Felix Takes the Stage (6 page)

N
ow, shouldn't we discuss this as civilized spiders?” Oliphant Uxbridge replied. His voice sounded unnaturally calm.

The two pirates started to laugh. “Who said anything about civilized!” one said. He moved toward Oliphant, waving his spine-studded front legs. “Keep watch on the missus, Seven Eyes.”

“You bet, Cap,” Seven Eyes replied. The second pirate was missing an eye. Unlike brown recluses, pirate spiders had eight eyes, arranged in two rows.

Edith and Felix had suspended themselves from a dust-encrusted ship's lantern opposite the figurehead. The egg sac glimmered softly in the reflection of the streetlight outside.
This is terrible,
Edith thought.
A hundred innocent lives cut off!

She and Felix exchanged glances, a cross fire of desperate looks from their dozen eyes. They were not in a good place to attack. Oliphant Uxbridge would be no help. His wife was growing hysterical as he continued to converse.

“Oliphant! He's coming closer to the sac! Oliphant, do something!”

“I think we could make an arrangement of some sort. My wife, she is lovely, I admit. But, well … I guess I could find anoth —”

“Are you nuts?” Edith screamed. “You lousy good-for-nothing!”

At that moment, there was another tiny glimmer above the ship's figurehead.

“Hi, guys!” said Julep.

Edith was stunned. How in the name of silk and venom had her daughters gotten there so quickly? But there they were! The two girls were swinging from silken threads attached to a block and tackle used for hoisting sails.

“Ahoy there!” cried Jo Bell, wiggling a dragline.

The two pirates launched themselves toward the sisters. But blinded by the streetlight outside, they had not seen the kill trap that Julep and Jo Bell had spun. They were caught! Julep and Jo Bell perched in opposite corners of the kill trap, paying out binding silk as fast as they could.

“Make it tight. Steer clear of their fangs, girls.” Edith paused to look at her three children in awe. “Brilliant, just brilliant,” she murmured.

“Thank you!” Mrs. Uxbridge gasped. “I don't know how to thank you. Your courage, your kindness.”

“Yes, we cannot thank you enough,” Oliphant chimed in.

Mrs. Uxbridge swung herself toward her husband and glared.

“What do you mean WE! You mealy-fanged, gutless, pompous ass. As soon as the eggs hatch, I'm out of here. And you get out now, on the double. Find yourself another figurehead to spin a web in. And find yourself another mate, as you suggested when you were about to hand me over to those thugs!”

“You can't mean it, dearest.”

“I
do
mean it, and don't dearest me.”

Fat Cat meowed, “Bravo, madame!”

“Mrs. Uxbridge, you are welcome to move onto the
Constitution
with us,” Edith said.

“My dear, don't you want to reconsider?” Oliphant persisted.

“No, Oliphant. I don't. But I do owe Mrs …. what is your name?”

“Edith, just call me Edith.”

“I do owe you an apology, Edith. You are not vulgar at all. And you may call me by my first name — Glory.”

“Oh, my! My!” Edith murmured to no one in particular. “Let's go back and get settled. It's been quite a night.”

Julep, Felix, and Jo Bell exchanged glances. The S word again. Whenever Edith said the word “settled,” they knew she was anything but. However, they followed their mother back to the
Constitution
.

D
espite Edith's worries, life was settled for a while. Oliphant Uxbridge moved to another ship's figurehead. He lost no time in taking up with another orb weaver. Glory's egg sac hatched, but unfortunately the proprietor of the store left the door wide open on the very day the spiderlings arrived. A fresh breeze swept into the shop and all one hundred twenty-two little Uxbridges blew away, out of the shop and onto the winds to find their own way in the world. Glory was very upset and often dropped in to visit Edith.

“Imagine losing a husband and one hundred twenty-two children all within such a short time.” Edith shook her head in sympathy. “But I know I'm better off without him. I do miss the spiderlings, though. I hardly got to know them before that fool owner opened the doors. How would he like it if someone decided to air out the place where he lived and all his babies were swept away!” To emphasize her feelings, Glory plucked the filament from which she suspended herself through the hatch into Edith's cabin. Her visits were brief, and she never accepted an invitation to settle into the web for a nice long chat. She seemed to prefer rappelling down through the hatch and hanging on the end of the silk thread for a bit.

“Well, humans usually just have one child at a time, sometimes two or three. But never one hundred twenty-two,” Edith offered.

“It doesn't matter — one or one hundred. You miss them all the same.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

 

What worried Edith more than Glory Uxbridge's sadness over her spiderlings was the shopkeeper's sudden interest in cleaning. It did not bode well. Edith preferred a certain amount of dust, clutter, and downright filth. It was never a good sign when humans became too particular about housekeeping. She began having a vague premonition that she and her children were on the brink of another move. It was this fear that caused her to seek out a globe, not the dented globe where the leucauge spiders lived but one in better shape.

“Follow me, children. I want to show you the precise spot where the
Constitution
encountered the HMS
Cyane
and the HMS
Levant
in the War of 1812.”

“But we know that,” said Felix, resting on the chart in the cabin. “You showed us, remember?”

“Oh, yes, I did,” Edith answered. “Well, how about I show you where the
Constitution
is right now?”

“It's still around after all these centuries?” Jo Bell asked.

“Absolutely!”

“You mean the real ship and not a model?” Felix asked.

“Positively.” An idea, like the tiniest little flicker, began to glow in Edith's mind —
Boston!

“Boston!” She blurted out the name of the old city where she had once lived with her mother after her father had died.

“Boston?”

“Yes, Boston! What a fine old city it is. Come quickly.”

“To Boston?” Julep asked.

“No, to the globe so you can see it.”

Two minutes later, Edith began to release some silk from the very tippy top of the globe. It was what her children called a “speaking thread.” She suspended herself over the Arctic land mass and then rappelled down over the North Atlantic. At the fiftieth latitude, she swung east toward the coast of Newfoundland, continued her descent over Nova Scotia, Maine, and New Hampshire, and fetched up above the state of Massachusetts. To be exact, for Edith was a precise sort, her position was 42° north and 71° west, the latitude and longitude of the city of Boston.

“All eyes on me, please,” she said.

Her three children, gathered near the Arctic Circle, looked down.

“I am dangling right above the coastline of the New England state of Massachusetts. This is Boston, home of the finest and the oldest public library in America! As I told you, my mother and I spent a very happy time there.”

“But the E-Men came, right?” Jo Bell asked with a sigh.

“No, no.”

“Then why did you leave?” Felix asked. There were several endless seconds, or so it seemed to the children, when Edith grew very still. “Well, Boston was where your grandma died, and I … I felt … so … so …”

“Lonely?” Julep asked, thinking how lonely she would feel if her mother were gone.

“Yes, there were too many reminders, I suppose. We passed so many happy hours in the children's room.”

“Mom,” Felix said when they had returned to the
Constitution
. “Is there any art in Boston? Any music?”

“Yes, dear. A wonderful symphony orchestra, and the Museum of Fine Arts and the library. The library has magnificent murals.”

“Hmm,” Felix said. He glanced quickly over at the Uxbridges' web, in all its spiraling glory.