meeting later that morning, Avery was surprised to find Kendrick at the table with no sign of Tuck.

Kendrick couldn’t have looked more uninterested as Avery took a seat beside him.

He stifled yawns while she repressed tears.

We make a sad pair.

Today, at least, she was thankful he hated small talk. Kendrick kept his gaze straight ahead, and that was fine with her. Though, the more she thought about it, Kendrick never really looked at her. In fact, he never really looked at anyone.

The silence lay as thick as a blanket as they sat there for five minutes, then ten, and that stretched to twenty.

“Ridiculous,” Kendrick said finally under his breath.

“It’s what we agreed to do,” Avery said in the same tone Kendrick had used with her at their first meeting.

Kendrick smiled, and Avery smiled, too.

They returned to their silence.

So much for trying to break the ice. Avery wished there was something she could say. She knew what it was like to feel isolated. They had at least that much in common.

“You never know what burdens people are carrying,”
Avery’s mother had always told her.
“Be nice to everyone.”

“Did you know we arrived here the same day?” she asked, wondering if he had struggled the way she had. Maybe he’d left a family member behind. Maybe he, too, carried regrets.

“Yeah, so?”

Avery needed something to keep her mind off of the missing necklace. She had lost too much sleep the night before trying to consider ways she might recover it or at least explain how she got it in the event she was questioned. No easy apology would spare her the gallows.

She would avoid an untimely death and find her necklace by whatever means necessary.

She stood. “I want to show you something.”

He stiffened. “Show me what?”

“Don’t come if you don’t want to,” she said casually, “but it may be the best place in the entire castle.” She moved toward the door and was relieved to hear Kendrick’s chair scrape the floor.

She led him down the hall to the stairs and then up to a landing where Avery pressed her ear against a door
without
a giant red
X.
When she pushed it open, she turned to watch Kendrick’s face as he carefully stepped inside.

Chapter 23

A Critical Development

Kendrick looked shocked then pleased.

With the help of her mother’s stories, Avery had discovered the library fit for a castle.

Here was the room that had inspired her father to build the library in the tree house. Its floor-to-ceiling shelves contained a vast array of leather-bound, golden-clasped books in every imaginable size. Rolling ladders served as bridges to an entire world of undiscovered information.

Come explore!
the books seemed to whisper.

And Avery knew—even if she could read one book a day for the rest of her life—she would barely make a dent in the stacks.

The scent of leather and lemons made her wish she had all the time in the world to travel volume by volume through the entire room. The only thing that would make this moment better would be to share it with someone she loved.

She looked at Kendrick.

Unfortunately, he would have to do.

Avery pointed to the ceiling, which had been painted a most realistic dark blue with golden stars and a huge moon like the one she had seen from the raft on her way to the castle. How strange! Light unmistakably shone through the moon, and Avery felt a breeze on her face.

But she missed
her
moon and
her
stars, the ones that had kept her company during many nights in the woods. She stood there bright-eyed and thunderstruck, waiting for Kendrick to ask the obvious questions:

Are we allowed in here?

How did you know this was here?

Should we tell Tuck?

But instead, Kendrick began a slow but deliberate climb up one of the ladders and, with a gentleness that surprised Avery, took a book from the shelf and tenderly opened it. Glancing down at her, he nodded and smiled, and she realized that was as close to a thank-you as she was likely to ever get from him. He was an odd boy, but to his defense, he had selected a book by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the great poet laureate, and she was impressed.

Avery found her own place among the shelves and tugged a few glittering stories and dusty history books from the stacks, situated herself on the floor, and began to read, looking for information about Queen Elizabeth and her secrets.

Her only concern became having enough time to read everything she wanted.

One of the books she discovered was a Bible. She turned its onionskin pages carefully, letting the words wash over her soul like cool water on a blistering day. As she scanned, the pages seemed to come alive to her as no other book had the power to do.

Hours later—or so it seemed—Avery looked up to find Kendrick standing over her. He still didn’t look her in the eye, but he appeared happier, more relaxed.

A new, unspoken bond seemed to form between them.

He held out a hand to her, whispering, “We should go.”

She accepted his help, tucking the Bible under her arm as well as a copy of
Great Expectations
and
Gulliver’s Travels
to borrow and return.

“Books are made for lending,”
her mother had always said.

Avery decided she would accept Kate’s offer to attend chapel services with the other thirteen-year-olds. Reading the Bible made her hungry to know more.

As she climbed the stone stairway behind Kendrick, she was grateful she had found another friend.

Avery skipped supper so she could begin drawing a map of the castle.

Returning to her mattress, she was surprised to find a large, thick parchment rolled and tied with a ribbon and resting on her pillow.

She untied it and shook it open.

It was the painting of Queen Elizabeth she had discovered in storage.

But why? Who had given the painting to her?

And then her gaze came to rest on the ruby necklace. It was circled with a message.

Looking both ways, she lifted her mattress just enough to slide the painting underneath. She would think about how to handle this message later. For now, she had something else to do.

Relying on her day-to-day experiences and memories of the afternoon she and Kate had spent exploring, she began sketching a floor plan, noting in block letters the rooms she knew and adding a question mark for those she didn’t.