Knight's Castle (6 page)

"Well," said Ann, hesitating.

Half an hour later Jack and Roger came into the room. Roger was whistling a merry tune that broke off in the middle as he stopped and stared.

The castle was still there and the dollhouse was still there and Prince John still held court in the fireplace. But all around and between and among them, the room was littered with books and ashtrays and tumblers turned upside down till it looked as though someone were holding a rummage sale on the floor. And down on the carpet, amid the coffee cups and boxes and perfume bottles sat Ann and Eliza, with two pairs of manicure scissors, busily cutting roses out of the flowered quilt from the dollhouse master bedroom and gluing them onto wooden matchsticks.

"What are you doing?" said Roger.

"Making a magic city," said Ann, happily, balancing one of the matchsticks upright on the carpet and sticking it there with some Scotch tape. "This is the rose garden."

"Well, you can just unmake it again," said Roger.

It was then that the mild and agreeable nature of Ann suffered a change. She got up and threw the scissors down on the floor. "I hate you," she said. "You're mean. And spoilsport and doggish in the manger!"

Jack looked at the city. "What's wrong with it?" he said, reasonably.

Roger looked at it, too. A sidewalk of stone blocks led away from the castle, flanked by a double row of glittering columns that ended suddenly where the supply of old ginger ale bottles had given out. There was an imposing building made of books, labeled "Public Library," and another beautiful one made of different-colored cakes of soap, labeled "Public Baths." And since you can always find more drinking glasses and glass ashtrays and perfume bottles than you can anything else when you're building a magic city, the whole area sparkled with transparent domes and pinnacles.

"It's too modern," Roger said. "All that glass. It looks all streamlined. It isn't yeomanly. Castles didn't have sidewalks."

"This one does," said Ann.

"It's a good city. If you like that kind of thing," said Jack, looking down on it from his superior height of twelve-and-a-half years. "I vote it stays." And he went out of the room.

"Majority rules," said Eliza. "Three out of four."

"But it's all changed around and everything's spoiled!" Roger burst out desperately. "It just isn't Torquilstone any more! I hoped maybe I'd have a second chance, and now I
know
it won't happen again, and I never will!"

"Never will what?" said Eliza.

"Nothing," said Roger.

"Come on, Ann," said Eliza. "Let's go finish our book someplace else. He's crazy. Let him tear the old city down if he wants to."

"No, it's all right," Roger said. "Let it stay."

"Well, it won't be any fun unless we all do it together," said Ann. And she started out of the room after Eliza.

Roger had a change of heart. Ann was right; things
were
more fun when you did them together. "Wait," he started to say. But a closing door was his only answer.

The rest of Roger's day is better left untold. Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. Suffice it to say that night came at last, and another day dawned, as usual, and Roger woke up with the sun in his eyes. He looked across at the castle. The castle looked back at him, small and toylike. Not a thing had happened. The magic was over. He had had his chance and he had failed.

Then suddenly as he looked he remembered the old man with the white beard he had met in the castle. And he went over and found the Old One and held him in his hand.

"Oh Old One," he said, "what's wrong? Is it the mistakes I made or is it because Ann built the city?"

To his joy he felt the familiar sensation of the Old One growing warm in his hand, and the tiny, leaden voice began to speak.

"Ods bodikins!" said the Old One. "Hath it come to this? Hath the race sunk so low that all useful knowledge is forgotten, by the mass? Modern education, psychoanalysis, nuclear physics, a pox on it! What booteth thy newfangled fads and fancies if thou forgettest the good old rule that magic goeth by threes?"

"Do you mean..." began Roger.

"Canst count, sirrah? Didst thou think magic hath naught else to do but be waiting on thee hand and foot, day in, day out, maybe yes, maybe no, whenever it please thy puling fancy? Think thyself lucky if it smile on thee one night in three!"

"The third night's tomorrow," said Roger.

"Grand news," said the Old One.

There was a silence. Roger waited. Then he said, "Is there anything else? That I ought to know?"

The Old One was already growing colder in his hand, but his voice came again, only fainter.

"And didst think thou couldst do it all alone, selfish? Rode ever knight on gallant quest without his gentle lady to speed him on and hark to his tale and tell him how he should have done it differently? 'Oh woman, in our hour of ease uncertain, coy and hard to please, when pain and anguish wring the brow a ministering angel thou,' as the poet saith. A trusty friend may oft prove helpful, too. Not to speak of cousins."

"Oh," said Roger. "Yes. I see what you mean."

"Then act upon it," said the voice, dying away. And the Old One lay cold and silent in Roger's hand.

"I will," said Roger. "Right away. I was just going to."

"What did you say?" said Ann, coming into the room in her nightgown.

"Nothing," said Roger, from force of habit. Then he went on quickly. "Yes, I did, too. I was talking to
him.
" And he told Ann all about it, and Eliza came in in the middle of it, and asked questions, and he had to start over, and tell it again, from the beginning. Ann believed it right away, the way she always did, but Eliza was disposed to scoff.

"The boy's raving," she said. "Too much reading has turned his feeble brain."

Roger shook his head. "Honest," he said.

"Scout's honor?" said Eliza.

"By my halidom," said Roger.

And of course after that Eliza believed, and was all too ready to run the whole thing, and wanted the magic to start happening right away.

"It can't," said Roger. "Not till tomorrow night."

"Why not?"

"Hast thou sunk so low that thou hast forgotten the good old rule that magic goeth by threes?"

"Well, I think it's silly of it," said Eliza.

"I hate arithmetic," said Ann.

"I think it makes it more interesting," said Roger. "And it gives us time to plan. The first thing is to get the castle back the way it was."

"Why?" said Eliza.

