The Girl Who Heard Dragons

Lady-in-Waiting

Mummie, Sally wants to play dress-up," said Frances, her pointed little face contorted with the obligation to accommodate her first guest in the new house.

"I do, too," said six-year-old Marjorie, pouting her plump cheeks in anticipation of refusal.

Sally Merrion just stood in the loose semicircle about Amy Landon's kitchen table, her dubious but polite expression challenging her hostess.

"Dressing up seems a very good idea for such a drizzling day," Amy replied calmly. To give herself a moment to think what she could possibly find for them to play in, she finished pouring the steaming bramble jelly into the jar.

Fran caught her breath as a gobbet on the lip of the saucepan splashed and instantly dissolved, coloring pink the hot water in which the jars were steeped.

"What had you planned to dress up as?"

"Ladies-in-waiting," said Sally, recovering from the initial surprise of agreement but still determined to put her hostesses to the blush.

There was such an appeal in Fran's soft eyes that Amy was rather certain that the notion of this particular costume was all Sally's.

"Wadies-in-waiting," Marjorie said, frowning and pouting as if to force her mother to accept.

"We'd be very careful," Fran said in her solemn way.

"I know you would, pet," Amy replied, smiling gentle reassurance.

Not for the first time, Amy wondered how long it would take the sensitive Frances to recover from the shock of her father's death: his brutal murder, Amy amended in the deepest part of her mind. Peter had been a victim of a bomb thrown without warning into a London pub.

She disciplined her thoughts sternly back to the tasks at hand: pouring the bramble jelly and figuring out how to comply with her daughters' needs.

"Werry careful," Marjorie said, bobbing her head up and down while Sally Merrion waited to be surprised.

"Of course you would, love," Amy assured the child, knowing that Fran could be depended upon to make certain that her younger sister was careful.

"Frances is a real dote," Amy's mother often said with pride, since the child resembled her in feature and coloring, "and more help then the twins, I'm sure, despite their being older. The poor wee fatherless lambkins," she'd recently taken to adding in a tone that stiffened Amy's resolve to make the move that had indirectly caused Peter's death.

During the first days of her bereavement, the hideous irony of his dying had given her a passionate dislike for Tower Cottage. The only reason Peter had been in that pub at that critical moment was to phone her the good news that he'd signed the mortgage contract for a house that would take them away from the increasingly dangerous city streets: a house in the gray-stoned hills of Dorset, with its own orchard and gardens, and a paddock for a pony; the kind of rural, self-sufficient life that Amy and he had known as children.

Her parents, and his, had urged her to repudiate the contract, to stay close to them so they could give her the comfort, protection, and aid that a young widow with four growing children would undeniably need.

Stubbornly and contrary to her prejudice toward Tower Cottage, Amy Landon had honored that agreement, citing to her parents that the life-insurance policy required by the mortgage company now gave her the house free and clear.

"You could say that Peter died to secure Tower Cottage," Amy had told the parental conclave. "It is far away from London and I want to get far away from London. I want to abide by the plans my Peter and I made. I'm well able for the life. It isn't as if I weren't country-bred… Just because you wanted to retire to the city…"

"But, all alone… so far from a village… and neighbors," her father and Peter's had argued.

"I'm hardly alone with four children. Young Peter's as tall as I and much stronger. We're scarcely far from a village when there're shops, a post office, and a pub a half mile down the lane. As for neighbors… I'll have too much to do to worry about neighbors."

And the fewer the better, she'd amended to herself. She abhorred the pity, even the compassion, accorded her for her loss. She was weary of publicity, of people staring blur-eyed at herself and her children. They'd all be spoiled if this social sympathy continued much longer: spoiled into thinking that the world owed them something because politics… or was it madness?… had deprived them of their father.

"My mother keeps a special box," Sally Merrion was saying to draw Amy's thought back to the present, to the low-beam kitchen redolent of bubbling bramble berries, sealing wax, and the casserole baking in the old Aga cooker. "It's got clothes my grandma and great-gran wore."

Amy wondered if she'd ever use those maxiskirts again. "I've some things in the blanket chest…" She hesitated. She couldn't leave the jelly half-poured and she resisted the notion, once again, that there was something about the box room that made her loathe to enter it.

"Don't worry, Mother. I wouldn't touch anything good," Fran said, patently relieved that her mother had risen to the need. "And you daren't leave the jelly."

"Wadies-in-waiting?" asked Marjorie in a quavering voice.

