The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (28 page)

“Give it over,” growled Faye, which only made Lucy cling to it all the tighter.

“Lucy, I promise,” said Jasper. “No matter what, you will be in charge of it.”

Faye shook her head, “You can’t—”

“I promise, Lucy. I am your brother and I’ve never lied to you or broken a promise.”

Lucy looked at Faye and, almost imperceptibly, stuck out just the very tiniest bit of her tongue in Faye’s general direction. But Faye, focused on the green book, did not see this. Lucy handed the book to Jasper.

“It doesn’t have any pages,” said Lucy, now swinging her legs off the bed, “except the one and that’s the one everyone has always been using to press flowers.”

“What do you mean, Lucy?” asked Wallace, who, like the others, leaned over the book Jasper was trying to open.

“Careful!” shouted Lucy. “All of our flowers are going to fall.”

But Jasper found it hard to open. The covers were stuck together.

“What did you put in here?” asked Jasper.

“Just flowers, like everyone else. Except I did put that clover I found by the beehives. It was a bit sticky.”

“Who is everyone, Lucy?” asked Noah. “Do you have a bunch of imaginary friends?”

“No,” Lucy said, “everyone who had the book before. There were loads of pressed flowers and broken petals and bits and pieces of flowers from long ago.”

“I can’t get it open.” Jasper had been trying to gently pry open the leather covers, but that only made a few old and brittle petals
fall out of the book.

Faye picked up a few. “Well, these are flower petals, and they are old.” She rubbed a few petals between her fingers. “But these other ones are pages, linen pages, from a book. This was once a book of some kind.”

“Don’t break them,” whined Lucy. “They might have been in there for a hundred years.”

“She’s right,” said Wallace, sniffing the petals and bits of linen pages Faye had dropped onto the bed.

“Oh, give the thing to me, will you?” said Faye, grabbing the book out of Jasper’s hands and pulling the leather covers apart.

There was a collective gasp as a shower of pressed flowers fell upon the children.

“You’ve broken it!” cried Lucy, grabbing the book back from Faye.

“No I haven’t,” Faye said, taking it back from Lucy. “I just got the thing apart.”

But Lucy pointed to the single linen page upon which she, and what seemed like generations before her, had pressed flowers. There were impressions of flowers, and stains from flowers, and bits of flowers all over the page. However, the corner of the page had been pulled away from the inside of the leather cover where it had been stuck. It was just the corner, but it was enough to see that there was writing under there.

“Be careful,” Jasper said, taking it gently from Faye’s hands. He began pulling the page slowly and carefully away from the cover, so it would not tear.

Flakes of yellowed paper caught in the leather straps looped through the spine of the binding. The cover was blank, except for
some slight indentations.

“It looks like it might once have said something—yes, it did. And from all of the flakes here, this book clearly had pages once,” said Wallace, running his finger along the inside of the spine.

“Look at this,” Jasper said, his voice hushed as he pointed to the words on the page that had stuck to the cover. He turned it over and placed it face-up on the green book so all could look.

On it was a written list of dates and names, handwritten in various inks, spanning many years.

The earliest dates were almost totally illegible, with the exception of “Breda, November, 1618,” and a few other partial entries that seemed to go back to the mid-sixteenth century. But dates such as “Muktsar, Spring, 1705,” “Edinburgh, Late Autumn, 1738,” “Amsterdam, Mid-Summer, 1740,” and “Vienna, Early Spring (but too late), 1827” were clear to the eye. There was an entry for “Naples, Spring, 1872,” although the ink was slightly smudged. The date was not obscured, but the word “spring” was hard to make out.

“That’s the year Mt. Vesuvius erupted,” said Lucy.

“My mother has been to Naples,” said Noah, “once about two years ago, and once when she was a girl.”

“My mum, too,” Jasper said, “when she was a schoolgirl. I think even my dad went when he was small.”

“What was it doing in the nightdress drawer?” asked Wallace, caressing the smooth leather. “It’s ancient.”

“When did you take it?” asked Faye.

Lucy blushed slightly. “After the man was jumping on the bed and stole into Mummy’s night things, I went and took it and put it under my pillow so it would be safe. Then I saw all the flowers
everyone had been pressing and I started pressing flowers, too.”

