Home Sweet Rome Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Marissa Moss

  Cover and internal design © 2013 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover Design by Brittany Vibbert/Sourcebooks

  Cover image © myVector/ Shutterstock, Maugli/ Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  July 5

  July 6

  Winter?

  March 26, 1595

  March 29, 1596

  July 6

  February 8, 1600

  February 8, 1600

  February 11, 1600

  July 7

  February 17, 1600

  March 7, 1616

  July 7

  Author’s Note

  Map of Rome

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Warren, with thanks for the map of seventeenth-century Rome.

  Even with all the high-tech ways of communicating, nothing compares to actual physical mail delivered the old-fashioned way by a real person. Getting a letter was always special, but even better was getting one at a hotel. Better still, at a hotel in Paris. That made the postcard even more romantic and exotic. But what made it the most mysterious was that it was from Mom.

  She’d vanished more than six months ago, and for most of that time we hadn’t heard a word from her. At first, my older brother, Malcolm, was sure she’d run off with some guy. Dad insisted she was on some super-important business trip. I didn’t know what to think. But after weeks of being scared she’d been murdered, then furious that she’d simply left, now we knew the truth.

  Mom was a time traveler. She was stuck somewhere in the past trying to change some event so that something terrible wouldn’t happen to us in the future.

  That was unbelievable fact number one. Except that Dad knew all about her time traveling. He simply hadn’t brought it up because he thought Mom’s time-traveling days were long over. So when she disappeared, he didn’t immediately think, “Oh, she’s in the past somewhere. She’ll be home for dinner before you know it.” But after a while, he began to suspect some weird time-travel stuff was happening.

  It would have been nice if he’d said something to us then instead of letting us find out the hard way that Mom could time-travel. Seems like something you should share with your kids, like an earlier marriage or a half sibling, not something to be kept secret.

  Unbelievable fact number two was that I could time-travel, too, which was how I bumped into Mom in nineteenth-century Paris and discovered the truth. If I touched the right thing (Mom called them touchstones), I’d be whirled into the past. The first time it happened was at the top of Notre Dame cathedral, and believe me, I wasn’t trying to go anywhere. I touched one of the gargoyles perched on the edge of the railing, and before I knew it, the city below me had changed completely. No more cars or buses, no more satellite dishes, just horses and buggies like in a movie about the 1800s.

  So even though we’d been in Paris for almost a week, I’d spent most of that time not really here but in the past, trying to follow Mom’s directions so we could go back to being a normal family. Dad and Malcolm couldn’t time-travel (at least not as far as we knew), but they helped me by doing research and figuring out what I should be changing and how. We actually made a pretty good team.

  For all my time (yes, pun intended) with famous artists and writers like Degas and Zola, I had only halfway changed anything in the past. I wasn’t a total failure, but I wasn’t a huge success, either. Mom had left me cryptic notes in the nineteenth century that hinted I would have more to do. The postcard here and now probably had some kind of instructions.

  Since we’d been busy most of the week in Paris trying to right a horrible wrong in history, we’d had only a few hours to play tourist. Last night, Dad, Malcolm, and I ate dinner outside at a cute little brasserie and walked back to our hotel in the warm summer night, just like your average American sightseers.

  “I love this!” Malcolm had said, flinging his arms wide as we strolled down the narrow streets of the Marais. “We should be homeschooled for all of high school, just traveling from one amazing city to another!”

  “At least for this year,” Dad agreed. “While I have this grant. And until we get Mom back where she belongs.”

  I guess I should mention that Dad is a photographer. And that grant was the excuse he had needed to take us all over the place while he took pictures of the Wonders of the World. Not the original seven wonders, but ones the ancient Greeks didn’t know about, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower. Really he was trying to track down Mom. We all were.

  So when the postcard was delivered to our breakfast table along with the basket of croissants this morning, Dad almost jumped out of his chair.

  “It’s from Mom! She’s telling us where we need to go next.”

  One side showed the Colosseum in Rome. On the other side was a message.

  Dear David, Malcolm, and Mira,

  I wish I could write more, but I don’t have much time. (The one thing you’d think I’d have plenty of!) All I can say is that Mira’s next time travel will be trickier because she’ll need to disguise herself as a boy. And before she finds a touchstone, she needs to eat some ragwort. This is essential—you must not forget the ragwort. But not too much since it can be poisonous.

  Please hurry! I miss you all terribly!

  Love,

  Mom

  Mom sounded scared. Her handwriting looked rushed and panicked. Which, of course, made me scared. And she acted like I could pick how and when I time-traveled. So far it seemed like a complete accident. I stumbled onto touchstones or I didn’t. I couldn’t plan anything.

  “Sounds like she’s in some kind of trouble.” Dad flipped the postcard over, staring at the picture side. “In Rome.”

  “But what am I supposed to do there?”

  “You’ll figure it out once you get there. Maybe you’ll get to see her!”

