Double Spell (7 page)

“Yes,” said Patrick, “they do.”

“Is this dog going to be a sheep dog when it’s fully grown?” Papa demanded.

“Well,” Pat said, “I guess … I guess … maybe it will be….”

“What do you mean, you guess? Is it a sheep dog now?”

“Well, yes.”

“I thought as much. Your mother is right. Do you know how big sheep dogs are when they’re full-grown?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s a foolish question since you spend more of your time with dogs than you do with people. I’m sure you must be aware of the relative sizes of dogs. A horse. A horse.” Papa paused. Nobody spoke. He went on, “The last sheep dog I had any acquaintance with belonged to a farmer who had the next farm to my grandfather. He had sheep too,” added Papa meditatively. “That sheep dog used to pull the pigs around in a cart when my sister Dora put them there and when he got into the rose garden, my grandfather … oh, he was a VERY large dog….” Papa’s voice trailed off for a moment into memory.

“We do have the coach house in the back,” Patrick offered weakly when he thought it was safe to speak.

The dog, who may or may not have realized he was being discussed in such a manner that his whole future might depend on the conversation, wandered over to the window seat, put out his tongue, and licked Marble a lick that covered her entire face.

Marble – to whom such a thing had never before happened – opened her eyes in great surprise, arched her back, flattened it again, and began to wash the dog’s ears.

“Well,” said Papa, after a long pause, “I guess that settles it. If those two creatures can get along in this house without fighting – and they, heaven knows, are the only ones who can,” he looked pointedly at the twins, “then the dog stays. You may call him Horse.” Papa got up and left the dining room.

More House Hunting – And Two Roses

F
or the next few days Jane and Elizabeth went on fifteen different streetcar rides and walked, it seemed, miles and miles of city streets, looking for an old red brick house with a double rose pattern in its trim. They saw hundreds of red brick houses with the now familiar peak of carved wood – some crumbled and half fallen in, some with shops or laundries built into their fronts, some in good repair with their white wood painted and bright, some that looked as though they might once have been red brick but now painted yellow or gray and made fresh and handsome with flowers in their window boxes. Not one of all those hundreds was the house they were looking for. Amelia’s house. Hester’s house.

The days were getting hot with cloudless skies and pavements like hot griddle pans. Jane was tired of walking, tired of looking for a house she was sure they wouldn’t find. She never said so, but oh, how she wanted to be
spending those days on the sand and in the water. Elizabeth’s determination never lagged. She held the doll tightly in her hand all the time they searched and, unlike Jane, who systematically examined the houses they passed for size, shape, and roses in their peaks, Elizabeth depended entirely on the feelings she had toward them – she counted on Amelia to let her know. But after four days of steady hunting, even she was beginning to get discouraged when her only real feeling of finding something turned out to be the back of an old theater, in no way at all resembling the little brick house.

Around noon on the fifth day out, very hot, very tired, with fifteen cents in their combined pockets, the twins were ready to go home. They were walking along College Street past the Central Library, heads down, not saying anything, when suddenly they bumped into their father hurrying in the opposite direction.

Papa was on his way to have lunch and he took them with him. Settled comfortably around the table in the little restaurant, hamburgers and milkshakes in front of them, the twins told Papa something of the hunt they were on. Neither was sure how much to tell or how to tell it, but they both thought maybe Papa could help.

“You see,” Elizabeth explained, “we found this old doll.” She showed Papa the doll and he examined it carefully.

“That is old,” he said, “and I should think fairly valuable. Where on earth did you find it?”

Jane told about the Antiques, Dolls Mended shop. Papa looked surprised.

“Well,” he said, “I could be wrong. If the woman in the antique shop sold it to you for two dollars and fifty-five cents it can’t be too valuable. She must know her business. Maybe it’s a later copy of an old doll that’s been badly treated. Still, I would have sworn …” He picked up the doll again. “Hm, in any case,” he handed it back to Elizabeth with a smile, “that’s not really your problem, is it?”

Elizabeth thought hard for a minute, sucking on her milkshake.

“You see,” she said carefully, “we got interested in the doll and we wanted to know about Toronto and houses and things at the time the doll was new. You know, we sort of wanted to dress it up new (“As if it were new, or as it was when it was new,” corrected Papa.) as it was when it was new,” Elizabeth obliged, “and sort of find out something about the times – the olden times, I mean.”

“We found it interesting,” Jane added self-consciously.

“So how do we do that?” Elizabeth looked guilelessly at her father.

“Well now,” Papa leaned back in his chair and took out his pipe, “you want to know something about old Toronto. I could sit here for hours and tell you things but maybe they wouldn’t be the things you’d like to hear, and I really haven’t the time, so perhaps you’d better start on a research project. Go to the library, go to the museum, ask for the information available about your subject. Then look around the city in the spots the books suggest and you’ll find many of the old houses still standing.” The twins didn’t have the courage to tell him they had already seen all too many.

“If you run into a snag,” Papa continued, “come back to me and I’ll help you with it. In the meanwhile, look things up, make notes, and gather all your information before you start looking again.”

“But that’s organizing,” said Elizabeth, outraged.

