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Helena! Here’s the one you can choose, if you dare.”
    I stood there, between one future and another. The nieces edged up behind Aunt Fannie’s throne to glimpse the future I might choose.
    â€œOhhhh,” they moaned.
    Mona too. How provoking that Mona would gaze upon one of my futures before I myself. That moved me.
    I elbowed her aside and peered down over Aunt Fannie’s humped shoulder, into the depths of the marble.
    No. Surely not. Anything but—
    â€œThere it is.” Aunt Fannie tapped the crystal ball. “Plain as the nose on your face.”
    â€œI couldn’t,” I whispered. “We couldn’t. How could we?”
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    THE MARBLE WAS awash, and water is not a happy subject for us mice. Stormy gray seawater crashed in waves. The marble filled to overflowing. Great, surging mountains and valleys of wicked water. I felt wet through.

    A ship too big for the marble to contain.
    Cutting through the seething sea was the sharp prow of a ship. A great iron ship, trailing black smoke. A ship too big for the marble to contain, rising and falling in the restless water.
    My stomach rose and fell.
    â€œWell, there you have it.” Aunt Fannie thumped the dimming marble. Still, I caught sight of the light from row after row of portholes rippling yellow across black water before the marble went dark.
    It was the great ocean liner carrying the Upstairs Cranstons to London, England.
    â€œHow wide is that . . . water?”
    â€œIt is called the Atlantic Ocean,” Aunt Fannie intoned, “and it is just at three thousand miles across.”
    My sisters Vicky and Alice, and Mother too, had all been dragged to their dooms in a rain barrel not three feet across. Not three feet.
    My throat was bone dry. “Mice don’t cross—”
    â€œMice better,” Aunt Fannie answered.
    â€œBut how in heaven’s name?” I pled. “And how could I convince the others?”
    Aunt Fannie adjusted her shawl. “That brainless brother of yours will welcome any reason to miss these last weeks of mouse school. He’d sooner drown than finish the semester.”
    True.
    â€œAnd Louise would risk her silly neck to be wherever Camilla Cranston goes.”
    True, true. But Beatrice—
    â€œAnd that boy-crazy Beatrice has kept Gideon McSorley a secret. She dare not refuse to leave him, or she will be found out!”
    Aunt Fannie looked particularly proud of her reasoning.
    Oh, I thought.
    â€œThere is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep the family together,” I said in a voice gone weak as ... water. “Nothing. After all, I am Helena, the—”
    â€œThen you will have to go to great lengths.” Aunt Fannie fingered a final whisker. “Great lengths indeed. Across land and sea, water and the world!” She shook a fist at the heavens. “A world of steam and humans and long, long distance!”
    The nieces quaked and clung to one another. She waved the crystal ball away. “Sit down, Helena, to learn what you will need to know.”
    All the nieces flopped right down and arranged their tails. They were agog and waited wide-eared to hear. So did I, of course.
    But Aunt Fannie did a strange thing then. Mysterious. “Here is how you hold your family together,” she said. Then she put out both her old hands, stretched wide open.
    â€œThat’s how you hold on to family.” She thrust her wide-open hands right at me. Right in my face.
    But what could that mean? What in the world?

CHAPTER SIX
    A World of Steam and Humans
    W E SAILED AWAY to London, England, Louise and Beatrice, Lamont and I. We began our journey by steamer trunk—that biggest trunk that had stood open for days in Camilla’s bedroom, filling up with her new finery. It had drawers inside.
    We packed a morsel of food, for we little knew where our next meal was coming from. But we took not a stitch of clothes, as we had no luggage. Mice don’t.