The Andre Norton Megapack

by Andre Norton

  Forties, Fredericka thought, and I’m blushing as though I were in my teens instead of a safe thirty-five.

  “Hi, Colonel.” The low rumbling sound came from Fredericka’s friend, the fat baggage man, who now stood behind her to rest from the great effort of drawing a half-filled mail bag across the platform.

  “Hi yourself, Willy,” the man called Colonel answered. He unfolded a neatly rolled newspaper and sat down on the packing case. Fredericka, having no excuse to linger, now walked purposefully across the track to her waiting train.

  A twenty-minute wait for a ten-minute journey, she thought as she settled herself on the dusty plush seat. And now most likely another ten minutes to add to it. But even as she thought this, the engine gave its warning toot and began to push itself backwards out of the station. Except for Fredericka, the car was empty and, in spite of herself, she couldn’t resist the temptation to go across the aisle and look out of the window. The man called Colonel had put aside his paper and now seemed to be looking directly at her own peering face. She ducked quickly and returned at once to her seat as, again, she felt her cheeks burn hotly.

  “Now whatever possessed me to do that?” she asked aloud, and then: “Behaving like a schoolgirl.” But the intent gray eyes followed Fredericka all the short journey to South Sutton and were only forgotten when the excitement of arrival and settling in to her new job put every other thought from her mind.

  When Fredericka climbed down from the train at South Sutton Station she felt hotter than ever but, as she looked round her, she was reassured. Here, at last, there was an air of midsummer peace that soothed her tired spirit. Fields dotted with bright black-eyed Susans and white clover rolled up to the track and even struggled through the floor boards of the platform. Beyond the fields there was a line of dark firs and a few low rooftops.

  If only Cy would stop the snorting of his dragon, I could probably hear crickets, Fredericka thought. Now I wonder what I do next and where—

  “Are you Miss Wing?” a pleasant voice asked. Fredericka turned, startled, to find a woman standing directly behind her.

  “Yes, I’m Fredericka Wing. But wherever did you come from? There wasn’t anyone else on the train.”

  The woman laughed and Fredericka observed that the face which had at first glance seemed plain now became attractive. She was shorter than Fredericka and less angular. She was wearing a sleeveless linen dress which looked clean and cool and her short dark hair had just been combed. She made Fredericka feel travel-worn and dusty.

  “I came across the fields, from the other side of the train. But I must introduce myself. I am Philippine Sutton and I have come to meet you because Miss Hartwell, she is so very busy.” She spoke slowly with a hint of a foreign accent. Her th’s became z’s and her r’s were rich and throaty.

  Fredericka put down her case and shook the proffered hand which felt small and soft in hers. French, Fredericka decided. “You seem to have the right name for anyone living in this town,” she remarked, and then: “It was good of you to bother to meet me.”

  “I wanted to come to the station anyway. I had a shipment coming in—things for my laboratory which I have at the farm. But I forgot—of course you don’t know anything about us yet. And I, I don’t know anything about you either.”

  “No. We’ll have to explain ourselves, but first I want to see about my baggage.” As always Fredericka now became fussed by the tiresome details of life from which she never seemed able to escape. New England her friends at college had called it. “I sent my trunk on in advance. Oh, good, I think that’s it on the platform.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Philippine said. “Then we can walk—my jeep’s laid up at the garage for the moment, but it isn’t far and I can show you the sights—or some of them. Miss Hartwell’s man, Chris, will collect your trunk and that bag too, if it’s heavy. There’s not much fuss about life in South Sutton,” she added, seeing Fredericka’s obvious concern.

  “No, thanks, I’ll manage this case. It’s got a change of clothes and all the necessary articles for a badly needed bath.”

  In a few moments the two women were walking along a wide country road edged with elderly spruce trees. Their feet scuffed up a fine cloud of dust that settled on the grass and clover struggling to grow along the roadside.