"Yes, yes, love. Go along then, girls. I really must finish the jelly. Fran, you can use those long skirts of mine. And there're old sheets in the blanket chest…" Why on earth be afraid of a blanket chest? But a frisson caught her between her shoulders. 'They'd make lovely flowing robes…"

From the scornful expression on Sally's face, Amy wondered what on earth the child was permitted to use in her own home. Cheeky girl.

Amy concentrated on the jelly, finishing the first pan of jars and getting the next ready before her maternal instinct flared. Back in the kitchen, separated from the main section of the cottage by the pantry, and thick walls, she could hear nothing. She'd better check. She pushed open the pantry door and the high happy voices of the girls, affecting adult accents, carried quite audibly down the stairwell. They were obviously playing there on the landing in front of the box room. Satisfied, Amy returned to her jelly.

She found unexpected satisfaction, she mused, in these homely preparations against the winter. Atavistic, Peter would have called her. The summer had not been kind to the land and its bounty was reduced, or so the villagers said, but Amy Landon had no fault to find. The apple and pear trees of Tower Cottage were well laden when you considered that there'd been no one to prune, spray, or fertilize them: and how there came to be beetroot, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and swedes in the kitchen garden, Amy didn't know. The villagers had rolled their eyes and each suggested someone else as the Good Samaritan. Her circumstances were known in the village, so she concluded that some kindhearted soul did not wish her to feel under obligation. Nonetheless, the abundance of the garden meant that she could manage better on the Spartan budget she allowed herself. (She would make no unnecessary inroads on savings that were earmarked to see young Peter through secondary school and college. And she refused to think in terms of compensation money.) With the cost of all commodities rising, she must grow or raise as much as possible on her property.

Mr. Suttle, who ran the tiny shop at the crossroads, had told her that old Mrs. Mallett had kept chickens: she had owned Tower Cottage before the Alderdyces bought it. (The Alderdyces, now, they hadn't lived there very long: come into money sudden like, and bought a grand house nearer London only they didn't get to live in their new house because they died of a motor accident before ever they reached it.) While Mr. Suttle hadn't heard of chickens living wild like that for two years or more, then returning to their own run, there was no other explanation for the flock that now pecked contentedly around the barn behind Tower Cottage, and obediently laid their eggs for Patricia to find.

To her father's amusement, and young Peter's delight, Amy had purchased a Guernsey cow, for what was the sense of having a four-acre meadow and a barn unexpectedly full of hay if one didn't use them. Mr. Suttle had knowledgeably inspected the same stable and hay, pronounced the one fit to house cattle and the other well enough saved to be eaten by the cow, and applauded little Mrs. Landon's sense.

Old Mrs. Mallett, who'd been spry to the day of her peaceful death, had kept chickens, cow, and pig (Mr. Suttle thought he might be able to find Mrs. Landon a piglet to fatten for Christmas) and lived quite well off her land, and kept warm and comfortable in Tower Cottage.

Amy assured Mr. Suttle that this was also her intention, and she thanked him for his advice, but she rather felt the piglet could wait until she was accustomed to managing cow, chickens, and children.

Actually, it was young Peter who managed the cow, after instructions from the farmer who'd sold them the beast. And Patricia, Peter's twin, cared for the chickens. The two vied with each other to prove their charges in that curiously intense competition reserved to twins.

Amy sealed the bramble jelly and began to stick on the labels that Fran had laboriously printed for her. All of them had picked the berries the day before, a warm, sunny Sunday, and made a game of the work, arriving home in the early September dusk, berry-full and berry-stained, with buckets of the rich dark fruit. The only deterrent to complete happiness for Amy had been the absence of her husband: this was what he had wanted for his family and he wasn't alive to share it. In poignant moments like this, her longing for him became a physical illness.

She must continue to force such negative thoughts from her mind: the children had had enough gloom, enough insecurity. She must find contentment in the fact that they were indeed living as Peter had so earnestly desired.

Young Peter came in with the milk pail, the contents frothy and warm. Patricia was just behind him with eggs from her hens.

"I think Molly likes me," Peter announced as he usually did when the Guernsey had let down her milk for him with no fuss.

"Another dozen eggs, Mummie," said Patricia, taking her basket into the larder and carefully arranging the freshest in the front of the molded cardboard. Peter heaved the bucket up to the counter and got out the big kettle, whereupon he began to measure the milk before heating it. He was keeping a record of Molly's output as against her intake, so that they would have accurate figures on how much their milk and butter were costing them. He was all for trying to make soft cheese, too, since there were herbs along the garden path for seasoning.

High on the wall by the pantry door, the old bell tinkled in its desultory fashion, announcing a caller at the front door.

