Magic Elizabeth (12 page)

“Oh, I
would
like it!” cried Sally. “But —”

“Run along then, and ask her.”

Sally hesitated for just a moment, and then she hurried out into the garden. She looked up at Emily’s window. The shade was drawn again. “Maybe they’re not home,” she told herself.

“Emily,” she called, then louder, “Emily!”

With a brisk snap, the shade flew up and Emily’s face appeared in the window. Her braids dangled over the sill as she leaned out. The corners of her mouth turned up in the curly smile Sally already knew so well. “Hi, Sally,” she said.

“Hi, Emily, how are you?”

“I’m fine. I was just hoping you’d come out today.”

“You were?” asked Sally. “But I thought — I
mean, yesterday, you were gone when I came back.”

“I had to go,” said Emily. “My mother called me. We went shopping.”

“Oh,” breathed Sally. She smiled her happy relief up at her friend.

“Sally,” asked Emily in an anxious voice, “are you — will you be going home? Is your mother coming?”

Sally shook her head. “No,” she said, “I told her I wanted to stay.”

“Oh, I’m glad!” cried Emily. “I’m
so
glad!”

“I’m glad too,” said Sally.

“Did you find Elizabeth yet?”

Sally shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “But Emily, my Aunt Sarah told me to ask you if you could come over for lunch. We’ll make gingerbread cookies too. Could you? Do you think your mother would let you?”

“I’d like to,” said Emily eagerly. “I’ll ask my mother. Wait just a minute.”

Sally chewed on the end of a blade of grass while she waited. “Oh, I hope,” she whispered, “I hope she can.” She crossed her fingers. Like a good omen from the past, a tiny toad hopped by, looking very much like the one in her dream, and vanished into the tall grass.

Emily’s face showed again at the window with
the suddenness of a puppet appearing on stage. She was smiling. “My mother says I can come,” she announced, and then the stage was empty. The curtains stirred a little.

Aunt Sarah had a little starched apron, white with borders of lace, for each of them, and they helped each other tie the sashes in back. “They were mine when I was about your age,” said Aunt Sarah.

When the cookies were baked, they ate them for dessert after their lunch of peanut-butter sandwiches, carrot sticks, and potato chips. They sat for this meal at the round table in the dining room. In the afternoon Aunt Sarah left them to their own devices for the most part, but when she was with them, she did not seem frightening in the least, and Sally felt quite proud of her. “She’s
my
Aunt Sarah,” she thought, and she enjoyed showing her off a bit to Emily. Showing Emily about the house after lunch was like living again through the wonder of seeing it for the first time herself, only without the fear.

“Oh, there’s the melodeon!” exclaimed Emily as they went into the parlor. “And it does play a little tune when you walk!” They amused themselves for a time by walking back and forth, just to hear it tinkle.

Of course Emily had to look at the shells, and
hear about how they had once lined the garden paths, and finger with wonder the bit of shell from Sally’s pocket. She seemed quite enchanted with the frail little cups and saucers, and her eyes were like saucers themselves as she listened to Sally’s story of how the handle on one of the cups had come to be broken.

“I wonder if it really did happen that way,” said Emily, staring at the cup through their two reflections in the glass front of the cupboard.

“That’s what its says in the diary,” said Sally.

“Could I see the diary?” asked Emily.

Sally nodded and led the way through the bead curtains.

“Shadow’s coming too,” said Emily.

“Oh, he always follows me, don’t you, Shadow?” said Sally. She felt quite as if this was her own home, and as though she had lived here all her life.

“What funny curtains,” said Emily. “They tickle when you walk through them. Oh, look at Shadow! He slipped on that rug!” She laughed.

“Cats,” said Sally, picking him up to comfort him, “are very dignified and don’t like to be laughed at.” And then she began to laugh.

“What’s the matter?” asked Emily.

“Oh, nothing,” Sally answered. “Just something I thought of.”

