Monday with a Mad Genius Page 5

  “You do?” said Jack.

  “Yes,” said Leonardo. “The secret of happiness is available to all of us, every hour of every day. Young, old, rich, poor—everyone can choose to find happiness in this way.”

  “How?” asked Annie. “What’s the secret?” She and Jack leaned forward, eager to hear the answer.

  “Curiosity,” said Leonardo.

  “Curiosity?” repeated Jack. He had curiosity. He had lots of it.

  “Always ask questions,” said Leonardo. “Always try to learn something new. Ask: Why? When? Where? What? Say: ‘I wonder what this means.’ ‘I wonder how that works.’ ‘I wonder what this person is like. And that person. And that one.’ I am always searching for answers to things I do not understand.”

  “Me too!” said Jack.

  “And so I look forward to each new day, each spring and summer and fall and winter, and all the months and years ahead, because there is so much to discover,” said Leonardo.

  “Me too!” said Annie.

  “Through my curiosity, I forget my failures and sorrows, and I feel great happiness,” said Leonardo. He looked up at the sky. “For instance, one might wonder how they built that eight-sided dome on top of the cathedral.”

  “I do wonder that!” said Jack.

  “And I wonder—what exactly makes the clouds change shape?” said Annie.

  “And—and what makes bread crackly on the outside and soft on the inside?” asked Jack.

  “Are there really just ten types of noses?” said Annie.

  “How many kinds of ears are there?” said Jack. “How many kinds of feet?”

  “Hands!” said Annie.

  “Eyebrows!” said Jack.

  Their two voices spilled over each other as they kept calling out questions: “And who rings the bells in the bell tower?” “Why is the sky blue?” “Where do city birds sleep?”

  “AND WHY WON’T LISA SMILE FOR LEONARDO?” asked Annie.

  Jack and Leonardo looked at Annie. Then they all turned and looked at Lisa. Jack had actually forgotten she was sitting near them.

  The quiet, lovely woman blinked. “What?” she said. “What did you say?”

  “Why won’t you smile for Leonardo, Lisa?” asked Annie. “Are you mad at him because you’ve been posing for three years?”

  Lisa’s face grew red. She seemed to be fighting tears. She shook her head.

  “Is—is there another reason?” Annie asked softly.

  Lisa looked at Leonardo. He was staring back at her. “Yes,” she whispered. “There is.”

  “What is it?” Annie asked.

  “I am afraid to smile,” said Lisa. She kept staring at Leonardo, though she was talking to Annie. “If I smile, Leonardo will paint my smile, and he will be done with me. He will sell my portrait to my family and never think of me again.”

  There was silence for a moment. Jack and Annie looked at Leonardo. “Annie,” said Leonardo finally, staring at Lisa. “Tell Lisa that if she will smile, I will finish her portrait. But tell her that I will not sell it to her family. I will carry it with me wherever I go, for the rest of my life, and I will never forget her.”

  “Lisa, Leonardo says that—” started Annie.

  But Lisa stopped her. “I heard,” she said softly. Then she smiled. It was a faint smile, but a mysterious and beautiful one. Her face glowed in the golden light of late afternoon.

  “Ah!” gasped Leonardo. “Keep that smile,” he said. He kept staring at Lisa as he dipped his paintbrush into a jar. “Please! Keep that smile, Mona Lisa.”

  Mona Lisa? Jack had heard the name Mona Lisa before.

  Lisa kept smiling. Leonardo painted.

  “Hey, listen,” Annie said to Jack.

  Jack listened. He heard a bird whistling and trilling. A plain brown bird was singing from the rooftop above the courtyard.

  “That looks like the bird you let out of the cage,” said Jack.

  “It is him!” whispered Annie.

  “He is a nightingale,” said Leonardo, keeping his eyes on Lisa. “A beautiful singer, yes?”

  Annie smiled at Jack. “Time to go,” she said. “Remember Morgan’s rhyme—help the genius ‘Till the night bird sings its song.’ ”

  “Right,” said Jack, sighing. “Good-bye, Leonardo.”

