Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy Read online

  Everything was meant to be simple. Mr. Whittard was to work, and Alice and Ophelia were to ice-skate. They’d go to the rink in the city square beneath the giant Christmas tree. A foreign city was meant to take their minds off terrible things. Ice-skating would help them forget some of their sadness. Now here was a boy asking her to do impossible things. He was making everything unsimple.

  “After you have been to the Wintertide Clock, you must find the elevator in the dinosaur hall,” said the boy. “That will take you to the seventh floor. You will need to take the left corridor. The right corridor leads to the Queen’s chamber. The left corridor is where the misery birds are kept—you must be careful not to wake them. At the very end of the corridor, there will be a small white cupboard with a small white drawer. You must bring the key that is in that drawer to me.”

  He’s full of orders, thought Ophelia. Check the clock, take this elevator here, get that key there.

  “Why were you chosen by a protectorate of wizards?” she asked. The best way to get to the bottom of things was with questions. “And how can someone take your name from you? I don’t think that’s really possible.”

  The boy sighed. The sigh of someone who is in a hurry but who knows he has to stop and go back to the very beginning to get anywhere.

  “Sit closer,” he said. “And I’ll tell you.” Through the keyhole, the boy said:

  You might think things fade with time. Memories, I mean. But they don’t. They grow stronger. I can still see the river beside the city, where I played with Julius and Rohan and Fred. We skipped stones there and built rafts and sailed all the way to the weir.

  When I was chosen, people didn’t understand. They said, “Why, him—he’s nothing but an ordinary boy.” But the wizards, they were never ones to listen to such talk. They always know exactly what they are doing because they learn it from standing very still and thinking for hours.

  The wizards had asked for every boy child, aged twelve, to be brought to the town square.

  “There is a boy child who shall undertake a treacherous journey to deliver a magical sword to the One Other so that the Snow Queen may be defeated,” the Great Wizard said in his calm, low voice.

  “We have dreamt him,” the wizards said together. “We have seen him in our visions.”

  My mother, on hearing this, was not impressed at all. “I think we’ll go fishing instead,” she said.

  All day we went about the forest and caught spangled trout, a whole bucketful, and even when I was tired, she wouldn’t go home. Of course, I know now it was because she sensed the boy to be chosen was me.

  While we were gone, the boys lined up in the square. There were some girls too, dressed as boys, because some mothers desire their children to do great things and thought there might be some benefits that came with the role. When my mother and I came home, it was well after dark and she thought we were safe. But there was the Great Wizard sitting at our small kitchen table, waiting.

  “He is the one,” he said.

  “How do you know?” said my mother, who wasn’t shy of a fight.

  You might think wizards are always casting spells and stirring cauldrons and changing tin into gold, and it’s true that sometimes they do, but mostly they are known for their trances and their thinking and their staring ahead until the future comes swimming into view. They can see the future in puddles and in dewdrops and sometimes even in shiny spoons.

  “Because it has been seen,” sighed the wizard. “And because he is so good. The Snow Queen will desire him, and he will lead her away from here to the other realm. And once there he will destroy her.”

  Good.

  Not brave or strong or super.

  These were the traits the town folk thought the decision should have been based upon. But it was because I was good. Well, they didn’t like that. And no amount of explaining settled them down for some time.

  “The Snow Queen likes more than anything else to destroy good things,” the wizards explained. “She likes good things to become bad things, bad things to become sad things, sad things to become eternally frozen things.”

  But the town folk soon forgot. It was still summer, you see, and the threat of an invasion from the north seemed impossible. The wheat was waving golden in the fields and the roses were as big as dinner plates.

  “You’re just an ordinary boy,” my mother muttered as she got me ready for my first day of education in the wizard house. “You don’t know the first thing about swords and journeys. And you’re bone lazy and always forgetting things.”

  Yet she deposited me at the door of the wizard house and tried not to cry. She brushed down my hair with her hands, and told me to be good and listen to what was being taught.

  They took my name. That was the first thing they did. They took it from me with a spell, and one of the young wizard apprentices grabbed it and placed it in a scruffy velvet box.

  Now, you might say this is impossible, but only because you have never had your name taken. The King himself could not believe it when I arrived here. He told me many times that all I had to do was sit down in a quiet place and think hard about it. But no amount of thinking could get my name back. In my mind there was nothing but a clean space, like a freshly painted wall. And it was the same for everyone else who knew me—my mother, for instance, when she came to collect me in the afternoon. She went to say my name and stopped, and tears filled up her eyes.

  And you might think a name is just a name, nothing but a word, but that is not the case. Your name is tacked to you. Where it has joined you, it has seeped into your skin and into your essence and into your soul. So when they plucked my name from me with their spell, it was as heavy as a rock in their hands but as invisible as the wind, and it wasn’t just the memory of my name, but me myself. A tiny part of me that they took and stored away.

  It was hoped that if they kept that part of me when I crossed to the other world, then they would be able to help me back again. But they weren’t very sure. No one had been that way for a long time.

