A Swiftly Tilting Planet (19 page)

“The names. Bran. Zillah. Zillie. Put them together and they aren’t far from Branzillo.”

Mrs. Murry looked at her with surprised admiration. “How amazing!”

Mr. Murry asked, “Are there other letters?”

“Were. Once.”

“Where are they?”

“Gone. Went to look. Began thinking about this
Branzillo when I went home. Remembered Chuck and me—”

“Chuck and you what, Mom?” Meg probed.

Mrs. O’Keefe pushed her cobwebby hair away from her eyes. “We used to read the letters. Made up stories about Bran and Zillah and all. Played games of Let’s Pretend. Then, when Chuck—didn’t have the heart for Let’s Pretend any more, forgot it all. Made myself forget. But that name, Branzillo, struck me. Bran. Zillah. Peculiar.”

Mr. Murry looked bemusedly at the yellowed paper. “Peculiar, indeed.”

“Where’s your little boy?” Mrs. O’Keefe demanded.

Mr. Murry looked at his watch. “He went for a walk.”

“When?”

“About an hour ago.”

“In the middle of the night, and at his age?”

“He’s fifteen.”

“No. Twelve. Chuck was twelve.”

“Charles Wallace is fifteen, Mrs. O’Keefe.”

“A runt, then.”

“Give him time.”

“And you don’t take care of him. Chuck needs special care. And people criticize me for not taking care of my kids!”

Dennys, too, looked at his watch. “Want me to go after him, Dad?”

Mr. Murry shook his head. “No. I think we have to
trust Charles Wallace tonight. Mrs. O’Keefe, you’ll stay awhile?”

“Yes. Need to see Chuck.”

Meg said, “Please excuse me, everybody. I want to go back to bed.” She tried to keep the urgency from her voice. She felt a panicky need to get back to the attic with Ananda. “Chuck
was
twelve,” Mrs. O’Keefe had said. Chuck was twelve when what? Anything that happened to Chuck was happening to Charles Wallace.

Mrs. Murry suggested, “Would you like to take a cup of tea with you?”

“No, thanks, I’m fine. Someone call me when Charles gets in?”

Ananda followed her upstairs, contentedly licking her lips for the last buttery crumbs.

The attic felt cold and she got quickly into bed and wrapped the quilt around herself and the dog.—Charles Wallace wanted me to find a connection between Wales and Vespugia, and Dennys found one in his reference books. But it’s a much closer connection than that. The letter Mrs. O’Keefe brought was from 1865, and from Vespugia, so the connection is as close as her attic.

Despite the warm glow of the electric heater, she shivered.

—Those people in the letter must be important, she thought,—and the Bran who wrote the letter, and his sister Gwen. Certainly the name Zillie must have some
connection with Madoc’s Zyll, and Ritchie Llawcae’s Zylle, who was nearly burned for witchcraft.

—And then, the Matthew he wrote to must be the Matthew Maddox who wrote the books. There’s something in that second book that matters, and the Echthroi don’t want us to know about it. It’s all interconnected, and we still don’t know what the connections mean.

—And what happened to Beezie, that she should end up as Mom O’Keefe? Oh, Ananda, Ananda, whatever happened?

She lay back against the pillows and rubbed her hand slowly back and forth over the dog’s soft fur, until the tingling warmth moved up her arm and all through her.

“But why Pa?” Beezie demanded over and over again. “Why did Pa have to die?”

“There’s never an answer to that question, my Beezie,” the grandmother replied patiently. “It’s not a question to be asking.”

“But I do ask it!”

The grandmother looked tired, and old. Chuck had never before thought of her as old, as being any age at all. She was simply Grandma, always there for them. Now she asked, not the children, but the heavens, “And why my Patrick, and him even younger than your father. Why anything?” A tear slid down her cheek, and Beezie and Chuck put their arms around her to comfort her.

Mrs. Maddox went over the ledgers so patiently kept up to date by her husband. The more she looked, the more slowly her hands turned the pages. “I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know it was this bad. I should have realized when he sold Matthew Maddox’s book …”

Chuck crawled up into the dark storage spaces under the eaves, looking for treasure. He found a bottle full of pennies, but no gold or jewels to give his mother. He found an old
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, the pages yellow, the bindings cracked, but still useful. He found a set of china wrapped in old newspapers dated long before he and Beezie were born, which he hoped they might be able to sell. He found a strongbox, locked.

