Magic Elizabeth (3 page)

“Waited dinner for you,” said her aunt’s gruff voice. “Had enough for Mrs. Chipley too. I thought she’d at least want a cup of tea before she left.” She indicated the tea kettle now quietly bubbling to itself. “But everyone’s in a hurry hurry hurry these days. Sit down.” Sally looked up in surprise to see that Aunt Sarah was already seated at the other end of the table, where Sally could not see her face clearly. The kitchen was lit only by the low blue flame of the gas stove and a rather dusty bulb in a paper shade hanging over the middle of the table. Near Sally was placed a dish of peas and potatoes and chicken. Since she and Mrs. Chipley had eaten dinner before leaving home, she was not at all hungry,
but she did not dare to mention it. She sat down, pushing back a chair which stood near the table. The chair legs squeaked over the linoleum, and Sally looked anxiously across at the shadowed figure, fearing that Aunt Sarah might say she was scratching the floor. But Aunt Sarah said nothing.

In fact she did not talk at all during the meal. Shadow wove his way under the table, brushing against Sally’s legs from time to time, and then darting across the kitchen floor. Sally could hear something bumping lightly along the floor, as if he were pushing it with his paw, but she could not see what it was.

When Sally at last put her knife and fork across her plate and looked up, her aunt’s harsh voice spoke from the other end of the table. “Didn’t eat much, Sally. Doesn’t your mother make you eat?”

“Yes,” said Sally in a small voice. “But I’m not very hungry,” she added bravely, her voice rising to an unfamiliar squeak on the last word.

Aunt Sarah stood up. It seemed to take some effort to unfold herself from the chair. She leaned across the table, one hand pressed against her back, and the other flattened on the table. How crooked her fingers were, Sally thought, staring at them. She looked up at her aunt’s face, which had appeared in the cone of light cast by the hanging bulb. It looked annoyed, or angry. Perhaps both. “I
think then,” her aunt said, “that you’d better go up to bed. Little girls who can’t eat belong in bed.”

Sally swallowed and looked miserably down at her hands in her lap.

“Well,” said her aunt, walking around the table to her. She put a bony hand on Sally’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said gruffly.

Sally stood up and followed her through the pantry and into the hall once more, where she picked up her suitcase. Aunt Sarah had switched on some more lights, and Sally could now see that the entrance to what must be the living room was hung with the oddest curtains she had ever seen. They were not really curtains at all, but rather a series of tiny colored beads on long strings, hanging close together to form a sort of screen or curtain. The beads moved and made a gentle clicking sound as Sally and her aunt passed. Sally could just glimpse dimly beyond the bead curtains the curving backs of chairs and sofas which looked very old. Their gentle shapes seemed comforting. Aunt Sarah was all straight sharp lines, and not comforting in the least. And she heard too, as they passed, from somewhere deep inside the room, a very delicate musical sound, faint and rather trembling.

“The melodeon. Always does that when the floor shakes. Used to play it when I was your age.” Sally was too astounded at such a wealth of information
from Aunt Sarah to ask what a melodeon was. But it sounded as if it must be something very graceful and beautiful.

She was surprised to see, now that the lights were on, that a white marble angel stood on a post at the foot of the curving staircase. The angel held a twisted orange bulb like a candle flame in one hand. She was smiling gently and looking out somewhere beyond the front door — perhaps, thought Sally, to where her parents were. She touched the angel’s cold bare foot as she passed. Shadow followed along behind them, almost as silent as a real shadow.

The stairway was longer than any Sally had ever climbed before. It went on and on, twisting and turning, and each time that Sally thought they must be at the top there was another turn, and more stairs, leading up and up. “What a strange house,” she thought again.

Sally had become aware of a very loud ticking sound that increased in volume as they went up the stairs. At last, finding herself in a long hallway lined with many doors on either side, she saw, down at the far end near a back stairway, a solemn-looking grandfather clock as tall as the ceiling. There was nothing friendly about this clock, as there had been about the little kitchen clock, and Sally stared at it in respectful awe. She had never seen one like it before, and she was astounded by its size, its deep
voice, and by the flashing of its pendulum behind the glass cover. The clock seemed to be announcing that in this part of the house, at least,
it
was in charge.

