“It’s not fair,” Michael said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Do you have to stand here forever?” Elizabeth asked, her lower lip trembling.
Cass snorted. “No, stupid, just until he tells them what they want to hear.”
“Forever,” Julia concluded, nodding.
Michael squared his shoulders and aligned himself beside James, looking up at him firmly. “Then we’re staying with you.”
“I said get out of here.”
“It’s what Artemas would want us to do,” Elizabeth said. “He’s always telling us to stick together.”
That was true. James didn’t have an argument for it. They took up their defiant places.
The headmistress of the lower grades, her body quivering with frustration, shook a stiff finger at them. Dislodging the younger ones from James’s side would take physical force, and she knew it. “I don’t have any more patience for any of you or your parents, and I’m calling them immediately.”
James gave her a scalding look, while he died inside. “My parents are visiting friends in Hawaii. They won’t be back for a month.”
“As usual,” the headmistress said, disgust blossoming on her face. “All right, then all of you can stand right here and be humiliated together.”
She marched away, leaving them in a forbidding, echoing hall of paneled wood and somber marble floors. Michael wobbled and coughed. “I hate them all,” Cassandra noted, chewing her fingernails.
“Shut up and act like you don’t care.” James looked at his huddled army. He wished he had the gentle brand of authority that Artemas used, but he didn’t. He could only stand there in stony silence, while other students and teachers walked by, staring. He felt angry from the top of his clipped brown hair to the soles of his polished loafers. His navy blazer was skewed aside by Julia, who had wrapped her arms around his waist.
Elizabeth leaned wearily against him on the other side. Michael stood at attention, his hands clasped behind his back, coughing but looking dedicated. Cass shifted from side to side and occasionally gave the finger to the older students walking by.
James loved his strange little aides-de-camp with a pride that made his chest ache.
Hours passed. Michael was eleven years old, but his face had the pasty color of an old man’s. James began to feel weary and defeated. He couldn’t let Michael and the others suffer. “I’ll say the fight was my fault,” he told them.
Michael shook his head violently. “If you tell stuff that isn’t true, I’ll knock your head off. I’ll tell Artemas, and he’ll knock your head off too.”
“I’ll hang you up by your scrawny thumbs, you little asshole. You look like you’re going to faint.”
“Nobody’s moving,” Cass announced. She pulled a half-eaten candy bar from her blazer’s pocket and shoved it at Michael. “There. That’ll make you feel better.”
“Cassie gave away a candy bar,” Julia said in shock.
At lunchtime the front door opened, and a lanky little girl came running in, her dark hair flying back from a serious, wide-eyed face. “I came to see you,” she said, stopping in front of them all and staring up at James as if his predicament made her want to die.
He gazed at her grimly. Alise Wyndham was in Michael and Elizabeth’s grade. The fact that she was their most devoted—and probably only—friend made her special. The fact that she had a crush on James made her an embarrassment.
“It’s okay,” Michael told her with dignity. “We’re Colebrooks. We’re used to being in trouble.”
Alise sidled up to James, looking up at him with sad adoration. It made him uncomfortable, because it was so bewildering—and besides, he didn’t want anyone to find him adorable, he wanted them to be frightened and impressed. “I believe you. It wasn’t your fault,” she said softly.
“Go back before the teachers notice you’re missing and you get in trouble.”
“I don’t care what the others say, I’m going to talk to you.”
“Go away.”
When she looked terribly wounded, he grew confused and remorseful. Her parents were dead, and she lived with an aging great-aunt. Grandmother said the old lady was missing more than a few marbles and gave more attention to a horde of pet cats than to Alise. James bent down to her and whispered, “I don’t want you to get in trouble because of us. Okay?”
“Alise,” the headmistress called, striding into the hall. She took Alise by one arm. “I’m shocked at you, Alise. Now, you’ve let these children get you in trouble too. What would your great-aunt think if you had to stay here with them?”
“Leave her alone,” James said slowly, gritting his teeth.
“I’m staying here,” Alise said.
“All right, you do that. If you’re going to let them shame you, you stay here and pay the price.”
