The Secret Country (4 page)

“But if she was mad because I took the sword, won’t she put it where we can’t get it?”

“Well, maybe. But she’ll do that right away, so it won’t hurt to wait to find out.”

“But—”

“Hold still!”

“Ow!”

“That’ll stay.”

“That was a sharp sword,” said Laura, sadly.

There was a pounding on the bathroom door. “Hurry up!” yelled Jennifer. They shrugged at each other and went out.

“You’re wet,” said Jennifer to Laura.

Laura regarded her with distaste. Grown-ups with nothing better to think about kept saying that Jennifer and Laura looked like sisters. It was true that they both had straight light brown hair and blue eyes. But Jennifer’s short hair fitted her head like Ellen’s velvet cap, and her eyes were almost as piercing as Patrick’s. Laura thought her own eyes always looked as if she wanted to be somewhere else. She hated to look at Jennifer’s and remember this.

“What happened to your knee?” asked Jennifer.

“She tripped on somebody’s sprinkler,” said Ted, while Laura stood dreamily imagining how Jen would look if she should say, “Somebody shot me with a black-hole gun.”

“Figures,” said Jennifer, and shut the bathroom door.

“Jerk,” said Laura, bitterly, to the door.

“You did trip.”

“We wouldn’t have found the sword if I hadn’t!”

Between then and supper Ted read his books and Laura pestered him to stop reading and go back to the secret house. After supper she pestered him to help her spy on Jennifer and David, who were in the backyard doing something which involved Tommy and the largest soup kettle.

“I think the people in their secret must be cannibals,” said Laura, hunched up on Ted’s windowsill.

“On a spaceship?”

“I think they’re on a planet now. I think they’re going to betray their captain to the cannibals.”

“Heh,” said Ted, turning a page. “At least when Lord Randolph decided to kill the King, he did his own dirty work.”

“I miss Lord Randolph,” said Laura.

“I miss Princess Laura,” said Ted. “She was too busy with her music to bother anybody.”

Laura sighed. Ted turned a page. Laura went back to the window, and watched David and Jennifer as they danced around the soup kettle, waving lilac branches and singing.

The next day Ted made Laura wait until after lunch to leave, so he could finish his book, and he made her read one of hers. Once again they borrowed Jennifer’s card from Katie, who looked at them pityingly and asked them if they wouldn’t like to go roller skating. They said they would not, and she told them to try E. Nesbit if they could stand a little stickiness.

They returned their books. They did not bother to get any more, asking instead for directions to Trumpet Street. They found their way to the secret house, and stood on the sidewalk and looked at it. It seemed the same. The front door was shut.

“Do you want to go first?” asked Ted.

“No,” said Laura, hoping he would cut his knee on the sword.

Ted crawled under the hedge. “It’s still here,” he said, sounding nonplussed. Laura grinned to herself. No wonder he had been in no hurry.

“Well,” said Ted, “neither of us can go first, or the other one can’t come at all.”

Laura squeezed in next to him and put her hand on the hilt of the sword above his. They knee-walked awkwardly out of the hedge and stood up in the yard. It looked greener than the yard on the other side had looked. Laura felt the same waiting quiet all around them. The cracked bluish flagstones of the front walk pricked at the back of her mind; they looked as they ought to.

“It doesn’t look any different to me,” said Ted, looking at the house.

“Let’s go through the gate,” said Laura.

This turned out to be locked, but looking through it was enough to convince Ted that they were indeed somewhere else. He leaned on it for a long time, staring out over the long empty plain while the stream mumbled along over its rocks and the wind lifted Laura’s damp hair off her neck and the delicate leaves and flowers of the black wrought-iron gate suddenly fell into place like the right piece of a jigsaw puzzle. If Laura had been able to explain what she meant, she would have asked him if anything here affected him in the same way. As it was, she kept quiet and let him stare as long as he liked.

“Well,” he said finally, “is there a way across the stream?”

“It isn’t deep,” said Laura, who was hot.

“Actually,” said Ted, “the first thing is to get through the hedge. How did you get home again?”

“Dropped the sword in the middle.”

“So if we
don’t
drop the sword in the middle we should come out in the right spot?”

