A Green and Ancient Light (31 page)

I felt a rush of emotion. It wasn't anything I saw, but the fact that I stood on the threshold of the puzzle's solution. With my feet set here, I had reached the end of the clue path; I was gazing into the face of the duke's secret. I'd accepted his invitation to examine the garden piece by piece, and now I could have told him “whether so many marvels were created for deception or purely for art.”

But . . . such grandiose thoughts presupposed that there
was
actually a fairy door somewhere in the verdant sprawl.

“Can you see anything?” Grandmother asked.

“The thicket,” I said.

“What about it?” asked Mr. Girandole. “Look carefully. Where do the angels' fingers point?”

Taking a deep breath, I studied the reflection and its framing figures. At the very center was . . . was an imposing vertical shaft—grayish-white, and cloaked in green—that old, dead tree, the giant trunk without limbs or crown, overgrown with vines.

The puzzle's final piece had fallen into place. Of
course
the door would be in some natural location—a rock wall, a bank of earth . . .
or a tree
. Most of the garden's light was filtered by leaves; they
whispered in the music of Faery. This stump—the remnant of one of the grand trees, those that now provided the roof of leaves—was easily old enough to have been here before the duke's time. There could be no mistake. The top angel's arm and finger were dead center on the trunk, pointing straight down its length. The other two angels pointed at it from the sides, and they smiled their enigmatic smiles.

But with the triumph came a new worry. What if the doorway required the tree to be alive? What if the portal we sought had died long ago?

“It's that dead tree!” I stepped out of the prints so the others could see.

“That old rampike!” Mr. Girandole stared at it, taking off his hat. “I've walked past it so often. A day or two ago, I even said to it, ‘I wish you could talk, old friend, and tell us of what you've seen'!”

“I remember it being there when I was a girl,” Grandmother said. “It seemed halfway between a tree and a statue. I wondered if all the statues had grown from trees, or if all the trees had started out as statues.”

Grandmother and R —— didn't remove their shoes, but they seemed to place their feet respectfully enough. Our different heights didn't matter: we all saw the vine-clad stump at the mirror's center.

Mr. Girandole clapped his hands. “
Sisters dancing in the water
and the sky!
The fairy metaphor of death—here death stands, amid all the garden's life, a trunk without limbs—the ‘dancing sisters' of its leaves are long gone, dancing far away.”

My worries about the door's functionality dissolved. It was fitting that the garden's answer lay here—in a mouth like a tomb,
a lifeless tree, and a path leading on beyond the world to where there was no more death.

But I was too nervous to go farther. I could only watch as Mr. Girandole and R —— crossed to the thicket, moved through the first brambles to the trunk's base, and began to search among the vines.

Grandmother and I sat together on the steps. She laid her stick across her knees.

“I think we've found it,” she said.

“I think so.”

“I wonder what your father would have done,” Grandmother said, “if he'd found a keyhole in this stump when he had the key. He might have disappeared into Faery, and I would never have known what became of him. I'd have been wrong about how the garden was a safe place to play.”

I nodded. Probably, my papa had never suspected a
tree
of harboring a keyhole. He would have assumed the key opened something built by the duke.

“Do you suppose the duke made the key,” I asked her, “or that the fairies gave it to him?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Girandole might.”

Mr. Girandole and R —— vanished around opposite sides of the trunk, picking their way into the brush. After several moments, by R ——'s wild whooping, I knew they'd found something. Soon, they came hurrying back, R —— elated and Mr. Girandole quiet and serious.

They'd discovered, at about waist height on the tree's far side, a keyhole.

“It's not framed by any metal,” Mr. Girandole explained. “Not carved. It's just right there in the wood, as if it grew there. It has
to be magical; most holes in tree trunks will swell shut or change shape.”

R —— spoke earnestly in his own language, and Mr. Girandole translated for us.

“R —— wants to go through the door. He knows that I plan to wait. Obviously, R —— can't wait for years, and shouldn't have to. He can be a test pilot, he says—he'll establish for us that the key works, and that I can use the door when I need to. He says he's no good at prolonged good-byes, so he wants to leave soon.”

