Little, Big

Book Four - THE WILD WOOD

I.

They neither work nor weep;

in their shape is their reason.

—Virginia Woolf

The years after baby Lilac was rapt from her sleeping mother's arms were the busiest Mrs. Underhill could remember in a long (in fact as-good-as-eternal) life. Not only was there Lilac's education to attend to, and a watch kept just as ever on the rest of them, but there were as well all the councils, meetings, consultations and celebrations, multiplying as the events they had all so long nursed into being came more and more rapidly to pass; and all this in addition to her usual tasks, each composed of countless details no one of which could be skimped or scamped.


A Time and a Tour

But look how she had succeeded! On a day in November a year after the boy Auberon followed imaginary Lilac into the dark of the woods, and lost her, Mrs. Underhill quite otherwhere measured the real Lilac's golden length with a practiced eye. She was, at just past eleven years old, as tall as bent Mrs. Underhill; her chicory-blue eyes, clear as brook water, were level with the old ones which studied her. "Very good," she said. "Very, very good." She circled Lilac's slim wrists with her fingers. She tilted up Lilac's chin and held a buttercup beneath it. She measured with thumb and forefinger the span from aureole to aureole, and Lilac laughed, tickled. Mrs. Underhill laughed too, pleased with herself and with Lilac. There wasn't a tinge of green to her biscuity skin, not a trace of absence in her eyes. So often Mrs. Underhill had seen these things go wrong, seen changelings grow dim and marrowless, become at Lilac's age attenuated pieces of vague longing and good for nothing ever after. Mrs. Underhill was glad she had taken on the handrearing of Lilac. What if it had worn her to a raveling? It had succeeded, and there would be aeons in which to rest soon enough.

Rest! She drew herself up. There must be strength for the end. "Now, child," she said. "What was it you learned from the bears?"

"Sleep," Lilac said, looking doubtful.

"Sleep indeed," said Mrs. Underhill. "Now . . ."

"I don't want to sleep," Lilac said. "Please."

"Well, how do you know till you've tried it? The bears were comfortable enough."

Lilac, pouting, overturned a darkling beetle which was just then crossing her instep, and righted it again. She thought of the bears in their warm cave, oblivious as snow. Mrs. Underhill (who knew the names of many creatures, as every naturalist should) introduced them to her: Joe, Pat, Martha, John, Kathy, Josie, and Nora. But they made no response, only drew breath all together, and let it out, and drew it again. Lilac, who had never closed her eyes except to blink or play hide-and-seek since the night she woke in Mrs. Underhill's dark house, stood bored and repelled by the seven sleepers, like seven sofas in their lumpish indifference. But she took her lesson from them; and when Mrs. Underhill came for her in the spring, she had learned it well, and for a reward Mrs. Underhill showed her sea-lions asleep in northern waters bobbing in the waves, and albatrosses in southern skies asleep on the wing; still she hadn't slept, but at least she knew how.

But now the time had come.

"Please," Lilac said, "I will if I must, only . . ."

"No ifs, ands, or buts," Mrs. Underhill said. "There are times that just go by, and times that come. This time's come."

"Well," Lilac said, desperate, "can I kiss everyone goodnight?"

"That would take years."

"There are bedtime stories," Lilac said, her voice rising. "I want one."

"All the ones I know are in this one, and in this one it's now the time you fall asleep." The child before her crossed her arms slowly, still thinking; a dark cast came over her face; she would fight this one out. And like all grannies faced with intransigence, Mrs. Underhill bethought her how she might give in—with dignity, so as not to spoil the child. "Very well," she said. "I haven't time to argue. There's a tour I was to take, and if you'll promise to be good, and after take your nap, I'll take you too. It might be educational. . . ."

"Oh yes!"

"And education after all was all the point. . . ."

"It was!"

"Well then." Seeing her excitement, Mrs. Underhill felt for the first time something like pity for the child, how she would be long bound up in the vines and tendrils of sleep, as quiescent as the dead. She rose. "Listen now! Hold tight to me, great thing though you've become, and nor eat nor touch a single thing you see. . . ." Lilac had leapt up, her nakedness pale and alight as a wax candle in Mrs. Underhill's old house. "Wear this," she said, taking a tiny green three-clawed leaf from within her clothes, licking it with a pink tongue, and sticking it to Lilac's forehead, "and you'll see what I say you'll see. And I think . . ." There was a heavy beating of wings outside, and a long broken shadow passed over the windows. "I think we can go. I needn't tell you," she said, raising a warning finger, "that no matter what you're not to speak to anyone you see, not anyone," and Lilac nodded solemnly.


Rainy-day Wonder

The stork they rode flew high and fast over swift-unfolding brown and gray November landscapes, but still perhaps Somehow within other borders, for Lilac naked on her back felt neither warm nor cold. She held tight to folds of Mrs. Underhill's thick clothing, and clutched the stork's heaving shoulders with her knees, the smooth oiled feathers beneath her thighs soft and slippery. With taps of a stick, here, there, Mrs. Underhill guided the stork up, down, right and left.

"Where do we go first?" Lilac asked.

