CHAPTER 13
The Emperor’s New Matching Handbag
That was completely awesome!” Tom announced, looking back at Colonel Brinley’s house. “He totally believed we were nineteenth-century kids. Girls, even!”
“Don’t flatter yourselves on your acting ability,” Frankie warned him. “I could smell rum on the colonel’s breath. He’s obviously not the sharpest key on the piano.”
“Shouldn’t we be playing the trombone and returning to our own time?” I asked as we stepped into the road.
“So soon?” asked Tom, sounding genuinely disappointed. “Look at that mounting block! It’s built right into the fence! It’s so a lady can get in and out of a carriage easily! Very nice design.”
“I’m glad you find this all so interesting,” I said. “But I’ve had way too much of the nineteenth century. This isn’t a safe place for us.”
“We can’t leave yet,” said Frankie. “I’ve been listening for Mr. Ganto’s signal that he’s within range of the Shagbolt, and I haven’t heard it. The windows were open back there and there wasn’t a sound, so he’s still on the far side of the river. And I still need a copy of Cabin.”
She hiked up her skirt and crossed the rutty road to the house across the street. Tom and I followed, without hiking our skirts, and tripped.
The Mordred place was bigger than the colonel’s, with a wraparound porch and fancy columns supporting the roof. It was the sort of house my mother would call “upscale.”
“It’s pretty amazing that the first place we visited,” said Tom, “had a copy of the book you were looking for.”
“It’s not amazing at all,” said Frankie, stopping at Mordred’s gate. A nearby tree had a WANTED poster tacked to it, offering a three-dollar reward for information leading to the capture of a fugitive slave who could be recognized by the pattern of whipping scars on his back. “I researched Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the Internet after my father’s book was stolen. A hundred and fifty years ago, practically everybody had a copy. In America, it was the second-bestselling book of the entire nineteenth century.”
“What was the first?” asked Tom.
“The Bible.”
“You wouldn’t know it,” I said, tearing down the poster.
Frankie pushed past the gate, and we followed her up a yellow brick walk to the front door.
“Couldn’t we just go back to the twenty-first century, and you can buy a copy of the book online?” I said, searching for any reason not to meet more nineteenth-century people. “I’ve got five bucks I’d be happy to chip in.”
“I looked into that,” Frankie admitted. “The cheapest first edition I could find was sixteen thousand dollars.”
“Colonoscopy!” cried Tom. “No wonder Ninja Lady stole your father’s copy!”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure the reason she stole it had nothing to do with its value,” Frankie said mysteriously. She looked straight at me as she said it. Again, something I should have picked up on went right over my head.
“Why else would somebody steal an old book?” I asked.
“Maybe to force whoever they stole it from to go looking for a replacement,” Frankie said. “Of course, I didn’t think of that until after we got to the nineteenth century. But then, she would have expected that.”
“Who? Ninja Lady?” I was totally confused. “Is there something you’re not telling us?”
“If I told you, you’d both start acting weird, and it would jeopardize the mission.”
“We’re already acting weird,” Tom pointed out.
“Weirder, then!” Frankie clarified. She turned to the door, lifted the ring in the brass door knocker’s nose—the knocker was the face of the wind, with puffed-out cheeks and puckered lips—and rapped loudly.
“The two of you shouldn’t say anything,” she said over her shoulder. “These are women. They’ll be more likely to spot boys in girls’ clothing than the colonel was. Let me do the talking.”
She rapped several more times and nobody answered. We heard laughter from the far side of the house and followed it.
Around back, in the center of a garden, five women sat at a table under the shade of an enormous oak. Books were scattered on the tabletop around a punch bowl and plates of tiny sandwiches. The women looked up at our approach, and the largest—she looked like an opera singer—stood and faced us.
Frankie curtsied. Tom didn’t realize we were stopping and collided with me. I shoved him back to keep my balance, and we flailed at each other until we realized we might not be making a good first impression. We froze.
“I am so sorry to bother you,” said Frankie, “but I am Shofranka Camlo. I am working my way through boarding school by representing the American importers of a wonderful new Parisian fashion sensation that promises to be the must-have accessory of the fall season. Since you ladies have the reputation of being the trendsetters of the town of Freedom Falls, we have searched you out before making our offer to any of your neighbors. I hope we are not intruding.”