Wondering who that could be since the few people with whom she was acquainted would know that she'd be in the kitchen this time of day, Amy half ran to the front hall, wiping her hands as she went and pulling fussily at her jumper, aware that it was jelly-sticky. She gave the door the hefty yank it required and discovered Sally's mother about to use the huge clumsy knocker.

"Good heavens, Mrs. Landon…"

"I'm terribly sorry to keep you standing on the stoop, Mrs. Merrion…"

"I can't thank you enough for minding Sally…"

"No bother. Such a nasty day, the girls have been playing dress-up."

In mutual accord, the two women crossed the square front hall to the stairs. Above them some charade was in progress: they could hear Sally announcing dire news in a loud and affected voice.

"Sally dear, it's Mummie come to collect you."

"Oh, Mummie, did you have to come just now?"

Amy and Mrs. Merrion exchanged amused glances at the distressed wail of protest. As they looked up. Sally was leaning over the upper balustrade, her face framed by a gauzy blue, the folds of heavy blue sleeves falling to cover her hands on the railing.

"I'm just denouncing the traitor in our midst who was de… dee… what did you say he was doing to us, Fran?" Sally turned her head and nearly lost the heavy headdress.

"Sally love" - Mrs. Merrion's voice was patient and level - "I've got to pick up the meat for tea and your father from the station. There's only just time to get to Mr. Suttle's before…"

"Oh, Mummie…" Sally's tone was piteous, and undoubtedly tears were being repressed.

Amy heard Fran's soothing voice, to which she added her own assurance that Sally could return very soon and continue the game.

"It just won't be the same…" Sally's voice ended on a petulant high note.

The women saw a swish of royal blue shirts, which told them that Sally was submitting to the inevitable.

"Fran love, would you put the things away for Sally since she has to leave now?"

"Yes, Mummie. Come on now, Marjorie, you can help…"

Marjorie blubbered a protest, evoking her privilege as the youngest in the family.

"If you're big enough to be a lady-in-waiting, you're big enough to help," Fran said in such an imitation of an adult that Amy and Mrs. Merrion grinned at each other.

Sally's stiff-legged descent of the stairs reminded them of that young lady's disgruntlement well before they could see her scowling face. Amy gathered up Sally's school mac and book bag, quickly deciding that the dirtier of the two school scarves was not Fran's, and prepared to speed the parting guest.

Sally allowed herself to be helped into her coat, but her seething resentment dissipated as she babbled to her mother that Mrs. Landon had smashing things to play dress-up in, Mummie, and when could she come again please, and thank you Mrs. Landon for the tea and Mummie didn't you have to go to the dentist again soon?

Mrs. Merrion, amused by her daughter's effusiveness, smiled and said all the properly courteous things as she hurried Sally across the square hall and out the door. As Amy waited politely on the steps while the Merrions' green shooting brake was bucking down the pebbled drive, she began to wonder at Sally's unexpected enthusiasm. What on earth had the girls managed to find in the "smashing" category in that blanket chest? What else was in it? Suits of Peter's that she'd put by for his son, the odd blanket or two, a few drapes, some outgrown things of Patricia's, party dresses of hers that she would be unlikely to wear in Dorset, several lengths of fabric. Nothing royal blue in the lot! And she'd never had any occasion to use gauze. Nor headdresses. As far as she could remember, there'd been nothing left behind in the box room by the previous owners, the unfortunate Alderdyces.

"Mum, the milk!" Peter shouted through the pantry door. "Do put everything back, Fran, won't you?" Amy paused long enough in the stairwell to hear her daughter's assurance before she returned to the kitchen and an urgent affair of pasteurization.

At supper that night, when Marjorie was safely in bed, Amy remembered the royal blue puzzle. "Fran, pet, how did you get on as ladies-in-waiting?" "Oh, Mummie," and Fran's face glowed unexpectedly, "we had a super time. Marjorie was in the red wool though we had to pull the skirt up over the belt so she wouldn't trip. She was the junior lady-in-waiting and carried Sally's train. Sally was queen because she was guest, so she had the blue because blue is a royal color. Isn't it?" Peter had guffawed so Fran turned wide serious eyes on her brother. "Sally said it was…" ("To be sure, it is, Fran pet," Amy reassured her, glaring at Peter.) "… So that left the green for me. But I think the green was for a man… because it only came to my knees. Marjorie's and Sally's dresses dragged on the floor…"

"Red? Green? What green?" Amy was mystified.

"Green… sort of velvet stuff, I think, and it went from here to here"-Fran measured the length on her small body-"and there was fur along the collar and no buttons so I used another belt…"

"I don't recall putting away any belts…"

"The fancy dress ones, Mummie, with the belt buckles and sparkly stones…"

Fran's pleasure was fading fast in the face of possible maternal disapproval, and her voice wavered as her eyes sought her mother's.

