The girl nodded. Her deep gray eyes were wide and glowed as if with extreme excitement. “That’s so wonderful,” she whispered. “Oh, I do wish I was one. So, are they all very rich? Did the first Harleigh leave lots of jewels and golden treasure?”
“Golden treasure?” Harleigh snorted again. He had an effective snort, not loud—only a puff of air accompanied by a sharp humph—but it expressed his feelings well, particularly negative ones. “No, of course not. Most of them are really poor or they wouldn’t live there.”
“Oh.” She seemed shocked, unbelieving. “Why wouldn’t they want to live in such a beautiful place?”
Harleigh’s smile was sarcastic. “Some of it’s beautiful, all right. But not all of it. And there are rules. Lots of them. Only poor people would put up with all the rules. Like they can’t have any visitors unless they bring them to meet my great-aunt first and get her okay. The only one who gets to decide things is my great-aunt.”
“And she’s very rich?”
“No. That’s not what I said. She just kind of runs things.” His smile was rueful. “Well, more than kind of, actually. She pretty much controls everything, because she’s the oldest direct descendant. And she also has the Fund.”
“What’s that? What’s a fund?”
“Well, it’s . . .,” Harleigh started before it again occurred to him to wonder why he was talking so much. Why was he discussing things with this strange girl that he’d never discussed with anyone before? Certainly not with anyone who wasn’t a Weatherby. Perhaps it was the way she seemed so enthusiastic, as if everything he said, and the way he said it, was absolutely fascinating.
“Well,” he began again, “the first Harleigh left the Fund. That’s what Aunt Adelaide calls it. It was money that was supposed to take care of the property, like pay the gardeners and maids and people like that. I guess when he was alive it was enough to pay for lots of servants, but now it’s barely enough to pay for two or three. That’s why,” he swung his arms, indicating what lay all around them, “why everything is such a mess.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s not a mess. It’s beautiful just the way it is. That’s why I come here. I love to come here.”
“And you get inside the grounds by”—Harleigh made his curled lip and raised eyebrow say he didn’t believe it for a minute—“by flying?”
She nodded. He was taking her slightly embarrassed smile to be a kind of admission that she wasn’t telling the exact truth, when to his great surprise, she asked, “Do you want to see me do it?”
“To see you fly? Yes. I sure do.” He made another lip twist that said he wasn’t the kind of person who would easily be made a fool of. “That is something I’d really like to see.”
“All right,” she said. She turned as if to go, but then turned back. “And you won’t tell on me? You won’t tell anybody?”
“No,” he said firmly, and felt sure he meant it, without stopping to ask himself why. “No. I won’t tell on you.”
She led the way then, through a tangled jungle of tropical vines, and then past a long wall of thick overgrown hedge. The complicated path went on and on with many turns and twists until, suddenly, there right before them, was the fence—its tall wrought-iron bars topped by a threatening fringe of sharply pointed spears.
Harleigh was still staring at the fence when he realized that she was no longer standing beside him. He turned to see her halfway up the trunk of a tall oak tree that towered over the wall. He’d missed seeing how she got up that far—how in the world she’d managed to make it up the smooth bare trunk to where the first limbs branched out. Continuing to climb, as quick and agile as a monkey, she was hidden for a moment in the crotch of the trunk before she appeared again crawling out on a high limb. As she climbed higher, he lost sight of her now and then as she disappeared behind leafy branches. And then, suddenly, there she was again far overhead as she flew, or seemed to fly, into a tree that grew outside the fence.
But there had been a rope, hadn’t there? She had been swinging from a length of rope, or hadn’t she? He was still staring up toward the place where she had disappeared, wondering and arguing with himself, when there she was, on the ground again, but now, just outside the fence.
“See,” she was saying with her small, narrow face pressed against the iron rods of the fence. “That’s how I do it.” She turned as if to go.
“Wait,” Harleigh said. “I want to talk to you. I want to know . . .”