“What a nice angel,” said Emily, stopping to admire
her. She touched the angel’s foot and smiled up at Sally. “I like this house,” she said. “And what a long stairway. It goes on and on!”

In the upstairs hall she stared in awe at the grandfather clock, and admired the flowers on the rug. “It looks like a garden up here,” she said.

Sally took her proudly into her bedroom.

“What a pretty room!” cried Emily, her eyes shining. “It’s the prettiest room I ever saw! Oh, Sally, you’re so lucky!”

“Maybe I am,” thought Sally, remembering how she had felt when she had first come here. And now, why now she was having the best adventure of her life! “How funny,” she thought. “If I hadn’t come here, I wouldn’t have known Emily, and I wouldn’t know about the other Sally, and Elizabeth!”

“Is that the other Sally and Elizabeth?” Emily was pointing to the picture over the fireplace.

Sally nodded.

“She
does
look just like you! And Elizabeth is — she’s wonderful! Oh, Sally, you just have to find her! Wouldn’t it be fun to play with her?”

Sally took Emily up to the attic and showed her the other Sally’s trunk and all the things inside. She let her read the diary, and she put on the other Sally’s clothes for her. She told Emily all about her dreams, and how it had seemed that she could see the other Sally in the mirror. The two of them stood
side by side looking into the mirror. “Yes,” said Emily, “that does look just like the other Sally in there.” She took a bite from the gingerbread cooky she had brought to the attic with her. “I wish I could have a dream like that,” she said wistfully.

But this time nothing happened.

And they looked and looked for some clue to Elizabeth’s whereabouts. But for a very long time they found nothing at all.

“What’s Shadow doing?” asked Emily.

Sally looked up from the paper-lace valentine she had found in a box. “Oh, he’s pushing something into that space between the wall and the roof. See where it comes down there? He’s always doing that.”

“Cats are funny,” said Emily. “Is it true that they don’t like to be laughed at?”

“That’s what my Aunt Sarah says,” Sally answered, smoothing the lace of the valentine and placing it back in the box. “She’s very old and she probably knows a lot.”

Emily had disappeared behind a chest of drawers.

Sally looked up when she heard a gasp of surprise, which seemed, since she could not see Emily, to come from the chest itself.

“Sally!” cried Emily’s excited voice. “Come here!” Her face, which to Sally’s surprise had
turned a glowing pink since she had last seen it, appeared briefly from behind the chest and then vanished again.

Sally was on her feet immediately, hurrying over to Emily, hardly daring to hope, scarcely able to breathe. “Is it — Elizabeth?” she whispered.

“No,” said Emily, looking up at her from where she was kneeling on the floor behind the chest. “It’s this!” And with a triumphant flourish she held something up in one hand.

It was Sally’s turn to gasp. “Emily,” she whispered. “It’s Elizabeth’s bonnet!”

Emily nodded her head up and down several times in rapid succession, her grin widening all the while, till it stretched almost to her ears.

Sally’s trembling fingers reached out to take the little yellow bonnet. “It really is!” she cried, looking up at Emily, whose head was still bobbing excitedly up and down. “Where did you find it?”

Emily’s head was slowing down, though the grin remained. “Right here,” she said proudly, pointing to a spot on the dusty floor near her knees.

Sally stared at the spot as if she expected it to tell her something. There was a pounding in her ears which would have made it impossible to hear anything, however, particularly the faint voice of a dust-laden floor.

She looked up at Emily, “I looked back here yesterday,” she said, “and I’m sure it wasn’t here then.”

Emily was not smiling now. Her eyes were very dark and round with astonishment. The two girls stared at each other. They could hear the steady ticking of the grandfather clock, like the beating of the heart of the old house. And indeed, at that moment the house did seem to Sally to be alive, and more than that, to
know
something about Elizabeth and the other Sally, about herself and Aunt Sarah. Houses must get to know something, she thought, with all the things that happen in them. Was it trying to tell her something?

