The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (40 page)

“But you can do it,” Wallace said. “It will be a three-axis control that—sorry, I don’t mean to... you both seem capable and knowledgeable in the mechanics of it. Your own design sounded excellent, minus a few small flaws.”

“I bet you’ll be in the air before Christmas,” said Noah.

The two brothers looked at one another and smiled.

“But,” said Orville, “we can announce your enormous contributions to the future of aviation, after—”

“Only after we tell you it’s all right to do so,” Jasper said.

“For now, the credit should go to the Wright brothers,” said Faye.

Wilbur and Orville both opened their mouths, but were stopped by five emphatic shaking heads. There was a moment of silence. The Wright brothers conceded.

“Can we say that we had great assistance from family...” Wilbur looked at Faye. “... and friends...” They looked at the others. “... without whom it would never have taken off the ground?”

“Absolutely,” said Faye with a smile.

“Can we call it Faye’s Flyer?” asked Orville.

“Just ‘Flyer,’” said Faye, although she did like the sound of it.

“Oh, that’s a lovely name,” said Lucy.

“But you’ll let us know if you ever want a ride,” said Orville with a wink.

“You know what we
would
like?” said Faye, an idea jumping into her head. “We’d like to borrow some bicycles. Does everyone know how to ride?”

They all nodded, save Lucy. It was getting late, and the night patrol would be coming every forty-five seconds. If they walked, it would be dark by the time they got back. It would be faster with bicycles.

“We have just the thing,” said Wilbur, as he, Katharine, and Orville hurried back into the shop. They emerged with four bicycles—three made for one rider and one bicycle, a tandem, built for two riders.

“Consider these gifts,” Wilbur said.

Faye put her hand on a smaller, elegant bicycle. “This one’s mine.”

“That one is built for a princess,” said Orville, with a bow, “and until now, we haven’t met one to bestow it upon.” Faye smiled and curtseyed back.

Jasper, who’d recently taught himself to ride and was teaching Lucy, chose the tandem for the two of them. Noah took the biggest and Wallace took the smallest.

“Ready?” said Faye, turning to the others. “Let’s go home.”

“Home?” Jasper asked, his eyebrows raised in wonder. Had Faye, the leader of every escape plan, the head of the rebels, actually called her house in Dayton, Ohio, home?

“Well,” Faye said, blushing as if caught in the act of something, “besides Sole Manner Farm, where else can we call home right now? Where else can we go?”

Jasper gave her a small nod and a little smile. He understood. They all did.

“Where on earth did you get that thing?” asked Rosie as Jasper and Lucy walked their tandem bicycle up to the porch.

“Oh, we found it... at Faye’s,” Jasper said, smiling up at her.

“Very well, but don’t you be getting too many skinned knees,” said Rosie. “Those contraptions are dangerous.”

“I’m famished, Rosie,” Lucy said, rubbing her belly. The smell of roast chicken and gravy perfumed the air.

“Well, of course you are. You’d better get washed for supper,” Rosie said, scooting the children in. Taking one more look at the bicycle, she shook her head as she closed the door. “I’ve made some of your favorites.”

The two siblings sat down to a delicious supper, as did their friends in each of their own houses. The food tasted more delicious than ever, now that their aeroplane was safe, and they at least felt a bit safer and more in control of things than they had in a very, very long while.

But they also had given away their only means of saving their parents—assuming, of course, their parents needed saving, and assuming the aeroplane would have helped save them. They would worry about new plans of escape and for finding their parents tomorrow. Tonight, they ate and breathed deeply and, even for just one night, it felt good just to be home.

A B
ICYCLE
B
UILT
F
OR
F
IVE

OR

THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD

B
y Saturday, with no invention to protect and nothing else they could or had to do, the children spent a normal childlike afternoon riding their brand new bikes. Later, they had a picnic in their meadow, and thoughts turned to Miss Brett.

“I never had a proper picnic before we met Miss Brett,” said Lucy, fondly.

“Neither had I,” Faye said, suddenly feeling less hungry.

By the end of the day, Miss Brett was on their minds, and they’d become anxious about returning to her classroom.

