The Secret Country (2 page)

“I’m hungry!”

“Me too,” said Ellen.

“Next summer,” said Ruth, giving in and turning for the door, “we’ll do it right.”

CHAPTER 1

WHO’S done what now?” “Laura. In the two weeks that that child has been here—”

 

“Eight days.”

“In the eight days that seem like two weeks that that child has been here, she has broken four cereal bowls, two mugs, three plates, a mirror, a Waterford bowl, two pots with plants, three pots without plants—”

Their voices came clearly through the closed door of the study. Laura crouched further behind the Japanese screen they kept in the hall. Three cereal bowls, she thought.

“—and, just now, the stained-glass window in the bathroom.”

“Where is she?” asked her uncle.

“I don’t know.”

“Did she run? Poor kid.”

“Poor kid?” Her aunt’s voice rose to a squeak in the way her mother’s would when you said something silly. But her mother would not think that her uncle was being silly.

“She’s also cut herself picking up all the pieces,” said her uncle. “And fallen down the front stairs twice. Not to mention cracking her head on—”

“And she won’t let me cut her hair.”

Maddeningly, at this most important point, her uncle lowered his voice to answer. Laura, wondering if she dared to stand right at the door and listen, put her head around the edge of the screen and saw her older brother standing in the middle of the hall. He looked disgusted.

“Ted!” she hissed. To her great satisfaction, he jumped and looked around in the wrong direction before he spotted her on the floor. He came and leaned against the wall next to her.

“Jen’s up crying in the bathroom,” he said, just above a whisper. “She liked that window.”

“It was an ugly window,” whispered Laura, who had liked it too.

“How did you break it when it’s up so high?”

“There was a wasp.”

“I told you, you want something killed, come and get me.”

“I can kill my own wasps!”

“They’ll kill
you,
” said Ted, pointing at the door of the study, “if you break anything else. They’ll put you in an orphanage for the summer.”

“I’m not an orphan.”

“You are for the summer.”

“So are you! If I go you’re coming with me!”

“You don’t have to go if you’d just—”

“They’ll hear you,” said Laura.

“They’re talking too loud themselves,” said Ted. They listened again.

“I know her parents are in Australia, I know she misses them, I know she’s shy, I know she doesn’t get along with our kids. Does that mean she can turn the whole house into a wreck and kill herself—and probably us—in the process?”

“All I’m trying to say—”

“She wants to cut my hair,” said Laura, watching Ted try to catch what her uncle was saying. Her uncle had lowered his voice again.

“What good would that do?” said Ted absently, his eyes on the study door.

“She says it makes me look like a waif.”

“Be quiet a minute,” said Ted.

“It’s her own fault. She can’t braid hair,” said Laura. Ted squinted at the door. “What’s a waif?” she asked him.

“A beggar child. You’ve been one in the Secret, don’t you remember?” said Ted, still looking at the door.

“I don’t look like a waif.”

Ted finally looked at her. “It wouldn’t hurt you to cut it,” he said. “Jen says it takes you forever to wash it.”

Laura was stung. “Whose side are you on anyway?”

“I’m not on anybody’s side, I just talked to Jen. We have to live here, you know. Jen’s all right; she asks us to play tag.”

So what, thought Laura. “I hate tag.”

“So do I, dimwit. That’s not the point.”

“Yes it is. It’s a stupid game. All their games are stupid.”

“Why don’t you let them cut your hair?” said Ted. “It’ll grow again.”

“I’m a princess,” said Laura, who had never had her hair cut and was not about to entrust the process to people who talked about her the way her aunt and uncle did.

“Not this summer you’re not a princess. Come on, Laurie.”

“No.” Laura forgot to whisper.

“Shut up,” said Ted.

They both shut up, but the voices in the study went on. Ted sat down on the floor and scowled at Laura, who scowled back.

“You’ve got to do something. They’re really mad.”

“I can’t help it if I break things.”

“But you can cut your hair. Then they’ll see you want to be nice.”