"Out," Mrs. Underhill said, and the stork dove and twisted; beneath, far off but coming closer, a large and complex house appeared.

Since babyhood, Lilac had seen this house many times in dreams (how it could be she dreamt but didn't sleep she never thought about; there was much that Lilac, raised the way she had been, had never thought about, knowing no different way the world and selfhood might be organized, just as Auberon never wondered why three times a day he sat at a table and put food into his face). She didn't know, though, that when she dreamt she walked the long halls of that house, touching the papered walls hung with pictures and thinking What? What could this be?, that then her mother and her grandmother and her cousins dreamt—not of her, but of someone like her, somewhere else. She laughed when, now, from the stork's back, she saw the house entire and recognized it instantly: as when the blindfold was lifted from her in a game of blindman's-bluff and the mysterious features she had been touching, the nameless garments, were revealed to be those of someone well-known, someone smiling.

It grew smaller as they grew closer. It shrank, as though running away. If that goes on, Lilac thought, by the time we're close enough to look in its windows, one of my eyes only will be able to see in at a time, and won't they be surprised inside as we go by, darkening the windows like a stormcloud! "Well, yes," Mrs. Underhill said, "if it were one and the same; but it's not, and what they'll see, or rather not see (I should think), is stork, woman and child about a midge's size or smaller, and never pay it the least never-mind."

"I can't," said the stork beneath them, "quite feature that."

"Neither can I," Lilac said laughing.

"Doesn't matter," Mrs. Underhill said. "See now as I see, and it's all one for the purpose."

Even as she spoke, Lilac's eyes seemed to cross, then right themselves; the house rushed greatly toward them, rose up housesized to their stork's size (though she and Mrs. Underhill were smaller—another thing for Lilac not to think to ask about). From on high they sailed down to Edgewood, and its towers round and square bloomed like sudden mushrooms, bowing neatly before them as they flew over, and the walls, weedy drives, porte-cocheres and shingled wings altered smoothly in perspective too, each according to its own geometries.

At a touch of Mrs. Underhill's stick the stork tipped its wings and fell sharply to starboard like a fighter plane. The house changed faces as they swooped, Queen Anne, French Gothic, American, but Lilac didn't notice; her breath was snatched away; she saw the house's trees and angles uptilt and right themselves as the stork pulled out of her dive, saw the eaves rush up, then closed her eyes, clinging tighter. When her maneuver was completed and the stork was steady again, Lilac opened her eyes to see they were in the shadow of the house, circling to perch on a flinty belvedere outcropping on the house's most Novembery side.

"Look," Mrs. Underhill said when the stork had folded her wings. Her stick like a knuckly finger indicated a narrow ogive window, casements ajar, kitty-corner to where they stood. "Sophie asleep."

Lilac could see her mother's hair, very like her own, displayed on the pillow, and her mother's nose peeking from under the coverlet. Asleep . . . Lilac's bringing-up had trained her to pleasure (and to purpose, though she didn't know it), not to affection and attachments; rainy days could bring tears to her clear eyes, but wonder, not love, shook her young soul most. So for a long time as she looked within the dim bedroom at her motionless mother, a chain of feelings was knitted within her for which she had no name. Rainyday wonder. Often they had told her, laughing, how her hands had gripped her mother's hair, and how with scissors they had cut the hair to free her, and she'd laughed too; now she wondered what it would be like to be laid against that person; down within those covers, her cheek on that cheek, her fingers in that hair, asleep. "Can we," she said, "go closer to her?"

"Hm," said Mrs. Underhill. "I wonder."

"If we're small as you say," the stork said, "why not?"

"Why not?" Mrs. Underhill said. "We'll try."

They fell from the belvedere, the stork laboring under her load to rise, neck straining, feet climbing. The casements ahead grew big as though they came closer, but for a long time they came no closer; then, "Now," said Mrs. Underhill, and tapped with her stick, and they swooped in a vertiginous arc through the open casement and into Sophie's bedroom. As they flew between floor and ceiling toward the bed, they would have appeared to an observer (if such a one were possible) to be the size of the bird one makes of two linked hands waving.

"How did that work?" Lilac asked.

"Don't ask me how," Mrs. Underhill said. "Anywhere but here it wouldn't." She added thoughtfully, as they circled the bedpost: "And that's the point, about the house, isn't it?"

Sophie's flushed cheek was a hill, and her open mouth a cave; her head was forested in golden curls. Her breathing was as slow and low a sound as a whole day makes together. The stork stalled at the bed's head and turned to coast back toward the arable lands of the patchwork quilt. "What if she woke?" Lilac said.

"You dasn't!" Mrs. Underhill cried out, but it was too late; Lilac had loosed her grip of Mrs. Underhill's cloak and as they passed, inspired by an emotion like mischief but fiercer by far, had taken hold of a coiling rope of golden hair and tugged. The jolt nearly upset them; Mrs. Underhill flailed with her stick, the stork squawked and stalled, they circled Sophie's head again, and still Lilac hadn't released the hank she held. "Wake up!" she shouted.

"Bad child! Oh horrible!" Mrs. Underhill cried.

"Squawk!" said the stork.