“Yes, ma’am.” As the headmistress walked away, Cassandra looked over her shoulder at Alise. “You idiot.”
“Shut up,” James told her. He put a hand on Alise’s small, bowed head. She lifted it and gazed at him with plaintive appreciation. “I’d rather stay with you anyway,” she said, so bravely that he wished he could tear the whole damned school and all its elite, hateful people down for her sake as well as for himself and his family’s. But he couldn’t. He wished he were Artemas.
The afternoon passed with agonizing slowness. They hadn’t sat down all day They hadn’t eaten.
The entrance hall’s large doors swung open with a crash. Artemas strode down the hall, his cadet’s cap tucked formally under one arm, his bearing as straight and dignified as a general’s in the academy’s gray uniform. He was so tall and his expression so solemn that James felt threatened and worried, but at the same time his chest swelled with love.
The younger ones ran to Artemas desperately, throwing their arms around his waist as he came to a halt. His face softened, and he put one long arm around them. He nodded at James approvingly. “You did the right thing.”
“Grandmother called you?”
“Yes. Come on.” He picked up Julia. Michael tugged at his sleeve. “We can’t just leave, can we?”
“Grandmother and I will deal with the school,” Artemas said.
Alise murmured from behind the others, “I can’t go.”
James took her hand. “Yes, you can. I’ll explain to your aunt for you.” She smiled up at him.
Artemas steered them out the front doors and into a lumbering old sedan that belonged to Uncle Charles’s gardener. Artemas did everything with the calmness of a grown man, not a seventeen-year-old boy. He drove them to a restaurant and bought hamburgers. “What will Uncle Charles say?” Elizabeth whispered.
“I’m in charge of this family, not Uncle Charles,” Artemas replied.
James nodded to himself and smiled. Artemas would never let them down.
Lily had a new letter from Artemas in one back pocket of her dungarees, a hardbound library copy of Charlotte’s Web in the other, and a mind to sit in the palm court at Blue Willow while she looked at them.
She climbed along a stone ledge at the base of the looming old mansion, brushing against the plywood that covered the palm court’s glass sides at the bottom level. Above her the hulking mint-green structure rose to a peaked roof. There were jagged holes in the upper panes of glass, where uncaring trespassers had heaved bricks. She reached the spot where the plywood had rotted and fallen away. Someone had knocked out the whole window.
She climbed in and stood on the dirty tile floor, letting her eyes adjust. Autumn sun filled the huge room with soft green light, spotted with white where the sun came through the holes. At the right end the giant glass doors into the mansion were covered with sheets of steel.
The palms’ fallen, decayed trunks lay jumbled across the tile pathways. Sunk into the ground, like ships settling in a sea of clay, were big ceramic pots with chunks broken out of their sides. Spiderwebs big enough to catch a horse hung from the corners of the ceiling.
In the court’s center sto
od a fountain, with a pretty little stone girl pouring empty air from a vase. A decade of rain had drawn dark rivulets down her and her pedestal. Even the fountain seemed to be melting into the ground.
The first time Lily had discovered the open window and explored here, she’d shaken with dread. It was a forgotten fairyland, and who knew what might be hiding in the shadows at the walls’ bottoms, where the plywood hid her view of blue sky and mountains? But there was nothing, only the whisper of the wind through the broken panes overhead.
She sat down with her back against the fountain’s base and her legs crossed on the dusty tiles. They were white with blue willows on them. She rubbed one with the sleeve of her flannel shirt, cleaning up her special place a bit, paying the mansion back for letting her come here. Taking care of it, for Artemas.
She pulled her book and the letter from her pockets. She’d been such a baby when he’d come to visit. Now, she was ten. She wrote to him about everything she did, and he wrote back to encourage her. The letter was on his school’s paper, with an important-looking gold crest at the top.
She read avidly. His handwriting was dark and beautiful. Keep making good grades in school, and don’t believe the teacher who said you’re too smart for your own good. You’re just too smart for her, that’s all. Tell that boy who called you a “giant red goober” that he has a small mind. Someday, he’ll be sorry. And keep remembering, I wouldn’t trust just any little girl to take care of Blue Willow for me. You’re the only one.