“I don’t want to be nice. I don’t like them and I want to go home.”

“Well, so do I. You’ll just make it worse if you don’t like them. Come on. Let’s go in the study and tell them you’ll cut your hair. Then they won’t be so mad about the window.” He studied her with a look she had not seen since last summer, and his voice became formal. “You could do it for a penance.”

That was too much. You did penance for things like murder not for breaking a window when you hadn’t meant to. Laura jumped to her feet, crying “Leave me alone!” and bumped her elbow on the screen, which tilted dangerously. She put her hands out to catch it. Ted, who was quicker, had already caught the screen, but he pushed it right into them. The taut paper gave suddenly with a horrible popping tear; the screen, trailing shreds, crashed past a shocked Ted to the floor of the hall, and their aunt flung the study door open and caught them in the wreckage.

 

The problem was that they were staying with the wrong cousins. Ted and Laura had been spending summers with the Carroll cousins for as long as they could remember, and probably, said Laura, longer. They had never stayed with the Barretts before and they didn’t want to.

The worst of it was that there was really nothing wrong with the Barretts. Tommy was too little to bother anybody. Jennifer was almost Laura’s age and delighted in letting guests have their way. David wouldn’t talk to them, but he wouldn’t talk to anybody else either, and he let Ted read his books. Katie was seventeen and presumably too old to bother with cousins of fourteen and eleven, but she had some of the best books they had ever read, and she didn’t care who read them as long as they were given back in one piece. Aunt Kathy and Uncle Jim, as other people’s parents went, were bearable.

The Barretts were very good people with whom to spend a nice, ordinary summer playing tag and hide-and-seek and red light, green light and watching television. But Ted and Laura had never spent a summer like that in their lives, and hadn’t wanted to, and didn’t like it. The Secret had grown every year with Ruth and Ellen and Patrick, and after a whole winter of deprivation, they wanted to get back to it.

Besides, Jennifer and David were never very enthusiastic about playing anything, even when they suggested it themselves. Worse yet, they objected to snide remarks about the television shows they watched. Ted and Laura came from a family in which a television show that could wring fifteen minutes of silence from its audience was rare and valuable. The reverent attitude of Jennifer and David bewildered them.

But they were stuck with Jennifer and David, because the right cousins had moved to Australia and Ted and Laura’s parents had gone to visit them for the summer. It cost too much to let Ted and Laura go too.

Ted and Laura did not even have the solace of letters from their cousins. They had tried to write to them. Laura had suggested doing it in the alphabet of the Secret Country. They excitedly got out their key sheet, which contained not only English and Secret Country alphabets, but the Sorcerous Letters and the Runes of the Eight Ghostly Kings. They tackled the date and “Dear Ruth, Ellen, and Patrick,” with great satisfaction. But then they looked blankly at each other. What was there to say? They felt that the Secret was not a subject to be trusted to the mails, and they had nothing else to say that was of any interest to their cousins, or indeed to themselves. So they ceremoniously burned the unfinished letter, which gave them a melancholy sort of pleasure and got them into trouble with their aunt, and gloomed through the long days, which gave them no pleasure at all.

And now this. Laura had broken things all the eleven years of her life, but nobody had ever been so upset about it as the Barretts were.

Their upset this time extended only to sending Laura to the room she shared with Jennifer, and Ted to the one he had to himself. Laura, feeling certain that this was only a method of getting her and Ted out of the way until a suitable punishment could be devised, became reckless and sneaked along to Ted’s room as soon as her aunt’s footsteps went away down the stairs.

“What’s the good of having things if they break?” she demanded of her brother.

Ted was reading, as usual. He turned a page, and Laura sighed.

“Mom doesn’t scream when I break something.”

“You’ve never broken so many things before.”

“Well,” said Laura, putting her hand flat down in the middle of his book, “I can’t help it.”

“You could be more careful,” said Ted, pulling his book out from under her hand.

“I am careful!”

“So how come you break so many things?” Ted asked the book.