"Wake up!" Lilac called, hand cupped by her cheek.

"Away!" cried Mrs. Underhill, and the stork beat strongly toward the casement, and Lilac, if she weren't to be pulled from the stork's back, had to release her mother's hair. One thick strand as long as a towline came away in her fingers, and laughing, shrieking with fear of falling, and trembling head to foot, she had time to see the bedclothes heave vastly before they reached the casement again. Just outside, like a sheet suddenly shaken open, and with a noise like that, they became again stork-sized to the house, and mounted quickly to the chimney-pots. The hair that Lilac held, three inches long now and so fine she couldn't hold it, slipped from her fingers and sailed away glittering.

Sophie said "What?" and sat bolt upright. More slowly she lay back again amid the pillows, but her eyes didn't close. Had she left that casement open? The end of a curtain was waving goodbye madly out of it. It was deathly cold. What had she dreamt? Of her great-grandmother (who died when Sophie was four). A bedroom full of pretty things, silver-backed brushes and tortoise-shell combs, a music-box. A glossy china figurine, a bird with a naked child and an old woman on its back. A big blue glass ball as fine as a soap bubble. Don't touch it, child: a voice dim as the dead's from within the ivory-lace bedclothes. Oh do be careful. And all the room, all of life, distorted, made blue, in the ball; made strange, gorgeous, unified because spherical, within the ball. Oh child, oh careful: a weeping voice. And the ball slipping from her grasp, falling as slow as a soap bubble toward the parquet.

She rubbed her cheeks. She put out a foot, wondering, toward her slippers. (Smashing on the floor, without a sound, only her great-grandmother's voice saying Oh, oh, child, what a loss.) She ran a hand through her hair, impossibly tangled, elf-locks Momdy called them. A blue glass ball smashing; but what had come before that? Already it had fled from her. "Well," she said, and yawned, and stood upright. Sophie was awake.


That's the Lot

The stork was fleeing Edgewood when Mrs. Underhill pulled herself together.

"Hold hard, hold hard," she said soothingly. "The harm's been done."

Lilac behind her had fallen silent.

"I just want," the stork said, leaving off her furious wing-beats, "none of the blame for this to fall on me."

"No blame," Mrs. Underhill said.

"If punishments are to be handed out. . ." the stork said.

"No punishments. Don't worry your long red beak about it."

The stork fell silent. Lilac thought she should volunteer to take whatever blame there might be, and soothe the beast, but didn't; she pressed her cheek into Mrs. Underhill's coarse cloak, filled again with rainy-day wonder.

"Another hundred years in this shape," the stork muttered, "is all I need."

"Enough," said Mrs. Underhill. "It may be all for the best. In fact how could it be otherwise? Now"—she tapped with her stick—"there's still much to see, with time a-wasting." The stork banked, turning back toward the multiple housetops. "Once more around the house and grounds," said Mrs. Underhill, "and then off."

As they climbed over the broken, every-which-way mountains and valleys of the roof, a small round window in a particularly peculiar cupola opened, and a small round face looked out, and down, and up. Lilac (though she had never seen his real face before) recognized Auberon, but Auberon didn't see her.

"Auberon," she said, not to call him (she'd be good now), but only to name him.

"Paul Pry," said the stork, for it was from this window that Doc had used to spy on her and her chicks when she had nested here. Thank it all, that part was over! The round window closed.

Mrs. Underhill pointed out long-legged Tacey as they came over the house. Gravel spun from beneath her bike's slim tires as she shot around a corner of the house, making for the once-trim little Norman farmhouse which had been stables once and then garage—the old wooden station wagon slept here in the dark—and was now also where Bumbum and Jane Doe and their many offspring had their hutches. Tacey dropped her bike at the back entrance (seeming, to Lilac over her head, to be a complex scurrying figure suddenly coming apart into two pieces) and the stork with a wingbeat rose out over the Park. Lily and Lucy walked a path there, arm in arm, singing; the sounds they made rose up to Lilac faintly. The path they walked intersected another, which ran past the leafless hedges wild now as madman's hair, stuck full of dead leaves and small birds' nests. Daily Alice loitered there, a rake in her hand, watching the hedge where perhaps she had seen a bird's or an animal's movement; and, when they had gained a bit more altitude, Lilac could see Smoky far down the same path, eyes on the ground, books under his arm.

"Is that . . ." Lilac asked.

"Yes," Mrs. Underhill said.

"My father," Lilac said.

"Well," Mrs. Underhill said, "one of them anyway," and guided the stork to swoop that way. "Now mind you mind, and no tricks."

How odd people looked from right above, the egg of the head in the center, a left foot seeming to emerge from the back of it, a right foot from the front, then the reverse. Smoky and Alice at last saw each other, and Alice waved, her hand also seeming extruded from the head, like an ear. The stork swooped low beside them as they met, and they took on more human shape.

"How's tricks?" Alice said, putting the rake under her arm like a shotgun and thrusting her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket.

"Tricks is good," Smoky said. "Grant Stone threw up again."

"Outside?"

"At least outside. Amazing how it quiets things down. For a minute. An object-lesson."

"About . . ."

