Aunt Maria (20 page)

Mum was beginning to shiver in the evening wind, collecting shells, but she was all right. “Mum, will you humor me again?” I asked.

“I might. Unless it means sitting on the beach two hours more,” she said. “What?”

“I'll tell you later tonight,” I said. “Promise?”

“Promise,” she said.

“THE STORY OF THE TWIN PRINCESSES”

BY N. M. LAKER

J
ust look what Aunt Maria wrote on the title page of my old story!

Dear Naomi,

I see from the last few pages of your other writing that Elaine is right. I have been much too trusting. You should not have gone to see the Phelpses, child. They are petty people who do not understand as you and I do, but they can only sow poison—that is the extent of their malice, and I know no real harm is done.

I give you this story instead and suggest you finish it while you meditate on how deeply you have hurt me.

Your loving,

Aunt Maria

In other words, disaster has struck. I am having to write the rest of this on the blank pages I left in “The Twin Princesses.” How lucky I did. The paper is furry and smells of mildew, and I am locked in. But at least I am still in human shape. And Aunt Maria doesn't know all the other things that happened before Elaine stole my biography. It is lucky I didn't have time to write any more.

I did hope Chris would come that night after I went to the Phelpses, but he didn't. He seems to have disappeared entirely. I keep being afraid he's been run over or shot by farmers inland.

Anyway, as soon as Aunt Maria started snoring that night, I whispered to Mum, “Mum, you promised you'd humor me.”

Poor Mum. She was terribly tired. She said she'd hoped I'd forgotten, but she got out of bed, sighing, and said what did I want.

“Put your coat on and come down and sit with me in Chris's room,” I said.

She was so sleepy she must have forgotten she thought Chris was in London. But she made a fuss because nothing would possess Lavinia to come down with us. I think the injunction must have been working that way. Lavinia scratched us both and bolted. “Oh,
leave
her!” I whispered angrily.

“What kind of lever, dear?” Aunt Maria called instantly.

“I said Mig has a slight
fever
, Auntie,” Mum called, coming to my rescue. “We're going downstairs to see what we can do for it. You go to sleep.”

“Call Dr. Bailey!” Aunt Maria said sleepily.

“In the morning,” Mum called soothingly.

It worked. Aunt Maria was snoring again as we went into Chris's room. Mum held her candle up and looked round it in a bewildered way. “Where's Chris?” she said. I had hopes for a moment, until she said, “Oh, downstairs eating tomorrow's lunch again, obviously. Look at the way he leaves his bed. What am I to humor
you
in, Mig?”

“By sitting here and waiting for Chris,” I said. “There's something I want to discuss with you both.”

Mum sat on Chris's bed. She yawned, then shivered. “Must the window be open?”

“Yes,” I said. “That's important.” I was still hoping Chris would jump through it then. It is fortunate Mum is so very saintly and obliging. She looked resigned. She pulled Chris's covers round both our shoulders and we sat leaning our backs against the wall, watching the little pointed candle flame quiver on the end of the candle.

“What are we waiting for?” Mum asked, giving a bit of a jump. It was much later. I could tell because the candle had burnt much further down, spilling a long transparent waterfall of wax down one side.

“Don John of Austria,” I said. “I hope.”

Mum sort of laughed. “Am I still humoring you?” she asked hopefully.

I said, “Yes,” and we both went to sleep again.

I had the dream again. It is worse each time you have it, because as soon as it starts you know what you're in for. Years and years of being shut inside the ground, desperate useless rages and frantic fighting to get out. It's horrible the way feet run over the top of you, too. I burst out of it finally and looked up at the ghost in the strange dim light. The candle was out. He had one eyebrow up and was looking at me expectantly.

“I'm working on it,” I told him. “This time I brought… ” I looked round and realized that Mum was fast asleep. She looked terribly peaceful and pretty with the light shining on her rounded forehead and her little nose, and none of her wrinkles showing.

I dug my elbow into her and she leaped up with her hands to her head, crying out, “Oh,
Lord
, I was having a horrible dream!” She saw the ghost, and he saw her. They both looked thoroughly amazed. “Who … who?” said Mum.

“The ghost,” I said. “At least, he's not. He's alive. This is his projection … er … sending from wherever he is.”

The ghost looked at me then. There was real hope in his face.

“Who
is
he?” said Mum.

“He's called Antony Green,” I said.

The ghost gave us both a little bow at that. His mane of hair flopped. And he turned to me expectantly.

“Mr. Phelps says you
must
talk,” I said. “He can let you out if he knows where you are.”

“Yes,
do
you talk?” Mum said.

He looked from one to the other of us and began smiling his long smile.

“Oh,
what
a smile!” Mum said.

“Yes, but be careful,” I said. “He usually goes away after that. It's a twisting-you-round-his-finger smile like Chris does.”

“Yes, I
see
,” Mum said. “Poor man, he's not quite all here, is he? No, wait a minute,” she said. The ghost was starting to go. I could see books through him. Mum jumped off Chris's bed and stumbled toward the ghost, all mixed up in Chris's covers. He backed away from her, until he really was in the bookshelf, among all the books there. “Don't go yet,” Mum said. “Let me look at you. Stand still … er… Antony Green.”

He stayed where he was, staring at Mum with a hurt, inquiring sort of look on his crooked face. It really was strange. Mum stood, bending a bit forward, peering at him embedded in the bookshelf.