  Dad knew that wasn’t likely. There were rules to time-traveling. We weren’t supposed to change anything, just observe—though Mom was breaking that rule. Despite flouting the absolutely most important of all the restrictions, she seemed determined to follow the other less-important rules, like not taking anything from the past back with us. And families shouldn’t time-travel together as that increased the risk that something bad would happen to change their future. As opposed to the good thing Mom wanted to happen to alter our future.

  “At least Mom’s telling you how to prepare this time,” Malcolm said. “You can borrow my clothes and we’ll figure out the ragwort thing.”

  “I don’t understand why she’s telling me how to dress. Last time my c
lothes changed all by themselves without me doing anything. I thought that was just part of time travel.” I ran my fingers through my curly hair, which just brushed the tops of my shoulders. Should I cut it to look like a boy? Would a baggy shirt be enough to disguise any evidence of being a girl? “And what kind of mother tells her kid to eat poison?” I threw down the rest of my croissant. Suddenly it tasted like cardboard. Mom had to be really terrified to tell me to do that.

  “So, we’re going to Rome?” Malcolm did one of his little happy dances, jiggling in his chair. They were cute in our home movies when he was six or seven. Now that he’s sixteen, they’re just plain dorky. But if he wasn’t worried, then maybe things weren’t that bad. Maybe I was imagining that Mom was scared because I was.

  “You’re not worried about Mom?” I asked, hoping he would reassure me.

  “Of course I am!” Malcolm said. “But I’m still glad we’re going to Rome! I’ll get to see the things I’ve read about in Pliny, Suetonius, and Livy, all that juicy ancient history.” My brother was a big history buff, and I bet he knew more about that kind of stuff than his teachers did. I had to admit I was eager to see Rome, too. Roman Holiday was one of my favorite movies. And I was a big fan of pizza and pasta. Maybe this would be fun, not scary.

  “Let’s look into this ragwort thing,” Dad said. He didn’t seem worried or excited. Just practical. “If we can figure out why Mom told you to eat it, maybe we’ll know what you’re supposed to do once you go back in time.”

  So before we got on the overnight train for Rome, we looked up ragwort on the Internet. It didn’t have any magical powers. In fact, it was very common—a weed you could find everywhere, kind of like dandelions. It even grew in a park next to the Paris train station. Suspiciously convenient. For a minute, I wondered if Mom had time-traveled to plant it just for me.

  The signs said not to walk on the grass.

  “Let me pick it!” Malcolm begged, not because he was eager to harvest ragwort, but because he loved the idea of ignoring the officious French warnings.

  Dad scanned quickly for any police and nodded. “Hurry up!”

  Malcolm stepped across the lawn in an exaggerated tiptoe, like a rubber-legged cartoon character. He picked the plant in slow motion, then pirouetted his way back to the safety of the sidewalk. Which shows how law-abiding my brother is, since this seemed like the height of bad behavior to him and he was smugly pleased with how reckless he’d been.

  “Hand over the ragwort,” I demanded. “And stop grinning. You act like you robbed a bank or something.”

  “Go ahead and eat some,” Dad said. “And keep the rest in your pocket. So if you need more, you’ll have it.”

  How would I know I needed more when I didn’t even know what it was supposed to do? I nibbled on a leaf, chewed on a petal. Ick! Maybe mixed in a salad or on a sandwich, the flower would taste better. I felt like a cow grazing.

  “Moo!” I joked lamely, forcing down the ragwort and waiting to feel if anything was different. “Nothing.” I shrugged. “Still the same old me.”

  “Maybe you’ll be different once we’re in Rome,” Malcolm offered, still proud of his great ragwort achievement.

  “Maybe I’ll be the same, but with a stomachache.”

  We boarded the train, stowed our bags, and stretched out on the hard berths. When Dad said he’d booked a sleeping car, I’d imagined something like the Orient Express in the Agatha Christie movie, an elegant train car with beds, washbasins, and closets. What we got was a cramped compartment with four bunks in it. We took up three and a gangly Swedish girl, a college student traveling during the summer break, had the fourth bed. Her English was pretty good but her strongest language was snoring. She was so loud that her nasal whistles and rumbles almost cloaked the rhythm of the wheels clacking on the tracks.

  I thought I hadn’t slept at all, but I must have since I woke up in the pale, thin light of dawn as the train chuffed into Termini, the main train station in Rome. Dad and Malcolm were already awake—or maybe they’d never slept. We all looked groggy and pouch-eyed. The Swedish student was still snoring, looking blissfully innocent while sounding like a tormenting demon. Even the noise we made gathering our stuff and stomping out of the compartment didn’t wake her.