"Stuffing a dozen marshmallows into your face on the way to school? I don't know. The ills that flesh is heir to, Mortality. I look very grave and say, 'I guess we can go on now.'

Alice laughed, and then looked sharply left, where a movement had caught her eye, either a far-off bird or a last fly nearby; saw nothing. Did not hear Mrs. Underhill, who had been regarding her tenderly, say Bless you, dear, and watch the time; only she didn't speak again all the way to the house, nor did she hear much of what Smoky told her about school; she was absorbed in a feeling she had felt before, that the earth, unimaginably massy as it was, turned beneath her only because she walked it, like a treadmill. Peculiar. When they came close to the house, she saw Auberon flee from it as though pursued; he gave a glance at his parents, but no acknowledgement, turning a corner and disappearing. And from an upstairs window she heard her name called: Sophie stood at her casement window. "Yes?" Alice called, but Sophie said nothing, only looked down at them both in wonderment, as though it had been years and not hours since she'd seen them last.

The stork glided over the Walled Garden and then, wings cupped, skimmed the ground between the avenue of sphinxes, all but featureless now and more silent than ever. Ahead, running the same way, was Auberon. In two flannel shirts (one like a jacket) grown somewhat small in a burst of growing he was doing, but still buttoned at the wrist; his long-skulled head balanced on a skinny neck, his sneakered feet pigeon-toed a bit. He ran a few steps, walked, ran again, talking to himself in a low voice.

"Some prince," Mrs. Underhill said in a low voice as they caught up to him. "A lot of labor there." She shook her head. Auberon ducked, hearing wingbeats at his ear as the stork rose up past him, and though he didn't stop walk-running, his head swiveled to see a bird he couldn't see. "That's the lot," said Mrs. Underhill. "Away!"

Lilac looked down as they rose away, and kept on looking down at Auberon growing smaller. In her growing-up Lilac (no matter that Mrs. Underhill strictly forbade it) had spent long days and nights alone. Mrs. Underhill herself had her enormous tasks, and the attendants set to wait on Lilac as often as not had games of their own they wanted to play, amusements the thick, fleshly, stupid human child could never grasp or join. Oh, they had caught it when Lilac was found wandering in halls and groves she had no business to be in yet (startling once with a thrown stone her great-grandfather in his melancholy solitude) but Mrs. Underhill could think of no help for it, and muttered "All part of her Education," and went off to other climes and spaces that needed her attention. But in all this there was one playmate who had always been with her when she liked, who had always done her bidding without a moment's hesitation, who had never grown tired or cross (the others could be, sometimes, not only cross but cruel) and always felt as she did about the world. That he had also been imaginary ("Who's the child always talking to?" asked Mr. Woods, crossing his long arms, "and why amn't I allowed to sit in my own chair?") hadn't really distinguished him from a lot that went on in Lilac's odd childhood; that he had gone away, one day, on some excuse, hadn't really surprised her; only now, as she watched Auberon lope toward the castellated summer house on an urgent mission, she did wonder what this real one—not very like her own Auberon really, but the same, there was no doubt of it—had been doing through all her growing up. He was very small now, pulling open the door of the Summer House; he glanced behind him as though to see if he had been followed; then "Away!" cried Mrs. Underhill, and the Summer House bowed beneath them (showing a patched roof like a tonsured head) and they were off, high and gaining speed.


A Secret Agent

In the Summer House Auberon unscrewed his fountain pen even before he sat down at the table there (though he firmly shut and hooked the door). He took from the table's drawer a locked imitation-leather five-year diary from some other five years, opened it with a tiny key from his pocket, and, flipping to a page in a long-ago unrecorded March, he wrote: "And yet it does move."

He meant by this the old orrery at the top of the house, from whose round window he had looked out as the stork bearing Lilac and Mrs. Underhill had passed. Everyone told him that the machinery which operated the planets in this antiquity was clabbered thick with rust and had been immovable for years. Indeed Auberon had tried the cogs and levers himself and couldn't move them. And yet it did move: a vague sense he had had that the planets, sun and moon were not, on one visit, in quite the same places they had been on a previous visit he had now confirmed by rigorous tests. It does move: he was sure. Or pretty sure.

Just why they should all have lied to him about the orrery didn't just at the moment concern him. All he wanted was the goods on them: proof that the orrery moved, and (much harder to get, but he would get it, the evidence was mounting) proof that they all knew very well that it moved and didn't want him to know.

Slowly, after glancing at the entry he had made and wishing he had more to state, he shut and locked the diary and put it in the table drawer. Now what question could he think of, what seemingly chance remark could he let fall at dinner, that would cause someone—his great-aunt, no, far too practiced in concealments, expert at looks of surprise and puzzlement; or his mother; or his father, though there were times when Auberon thought his father might be as excluded as he was—to confess inadvertently? As the bowl of mashed potatoes went around, he might say "Slowly but surely, like the planets in the old orrery," and watch their faces. . . . No, too brazen, too obvious. He pondered, wondering what anyway would be for supper.

