by Andre Norton
Nan stood in the doorway of the room where Uncle Jasper sat on a chair, watching his men sound out paneling, toss covers from a bed so they could prod beneath it. He seemed to sense her coming and turned at once.
“There is a queer thing.” She brought out the words shrilly, those words she had tried to fit together in her mind on her way upstairs.
“Yes, my child?” Uncle Jasper's voice with the deceptive softness spurred her to a greater effort.
“In the parlor—there is a piece of the wall sticking out. I pulled at it—”
“Yes!” Uncle Jasper was on his feet at once. “Bring that gallows rogue.” He motioned toward Master Bowyer. “Now"—he set a hand around Nan's upper arm in a grip which hurt, but the pain this time cleared her wits—"now, show me this strange wall, girl!”
Back in the parlor, she pointed. The boy had obeyed her order; it could plainly be seen that here was a small door. Uncle Jasper loosed his hold on her and took an eager stride to pull it fully open. There was only an empty space behind. With a cat's swiftness he turned to look at Master Bowyer. But the innkeeper showed only a measure of surprise.
“It seems that this house has its secrets about which even I know nothing,” he said in that calm voice of his.
For a moment Uncle Jasper's hate and suspicion made a frightening mask of his face. Then he shrugged. “Let the search continue,” he said.
But Nan knew he was sure that this was the right place, that somehow Master Bowyer had beaten him. Deep in her for the first time there was a tiny spring of hope. Uncle Jasper could be bested. And not by a man like Master Bowyer. She had done it—she and that boy!
If a thing might be done once, perhaps it could be done again. The spirit he had subdued and thought fully broken was coming to life again within her thin body. In time she might even find her own way of escape; she must sharpen her wits and use every advantage. No one was going to make her free except herself.
Chris watched them drive out of the courtyard at sunset. They had ripped and hunted, and left the inn in vast disorder behind them. But they had not found what they sought. Though Sukie was now a part of it, too. She must have seen the bag, or what remained uncharred of it in the oven, when she at last had gone under escort to clear out the roast. However, no one under this roof would betray the master.
The girl—Chris wondered a little about her. He had seen her again only fleetingly as her uncle had bundled her back into the coach. But there had been something different about her—It did not matter. She was gone; they were all gone.
He held his head high as he went back to the disordered kitchen. Master Bowyer had taken him in from despair and maybe even death in the fields. Now he had had a chance to repay, and he had done so. He was no longer what he had been in his own eyes, but something better.
4
Dream or—?
Nan opened her eyes. Her whole body was stiff and aching. It had been a dream, of course! But she had never in her life known a dream so real, a dream in which you could smell things, taste things, be hot, cold—and very much afraid. Yes, there were dreams which made one afraid. Only that was a different kind of fear, somehow. Remembering that other Nan and Uncle Jasper, she shivered.
There came the low buzz of the small alarm clock Grandma had given her last Christmas. Time to get up. She looked thankfully around the room. At least she was not—there! All she could remember was being put back into that dreadful coach.
Nan glanced down at her hands. Somehow she had expected to see those soiled linen cuffs about her thin wrists, but only her pajama sleeves showed.
Scrambling out of bed, she grabbed for her dressing gown. Better make it to the bathroom before Chris got in there. He was so slow!
Chris—Chris had been a part of her dream, a very important part. He had been at the inn, had taken whatever lay in the hiding place—She stumbled down the hall, still bemused by the vivid memory. Why had Chris been a part of her dream? In the dream he had been a little taller, and his hair had been a lot longer. He had not worn glasses either. The boy had been Chris, however, without question.
And the inn—the Red Hart—they had been in the inn! Only how could they have? The model was so small you could hold it with one hand. No one could have been in that.
Chris flopped over in bed to reach mechanically for his glasses. He always did that in the morning, even before he got out of bed. Sitting up, he looked at the night table. There was the Red Hart, just as he had seen it before he fell asleep.