He brought his findings to the living room. His mother was in the store, but Beezie and the grandmother were there, doing the week’s baking.

“The pennies are old. They may be worth something. The china’s good. It may pay for our fuel for a month or so. What’s in the box?”

“There isn’t a key. I’m going to break it.” He took hammer and screwdriver and wrench, and the old lock gave way and he was able to lift the lid. In the box was a sheaf of letters and a large notebook with a crumbling blue leather binding. He opened the book to the first page, and there was a watercolor sketch, faded only slightly, of the spring countryside.

“Grandma! It’s our rock, our picnic rock!”

The old woman clucked. “And so it is.”

The rock was shaded in soft blues and lavenders merging into grey. Behind it the trees were lush with spring green. Above it flew a flock of butterflies, the soft blues of the spring azures complemented by the gold and black of the tiger swallowtails. Around the rock were the familiar spring flowers, dappling the grass like the background of a tapestry.

Chuck exclaimed in delight, “Oh, Beezie, oh, Grandma!” Reverently he turned the page. In beautiful script was written,
Madrun, 1864, Zillah Llawcae.

The grandmother wiped her floury hands carefully and put on her spectacles, bending over the book. Together they read the first page.

Madrun.

Past ten o’clock. Through my bedroom window I can look down the hill to the Maddoxes’ house. Mr. and Mrs. Maddox will be asleep. They get up at five in the morning. Gwen Maddox—who knows? Gwen has always considered herself a grownup and me a child, though we’re separated by only two years.

The twins, my dear twins, Bran and Matthew. Are they awake? When Bran lied about his age, so afraid was he he’d miss the war, and went to join the cavalry, I feared he might be killed in battle. When I
dreamed of his homecoming, as I did each night when I looked at his diamond on my finger and prayed for his safety, I never thought it could be like this, with Bran withdrawn and refusing to communicate with anyone, even his twin. If I try to speak to him about our marriage, he cuts me short, or turns away without a word. Matthew says there have been others who have suffered this sickness of spirit because of the horrors of war.

I am, and have been for nearly seventeen years, Zillah Llawcae. Will I ever be Zillah Maddox?

They continued to turn the pages, more quickly now, not pausing to read the journal entries, but looking at the delicate paintings of birds and butterflies, flowers and trees, squirrels and wood mice and tree toads, all meticulously observed and accurately reproduced.

A shiver ran up and down Chuck’s spine. “Pa’s mother was a Llawcae. This Zillah could be one of our ancestors … and she was alive when she painted all this, and it’s just the way it is now, just exactly the same.”

He turned another page; his eye was caught, and he read:

This is my seventeenth birthday, and a sorry one it has been, though Father and I were invited to the Maddoxes’ for dinner. But Bran was there and yet
he wasn’t there. He sat at the table, but he hardly ate the delicious dishes which had been especially prepared, to tempt him as much as in honor of me, and if anyone asked him a question he answered in monosyllables.

He turned the page and paused again.

Matthew says Bran almost had a conversation with him last night, and he is hopeful that the ghastly war wounds of his mind and spirit are beginning to heal. I wear his ring with its circle of hope, and I will not give up hoping. What would I do without Matthew’s friendship to comfort and sustain me? Had it not been for Matthew’s accident, I wonder which twin would have asked for my hand? A question better not raised, since I love them both so tenderly.

The grandmother took the top letter from the packet. “It’s from Bran Maddox, the one Zillah’s talking about, but it’s from some foreign place, Vespugia? Now where would that be?”

“It’s part of what used to be Patagonia.”

“Pata—?”

“In South America.”

“Oh, then.” She drew the letter out of its envelope.

My beloved brother, Matthew, greetings, on this warm November day in Vespugia. It there snow at home? I am settling in well with the group from Wales, and feel that I have known most of them all our lives …

When she finished reading the letter, she said, “Your poor pa would have been thrilled at all this.”

Chuck, nodding, continued to turn the pages, reading a line here and there. As well as the nature pictures, the young Zillah Llawcae had many sketches of people, some in ink, some in watercolor. There was an ink drawing of a tall man in a stovepipe hat, carrying a black bag and looking not unlike Lincoln, standing by a horse and buggy. Underneath was written, “Father, about to drive off to deliver a baby.”

