them, no sirens wailed, ignited by catastrophe; and still the shoppers and loungers and criminals went their ways, unalarmed, unmoved, their faces filled with private wrongs.
They went on warily to Old Law Farm, holding each other, each feeling that the sudden blow had been meant to separate them (why? how?) and had only barely failed, and might come again at any moment.
What a Tangle
“Tomorrow,” Tacey said, turning her embroidery-frame, “or the next day or the next.”
“Oh,” Lily said. She and Lucy were bent over a crazy-quilt, enriching its surface with different stitcheries, flowers, crosses, bows, esses. “Saturday or Sunday,” Lucy said.
At that moment match was put to touch-hole (perhaps by accident, there would be some trouble about it afterwards) and the thing that Sylvie and Auberon in the City heard or felt rolled over Edgewood, booming the windows, rattling knickknacks on etageres, cracking a china figurine in Violet’s old bedroom and making the sisters duck and raise their shoulders to protect themselves.
“What on earth,” Tacey said. They looked at one another.
“Thunder,” Lily said; “midwinter thunder, or maybe not.”
“A jet plane,” Tacey said, “breaking the sound barrier. Or maybe not.”
“Dynamite,” Lucy said. “Over at the Interstate. Or maybe not.”
They bent to their work again, silent for a while.
“I wonder,” Tacey said, looking up from her frame half turned back-to-front. “Well,” she said, and chose a different thread.
“Don’t,” said Lucy. “That looks funny,” she said critically, of a stitch Lily was making.
“This is a crazy-quilt,” Lily said. Lucy watched her, and scratched her head, not convinced. “Crazy isn’t funny,” she said.
“Crazy
“Cherry Lake,” Tacey said. She held her needle to the wan light of the window, which had ceased to tremble. “Thought she had two boys in love with her. The other day…”
“Was it some Wolf?” Lily asked.
“The other day,” Tacey went on (slipping at the first try a silk thread green as jealousy through the needle’s eye), “the Wolf boy had a terrible fight—with…”
“The rival.”
“A third one; Cherry didn’t even know. In the woods. She is…”
“Three,” Lucy sang, and on the second “three” Lily joined her an octave lower: “Three, three, the rivals; two, two, the lilywhite boys, Clothed all in green-o.”
“She is,” Tacey said, “a cousin of ours, sort of.”
“One is one,” her sisters sang.
“She’ll lose them all,” Tacey said.
“… And all alone, and ever more shall be so.”
“You should use scissors,” Tacey said, seeing Lucy face down on the quilt to bite a thread.
“You should mind your own…”
“Business,” Lily said.
“Beeswax,” Lucy said.
They sang again: Four for the gospel-makers.
“Run off,” Tacey said. “All three.”
“Never to return.”
“Not soon anyway. As good as never.”
“Auberon…”
“Great-grandfather August.”
“Lilac.”
“Lilac.”
The needles they drew through cloth glittered when they pulled them out to the full extension of the thread; each time they pulled them through the threads grew shorter until they were all worked into the fabric, and must be cut, and others slipped through the needles’ eyes. Their voices were so low that a listener would not have known who said what, or whether they talked at all or only murmured meaninglessly.
“What will be fun,” Lily said, “is to see them all again.”
“All come home again.”
“Clothed all in green-o.”
“Will we be there? Will all of us be? Where will it be, how long from now, what part of the wood, what season of the year?”
“We will.”
“Nearly all.”
“There, soon, not a lifetime, every part, midsummer.”
“What a tangle,” Tacey said, and held up for them to see a handful of stuff from her workbox, which a child or a cat had got into: silk thread bright as blood, and black cotton darning-stuff, a hank of sheep-colored wool, a silkpin or two, and a bit of sequined fabric dangling from it all, spinning on a thread-end like a descending spider.
III.
Hawksquill could not at first determine whether by the operations of her Art she had cast herself into the bowels of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the heart of the fire or the middle of the air. Russell Eigenblick would later tell her that he had often suffered from the same confusion in his long sleep, and that perhaps it was in all four places that he had been hidden, in all four corners of the earth. The old legend always put him in the mountain, of course, but Godfrey of Viterbo said no, the sea; the Sicilians had him ensconced in the fires of Etna, and Dante put him in Paradise or its environs though he might just as well (if he had been feeling vindictive) have stuck him in the Inferno with his grandson.
The Top of a Stair
Since taking this assignment, Hawksquill had gone far, though never quite this far, and little of what she had begun to suspect about Russell Eigenblick could be put into a form understandable to the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club, which almost daily now importuned her for a decision concerning the Lecturer. His power and appeal had