“You are… selling something?” Opera Singer sounded intrigued.
“I prefer to think of it as providing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“What boarding school? And who are they?” Opera Singer waved her hand at Tom and me.
“Miss Evangeline’s School for the Gifted but Destitute. This is Thomasina, and this is Rose. I speak for them.”
“Have they no command of English?”
“Alas, madam, no one knows. They are mimes.”
“Yes. They do not speak.”
Tom and I shook our heads sorrowfully. Tom pretended to zip his lips, which made absolutely no sense, since I was pretty sure the zipper hadn’t been invented yet.
“Mimes!” gasped Opera Singer. “How awful! You poor dears!”
Tom bugged his eyes and nodded enthusiastically, and I realized he was imitating the silent comedian Harpo Marx, from the old Marx Brothers movies that he loved but his mother couldn’t see the value of. He raced over to the table and acted like he was eating an invisible hamburger.
“Are you hungry?” asked a lady in a lavender dress, who held up a plate full of sandwiches. Tom held out his apron and emptied the entire plate into it. Then he threw in some cupcakes. He sat on the edge of the table and began eating out of his apron, flashing Harpo’s squirrelly look from the depths of his bonnet. A couple of the women looked appalled, but the others raised fans to their faces and giggled.
“You said something about an opportunity?” Opera Singer asked.
Frankie, who didn’t look all that pleased by the demon she had unleashed, flashed a forced smile and said, “We are taking pre-orders for the biggest advance in fashion since the crinoline! I am talking about nothing other than the Fantastic Transparent Plasteek Clutch Purse!” Frankie dramatically waved a Ziploc bag over her head.
There was a sharp intake of breath from around the table. I sat down in Opera Singer’s chair and helped myself to the sandwiches, which turned out to be cucumber. Everybody else’s eyes were on Frankie. She moved close to the table and displayed her plastic bag. The ladies stared as if she were showing them diamonds.
“Tired of rummaging in your reticule for that thing that always seems to be at the bottom?” Frankie asked. I supposed reticule was an old-time word for handbag. “Rummage no more, with this miracle of the age! See where everything is at a glance! Let others know the high quality of your combs and brushes; the size of your homes by the number of keys on your key rings; how beautiful your embroidered handkerchiefs are without ever having to sneeze!” She plucked a butter knife off the table, placed it inside the bag, zipped it, flipped it, and shook the sealed bag to show the contents wouldn’t fall out. The ladies gasped and said “Oh!” as if she had done a magic trick.
Frankie handed the bag to Lavender Lady. “Feel it. Hold it to the light. It is waterproof down to two fathoms, and you know how your river loves to flood!”
“It’s so smooth!” declared Lavender Lady. “And the weave is so fine, I can’t even see the thread!”
“The thread is silk from silkworms owned by mystic men of the Far East who breed their worms to have great clarity of mind. This clarity can be seen in the silk. Or not seen, perhaps I should say,” Frankie explained, with a remarkably straight face.
I couldn’t help but enjoy Frankie’s performance. I suspected she was showing off her carnival-schooling.
As the bag got passed around the table, I ladled myself a lemonade from the punch bowl. A glance around the garden reminded me how far back in time we had traveled. The ceramic gnomes were beardless.
“This, of course, is a salesman’s sample,” Frankie explained. “Pre-order price is only two dollars per purse. In Scupperville”—she named a town farther up the river—“twenty-seven of the town’s most refined ladies pre-ordered a total of thirty-three purses. One of those ladies, I should perhaps not mention, bragged about how Scupperville is always ahead of Freedom Falls when it comes to fashion.”
Opera Singer bellowed “Marigold!” at the house, and a parlor maid bustled out.
“Marigold! Please bring me two dollars from the top drawer of my vanity.”
Marigold turned, but Frankie raised a hand and stopped her.
“That will not be necessary. We are accepting no money at this time. You will pay upon receipt. I will take down the names of any of you who wish to place an advance order.”
A portable writing desk sat on one corner of the table. Frankie helped herself to a piece of paper, dipped a handy feather pen into an inkwell, and looked up expectantly at the ladies. All of them gave their names, and two of them wanted to pre-order more than one bag.
“You ladies are ever so much more gracious than the ladies of Scupperville.” Frankie sighed. “It seems such a pity they will be receiving their purses before you.”
