“Hold hard, hold hard,” she said soothingly. “The harm’s been done.”
Lilac behind her had fallen silent.
“I just want,” the stork said, leaving off her furious wing-beats, “none of the blame for this to fall on
“No blame,” Mrs. Underhill said.
“If punishments are to be handed out…” the stork said.
“No punishments. Don’t worry your long red beak about it.”
The stork fell silent. Lilac thought she should volunteer to take whatever blame there might be, and soothe the beast, but didn’t; she pressed her cheek into Mrs. Underhill’s coarse cloak, filled again with rainy-day wonder.
“Another hundred years in this shape,” the stork muttered, “is all I need.”
“Enough,” said Mrs. Underhill. “It may be all for the best. In fact how could it be otherwise? Now”—she tapped with her stick—“there’s still much to see, with time a-wasting.” The stork banked, turning back toward the multiple housetops. “Once more around the house and grounds,” said Mrs. Underhill, “and then off.”
As they climbed over the broken, every-which-way mountains and valleys of the roof, a small round window in a particularly peculiar cupola opened, and a small round face looked out, and down, and up. Lilac (though she had never seen his real face before) recognized Auberon, but Auberon didn’t see her.
“Auberon,” she said, not to call him (she’d be good now), but only to name him.
“Paul Pry,” said the stork, for it was from this window that Doc had used to spy on her and her chicks when she had nested here. Thank it all, that part was over! The round window closed.
Mrs. Underhill pointed out long-legged Tacey as they came over the house. Gravel spun from beneath her bike’s slim tires as she shot around a corner of the house, making for the once-trim little Norman farmhouse which had been stables once and then garage—the old wooden station wagon slept here in the dark—and was now also where Bumbum and Jane Doe and their many offspring had their hutches. Tacey dropped her bike at the back entrance (seeming, to Lilac over her head, to be a complex scurrying figure suddenly coming apart into two pieces) and the stork with a wingbeat rose out over the Park. Lily and Lucy walked a path there, arm in arm, singing; the sounds they made rose up to Lilac faintly. The path they walked intersected another, which ran past the leafless hedges wild now as madman’s hair, stuck full of dead leaves and small birds’ nests. Daily Alice loitered there, a rake in her hand, watching the hedge where perhaps she had seen a bird’s or an animal’s movement; and, when they had gained a bit more altitude, Lilac could see Smoky far down the same path, eyes on the ground, books under his arm.
“Is that…” Lilac asked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Underhill said.
“My father,” Lilac said.
“Well,” Mrs. Underhill said, “one of them anyway,” and guided the stork to swoop that way. “Now mind you mind, and no tricks.”
How odd people looked from right above, the egg of the head in the center, a left foot seeming to emerge from the back of it, a right foot from the front, then the reverse. Smoky and Alice at last saw each other, and Alice waved, her hand also seeming extruded from the head, like an ear. The stork swooped low beside them as they met, and they took on more human shape.
“How’s tricks?” Alice said, putting the rake under her arm like a shotgun and thrusting her hands in the pockets of her denim jacket.
“Tricks is good,” Smoky said. “Grant Stone threw up again.”
“Outside?”
“At least outside. Amazing how it quiets things down. For a minute. An object-lesson.”
“About…”
“Stuffing a dozen marshmallows into your face on the way to school? I don’t know. The ills that flesh is heir to, Mortality. I look very grave and say, ‘I guess we can go on now.’
Alice laughed, and then looked sharply left, where a movement had caught her eye, either a far-off bird or a last fly nearby; saw nothing. Did not hear Mrs. Underhill, who had been regarding her tenderly, say
The stork glided over the Walled Garden and then, wings cupped, skimmed the ground between the avenue of sphinxes, all but featureless now and more silent than ever. Ahead, running the same way, was Auberon. In two flannel shirts (one like a jacket) grown somewhat small in a burst of growing he was doing, but still buttoned at the wrist; his long-skulled head balanced on a skinny neck, his sneakered feet pigeon-toed a bit. He ran a few steps, walked, ran again, talking to himself in a low voice.
“Some prince,” Mrs. Underhill said in a low voice as they caught up to him. “A lot of labor there.” She shook her head. Auberon ducked, hearing wingbeats at his ear as the stork rose up past him, and though he didn’t stop walk-running, his head swiveled to see a bird he couldn’t see. “That’s the lot,” said Mrs. Underhill. “Away!”
Lilac looked down as they rose away, and kept on looking down at Auberon growing smaller. In her growing-up Lilac (no matter that Mrs. Underhill strictly forbade it) had spent long days and nights alone. Mrs. Underhill herself had her enormous tasks, and the attendants set to wait on Lilac as often as not had games of their own they wanted to play, amusements the thick, fleshly, stupid human child could never grasp or join. Oh, they had caught it when Lilac was found wandering in halls and groves she had no business to be in yet (startling once with a thrown stone her great-grandfather in his melancholy solitude) but Mrs. Underhill could think of no help for it, and muttered “All part of her Education,” and went off to other climes and spaces that needed her attention. But in all this there was one playmate who had always been with her when she liked, who had always done her bidding without a moment’s hesitation, who had never grown tired or cross (the others could be, sometimes, not only cross but cruel) and always felt as she did about the world. That he had also been imaginary (“Who’s the child always talking to?” asked Mr. Woods, crossing his long arms, “and why amn’t I allowed to sit in my own chair?”) hadn’t really distinguished him from a lot that went on in Lilac’s odd childhood; that he had gone away, one day, on some excuse, hadn’t really surprised her; only now, as she watched Auberon lope toward the castellated summer house on an urgent mission, she did wonder what this real one—not very like her own Auberon really, but the same, there was no doubt of it—had been doing through all her growing up. He was very small now, pulling open the door of the Summer House; he glanced behind him as though to see if he had been followed; then “Away!” cried Mrs. Underhill, and the Summer House bowed beneath them (showing a patched roof like a tonsured head) and they were off, high and gaining speed.
A Secret Agent
In the Summer House Auberon unscrewed his fountain pen even before he sat down at the table there (though he firmly shut and hooked the door). He took from the table’s drawer a locked imitation-leather five-year diary from some other five years, opened it with a tiny key from his pocket, and, flipping to a page in a long-ago unrecorded March, he wrote: “And yet it does move.”
He meant by this the old orrery at the top of the house, from whose round window he had looked out as the stork bearing Lilac and Mrs. Underhill had passed. Everyone told him that the machinery which operated the planets in this antiquity was clabbered thick with rust and had been immovable for years. Indeed Auberon had tried the cogs and levers himself and couldn’t move them. And yet it did move: a vague sense he had had that the planets, sun and moon were not, on one visit, in quite the same places they had been on a previous visit he had now confirmed by rigorous tests. It does move: he was sure. Or pretty sure.
Just why they should all have lied to him about the orrery didn’t just at the moment concern him. All he