"I think we ought to go by the book. Just to be on the safe side."

"
They
didn't," Ann pointed out. "Once the magic began and you got to be their size, they did just as they pleased.
I
mean to do just as I please from the start!"

Roger began to see what the Old One meant about women.

"After all," Ann went on, "you had your chance. I think we ought to take turns from now on. I get this turn, 'cause I'm your sister. And I don't think we ought to plan at all. I think we ought to build just whatever comes into our heads, and then leave it up to
them.
I think it'll be more exciting that way."

This was such a long and spunky speech for Ann to make that the others were too surprised to argue.

"I guess it's only fair," said Roger. "Don't say I didn't warn you. Have it your own way."

"Good," said Ann.

"I get dibs on next time," said Eliza.

After breakfast they tried to interest Jack in the magic, but he would have none of it. He said he had too much to do to listen to a lot of nutty talk, and went off to his darkroom to develop the pictures he'd taken to replace the ones Ann had spoiled when she walked into the darkroom yesterday.

Ann and Eliza and Roger didn't mind. They were too busy roaming the house, collecting material for the magic city. An old toy chest in Eliza's room yielded a store of battered playthings, and Ann added toy autos and parts of electric train to the city with reckless abandon. Roger and Eliza invaded the kitchen, and borrowed so many cooky cutters and jelly molds that the cook cried out and said she'd have to speak to the madam.

But Aunt Katharine, except for the times when she was defending her art treasures from the children's eager clutches, was so delighted at how well they were getting along that she made little objection, and, as Ann put it, the hours moved on oiled wheels until pretty soon it was the fateful night. The city by this time was terrible and wonderful to behold. I shall not attempt to tell you what it was like. It defied description.

One thing the children were careful to do, and that was to leave a wide cleared avenue from the hall door to Roger's bed. "Otherwise we might never find each other once it starts," said Ann, "and it'd be like those awful books where the characters get separated and you can't keep track of anybody."

And then she had another idea, and added one final touch. Her final touch was a statue, or at least that's what Ann said it was, to stand in the park in front of the castle. The statue was composed of a can of pea soup, balanced on an iron trivet. It was labeled, "St. George Peabody."

And then it was bedtime. Nobody was sure how far into the house the magic would reach, and Eliza's room was way over in another wing, but that didn't discourage Eliza.

"Meet me by midnight when the lone wolf howls," she whispered to Ann. And as soon as the heavy feet of grown-up interference were safely out of the way, a howl like a rather small and cautious wolf's was heard, and a lone figure came tiptoeing into Ann's room and got into her bed.

"How now, you secret, black and midnight hag?" said the figure.

"Shush," said Ann. "It won't happen if we talk."

But the night when you want to go to sleep most is always the night when you can't, as you may have noticed yourself on nights before Christmas. And not only that, but Ann had decided they should wear their bathrobes and slippers to bed, for Roger had told them how silly he felt, arriving at Torquilstone in just his pajamas and bare feet, and the extra clothes and crowded conditions made things hot and difficult. And not only that, but it was a single bed. And not only that, but Eliza proved to be a tosser and a turner and a talker.

"What do you hope happens?" she whispered. "I hope there's a battle and a siege and we get to rescue somebody from durance vile. Maybe we can fix it so Ivanhoe marries Rebecca, too."

"Shush," said Ann.

"I wouldn't mind having a deadly combat with that Brian, either," Eliza went on, thoughtfully. "Move over. Your elbow's in my back."

Ann sighed, and squashed herself against the wall.

But at long last sleep came and knitted up Eliza's raveled sleeve of care, and after that Ann was still awake for a while, and then all of a sudden she wasn't.

When she woke up she knew it had begun. It was still dark in her room, and her bed hadn't turned into a plateau and was still just a bed, but somehow she knew it was time. She shook Eliza. "Wake up," she said.

"Man the battlements," muttered Eliza, hitting out. "The Normans are attacking."

"You're dreaming," said Ann. "Wake up. This is real."

Eliza opened her eyes and staggered to the door after Ann. And then she wasn't sleepy anymore.

Where the hall should have been there wasn't any hall, just great airy space, and far above them a round shining globe that might have been the hall light back in unmagic times.

And from up ahead, where the door of Roger's room had been, came a blaze of light and a deafening roar. Ann and Eliza ran over drab stubbly earth (the hall carpet had been brown) in the direction of the light and the noise. Then they stopped.

"My," said Ann. "It
is
streamlined, isn't it?"

The magic city had grown to life-size, and the beastlike roar was the sound of its traffic, as all the motorized vehicles from Eliza's toy-chest whizzed about its avenues. And all its buildings were modern with glass and chromium, and glaring with electric lamps and neon signs, and that was the blaze of light. It was like the middle of New York City, only more so. Except that riding the trucks and sports cars and parts of old electric trains were knights in armor and ladies in tall headdresses. Few of them were expert drivers, and all of them were exceeding the speed limit.

Ann eyed the city dubiously. "I didn't think it'd be like this, exactly," she said.

Eliza had no qualms. "Come on!" she cried. "Into the jaws of death rode the six hundred!" And she pulled Ann forward into the heart of the traffic.

A varlet in a Yellow Cab skidded toward them on two wheels and they had to jump for the curbstone.

"Let's find Roger," said Ann.

They looked ahead, and far in the distance they saw a small figure clambering down a fall of rock. They ran toward it. A bus came along, going their way, and Eliza hailed it and pushed Ann up the step before her.

"What about money?" said Ann.

"Who knows?" said Eliza. "Maybe magic will provide."

But it didn't. When they thrust their hands in their bathrobe pockets, nothing was in them but the usual linings and handkerchiefs and cooky crumbs.