We couldn’t penetrate into those unyielding bushes at the grove’s heart. The tangle might harbor nothing more than thorns and roots and trunks from one side to the other, or it might conceal wonders; either way, it was closed to us. As we picked leaves from our clothing out on the open ground again, Mr. Girandole said he supposed it was fitting that the garden’s very middle should be beyond our reach. “Like Eden,” he said. “The Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, not to be touched.”
Standing there, we were only a few steps from the pedestal of the missing statue—the image of the duke’s wife, G ——. I couldn’t help moving closer to gaze in wonder at the small, sandaled feet, exquisitely crafted in stone.
Mr. Girandole watched me curiously, but his gaze, too, was drawn to the pedestal.
Without thinking carefully, I said, “The day I met you, you talked about Cinderella. The prince went to search far and wide through the land for the girl with the beautiful feet. He knew he’d find her.”
I closed my mouth, realizing I’d probably said too much. I felt him staring at me. I finished lamely, “These are beautiful feet, I’ve always thought.”
* * * *
Taking my notebook, I climbed to the roof of the leaning house while Mr. Girandole patrolled the garden. Grandmother was snoring softly down on the terrace, and R —— was looking through a book of piano music we’d brought to amuse him.
I leaned back against the parapet and held the notebook in my lap. On a clean page, past all my notes and diagrams and scribbles that were swiftly filling it up, I copied out every inscription again so I could study them free of explanations:
You who enter this place, observe it piece by piece and tell me afterward whether so many marvels were created for deception or purely for art.
My steps fall softly like the rain
Or a thousand cheeses times a thousand if you give me days enough
Hurry now to find me draw near but not inside
I am it is very true
Round and round the dancers go and my answer is in three and seven
The Mermaid
Or walls or ivied garden porch or doorstep have we none
Behold in me
You have we have all have though perhaps home
Narrow
Reason departs
I am a gate
All is folly and you search both high and low in vain
The path beyond the dusk
Fifteen inscriptions. Some made an odd sort of sense; some made none at all. They had no punctuation, except for the one Grandmother had given me. I’d never seen it for myself; I wondered if she had added the punctuation, though I didn’t guess it mattered much. Idly, I began to play with the punctuation of another:
I am. It is very true.
I am, it is: very true.
This was pointless. You search both high and low in vain. My father had spent years looking for a keyhole. I could spend years pushing words around on paper, counting trees, and reading books.
For deception, or purely for art.
A thousand cheeses times a thousand.
If you give me days enough.
There’s no meaning here at all, is there? I asked the duke. Rising to my knees against the balustrade, I put my chin on my arms and watched Mr. Girandole pacing near Neptune, his hands clasped behind him. No meaning at all. The purpose is the search—to make discoveries, each one whetting your appetite for more. It’s the perfect puzzle, because it never ends, from year to year, generation to generation. There is no disappointment, because the solution is always just ahead, growing more wonderful with each theory that fails.
I stood up and took a good look around. The filtered sunlight shifted with the breeze—shafts of light, as from the high windows of a cathedral. Green vaults receded among the trees, each an entrance to the secret avenues of the world. A plane was passing somewhere; I rarely heard planes anymore, here in our garden.
As my gaze slid over the mass of bushes between the square pool and the sleeping woman, I did a double-take. Once again, I saw something I’d never seen because I’d never been looking for it. In the middle of that thicket, against the ravine’s west wall, there was a distinct gap in the foliage, a place where no bushes grew. Only my high vantage allowed me to see it. Perhaps it marked an outcropping of stone . . . maybe a pit or well . . . maybe a natural, muddy hollow where rainwater pooled. Whatever it was, I would have to go and find out. Again, my heart was fluttering—that was the effect the garden had.
As I climbed down the ladder, R —— sang, “Da dum dum daaa, da dum dee deedle-dee dum!”—his nose buried in the piano score, his hands playing a keyboard that wasn’t there.
Grandmother went right on with her nap. Mr. Girandole noticed me hurrying down the terrace steps. I waved him over, pointing toward the thicket where I was headed.