The floor of the hall was covered by a gray carpet patterned with enormous red flowers. Shadow sat on one of the flowers and gave a huge yawn, which ended in a high, petulant meow. The sound echoed down the hallway, and Sally shivered and began to yawn too. She was very tired, almost too tired to care about anything — even when her aunt opened one of the doors that lined the hall and showed her into the room that would be hers. It was a very pretty room, the prettiest Sally had ever seen, its furniture painted pale blue, its brass bed covered with a ruffled yellow spread. The yellow curtains at an open window snapped in the wind. Sally placed her suitcase on the floor next to the bed. She felt too shy to say, “This is a very pretty room,” which was what she was thinking.

“Now how did that get open?” said her aunt. One of the two windows in the room was slightly open. Aunt Sarah walked over to it and shut it. She looked angrily at the wet curtains.

While her aunt was frowning at the curtains, Sally looked up at an oil painting that hung over a little green marble fireplace. It was a picture of a girl
about Sally’s own age, with long red hair, a sprinkle of freckles over the nose, and round greenish eyes. She wore a yellow bonnet tied with ribbons beneath her chin, a long pale blue dress with three layers of ruffles, and high-buttoned shoes. The girl was holding a rag doll on her lap, and she was looking down at it as if she loved it very much. The doll’s hair was long and was made of what seemed to be thick strands of golden thread. It had a painted pink mouth curled into a smile at the corners. The eyes were a deep blue, the pleasant shape of watermelon seeds, and painted on with a very thin brush so that each golden eyelash showed. The doll was wearing a long blue dress and small high-buttoned shoes, and even a yellow bonnet, exactly like those worn by its mistress. Its hands were tucked into a tiny white fur muff. It was the most adorable doll Sally had ever seen, and in less than a moment she had fallen in love with it.

“I see,” said Aunt Sarah, pointing with a sharp finger that seemed to slice the soft air in the pretty room, “that you’re looking at the picture.”

Sally nodded.

“That was a girl who lived in this house a long time ago. She must have been about your age when the picture was painted. This was her room.” She lowered her arm abruptly, as if she were a mechanical
toy that had run down, looked proudly about the room, and straightened the round rag rug which Sally had mussed in walking over it. “Some of those old things in the picture are stored in the attic,” she murmured.

But Sally was staring at the picture.

The girl in the picture was smiling, so that a dimple deepened in her left cheek. Sally had not noticed that before. It was almost as if the girl’s expression had changed, just a little, since she had first looked at the picture.

Sally’s fingers touched the dimple in her own cheek. “Why, she looks just like
me!
” she thought in astonishment.

“You resemble the girl in the picture quite remarkably,” Aunt Sarah was saying. “They called her Sally too.”

Aunt Sarah showed Sally where the bathroom was, right next door to her room, gave her a pink towel and washcloth, and then came back to the bedroom with her. While Sally began unpacking her suitcase, her aunt straightened the curtains, turned back the yellow spread to reveal a bright patchwork quilt beneath it, and moved a vase carefully into the very center of a little table that stood beside the bed. She cleared her throat several times, as if she were going to say something, and
then, quite abruptly, she touched Sally on the shoulder, said, “Well, good night,” and out she went, with Shadow following. As the door was closing behind them, Shadow looked back. The golden glitter of his eyes seemed to linger in the room long after the door had closed.

Mysterious sounds from the darkness outside invaded the quiet room. Branches rubbed against the walls of the old house. Trees creaked and groaned in the wind, and a sudden splash of rain hit the window as if a hand had thrown it. And yet Sally felt oddly comforted by the pretty room and its oil painting. She smiled shyly up at the portrait of the other Sally and her doll. She wondered what the other Sally would think if she could see her placing her clothes in the top drawer of the blue painted chest.

“She looks nice,” she thought. “I think I would have liked her.”

“But I don’t like Aunt Sarah, and I don’t like Shadow,” she told herself as she put on her pajamas. “I don’t like them at all.”

Before getting into bed she looked around the room, at the wallpaper, sprinkled with tiny bouquets of pink flowers that reminded her of the violets on the curtains in her mother’s sewing room. A small white desk held a feather pen stuck into a blue bowl
filled with tiny white pebbles; the dainty blue chair next to it seemed to be the very chair upon which the other Sally was seated in the picture.