There were many sketches of a young man, just beyond boyhood, with fair hair, a clear, beardless complexion, and wide-apart, far-seeing eyes. These were labeled, “My beloved Bran,” “My dearest Bran,” “My heart’s love.” And there were sketches of someone who looked like Bran and yet not like Bran, for the face was etched with lines of pain. “My dear Matthew,” Zillah had written.

“It’s so beautiful,” Beezie said. “I wish I could paint like that.”

But the old woman’s thoughts had shifted to practicality. “I wonder, would this notebook bring a few dollars?”

“Grandma, you wouldn’t sell it!” Chuck was horrified.

“We need money, lad, if we’re to keep a roof over our heads. Your ma’ll sell anything she can sell.”

The antiques dealer who bought the pennies and the set of china for what seemed to Chuck and Beezie a staggering sum was not interested in Zillah’s notebook.

Mrs. Maddox looked at it sadly. “I know it’s worth something. Your father would know where I should take it. If only I could remember the name of the person who bought Matthew Maddox’s book.”

But Chuck could not feel it in his heart to wish the beautiful journal sold. His grandmother took an old linen pillowcase and made a cover to protect the crumbling leather binding, and on it Beezie embroidered two butterflies, in blue and gold. She was as entranced with the journal as was Chuck.

They shared the notebook and the letters with the grandmother, reading aloud to her while she did the ironing or mending, until they had her as involved as they were. The present was so bleak that all three found relief in living the long past.

Beezie and Chuck looked at the old foundation behind the store. “That’s where the Maddoxes’ house must have been. They didn’t live above the store, the way we do.”

“Our apartment was all part of the store.”

“I wonder what happened to the house?”

“We’ll never know,” Beezie said drearily.

“I tried to check one of Matthew Maddox’s books out of the library,” Chuck said. “But the librarian said they haven’t been around in a long time. She thinks somebody must have lifted them. But I did get some books on Vespugia. Let’s go upstairs and look at them.”

They compared the photographs in the books with the watercolors in the final pages of the journal, where Zillah had tried to reproduce in ink and paint what Bran had described in his letters. Zillah’s painting of vast plains rising terrace-fashion up to the foot of the Andes gave them a feeling of a world so different it might have been another planet.

Beezie had turned back to Zillah’s notebook, to a painting of a tall and handsome Indian, with strange blue eyes set rather too close to his aquiline nose. The caption read: “This is how I think Gedder must look, the Indian who Bran writes is descended from Madoc’s brother.”

Chuck reached for one of Bran’s letters and read:

I wish I was more drawn to Gedder, who is so obviously drawn to Gwen. I feel an ingrate when I think of all he has done for us. Building is completely different in Vespugian weather than at home—or in Wales, and I shudder to think what kind of houses we might have built had Gedder not shown us how
to construct dwellings to let the wind in, rather than to keep it out. And he showed us what crops to plant, hardy things like cabbage and carrots, and how to make windbreaks for them. All the Indians have helped us, but Gedder more than the others, and more visibly. But he never laughs.

“I don’t trust people who don’t laugh.” He put the letter down.

Beezie got a baby-sitting job that began right after school, so Chuck took her place at the cash register, pretending that he was Matthew Maddox and that the store was big and flourishing. The grandmother took in ironing and sewing, and her old hands were constantly busy. There was no time for leisurely cups of tea and the telling of tales. Chuck moved more and more deeply into his games of Let’s Pretend. Matthew and Zillah, Bran and Gwen, Gedder and Zillie, all were more alive for him than anyone except Beezie and the grandmother.

One evening Mrs. Maddox stayed late downstairs in the store. When Chuck came home from chopping wood for one of their neighbors, he found Beezie and his grandmother drinking herb tea. “Grandma, I’m hungry.” He could feel his belly growling. Supper had been soup and dry toast.

Seeming to ignore his words, the old woman looked at him. “Duthbert Mortmain’s been calling on your ma. He’s downstairs now.”

“I don’t like him,” Beezie said.

“You may have to,” the grandmother told her.

“Why?” Chuck asked. He remembered Duthbert Mortmain as a lumbering, scowling man who did small plumbing jobs. How did he smell? Not a pleasant smell. Hard, like a lump of coal.