  Leonardo didn’t seem to hear him.

  “Good-bye, Lisa,” said Annie.

  Lisa turned her eyes to look at Jack and Annie. “Bye,” she whispered.

  Then Leonardo turned and looked at them, too. “Yes, good-bye, my friends!” he said. “Come again soon, please! You have been a great help to me today.”

  “You helped us, too,” said Annie.

  Leonardo bowed to them. Then he turned back to his work. He painted Lisa’s smile as the nightingale sang on. The bird’s song grew louder and louder, until it seemed to fill the Florence night.

  It was twilight when Annie and Jack stepped back out into the street.

  “Where’s the tree with the tree house?” asked Annie.

  “Somewhere over the bridge beyond the big dome,” said Jack.

  They kept their eyes on the dome as they threaded their way through the streets of Florence. When they came to the cathedral, the square was quiet. The cathedral’s great doors were open. Jack and Annie could see candles burning inside.

  Jack and Annie kept walking and soon came to the market. The hundreds of tents and stalls were all closed for the night. The square was empty.

  Jack and Annie returned the way they had come that morning. Walking down the same narrow lanes, they saw that all the shops were closed now, too. They crossed the covered bridge and walked along the flowing river, past quiet houses where smoke curled from chimneys into the darkening sky.

  Finally Jack and Annie came to the hedge that hid the tree with the tree house. In the gray light of dusk, they climbed up the rope ladder.

  “Before we go home, I want to look something up,” said Jack. He pulled their research book out of his bag and looked in the index for Mona Lisa. He found it and turned to the right page.

  “Look! It’s Lisa!” said Annie.

  Jack and Annie stared at a picture of Leonardo’s painting. It looked exactly the same, except now there was a smile on Lisa’s face, the same smile they’d just seen in real life. Jack read aloud:

  Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of Mona Lisa is perhaps the most famous painting in the world. It is believed to be a portrait of Lisa del Gioconda. (The Italian word mona means “my lady.”) Leonardo da Vinci never sold the portrait of Lisa. He took it with him everywhere he traveled until he died.

  Jack closed the book. “He kept his promise,” he said.

  “I knew he would,” said Annie. She sighed. “Good-bye, Leonardo,” she whispered. Then she picked up their note from Morgan and pointed at the words Frog Creek. “I wish we could go there,” she said.

  The wind started to blow.

  The tree house started to spin.

  It spun faster and faster.

  Then everything was still.

  Absolutely still.

  Sunlight flooded through the tree house window. No time had passed in Frog Creek. The school bell was still ringing, announcing that class would start in ten minutes. Jack and Annie were wearing their school clothes. Jack’s cloth bag had changed back into his backpack.

  “We have to hurry,” said Annie.

  “I know,” said Jack. He looked inside his pack. He was happy to see the Wand of Dianthus. As he pulled out their research book, a piece of paper fell out. It was the sketch of Leonardo’s angel.

  “Oh, I forgot all about this,” said Jack. He and Annie looked at the sketch.

  “It shows he was really a good drawer,” said Annie.

  “Yep,” said Jack. “And it will remind us about Leonardo’s secret of happiness.”

  “He was curious about everything,” said Annie. “Angels, noses, birds.”

  “Feathers, flowers, wolves, and spiders,” added Jack.

  “
Shadows, light,” said Annie.

  “Bells, clouds, the moon,” said Jack.

  “And every time he was unhappy about something, his curiosity seemed to make him happy again,” said Annie.

  Jack took the angel drawing from Annie and carefully put it back into his pack. “Come on,” he said. “We don’t want to be late for school.” Jack started down the rope ladder, and Annie followed.

  Jack and Annie walked together through the sun-bright woods. “I wonder where my new class will be,” said Annie.

  “Yeah,” said Jack, “and I wonder where my desk will be. Close to the window? Or the door?”

  “And will Randy and Jenny be in my class again this year?” said Annie.

  “Will Joe be in mine?” said Jack.