What a dream!
He touched fingertips to the roof of the miniature building. How could he have known all those rooms inside? He wished now that he had paid more attention when the hinged bottom was open. Only then all he had cared about was the inn sign. That hung safely in place just where he had put it last night.
“Chris!"—Aunt Elizabeth at his door—"Chris, you must get up—”
“I'm up!” He made that statement true by sliding from between the covers. The inn firmly grasped in one hand, Chris looked for a proper hiding place. He finally decided on the bottom drawer of the desk, placing over the model some sheets of paper. He did not think Clara would come looking in there. Nor that girl Nan—snooping again—
Chris paused. That girl—she had been a part of it. He breathed a little more quickly, recalling how she had opened the hiding place and then gone, leaving him to save Master Bowyer. Even though she had looked different in the dream, she was really the same. But why was she in his dream, a part of the story of his inn? He slammed down his comb, made a face at the glass.
“Chris"—Aunt Elizabeth warning him again.
“I'm hurrying.” He gave his usual answer. And he had better hurry; there was no use putting off facing up to the usual—breakfast with Aunt Elizabeth timing about every mouthful, going off to the Academy. Too bad that the dream was not real. He would like to live at the Red Hart just as he had last night. Sure it was cold, and the work was hard. But— He sighed and, with his usual deliberation, got ready for a day which seemed to him far more difficult to face.
“Miss Crabbit?” Aunt Elizabeth was saying as Chris came to the breakfast table. “Why, I remember her. She had a younger sister, Margaret, who was in my graduation class at Miss Pierce's. Yes, I am sure—Margaret Crabbit—she teaches French at college now. Martha isn't in your class then.”
Nan had not looked at Chris since he sat down. She was afraid if she did she might blurt out the question at the tip of her tongue—what had he dreamed last night? Chris was, however, his usual sullenly silent self, which first relieved and then annoyed her.
“Martha's class was full.” Nan did not see any reason to explain that to be with Miss Crabbit represented a kind of outer darkness as far as Martha was concerned. Martha had completely ignored her at lunchtime. Nan had had to eat— though she had not eaten much—at a table with complete strangers who talked over and around her as if she did not exist at all. Two were girls from Miss Crabbit's room who spent most of the time groaning over homework, saying that they were going to get their mothers to protest about all the Crab expected them to do.
“Well,” Aunt Elizabeth said comfortably, “there are other girls to be friendly with.”
Nan made no answering comment. As far as she was concerned everybody in the school was an enemy who eyed her with the same wary dislike Martha had shown. She was already secretly counting the days to spring vacation, and that seemed far too long away.
“Chris will walk with you as far as the Academy.” Aunt Elizabeth made that unpleasant suggestion as if it were something decided upon. For the first time Nan glanced in the boy's direction.
His eyes were on his plate, and he said nothing at all. But Nan could feel a wave of dislike spreading across the table. She might have accepted that, found some way to escape— yesterday. Now she lifted her chin a fraction.
So Chris did not want to walk with her. Well and good! What did she care? They might start out together, so Aunt Elizabeth would not make matters
worse by absolutely ordering them to do so; then they could separate. Nan guessed that even if this city was a lot larger than Elmsport she could find her way.
“Oh"—Aunt Elizabeth had gone to the window—"snowing again. I'll just call down to Haines. He'll get a taxi. There is no use of you both getting colds by tramping through this.”
For the first time Chris raised his head and looked around. “I'm walking,” he said calmly. “I've got boots.”
He got up and left the room before Aunt Elizabeth could answer. She gave a little laugh which did not sound as if she were really amused. “Well, I suppose it is different for a boy. I really don't know how to— But you shall take a taxi, dear!”
Nan was willing enough to agree. She felt that Chris's solution was the best for both of them, but she wished he had not made it first.
Chris pulled on his short coat. His book bag was on the hall chair. Now he drew his cap down over his ears, settled his glasses with a firm push of the nosepiece. Taxi! All it would need to set off Canfield was for him to reach school riding in a taxi with a girl.