“No want good-bye,” R —— said. “But here, can't stay. No place. No want good-bye, but tomorrow and tomorrow, more, more hard. I go today.”

Mr. Girandole drew a long breath. “R ——, there
is
a place for you here, if you'd like to stay. You can live in my cave for the winter, and through next year . . . for however long it takes until the war is over. Then you can go or stay as you please. You're our friend.
My
friend.” He reached for R ——'s hand and clasped it.

In a breaking voice, R —— said, “Thank you, Girandole.” He pronounced the name badly, but it was the first time I'd heard R —— call him anything other than “Mr. Satyr.” Again he spoke in his native tongue, and at the end, Mr. Girandole gripped R ——'s arms before turning back to us.

“He's resolved to go.”

Grandmother nodded understanding.

“But R ——,” said Mr. Girandole, “Noon is the worst hour to do this. You want to cross the border into Faery quickly, because the border is the most dangerous. It's thinner at dawn and dusk. Can you wait until gloaming this evening, when you won't have far to go?”

R —— agreed.

Mr. Girandole took off his hat and placed it over his chest as he faced me. I knew he was searching for the words to thank me, trying to take care of all the things that needed to be said. We'd found the door for him—we'd done it together. I shook his hand.

For lunch, we had a picnic on the terrace. We ate the food Grandmother and I had brought: crackers, sardines, cheese, plums, tangerines, and a few early grapes. Mr. Girandole fetched his jug of sun-brewed tea; we had no way of cooling it, but its flavor was summer itself. The long, warm afternoon stretched around us as R —— played fairy melodies on his flute, Mr. Girandole kept his tireless lookout, and Grandmother settled down on a bench for her nap.

“I'm not going all the way down the mountain and then back up before evening,” she told me. “But if you have the energy, it would be good for you to make a trip down there and gather up what you can find in the kitchen. R —— ought to have supper before he goes.”

“I can go hunting for the main course,” Mr. Girandole offered.

“Then we'll have a proper feast,” Grandmother said.

I was glad for a mission. The waiting was unbearable, and I was already missing R ——. His music filled me with an indefinable emotion that was part sadness, but it included a yearning for something I could not name.

“What if some of your friends are looking for you?” I asked, thinking that it was unusual for Grandmother to be away from the cottage all day.

She eased her head back, using the carpet bag as a pillow. “Tell them we've switched today, and I'm off playing while you mind the house.”

*  *  *  *

As I descended the meadow, I caught sight of Mrs. F —— taking down laundry in her back garden. She looked toward me between billowing sheets, and I waved. She may have tipped up her chin in a dour greeting, but it was hard to tell. I let myself in at our back door with Grandmother's shiny brass key. I was so used to village life that I was thinking of the ice man, who made his deliveries twice a week; tomorrow, whether we were home or not, we would have to leave the door unlocked for him. It was such a different world from the city . . . the city to which I'd be returning in only four days.

I collected what transportable food I could find and stuffed it into the other rucksack. Slinging it over my shoulder, I pulled the door shut and locked it. I bounded off the mossy step and raced toward the gate. But halfway there, I stopped so suddenly that I pitched over forward, landing on all fours.

A man was standing just outside the gate. He leaned with his arms folded on it, watching me from beneath the bill of his hat.

A policeman.

“Whoops,” he said, commenting on the tumble I'd taken.

I floundered and scooped up two bread rolls that had bounced out of the bag.

“Good afternoon,” said the policeman, and I returned the greeting as best I could, picking myself up, wondering what to do. It felt as if the air were being squeezed out of my chest.

“Where are we going?” He raised his head and sighted along his nose at me.

“Not, uh, far,” I mumbled. “I mean . . .”

A second policeman strolled toward us from out by the arbors.

“What's that? Speak up,” said the first. “Where's Mrs. T ——?”

I opened my mouth with absolutely no idea what I was going to say. I hadn't been thinking about a thing except getting back up the mountain as quickly as I could.

