The Sixty-Eight Rooms (12 page)

“Don’t call him over—we’re not supposed to be here,” Jack said, not knowing what he would say next.

“Oh, I see,” she said, smiling at them. “You have escaped your tutor also, no?”

“Exactly,” Ruthie said. That was as good an excuse as any. “It is such a nice day we thought we’d go crazy with more lessons!”

“My name is Sophie Lacombe,” the girl said, presenting her hand for Jack to kiss. Ruthie understood what this gesture meant, but Jack was clueless. She elbowed him. He finally understood and took Sophie’s hand.

“His name is Jack and I’m Ruthie,” she said for him.

Sophie smiled at them and repeated their names in her French accent, turning them into “Jacques” and “Rootie.”

“I am happy to meet you.” She had perfect manners. Then she smiled broadly and added, “Let me escape with you!” She didn’t wait for an answer but started running in the opposite direction from her tutor, who didn’t seem interested in her at the moment anyway, his nose buried deep in his book. Jack and Ruthie followed, not having a better idea what to do. Ruthie was a bit concerned about going too far from room E24; she looked over her shoulder to make sure it was still in view. She didn’t need to worry. They followed the path only a short distance down the small hill before they reached the pond. The limestone
building and the balconies of the room could still be seen in the distance.

“We can sit here and you can tell me everything about the colonies and whom you are visiting in Paris!”

“Paris?” Jack said. Until this point they had had no idea that they were even in Paris; the catalogue had said only France. And it certainly didn’t look like the pictures of Paris that they’d seen. It didn’t look like a city at all. “Uh … yes, Paris. Tell her why we’re here, Ruthie.”

Ruthie glared at him. She had been counting on him for the quick answers.

“Well,” she began hesitantly, “first of all, let me say we are so lucky to be here—”

“Yes, of course,” Sophie interrupted. “I have heard so many stories of ships sinking on the voyage from America!”

“It was a very rough voyage,” Jack jumped in. “We nearly died in three separate storms!” The suggestion of an ocean voyage was all Jack needed. “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to cross the ocean. Ruthie was sick almost the whole time!”

“Mon dieu!”
Sophie said, her big eyes opening wide. Ruthie did not protest this made-up story as long as Jack was doing the talking. She noticed that Sophie was directing her wide-eyed gaze only at Jack. “Tell me more!”

“Well, we came here with our parents….”

“You are brother and sister, then?”

“That’s right,” Jack said. “Our father is an assistant to Ben Franklin!”

Now it was Ruthie who was wide-eyed.

“Monsieur Frankleen!” Sophie exclaimed. “I have heard he is very charming! Will he be your king—or president, as you say?”

“Nope. Never,” Jack said, rather too confidently. “I mean, I think he likes the job he has now.”

Good cover
, Ruthie thought. Jack, who only a moment ago had been tongue-tied, was now telling an amazing tale of adventure that he was making up on the spot.

The story he told had them arriving in Paris only a few weeks earlier. He explained to Sophie that their father had to visit because Benjamin Franklin was living in France. Jack liked to read about wars and history, and he remembered that Ben Franklin had been sent to Paris during the American Revolution to make friends for the new country, to borrow money from the French government and to set up an American embassy. Jack also remembered that the American Revolution had inspired the French people to overthrow King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette and chop off their heads—and those of many of their friends! He knew so much about history that he could weave these facts into his story. Then Jack did a smart thing: he changed the subject.

“So what about you? What does your family do in Paris?”

Sophie seemed thrilled to be asked, but her answer was a little surprising. It sounded to Jack and Ruthie as if her parents didn’t really have jobs—not the kind of jobs that you went to every day and got paid for. Her parents
simply seemed to be friends of the king and queen. She said they lived “at court.” Ruthie wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but she had a feeling that Sophie was from a very rich family—exactly the kind of people who would be getting their heads chopped off in guillotines. Ruthie liked Sophie and thought that if they had been from the same time, they would be friends. She could tell for sure, though, that Sophie liked Jack, especially when she asked him how old he was.

“Only eleven?
Mon dieu!
You seem much older!” She actually batted her eyelashes at him. Ruthie had only seen that in movies and thought it was kind of ridiculous that Sophie would be flirting with Jack; it made her seem much younger than her clothes and hair suggested.

“Almost twelve,” he added.

“Oh, Jack!” Ruthie interrupted, getting back at him for saying that she had been sick all the time on their ocean voyage. “You won’t be twelve for ten months.” Ruthie gave Jack a knowing smile. “I’m older,” she added, to Sophie. “Twelve and a half.” It was a lie, but she couldn’t resist. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen. I wish I were still young, though, like you. Next year I am to be married,” she said.

Jack and Ruthie looked at each other. Ruthie tried to picture her sister, Claire, who was just a couple of years older than Sophie, being married. She couldn’t.

“Married! Who will you marry?” Ruthie asked.

“I do not know yet,” she said. “Of course it will be
someone at court; that is all I know. My father will arrange it.” She stated all this as a somewhat sad matter of fact. “But I want to hear more about your country! Tell me all about your revolution!”

Jack pulled up every tidbit of information he could remember about the American Revolution and how the colonists won independence from the English king.

“Maybe we should have a revolution, like America, no?” Sophie suggested. Ruthie thought at first she said it to flirt with Jack. But then Sophie smiled, leaned toward them both and said quietly, “I am not too fond of our king. But do not tell anyone!”

Jack wanted to tell her so badly that they would have a revolution, and soon. But he didn’t know how to tell her or even if he should. He didn’t have a chance to think about it, for at that moment they heard the voice of a French man, the tutor, calling Sophie’s name.

“I must go now. Will you be here tomorrow?”