"Oh, those!" Amy said as if her memory had been at fault. "Those old things. I'd forgotten about them."

"I don't remember you and Father going to costume do's," Peter said, gathering his brows just the way his father had.

"You could scarcely remember everything your father and I did, Peter," Amy said placidly. Peter tended to act the expert. "There's more Horlicks." She reached for Peter's glass, smiling to clear the anxiety from her daughter's face. "Molly's making more and we have to keep up with her production. Peter, time for you to check her while we girls do the supper dishes. Then all of you, off to bed…"

She made the school lunches and checked the doors before she could no longer defer the mystery of the fancy clothes. Resolutely she climbed the stairs, looking down into the square hall, as she came to the first landing. The oldest part of the house, the estate agent had said, probably was an old Norman keep, though the stonework was in astonishingly good condition for a structure so old. Doubtless that was why the fifteenth-century architects had incorporated the keep when the cottage was built. Certainly, thought Amy, the house was a continuous production: all periods, rather than one, now combined into a hodgepodgery that had appealed to Peter's sense of the ridiculous.

The heterogeneity had also fascinated the engineer who had examined the house for Peter and Amy prior to the contract signing. On the way down to Dorset, the man had been frankly suspicious at the asking price and warned Peter and Amy to be forearmed for disappointment in its state of repair. Surprisingly, the engineer had discovered very few problems, most of which could be put right with a judicious slap of mortar, plaster, or paint, and the odd dab of putty or sealer. The cellar was dry, the thick sound walls oozed no damp, the floors were remarkably level, the chimneys, of which there were nine in all, drew, the drains were recent and in good order, the slate roof was undamaged by the storms of the previous winter. And not a sign of woodworm or dry rot. The engineer reluctantly concluded that the Tower Cottage had been so reasonably priced because, as advertised, it was genuinely to be sold quickly to settle the Alderdyce estate.

Still, there was a palpable aura in the square hall, which Peter had chalked up to antiquity. And something almost expectant in the atmosphere in the box room immediately above the hall, those two rooms comprising what was left of the old Norman keep. Amy was not a fanciful person, certainly not superstitious, or she would never had moved into Tower Cottage at all after Peter's death. Yet she avoided the box room, sending the children either to retrieve objects stored there or consign others to its capacious shelving or the huge, heavy wooden chest that dominated the front wall under the two slit windows. "Flemish work," the engineer had called the chest, with the modem addition of a thin veneer of cedarwood on the inside to make its purpose clear. He had wondered if the chest had been built in situ, for he could not see how it would otherwise have got through the doorway. Peter had sat on the chest that day, Amy recalled: he'd thumped the wood, laughing at the hollow echo of the empty chest, remarking that it would be a good place to hide the body… several bodies by the size of it. Amy had felt the frisson then, running up her spine to seize her head and jerk it on the neck with an involuntary force that had astonished her. The engineer noticed and solicitously remarked that un-lived-in houses always chilled him.

Since they'd moved in, she'd made one concession to the distressing atmosphere of the box room: she'd put the brightest possible bulb on the landing and had Peter put an equally strong one in the box room's single socket. (Oddly enough, the children loved playing in the box room.) Tonight she turned on both lights and stood for a moment on the threshold, staring at the dark bulk of the carved wooden chest.

It did not move. The carvings did not writhe or gesture. A faint odor of lavender and cinnamon was detectable, mingling with old leather, wool, and camphor: homey smells, compatible with the room's use. Not a shadow stirred.

With swift steps, Amy crossed the room and tugged up the lid of the chest. Just as she'd thought. The two torn sheets, rough-dried, were neatly folded on top, her maxi- skirts just below. But one was a check and the other black. Where was royal blue, or red, or green with a fur-trimmed collar? She sat on the edge of the chest and lifted one stack of garments, Patricia's outgrown jumpers and skirts, Peter's shirts and underclothes, socks. She turned in the other direction and sorted through business suits, vests, more jumpers, her crepe and wool party dresses. At the bottom were two pairs of old drapes and some glass curtains, white. Nothing gauzy blue. No ornate headdresses. No costume belts. She delved to the wood of the chest's floor and found only the mundane things she expected.

Fran was a literal child: if she'd said she'd dressed in green with no buttons and a fur collar, she had. Puzzled, Amy ran her eyes over the contents of the shelves; nothing there surely but Christmas ornaments, boxed games, lampshades, empty jars, young Peter's tenting and backpack frame, oddments of china set aside for a jumble. On the other side of the door, the tea chest containing Peter's business papers, books, the family's suitcases as neatly stacked as they'd been since the day after removal from London.