“There’s something in there,” I said, facing the green wall that stood three times my height, thorny and dark. A white butterfly wove among the bushes’ pale blossoms.
“What do you mean?” Mr. Girandole asked, his nose testing the air. “Something moving?”
“No. Something big and oblong that keeps the bushes from growing.”
Eyeing the dense brake, he adjusted his hat. “Well, then, here we go again.”
Once more, we pushed and twisted, fighting for places to plant our feet and squeeze through. Vines tried to choke us; dead limbs cracked and rolled beneath my shoes. Invisible strands of web stuck to my face, and spiders jiggled indignantly. Parting the leaves, I squinted ahead.
“I think it’s just a big rock,” I said, glimpsing a gray shape too formless to be a statue.
“If it’s a rock,” said Mr. Girandole, “then it’s a rock with teeth!”
We struggled through the last vines, and I stared into a mouth wider than my outstretched arms, the thicket’s creepers flowing between rounded teeth like an expelled mouthful of seawater. Far back in shadows rose a huge, fluked tail.
“A whale!” I cried out. It was another statue on a rectangular base, lost here in the bushes. And sure enough, we found letters carved into the pedestal’s side.
“Didn’t you know about this one?” I asked as we worked our way along the leviathan, admiring the intelligent-looking eye, the flipper, the power in its massive shape.
“I’m no longer sure,” he said. “If I knew once, it was years upon years ago. It’s certainly been covered over since before I met your grandmother, and I didn’t pay as much attention to the statues back then—they were just man-things.”
It thrilled me to have made a discovery the others had missed—to be seeing for the first time something that not even Grandmother in her long years had ever seen. This whale had lain here behind the leaves and branches, his eyes unblinking through rains and winds, summers and winters, mere paces away from the open glade but always hidden. Garlands of vine draped the sea-beast so thickly that I doubt he would have been recognizable from a short distance; the tail seemed almost to be a leaning tree. Step by step, leaf by leaf, we uncovered the inscription:
Yet one by one a herd may pass
We circumnavigated the base, hunting for other markings, tapping for hollow sounds, and especially looking for keyholes, since my father had likely never found the whale. Mr. Girandole boosted me up, and I sat on the creature’s broad back. There was a shallow depression for the blowhole, from which a real whale would send up plumes of breath—but it was only a blowhole, not a keyhole.
“So,” said Mr. Girandole, helping me down. “Another enlightening revelation.”
“Now there are sixteen inscriptions,” I said. “When does it end?”
Grandmother awoke as we sat on the terrace, pulling brambles from ourselves and tossing them over the railing. “What did I miss?” she asked, sitting up.
“A whale,” I s
aid.
That afternoon, we scouted from the house’s roof and from the hilltop for any other suspicious openings in the thickets. Mr. Girandole climbed a few strategic trees and did some hunting in the brake southwest of the dragon, down by the old entrance arch. Near as we could figure, there were no other places where statues might hide—except, of course, for that central tangle. Even so, the leaning house overlooked much of that, and no break in the rolling bush-tops was apparent. It was always possible, though, that branches might be joined in a ceiling, hiding something beneath. We could never truly know.
Before we left for the cottage, R —— asked if there were reeds growing by the stream; he wanted to try making a flute. Mr. Girandole said he would bring a few back when he went to refill the water bucket.
* * * *
Despite the fun we were having, as that glorious week drew to its close, a feeling of gloom and frustration settled over me. We were finding no more clues—no numbers, no inscriptions, and certainly no keyholes—and what we had gleaned seemed to lead in hopeless circles. Again and again I pondered my theory that perhaps the duke had intended the garden to be no more than an endless path, that no ultimate attainment could be better than the journey itself.