Lily sighed with delight and pressed the letter to her chest. She had a mission in life, a mission that made everything right.
A gunshot echoed through the woods outside. Lily raced to the broken window. Crouching, she peered out. Down the hill, where the forest opened onto the old lawn, she spied Joe Estes among the weedy grass and little pine trees. He was dressed in his hunting clothes, and he carried a rifle. A little ol’ squirrel rifle. Lily sniffed in disdain.
He was a grown boy, and his folks owned Estes Hardware and Feed, in town. They were nice, solid people, Mama said.
But Joe raced stock cars like a fool, and he’d been in trouble with the law for things Mama and Daddy would only whisper about, and he liked to hunt. He could hunt from now till the cows came home, but he’d better get off Blue Willow. Furious, Lily stuffed her book and letters back into her pockets, then slipped out the window. She tiptoed down the hill, hiding behind the tree trunks, her heart racing.
When she reached the bushes along the edge of the forest, she hunkered down and began growling. She’d scare him off, make him think a bear was after him. There were still some around these woods. He couldn’t kill a bear with a squirrel rifle.
She rattled the bushes, made the most terrible, low-pitched noises in her throat, growling louder and louder, and peeped at him, wanting to see him run. He turned, staring in her direction.
Then he put the rifle to his shoulder and fired.
An invisible hand slapped her backward. She lay on the ground, blinking in amazement. A pain like fire ran down her right arm. She could hear Joe tromping toward her. Dazed, she looked at her arm and saw blood everywhere. Her shirtsleeve was torn near the top. It revealed a long, deep gouge on her shoulder.
“Oh, my God,” Joe said, when he parted the bushes and looked down at her. “It was your fault, you stupid little shit. I oughta leave you here, but it’d just cause a stink.”
Lily glared up woozily, pointed at him with her good arm, and intoned, “This is my land. If I was a bear, I’d bite your head off.” Then she fainted.
• • •
Aunt Maude and the sisters’ faces appeared over her like angels. Mama and Daddy were looking down at her too. Lily gazed up at them from a dreamy mist, smiled, and shut her eyes again. She was in the guest bedroom at Aunt Maude’s, she remembered. Her bandaged arm was cushioned on a pillow.
“She’ll sleep all afternoon, doped up on those pain pills the doctor gave her,” Lily heard Aunt Maude whisper. “Leave her here till you get through talking to the sheriff.”
“I’d like to kill that damned Joe for hunting on the estate,” Daddy answered, his voice sounding tired and worried. “But I can see how him shooting Lily was just an accident. Good Lord, who expects to find a ten-year-old girl hiding in the middle of nowhere and growling at him?”
“What are we goin’ to do with her?” That was Mama, Lily knew. She sounded upset. “She thinks that old estate belongs to her. She thinks she has to take care of it for Artemas Colebrook.”
Little Sis. Her voice was high and squeaky. “Can’t fault that kind of loyalty, Zea.”
“But I worry about her. She’s not like other little girls. She keeps to herself, reads all the time, hangs out at the old mansion. I can’t keep her away from it.”
Big Sis. Her voice was gravelly. “She’s as tough as a mustang and twice as stubborn. She’ll never get by on dainty temperament or dainty looks—not with her size and that cap of orange hair. But that doesn’t matter. She’s smart. You might as well get used to the fact that she’s odd. It’s a remarkable kind of odd.”
Odd? Tears pooled behind Lily’s eyelids. What could be good about being odd? When an old man who lived down the street from Aunt Maude had started going outside with no pants on, people said it was because he’d gotten odd. His wife sent him off to a home for crazy people.
“She thinks Artemas Colebrook is coming back someday to marry her.” That was Mama again. Lily’s heart jerked at the tone of disbelief in Mama’s voice.
