Little, Big

out, dear. Don’t be afraid.”

The door opened, just enough to let Amy pass, and though she shut it behind her softly, it boomed resoundingly as it latched. “Oh,” she said, not having at first recognized the woman on the stair, “Mrs. Drinkwater.”

“Come up,” Violet said. She patted her lap, as she might to attract a kitten. Amy mounted the stairs to where they sat halfway to the landing. Her dress was homemade, and her stockings were thick, and she was even prettier than Violet remembered. “Now. What is it?”

Amy sat on the stair below them, a miserable huddle, with a big loose bag in her lap, like a runaway’s. “August’s not here,” she said.

“No. We… don’t know where he is, exactly. Amy, now everything’s going to be all right. You’re not to worry.”

“It’s not,” Amy said softly. “It’s not going to ever be all right again.” She looked up at Violet. “Did he run off?”

“I think he did.” She put her arm around Amy. “But he’ll come back, possibly, probably…” She brushed Amy’s hair aside which had fallen lankly and sadly over her cheek. “You must go home now for a while, you see, and not worry, and everything will turn out for the best, you’ll see.”

At that Amy’s shoulders began to heave, softly and slowly. “Can’t,” she said, in a small high weeping voice. “Daddy’s put me out. He’s sent me away.” Slowly, as though unable not to, she turned and put her sobbing head in Violet’s lap. “I didn’t come to bother him. I didn’t. I don’t care, he was wonderful and good, he was, I’d do it all again and I wouldn’t bother him, only I got no place to go at all. No place to go.”

“Well, well,” Violet said, “well, well.” She exchanged a glance with Nora, whose eyes had filled too. “Of course you have a place. Of course you do. You’ll stay here, that’s all. I’m sure your father will change his mind, the silly old fool, you can stay here as long as you need to. Now don’t cry any more, Amy, don’t. Here.” She took a lace-edged hanky from her sleeve, and made the girl look up and use it, looking levelly into her eyes to stiffen her. “Now. That’s better. As long as you like. Will that be all right?”

“Yes.” Still a squeak was all she could manage, but her shoulders had stopped heaving. She smiled a little, ashamed. Nora and Violet smiled for her. “Oh,” she said, sniffing, “I almost forgot.” She tried with trembling fingers to undo her bundle, dabbed her face again and gave Violet back her sodden hanky, not much help for storms like Amy’s, and managed to work open the bundle. “A man gave me something to give you. On my way here.” She rooted among her belongings. “He seemed real mad. He said to say, ‘If you people can’t keep your bargains, there’s no use dealing with you at all.’ She drew out and placed in Violet’s hands a box that bore on its cover a picture of Queen Victoria and the Crystal Palace, done in different woods.

“Maybe he was joking,” Amy said. “A funny, birdy man. He winked at me. Is it yours?”

Violet held the box, whose weight told her that the cards, or something like them, were within.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know.”

There were footsteps climbing the stairs of the porch just then, and the three of them fell silent. The footsteps crossed the porch, with a squishy squeak as though sodden. Violet took Amy’s hand, and Nora Violet’s. The screen-door spring sang, and there was a figure against the cloudy oval glass of the door.

Auberon opened the door. He wore waders, and an old hat of John’s stuck full of flies. He was whistling as he came into the hall, about packing up your troubles in an old kit bag, but stopped when he saw the three women huddled on the stair, inexplicably, halfway to the landing.

“Well!” he said. “What’s up? Any word from August?” They didn’t answer, and he held up to show them four fat speckled trout neatly strung. “Supper!” he said, and for a moment they were all motionless, a tableau, he with the fish, they with their thoughts, the rest only watching and waiting.

No Catching Up

The cards had altered in their time elsewhere, Violet found, though just how she couldn’t at first define. What meaning they had once had seemed to have clouded over, to have become powdered or dusty with obscurity; the patent, even funny quadrilles of meaning the figures had once joined hands in whenever she laid them out, the Oppositions and Influences and so on—they would have none of it any more. It was only after she and Nora had investigated them for a long time that she discovered that they had not lost power but gained it: they could no longer do what they had done, but they could, if interpreted correctly, predict with great accuracy the small events of Drinkwater daily life: gifts, and colds, and sprains; the itineraries of absent loved ones; whether it would rain on a picnic—that sort of thing. Only now and again did the deck throw up anything more startling. But it was a great help. They would grant us that, Violet thought; that gift in exchange… In fact she supposed (much later on) that to bestow this diurnal exactness of her deck was why they had taken it from her in the first place, unless they just couldn’t help bestowing it. There was no catching up with them, no, not ever.

August’s offspring would in the course of time be settled around the five towns, some with their mothers and grandmothers, some with others, changing names and families as they moved, as in a game of musical chairs: when the music stopped, in fact, two of the children (by a process so charged with emotion, and so complex in its jointure of shame, regret, love, indifference and kindliness that the participants would never be able to agree later on how it had happened) had changed places in two different dishonored households.

When Smoky Barnable came to Edgewood, August’s descendants, disguised under several names, had come to the dozens. There were Flowers, and Stones, and Weeds; Charles Wayne was a grandson. One though, left out in the game, had found no seat: that was Amy’s. She stayed at Edgewood, while in what she called her tummy there grew a boy, recapitulating in his ontogeny the many beasts, tadpole, fish, salamander, mouse, whose lives he would later describe in endless detail. They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.

II.

Hours and days and months and years go by; the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know; but whatever the time gives us in which to live, we should therefore be content.

—Cicero

Jolly, round, red Mr. Sun lifted his cloudy head over the purple mountains and cast long, long rays down into the Green Meadow.” Robin Bird read it out in a proud, piping voice; he knew this book almost by heart. “Not far from the Stone Fence that separates the Green Meadow from the Old Pasture, a family of Meadow Mice awoke in their tiny house in the grass, Mother, Father, and six pink, blind babies.

Robin Bird’s Lesson

“The head of the household rolled over, opened his eyes, twitched his whiskers, and went out to the doorstep to wash his face in the dew caught in a fallen leaf. As he stood there looking out at the Green Meadow and the morning, Old Mother West-wind hurried by, tickling his nose and bringing him news of the Wild Wood, the Laughing Brook, the Old Pasture and the Great World all around him, confused and clamorous news, better than any Times at breakfast.

“The news was the same as it had been for many days now: the world is changing! Soon things will be very different than you smell them today! Prepare yourself, Meadow Mouse!