He called back a very short good-bye and made it out of the apartment door, half-expecting a hail from Aunt Elizabeth. Luckily the elevator came quickly. In the lobby he passed Haines who was listening at the phone, probably to Aunt Elizabeth ordering the taxi.
The snow was falling thickly, curtains of it driven here and there by the wind. Chris snuggled his chin deeper into his turned-up collar. Big storm for so late in the year. Chris trudged on. His dream memory nibbled at his mind, but now he tried to shut it out. He did not want to think about the Red Hart Inn somehow.
Since the taxi was late, Aunt Elizabeth had to write an excuse. Then Nan had to take it to the office at school. By the time she reached her desk in Miss Crabbit's room, the impatience of those she had dealt with left her feeling as if she had deliberately set out to annoy them in turn.
The day, begun badly, continued worse. As Martha had forewarned, Miss Crabbit certainly upheld the nickname which had been given her. Though Nan realized that she was not being singled out for any sharpness of tongue, which met her own faltering attempts to keep up with the class. Miss Crabbit could “keep discipline.” She had an exterior and tone of voice which reduced even the boys in the back to some semblance of order, but she was impatient with those who did not work their best.
Nan, still at sea in a class where many things appeared so different from all she had known, was near giving up in despair of ever getting anything right again. At lunch she made the round of the cafeteria without paying much attention to the food she selected. She had a hamburger and a glass of milk, as well as knife, fork, and spoon which she did not need, clattering together on her tray when she turned to face what was even worse than the Crab's class—a room filled with tables, the smell of food, a roar of voices, and no one to welcome her.
She hesitated by a table, then set her tray down where there were two vacant seats. The three girls at the other end talked shrilly, as if to top the roar about them. Nan, in one quick and guarded glance, recognized them as classmates, though it was difficult, even though their faces were familiar, to put names to them.
The blonde one with the very long hair and the blue pants suit with the red-white-and-blue-striped T-shirt—that was Marve. Even Miss Crabbit called her Marve. With her, wearing jeans and a floppy shirt with Cat Woman printed on it, was a girl with her hair trimmed as short as a boy's used to be. She had a sharp nose—
Nan remembered a nose like that. A ghost of last night's dream troubled her mind. Uncle Jasper—he had had just such a nose—though a much larger one, of course, and his lips were thin in the same way, too.
The third girl was the Karen Long who sat just in front of Nan in class. She always looked oddly—or had the two days Nan had seen her—like a blurred copy of Marve. Her stringy hair was darker, a straight brown, hanging in untidy ragged locks, instead of being sleek the way Marve's was. She also wore a pair of blue pants and a red-white-and-blue shirt, but she was too plump for them to fit as well as Marve's.
To Nan's complete surprise Marve got up, slid her tray with a clatter down the table, coming to perch on the chair next to Nan, her two friends moving down in turn. Marve was smiling.
“You live at the Ramsley, don't you?”
Nan still could not believe the friendliness in Marve's voice was meant for her. There was none of that put-you-in-your-place staring with which Martha had favored her.
“Just for a while.” Somehow she found her voice around a bite of hamburger she did not even taste. “I'm staying with Miss Hawes.” Not Aunt Elizabeth—because she was not— not a real aunt.
“I know. M’ mother belongs to the bridge club. She heard all about you.”
Nan tensed. Would Marve, for all her appearance of friendliness, now ask questions as Martha had?
“M’ mother takes Travel Magazine.” Marve planted both elbows just beyond the edge of her tray. “I saw that piece about Taiwan your mother wrote. It must be something to travel around that way. You go with her—when there's vacation?”
Nan shook her head. “I lived with Grandma—until I came here.” She wondered if Marve would lose interest in her now.
“I bet she brings you things.” Marve was watching her oddly. “I bet you've got some wonderful presents from all those places.”