“They’re always in the way,” said Laura sullenly. She did not know how she broke so many things. It was much more as if they broke themselves.

“So are you,” said Ted. “Always.”

“Well, I don’t have anything to do!” said Laura, furious.

“Read,” said Ted, and went on doing so.

“I’ve read all the ones I can. The words in the rest of them are too hard.”

“Laurie!” yelled Jennifer from downstairs. “Mom says you can come play tag.”

“I’m too hot!”
shrieked Laura.

The back door banged.

“Would you read to me?” said Laura.

“I’m in the middle of the book. You wouldn’t understand anything. You don’t like the way I read anyway.” He did not say, “Go away and leave me alone,” but Laura knew he wanted to.

“Tag is a penance,” she said.

“So go play.”

Laura went resignedly downstairs and outside. It was very hot and bright and stuffy.

There was no one in the backyard, so she started around to the front. There were lilac bushes all along one side of the house, in which they were not supposed to play. The bushes would have made a fine Green Caves for the Secret, but here it didn’t matter. As Laura came around the corner of the house, she heard people talking among the bushes.

“What did she say?”

“There are spies among us.”

Laura pushed her hair away from her ears. Something in their voices was familiar to her.

“Who are they?”

“This place is probably bugged.” Laura moved guiltily away, but only a few steps. It was Jennifer and David talking, but she had never heard them sound like this.

“So speak crookedly,” said Jennifer.

“They are those who eat and sleep with us and share our bathing place.”

“Where are they from?”

“I fear the Imperium.”

“Well, then, let’s tell the captain.”

“She may be one of them.”

“Nonsense!” said Jennifer, in her own voice.

“She’s shown them documents,” said David.

“She’d never betray us,” said Jennifer; once more her voice had the quality Laura had found familiar. Now she recognized it. Ted had just used it to suggest she do a penance. They were playing: not this business of running around and hiding for no reason, but a real play, with parts.

“The documents had red covers,” said David.

“Oh, no!” said Jennifer. “Not the plans for the black-hole gun!”

Laura went tearing into the house and back up to Ted’s room, banging doors. She skidded on a braided rug in the upstairs hall, but caught herself on the edge of Ted’s door.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’ve got a secret too!”

Ted put his book down. “Quit yelling. How do you know?”

Laura told him. Ted shrugged. “Probably just some s-f show they saw on TV.” Laura hauled him down to the side of the house.

“The crew all love her,” said Jennifer earnestly, out of the bushes. “If we put it to the vote she will go free and the spies will be able to work their will unchecked.”

“No doubt,” said David, “we can think of—we can devise other means to rid ourselves of this—this—maggot.”

“We could hire—” began Jennifer.

“Hirelings talk,” said David. “We’ll have to do it ourselves.”

Laura looked at Ted’s face and was satisfied. There was a note in David’s voice that told her a scene had just ended. Ted had heard it too. They crept around the house, eased themselves up the creaky steps of the porch, and went back to Ted’s room.

“How can they have a secret?” demanded Laura.

“All that tag was just for us,” said Ted. Laura looked at him and was alarmed as well as puzzled. She had not seen Ted look so worried since two summers ago, when they lost Ellen in the Thorn Forest during the Secret. They had almost had to ask their parents for help, and they would never have been able to explain what they were up to.

“We shouldn’t be here,” said Ted now.

“What?”

“We couldn’t work our Secret with a lot of strange kids around.”

Laura was horrified. “No, we couldn’t.”

“We’ll have to keep out of their way,” said Ted.

Laura showed her teeth at him. “It’s not fair. It’s bad enough we have to be in this place all summer and not have any Secret, without having to keep out of the way and have any fun, either.” That was more horrifying than interfering with somebody’s secret.

“You don’t like tag anyway.”

“But if
they
don’t like tag we could—”

“Would you let them in our Secret?”

“No!”

“Well, then.”

“It’s not fair. Tag’s better than nothing.”

“Laurie,” said Ted in a way he had.