Sunday brought more worries. Was Miss Brett all right? Had Reginald Roderick Kattaning returned? They worried all the more when, by two o’clock in the afternoon, the carriage still had not arrived. The carriages had always arrived just after lunch.

“How very odd,” mumbled Rosie, wringing her hands and clucking her teeth. She had been sitting with Jasper and Lucy on the porch for hours.

Faye walked over to Jasper and Lucy’s house. She carried her bag and concern.

“This has never happened,” she said to them. “Everything has
always run like clockwork with these fellows.”

“Oh, dear,” Lucy said. “I do hope the clock hasn’t been broken.” Her fingers went to her mouth and she began to nibble.

The three children left their bags on the porch and walked around the block to Noah’s, where Myrtle was pacing and twirling her hair around her fingers. Then the four walked to Wallace’s.

“Well, I never,” mumbled Daisy, cracking her knuckles.

“What do you think is going on?” Wallace asked in a whisper.

No one knew.

“Let’s just wait for one of the patrol carriages or motorcars,” said Wallace.

No one had seen a patrol that day, and that was not unusual. But as the clocks ticked and tocked, and hours passed, it was strange that the men in black were nowhere to be seen.

By four o’clock, the children decided they needed a plan. All five of them and their nannies were pacing and worrying on Jasper and Lucy’s porch. Daisy was cracking her knuckles, Myrtle was twirling her hair, Camellia was tugging at her ear, and Rosie was clucking her teeth and shaking her head.

“We need to do something,” whispered Noah.

“We need to get out there,” said Faye.

“I think we should go to your cousins and ask them to help,” said Jasper.

Faye agreed. “Maybe they can help us get out to the schoolhouse,” she said. “Mother told me Orville has a motorcar.”

“I don’t think we want to get him involved,” said Wallace.

“If he did take us, we couldn’t exactly tell him to leave us in the lap of danger and run on home,” said Noah. “No law-abiding,
kind, generous cousin would do that. Besides, I’d like to keep my head attached to my body. I saw the gleam in his eye when he saw the aeroplane. A ride with your cousin Orville might not be the best thing.”

“But we do have to go somehow,” said Wallace.

“Maybe the funny men don’t want us to go,” said Lucy.

“I don’t care,” Faye said. “Lucy, Miss Brett is there. What if she needs us?”

“She does!” cried Lucy. “She does need us!”

“How do we get there?” said Wallace.

“We don’t know where it is, let alone how to get there,” Noah said. “Those crazy coachmen always seem to go a different way. Who on earth could ever remember which direction to take or where it, or any other road for that matter, actually—”

“I can,” said Lucy, blushing under the gaze of the four others. She looked at Jasper and stopped her little finger from finding its way into her mouth.

“Of course you can,” said Jasper. He beamed at his sister. Of course, Lucy would remember. “And I know just how we’re going to do it.”

“It may take us a month to get there,” groaned Faye.

“It won’t,” Jasper said. “We won’t have the packages, and we can ride directly there. Our bicycles are almost as fast as the carriages.”

“What are we going to tell the nannies?” asked Wallace.

That was going to be a big problem.

The nannies were already pacing and worrying on Jasper and Lucy’s porch, and when the children began to explain the plan, there was not much enthusiasm. Daisy once again cracked her knuckles, Myrtle once again twirled her hair, Camellia once again tugged at her ear, and Rosie once again clucked and clucked like a mother hen.

“Oh, goodness, oh, dearie me,” Rosie said, shaking her head, close to tears.

“We don’t have a choice,” Jasper said, patting Rosie gently on the back.

“We must get out to the schoolhouse,” said Faye. “There’s no one here to take us and no one coming to get us. We’re on our own and we have to go.”

The four nannies were persuaded to go inside and have a cup of tea, but not before Rosie gave them some sandwiches and water in canteens. Then the five children mounted their bicycles. Lucy’s feet hardly reached the pedals on the back of the tandem, but she was determined to push along and help her brother.

But almost the moment they left their neighborhood, Jasper shouted to get down. Quickly, they all ducked into a toolshed at the edge of someone’s property.

Silently, they watched as a man wearing a black beefeater’s cap nearly twice the man’s own height, a black military suit the likes of which none of them could recognize, and boots that reached nearly to his thighs rode by on a giant unicycle.