She turned back once more, but only long enough to wave. “I have to go now,” she called back over her shoulder. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Chapter Three
In spite of its windowless gloom, the Weatherby House’s library had always been Harleigh Four’s favorite room. Under a high-domed ceiling, its soaring walls supported shelf after shelf of darkly shining wood. Here and there a series of circular stairs led up to narrow balconies, which gave access to even higher rows of shelves. And every shelf was solidly covered by beautifully bound books. So many books and shelves there was barely enough open wall space for the more-than-life-size oil painting of a frowning man sitting, with a book in his lap, on a thronelike chair. The man in the picture was, of course, Harleigh J. Weatherby the First, and in his great-grandson’s opinion the library, of all of the grand Weatherby rooms, was undoubtedly the grandest.
He had to admit, however, that it was a bit gloomy. The famous portrait of Harleigh J. Weatherby the First soared up, from only an inch or so above Harleigh Four’s head, when he measured himself on the wall below it, to just below one of the second-floor balconies, completely covering the only space where there might have been room for a panel of windows.
“Poor architectural planning,” Harleigh Four’s father, Harleigh the Third, liked to say about the library. Harleigh the Third, an architect himself, seemed to spend most of his time criticizing, not only Weatherby House, but also famous buildings all over the world. “Planned for the grand effect,” was one of his favorite comments, “rather than for any useful purpose.”
Harleigh Four didn’t entirely disagree. But, at the same time, he did feel that this kind of picky criticism of Weatherby House didn’t serve any useful purpose. He liked the enormous library just the way it was. So what if it was dark and gloomy. There were plenty of lamps, after all, and if it sometimes felt lonely it was only because . . . well, because nowadays no one was allowed to use the library except Harleigh Four and Uncle Edgar. And, as Uncle Edgar liked to say, when he could get anyone to listen, it was quite likely that no one had ever used it very much.
The very next day after Harleigh Four discovered the “flying” trespasser, Uncle Edgar once again brought up his favorite criticism. The picky one about how little time the original Weatherby must have spent in his glorious library. As Harleigh came into the room that morning, Uncle Edgar was holding up a book called The Iliad and saying, “We have here in this grand room every book you’d expect to find in the library of a well-educated, highly literate person But not a one, except for the ones you and I have been perusing, looks the least bit loved—or even briefly visited. Not a one that seems a little worn or that falls open easily to a favorite page. No, I’m afraid”—Uncle Edgar pointed up at the painting of Harleigh the First—“our famous ancestor was a bit of a fake in more ways than one. All this”—he waved his big arms and then pointed to the portrait—“that book in his lap, and all these beautiful volumes just to make people think he was a well-read man.”
Harleigh tried to copy the frown on the face in the portrait. He didn’t see the point in putting down his famous ancestor for unimportant faults, as if he’d only been an ordinary, unimportant person. In the past he’d tried to say so, but today was no time for an argument, or for one of the long rambling discussions that Uncle Edgar liked to get into.
Today Harleigh Four was determined to get away as quickly as possible to see if the mysterious trespasser had been lying when she said she would be back. So today’s lessons needed to be dispense
d with quickly, and that was what he set himself to do. By concentrating fiercely on everything Uncle Edgar gave him to read, and on every problem put before him, Harleigh finished all his assignments in record time, surprising not only Uncle Edgar but himself as well.
“My word!” Uncle Edgar exclaimed as he went over the page full of geometry problems Harleigh slapped down in front of him. “I am impressed. And a bit puzzled, too, I must say. To what should I attribute the sudden improvement in our attention span?” His smile widened. “Turning over a new leaf, are we?”
Harleigh didn’t return the smile. Instead, he just shrugged impatiently and asked if he could go. Uncle Edgar’s broad grin faded into the folds of his fat face. “All right, all right, be off with you,” he grumbled, and a few seconds later Harleigh Four was on his way.