Papa laughed. “Organizing can be a good thing, Liza,” he said. “If you want to find out things you have to organize your material – sort out what you know before you can make any sense of it.”

Jane tried not to look smug.

“Come on. I have to go up to the museum myself. I’ll take you along and you can ask about clothes and houses there,” Papa offered.

The museum was almost as frustrating as their four-and-a-half day tramp had been. There were many dresses, many brooches like the one Hester wore in the dream, fashionable, said the labels, about 120 years ago. It was harder to tell about the doll’s clothes because hers were so badly worn, but it seemed that her dress, like Hester’s, was from the period of the 1840s.

“That’s something to know, anyhow,” Jane said encouragingly as they got off the subway from the museum and stood waiting for the Queen streetcar to take them home.

Elizabeth didn’t hear Jane. Jane had disappeared. The city had disappeared. She was standing in a field of tall grass, with cows grazing around her. There were children there, too, in dresses and pants like the clothes they had just seen in the museum. The summer wind was blowing
high and everyone was running, laughing. She stooped to put down her doll to run with them. She opened her mouth to say, “Wait, I’m coming,” when she was pulled abruptly away. The children were gone. The field was gone. The only thing that looked the same was the heavy iron fence. Jane was pulling her arm. The streetcar was coming.

“Come on,” she said, “What’s the matter with you?” “Nothing.” Elizabeth wanted to think a little about what she’d seen before she told.

When they got home and Jane suggested once more, as a result of what Papa had said about research, that they make a list of the things they knew, Elizabeth didn’t argue. They sat down on the beach with a pencil and paper after they had had a swim and Jane wrote:

“We don’t know that exactly,” interjected Elizabeth. “No,” answered Jane impatiently, “but we can start with that.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” said Elizabeth. “Sure we do, what makes you say that?”

“I don’t know, I just feel that way.”

Jane kept her thoughts about that to herself.

“Where is the box?” she asked, not looking up from her writing.

“Upstairs. I’ll get it.”

While Elizabeth was gone, Jane put down her pencil and looked longingly toward the lake. She wondered just how long she was going to be able to keep up the nonsense. Instead of feeling closer to Elizabeth she was finding her sister harder and harder to understand.
Oh, well,
she thought.
It is an old doll and maybe we will find out some interesting things.
Elizabeth came bounding out of the kitchen door, racing through the garden.

“Guess what?” she shouted as she ran. “Guess what? It’s roses. The box has two roses, look!” She threw herself down on the sand beside Jane and thrust the box under her sister’s eyes. There on the long catch of the leather box were two roses, side-by-side. Jane had been right. The flower petal designs on the peak of the brick house were roses, roses just like the ones on Amelia’s box.

Jane Is Frightened

T
he roses were a great shock to Jane. She was silent all evening. She let Elizabeth do all the talking. Excited talking. Insane talking. Talking about magic, about visiting back in time, about signs leading the way to fantastic discoveries and about mental telepathy. Jane hated it. It frightened her. What if Elizabeth was right? She had restless dreams all night, and first thing in the morning she poked her leg out of bed and gave her sister a shove with her toe.

Elizabeth humped over in her own bed. “Whmphmarr?” she asked into her pillow.

“Wake up.”

“Why?” Elizabeth rolled over, sat up, reached down, and touched her toes. She had once heard it made girls graceful so she had been doing it every morning for three years. With toes touched twice she slumped back in her bed.

“Why should I wake up?”

“I just wanted company,” Jane grinned as Elizabeth hurled her pillow across the space between the beds and hit her in the face. (They had had their bunk beds made into single beds when they moved into the tower room.)

“Liza,” Jane added seriously, “I have a feeling something not nice is going to happen. You know, sort of like having a test in school or going to the dentist or something. Do you feel that way, too?”

“No, but I know what your horrible feeling is all about. Willy Wallet is coming today.”

Jane groaned, “Oh, I’d forgotten all about that. Why did you have to remind me?” She got out of bed and walked over to the window.

“You asked,” answered Elizabeth cheerfully. “Are we going to the library this morning to look at some more houses?”

Jane didn’t want to. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out anything more but, being Jane, she couldn’t leave it unfinished either.

“Yes,” she said, with a carefully repressed sigh, “we’ll go.”

Downstairs in the garden, Papa was having his after-breakfast coffee.

“How’s it going?” he asked. “How’s the history project?”

“Not too well,” Jane answered, then said quickly, “but we’re really finding out lots of things.”

“Does the library have books of families?” Elizabeth interrupted.

“Books of families?” Papa was puzzled.

“You know, books with names of people in old Toronto families?”

“You may have to go into the Canadian or the Ontario archives for that – those are the official records – but try the library certainly. Why do you want those? Are you going to write a story or something?” Papa smiled indulgently.

“Maybe,” Elizabeth said and was looking around for a way out of the discussion when Horse came bounding around the corner of the house and jumped into Papa’s lap, spilling the last of the coffee into the grass.

Papa leapt out of his chair, glaring at the dog. “No peace in this house at all,” he shouted, “no peace in this family, ever.” He stomped off toward the kitchen.