For the second time she had driven north to Edgewood, this time over the ruts and potholes of a degenerated road system, and passing this time checkpoints where passes and visas had to be shown, a thing that would have been unthinkable five years before when she had come here. She supposed that she had been followed, at least part way, but no tail could have kept up with her through the tangle of rainy roads that led from the highway to here. She came alone. The letter from Sophie had been odd but urgent: urgent enough, she hoped, to justify sending it (Hawksquill had insisted her cousins never write to her at the Capital, she knew her mail was scanned) and to justify a journey and a long absence from the Government at a critical time.
“Hello, Sophie,” she said, when the two tall sisters came out on the porch. There was no welcoming light lit there. “Hello, Alice.”
“Hello,” Alice said. “Where’s Auberon? Where’s George? We asked…”
Hawksquill mounted the steps. “I went to the address,” she said, “and knocked a long time. The place looked abandoned…”
“It always does,” Sophie said.
“… and no one answered. I thought I heard someone behind the door; I called their names. Someone, someone with an accent, called back that they had gone.”
“Gone?” Sophie said.
“Gone away. I asked where, for how long; but no one answered. I didn’t dare stay too long.”
“Didn’t dare?” Alice said.
“May we go in?” Hawksquill said. “It’s a lovely night, but damp.” Her cousins didn’t know, and, Hawksquill supposed, couldn’t really imagine the danger they might put themselves in by association with her. Deep desires reached out toward this house, not knowing of its existence, yet sniffing closer all the time. But there was no need (she hoped) to alarm them.
There was no light in the hall but a dull candle, making the place shadowy and vast; Hawksquill followed her cousins down, around, up through the impossible insides of the house into a set of two big rooms where a fire burned, lights were lit, and many faces looked up interested and expectant at her arrival.
“This is our cousin,” Daily Alice said to them. “Long-lost, sort of, her name is Ariel. This is the family,” she said to Ariel, “you know them; and some others.
“So, I guess everybody’s here,” she said. “Everybody who can come. I’ll go get Smoky.”
Sophie went to a drum-table where a brass, green-glassshaded lamp shone, and where the cards lay. Ariel Hawksquill felt her heart rise or sink to see them. Whatever other fates they held or did not hold, Hawksquill knew at that moment that hers was surely in them: was them.
“Hello,” she said, nodding briefly to the assembly. She took a straight-backed chair between a very, a remarkably old and bright-eyed lady and two twin children, boy and girl, who shared an armchair.
“And how,” said Marge Juniper to her, “do you come to be a cousin?”
“As nearly as I can tell,” Hawksquill said, “I’m not, really. The father of the Auberon who was Violet Drinkwater’s son was my grandfather by a later marriage.”
“Oh,” Marge said. “That side of the family.”
Hawksquill felt eyes on her, and gave a quick glance and a smile at the two children in the armchair, who were staring at her with uncertain curiosity. Rarely see strangers, Hawksquill supposed; but what Bud and Blossom were seeing, in the flesh, with wonder and a little trepidation, was that enigmatic and somewhat fearsome figure who in a song they often sang comes at the crux of the story: the Lady with the Alligator Purse.
Still Unstolen
Alice climbed quickly up through the house, negotiating dark stairways with the skill of a blind man.
“Smoky?” she called when she stood at the bottom of a narrow curl of steep stairs that led up into the orrery. No one answered, but a light burned up there.
“Smoky?”
She didn’t like to go up; the small stairs, the small arched door, the cramped cold cupola stuffed with machinery, gave her the willies, it wasn’t designed to amuse someone as big as she was.
“Everyone’s here,” she said. “We can start.”
She waited, hugging herself. The damp was palpable on this neglected floor; and brown stains spread over the wallpaper. Smoky said, “All right,” but she heard no movement.
“George and Auberon didn’t come,” she said. “They’re gone.” She waited more, and then—hearing neither noise of work nor preparations to come down—climbed up the stairs and put her head through the little door.
Smoky sat on a small stool, like a petitioner or penitent before his idol, staring at the mechanism inside the black steel case. Alice felt somewhat shy, or intrusive into a privacy, seeing him there and it exposed.
“Okay,” Smoky said again, but when he rose, it was only to take a steel ball the size of a croquet ball from a rack of them in the back of the case. This he placed in the cup or hand of one of the extended jointed arms of the wheel which the case contained and sheltered. He let go, and the weight of the ball spun the arm downward. As it moved, the other jointed arms moved too; another, clack-clack-clack, extended itself to receive the next ball.
“See how it works?” Smoky said, sadly.
“No,” Alice said.
“An overbalancing wheel,” Smoky said. “These jointed arms, see, are held out stiff on this side, because of the joints; but when they come around to this side, the joints fold up, and the arm lies along the wheel. So. This side of the wheel, where the arms stick out, will always be heavier, and will always fall down, that is, around; so when you put the ball in the cup, the wheel falls around, and that brings the next arm into place. And a ball falls into the cup of
“Oh.” He was telling all this flatly, like an old, old story or a grammar lesson too often repeated. It occurred to Alice that he’d eaten no dinner.
“Then,” he went on, “the weight of the balls falling into the cups of the arms on
“Amazing,” Alice said mildly.
Smoky, hands behind his back, looked glumly at the unmoving wheel. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.
“Oh.”
“This guy Cloud must have been just about the stupidest inventor or genius who ever…” He could think of no conclusion, and bowed his head. “It never worked, Alice; this thing couldn’t turn anything. It’s not going to work.”
She moved carefully among the tools and oily disassembled works and took his arm. “Smoky,” she said. “Everybody’s downstairs. Ariel Hawksquill came.”
He looked at her, and laughed, a frustrated laugh at a defeat absurdly complete; then he grimaced, and put his hand quickly to his chest.
“Oh,” Alice said. “You should have eaten.”
“It’s better when I don’t,” Smoky said. “I think.”
“Come on,” Alice said. “You’ll figure this out, I bet. Maybe you can ask Ariel.” She kissed his brow, and went before him out the arched door and then down the steps, feeling released.
“Alice,” Smoky said to her. “Is this it? Tonight, I mean. Is this it?”
“Is this what?”
“It is, isn’t it?” he said.
She said nothing while they went along the hall and down the stairs toward the second floor. She held Smoky’s arm, and thought of more than one thing to say; but at last (there wasn’t any point any longer in riddling,
