Vespers Rising (The 39 Clues #11)(15)

MADELEINE CAHILL 1526

Peter Lerangis


As the last student fell unconscious to his desk, Madeleine Babbitt thought about lies.

She’d lived inside them all her life. Lies and secrets. Now she could shout out the truth, and no one would hear it. She smiled as she pulled a pencil from under the face of a slumped-over Flynn O’Halloran. His head thumped, echoing through the Xenophilus Institute of Alchemy, a grand name for a one-room schoolhouse made of clay and dried peat.

Maddy Babbitt, scared as a rabbit, they called her. She had acted the part almost all of her nineteen years. To keep attention away. To keep from being noticed. She almost believed she was that person. The stammer and the apologies had become part of her until her bolder side nearly faded away. Today, when Flynn had swiped her project notes and read them aloud, she had shrunk away. A sleeping potion — aren’t you boring enough? he’d taunted. Everyone had dared her to demonstrate. So she had.

And it felt wonderful.

“Sleep well, my friends,” she said, capping a vial of amber liquid. She glanced outside, looking for Professor Xenophilus, who had missed class today. A pity. He was probably lost in his own laboratory work, concocting medicines and marvelous inventions.

“As you only sniffed the potion on a handkerchief,” she continued to the silent class, “you will waken in five minutes, fizzy and refreshed. Had it entered your bloodstream directly, it would take an hour.”

Her stammer was gone. How liberating to speak to a stupefied audience! As she placed the vial into a pouch that hung around her neck, she felt fit to burst. Two decades of pent-up secrets bounced around inside her like unruly puppies before an opening door. “And also,” she blurted out, “my name is not Maddy Babbitt! It’s Madeleine …”

Say it! Go ahead.

But try as she might, the name Cahill stuck in her throat. Her training was bone deep.

As sunlight poked through the clouds and into the room, a tiny windmill of black-and-white sails began to turn on a table. These knocked a pebble down a chute, striking a hook that released a weighted pulley, which in turn raised a small spring-loaded hammer. The hammer then struck a brass gong, signifying the end of alchemy class.

Soon the distant tune would sound — Mother summoning her, expecting help in the apothecary. Leaving behind the sleepers, Madeleine raced outside. She sped down a sloping path through heather and scrub. A low bank of clouds swept over the moor, casting the village of Scáth below in gray-green mist.

Madeleine looked up to the soft-ceilinged sky as she ran. She thought of her father, a man she’d never met. Mother claimed he had been the greatest alchemist and an even better father. She hoped that wherever he was, he was looking down and seeing the results of her alchemy training. Even more, she hoped he was proud.

In a moment, her shoes hit the cobblestones of town. She wove through winding alleys that echoed with the distant sound of a tin flute, piercing and sweet. This was Mother playing a tune called “Bhaile Anois,” which meant home now. It was composed by Father and had become the traditional Cahill family song of summoning. As she ran, Madeleine waved to the pink-faced baker and soot-blackened chimney sweep, the burly butcher and weary lamplighter.

She dashed around the corner of Front Street. Carriages groaned up the hill, passing an old beggar woman who slept in the shadow of an abandoned stable. Ahead, the street descended toward the lake, where it flattened and followed the gentle curve of the bank. At the bottom of the hill stood O. Babbitt & Daughter Apothecary.

Madeleine slowed. Before the shop, a crowd of people had gathered in the street. A group of men was pounding on the front door. They were dressed in hooded capes of purple and black. Behind them stood a massive wooden dray cart tethered to pack horses. On the cart, three men lay moaning and half dead. Shackled to the cart’s frame, his clothes ripped and face covered in blood, was Professor Xenophilus.

Madeleine stopped.

The old man slowly turned his gaze up the hill. His deadened eyes settled on her. He gestured feebly with an arm that hung at an odd, unnatural angle. Run away, his body language was saying.

One of the caped men spun toward Xenophilus, smacking his head with an open fist. The teacher’s knees crumpled and he fell to the cobblestones. “Old fool,” the man bellowed, “are ye sure there be Cahills here?”

Madeleine stumbled backward at the sound of the name she’d only ever heard uttered by her mother.

How did they know? How could Xenophilus —?

Last week. Under her teacher’s observation she’d sampled an earlier version of the formula. Just a bit. Upon awakening, he’d scolded her about proper dosage. Too strong, and the potion induced coma! Ah, but too weak, and the recipient was half awake, unable to stop from saying his or her innermost thoughts!

The look on his face had startled Madeleine. His usual jovial, patient expression had changed. He seemed confused, as if seeing her for the first time.

I must have told him that day, she thought. Under the earlier, weaker formula, I must have revealed my name. It made sense — her father was so often on her mind. Surely Xenophilus would have recognized the name of such a famous alchemist.

And now the secret had been beaten out of him — because of me, she thought. But by whom? Who were these people?

A loud crack rang out. The men were using a wooden ram now, and the apothecary door was about to give.

“We know you’re in there, woman!” a voice shouted.