  “Whatever happened to Raymond Johnson?” asked Annie. “Is he coming back this year?”

  “I hope so,” said Jack. “And who’s the new librarian? And the new music teacher?”

  “Yeah, and what kind of noses do they have?” said Annie.

  Jack laughed. All the questions about school didn’t make him nervous anymore. Now he was eager to find out the answers. He quickened his steps. “And how long will it take us to get there, if we walk really, really fast?” he said.

  “What if we run?” said Annie.

  Jack and Annie started running, as the wind blew through the trees and the leaves fluttered through the air and the birds sang from the branches in the Monday-morning woods.

  Leonardo da Vinci, (say lee-uh-NAR-doh duh VIN-chee) was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy, just outside Florence. He died on May 2, 1519, in France.

  Leonardo da Vinci lived in a time called the Renaissance (say REN-uh-sahns). Renaissance means “rebirth.” The time was given this name because in those years, learning and creativity reached new heights after a long period called the Middle Ages. The Renaissance began in Italy in the 1300s and then spread to other parts of Europe. Leonardo has always been the perfect example of the “Renaissance man,” which is a person who has many different talents. He was not only one of the world’s greatest painters, but he was also an inventor, mathematician, botanist, geologist, cook, musician, philosopher, engineer, and sculptor.

  Monday with a Mad Genius was inspired by many true facts about Leonardo da Vinci, such as his reverse handwriting and his keeping of many notebooks. Historians think that his notebooks may have totaled as many as 13,000 pages, but only 7,000 pages of his writings and drawings have been found.

  Leonardo really did begin painting a fresco of a vivid battle scene called The Battle of Anghiari in the hall of the great council in Florence. A fresco is a plaster painting on a wall or ceiling. The Battle of Anghiari was indeed damaged because Leonardo experimented with a new painting technique and parts of the painting melted down the wall. Sadly, he never finished it.

  Leonardo really had a great interest in birds and flying. He wrote in one of his notebooks that a bird had visited him as a baby in his cradle. One of his earliest biographers wrote that Leonardo bought caged birds in the market and freed them. Leonardo’s notebooks had designs for a flying machine with flapping wings, which he called a “great bird.” Leonardo wrote that the “great bird” was about to take its first flight and would fill the universe with amazement and bring “eternal glory to the nest where it was born.” It was not recorded that his machine ever flew successfully. It is possible that he or an assistant may have tried to fly the plane and failed.

  Leonardo really did take three or four years to paint one of the world’s most famous works of art, the Mona Lisa. And he really did keep the painting with him until he died. But no one knows—or will ever know—the real reason for the Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile.

  Mary Pope Osborne is the award-winning author of many novels, picture books, story collections, and nonfiction books Her bestselling Magic Tree House series has been translated into many languages around the world. Highly recommended by parents and educators everywhere, the series introduces young readers to different cultures and times in history, as well as to the world’s legacy of ancient myth and storytelling. Mary Pope Osborne is married to Will Osborne, a co-author of many of the Magic Tree House Research Guides and librettist and lyricist for Magic Tree House: The Musical, a theatrical adaptation of the series. They live in northwestern Connecticut with their Norfolk terriers, Joey and Mr. Bezo. You can visit Mary, Will, Joey, and Mr. Bezo on the Web at www.marypopeosborne.com.

  Sal Murdocca is best known for his amazing work on the Magic Tree House series. He has written and/or illustrated over two hundred children’s books, including Dancing Granny by Elizabeth Winthrop, Double Trouble in Walla Walla by Andrew Clements, and Big Numbers by Edward Packard. He has taught writing and illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York. He is the librettist for a children’s opera and has recently completed his second short film. Sal Murdocca is an avid runner, hiker, and bicyclist. He has often bicycle-toured in Europe and has had many one-man shows of his paintings from these trips. He lives and works with his wife, Nancy, in New City, New York.

  Here’s a special preview of

  Magic Tree House #39

  (A Merlin Mission)

  Dark Day in the Deep Sea

  Available now!

  Excerpt copyright © 2008 by Mary Pope Osborne.