And yet three factors persuaded me otherwise. One was the key: surely something as specific and purposeful as a key would not have been made without a door that it could open. The second was the strange poem R —— had written in his delirium. And finally, there were the fairy voices that he continued to hear at night, and his dreams of fauns, who seemed to be waiting for him beside a road that stretched away in the starlight. R —— had no memory of writing the poem, though it was there in his notebook, scrawled in his own hand. He claimed he was not a poet and had composed no poetry since his school days—when, he said, love compels every youth to attempt it.
He was, however, a musician, and he succeeded admirably at carving a flute out of a hollow reed. It couldn’t play as many notes as a real flute could, but R —— was most interested in playing the fairy melodies he heard. Sometimes, Mr. Girandole listened keenly to these and asked R —— to play on and on without a rest; sometimes, the melodies plunged Mr. Girandole into melancholia, and he would leave the chamber without a word and disappear into the forest. As the days passed, we all walked around with the fairy melodies in our heads. We’d catch ourselves humming or whistling them without realizing it. R —— sent the piano book home with Grandmother and me. In his own notebook, he drew a musical staff and wrote down some of the melodies the fairies sang. Intrigued, I copied these into my record. They were not like ones I’d heard anywhere else, and in the years since, I’ve never encountered their like in any songbooks or the works of mortal composers. It’s difficult to explain how they are different, but if you heard them, you would agree.
I wandered about the garden with increasing aimlessness, gazing at the stone faces, running my fingers along the pedestals, climbing and descending stairs. I lay on the benches; I sat with Grandmother and Mr. Girandole as they watched the slow play of light through the leaves. I learned a song in R ——’s language. Grandmother encouraged this as a diversion from the fairy music, which she said we oughtn’t to become too familiar with; it was like the germander, she said: beautiful and fragrant, but it would take over everything if not kept in check. She did her best to get R —— to think carefully about his determination to leave the human world behind, but it was a lost cause. In the middle of a conversation, he would hear the trilling of a bird, or his gaze would fix upon a dapple of sunlight on the mossy stone, and his mind would journey far away.
During the times he was most awake and present in our world, we would get him to talk about planes or the shenanigans he’d pulled with his fellow pilots or growing up on a dairy farm near the city of ——. He improved the tangerine-peel game when he discovered how well cockleburs stuck to a particular cloth we’d brought. With Grandmother’s permission, he drew a target of concentric circles on it, and we weighted its top edge so that it hung down against the wall of the sunken compartment. We tossed the burrs, aiming for the bull’s-eye, which I said was Aldebaran, the Red Star, the Eye of Taurus.
And always, always, I studied my notebook, looking for meanings—for some way that the cryptic words and numbers might relate to the garden as it lay there, in deep shade, in spears of sunlight, in the bottomless night when we were gone and the fairies sang R —— to sleep.
* * * *
One morning, R —— greeted us from his window and announced that he wanted to come down the stairs and all the way to the floor of the glade itself, outside the leaning house. He’d been able to gaze across at some of the statues, but he longed to see them up close. Mr. Girandole scowled at the idea, but Grandmother thought it would be good for R —— to walk a little—a body, she said, had to be encouraged to heal.
So, Mr. Girandole and I climbed up and got him. After checking on his healing progress, we steadied him as he sat on the top step and eased his way down, stair by stair. Mr. Girandole went ahead of him to catch him if he fell; I moved beside R ——, ready to grab his good arm if need be. He rested on the terrace, gulping the air, looking around in bliss. “Isn’t this far enough?” asked Mr. Girandole hopefully, but R —— shook his head and clambered toward the lower stairs.
At the bottom, he sat breathing hard and wiping away sweat with his sleeve, clearly delighted. Grandmother looked him over and nodded. “To the pool and back,” she ordered. “You don’t want to overdo it.”
R —— gave her a military salute.
Mr. Girandole and I supported him between us, and Grandmother supervised, directing us to watch his leg and go slowly and look out for fallen branches. We advanced over the mossy earth. R —— winced now and then, and we’d stop at once, afraid we were tearing his stitches loose. But he’d nod and urge us forward again.
“Nice fellows,” he said merrily, between hitching breaths. “This good, huh? Good rummies, good rummies! Three musket-men!” He squeezed our necks and planted a noisy kiss on Mr. Girandole’s cheek.