She sat down in the chair and tried to imagine how it must have felt to be that other Sally, so long ago. She looked up at the painting, and she placed her hands just like the other Sally’s hands and pretended that she was holding the soft cottony body of the little doll.

As she went to sleep that night, with the patchwork quilt pulled up to her chin, almost the last thing she was conscious of was the painting. The rain had almost stopped. Moonlight suddenly flooded the room. In the silvery light the picture seemed to spring to life. In just another moment, if Sally could keep her eyes open, the other Sally might step down by way of the mantel and enter the room she had left so long ago …

But the very last thing she heard, just as she was dropping off to sleep, was a mournful yowl, which might have been the wind or perhaps Shadow, somewhere in the darkness beyond her window.

She woke up once that night, shivering, from a dream in which Aunt Sarah, wearing a pointed black hat and a great billowing black cloak, was riding upon the back of an enormous Shadow. Closer and closer they came, and closer and closer —

She lay awake in the dark for a long time, trembling, and in the strange moaning blackness, with the trees beating like wings at the mysterious old house, it seemed quite possible to her that Aunt Sarah might indeed be a witch.

But when she fell asleep again at last, it was to dream that she was playing with the other Sally and her doll upon the round rag rug beside the bed, and that sun was streaming in through the windows.

T
here was something cold
on Sally’s forehead. Her eyes flew open in alarm. Looming over her was Aunt Sarah’s sharp-nosed face; her thin hand rested upon Sally’s forehead. Something moved at the foot of the bed, and Sally’s eyes turned quickly to confront Shadow, seated at her feet. He narrowed his eyes and looked back at her, unblinking. For just a moment it was like another bad dream. Sally thought that she might scream, but she found that her throat had gone so dry that she could never have managed it. Which, after all, was probably just as well. For what good would it do?

Her aunt, seeing Sally staring up at her, quickly drew her hand away.

Sally immediately closed her eyes again, hoping that Aunt Sarah would think she was sleeping and go away.

But “Sally,” her aunt whispered.

Sally did not answer for a time, but at last, feeling Aunt Sarah still standing there, she slowly opened her eyes and looked up at her. This close, with the morning sun filling the room, she could see that Aunt Sarah’s eyes, like Shadow’s, were pale green.

Aunt Sarah reached again toward Sally’s forehead. Sally turned her head away and stared at the flower-sprinkled wall. The moving shadows of leaves came and went over the little bouquets. Aunt Sarah snatched her hand back. “Good morning,” she said sharply. “Do you feel all right? Your head seems warm and you look quite flushed. I’m not used to children, you understand.”

“I’m all right,” Sally answered stiffly, turning her head to look up at Aunt Sarah. Her voice, to her surprise, sounded rather hoarse. She tried to stifle a cough, but Aunt Sarah noticed it.

She looked sharply at Sally, who looked back, unmoving. Something flickered in Aunt Sarah’s eyes. If it had been anyone else, Sally would have thought it was concern or kindness. But since it was Aunt Sarah — Sally turned her head away again. “I hope I’m not getting a cold,” thought Sally, remembering
the rain the night before. “Then she’ll really be mad at me.”

Her eyes moved to the windows. A maple tree was looking in through both of them. She wondered if it could be one tree. If so, it was a very large one. She blinked at the brilliant gold-and-green light that glittered in the moving leaves. Between two swaying branches she could see what looked like the corner of an old barn.

She raised herself on one elbow and looked up at her aunt, seeing her now through a moving blur of light. She blinked again. “Is that a barn?” she asked, before she could help herself. She didn’t really like to ask Aunt Sarah anything at all.

“Yes,” said her aunt. “This house used to be a farmhouse a long time ago, at the edge of a little town called Forest Valley.”

Sally looked at the painting above the fireplace.

“Yes,” said her aunt, following her gaze to the painting. “This was all country around here when she lived here. None of these buildings —” she waved an arm to indicate the apartment buildings on all sides of them. “But breakfast is almost ready,” she said. “We’ll see you downstairs shortly.” Aunt Sarah turned and walked out the door.