  When I realized my name was gone, I was angry as a wild boar. I stamped around in the upstairs school, which was just a bare room with a wooden floor and no seat and no table. I was made to stand there for hours and hours. I was made to listen to their lessons, which were all about being polite and standing still and listening to trees and about nothing magical at all. That first day I banged on the walls. I shouted, “Give me my name back!”

  The Great Wizard himself came and told me to stop making a racket. Wizards don’t much like noise, you see. Regarding the name, the Great Wizard said in his slow, calm voice, “Well, you’ll get used to it in time, and it is only for your own good. If the protectorate keeps your name, it will allow you to return one day through the meridian, which is the point of no return between that world and this. Or at least that is what we hope.”

  Which didn’t make me feel very confident.

  All that summer I had to go to them each day, and they taught me what they could. They taught me how I must always tell the truth and always stop to help those who needed help, and something about magical owls, but I missed that part because I wasn’t listening. I had to repeat again and again, “I am a boy chosen by a protectorate of wizards from the east, west, and middle to deliver this sword so that the Snow Queen may be defeated.” My voice grew hoarse from saying that. And they taught me that, in the other world, I would find a kind and just ruler.

  And I asked them, “Well, do you know his or her name?” and they just stared at me patiently.

  But I got used to those wizards, who really are very kind. If you have heard it said that wizards eat nothing but biscuits, then you have heard the truth. The biscuits at the wizard house were made by Petal, who was not tall and thin like the others, but short and round. And also she was a woman and also seemingly a wizard, which made even less sense to me.

  On that first day they let me down from the schoolroom and deposited me in the kitchen, where Petal was kneading dough. She w
as sitting in a slant of sunlight from the large kitchen windows, her red hair aflame, her large arms working the dough. She banged the dough with her fist and picked it up and slammed it on the table so that clouds of flour rose and settled in showers over her. She smiled at me.

  “I’m going to make biscuits,” she said.

  I didn’t answer, but scowled.

  Petal had a broad, calm face browned by the sun and very large, pleasantly freckled hands. “Are you terribly sad about your name?” she asked.

  “Well, wouldn’t you be?” I replied.

  “I would. It’s true. I would. But one day it will be yours again.”

  “But I want it back now. It was mine, and stealing is wrong.”

  “Indeed,” said Petal. “Indeed.” She took a small piece of dough and roughly made it into the shape of a little man. “Here, watch this.” She took the little man and cupped him near her mouth and breathed a tiny soul into him. She put him on the table, and he stood up and danced its length, spinning and turning and doing cartwheels.

  It was the first piece of magic that I had seen in the house, and it made me laugh.

  “Can you do it again?” I asked.

  “I could,” she said. “But then I would have to lie down for the rest of the day, and there is work to be done.”

  The wizards smell like the earth and mushrooms. The smell of them stays in the room for hours after they’ve gone. Yes, I got used to those wizards in a way.

  All the while that summer, everyone was waiting for her. The Snow Queen, I mean. At first it seemed too difficult to believe in such a thing. Then the first of the refugees appeared from the north, skinny and starving, children, mainly, who had managed to escape her. They said she had teeth like razors and hair like a blizzard and she carried a sword called the Great Sorrow.

  When the wizards heard that, they said, “It is as we have seen.”

  Which didn’t make the town folk feel confident at all. The forges worked day and night, making weapons. Everyone looked to the horizon. People were spooked by certain clouds coming over the grasslands and swamps. They packed up their belongings, ready to take flight, then unpacked them again when they realized they were nothing but ordinary clouds on ordinary days.

  They complained to the wizards. Why would they spend such time bothering with a boy? Why could they not fight the Snow Queen with their magic? The wizards didn’t say much to that. They took me into the forest. They taught me which plants to eat and which not to. They taught me how to shoot with a bow and arrow. I quite enjoyed that until I had to kill a rabbit, which was horrible. They showed me how to lay my hands on the Herald Tree, which was a very strange education.

  “You keep talking about a sword, yet I haven’t seen one,” I said in the wizard house. “Is it all make-believe?”

  They smiled serenely at that.

  “I mean, none of it makes sense,” I said. “This One Other, for instance, who is that? Shouldn’t you give me some details? Like what he looks like?”

  They smiled even more serenely, and it was a good thing they hadn’t given me the sword yet.

  Each night I went home, and my mother met me at the door and examined me to see if I’d changed at all. She had been very annoyed about my name in the beginning but had gotten used to it. My boy was what she had taken to calling me, and it was quite comforting.

  “What did you learn, then?” she asked me each day.

  All I could do was shrug.

  The morning I left the kingdom, I woke with the wizards standing above me, in our very own little house, without even having knocked. For three days the air had cooled, though it was still summer. The fruit had browned and fallen from the trees. Everywhere people were bundling their daughters onto horses and their grandmothers into wagons, and whole processions of people were leaving the city. The river was covered in a lacework of ice.

  That morning my mother didn’t say much but held my face between her hands.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said.