“Do that again and you’re on your own,” Mr. Girandole growled.
R —— cackled and sang, “Yo, ho! Yo, ho!”
“Will you be quiet?” said Mr. Girandole.
“I come home from tavern like this,” said R ——. “Just like this!”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Grandmother looking exasperated.
“Riddle for notebook,” said R ——. “What beast have six leg, three head, smell bad? . . . Us!”
Mr. Girandole muttered something under his breath, and I’m sure we reached the pool not a moment too soon. We lowered R —— gingerly onto the rim, and as soon as he was safely down, Mr. Girandole squirmed free and retreated in a huff, fanning his face with his hat.
R —— looked at me with such infectious humor that I couldn’t help smiling. Then he gazed around at the statues of the four women and remarked about what a good place this was.
Grandmother pointed out the inscription to him with her stick: You have we have all have though perhaps home.
“Make nothing sense,” said R ——.
“As much sense as you make.” Grandmother rapped him lightly on the head with her knuckles.
R —— settled down, catching his breath, and grew more serious. “One part only,” he said, looking down at the carved letters. “No all here. Part of more big something.”
Grandmother sat beside him and sighed.
R —— grimaced as he stretched forward and picked up a twig. He used it to poke and stir the murky water. I watched a striped lizard skitter along the pool’s curb just beyond the nearest statue. Already the day was warming up, even here. I could sense the late-morning heat ringing on the leaves above us, baking the rocks that lay at the bottoms of sunlight wells. The air was wonderfully aromatic. R ——’s twig made lazy splashes. The lizard vanished over the far rim. Grandmoth
er began to look drowsy.
“Hey!” R —— said suddenly.
That woke Grandmother up, and when she saw R —— pointing into the pool behind her, she jumped to her feet and caught my arm for balance.
We watched a gray-brown snake, about the length of Grandmother’s stick, swimming across the pool toward us, gliding in S-curves, its head just above the surface. R —— made a commotion with his twig, and the snake changed course, heading toward the pool’s northwest corner.
“Is it dangerous?” I asked, feeling chills.
“No,” said Grandmother. “It’s harmless.”
R —— started to say something, but at that moment, Mr. Girandole dashed closer, motioning for silence.
“Someone’s coming,” he whispered.
A new chill struck me. I peered around, looking for movement, but saw only the green vaults and sun-spears receding into the distance.
R —— raised his head, alarmed, and glanced toward the leaning house.
“No time,” Mr. Girandole hissed. “On the ground. Now.” He half-lifted, half-dragged R —— off the pool’s rim.
R —— grunted in pain but looked to Mr. Girandole, awaiting instructions.
Mr. Girandole jammed his hat into place and crouched behind R ——, putting his hands beneath the pilot’s arms. “We’ll be there, in the brush.” He indicated the dense bushes where the whale hid, just north of the pool. Then he nodded toward the southern arch. “M ——, you go that way, and make yourself obvious.” To me he said, “You’d better close up the bedroom.” At once, he began to drag R —— backward over the mossy ground, the pilot grimacing and flinching.
Grandmother had already pulled the medicine bottle out of her carpet bag and now thrust the bottle into my hands. “Go!” she said.
“Notebook!” I whispered back and started to rummage through the bag.
“Take the whole thing!” She gave it to me and hobbled away down the gentle slope.
I sprinted to the leaning house and up the steps, ascending to the upper room as quickly as I could go. Once there, I yanked R ——’s pallet into the secret space, set the medicine bottle on the sunken floor, and lifted down the half-full waste bucket. When I’d cleared the chamber’s upper half of incriminating evidence, I unloaded my notebook, climbed out of the well, and heaved the floor shut. I clenched my teeth at the reverberating sound. Bounding down the stairs with the bag over my shoulder, I hurried to rejoin Grandmother. I saw no sign of Mr. Girandole and R ——; they’d successfully disappeared into the thicket.
A Green and Ancient Light Page 21