  We stepped out into a big building full of shops, restaurants, and streams of people towing luggage. The babble of Italian, French, German, English, Russian, and other languages I didn’t recognize rose over our heads. I could almost see the words floating to the ceiling like so many balloons. At the end of the train tracks, enormous boards showed all the places where passengers could be going—Paris, Geneva, Milan, Venice, Berlin, Madrid. Just reading the names, I imagined how easy it would be to get on any of those trains and find myself whisked away to someplace new and exciting.

  Except we were in Rome, which was new and exciting in itself. Ever since I could hold a crayon, I’ve wanted to be an artist like my grandfather, and for centuries, Rome was the city where painters went to train their eye and their hand. I was here to help Mom, but I hoped I could improve my drawing while I was at it.

  As soon as we walked out of the station, past the small cars and flocks of motorcycles, we saw our first ancient ruins. An enormous stone building with broad buttresses and high windows loomed across the street. It was a strange mix of styles. Later I realized they were layers, really—ancient Roman with Renaissance doorways and modern additions. Centuries folded into one structure. Most of the building was now a museum of ancient art. Somehow the sight of that woke us all up, especially Malcolm, who launched into his history teacher mode.

  “This was originally the baths of Emperor Diocletian,” Malcolm explained. “Ancient Roman baths weren’t just bathtubs. They were enormous spa complexes with gyms, warm pools, cold pools, hot pools, dressing rooms, toilets. It’s so cool!” He was ready to go straight into the museum, to start exploring, but I dug in my heels.

  “I’m not awake yet! I need to shower and brush my teeth.” Actually, I was itching to sketch, but I felt embarrassed by my lank, unwashed hair and my sour breath. If I was a real artist, I wouldn’t care. I’d just draw.

  “Let’s at least get a cup of coffee,” Dad suggested. “Some breakfast will perk us up.”

  “Okay,” Malcolm agreed reluctantly, even though I knew how much he depended on coffee, almost as much as Dad did, which was a lot. If my brother was an artist, he’d already be whipping out his sketchbook, caffeinated or not. Why couldn’t I be more like him?

  But before we came to a café, we passed a set of Renaissance doors carved out of a wall of Roman rubble, also part of the ancient baths. The plain cross nailed high above the arched entrances and the words S. MARIA DEGLI ANGELI spelled out in black tiles on a severe white band were the only signs it was a church. Malcolm stopped at the central door, pleading with his big, brown puppy eyes.

  I had to smile. Only my brother would think a Roman ruin converted into a church was a special treat worth begging for.

  “Just a quick look, all right?” Dad said. “We’ll have plenty of chances to see things later.”

  “Promise—just in and out!” Malcolm pushed open the door, and the early morning sunshine disappeared into a vast, hushed space. For a church, it still felt classically ancient with colored marble panels, tall columns, and wide arches marking out the space in spare geometric symmetry. There were altarpieces and crosses in the chapels, but the big barrel vaults and the red, pink, and toffee-colored marble gave an impression of imperial grandeur, a seriousness of Roman law and order. The churchy bits seemed added on, not part of the building’s heart and soul, but scraps of decoration that could easily be removed.

  In such an architectural marvel, Dad couldn’t help himself. Even without coffee to jump-start his brain, he pulled out his guidebook and explained that we were standing in what was once part of the baths of Emperor Diocletian and later turned into a church by M
ichelangelo—yes, that Michelangelo, the one who painted the Sistine Chapel. We’d been in Rome for maybe five minutes, and we were already seeing ancient and Renaissance Rome in the same building! That seemed like some amazing time travel right there.

  We’re in Rome! I thought, shivering with excitement. Somehow now it seemed real. The Sistine Chapel is here! Plus pizza and pasta and gelato. I wanted to go everywhere, eat everything at once. Suddenly I was starving, but something in the church kept me there. A deep crack split across the floor. As I came closer I saw it was a groove etched into the marble, zodiac symbols ranged on both sides of it.

  It was some kind of calendar, and anything that measured time was magnetic for me now. I wondered if it could it be a touchstone. Could I have found one already, ready to hurl me back into time so soon? I could feel it pulsating with power, throbbing like a vein in the skin of the church. I hoped it was just the ragwort making me dizzy, or the lack of sleep, but just in case I stepped away from the bronze line.

  “It’s a sundial and a meridian all at once,” I said, reading the explanation on the wall of the church while keeping a safe distance from the marker.

  “How do you know that?” Malcolm was suspicious.

  “Don’t act so shocked. Maybe I don’t know about science-y stuff, but I can read a label.” I can feel the time locked inside of it, I almost shouted, but I didn’t because that would make me sound as crazy as I felt.

  “That label, there?” Malcolm pointed.

  “Yeah?” I raised an eyebrow. Did he think I’d forgotten how to read now? Or could he somehow see the way the meridian was tugging at me, drawing me to it the way a river current carries along a leaf?

  “Since when do you know Italian?” he asked.

  “Since never. I don’t.” So he couldn’t feel the meridian’s pull. He just thought I was showing off.

  “Then how come you’re reading an explanation written in Italian?”