Secrets at Sea Read Online Free Page B

their wrists. Tape measures around their necks, and a welcome new supply of thimbles. Then here came the tailors for Mr. Cranston’s frock coat and morning coat and striped trousers and silk nightshirts with his initials sewed on. All these things he didn’t know he needed.
    Louise and Beatrice and I were up half the night every night, bringing down snippets of satin and serge that had fallen from the dressmakers’ scissors. And ribbon ends. And any spool of thread, rolled under their worktables. And all the pins and needles worked into the carpet. Because you never know what you’ll need. We think ahead, we mice.
    Through the kitchen wall Mrs. Flint and her daughters moaned over all these extra mouths to feed. The tailors ate like horses. Mrs. Flint banged pans until you couldn’t hear yourself think. But she made apple fritters for all, and we were up the other half of the night, bringing back all the peelings we could carry. We mice have a great use for apple peelings. They keep the curl in your tail.
    Time was running out, Louise reported. The steamer trunks were crammed full. The luggage tags tied on. She’d come back with the news from Camilla’s room, very droopy, tracking in cobwebs. Then she’d fling herself into her matchbox. She was very down in the mouth at the thought of losing Camilla to London, England.
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    AND SO I set forth on a visit to Aunt Fannie Fenimore. Into a cloth bag I could carry around my neck I folded my best outfit. And I stuck in a morsel of apple fritter wrapped in waxed paper. Aunt Fannie is very greedy. Don’t go empty-handed to her.
    For good measure, I brought her a scrap of watered taffeta from off the floor under a dressmaker. One of Aunt Fannie’s nieces could make it up into a skirt and cape for her.
    Because a visit to Aunt Fannie was always educational, I wanted to take Beatrice. But she’d made herself scarce that afternoon. And Louise was Upstairs, collecting ribbons and rumors. Lamont was at school. We hoped.
    So I set off all on my lonesome, across the croquet lawn. The Upstairs Cranstons don’t play. And no young man calling on Olive ever stayed long enough to finish a game. But it is important to have a croquet lawn. With one eye on the sky, I rested under a croquet hoop to catch my breath and rest my bulging bag.
    The lawns were full of mice, coming and going. For every one of us you see, there are a thousand more. Ten thousand. But I had no time for idle chitchat. At least I didn’t have to cross the busy road. Mice like us live in the big houses between the river and the road. And the Fenimores were the next house over, a hedge away.
    Under their porch, I stepped into a new skirt, summery with sprigs. There was lace at my throat fixed with a glass bead. I looked nice.
    The Fenimore humans were away. I crept down the silent house, inside the walls to Aunt Fannie’s, dragging the sack along the narrow trail. It was well-trod. Mice come from all over to seek Aunt Fannie’s advice. When I came to her door, one of her nieces—Mona—was barring it.
    All mice of Aunt Fannie’s years have nieces, and she used hers to fetch and carry for her.
    Mona looked me up and down and saw my finery was new. She twitched. “Oh, it’s you, Helena. I don’t know if she—”
    â€œWho is it?” Aunt Fannie cried out from the depths of her gloomy room.
    â€œIt’s only Helena Cranston from across the hedge,” Mona cried back. Aunt Fannie says she’s deaf, though she hears everything.
    â€œI’ve been expecting her,” she bellowed.
    She expects a lot. And she always claims she knows when you’re coming. She claims she knows everything.
    Mona led me forth into the dreary, hollowed-out chamber, into Aunt Fannie’s presence. Her throne was an old cast-off powder puff. She sat on it, draped in shawls, though it was hot as August in here. You never saw an older mouse. She’d