  “This,” announced Philippine, “is rightly named ‘Spruce Street’. If we had turned left it would take us out to the farm belonging to my aunt, Mrs. Sutton. Yes—a direct descendant of the Lucius Edward Sutton who founded the town in 1814 and the college six years later. The family place, we call it ‘the Farm,’ is where Mrs. Sutton and I do a business in herbs, and I have my lab. It’s about a mile out of town. It won’t take you long to learn the lie of the land since the whole of South Sutton is nothing but a crossroads. Those gates on the left and those impressive buildings you can just see through the trees are Sutton College.”

  Fredericka looked around her. The air was heavy with the warm scent of hay and the more subtle perfume of the spruce trees.

  “I love New England,” she said simply, “and this seems exactly as it should be.”

  “Yes. I love it, too,” Philippine said. “I can work here in peace—and forget the other life.” She hesitated. “I mean France, in the war,” she added.

  As she said this her voice became hard and her accent more pronounced. Fredericka looked up quickly. The woman’s face was a mask—of hatred, sorrow, fear—Fredericka could not be certain. But in a moment Philippine collected herself and the smile returned to her face.

  “I’m sorry. Here all is well and yet—sometimes the other life comes back. I was put in a concentration camp by the Germans when they invaded France. But we will not talk about it.” A look of strain returned to her face and, with an obvious effort, she remembered her role as guide. “We come now to Beech Street which crosses Spruce and is really the main street of the town. Along there, on the right are the church—only one, Congregational, and the shops just beyond it. Opposite them are the town hall and the police station, and across the road there on the corner of Beech and Spruce, is the Inn. It’s made over from one of South Sutton’s earliest buildings—an old coaching inn, 1820, I think it was, and built about the same time as the first college buildings. The food is good. You’ll probably want to eat there sometimes.”

  “Is that all there is to South Sutton?” Fredericka asked.

  “Just about.” Philippine laughed again. “We turn left here into Spruce Street. The campus is on our left still and here, a stone’s throw on the right, is Miss Hartwell’s bookstore.”

  “Oh—but—it’s lovely,” Fredericka exclaimed. “It’s the kind of Victorian I like—the valentine kind—and it has trees—copper beeches and lots of land. It’s exactly right.”

  Philippine who was a little ahead, turned to look back at Fredericka. “I think you’ll like it. It is a good house and it’s also a good bookstore, which, if all Lucy Hartwell says of you is true, will matter even more to you.”

  Was there reproof in her voice? Or was it just the foreignness of this stranger? Fredericka cursed herself for being sensitive. It was what happened to well brought up New England women when they got into their thirties and hadn’t married. Even New York couldn’t do anything about it.

  As they walked up the brick walk, the screen door banged open and a large woman hurried out.

  “Is that you, Miss Wing? Oh dear—do please forgive me but I’ve got to leave almost before I see you. But Philippine will tell you everything, won’t you, Philippine? Oh dear, I don’t know what this town ever did before Philippine came to take charge of us. And Margie, that’s my niece, will help too, if you want her. She needs discipline, all the young do these days, but she may be some use. Dear me—”

  The torrent of words would have continued forever, Fredericka felt certain, if the speaker had been standing still but all the while she had been hurrying down the path and only when she reached the gate did she stop and turn back to peer at her new empl
oyee in a vague, nearsighted way.

  “Yes, you’re just as I hoped you’d be,” she announced unexpectedly. “And we did really cover everything by letter. Just go in. I’ve left notes around saying what’s what.”

  “It’s all right, Lucy,” Philippine said gently. “But how are you going to get to the station?”

  “Walk—or rather run. I sent Chris on with my bags. He’ll probably persuade Cy to wait for me.” She waved a large hand vaguely and trotted off toward the station.

  “She’s a darling,” Philippine said, and then laughed as she added, “but a little distraught as you may have observed. Personally I can’t see what use she’ll be to that niece in California.”

  “She seems more motherly than businesslike.”

  “She isn’t really. The bookstore is an obsession and you’ll see that she’s done a fine job with it.”

