door into the gilt room, where the largest portrait—that of Lord Bell’s father, high above the floor—was hanging upside down. She continued to the library, where Nicholas stood amazed before a castle made of books. It was six feet tall with battlements and towers, a marvelous construction he had found moments ago, he claimed, after hearing Molly’s laugh and chasing her into the library.
“I saw her place the final book,” he said, pointing to a leather-bound copy of The Rise and Fall of the Lost Volcanic Islands. “I said I would report her and she answered…”
Nicholas hesitated, seemingly reluctant to repeat what Molly had said. Mrs. Wickware’s legs quivered when he paused. Her skin began to blotch and she was breathless, having walked much faster in the chase than she had realized.
“What did she say?” Mrs. Wickware asked.
“That I could tell the chicken-breasted harpy anything I liked.”
She struck him on the cheek, sudden as a reflex.
He accepted the blow and said, “I’ll take it down straightaway,” beginning at once to reshelve the books, and Mrs. Wickware could not decide whether it was Nicholas’s poise or Molly’s pandemonium that made her want to knock the castle over, or—if only it were possible—to climb inside, close her eyes, and hide behind its walls.
She pursued Molly throughout the house, encountering finger-pointing servants and flagrant mischief at every turn. She visited the stables outside, found the groom trying desperately to calm the frantic horses, and followed a trail of dirty footprints back inside the house. They led her through the kitchen, up the rear stairs, and straight to the third-floor hall, where Molly knelt—neither breathless nor disheveled, the bottoms of her shoes immaculate—on the very spot of the floor where Mrs. Wickware originally told her to remain.
* * *
“You actually saw her enter the library?” Mrs. Wickware asked Nicholas at dinner.
She had questioned—repeatedly—everyone who had witnessed any part of Molly’s escapade. How could anyone traverse the entire house, including the stables, and accomplish so many things in so little time unopposed and unassisted? It had taken two grown men with a ladder to reposition the inverted portrait in the gilt room, and Nicholas had spent hours returning the nearly five hundred books of Molly’s castle to the shelves. And yet the servants’ accounts harmonized down to the minute. Molly herself refused to speak a word in self-defense but rather smiled, seeming tickled by the story, until Mrs. Wickware locked her in a closet and stationed Jeremy at the door.
“It was just as I have told you,” Nicholas said, lowering his fork and speaking very slowly. “I followed the sound of her laugh and saw her place the final book. When I threatened to report her, she said—”
“Yes, I understand, but did you see her running in? Surely she had been working in the room for quite some time?”
“I had passed the library ten minutes earlier,” Nicholas said, “and nothing looked amiss.”
“But don’t you see that it’s impossible?” Mrs. Wickware cried.
Before attempting to explain the obvious again, she picked up the lavender teapot and poured herself a cup, hoping to soothe her throat after hours of fruitless questioning. A long fat leech issued from the spout and overflowed the cup with a quick, dramatic plop. Mrs. Wickware shrieked and swatted it away. The cup exploded on the floor, the pot was overturned, and somehow the leech remained upon the table. She leapt from her chair and backed away, tugging the bell rope so emphatically its tassel tore free in her hand.
Newton and Emmy promptly appeared, but they could hardly make sense of Mrs. Wickware’s incoherent fury. Once Nicholas explained the commotion, Newton collected the leech and swept the breakage from the floor. When Mrs. Wickware upbraided Emmy for delivering the pot, the kitchen maid grew incensed and said, with a fiery glow, that she had seen Miss Molly creeping round the pot and had chased her off, assuming at the time that she had come to steal the tea.
“She bedevils us!” Emmy said. “Always sneaking about, snatching food and sullying floors and interfering with our work! I am sorry, Mr. Nicholas, to speak against your sister, but I have never known a girl so bold in all my days!”
Nicholas bowed his head in woeful resignation.
“You can’t have seen her in the kitchen!” Mrs. Wickware said. “She is locked inside a closet and has been for many hours!”
“Then it must have been her ghost, beg pardon,” Emmy said, “or the girl’s spitting image, with the same