Knight's Castle (2 page)

After that, Roger and Ann found that their dessert went down more easily, though neither of them was ever able to feel quite the same about sponge cake or Royal Ann cherries again. Still, if their father could be brave, who were they to be behindhand?

Their mother was making plans. "Maybe we can stay with your Aunt Katharine while your father's in the hospital," she was saying.

"No, Martha," said their father. "We can't go wishing ourselves on people, like that."

"I don't know why not," said their mother. "My own sister. That beautiful big house."

"Even so," said their father, two words which were law in that house.

"I'll call her, anyway," said their mother. "Maybe she can find us an inexpensive hotel."

Ann and Roger looked at each other. The words didn't sound very promising, suggesting mean chandeliers with light bulbs that were too small, and long dark corridors and a draught coming in under the door. Still, this was no time for selfishness; so they volunteered to do the dinner dishes, and tried to cheer each other with bright conversation. Once Ann said, "Poor Father," and Roger said, "Yes," and once Roger said, "You forgot to scour the sink," and Ann said she was just going to.

When they came out of the kitchen their mother was just hanging up the telephone. "She insisted, Fred. I just knew she would," she was saying. "Children, we
are
staying with Aunt Katharine after all. Now you'll have Jack and Eliza to play with."

"Oh," said Roger. Ann threw him an understanding look.

"Oh what?" said their mother.

"Nothing," said Roger. And then it was time for Ann to go to bed, and Roger to go upstairs for a half hour of tapering off before his own bedtime.

"Jack and Eliza!" muttered Ann to Roger, on the stairs. "Help!"

Up till two years ago their cousins Jack and Eliza had lived in the same town they did. The last they'd seen of Eliza she'd been just about the bossiest nine-year-old girl on her, or any other, block. As for Jack, all he cared about was his Leica camera, and spent all his time in his darkroom, only coming out for meals, or, as Ann once said wittily, to cast his shadow, like Groundhog Day.

"He's pretty good at baseball, though," said Roger.

"That," said Ann, "is small comfort."

"Ann, go to bed," said her mother, from below; so she did. But once there, she lay awake wondering about Baltimore, Maryland. All the words made her think of was a Baltimore oriole. She tried to picture a city all orange and black, like an oriole's feathers. After a bit she tiptoed over to the bookcase and found
The American Family Encyclopedia,
Volume One, A—Boon. Baltimore, Maryland, she read, was the eighth largest city in the United States, population 859,100. Chief industries, iron and steel, straw hats, et cetera.

She got back into bed and shut her eyes, seeing a sky flaming with the orange of many steel forges, while in the black iron foundries below 859,100 dark figures labored, all wearing straw hats. "Only I should think the straw hats 'd catch fire," she murmured to herself. A second later she was asleep.

In his room, Roger sat on the floor among the two hundred and fifty-six model soldiers, and absently started a small war. He wouldn't have done it if anyone had been looking, of course. Now that he was eleven, he kept the soldiers just as a collection. But when he felt lonely or unhappy, or when things went wrong, he sometimes still secretly played with them, for all the world as though he were still only ten-and-a-half.

Two hundred and seven of Roger's soldiers were modern ones, British grenadiers and such, that he had bought himself, or been given. Thirty-one were World War One veterans that had belonged to his father, and seventeen were survivors of the Spanish American War, and of many a nursery battle since the days of Roger's grandfather.

The two hundred and fifty-sixth soldier was much older, even, than any of these. No one knew exactly where it had come from in the first place, but Roger's father said it had been in his family for generations. No one could tell what kind of soldier it was, or even if it was a soldier at all, because all its paint was worn off, and its weapon, if any, had disappeared in the sands of time.

But it was the size of a model soldier, and Roger and his father before him, and
his
father before
him,
had played with it along with their own soldiers, though each one's father had said it was an antique and shouldn't be handled.

Roger called it the old one, and usually gave it special duties like being a sentinel or scout, so that it wouldn't be damaged in the heat of battle. Roger's battles (particularly when he felt lonely or unhappy) were usually very heated indeed.

But tonight even the familiar call to arms wasn't much comfort. There was a small skirmish, and several gallant privates bit the dust, but Roger's heart wasn't really in it, and after a minute or two he got into bed and put out the light. And if he took one of the soldiers to bed with him I hope you will not scorn him too much. A model soldier is not the same thing as a teddy bear at all. Taking a model soldier to bed with you is much more mature, and more manly, too.

It was the old one Roger held in his hand, and as he lay thinking about the weeks ahead in Baltimore, Maryland, he clutched it hard. Of course if their father were going to be all right, that was the main thing. But he wished something fun and exciting could happen to him in Baltimore, Maryland, too.

Just as he was thinking this thought, a voice spoke. It wasn't the voice of conscience, either. It seemed to come from somewhere very near Roger, and it seemed both cross and sleepy.

"A murrain!" it seemed to say. "Just as I was beginning to feel rested! Ah well, back into the fray, a soldier's lot is not a happy one, a plague on it! Still, needs must when duty calls! I could not love sleep half so much loved I not honor more!"

Roger sat up in bed. His hand tickled. For a second he could have sworn the old one was stirring in his grasp, stretching and yawning. Roger opened his hand quickly, and the old one fell to the floor by the side of the bed, landing in a standing position.

"Rough play, by the rood!" he seemed to say. A moonbeam shining through the window struck a silver glint from his battered countenance, and for a moment he seemed to be turning to the other soldiers lined up on the floor, as though giving them a word of command. And then for another moment it seemed as though all the soldiers were moving in the soft light, marching toward Roger:

Roger rubbed his eyes and opened them again. The soldiers were still now. Nothing had happened. Naturally.