“I think you've got yourself wrong,” was the first thing Mum said after a while. “Nobody looks quite this odd. But you're putting out your own idea of yourself, aren't you? I suppose it's quite a privilege to see it.” Then she stared a while longer and said, “That dream—you brought that dream, didn't you? Is that where you are, how you feel? It
is
, isn't it?” The ghost was nodding slowly. “And you're alive? Mig says you're alive,” Mum said. The ghost was still nodding. Mum looked angrily over her shoulder at me. “Mig, why didn't you explain at
once
? As soon as you met him. We could have got him out weeks ago!” And she rounded on the ghost again. “You have to tell me where you are,” she said, “and we'll come and get you. Can you please explain exactly where you are?”

The ghost put up his shoulders and spread his hands out. I thought he meant he couldn't say, but Mum nodded and said, “I see. And how do we find that out?” The ghost raised a shadowy hand and pointed, first away somewhere, then more or less at me. “I
think
I see,” Mum said. The ghost was fading all the time now. She said, “I think that's everything. You can let go now. I'll be with you as soon as we can.”

The ghost was a mere blur by then. I could only see his strange crooked face. “Mum!” I said. “Make him wait!” But he vanished while I was saying it. “We never asked him about Chris!” I wailed in the dark.

“He couldn't stay, Mig. Couldn't you see?” Mum said. “It took him a tremendous effort to be here at all.” She stumbled about in the dark. “Where's the candle? What made it go out?”

“He always puts it out,” I said. I found the matches and her hand and put the two together. “There was something urgent I needed him to do,” I said.

“There can't be anything more urgent than he is himself,” Mum said, lighting the candle. She had fierce wrinkles in her forehead. “You can't find someone who's buried alive and then
ask
them things!” she said. “Goodness, Mig, surely you can see that.” Then she sat down with her face in her hands. “Now let me think a minute. My head's in rather a whirl!”

I let her think. Now she put it that way, I was very ashamed at not seeing for myself the trouble Antony Green was in. And I sighed. If I couldn't ask him to help about Chris, there was no Don John of Austria after all, and what was I to do?

This time it was Mum's elbow that dug into
me
. “Mig, wake up. I've just realized I haven't seen Chris for nearly a week. Where
is
he?”

Seeing the ghost had worked, after all. I flung my arms round her and babbled explanations. She wouldn't believe me at first. I thrust the blankets at her. “Smell!” I said. “Wolf.” I offered to get my biography as proof, but that wouldn't do. She seems to think I always write fiction. So I said, “You believe Antony Green is a ghost buried alive. Why not this about Chris, too?”

That did it. Mum said, “But that means that yesterday, when they were hunting the wolf—
Mig
! They didn't
shoot
Chris?”

“No. It was another wolf, a she-wolf,” I said. “Aunt Maria meant them to shoot Chris, though.”

Mum was angry. Oh, she was angry. The worm turned all right in the middle of that night. “And to think I've been waiting hand and foot on that—that
evil
old woman!” she said. She raged. She called everyone names I'd never heard before. “Well-done, Chris, with her evil bloomers!” she said. “Mig, I thought he was a dog. I'm glad I let him out of the house. Now I wonder … what's the soonest we can go back and talk to your Miss Phelps? She'll be asleep now. We'd better go first thing in the morning.”

“Before you do,” I said. “There's another thing. Dad's alive. I talked to him.”

“He was always much too enmeshed in this horrid little dump,” Mum said. “No wonder, really. Tell.” So I did. She said, “He does pick 'em. Zenobia Bailey's almost as bad a name as Verena Bland. Poor Greg. Does he want out, Mig, or is he quite happy?”

“Happy,” I said. “Not quite happy.”

“That'll have to do,” Mum said. We went back to bed then or, as Mum said, Aunt Maria would be banging for breakfast before either of us had got to sleep. Lavinia was awfully pleased to see us. She must have thought the ghost had eaten us, silly thing.

In the morning, I could hardly see for yawning, but Mum swiftly buttoned and hooked Aunt Maria into her clothes. “You're coming down for breakfast today,” she said.

“I know, dear,” said Aunt Maria. “Elaine's coming to take me out at ten. Are you coming with us?”

That rather took the wind out of Mum's sails, but she said, “No, Mig and I are going out ourselves. I want that quite clear. This
is
our Easter holiday, you know.”

“Of course, dear. So good of you to spend it with me—quite devoted,” said Aunt Maria. Mum made exasperated faces at me over Aunt Maria's head. And I made faces back to leave it at that.

Elaine gave me several forbidding looks while she was wheeling Aunt Maria down the hall, but I didn't think about it much. I just wanted them to go. As soon as they had, I said to Mum, “We have to go up that path behind the gardens.”

“Why have we?” she said. “I intend simply to walk across the street and knock on the door. No one can stop us.”

“They can turn us into things afterward,” I said.

“Yes, that is frightening,” Mum agreed. “But I feel like a demonstration, Mig. Chris made his. You've been writing down exactly what you think—”

“Yes, but that was sneaky,” I said. “I didn't dare say it.”

“Well, I dare you to cross the road with me now,” Mum said.

And we did. I was terrified. The road seemed a mile wide, with telescopes trained on it from behind every lacy window, but nobody did anything to stop us. And Mr. Phelps opened the door as we reached it.