Yet Sally Merrion had been dressed in royal blue… a queen's color… and gauzes!

A flash of color caught her eye and she turned toward the chest, blinking. She could have sworn that the topmost sheet had been, however fleetingly, a brilliant blue. To reassure herself, she smoothed the sheet, but her fingers told her that it wasn't velvet, just worn linen. She stood up, closing the lid of the chest, almost dropping it the final few inches as the full weight of the wood tore the lid from her fingers' inadequate grasp.

She'd ask Fran in the morning where she'd found those dress-up clothes. Possibly she'd misunderstood.

The frisson caught her by the back of the neck before she'd reached the safety of the door. It was like a hand on the scruff of her neck, pulling her back to the scent of some childhood crime: an injunction against a cowardly retreat.

In spite of herself, Amy turned back into the room and stared around her. The scent of lavender and cinnamon was cut by a sharper smell, vinegarish. Then a sweetish odor, familiar but unnameable, assailed her, an odor as sharp as the previous intangible command to stay. Stiffly, Amy walked back to the chest, set her hand on the lid, imagining, as Sally might have, wondrous costumes in which to be medieval ladies-in-waiting… and a queen.

No torn sheets, no dull woolen jumpers now lay exposed, but royal blue velvet, a deep red wool dress, a green surcoat fur-trimmed, and belts, encrusted with rough-cut bright stones set in the dull gleam of gold links.

She let the lid drop and the compressed air smelled of sweat, human and horse, of stale food and spilled, soured wine, heavy perfumed musk mixed with camphor. Weakly, Amy sank to the cold stone floor, impervious to that chill.

"The Alderdyces came into money…" Mr. Suttle's words came to mind.,

Had some Alderdyce child, or adult, dreamed of hidden treasure in the old keep? And found it in the chest?

Amy shook her head, fighting to think rationally. Did the chest grant wishes, then? Pray God it was only one wish and Fran had had the chest's quota for them all, and that was the end of the matter.

She thought of gold and jewels, rich fabrics. Oriental silks, and gauzes, of ornate Arabian leather slippers. And opened the chest. Her heart pounded as she dropped the lid on those same imagined riches.

Mrs. Mallett? She'd lived in Tower Cottage for years, spry till the day of her death. Hadn't Mr. Suttle said so? Wanting for nothing, the house and grounds supplying her requirements.

Amy laughed, a single sound, hard and strained, like her credulity. What had the widowed Mrs. Mallett lifted the lid to find? A body? As Peter had whimsically suggested.

The sweetish odor, familiar but unidentifiable, pervaded the box room.

Amy screamed, a soft tortured cry, her hands stifling it to a whisper, lest Peter or Patricia hear her. That same sweetish odor had filled her nostrils as she'd knelt before Peter's coffin in the church. How could the house have killed her Peter in that bombed-out public house. It couldn't have… Illusions! Her longing for him that day!

"NO!" The single negative was as low as it was firm. She spread her hands, fingers flat on the lid of the chest, denying what could be if she so desired. "No!"

She spread her arms across the chest in repression, in supplication, in prayer. This was just a chest with old clothes in it, two torn sheets and some dresses waiting for parties, for children to grow up to fill. This was just an ancient tower, used as part of an old house, a house where children could grow up in healthy country air, on fresh vegetable and milk, and where they could pick apples and pears in an orchard and bramble berries from hedges. Just an old house that had served many families in the same way.

The nauseating sweetness dispersed: lavender and cinnamon returned, and the smell of night and rain.

Slowly Amy pulled her arms together, rose to her knees before the chest. She placed the heels of her hands under the lid and, swallowing against the dryness of her throat, pushed upward. Her body blocked some of the light from the overbright bulb, but she saw the comforting white of old cotton sheeting, caught a whiff of her favorite cologne, impregnated in the dresses stored in the chest, a hint of the cedarwood. It was as she'd wished. She let the lid down gently and leaned her forehead weakly against the edge.

It took her a few moments to gather enough strength to rise. Really, she told herself as she walked toward the door, she ought not to attempt to do so much in one day, though they'd enough bramble jelly to last years, even with the amount Peter slathered on his toast.

She switched off the light and closed the box room door behind her. Her fingers hovered briefly over the key. No, she could not lock out what had apparently happened or lock in whatever it was. That would be superstitious as well as downright useless.

Nonetheless, when she flicked off the hall light, she said "good night" just as if there were someone waiting to hear.