“I guess.”

They held the sword again and squirmed through the hedge. Laura was getting tired of the hedge. Ted thrust his arm in front of her in time to keep her from falling into the water, let go of the sword, and stood up. “Now about this stream,” he said, and stopped.

Laura looked where he was looking. Over the same hill came what looked like the same three figures, one tall and two not, gesturing at the house.

“I bet they’re the same people I saw yesterday,” said Laura, and took a step backward into the hedge. Ted caught her as she ducked to go through it.

“Only one of them is bigger than I am, and we’ve got the sword.”

“You take it, then,” said Laura, holding it out to him. It was making her hand prickle; she thought it must be too heavy for her.

“Wait a minute,” said Ted, squinting across the water.

The three people were coming down the long slope before the stream.

“The tall one looks like Ruth,” said Laura.

Ted squinted again. “It is Ruth,” he said.

Laura looked at him, suspecting him of teasing her, and saw that he was so stunned that he had no energy left to sound surprised. She looked at the tall person again.

“It is?”

“Sure. Look at her hair.”

“Then that’s Ellen—and Patrick!”

“It is our Secret Country!”

“Ruth!” yelled Laura. “Ellen! Patrick!”

The tall person jerked its head up. One smaller person stopped. The second small person bumped into the first, said “Hell!” quite audibly, and then gaped at Ted and Laura. They all stood there.

“Hey!” shouted Ellen, the small one who had bumped the other. She always found her voice first and had often gotten them out of trouble. “Have you got a sword?”

Patrick held one up, and Laura waved theirs back at him. “Is this house in Australia?” she yelled.

Ellen and Ruth and Patrick came down the hill and across the flat space in a sudden bound, all talking at once.

“We’ve been here for weeks—”

“We found the sword under a bottle tree, and—”

“Where have you been?”

“How do we cross the stream?” demanded Ted.

“There’s a bridge in the woods,” said Patrick. He began hurrying his sisters, who were involved in complicated explanations of enormous gardens and too many prickly pears and the essential oddness of Australia downstream. Ted and Laura hurried along on the other side of the water. Its banks grew steeper as it went into the woods, and Laura slid down one of them suddenly and found one foot in the water and the other in mud.

Ted pulled her out. “Give me the sword,” he said. “You’ll kill yourself.”

Laura let him take it. As she scrambled to her feet, she looked across the stream and caught Patrick giving her a look of great concentration, as if he or Ted or Ruth or Ellen had not been pulling her out of pools, streams, ditches, swamps, and patches of mud ever since she could walk. She wondered what was the matter with him.

Just when the thickening trees were beginning to crowd and poke them uncomfortably close to the edges of the stream, they came to the bridge. It was an unassuming bridge of wooden planks, with one handrail. Ted and Laura bolted across it. Laura tripped on the last plank and fell flat. Ellen picked her up, and Patrick gave her that look again.

“How did you get here?” asked Laura, pointedly addressing Ellen.

“I was throwing a ball for the dog,” said Patrick. He did not look like his sisters. They had black hair, but he had pale brown hair and blue eyes, like Ted and Laura. He seemed never to blink, and he could stare anyone down. “And the ball went smack into the middle of this clump of bottle trees. And I went crawling after it, and I put my hand down on something sharp, and sliced it good. So I was almost to the other side of the clump anyway, so I just grabbed the thing, and slithered on through, so I could look at it better. And then I was here. The house and the dog and Ellen were all gone, and it was dark. So I took the thing back through with me and crawled out the side I had come in, and I was still here. So I went
back
under the trees and left the sword, because it was a nuisance and I couldn’t see it anyway and I only had one good hand. I came out again, and I was back in Australia, and it was day again. So I told Ruth and Ellen, and we all came.”

He sat down on a stump, looking satisfied.

Ted told him about what had happened to himself and Laura.

“So,” said Ellen to Laura, “we’ve been wandering around for days looking for you.”

“Living in the woods?” said Ted. “Or have you met anybody who—”

“No,” said Ellen, “we had to go home.”

This isn’t a very good secret country,” said Patrick. “Time is the same. If you spend three hours here, it’s three gone at home too.”