The Summer House he sat in wasn't much changed from the time his namesake had lived and died there. No one had been able to think what to dowith the boxes and portfolios of pictures, or felt up to disturbing what seemed a careful order. So they only patched the roof against leaks, and sealed the windows; and thus it stayed while they thought. The image of it would now and then pass through one or another of their minds, particularly Doc's and Cloud's, and they would think of the past stored up there, but no one got around to unsealing it, and when Auberon came to take possession no one disputed him. It was headquarters now, and contained all things necessary for Auberon's investigations: his magnifying glass (old Auberon's in fact), his clack-clack folding measure and roll-up tape measure, the final edition of The Architecture of Country Houses, and the diary which contained his conclusions. It also contained all of Auberon's pictures, which Auberon the younger had not yet begun to look into; the pictures that would end his quest as it had the elder's, through vast superfluity of ambiguous evidence.

Even as it was he wondered if the thing about the orrery weren't dumb after all, and his arrangement of string and pencilmarks open to more than one conclusion anyway. A blind alley, as lined with mum sphinxes as the others he had gone up. He stopped tilting back the old chair he sat in, stopped vigorously chewing the end of his pen. Evening was gathering; no evening more oppressive than one like this, in this month, though at nine years old he didn't attribute his oppression to the day and the hour, or call it by that name. He only felt how hard it was to be a secret agent, to go in disguise as a member of his own family, trying to so insinuate himself among them that, without his ever asking a question (that would expose him instantly) the truth would be spilled in his presence because they would have no reason to doubt he was already privy to it.

Crows cawed away toward the woods. A voice, blown around the Park with odd alteration, called his name, and announced dinner. He felt, hearing the long-drawn melancholy vowels of his own name, at once sad and hungry.


The Worm Turned

Lilac saw sunset elsewhere.

"Magnificent!" Mrs. Underhill said. "And terrifying. Doesn't it make your heart beat high?"

"But it's all made of cloud," Lilac said.

"Hush, dear," Mrs. Underhill said. "Someone's feelings could be hurt."

Made of sunset was more correct: all of it, the thousand striped war-tents obscured in the wreathing smokes of orange watch' fires, and their curling pennants striped the same in sunset colors; the black lines of horse or foot or both, picked out with silver weaponglint, that receded as far as the eye could see; the bright coats of captains and the dark gray of guns being drawn up under their command against empurpled harricadoes—the whole vast encampment, or was it a great flotilla of galleons, armed and under sail?

"A thousand years," Mrs. Underhill said grimly. "Defeats, retreats, rear-guard actions. But no more. Soon . . ." The knobby stick was under her arm like a commander's baton, her long chin was held high. "See?" she said. "There! Isn't he brave?"

A figure, burdened with armor and with weighty responsibilities, walked the poop, or toured the breastworks; wind stirred his white whiskers as long almost as himself. The Generalissimo of all this. In one hand he held a wand; just then, the sunset altered, the tip of the wand caught fire. He gestured with it toward where the touch-holes on his guns would be, had they been guns, but then thought better of it. He lowered the wand, and it went out. From his broad belt he drew out a folded map, unfolded it, peered nearsightedly at it for some time, then refolded it, replaced it, and took up his heavy tread again.

"The die's cast now," Mrs. Underhill said. "No more retreating. The worm's turned."

"If you don't mind," the stork said, her voice faint between labored pants, "this altitude's too much for me."

"Sorry," Mrs. Underhill said. "All done now."

"Storks," the stork panted, "are accustomed to sit down, once a league or so."

"Don't sit down there," Lilac said. "You'll sink right through."

"Downward then," Mrs. Underhill said. The stork ceased to pump her short wings, and began to descend, with a sigh of relief. The Generalissimo, hands on his gunwales or his machicolated belvedere, stared eagle-eyed into the distance, but failed to see Mrs. Underhill salute him smartly as they passed.

"Oh, well," she said. "He's as brave as they come, and it's a fine show."

"It's a fake," Lilac said. It had already shape-shifted into something even more harmless as they sank.

Curse the child, Mrs. Underhill thought irritably. It was convincing, convincing enough. . . . Well. Perhaps they oughtn't to have entrusted it all to that Prince: he was just too old. But there it is, she thought: we're all old, all too old. Could it be they had waited too long, been too long patient, retreated one final furlong too many? She could only hope that, when the time at last came, the old fool's guns would not all misfire, would at least give heart to their friends and frighten briefly those on whom they were trained.

Too old, too old. For the first time she felt that the outcome of it all, which could not be in doubt, could not, was in doubt. Well, it would all be over soon. Did not this day, this very evening, mark the beginning of the last long vigil, the last watch, before the forces were at last joined? "Now that's the tour I promised you," she said over her shoulder to Lilac. "And now . . ."

"Aw," Lilac said.

"With no complaints . . ."

"Aaaawww . . ."

"We'll take our nap."

Lilac's long-drawn note of complaint altered, surprisingly, in her throat, to something else, a sudden mouth-opening thing that stole over her like a spirit. It went on opening her mouth wider and wider—she hadn't thought it could open so wide—and made her eyes close and water, and sucked a long draft of air into her lungs, which expanded with a will of their own to take it in, Then, just as suddenly, the spirit was gone, releasing her jaws and letting her exhale.