  Published by Random House Children's Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Jack felt raindrops. He looked up and saw a summer storm cloud.

  “Hurry!” Jack called to Annie. They were riding their bikes home from the library. Jack’s backpack was filled with library books. He didn’t want them to get wet.

  As Jack and Annie pedaled faster, a large white bird swooped over them and flew into the Frog Creek woods.

  “Did you see that?” cried Jack.

  “A seagull!” called Annie. “It’s a sign!”

  “You’re right!” said Jack. The last time they’d seen a seagull in Frog Creek, the magic tree house was waiting for them!

  “The woods!” said Annie.

  Jack and Annie bumped their bikes over the curb. The rain fell harder as they headed into the wet woods. Their bike tires bounced over the rough ground, crushing leaves and snapping twigs.

  “It must be time to look for another secret of happiness for Merlin!” Jack called.

  “I hope Merlin’s feeling better!” shouted Annie.

  “I hope Teddy and Kathleen came with the tree house!” shouted Jack.

  “Me too!” shouted Annie.

  Jack and Annie steered their bikes under canopies of wet leaves. By the time they came to the tallest oak in the woods, the seagull had disappeared. But the magic tree house was back! It was high in the tallest oak, its rope ladder swaying in the wind and rain.

  Jack and Annie climbed off their bikes and propped them against the trunk of the tree.

  “Teddy! Kathleen!” Annie shouted.

  There was no answer.

  “I guess they didn’t come this time,” Jack said.

  “Darn!” said Annie. “I really wanted to see them.”

  “Boo!” Two older kids looked down out of the tree house window: a curly-haired boy with a big grin and a girl with sea-blue eyes and a beautiful smile. Both were wearing long green cloaks.

  “Yay!” cried Annie and Jack.

  The rain fell harder as they started up the rope ladder. When they climbed into the tree house, they yanked off their bike helmets and hugged Teddy and Kathleen.

  “Morgan sent us to tell you about your next mission for Merlin,” said Teddy.

  “How is Merlin?” asked Annie.

  Teddy stopped smiling. He shook his head.

  “Merlin still suffers from an unspoken sorrow,” Kathleen said sadly.

  “When can we see him?” asked Annie.

  “We’ve learned two secrets of happiness to share with him,” said Jack.

  “You may visit him after you have learned two more secrets,” said Kathleen. “Morgan b
elieves four is the magic number that will ensure success.”

  “We have come to send you on your search for a third secret,” said Teddy.

  Kathleen took a book from under her cloak and handed it to Jack and Annie. “From Morgan’s hands to our hands to yours,” she said.

  Jack took the book from her. The cover showed waves crashing on a beach.

  “Wow,” said Jack. “We’re going to the ocean?”

  “Yes,” said Teddy. “That is where you will next search for a secret of happiness.”

  “The ocean always makes me happy,” said Annie. “Once Jack and I traveled to a coral reef and swam with dolphins. And we ran into an octopus. But he was nice and shy and—”

  “But the shark we saw wasn’t shy,” Jack broke in. “It was a big hammerhead.”

  “Oh, my,” said Kathleen.

  “We took a ride in a mini-sub,” said Annie. “It was so cool!”

  “Until it started to leak and—” said Jack.

  “We had to escape!” said Annie.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “We tried not to splash—so the shark wouldn’t notice us.”

  “We had so much fun!” said Annie.

  Kathleen smiled. “Well, I hope you will not find the same ‘fun’ on this journey,” she said.

  “But in case you do, you have your wand to help you, do you not?” asked Teddy. “The Wand of Dianthus?”

  “Of course,” said Jack. “I always carry it, just in case.” Jack reached into his backpack and pulled out the silvery wand. It was shaped like the spiraled horn of a unicorn.

  “You remember the three rules?” asked Kathleen.

  “Sure,” said Jack. “To make magic, we use a wish with only five words.”

  “And before we use the wand, we have to try our hardest,” said Annie.

  “And the wand can only be used for the good of others,” said Jack, “not just ourselves.”