Magic Elizabeth (4 page)

Shadow growled low in his throat, flicked a glance at Sally, and jumped off the bed to follow Aunt Sarah out.

As soon as they had gone, Sally jumped out of bed and ran to a window to look out. She could see now that it was indeed one enormous maple tree that showed at both windows. The tree seemed absorbed in shaking raindrops from its leaves. One leaf lay like a hand against a windowpane. Sally placed her hand over it. A wide margin of the sharp-edged leaf showed all around her hand, which looked quite small against it. How large the leaf was! She had never seen one so big. She supposed that the tree, like the house, must be very old.

She peered down through the moving leaves into what seemed at first to be a rippling green sea. Her room was at the back of the house, and she was looking down into what must once have been the garden. Now it was a blowing field of foxtails, tall grass, and Queen Anne’s lace. Blue and yellow butterflies rocked like tiny boats on the billowing green. The fur of the foxtails flared in the sun. Raindrops sparkled on the grass and weeds. The leaves of the apple trees — there were a number of them — were still shiny with rain.

Tall apartment buildings rose on either side and at the far end of the yard. How stiffly the red-brick buildings, their windows silver with raindrops, stood there enclosing the leaping garden. They might have been forbidding it to move on any further. For it seemed that the wild tangly growth out
there meant to do so if it could. Already it was lapping up the sides of the apartment buildings in vines, perhaps planning to creep over the top of them to the other side. The old barn slanted alarmingly beneath the vines, which nearly covered it. Its roof was sinking in the middle, as if the vines were working from inside too.

A row of pine trees at the back of the yard might have been the beginning of a deep forest, had it not been for the tall building just behind. The vines were busy there too, winding up into the pine trees and dragging their branches down. They had even crawled into the apple trees, so that the green-and-yellow apples looked as if they were growing from the vines. Bushes were bowed down by them. Even the grass and weeds were woven together in some places into little knotted bouquets.

How pretty it all was! If Aunt Sarah’s appearance had been like a bad dream, this was certainly a good one.

Sally leaned on the window sill and gazed down, feeling indeed as if she might be dreaming.

In all that moving green, a tiny flash of red caught Sally’s eye just then in the crack between the barn doors. She pressed her face against the glass and stared out at it. She wondered what it could be.

How she longed to be out there, feeling the
breeze lifting her hair. She turned her cheek to the cool glass, imagining how it would be. She wanted to wade through that sea of green, the foxtails tickling her knees. She wanted to peek into the barn, perhaps even go inside. What had it been like when the other Sally lived here? she wondered.

How quiet the room seemed behind her. The furniture was as stiff as the buildings. The only movement in the room was the flicker of leaf shadow over the walls and floor. Only the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall broke the absolute stillness of the house.

Just then there came a metallic clatter from the kitchen, reminding her that Aunt Sarah was waiting. She sighed and turned from the window. Maybe after breakfast she could go outside, if she could work up the courage to ask.

They ate breakfast at the big round table in the dining room, seated in high-backed gilded chairs with red velvet seats. Sally thought that they were quite a lot like thrones. Beside them, on a shelf beneath a bay window, stood a pot of tall ferns, looking like a miniature forest.

“Bought that the first day I was here,” Aunt Sarah explained. “Shadow likes something green in the house, to nibble.” And sure enough, just then Shadow, who had been cleaning his paws beneath
the table, jumped up on the shelf and delicately nipped at a frond of fern.

Beyond the window, at the end of the rippling garden, Sally could see the row of pine trees, seeming even more like a real forest than they had from upstairs, for from where she was sitting she could see nothing of the building behind them through the thick branches. How dark and mysterious they looked, even by daylight!

They had very little to say to each other during breakfast, although Sally was bursting with questions such as, “What is that red I saw in the barn?” and “Can’t I please play outside?” But every time that she peeked across the table at Aunt Sarah’s stern-lipped face, her courage failed her.

Sally sneezed.

Her aunt looked up. “That doesn’t sound good,” she said. “You’d better stay inside this morning, Sally. You may play in the parlor or anywhere you like in the house, if you are careful not to break anything, but you’d better not go into the attic. It’s much too dusty and dirty up there.” And she stood up, excused herself, and went into the kitchen.

Sally looked up from her plate, pushed her chair back, stood up, and wandered into the big parlor that she had glimpsed the night before through the bead curtains.

As she came into the room, she surprised Shadow,
who jumped into the air and skidded across the shiny floor on a small rug, giving a startled “m-row” as he went. Sally clapped her hand to her mouth, and out came a sound that was very much like a strangled laugh.

“Cats,” said Aunt Sarah’s voice, “are very dignified, and do not like to be laughed at.” Sally looked up to see her standing, a broom in one hand, just beyond the bead curtains in the front hall. Shadow walked through the curtains to her, and Aunt Sarah picked him up. Sally could see the glitter of his fiery eyes in the dim hallway, and then both of them disappeared. Tears started in Sally’s eyes and blurred the hanging beads so that they looked like the glitter of Shadow’s eyes, endlessly repeated. She angrily brushed the tears away. “I didn’t mean anything wrong,” she whispered. But she’d done it again. There seemed to be no pleasing Aunt Sarah. “She doesn’t like me any more than I like her,” she thought. “She’s afraid I’ll hurt her old house, or her cat.”

“I’m going out for a short time,” called Aunt Sarah. Sally jumped and looked to see that she had reappeared behind the bead curtains. She was wearing a hat, and was drawing white gloves over her fingers. “I’ll leave Shadow with you,” she said, and she was gone, the door opening to let a flood of sunlight into the hall and then closing with a soft thud
that was like the sound of darkness returning to the hall. Sally ran to a window and peeked out. She watched her aunt go down the path, through the little iron gate; and then she watched as her aunt’s profile, beneath the black hat, sailed grimly along over the tops of the bushes.