“But how did it get here, then?” Emily was asking.

Sally shook her head. How
had
the bonnet gotten here, where it had certainly not been yesterday? She looked up at the dusty rafters overhead — not so far overhead at this point, for they were sitting only a little distance from the part of the wall where the roof sloped steeply down. By standing on tiptoe, she was able to touch the roof. She ran her fingers along the top of the rafter. The thick coating of dust that she found there had certainly not been disturbed in many years. There was nothing up there but dust. The bonnet could not have fallen down from there.

She sat down again. “Emily,” she said, “do you realize what this means? It means that Elizabeth
is
here somewhere. I was right!”

Emily nodded. Her eyes were very shiny.

Sally got down on her hands and knees and peered beneath the chest of drawers. She sat up. “She’s not there,” she said. She looked down at the faded little bonnet in the palm of her hand. It looked in that unsteady hand as if it were trembling with a life of its own.

As she gazed at it, her longing to find Elizabeth, to hold her in her arms, grew until it filled her entire body and spilled over into the attic. It seemed to her that the very cobwebs shuddered in sympathy. The trunks looked as if they were about to fling open their tops in excitement.

“Emily,” she said, looking up at her friend, “it almost seems as if Elizabeth is leaving clues for us, doesn’t it?”

Emily touched her tongue to her upper lip and nodded. “Maybe she really is magic,” she said.

“Maybe she wants us to find her,” said Sally. “Maybe she’s lonely.”

“Yes,” agreed Emily, clasping her hands tightly together and shivering with delight. “Do you think she’s playing a game with us?”

Sally thought for a moment. “No,” she said at last,
“I don’t think so. I think it’s just that she can’t do everything for us. We have to do something to find her.” It seemed to her as she spoke that she knew Elizabeth very well, knew that she would not play such a game with them, would never tease them. Or was it the other Sally she knew so well? After all, it was the other Sally who had first imagined things with Elizabeth, just as Sally herself was doing.

“But what can we do?” asked Emily.

“We can start looking all over again,” said Sally. Determination strengthened her voice. She stood up and slipped the little hat carefully into her pocket.

Once more they made a careful search of the attic.

“She isn’t here anywhere,” wailed Emily at last, turning her dust-streaked face to Sally. Cobwebs were clinging to her long braids, and there was a black smudge on her nose. “Your face is all dirty, Sally,” she said.

Sally nodded wearily. “There’s nowhere else to look,” she agreed and brushed at her cheek. But Elizabeth had to be somewhere, she reminded herself, touching the little bonnet in her pocket. Yes, she had to be.

They went downstairs to show their find to Aunt Sarah, who could not seem to believe that she held
the little bonnet in her trembling fingers. She was looking at it as if it were a small ghost.

“Elizabeth
was
wearing the bonnet when she was lost, wasn’t she?” asked Sally anxiously, for she had just realized that maybe the bonnet had never been lost at all. And that would mean — that would mean that Elizabeth was as far away as ever!

But Aunt Sarah nodded. “I’m certain that she was,” she answered firmly, and Sally believed her. “You say the bonnet wasn’t there yesterday?” she asked.

Sally shook her head. “I know it wasn’t there. I looked. I remember looking in that very place.”

“It’s very strange,” said Aunt Sarah, “very strange indeed.” And she gave the bonnet back to Sally, handling it very gently as she did so. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” she said, as if she were talking to herself, “if you
did
find Elizabeth after all these years?” She smiled, though it looked to Sally — she thought that she must be mistaken — as if there were
tears
in Aunt Sarah’s eyes!

It was hard to say good-bye to Emily that day, for both of them were so excited that they wanted to go on and on talking about the bonnet, and how it could have come to be there on the floor of the attic, and where else they could look for Elizabeth. Even Aunt Sarah was caught up in their enthusiasm, and seemed reluctant to have it end.

“You’re very sure,” she said, “that you looked everywhere?” They nodded.