She blinked, smacking her lips, wondering what it was.

"Sleepy," said Mrs. Underhill.

For Lilac had just yawned her first yawn. Her second came soon after. She put her cheek against the rough stuff of Mrs. Underhill's broad cloak, and, Somehow no longer unwilling, closed her eyes.


Hidden Ones Revealed

When he was very young, Auberon had begun a collection of postmarks. On a trip with Doc to the post office in Meadowbrook, he had begun idly examining the wastebaskets, having nothing else to do, and had immediately come up with two treasures: envelopes from places that seemed fantastically distant to him, and looking remarkably crisp for having come so far.

It soon developed into a small passion, like Lily's for bird's nests. He insisted on accompanying whoever was traveling near a post office; he conned his friends' mail; he gloated over distant cities, far states whose names begin with I, and, rarest of all, names from across the sea.

Then one day Joy Flowers, whose granddaughter had lived abroad for a year, gave him a fat brown bag full of envelopes sent her from every part of the world. He could hardly find on the map a place which had nOt stamped its name on one of these pieces of blue flimsy. Some of them came from places so distant they weren't even in the alphabet he knew. And at a stroke his collection was complete, and his pleasure in it over. No discovery he could make in Meadowbrook's post office could add to it. He never looked at it again.

It was the same with old Auberon's photographs, when at last young Auberon discovered them to be more than a record of a large family's long life. Beginning with the last, of a beardless Smoky in a white suit beside the birdbath made of dwarves which still stood by the Summer House door, he had dipped tentatively, then sorted curiously, and at last hunted greedily through the thousands of pictures big and small, elated with wonder and horror (here! Here was the secret, the hidden ones revealed, each image worth a thousand words) and for a week was almost unable to speak to his family for fear of revealing what he had learned—or rather thought he was about to learn.

For in the end the pictures illuminated nothing, because nothing illuminated them.

"Note thumb," old Auberon would write on the back of a dim view of gray and black shrubbery. And there was, in the undisentanglable convolvulus, something that looked very much like a thumb. Good. Evidence. Another, though, would annul this evidence entirely, because (with only speechless exclamation marks on its back) here was an entire figure, a ghostly little miss in the leaves, with a trailing skirt of dew-glistening cobweb, pretty as a picture; and in the foreground, out of focus, the excited figure of a blond human child looking at the camera and pointing out the wee stranger. Now who could believe that? And if it was true (it couldn't be, how it had been faked Auberon had no idea, but it was just too stupidly real not to be fake) then what good was the maybe-a-thumb-in-the-shrubbery and a thousand others just as obscure? When he had sorted a dozen boxes into the few impossible and the many unintelligible, and saw that there were dozens of boxes and portfolios yet to go, he shut them all up (with a mixed sense of relief and loss) and rarely thought about them again.

He never again opened the old five-year diary in which his own notes had been made either, after that. He returned the last edition of the Architecture of Country Houses to its place in the library. His own humble discoveries, or what had seemed like discoveries—the orrery, a few interesting slips of the tongue made by his great-aunt and his grandmother—heart-startling as they had once seemed, had been swamped by the thick flood of torturous pictures and worse notes on them which his namesake had made. He forgot about it all. His secret-agentry was over.

His secret-agentry was over, but he had by this time gone so long in disguise indetectably as a member of his family that by slow stages he had actually become one. (It often happens so with secret agents.) The secret that was not revealed in Auberon's photographs lay, if it lay anywhere, in the hearts of his relatives; and Auberon had for so long pretended to know what they all knew (so that they would reveal it to him by accident) that he came to suppose he did know it as well as any of them; and like his evidences, and about the same time, he forgot about it. And since, if they had ever really known anything that he didn't know, they too had all forgotten it or seemed to have forgotten it, then they were all equal and he was one of them. He even felt, just below consciousness, that he was aligned with all the rest of them in a conspiracy that excluded only his father: Smoky didn't know, and didn't know they knew he didn't know. Somehow, rather than separating them from him, this joined them to Smoky all the more, as though they kept from him the secret of a surprise party planned for Smoky himself. And so for a while Auberon's relations with his father grew a little easier.

But even though he stopped scrutinizing others' motives and movements, a habit of secrecy about his own persisted in Auberon. He often put false faces over his actions, for no good reason. Certainly it wasn't to mystify; even as a secret agent he hadn't wanted to mystify anybody, a secret agent's task is just the reverse of that. If he had a reason at all, it may have been only a desire to present himself in a milder, clearer light than he might otherwise have appeared in: milder and clearer than the dim-flaring lamps by which he perceived himself.

"Where are you off to in such a tear?" Daily Alice asked him as he wolfed his milk and cookies at the kitchen table after school. He was in this autumn the last Barnable still a scholar in Smoky's school. Lucy had stopped going the year before.

"Play ball," he said, his mouth full. "With John Wolf and those guys."