Sally turned and faced the room. She was alone, she thought. “I’m all alone,” she said aloud, trying her voice to see how it sounded in the still room. It sounded very small indeed, and rather frightened besides. How very big the house felt suddenly. The long beaded strings of the curtain, which had been disturbed by the opening and closing of the door, still clicked softly together. Sally sat down on a tiny flowered stool before the fireplace, which was of green marble like the one in her room, only much larger. As she did so, she heard again the tiny tremble of music she had heard the night before in the hall. And her eyes found, between two velvet-draped windows, what must be the melodeon.

Sally walked over to it. It was a very pretty and graceful instrument, rather like a small piano. Its wood was highly polished, and smelled faintly of lemon. She shyly touched one of the yellowed keys, and the tinkly musical note flew lightly about the room. “What a pretty thing it is,” she thought. “Imagine it belonging to Aunt Sarah.” For it was
as unlike her as anything could be — very dainty, and possessing a most beautiful voice.

She turned from the melodeon to look at the rest of the room, which became clearer as the music died away. She became aware, too, of the sounds of traffic in the street — cars and trucks passing, horns honking and heels clicking — loud for a time, then fading away to be replaced by other sounds. She thought again that the furniture looked very old, as if it must remember a time when the noises outside were quite different. Most of it was upholstered in some kind of velvet, worn dull in spots and shiny in others. The wood that framed many of the chairs and love seats was carved with flowers and bunches of grapes. Maybe it had looked like this when the other Sally lived here, she thought. The gas jet in the fireplace was lighted, and the line of flickering blue flames made a comforting bubbling sound in the otherwise quiet room.

Two tall cupboards with rounded glass fronts stood against one wall, looking like a pair of prim old-fashioned ladies. Sally walked across the room to peer into them, wondering at their contents. She had never been in a house like this before. Everything, even Aunt Sarah, seemed to have come from another time.

One cupboard held a set of teacups and saucers,
and beside them was another set exactly the same, except that these were doll-sized. She wondered if they had belonged to the other Sally, and she longed to touch them, but did not dare to open the cupboard. One of the tiny cups, she could see, had lost a handle. The cups, brushed with gold inside, were so thin that she could see through them, as if they were really the ghosts of cups used here long ago. She imagined the rustle of the ladies’ long skirts as their hands gently lifted the fragile cups. Perhaps the other Sally had sat on the fireplace stool, holding her doll and watching them, and the room was lit by candles — no — she looked at the line of blue flames in the fireplace — gaslights, maybe that’s what they had then.

She sighed and moved on to another cupboard, this one a jumble of huge sea shells, pink, violet, bone-white. They looked, she thought, with their open ends toward her, as if they were all humming with the sound of the sea, which she knew she would hear if she opened the cupboard door, took one out, and held it to her ear. She wondered if the humming of so many shells would fill the room if she
were
to open the door.

But she moved restlessly on, with an odd feeling that she was looking for something, though she didn’t know what. She peeked behind chairs and behind the large gold fan that seemed to have been
pushed aside when the gas was lighted in the fireplace. She smoothed out the wrinkle in the rug behind it. She even looked under the cushions of the davenport. It was while she was straightening the last cushion that the glitter of one of the tiny teacups caught her eye.

“The doll!” she whispered. “I wish I could find the doll!” What if the doll were still in the house? What if she could find her? What if she explored the whole house, even — the word “attic” flashed into her mind, and her thoughts went bounding up the stairs to a mysterious place at the top of the house, a place Aunt Sarah had called dusty and dirty. But hadn’t Aunt Sarah said something else about the attic, the night before, in her room — something about old things being stored in the attic, the old things in the picture?

Sally sat down again upon the little flowered stool.

“Aunt Sarah said not to go up there,” she told herself.

“But she isn’t here,” she answered, “and besides, she said I’d ‘better not.’ That isn’t exactly the same, is it?”

“She’ll be awfully mad if she comes back and finds me poking around up there.” She was already standing up.

“Well, I’ll hurry and I won’t hurt anything. I’ll
just look. This might be my only chance to go up there.”

She could
feel
the huge dark attic yawning far, far above her, beneath the tall trees that shaded the house. And she shivered. Attics were full of black shadows and queer shapes, especially strange attics — and especially forbidden attics.

But she found herself at the bead curtains.

She pushed through them into the hall. Her knees were shaking, but she made herself go on, up the long stairway, touching the cold foot of the stone angel for good luck.

She had forgotten all about Shadow.

S
ally did not notice
, as she made her way up the winding staircase, that Shadow was following close behind. She was hurrying, sometimes taking two steps at a time, for she felt that there was no time to lose. Aunt Sarah might return at any moment.

As she stepped onto the carpet of red flowers in the upper hall, the grandfather clock at the other end of the hall gave the loud click which came before its chiming, as if the clock had to take a deep breath before beginning the hard work of telling the hour. Sally jumped nervously. “Shh,” she whispered to the clock, but it went slowly on with its chiming. Standing there, looking down the long
expanse of hall at the enormous clock, she felt as if it was speaking to her. “From now on,” it seemed to be saying, “things will be different.” The deep tones vibrated through her body, as if the upstairs had become the inside of a great clock. The very walls trembled. She felt trapped there, unable to move until the clock finished. Behind her, Shadow stopped to lick a paw. As the deep notes died away, and the melodeon shivered a tiny response from the parlor, she listened for a moment, and hearing nothing at all downstairs she took a deep breath and began to step very quietly from flower to flower upon the carpet, as if they were stones in a stream she must cross. Shadow silently followed.