Ruthie was about to say no but Jack answered first. “We’ll be here for a few minutes early in the morning, but then we are going on a trip with our father.”

“I will be right here, then. Watch for me.
Au revoir?”
She ran off to find her tutor, turning once to wave to them.

“Wow,” Jack said when she was gone. “I can’t believe we just had a conversation with someone who lived over two hundred years ago!”

“Me neither,” Ruthie agreed. She thought about what
had just happened; she was having difficulty understanding how it could be. What was the power that made this happen and was there a reason for it? Why Ruthie, why Jack, why Sophie? As they walked back to the balcony stairs she said to Jack, “She seemed so nice.”

“I wonder what will happen to her in the future,” Jack said. “The French Revolution was pretty violent.”

Inside they sat down, Ruthie at the desk again, looking with new interest at the diary in front of her. She would love to know what it said. Jack sat on a couch with fancy fabric and gold trim. He squirmed.

“With all this money, why didn’t they make the furniture comfortable?” He got off the couch and opted for the floor, stretching out on his back and staring up at the ceiling. “This whole thing,” Jack declared, “is definitely bizarre!”

“I know,” Ruthie agreed. “I keep having to remind myself that we’re five inches tall!”

Then Ruthie remembered the pencil. “Look at this, Jack.” She pulled it out of the drawer and held it up for Jack to see. “A number-two lead pencil shouldn’t be in this room—or any of the Thorne Rooms. How do you think it got in here?”

“Weird, definitely weird,” Jack replied. “I say we try and find out what’s making all this happen, if we can.” Ruthie could feel the wheels turning in his brain from all the way across the room.

“Got any suggestions? I haven’t seen any instructions posted for us or a user’s manual anywhere.”

“Let’s try the first room—E1. Isn’t it a castle room?” Jack said.

“I think it is—let’s check in the catalogue.” They left room E24 and went back to the ledge. Ruthie knelt and flipped the pages of the catalogue to the beginning. “Yeah, it’s a room from England, around the year 1550.”

“Okay, that puts it around sixty years after ‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue,’ ” Jack said, and then asked Ruthie, “Do you remember anything that happened around that time in history?”

She looked at him and rolled her eyes. “I’ll pay more attention in history class from now on,” she vowed. “Do you think we’ll find some answers in there?”

“Who knows? But it’s the logical place to start,” he answered. “Let’s get rid of these clothes—they’re too uncomfortable.”

T
HEY WALKED BACK ALONG THE
ledge to room E22 and found their own clothes where they had left them. Ruthie stayed in the room to change and Jack went out to the corridor. As she was bending down to tie her shoes, she heard Jack call her name insistently.

“I’ll be there in a sec—let me get my shoes on,” she called back to him.
He can be so impatient
, she thought. But what happened next explained the tone in his voice. She came out from the back of the room and there, on the corridor ledge, was a cockroach-type creature, with long, hairy legs batting wildly in the air. It looked like some horrible monster from a science fiction movie. She tried to scream but nothing came out of her throat except a feeble gasp. The thing was huge, with twitching antennae all over its face. Its bugged-out eyes stared right at her. She ran back into the room.

Ruthie tried to think quickly. She could feel herself shaking all over. Where was Jack? Had this giant insect with six spiked legs and antennae as long as her arms knocked Jack off the ledge while he was changing his clothes? Had Jack seen it and panicked and then fallen?
That kind of fall could kill him … it can’t be!
That’s why he’d sounded so hurried when he called for her. She had paid enough attention in science class to know that cockroaches were omnivores, which meant they ate everything.
I need a weapon
, she thought. She scanned the room; the fireplace poker would have to do. She would at least have a fighting chance with that. She grabbed it and ran back out.

The hideous roach was waiting for her on the ledge. By the size of it she calculated that this was no ordinary house cockroach. It was the kind her mom called a water bug because they traveled up through sewer pipes. The thing was about three inches long—not including the length of its legs. It was the ugliest thing she had ever seen in her life! She raised the poker and took a swing at it. It actually hissed at her, a horrible, sticky sound, showing its uneven, sharp teeth. Ruthie thought she would faint but she didn’t; she needed to find Jack. He was still nowhere to be seen.

The thing seemed to be interested in a fight with her. It stood up on its two back legs and used the other four to take swipes at her. Luckily, she had brainpower as an advantage. As it reared, she swung at a back leg, hooked it with the end of the poker and pulled forward with a quick motion. That caused the insect to lose its balance, flipping
over onto its back. Now she had just enough time to slip by as it lay upside down on the ledge, wiggling its hairy legs in the air as it attempted to right itself.

“Jack! Jack!” she yelled. “Where are you?” She ran along the ledge to the catalogue stairway. Then she heard his voice.

“Back here!” She turned and saw him running toward her, holding a candle stand taller than he was. The cockroach was between them. “I was looking for a sword or something but this was the best I could do!” As he spoke the giant bug finally succeeded in flipping itself over. It saw Jack just a few feet in front of it and started to charge. Jack bravely held his position.

“Go back in a room, Jack! It could knock you off the ledge!”

“We have to kill it, though!”

Ruthie was at the top step of the catalogue stairs, and she realized that if she climbed all the way down to the floor in order to switch back to full size, it would be too late for Jack. She didn’t have that kind of time. She decided to take a risk—or rather, a leap. She reached into her pocket, grabbed the key and dropped it as she threw herself from the book stairs. It happened so fast; the beginning of the jump felt as though she were leaping to her death off a tall building. She expanded in midair both upward and downward, so when it was all over, her head was higher than where she had started. Her feet hit the floor with extra force. But she didn’t have any time to pay attention to that. Four of the cockroach’s six legs were swinging at Jack while he tried to use the candle stand as a bat. Jack saw the full-size Ruthie and retreated a few steps.