Ozark Trilogy 2: The Grand Jubilee (25 page)

Then came the very last thing. She worked on a table in the attics, finding her materials in broken vases and cracked or chipped glass things of all kinds. There were punchbowls there, and oval plates with nests for stuffed eggs, pitchers meant to hold tea for twenty or more, great glass trays for passing sandwiches, and as in any good Ozark household there was a bin of glass shards and chips kept for the principle of thrift and because the tadlings liked to use them for playing house. The leading was the only thing she lacked, and she found it easily enough in the town.

She cut and fit the pieces carefully, measuring and remeasuring, checking after each added bit to be certain there was no mistake; and when she was through she was flushed with pleasure. For her labors she had a pane of glass that fit into her single window, formed of every shade of yellow, from the palest lemon to a deep color that almost lapsed into orange. She set it firmly into the window frame, over the old glass, and made it secure, and she had perfection. In the early morning and all through the day till midafternoon the air in the room was golden, glorious yellow; then as the sun grew lower it took on a paler tint, the light of afternoons in winter when the lamps are on but the curtains are still open. Still a golden light, though it lacked the splendor of the morning.

“It is my place,” she said when everything was ready and she stood looking round her. “
My
place.” Her brothers would not think to come here, nor be interested if they did. There was nothing here for them.

Grateful, overwhelmed at the mercy the room offered her, Silverweb of McDaniels dropped to her knees on the bare gray-white floor, raised her eyes to the flood of golden light, and folded her hands-not in the prim steepling of the Reverend and the Grannys and the Solemn Service, but clasped together and round one another as if something beyond price were sheltering inside them.

Her lips moved, but she made no sound; the words were not intended for any human ear.

Holy One,

Hail and all hail!

Hosannah!

Hosannah, glory in the highest!

Allelulia!

Amen.

The prayer moved through her; as it was repeated again and again it was no longer Silverweb praying the words, but the words praying her. Love unbearable caught her up and surged in her, a touch that carried bliss for which no words would ever be adequate, and she became a part of the golden light. She was a crystal that rang to the touch of a Thing unseen but more real than the floor under her knees, a crystal burning in a constant fire that would one day-the Holy One grant her that grace!-burn away every last flaw and let the light pour through her as it poured through her window. And she, Silverweb, would disappear.

Oh, the flesh of her might move around, it would carry her through days and speak the necessary phrases and lie in a foolish bed at night and put food and drink into its mouth-but
she,
the real Silverweb of McDaniels, would not be there. She would be caught unto the One and radiating the glory of the universe; that would be her privilege and her life.

Soon there was only the one word left, and even her lips ceased to move. Looking at her, you might have thought she was not breathing, but she was. Her breath was the Allelulia! and all the rhythms of her blood and breath had set themselves to its measure, and she was aware of nothing else.

Anne of Brightwater knew that her daughter was occupied deeply by some project. Every day Silverweb ate breakfast with her family at Castle McDaniels, did the chores set her with her usual serene efficiency, reappeared again at supper-rarely at the noon dinner, but always at supper-read with them in the evenings, or sang for them in the clear strong voice that was the backbone of the Reverend’s choir. Whatever was asked of her she did willingly, while the eight brothers tried in vain to shake her calm and she smiled at them. She would peel pan after pan of vegetables: given a basket, she’d go off and gather fruit or nuts; she would milk goats and bring the pails back b
rimmin
g, not a drop spilled; hand the girl a pile of the most boring sort of stuff to mend-her brothers’ stockings, or the heavy linen napkins and pillowslips-Silverweb took up her needle, found a chair, and shortly the work was done. She complained never, argued rarely, and spoke only when she was spoken to.