  Inside the door a long passage ran straight back to another door which stood open so that one could see the green of trees beyond it. Fredericka could observe the whole ground floor of the house, or most of it, from where she stood just inside the front door—shop rooms to right and left, and back of them two large rooms, also filled with books.

  “I’ll just whisk you through here and upstairs—and then leave you in peace,” Philippine said.

  Fredericka saw that the back room on the left side was the office and lending library and that beyond it was an attractive modern kitchen which seemed to have been added to the square box of the house as an afterthought.

  “Miss Hartwell always lives in there, and I expect you will, too,” Fredericka’s guide said, as they looked in through the kitchen door.

  Fredericka stopped for a moment to stand in the door at the end of the hall and look out across a narrow porch into the tangled mass of trees and shrubs that crowded, like an invading jungle, toward the small patch of back lawn.

  “Very overgrown, is it not?” Philippine asked. “Chris slashes away upon it when he has time. Around the other side”—she waved a vague hand toward the kitchen—“it is more cleared—a few flowers and even a hammock. But you can discover all that for yourself.”

  Fredericka hurried after her guide and climbed the stairs that went up steeply from a point in the hall midway between the front and back doors.

  Philippine finished her explanation hurriedly. “Your room is the yellow guest room at the back, Miss Hartwell’s at the front and, on the other side of the hall, an extra shop storeroom at front, bath and a personal storeroom at the back. There’s no second floor over the kitchen—so that’s all there is. And now I must dash. My jeep should be ready and my lunch—” she stopped abruptly. “But—how stupid of me. What about your lunch?”

  “I—I don’t really want anything at the moment. I’d rather have a bath first and then I’ll see if there’s a bread crust in the kitchen.”

  “I’m sure there’s something there. If not, it’s only a step to the stores—you remember—along Spruce Street on the right. If it’s really all right I must dash. I am so sorry but we will meet soon again, I hope.”

  Fredericka heard the clatter of steps on the stairs and then, as the screen door slammed, she sank into the chintz chair and groaned.

  Suddenly the door opened again and Philippine’s voice, sounding strident and foreign in the quiet house, called: “The bookshop never stays open on Saturday afternoon unless Miss Hartwell happens to want it to. So you’ll have the weekend to catch your breath.”

  “Thanks,” Fredericka called.

  The door slammed again, this time with finality.

  An hour later, Fredericka, feeling greatly refreshed, finished the last of the salad and cold coffee that she had found waiting for her in the kitchen. She had planned to explore the bookshop and the library but a glimpse of the hammock beyond the kitchen window was too much for her resolution. She salved her conscience by taking a block of paper and a pencil from the office desk and when she had stretched herself out in the leafy shade, she wrote the words, Things to be done… Then she stopped and chewed the pencil meditatively.

  So much had happened since that morning two weeks ago when she had read the ad among the Personals in the Saturday Review. She knew it now by heart.

  WANTED. Educated woman to run bookshop and lending library, small college town in Massachusetts. Work not arduous. Rest and enjoyment of country possible. Owner-manager called away suddenly. Please reply Box 874

  It had sounded like the answer to prayer. Being a branch librarian in New York in July had been bad enough, but short staff, shorter tempers, and hours of overtime had made the thought of escape a rainbow dream. And there was the book started two years ago, the encouraging letter from the publisher: “Work not arduous.” There would be time, at last, to write.

  At a sound behind her Fredericka sat up suddenly, and the pencil slipped from her hand to the ground.

  From the tangle of shrubs and trees a black face peered out at her.

  “Beg pardon, Miss. I’m Chris. Miss Hartwell’s Chris. Sorry if I scared you. I’ve been unpackin’ books in the stable here and Miss Hartwell, she say I was to ask you if you didn’t want somethin’ else done afore I went along home.”

  The tall negro now stood over her and his smile looked too good to be true, but perhaps he was just trying to be friendly.

  “Oh. Then you’re Christopher Fallon.”

  “That’s right, Miss.”