But at that moment, Mrs. F —— appeared from around the corner of her back hedge. Her sharp glance took in the two men and me. “P ——!” she cried pleasantly, calling the policeman by his first name and waving to his companion. I'd never heard such a cheerful tone from her. “A fine day, isn't it? What brings you here?”

Both men tipped their hats. “Making the rounds, Mrs. F ——. Keeping an eye on things, now that the Army is gone.” The man at the gate turned back to me. “Well, boy?”

I looked down at my shoes and sideways at the purple blossoms of the germander.

“Look up here, and answer my question.”

Just when I thought I might faint, Mrs. F ——, the last person from whom I'd have expected help, came to my rescue. “P ——, you're scaring the boy. He's not a burglar. That's M ——'s grandson, staying with her. He's been here since April.”

Of course, the policemen knew I belonged here. They must have seen me with Grandmother a hundred times. But how was I going to explain where Grandmother was now, or where I was running to with an armload of food?

Mrs. F —— continued. “I'm watching him today, because M —— has an appointment.”

I felt my eyes widening, but I kept my face averted.

“He just went over there to collect some things from the kitchen. I told him to hurry.”

“Oh.” The policeman straightened and patted the top of the gate. “Right, then.”

His partner chuckled, thumbs stuck into his belt. “Burglars generally don't have keys, do they?” he said as if to me, and winked.

The first man unlatched the gate for me and held it open as I hurried over to join Mrs. F ——.

“Take it on inside,” she told me, and with a nod, I let myself into her back garden, where the laundry billowed like sails and circus tents. The hedge was dense, but I found a place to peep through. She stood and chatted with the two policemen for a long while.

Not wanting to go into her house alone, I sat down and pulled up my knees in a shady corner of the yard. A white stone cherub held a basket that sprouted pink fuchsia, its blossoms like lanterns.

Eventually, Mrs. F —— entered the garden and looked around until she spotted me. With a gesture she told me to stay put, and she went into her kitchen. She emerged soon after with a glass of cold tea that clinked and rattled with chips of ice.

As she handed it to me, I blurted my thanks. I was almost as afraid of her as of a policeman or soldier. I remembered Grand­mother saying that Mrs. F ——'s boys had been hellions. I wondered what exactly that meant, what kind of mischief they'd pulled. I still didn't know how to explain myself.

She held up a hand to cut me off. “The thanks will suffice,” she said. “Whatever you're up to, I won't have M —— thinking I wrung the story out of you.”

Mrs. F —— certainly knew my grandmother well. Crossing her arms, she peered down at me from beneath her straight hair—it was as gleaming white as her linens on the clothesline. “You'd better sit there and take your time with that tea before you go scampering
up the field again.” She glanced toward the hedge, indicating that I should give the police plenty of time to move on. To spare me the anguish of conversation, she turned her back, adjusted one of the sheets, and hobbled up the path to her door.

I clutched the sweating glass, sipping at the frosty, aromatic tea, and listened to the birds chirping in the trees and hedges. Slowly, my heartbeat returned to normal. The largest sheet above me inflated with the breeze, tugging at its clothespins, and it was like being on the deck of a ship; the colorful handkerchiefs and skirts were flags and pennants, and the vine-covered clothesline pole was the mast.

But the sun was forever moving, and I was itching to get back to the grove. I walked carefully among the flower beds to the path and carried the empty glass to the cottage door. Before I could knock, Mrs. F ——'s face loomed in a window.

“You can leave it there, on the step,” she told me. She was chopping some pungent vegetable on a cutting board. I could hear the knife going
zak-zak-zak.
The strong odor of the juice made my eyes water, even outside the window. It didn't seem to bother Mrs. F ——.

“Thank you again,” I said.

She nodded briskly and turned back to her cooking.

Pausing only to take a good look around for policemen, I hurried back up the mountain. Before I passed under the roof of treetops, I noticed that the sky was one of the best I'd seen all summer: bottomless, dazzling blue, with magnificent white cloud towers. They formed endless pictures, their shifting so slow that one hardly noticed it.