It was unnatural, and Anne knew it. No healthy young woman of sixteen, soon to be seventeen, behaved like that. She should have fussed, the way chores had been loaded on her in the last few weeks, testing for some response; she should of been complaining bitterly-and with justification. The Castle had servingmaids in abundance, and Silverweb had a mind glittering in its brilliance, a mind that had terrified the Grannys and impressed whatever crevice it was in the computers that set her lessons and graded them once she outgrew Granny School. Silverweb had finished every course offered, before her twelfth birthday; and someone-a human someone-had come to apologize. They were extremely sorry, he told Anne of Brightwater and Silverweb’s father, Stewart Crain McDaniels the 6th, but there was nothing left to teach the girl.

“Youall could of course bring in a human teacher,” the man had said, hesitantly, almost as if there were something impolite in the suggestion. “There are specialists that know many things we’ve never seen any need to include in the programs. . :”

Stewart Crain had been firm in his response; Silverweb knew far too much already to suit him. A young woman that’d turned down four young men he’d offered her for husband, one after another, with the same fool reason-she didn’t “choose” to marry? A young woman that’d run away from home to try to join Responsible of Brightwater on her Quest, and had to be sent clear to Castle Airy for the three Grannys there to punish? He’d not have her taught more things she might use as warp or woof for her stubborn and always unexpected behavior; oh, no. He sent the man away, thanking him brusquely for his concern, and that was the end of it. Thereafter, Silverweb relied on the libraries.

But now she did not do even that. When she first began disappearing, slipping away as soon as the mountains of household and garden tasks set her were finished, showing up again only when her absence would be remarked upon, the libraries had been Anne’s first thought. After all, through the brief days of the Jubilee, while the other young ones spent their time at the plays and the fairs, Silverweb had moved inflexible between their rooms and the libraries of Brightwater. But she had not found her daughter among the books. Not in the Castle’s own very respectable room of volumes and microfiches; not in the town library with its banks of machines making available all the books of the world and facsimiles of some from Old Earth; not in the ample and specialized library of the Reverend.

And then she had had a thought that she almost dared not entertain: was it possible Silverweb was slipping away to meet some young man? Anne would of been obliged to make a show of stern disapproval for that, but in her heart she’d of been overjoyed. A girl not married at Silverweb’s age, and showing no sign of any interest in the state, was a rare creature on Ozark. Anne didn’t mind having a rare creature about, precisely, but she’d rather have had grandchildren, and the boys were still far too young to provide them.

She set the servingmaids, a few that she knew to be trustworthy, to watching, then. And they came back with just the news she’d feared. There was not, so far as any of them could find out, a young man in the picture.

At last, when she’d made up her mind to confront Silverweb and demand an explanation-an awkward thing at her age, and with her behavior so sickeningly perfect that it allowed no smallest chink for objection-the mystery was solved for her. Among the Castle staff there was a very old woman, well into her nineties, that’d been there all her life, born in the bedroom of her mother, also a McDaniels servingmaid. She was not expected to do anything now but sit and rock; though she insisted she could still outwork any woman in the Castle, she made no attempt to prove it.

Joan of Smith came to Anne’s workroom to tell her, leaning on the cane she swore she didn’t need-and would
not
have needed if she’d allowed modern magic to help her. She had an awesome stubbornness.

“I know where the young miss has been getting herself to, my lady,” said Joan of Smith. “A long walk it was for me, but I checked before I came-and sure enough, there she was.”

Anne stood up, heedless of the yarns slipping off her lap onto the rug, asking, “Well,
where?
Not in this Castle, surely!”

“Yes, indeed,” said Joan. “Right here in this Castle. She’s not a child to go gallivanting, not Miss Silverweb.”

“But we looked everywhere-we even sent staff up to the attics, and they found her there once or twice fooling with bits of glass, but not after that . . . We looked this Castle up, down, and sideways!”

“Missus,” said Joan of Smith, “there’s a place you didn’t look. I’ve been here all my life, and I’ve seen it only once or twice, and would of had no idea what it was intended for. But my mother’d heard of it from her mother . . . My lady, there’s a room beyond the attics.”