  “Well. I do have a trunk at the station. Miss Sutton said you could get it for me.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “How do you manage? I know there isn’t any car.”

  “No, Miss. I uses the wheelbarrer, fetchin’ anythin’ from the depot—parcels of books mostly.”

  “Good.”

  As the man started to move away, Fredericka felt a sudden impulse to detain him. The silent house and great overgrown garden were all at once oppressive.

  “Is it Miss Sutton, or Mrs. Sutton, Chris?”

  “Miss, if you means Miss Philippine the lady who met your train. Her aunty is ole Mrs. Sutton that owns the big place out on the turnpike. Her father, that was Mrs. Sutton’s brother, he went to the big war, the first one, and married hisself to a French woman. But they both got themselves killed in this war we had just presently. Ole Mrs. Sutton she went and hunted for Miss Philippine until she foun’ her at last and brought her back home.”

  “Hasn’t she any children of her own then?” Fredericka couldn’t resist asking. Then she was immediately sorry for the question. Was she prying into affairs that were no business of hers? Why must she analyse every word she spoke? Why must she be so sensitive? She looked a little nervously at Chris but he answered her without hesitation.

  “Yes, Miss, she’s got two children of her own—Miss Catherine—that’s Mrs. Clay, that was. She ain’t married jes’ at present. She lives in New York but she’s jus’ visitin’ heah right now. Then there’s the boy—got hisself all smashed up in the war though.”

  “He isn’t called Colonel, is he?” she asked, somewhat to her own surprise.

  “Oh no, Miss. He’s Roger—Roger Sutton,” he added unnecessarily.

  He began to move away toward the brick path that ran round the house to the front and Fredericka said quickly, “There was a man I—er—well, there was someone called Colonel at the junction and I just wondered if it could have been this Mr. Sutton.”

  “No Ma’am.” Chris turned back. The smile had gone at last, and he regarded Fredericka solemnly. “Perhaps it could likely have been Colonel Mohun. He teaches in the college and everyone calls him Colonel ’round here.”

  Fredericka, for the third time that day, felt herself blushing. She wished now that she hadn’t spoken. If only Chris would stop looking at her and go away.

  “The Colonel’s a good man,” Chris said slowly, and something in the way he emphasized the word “good” made Fredericka look up quickly. Yes, it was as if he had said, “Those others, those Suttons, are a bad lot.”

  “Thanks, Chris. I
’ll be here tonight, probably working in the shop, so you can bring the trunk any time.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  Fredericka watched the retreating back and wished she hadn’t talked so much. As the sound of Chris’s footsteps died away, the garden seemed unnaturally silent. She shivered. Was it a sudden cool breeze, or was it something else—a coldness and loneliness inside herself? Who was that illustrator who made trees into witches and ogres? Rackham. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder—was that also true of—evil? Why was she suddenly so disenchanted? She shivered again and got up to walk indoors slowly. She must apply her own mental discipline to such ridiculous imaginings.

  Chapter 2

  Fredericka woke herself with a loud sneeze and turned over to look at the clock on the table by her bed.

  Eight. Later than usual—much. But there had been the thunderstorm in the middle of the night and she had lain awake for a long time afterwards. She opened her eyes wide and stared at the unfamiliar yellow room.

  She sneezed again, sat up, and was sure that she had started a cold. Her eyes ached and her throat felt like sandpaper.

  As she dressed slowly, stopping at intervals to reach for a paper handkerchief, she was aware of a curious apprehension that had nothing to do with her cold and nothing to do with being alone in a strange house. Suddenly she sneezed again.

  “Sneeze on Sunday, sneeze for—” What was the old rhyme? She finished dressing hurriedly and then looked out the window at the back of the room, over the sloping tin roof of the porch to the patch of lawn and the tangle of bushes beyond. She must explore that jungle later if the sun came out. But not now. The dark leaves hung heavy and dank from their night’s wetting and even the lawn was steaming after the heat of yesterday.