“It must have been there when we arrived,” said Jasper. “And it must be Mummy’s, even though we’d never seen it before.”

“What does that say on the front?” asked Noah. “There are words, or there
were
words.”

“I know what to do,” said Wallace.

Wallace handled the book as if it were a treasure. Careful not to place it near anything that might harm it, he brought it over to the classroom’s laboratory table.

“Are you using chemicals on it?” asked Lucy, fearfully.

“No,” he said, “only some ash, and not on the leather itself.”

He placed a very thin piece of tissue on the cover of the book. Then, most carefully, he rubbed the ash on the tissue, and used a stick ruler to rub evenly. Words came out as if written by ghosts from the past. Just four words. “The Young Inventors Guild.”

“What does that mean?” asked Noah.

“Who were they?” asked Lucy. “All I know is one thing they did.”

“What’s that?” asked Wallace.

“They pressed flowers,” said Lucy. “Whatever else they did, they pressed flowers.”

“My guess is they invented things,” said Noah.

“But who
were
they?” Faye asked, running her finger across the cover.

“When
were they?” asked Noah.

“Well, it’s ours now,” said Faye. “Whoever the Young Inventors
Guild was, we have their book and it’s ours.” Faye looked at it again. “It is awfully strange, isn’t it?”

“What?” asked Jasper, still looking at the book.

“Well, here we are,” Faye said, “and we’re inventors, and whoever they were, these people considered themselves inventors. I wonder just how young they were. As young as us?”

“And you know what?” asked Lucy, jumping from her perch on the table, scurrying to her desk, and pulling out all of their notes on the flying machine. “Now
we’re
the Young Inventors Guild.”

The children were silent for a moment, reflecting on the book that lay in their hands and the inventions that lay in their brains. Who was this Young Inventors Guild? Why was the book hidden in the nightie drawer? Why did the Modest family have it anyway?

“But what does this have to do with our parents?” Noah asked.

“Well, it might not have... I don’t know,” said Jasper, staring at the book.

Faye took the old page with the list of places. “Naples, 1872. Your mum was there, Jasper? When she was a girl?”

“My mother, too,” said Noah. “She was there around then.”

“Yes, but your mother is an opera singer, not a scientist or an inventor. Jasper, your mum was there when she was young?”

“I think she was, but I don’t know the year,” said Jasper. “Do you, Lucy?”

“She never told us,” said Lucy.

“What about you?” asked Jasper, looking from Faye to Wallace. “Were your parents ever in Naples when they were young?”

“I don’t know... I don’t think so,” Wallace said. “Maybe.”

Suddenly, they all felt very far from their parents—as if they didn’t know them very well at all.

That night, when Miss Brett returned from checking on the cow, which had a mouth infection from trying to eat the bottom of something that looked like a rocket, she chose to read to the children from a new book by a woman who had been a friend of her mother in England, where her mother lived until she was nineteen.

“Edith Nesbit and my mother went to school together as girls, in Kent. Ms. Nesbit moved around quite a bit when she was young, but the two of them kept in touch until Ms. Nesbit moved back to London. But then my mother moved to America, and after a while, they lost touch. This book by Edith Nesbit was published last year, and I was so thrilled to find it. It’s called
Five Children and It.
Somehow, I thought you might enjoy it.”

“Because it’s about five children?” asked Lucy.

“Well, yes, but it’s not just about five children. It’s about five children who are made to leave the city and live out in the country, where they discover the most incredible thing.”

“But they’re away from their mummy and daddy?” asked Lucy.

“Yes, dear, they are,” Miss Brett said gently.

The children let the rest of the world fall away as Miss Brett read them the book’s first chapter.

When the children were all quiet, Miss Brett closed the
book and blew out the candle. But the children were not asleep. The story made them think about how far away they really were from their parents. They might as well be on another planet or in another century. And what did they even know about the people they loved most?

Out of habit, Faye reached for her necklace, Jasper and Lucy for their bracelets, and Wallace for his lucky coin in his empty pocket. Noah thought of Ralph.

Tokens of comfort, all out of reach.

L
UCY
T
ELLS
A T
AIL

OR

PIECES BEGIN TO FALL