"Oh." She half-refilled the glass he held out to her. Good lord he had gotten big lately. "Well, tell John to tell his mother I'll be over tomorrow with some soup and things, and see what she needs." Auberon kept his eyes on his cookies. "Is she feeling any better, do you know?" He shrugged. "Tacey said . . . oh, well." It seemed unlikely from Auberon's air that he would go tell John Wolf that Tacey had said his mother was dying. Probably her simple message wouldn't even be passed. But she couldn't be sure. "What do you play?"

"Catcher," he said quickly. "Usually."

"I was a catcher," Alice said. "Usually."

Auberon put down the glass, slowly, thinking. "Do you think," he said, "that people are happier when they're alone, or with other people?"

She carried his glass and plate to the sink. "I don't know," she said. "I guess . . . Well, what do you think?"

"I don't know," he said. "I just wondered if . . ." What he wondered was whether it was a fact everyone knew, every grown-up anyway: that everyone is of course happiest alone, or the reverse, whichever it was. "I guess I'm happier with other people," he said.

"Oh yes?" She smiled; since she faced the sink, he couldn't see her. "That's nice," she said. "An extrovert."

"I guess."

"Well," Alice said softly, "I just hope you don't creep back in your shell again."

He was already on his way out, stuffing extra cookies in his pockets, and didn't stop, but a strange window had suddenly been flung open within him. Shell? Had he been in a shell? And—odder still—had he been seen to be in one, was it common knowledge? He looked through this window and saw himself for a moment, for the first time, as others saw him. Meanwhile his feet had taken him out the broad swinging doors of the kitchen, which grump-grumped behind him in their way, and through the raisin-odorous pantry, and out through the stillness of the long dining room, going toward his imaginary ball-game.

Alice at the sink looked up, and saw an autumn leaf blown by the casement, and called out to Auberon. She could hear his footsteps receding (his feet had grown even faster than the rest of him) and she picked up his jacket from the chair where he had left it, and went after him.

He was gone out of sight on his bike by the time she got out the front door. She called again, going down the porch stairs; and then noticed that she was outdoors, for the first time that day, and that the air was clear and tangy and large, and that she was aimless. She looked around herself. She could just see, extending beyond the corner of the house, a bit of the walled garden around the other side. On the stone ornament at its corner a crow was perched. It looked at her looking around herself—she couldn't remember ever having seen one so close to the house before, they were fearless but wary—and flopped from its perch, and flapped with heavy wings away over the park. Cras, cras: that's what Smoky said crows say in Latin. Cras, cras: "tomorrow, tomorrow."

She walked around the walled garden. Its little arched door stood ajar, inviting her in, but she didn't go in. She went around to the funny little walk bordered by hydrangeas that had once been in training to be ornamental shrubs, tall and orderly and cabbage-headed, but which had declined over the years into mere hydrangeas, and smothered the walk they were supposed to border, and obscured the view they were supposed to exhibit: two Doric pillars, leading to the path that went up the Hill. Still aimless, Alice walked along that walk (brushing from the last hydrangea blossoms a shower of papery petals like faded confetti) and started up the Hill.


Glory

Auberon circled back along the road that ran around Edgewood's guardian stone wall, and at a certain point, dismounted. He climbed the wall (a fallen tree there and a weedy hummock on the other side made a stile) and hauled his bike over, wheeled it through the rustling gilded beechwood to the path, mounted again, and, glancing behind him, rode to the Summer House. He concealed the bike in the shed old Auberon had built.

The Summer House, warmed by September sun poured in through its big windows, was still and dusty. On the table where once his diary and spying equipment had lain, and where later he had sorted through Auberon's pictures, there lay now a mass of scribbled-over papers, the sixth volume of Gregorovius's Medieval Rome, a few other large books, and a map of Europe.

Auberon studied the top sheet, which he had written the day before:

The scene is in the Emperor's tent outside Iconium. The Emperor is seated alone in an X-kind of chair. His sword is across his knees. He is wearing his armor but some of it has been taken off, and a servant is slowly polishing it, and sometimes he looks at the Emperor, but the emperor just looks straight ahead and doesn't notice him. The emperor looks tired.

He considered this, and then mentally crossed out the last sentence. Tired wasn't what he meant at all. Anybody can look tired. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa on the eve of his last battle looked . . . well, what? Auberon uncapped his pen, thought, and recapped it again.

His play or screenplay (it might end up either, or be transmogrified into a novel) about the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had in it Saracens and papal armies, Sicilian guerillas and potent paladins and princesses too. A congeries of romantic place-names where battles were fought by mobs of romantic personages. But what Auberon loved in these doings wasn't anything that could be called romantic. In fact all that he wrote was only to bring forth that figure, that single figure on a chair: a figure seen in a moment of repose snatched between two desperate actions, exhausted after victory or defeat, hard clothes stained with war and wear. Above all it was a gaze: a calm, appraising look, without illusions, the look of someone coming to see that the odds against a course of action were insurmountable but the pressures to execute it irresistible. He was indifferent to the weather around him, and as Auberon described it, it was like him: harsh, indifferent, without warmth. His landscape was empty, save for a far tower with an aspect like his own, and perhaps a distant muffled rider bearing news.