Nan chewed at her hamburger. She need not tell any real lie now. Mother had brought or sent some things. There was a doll from Japan, and a turquoise bracelet, and a dress from London. Only the dress had been too small when it came, and Nan had never worn it. Not that she cared because she had not liked it at all.
“Some,” she admitted warily.
“You got them with you?” Marve sounded almost impatient.
“No. When Grandma had to move, we put a lot of things in storage.”
For a moment Marve was silent; then she nodded. “I guess you would at that. Too bad. The Crab gives extra credit if you can bring in something from abroad to show.”
Nan half expected Marve to shove off again, but she stayed. Karen and the other girl simply watched and said nothing, though the girl with the pointed nose smiled. Not quite a nice smile, Nan decided. She felt uneasy as if waiting for something, she did not know quite what, to happen. She was very sure that Marve had not joined her out of a pure wish to be friendly.
“You know Karen"—Marve pointed—"and this is Pat, Pat Wilcox.”
They both bobbed their heads but did not speak.
“We're Three's a Crowd"—she laughed as if inviting Nan to share a joke— “That's what the rest call us. You see,” she added as if surprised Nan did not immediately show understanding, “when we all got slammed in the Crab's room this year, we sort of joined forces.” Marve tossed her head and smoothed back her hair.
“I live on Richmond Street, and Pat two doors down. Karen is around the corner at the Bellamy. So we're near you. Your brother doesn't come here, does he?”
“My brother? Oh, you mean Chris. No, he goes to the Academy.”
“That's right,” Marve nodded, “he's your stepbrother, isn't he? He'd be kind of cute if he didn't wear those goggles and look like he always had a stomachache.”
Karen tittered, and Pat's smile widened a fraction.
“You're lucky,” Marve continued. “The Academy gives a keen dance right after Easter. Most of us haven't a chance of getting an invitation to that.”
“I probably haven't either.” Nan made certain she was not going to be accepted by Three's a Crowd on false pretenses. “I don't think Chris dances. Anyway we don't know each other very well.”
“That's exciting.” Marve leaned a little closer. “Must be smooth to just wake up some morning and find you have a big brother and all! Weren't you excited when you heard?”
“Some,” Nan admitted dryly.
“I'll bet you were.” For the first time Pat spoke. But her tone suggested that any surprise Nan might have felt was for the worse instead of the better.
&n
bsp; Nan, however, could not help but warm a little to Marve in spite of her wariness. She already knew that this girl held leadership of the room and to be singled out by her might mean complete acceptance. She felt grateful, even if she did not care too much for either Pat or Karen.
So when Marve insisted that she join them on the walk home from school, she found herself pounding along in the now thick snow. Luckily Aunt Elizabeth had not thought to send the taxi which Nan had half expected.
When they parted under the canopy where Haines sheltered, it was with the assurance from Marve that they would be by in the morning to pick her up—in Marve's father's car.
“He won't mind. One more won't make any difference,” she said. “M’ mother knows your aunt. So I can fix it. You'll see.”
Nan felt so much better she did not even dread the elevator as she crossed the lobby.
Chris tramped over her wet footprints in the lobby before Lind, the super, could get them mopped up. His mind was already racing ahead of his body—to the inn. All day he had managed, with a great deal of willpower, not to think about that very real dream. But now he relaxed his control and began going over it bit by bit in his mind.
If it were only his dream! He resented the fact that Nan had played a part in it—an important part. During the day he had had a chance to get into the library on the excuse of a project and had tried to find out what he could about the Papist priests whom the King's Men hunted down. There were some facts which made him shiver, the more so when he remembered Master Bowyer. They killed men they said were traitors in a horrible way then.
But at least his dream had not been that bad. Master Bowyer had escaped, because that officer could not find any evidence that Bowyer was secretly a priest. Chris remembered how his dream self had hidden that evidence. He had had a lot of luck, being able to get the bag into the oven that way.