Heading for the nearest exit, he crossed the broad entryway at a run and dashed down the wide west corridor as far as the door that led into the glass-roofed greenhouse, or as Aunt Adelaide called it, the solarium. He continued at a run down one of the solarium’s narrow aisles, dodging around hanging vines and under huge fronds of exotic plants. Passing old Ralph, the gardener, without stopping to say hello, he burst out into the open courtyard, where he stopped long enough to catch his breath and decide on his next move.
The next problem was that he wasn’t sure if he could remember exactly how he’d arrived at the place where he’d first seen the trespasser. He knew he’d been a long way out into the most neglected part of the property, in an area he’d only started to explore since he’d gotten some of his strength and endurance back. He thought he might have seen that old tree that stood in the midst of a surrounding clearing on one of his recent explorations, but he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t until he had made several false starts that he stumbled on the bamboo thicket and knew he was on the right track.
But one crooked, narrow path through the bamboo ended only in a thorny blackberry thicket. Back at the beginning of the bamboo, Harleigh chose another heading, which for a time seemed to be slanting in the wrong direction before it ended exactly where he wanted it to—under the same tree the trespasser had been hanging from when he first saw her.
Just as he remembered, several thick limbs branched out from the wide trunk, quite a way off the ground. But today no one was hanging from any of them. And what’s more, there seemed to be no way to get up to them. He walked slowly around the thick trunk—the tall, smooth trunk that offered nothing at all that could be used as a hand- or toehold.
Giving up on the trunk, he had gone back to staring up at the limb the girl had been hanging from, when he noticed that this particular limb branched out from where the main trunk divided into three parts, forming a large crotch. And right there in the crotch was something that looked like the edge of a platform, and above it a glimpse of a smooth wooden panel that might be a part of a wall. It really looked as if something had been built high up there in the tree.
A tree house, right there on Weatherby property? But how did it get there, and once it was there, how in the world did anyone get up to it? As far as Harleigh could see, there was no way to get up that wide trunk unless you had a ladder or . . . Unless you flew, he found himself thinking, but not believing, of course. Not for a minute.
“Yeah, sure.” He snorted, and turned to walk away. Then he turned back to once again stare at whatever it was that had been built way up there in the big old tree. He was still staring when, just above the section of wall, something appeared and then disappeared so quickly he wasn’t sure he’d actually seen it. A hairy brown something that might have been—an animal, perhaps a squirrel? Or else . . . And then there it was again, the same mop of dusty-brown hair and beneath it, two eyes. And then a whispery voice called, “Here I am, Harleigh. Up here.”
Chapter Four
At the sudden appearance of the trespasser, Harleigh Four was confused by a series of rapidly changing reactions. The first and most unexpected was a rush of eager excitement. Almost as if he were about to say something stupid like, “Hey! You did come back. I was afraid you wouldn’t.”
But he managed to bite his tongue and consider some other, more suitable, remarks. Questioning remarks like, “What are you doing up there?” or “Who are you, anyway?” And another one that suddenly seemed especially urgent. “How did you get up there?”
Various possibilities were still shuffling through his mind like a deck of cards when she said, “Do you want to come up?”
Harleigh frowned, gulped, and nodded. “Yes, I guess so. How?”
Her head disappeared behind the piece of wall and then reappeared. “Here,” she said. “Get back out of the way.” A moment later something fell to the ground at Harleigh’s feet with a muffled clanking sound. It turned out to be a bag made of old stiff leather, and inside the bag were three iron rods, each about a foot long.
Harleigh was starting to ask when she explained.
“Look on the trunk of the tree about two feet high. No. More over that way. Do you see a round hole? Push one of those rods into it.”
He was about to say he didn’t see a hole when he found it, small and round and almost covered by a loose flap of bark. Inside the hole there seemed to be a hollow metal pipe that had been driven into the trunk of the tree. Following the girl’s directions, he slid the rod into the pipe until only a few inches remained outside the trunk.