“That’s stupid,” said Ted, outraged.

“That’s not all,” said Patrick. “You know what’s even worse? The time zones. With us in Australia and you in the States. I figured it out last night.” Laura thought that he did not sound very happy about it, which was unusual for something he had figured out. “It’s spooky. You’re on central daylight, right? Well, that’s twelve hours from us. When it’s midnight for you, it’s noon for us.”

“It’s two in the morning in Australia?” said Ted.

“That’s nothing,” said Patrick. “It’s three in the afternoon here. We’re on eastern daylight here.”

“How do you know?” demanded Ted.

“There’s a clock in that house,” said Ruth, shivering.

“Did you get in?” said Laura.

“No,” said Ruth, “and I don’t want to. You can hear the clock from out here. You can hear it from a long way away and it sounds—each stroke sounds like somebody’s head being chopped off.”

“How do you know?” said Ellen. “Have you ever heard anybody’s head being—”

“She can start with yours if you don’t shut up,” said Patrick. He addressed Ted. “We’re on eastern daylight here,” he said again.

“Just like Pennsylvania; just like on the farm,” said Ted slowly.

“But daylight savings time isn’t real,” said Laura.

“Darn right it isn’t,” said Patrick.

“It might make sense,” said Ted. “Maybe we couldn’t have found out about the Secret Country if we hadn’t been spending all those summers in a place that has the same time as it does. I mean, eastern daylight isn’t real time for Pennsylvania, but it is for somewhere out in the Atlantic, so—”

“You think this is somewhere out in the Atlantic,” said Patrick.

“No,” said Ted, irritated. “Obviously it isn’t.”

Patrick looked very much as if he were going to say something unpleasant, but he didn’t. Laura knew what he had wanted to say. He had wanted to say that they had not found out about the Secret Country, they had made it up. But he knew better than anyone, having been shouted at for it so often, that the one thing you did not do during a game was to so much as hint that it was one.

There was a wary silence; they all knew that look.

When Ellen was sure that Patrick was not going to say anything after all, she said, “Do you want to see the well?”

“Sure,” said Ted, formally.

“It’s back over the hill,” said Ellen. She let Ruth and Ted and Patrick go on before her, and waited for Laura.

“Is it really the well?” said Laura eagerly.

“Well,” said Ellen, “I suppose. I thought it ought to have a roof, instead of a stone lid, and Ruth wanted it to be more mossy, and Pat said the tree by it ought to be hollow. But it looks right somehow.”

“Is it an oak tree?”

“Yes,” said Ellen. “And a very good one.”

“Do the acorns fall into the water?”

“Well,” said Ellen, “they would if you left the lid off.”

“Heh,” said Laura. “Are the stones white?”

“No,” said Ellen. “Pink.”

“Pink?”

“Well, spotted. Patrick says they’re granite.”

“But—”

“I know,” said Ellen. They came out from the shade of the trees, blinking in the sudden heat. They were across from the house again. Ted and Ruth and Patrick, talking and waving their arms, turned to go up the long slope, and Laura and Ellen followed them.

“So is it our Secret Country or not?” asked Laura.

“Patrick,” said Ellen, “was happy that it didn’t look the way we wanted it to, and said of course it wouldn’t. He became very superior,” she said, burying both hands in her mop of hair in a way she had, “and wouldn’t tell us why it shouldn’t look the way we thought it should. He has ideas about this place.”

Laura, who liked Patrick but did not trust him, and who knew about his ideas, had a brief but vivid desire to have gone roller skating this afternoon. She did not say anything because they had caught up with the other three.

“Now look,” said Patrick, pointing before them, “and tell me what you think this is, Ted and Laura.”

Down at the bottom of the hill was a round stone well beside a warped oak tree. Laura knew immediately what Ellen had meant by calling the tree a good one. It, like the pattern of leaves and the flagstone and the iron gate, was right. The well was far from right; it looked even worse than Ellen had said it did. A road began at the foot of the tree and ran straight away from them to the horizon through a flat grassy plain. Here and there beside the road were a few more warped oaks. It was blazing hot and the air wavered like water.