"I must be sleepier than I thought," Roger said to himself. "I'm seeing things that aren't there." And he plumped up his pillow and put his head down on it and went to sleep.

The next three days were a flurry of activity and packing and meeting each other on the stairs at odd hours with armfuls of clothes. And of course the children would forget, sometimes for half days at a time, why they were going to Baltimore, Maryland, and just be happy and excited to be going anywhere.

Roger's packing took the longest. First he dumped the whole contents of his clothes basket and his dresser drawers into his suitcase, and that was quick, and the suitcase closed quite easily after he sat on it for a while, and he didn't actually have to
stand
on it at all, hardly.

But then came the problem of choosing exactly the right-sized grocery carton from the pile in the attic, and then each of the two hundred and fifty-six soldiers had to be wrapped carefully in cotton and fitted into the box, not to mention sundry cannon, tanks, drawbridges, turrets from old broken castles, and other art treasures without which no boy's life can be truly rich and full.

Their mother went so far as to suggest that there were probably plenty of things to play with at Aunt Katharine's without taking toys along, but one glance at Roger's expression told her what a barbarous idea this was.

And quite soon the night of the third day came, and they were on the train. Roger and Ann had traveled in Pullman cars before, and there was nothing about this particular Pullman car to distinguish it from those they had known and loved in the past, except its name, which was Wah-Wah-Tay-See. Ann, who was making a collection of the names of Pullman cars, wrote this down on a special page in her notebook.

Their mother and father had a drawing room, and the two children were in the section nearest to it, Ann in the lower berth and Roger in the upper. And the dining car menu, like all menus in trains, had tonight's dinner listed in the middle, and then around the edges lots of far more interesting dishes that apparently no one was supposed to order, because their waiter looked very surprised when Ann asked for pickled mangoes and Roger called for a bottle of Apollinaris water. The children's mother tried to thwart them in this project, but their father gave her his well-known let-them-do-it-this-once look, and she subsided.

When they got back to their car after dinner, the usual nice old lady turned up in the section opposite, and wanted to talk to them about a dear little fairy who lived in a Pullman car. Roger and Ann were polite about this, and luckily it didn't go on for very long, because the train was getting into Baltimore, Maryland, early in the morning; so bedtime had to be early tonight.

And when Roger, in his pajamas, hung his head down over the edge of the berth and poked it through the green curtains to talk to Ann in the berth below, the usual cross other old lady in the upper berth next door rapped on the wall and said, "Quiet!"

So after that Roger lay still and tried to go to sleep, but he couldn't. Ann, down below, could look out on barns and towns and moonlight and hotdog stands, but he had only a curving wall and curtains and the dim light from the corridor to gaze at.

Pretty soon he decided he couldn't stand gazing at them any longer. He opened his curtains, let his feet down over the edge, swung wildly in space, and thumped to the floor.

He looked in on Ann. A gentle snore issued from under a mound of blankets. So then he knelt on the floor of the corridor and felt under the lower berth till he found the grocery carton of soldiers. He'd take a few of the top ones out and have a war in his berth, that's what he'd do.

To get the string off the box was but the work of a moment, but wasn't so noiseless a process as Roger would have chosen, and just as he had his hand inside the top flap, the cross old lady in the upper berth next door parted her curtains and glared down at him with a face so truly horrible that all Roger could do was gasp, grab the first soldier he found, shove the carton back, scramble up to his own berth and pull the curtains. He lay clutching the soldier, his heart beating fast, waiting for the old lady to call the conductor or pull the emergency cord and stop the train. But nothing of the kind happened.

What did happen was that he felt a tickling in his hand again, like the time before, and when he turned on the little light with his other hand he saw that what he held was the old one and he was talking.

"Newfangled flummery!" he was saying. "Modern inventions, industrial revolution, rush, rush, rush, choo-choo, crash, bang! A castle that stayed put was good enough for me, aye, and my forefathers before me, and when we sallied forth 'twas a gallant steed under us, aye, and a trusty sword in hand! By my halidom!" he added.

"What did you say?" said Roger.

"Thou heardst me," said the old one.

"I did not," said Roger. "You didn't say any of that. You didn't talk that other time, either. It was a dream. So's this."

The old one reached out his small metal hand and pinched Roger hard. For such a small pinch it hurt quite a lot.

"Ow," said Roger. And then he knew. And remembering from his reading that Psammeads and Phoenixes and Mary Poppins always had to be addressed with due deference, he made his voice very respectful indeed.

"Oh Old One," he said, "I take it back. I see it all now. You
are
magic."

"Light dawneth," said the Old One.

"Why," said Roger, getting excited, "I suppose you must be the lucky charm of this family, like the Mouldiwarp of the House of Arden! Only I suppose you've been handed down from generation to generation till people forgot you were magic and just used you to play soldiers with! I'm sorry if we played too rough. And those times I forgot to pick you up and stepped on you afterwards by mistake. I hope the magic hasn't all gone out of you. It hasn't, has it? Did you come to make Father get well in Baltimore, Maryland? Because if I get a wish, that's what I wish."

The Old One said nothing, but Roger thought he grew a bit warmer in his hand. Encouraged, he went on.

"And if you still have any magic left in you after that, I wish we'd have an adventure in Baltimore, Maryland, while we're waiting."

"Quiet!" said the voice of the old lady next door. And she gave a really terrible rap on the partition at Roger's feet.

So Roger put out his light, and placed the Old One carefully on the pillow next to him, where the dim glow from the corridor could shine on his face. And just before he went to sleep, Roger heard the Old One speak again.