Little, Big

by next evening, an evening as still and blue as this one or stiller, everyone in the pentacle of five towns around Edgewood would know that Marge Juniper had had a visitor.

“But,” Sophie said, “You can’t have walked here since evening…”

“I walk fast,” Lilac said; “or maybe I took a shortcut.”

Whatever way she had taken had led her past a frozen lake and a lake island all glittering in starlight, where a little pillared gazebo stood up, or perhaps it was only snow-shapes that suggested such a place; and through woods, waking a chickadee; and past a place, a sort of castle iced with snow…

“The Summer House,” Sophie said.

… a place she’d seen before, from above, in another season long ago. She came toward it through what had been the flower beds that bordered its lawn, gone wild now and with only the tall dead stalks of hollyhock and mullein standing above the snow. There were the gray bones of a canvas sling-chair in the yard. She thought, seeing them: wasn’t there some message, or some comfort, she was to deliver here? She stood for a moment, looking at the derelict chair and the squat house where not a single footprint went through the snow up to the half-engulfed door, a summery screen door, and for the first time she shivered in the cold, but couldn’t remember what the message was or whom it had been for, if there really had been one at all; and so passed on.

“Auberon,” Sophie said.

“No,” Lilac said. “Not Auberon.”

She walked through the graveyard, not knowing it to be such; the plot of ground where John Drinkwater had first been buried and then others beside him or near him, some known to him and some not. Lilac wondered at the big carved stones placed at random here and there, like giant forgotten toys. She studied them a while, walking from one to another and brushing off their caps of snow to look at sad angels, and deep-incised letters, and granite finials, while beneath her feet, beneath the snow and black leaves and earth, stiff bones relaxed, and hollow chests would have sighed if they could have, and old attitudes of attention and expectancy undissolved by death were softened; and (as sleepers do when a troublesome dream passes or a bothering noise, the crying of a cat or a lost child, ceases) those asleep there rested more deeply and slept at last truly as Lilac walked above them.

“Violet,” Sophie said, her tears flowing freely and painlessly now, “and John; and Harvey Cloud, and Great- aunt Cloud. Daddy. And Violet’s father too, and Auberon. And Auberon.”

Yes: and Auberon: that Auberon. Standing above him, on the bosom of earth that lay on his bosom, Lilac felt clearer about her message, and her purpose. It was all getting clearer, as though she continued to wake further all the time after waking. “Oh, yes,” she said to herself; “oh, yes…” She turned to see, past black firs, the dark pile of the house with not a light showing, as snow-burdened as the firs, but unmistakable; and soon she found a path to there, and a door to go in by, and steps to go up, and glass-knobbed doors to choose from.

“And then, and now,” she said, kneeling on the bed before Sophie, “I have to tell you what.

“If I can remember it all.”

A Parliament

“I was right, then,” Sophie said. A third candle was burning down. Deep cold midnight was in the room. “Only a few.”

“Fifty-two,” Lilac said. “Counting them all.”

“So few.”

“It’s the War,” Lilac said. “They’ve all gone. And the ones left are old—so old. You can’t imagine.”

“But why?” Sophie said. “Why if they knew they must lose so many?”

Lilac shrugged, looking away. It didn’t seem part of her mission to explain, only to give news, and a summons; she couldn’t explain to Sophie either exactly what had become of her when she had been stolen, or how she had lived: when Sophie questioned her, she answered as all children do, with hasty references to strangers and events unknown to her hearer, expecting it all to be understood, to be as familiar to the grown-up as to the child: but Lilac was not as other children. “You know,” she only said, impatiently, when Sophie questioned her, and returned to the news she had come to bring: that the War was to end; that there was to be a peace conference, a Parliament, to which all who could come must come, to resolve this, and end the long sad time.

A Parliament, where all who came would meet face to face. Face to face: when Lilac said it to her, Sophie felt a hum in her head and a pause in her heartbeat, as though Lilac had announced to her her death, or something as final and unimagined.

“So you must come,” Lilac said. “You have to. Because they’re so few now, the War has to end. We have to make a Treaty, for everybody.”

“A Treaty.”

“Or they’ll all be lost,” Lilac said. “The winter might go on, and never end. They could do that, they could: the last thing they could do.”

“Oh,” Sophie said. “No. Oh, no.”

“It’s in your hands,” Lilac said, stately, minatory; and then, solemn message done, she threw her arms wide. “So all right?” she said happily. “You’ll come? All of you?”

Sophie put her cold knuckles to her lips. Lilac, smiling, alive and alight in the winter-dusty room: and this news. Sophie felt vacant, disappeared. If there were a ghost here, it was Sophie and not her daughter.

Her daughter!

“But how?” she said. “How are we to go there?”

Lilac looked at her in dismay. “You don’t know that?” she said.

“Once I did,” Sophie said, tears gathering again in her throat. “Once I thought I could find it, once… Oh, oh, why did you wait so long!” With a pang she saw, dead, buried within her, the possibilities that Lilac spoke of: dead because Sophie had crushed all possibility that Lilac could ever sit here and speak them. She had lived long with terrible possibilities—Lilac dead, or utterly transformed—and had faced them; but Tacey and Lily’s ancient prediction (though she had counted years, and even studied the cards for a date) she had never allowed herself to believe. The effort had been huge, and had cost her terribly; she had lost, in her effort not to imagine this moment, all her childhood’s certainties, all those commonplace impossibilities; had lost, even, without quite noticing it, every vivid memory she had ever had of those daily impossibilities, of the sweet unreasonable air of wonder she had once lived in. Thus she had protected herself; this moment hadn’t been able to injure her— kill her, for it would have!—in her imagining it; and so she had at least been able to go on from day to day. But too many thin and shadowed years had gone by now, too many. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t know the way.”

“You must,” Lilac said simply.

“I don’t,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “I don’t, and even if I did I’d be afraid.” Afraid! That was the worst: afraid to take steps away from this dark old house, as afraid as any ghost. “Too long,” she said, wiping her wet nose on the sleeve of her cardigan, “too long.”

“But the house is the door!” Lilac said. “Everybody knows that. It’s marked on all their maps.”

“It is?”

“Yes. So.”

“And from here?”

Lilac looked at her blankly. “Well,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Lilac,” Sophie said. “I’ve had a sad life, you see…”

“Oh? Oh, I know,” Lilac said, brightening. “Those cards! Where are they?”

“There,” Sophie said, pointing to where the box of different woods from the Crystal Palace lay on the night table. Lilac reached for them, and pulled open the box. “Why did you have a sad life?” she asked, extracting the cards.

“Why?” Sophie said. “Because you were stolen, partly, mostly…”

“Oh, that. Well, that doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t matter?” Sophie laughed, weeping.

“No, that was just the beginning.” She was shuffling the big cards awkwardly in her small hands. “Didn’t you