Auberon had a name for all this: Glory. If it wasn't what was meant by Glory, he didn't care. His plot—who was to be master, that's all—didn't really much interest him; he was never able to grasp just what the Pope and Barbarossa were arguing about anyway. If someone had asked him (but no one would, his project had been begun in secrecy and years later would be burned in secrecy) what it was that had drawn him to this particular emperor, he wouldn't have been able to say. A harsh ring in the name. The picture of him old, mounted, armed, on his last futile crusade (all crusades were futile to young Auberon). And then swept away by chance in that armor under the waters of a nameless Armenian river when his charger shied in the middle of the ford. Glory.

"The Emperor doesn't look tired exactly, but . . ."

He marked this out too, angrily, and recapped his pen again. His huge ambition to delineate seemed suddenly insupportable, as though he might weep that he had to bear it alone.

I just hope you don't creep back into your shell.

But he had worked so hard to make that shell look just like him. He thought everyone had been fooled, and they hadn't been.

Dust swam in the sunlight still being cast into weighty blocks by the windows of the Summer House, but the place was growing chilly. Auberon put his pen away. Behind him on the shelves, old Auberon's boxes and portfolios stared at the back of his head. Would it always be so? Always a shell, always secrets? For his own secrets seemed likely to separate him from the rest of them as surely as any secret they had kept from him could have. And all he wanted was to be the Barbarossa he imagined: without illusions, without confusions, without shameful secrets: ferocious sometimes, embittered maybe, but all of a piece from breast to back.

He shivered. What had become of his jacket, anyway?


Not Yet

His mother was drawing it over her shoulders as she climbed the hill, thinking: Who plays baseball in weather like this? Young maples along the path, surrendering early, had already flamed beside still-green sisters and brothers. Wasn't this football or soccer weather? An extrovert, she thought, and smiled and shook her head: the glad hand, the easy smile. Oh dear . . . Since her children had stopped growing up quite so fast, the seasons had started going by Daily Alice faster: once, her children were different people in spring and fall, so much learning and sensing and laughing and weeping were packed into their age-long summers. She had hardly noticed that this fall had come. Maybe because she had only one child now to be readied ftr school. One and Smoky. Practically dutiless on autumn mornings with only one lunch to make, one sleepy body to chivvy from bath to breakfast, one bookstrap and one pair of boots to find.

And yet, as she went up the Hill, she felt huge duties calling to her.

She reached the stone table at the peak of the Hill, a little out of breath, and sat on the stone bench by it. Beneath it—a sorry mess, decayed and autumnal-looking—she glimpsed the pretty straw hat that Lucy had lost in June and mourned all summer. Seeing it, she felt sharply her children's fragility, their danger, their helplessness before loss, before pain, before ignorance. She named them in order in her mind: Tacey, Lily, Lucy, Auberon. They rang like bells of different pitch, some truer than others, but all answering her pull: they were fine, really, all four, just as she always told Mrs. Wolf or Marge Juniper or whoever else inquired after them: "They're fine." No: the duties she felt calling her (and she felt them more intensely now, seated in the sunlight above a wide landscape) didn't have to do with them, or with Smoky either. They had, Somehow, to do with that path upward, and this windy hill-top, and that sky raddled with fast-moving, pigeon-feather gray-and-white cloud, and this young autumn full (as every autumn so strangely is) of hope and expectation.

The feeling was intense, as though she were being drawn in or swept away; she sat motionless in its grip, marveling and a little frightened, expecting it to pass in a moment, like sensations of deja vu. But it didn't pass.

"What?" she said to the day. "What is it?"

Mute, the day couldn't answer: but it seemed to gesture to her, to tug at her familiarly, as though it had mistaken her for someone else. It seemed, and it would not stop seeming, just about to turn all at once to face in her direction, having heard her voice—as though she had all this time been looking at the wrong or back side of it (and of everything, always) and was now about to see it plain, as it really was: and it she, too: and still it couldn't speak.

"Oh, what," Daily Alice said, not knowing she spoke. She felt that she was dissolving helplessly into what she beheld, and at the same time had grown imperious enough to command it in every part; light enough to fly; yet so heavy that not the stone bench but the whole stone hill was her seat; awed, yet for some reason not surprised as she came to know what was being asked of her, what she was summoned to.

"No," she said in reply; "no," she said, softly, as she might have to a child who had by mistake taken hold of her hand or the skirt of her dress, thinking her its mother, turning up to her, inquiringly, its wondering face. "No."


"Turn away," she said, and the day did.

"Not yet," she said, and rang the bells of her children's names again. Tacey Lily Lucy Auberon. Smoky. Too much, too much yet to do; and yet there would come a time when, no matter how much was left to do, no matter how her daily duties had grown or shrunk away, a time when she could no longer refuse. She wasn't unwilling, or afraid, though she thought that when the time came she would be afraid, and yet could not refuse. . . . Astonishing, astonishing that there could be no end to growing bigger, she had thought years ago that she had grown so huge that she could grow no more, and yet she hadn't even begun. But: "Not yet, not yet," she said, as the day turned away; "not yet, there's too much to do still; please, not yet."

The Black Crow (or someone like him), far off invisible through the turning trees, called its call, heading home.

Cras. Cras.