  “Hush now. It’s you that’s been chosen and there’s nothing we can do about it,” she said.

  “Will I see you again?”

  How she cried at that.

  “Please,” I said. “Tell me I’ll see you again.”

  And she said, “Yes, yes, yes, my boy, of course you will.”

  Petal had made me some biscuit men, and my mother placed some bread and cheese inside my satchel. The wizards gave me the compass, which they told me must always point south.

  “But I don’t know what to do,” I said. “You haven’t taught me properly.”

  It was true—all their months of teaching me and I still couldn’t make sense of it.

  For instance, how was I meant to know who this One Other was? Couldn’t they give me some sort of clue? But I dared not ask that again.

  “Can’t you write it down for me?” I said. “I mean, everything I’m meant to do, just in case I forget?”

  So the Great Wizard wrote on a piece of paper very patiently, folded it three times, and placed it in with the biscuits. There were a bow and a quiver with just one arrow.

  I said, “Is that enough?”

  And they said, “It is all you will need.”

  Then they brought the sword, which I hadn’t seen before and which was very heavy and very plain and not at all magical-looking. They tied it to my waist.

  “We, the protectorate of wizards from the east, west, and middle, have made this sword so that the Snow Queen may be defeated,” they said.

  They put a spell on me. They lay their hands on me, all five of them. You see, they coated me in it, this spell. It was a dripping ointment–smelling one, and they said I should not get wet or the whole lot would come off.

  “It will cover your scent, which the Queen will know,” they said, “and hide you from her wolves and her owls.”

  After that I wasn’t sure what I should do.

  “Now, my boy,” said the Great Wizard, “you should begin to run.”

  “I see,” said Ophelia. It was all she could think to say. She thought she’d been very patient listening.

  “You do?” said the boy behind the door.

  “I really have to get back to my sister. We might go ice-skating, you see. I’ll try and come back later,” she said.

  “Thank you, Ophelia,” he said, although she could hear the disappointment in his voice.

  She had the words I’m sorry on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t say them. She stood up, chewing her fingernail, walked across the checkerboard floor, and tried not to think of the blue-green eyes watching her. She tried not to think about how the boy knew her name. He’d said it twice, and she hadn’t told him it. Not once. She tried not to think of anything. She could not help the boy because she didn’t believe in him.

  There, she’d thought it.

  She didn’t believe in wizards or boys with no names. These things could not be classified. These things could not be pigeonholed. These things made her feel terrible. She plunged her hands into her coat pockets to keep them warm. She walked through the gallery of broken stone angels, across the celebrated sea monster mosaic, upstairs and downstairs.

  In her left pocket there was a map of the museum, and in her right pocket there was her puffer. There was also a small hole. She stuck her finger through the hole because for some reason, lately, that made her feel a little calmer.

  If her mother had been alive, Ophelia would have told her about the hole. But she was not. Ophelia looked at her watch. Her mother had been gone exactly three months, seven days, and fourteen hours.

  If Ophelia had shown her pocket to her mother, who was not practical at all, she would have sighed.

  “Surely we have a needle and thread somewhere here,” her mother would have said, and taken Ophelia from room to room in their house, looking in drawers and boxes. She might have found some twine or even some glue. She might have used her stapler; she’d done that once with the hem of Ophelia’s school uniform. The stapler li
ved on her writing desk, right beside the vampire-teeth paperweight.

  Ophelia stuck her finger through the hole. She felt it tear a little more. She was nothing like her mother, she thought. Her mother had believed in almost everything. Her mother had believed in vampires with satin cloaks and shape-shifters that slid through keyholes. She believed in the ghosts of children who terrorized schools and strange creatures who sucked the thoughts from their victims’ brains. She loved crumbling castles and dark towers and secret doors.

  Her mother wrote about these things. She wrote about these things all morning in her study. Her stories were sent away in bundles of paper tied up with string and returned as the books that lined the sitting room. Dark books. Thick books. Books with her name, Susan Worthington, emblazoned on the front in blood-red letters that glimmered in the dark.

  Ophelia walked down the long gallery that contained the paintings of bored-looking girls in party dresses. She squeezed through the crowd in the Gallery of Time. She didn’t bother at all to look for the little window in the clock that the boy had asked after.

  She went through the pavilion of wolves and the exhibition of elephants. She stamped through the arcade of mirrors, the room filled with telephones, the gallery of teaspoons.

  No, she was nothing at all like her mother. She didn’t believe in boys who came from elsewhere. She simply refused.

  2

  In which Ophelia, while refusing to save the world, does something very brave indeed

  Miss Kaminski was tall and elegant in a crisp white pant-suit. She stood in the doorway to the sword workroom and smiled a dazzling smile. Mr. Whittard, looking up from his station, magnifying glass and lamp in his white-gloved hands, turned red at the sight of her.

  “I have been thinking,” said Miss Kaminski. “Perhaps Miss Alice and Miss Cordelia would like a special tour of the museum.”