“Now look a little over that way and you’ll see another hole. Put another one of the rods in and you can stand on them to reach the hole for the next one,” she went on. He followed her directions, but it wasn’t easy. Not that he had any trouble figuring out what had to be done. He wasn’t stupid. But it was just that even with the two rods firmly in place, it wasn’t easy for him to use them to climb up to where the trespasser was leaning down through a narrow opening between two wooden panels. Even after he realized that there was a another rod already in place farther up, he slipped and had to jump free and start over several times before he reached the point where the girl could grab his arm and help him climb on up. Up to where he was finally able to slide clumsily on his stomach onto a warped and splintery floorboard. Pushing himself to a sitting position, he looked around and quickly decided it was hardly worth the effort.
The planks that formed the floor and walls of the tree house were sturdy but rough and badly stained. Inside the small enclosure there were only a torn and ragged bit of braided rug and a small wooden box, on which sat a rusty tin can full of yellow flowers. Next to the pitiful flower arrangement was a small cup with a missing handle sitting on what was left of a cracked saucer. And overhead—nothing but a piece of ragged canvas.
“Did you build this yourself?” he asked.
“Oh, no.” She shook her head solemnly. “I didn’t build it. It’s been here for years and years. Someone probably built it for some Weatherby children a long time ago. A very long time ago.” She pointed. “I found that cup and saucer right down there buried in the dirt near the trunk. I think they’re very old. The children they belonged to probably died a long time ago.” She paused thoughtfully before she went on, “I don’t think they mind if I use their things.”
“How could they mind if they’re . . .” Harleigh began and then dropped it. A shiver was crawling down the back of his neck. Hoping to change the subject, he glanced up at the torn canvas roof and asked, “What do you do when it rains?”
She smiled, almost giggled. “Oh, I don’t come here when it rains.”
“Oh.” Harleigh considered for a moment. Considered the fact that he had almost been ready to believe that this was where she lived, right up here in the tree. He shrugged inwardly, excusing himself for having such a stupid idea by thinking that a person could believe almost anything about someone who looked so much like—like what?
Just as before, she was dressed in what seemed to be the ragged remains of a fancy costume, which glittered here and there with all that remained of what must once have been a pattern of shiny sequins. And beneath the sequined ta
tters, some skin-colored leotards that ended at her wrists and ankles. Her small feet, narrow and long-toed, were bare.
“So, how often do you come here?” he finally asked, and then, before she could answer, “And where do you come from? I mean, where do you live?”
She didn’t answer immediately, but at last she nodded slowly and said, “I’ve lived in a lot of places. Famous places like London and New York and Miami. But right now I’m living in Riverbend.”
“Well, sure,” he said, frowning. “I could have guessed that much. I mean, where in Riverbend.”
She sighed and turned her face away. When she looked back, she stared right into Harleigh’s eyes. Her own eyes were misty gray and very wide open. “I’m not allowed to say,” she said.
“What do you mean? Who won’t let you?”
Another mournful sigh. “It’s a long story,” she began. “My family are very famous people, but they have to be careful because they lead very dangerous lives. So sometimes they send me away to live in Riverbend because they think I’ll be safer here.”
Harleigh believed her. Or at least he came fairly close to it. He had to swallow hard before he asked, “So you were in danger when you lived with your family?”
“Yes,” she said sadly, still staring right into his eyes. “Sometimes I guess I was. I have a very strange story. Maybe I’ll tell you someday. But in the meantime, you can call me Allegra.”
“Allegra?”
She nodded. “Of course, I have been called other things, but my real name is Allegra. You can call me that.”
That did it. He wasn’t taking her “being in danger” story very seriously when he replied, “Okay. I’ll call you Allegra, if you promise not to call me Hardly anymore.”
She nodded and said she wouldn’t. But then she suddenly smiled and leaned forward.
“Tell me about the House,” she said. “About Weatherby House.”
The Treasures of Weatherby Page 2