“Is that absolutely written in stone?” asked Opera Singer, who turned out to be Ethel Mordred. “Just because they ordered before we did?”
“I am afraid that is how it works,” said Frankie, in a voice full of regret.
“Perhaps if we offered you a little more money per purse? Or if we gave our money in advance? You might move us to the top of the list?”
“Alas, I would not be comfortable doing that,” said Frankie. “However…”
“Yes?”
“Is that the new book everybody is talking about?” Frankie pointed to the table. “The one about the evils of slavery? I have been meaning to read it, but all the booksellers seem to be sold out.”
“Why, I’ve finished reading mine,” said Lavender Lady, who had identified herself as Lavinia Moon. She picked up both volumes of the book and handed them to Frankie. “Please take it as a gift. I am sure you would find it particularly edifying. Considering.” She waved a hand at Frankie’s face. Frankie cocked her head to one side.
“Why, thank you so much! You know, I do believe the Scupperville orders might accidentally find their way to the bottom of the pile!”
The ladies beamed. Frankie placed volume two of Uncle Tom’s Cabin into her Fantastic Transparent Plasteek Clutch Purse and sealed it shut. That’s when an unearthly howl came from the direction of the river. The eeriness of it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
“Oh, dear!” cried Mrs. Mordred. “I do hope Joe Sawyer has not gotten his cravat caught in the lumber mill’s band saw again!”
I squirmed, wondering what part of Joe Sawyer’s body his cravat might be.
“Well, ladies,” said Frankie, “we will not take up any more of your time. We have miles to go before we sleep. You can expect your new purses to arrive from Paris sometime before Christmas. I will deliver them personally and you can pay upon receipt. It has been such a pleasure to have met you!”
Frankie gave meaningful glances to Tom and me, and we followed her out to the road.
“That was absolutely amazing,” I conceded. I was genuinely impressed. “You sold those women something anybody else would have thrown away as trash.”
“You’ll notice I didn’t take any money from them,” Frankie said primly, sticking the other volume of Cabin into the second of her two Ziploc bags and putting them both into her tiny backpack. They fit with very little room to spare. She took the trombone case from me, jammed it against my chest, and popped the lid. “That howl we heard was Mr. Ganto, signaling he’s back in range. I want to use the Shagbolt before he gets too close.”
“You don’t want Mr. Ganto arriving at the same time we do?” Tom guessed, echoing my own thought.
“No, I don’t,” admitted Frankie. “It would be better if he showed up a few minutes after we do. If we all arrive at the same time, the first thing he’ll do is take the Shagbolt away from us.”
“Because he’s under orders from your father,” I said.
She nodded and raised the trombone to her lips. “I want all of us thinking of that ghastly middle school of yours, about ten minutes after we parked the golf cart behind the Dumpsters. If we do this really well, we’ll wind up sitting in the cart. I’ll drop you two off at home, and then I’ll take the cart back to the carnival.”
“Wait!” said Tom, putting his hand up.
“What?”
“I don’t suppose you could leave me here?”
“Are you kidding?”
“I don’t mean forever,” Tom hastened to explain. “I just mean for a day or two, and then you could come back for me. I love this stuff—it’s what I really want to study—and I could use a break from Puma Ma. I’d like to look around some more.”
Tom ran away from home, on average, every two weeks. The first few times it happened, his mother had called the cops. As it got to be a regular thing, she grew less concerned. At first, he had hidden out at my house, but when that became the first place his mother would look, he found other places he could disappear to. His favorite was the back room of the Freedom Falls Historical Society, which had a window with a loose latch.
“No,” said Frankie. “I like history as much as anybody, but this particular time and place is way too dangerous for us. Besides, neither of you can imagine how leaving somebody behind could totally screw up the future. We’re all going back together!”
She gave the trombone’s slide a loosening wiggle. “Now, don’t distract me. The last thing I want to do is play that final note flat.” She grinned. “You’ll know I’ve messed up if we all get run over by a herd of buffalo!”
She put the mouthpiece to her lips and pumped out the first six of the seven notes she had taught us earlier, and I was pleased to find I remembered them perfectly. The seventh note was an F, and she played it clear and sharp.
For the second time in my life, I felt myself turn to dust in the wind. The individual grains of me blew away, spiraled through a tunnel, and put themselves back together in a brand-new place.
It was not the place we were trying to get to.