“There will be no pampering, Mrs. Luccock. Let her carry her own bag!”
Quickly, Emily wrapped both her small hands around the handle of her travelling bag and stumbled forward. To her dismay, she found that Mrs. Plumly stood directly in her path. She hesitated for a moment, and in that moment Mrs. Plumly finally looked up from her needles to present a round, blossom-pink face as harmless as an apple dumpling and to give Emily a secret, sympathetic smile. Emily nearly dropped her bag in surprise. Curiously, this unexpected friendliness from someone as warm and cozy as a story-book grandmother came close to making her cry at last. But under Mrs. Meeching’s icy stare, she kept back the tears and steered around Mrs. Plumly as best and as rapidly as she could manage.
Now, for the first time, she could study the parlor that had once so delighted her. Although her bag thump-thumped painfully against her knees, she managed to peek upward. There they were, the same plaster cupids gamboling in the corners and all around the edges of the endlessly high ceiling. On either side, the walls were still graced with the same huge mirrors. And directly ahead the same broad oak staircase curved up to a high mirrored wall, and then up and up to a second and yet a third story. Emily remembered how she had loved to run up those stairs to her little room on the second floor. She hoped that Aunt Twice, if she could do nothing else, had arranged for Emily to have that very same room again.
Of course, everything she now saw in the parlor provided only a memory of an elegance long since past. The carpet under her feet was worn to the threads. The gold frames around the mirrors were tarnished and peeling. And cobwebs dangled like small ghosts from the cupids overhead. She could tell all this despite the shadows that shrouded the room.
Shadows seemed to be lurking everywhere. Shadows in the stairwell. Shadows hovering in the corners of the ceiling. Shadows even seemed to be huddling in every chair that lined the walls of the room. And then Emily made a horrifying discovery. In the dim, flickering light what had appeared to be shadows in the chairs were not shadows at all. They were very old people sitting and staring silently ahead with pale, wrinkled faces as empty of expression as unmarked gravestones!
Who were they? Why were they there? Had they been sitting in the room all along, watching the terrible scene at the front door without so much as a murmur? If Emily had not seen one of them shuffle an old, shabby carpet slipper just then, she might have wondered if they were even alive. But the worst thing was that they all seemed to be looking right through her as if she were not even there, as if she had become a shadow too!
She had no more than made this new, startling, and frightening discovery, however, than she made another one of an entirely different nature. Directly ahead of her, at the foot of the staircase, sat a round table laid with a magnificent, full-skirted red velvet cloth. Its heavy gold fringe barely brushed against the worn carpet, as if it were afraid to touch such a shabby relic. On this splendid setting rested a large bowl of cut crystal, so brilliant it twinkled like a star in the dusky parlor. And in the bowl lay a neatly arranged miniature mound of her favorite Christmas treat—puffy, tempting, tantalizing, delicious pink-and-white-striped peppermint drops! It almost seemed that they had been placed there just for Emily. Forgetting everything, she set down her travelling bag and reached out her hand.
Snap! Another hand, thin and cold as six feet under, flicked around her wrist. “Those are not placed there for the benefit of charity brats!” hissed Mrs. Meeching. Behind her, Aunt Twice gave a fainting gasp.
With wide eyes still fastened on the peppermint drops, Emily picked up her bag and numbly followed after Aunt Twice.
THREE
Tilly
They did not go up the broad oak stairway at all, so it seemed that not only was Emily not to have her old room again, but she was not even to have a room near it. Where then? she wondered. Aunt Twice had made a direct turn to the left instead, and they had now entered the dining room.
But how changed it was from the last time Emily had seen it! No longer did a cut glass chandelier twinkle over a dining set of the finest polished, carved mahogany. Now a single lamp threw a dim, trembling light over two rows of unpainted wooden chairs standing like stiff sentries around a long table that looked as if it had seen endless service in a pauper’s kitchen. Each chair guarded a thick crockery bowl and plate, a tin cup and spoon set on an unwholesome brown oilcloth cover. Aunt Twice hurried past them without a glance, and Emily scurried after her. She could still feel Mrs. Meeching’s eyes piercing her back as she followed Aunt Twice through a heavy swinging door into an enormous, bleak kitchen.
Of course, in Emily’s earlier position of pampered visitor, she had never entered this kitchen, but she could not believe it had ever looked as it did now, as if everything in it had been dipped in a bucket of grey paint. A gas lamp glared at her coldly from across a grey iron sink. Two grey iceboxes, one large as a wardrobe and secured by a grim padlock, loomed in a corner. On the stove, a thin, grey, watery soup bubbled in an ugly grey enamel cauldron. It was, without doubt, the dreariest kitchen Emily had ever seen.
But all the while she was taking in the kitchen, another pair of eyes was taking her in. The eyes,