“Joan!” Anne of Brightwater settled the old lady into a chair and saw her comfortable, fussing over her till she was sure the pillows at her back were as she liked them, and talking the whole time. “I have not been here all my life, for sure, but I’ve been here a considerable number of years, and I have been over every inch of this Castle. There’s no room beyond the attics-there’s no `beyond the attics’ at all!”

“Oh, yes, Missus, there is. A few of the maids know of it, those as are truly honest about their work; they clean it once a year. But it never entered their heads the young miss’d go there, seeing as how they’re scared to death of the place their own selves. Come cleaning time, they draw lots for who’ll do the job, and it’s always two of ‘em, and garlic in both their pockets. Ninnies!”

“Well!” Anne sank down in a chair and pulled it close to Joan’s, whose ears were no longer what they had been. “So there’s a secret room in my Castle, and everybody knows about it but me, is there? You don’t seem to be afraid of it, Joan of Smith . . You know something the others don’t?”

“As I said, Missus,
I
heard of it from my mother, that heard of it from hers. In my grandmother’s day-that’d be more than a hundred and fifty years back, mind-the Magicians were few and the Magicians of Rank even fewer. It wasn’t like it is today, ma’am. Times there were when a Magician of Rank couldn’t come when you sent for him, good will or not-even such a one can’t be in two places at once, and it was a matter of choosing among the emergencies which was the worst. That left only the Grannys-and
they
were not so many in those days, either!-to do all the healing. And so it would sometimes come about that there’d be somebody taken sick as was
catching,
and it something the Granny couldn’t manage, and might could be days before anyone from the higher ranks could come to the Castle. And a person like that, they put ‘em up in the room back beyond the attics, with just a Granny to nurse them-or sometimes just a willing woman, if no Granny was to hand either. And there they stayed, for so long as was needful. It’s a tiny bit of a room, Missus. Just a
tiny
one!”

“And you’ve been up there?” marveled Anne, staring at the aged woman with little but a quaver left for a voice, all bones and wrinkles, and a fine trembling to both her hands if she didn’t keep them clutched tight to her cane. “Up to the
attics?
”

“I didn’t care to disappoint you, Missus,” said Joan. “If the room’d shown no signs of anybody being there, you see, I’d of said nothing. Hate to spoil the only thing that gives the young females on the staff any pleasure at spring cleaning. So I checked, first.”

“Law!” said Anne of Brightwater. “Well, I thank you . . . And what’s she got up there? A lovers’ bower? A . . . I don’t have any guesses, Joan; what is it? A place to get away from her brothers, that’s clear, and nobody could fault her for
that
. But is there more to it?”

“You’d best go see for your own self, dear lady,” said the old woman, giving a wave of the cane. “That’d be the way.”

“I’m willing; tell me how to get there.”

“Go all through the attics, to the furthest one, yonder on the east tower. . .”

“Yes?”

“There you’ll find a old blanket tacked up on the wall. Looks like somebody just put it there to cover might could be a cracked place, or a stain where rain’d got in. Tacked just at the top corners, it is. You pull that aside, and back of it you’ll find a kindly hall about wide enough for one person with her elbows pulled in real careful. And the room’s at the end of that.”

“I’ve seen that old blanket!” Anne declared. “I never thought . . . Isn’t there a trunk pushed up against it?”

“Used to be. But not this moment. I expect Miss Silverweb shoves that trunk back there when she comes downstairs.”

“Do the boys know about this room?”

The old lady chuckled. “Think the women as keep this Castle are pure fools, Missus?” she demanded. “
No
male person-less he was too sick to know where he was!-has ever known about that room. Bad enough that people have died in there, and people laid moaning while they waited for help. Bad enough with all the bedclothes having to be carried out and burned out behind the stables, right down to the mattress-
none
of us had ary interest, my lady, in little boys as would think it fearsome fun to wrap up in bedsheets and hide in the old wardrobe in there, and jump out at you when you went in to clear away the dust! No, no; the boys have no least notion.”