“Well, you don’t know,” Daddy said slowly. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Oh, Drew, don’t you dare encourage her notions. She’ll outgrow ’em. When she’s older, she’ll figure out that the world doesn’t work like something out of ‘Cinderella.’ ”
“Let her daydream,” Little Sis whispered. “Maybe it’ll keep her away from the bull-necked dimwits around here. You want her to go to college, don’t you? And you sure don’t want her pregnant or married before she’s old enough to know her head from a hole in the ground.”
Lily listened in stark despair as they tiptoed from the room. She opened her eyes and let the tears roll out the corners. She wasn’t going to marry anyone, not Artemas, or dimwits, or anybody else.
She wrote to Artemas about getting shot. By return mail he sent a large package. Inside neatly folded tissue paper was his beautiful gray academy jacket, with gold piping at the stiff, stand-up collar, ornate brass buttons down the center, four gold stars pinned in a perfect horizontal line across one breast, and under them, a shiny little nameplate with ARTEMAS COLEBROOK, SENIOR CADET COMMANDER in etched black letters.
On a piece of academy stationery he had written, I wore this to graduation. Now, I want you to have it. What you did was very brave but you have to promise not to get shot again.
She wrote back, I promise. It wasn’t much fun.
Lily modeled the jacket for Mama and Daddy. Artemas’s jacket swallowed her. “He must be as big as Daddy,” she said in awe. So big and sweet that he wouldn’t mind that she was wild as a mustang, with fuzzy red hair, big hands, big feet, knobby knees, and a long bullet scar on her shoulder.
Artemas would come back someday. He already knew she was odd, and it didn’t seem to bother him.
Six
These were Artemas’s last few weeks of freedom before he entered West Point, and the summer sun splaying down through the trees was warm as life on his naked body, and Susan de Gude was his first girl.
“Yes, like that,” she whispered against his ear, bare and golden beside him on the soft forest floor. Even though the air rolling in from the sound was tepid, he burned, sinking into a blinding need to learn what a girl felt like inside. But this was her first time, too, and he didn’t want to hurt her, or God help him, do anything that would make her want to stop.
They’d spent what seemed like hours reaching this point, touching each other with awe and, for a while, embarrassment, until the fire of excitement erased everything
but sensation. Now, she was writhing under his hand, and he was exploring the moist recesses between her legs with a restraint that made him light-headed. “You’re so smooth inside,” he murmured, taking her mouth as she tilted her head up to his again. She moaned into his lips, then broke away, her green eyes smoldering, her hair, dark red and tangled, catching on bits of grass as she twisted her head from side to side.
He felt as if the ache between his legs would consume him. There was no longer any way of knowing where it ended and the limits of his skin began. She and he had managed to get a condom in place only seconds ago, snickering over it, nearly shooting it across his belly a time or two before the laughter faded into desperate intensity, and her fingers, trembling but incredible, had stroked it down firmly.
“Now, okay?” she begged, her narrow hips grinding upward into his palm. Her face and breasts turned a brighter shade of pink, her small nipples becoming as dark as roses. Her lashes quivered and lowered shyly. “I’m going to do it, you know, come, any second.”
Those were the most erotic words in the world. Shaking, Artemas tried to say something coherent but only managed “Me too” before he carefully moved over her, frantically aware that she was much smaller and softer than his brutally muscled body. There was a painfully awkward moment in which their legs became entwined and he jabbed her upper thigh with his jutting arousal, but then he instinctively slid his hands under her and lifted her legs around him, and they were dignified again.
Then, suddenly, he was pressing into the edge of her sex, feeling it stretch, holding back so hard that every muscle in his back and buttocks quivered. They inched closer, her eyes wide on his. “Does it hurt?” he asked desperately. “Is it all right?”
A smile broke across her damp lips. “Yes. Its perfect.”
They wrapped their arms around each other and huddled together. He began to move. It was amazing, wonderful, the sliding and tug of her flesh and the grip of her hard thighs on his hips. She gasped and burrowed her face into the crook of his neck, then shuddered and began struggling under him. “Susie?” he said with alarm. He could barely think, but he forced himself with the iron willpower he’d spent his whole life developing.
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