by John Plotz
“What I mean, Walker, is this: What if I could write songs that would tell the real working people of this country—every country for that matter—who they really are, what they’ve done and what they might yet do?” Walker nodded slowly, eyes still locked on Morris’s face.
“Listen to this, tell me what you think!” Without waiting for an answer, Morris launched into another verse, still to the same tune:
“These are they who build thy houses, weave thy raiment, win thy wheat,
Smooth the rugged, fill the barren, turn the bitter into sweet,
All for thee this day—and ever. What reward for them is meet
Till the host comes marching on?
“What do you say, Mr. Walker, might we get this echoing in their ears? Do the workers more good in their mouths than anything from a book!”
Walker laughed politely, then paused, about to take a risk. “Well, Morris,” he said, testing the formulation carefully: Could he really address someone twenty years his senior by his last name, like a schoolboy? “The thing is, Morris,” he said again, bolder this time, “you weren’t made to sing, you know.” He blushed deeply (“Quite right,” muttered Mead, “dreadful voice!”) but hurried on: “You were made to, to, to, make books.”
Morris, who’d been humming the tune over and over as Walker spoke, broke off suddenly. “By heavens, Walker,” he shouted so suddenly that Walker started violently, “there’s no disputing it! We should make books. Right!”
Walker gave a startled look around him as if he expected Morris to pull a printing press out of his pocket. “Back to Kelmscott House!” Morris barked, giving Walker a brisk clap (a buffet, really) on the back. “Do you suppose we can have a Chaucer ready by Christmas?”
I hitched my bag expectantly and turned to Mead. Wouldn’t we follow them? Ed, though, was peering intently up into the tree we were perched in: to judge from the acorns all around us, a red oak. “Beside the dark hills,” he was muttering, looking around at the looming London buildings that hemmed us in. “The dark hills … the town of the tree.”
“The town?” I was puzzled. “How is a tree a town?”
Instead of answering, Mead, too, recited softly: “All birds sing in the town of the tree.” I felt a little shiver building. Morris was speeding away from us, out of earshot already. But here we sat, in a grimy London tree, waiting for what?
I turned for reassurance to Ed. Reasonable level-headed Ed, who’d never climbed a tree in his life, let alone a fifty-foot oak in the dark. He was looking up over our heads, intently studying the trembling leaves. Even the trunk was vibrating faintly. I’d thought it was just me shivering, but now I realized that the sun was setting, and all over the tree birds were moving, flicking their wings, getting ready for, for what? Something that only happened at dusk.
“Mead,” I whispered, trying to calm down. “Mead? What’s going on with Ed? Does he know what he’s doing?” Ed turned to look at me and gave me a little absentminded smile. Then, before I could say anything, he was up and into the leaves, swinging himself up on branches that looked far too frail to bear his weight. As he disappeared from sight above us, the birds all started to sing at once.
There was a long period when I could hear nothing but the singing, louder and louder. We hadn’t eaten for a long time, I found myself thinking. And then a second later, “I wonder what Granny made for dinner?”
I could have kicked myself. People didn’t think about what Granny made for dinner when they were under a geas. Or did they?
I snuck a quick glance over at Mead. In his face at that moment, there was no quest, no William Morris—he didn’t even look like a teacher. I wondered what was showing on my own face. I gave it a quick wipe, looked down at my palm. Paint from Rossetti’s mural, a black smudge from ducking through a skylight at the Red House, coal grime, and, right over my lip, a thick, gleaming red liquid from Iceland that could only be … I shuddered again. Mead looked over and muttered sleepily, “Fafnir found when he tasted it he could speak with animals.”
“It?”
Mead looked at me hard. Suddenly I could feel all those splotches on my face and neck start to pulse and sting. “Do you need me to tell you what splattered your face in Iceland?”
I sat there thinking, listening to the singing above us, wishing, as hard as I’d wished for anything in my life, for Ed to come crunching and thudding back down through the branches to us. Without even thinking about it, I put the smear to my mouth and licked it. Nothing, nothing happened.
“Mead!” I said. No reply. “Mead! I can’t hear them!” Mead looked at me brightly. “What’s happening up there?” He still didn’t say anything. I could feel the tang of whatever that was in my mouth: salty, and a little sweet. I was suddenly extremely hungry, and tired. Most of all, like an itch I wasn’t allowed to scratch, I missed Granny.
Then suddenly there he was, pushing through the branches above our head in the dusk: a sneaker, a leg, then, after a long pause, his hoodie was shoved down at us without a word. It was … “Squirming!” I hissed in alarm. “Ed, your hoodie is squirming!”
“Actually,” said Ed drily, “my hoodie right now is singing, in the town of the tree.” And sure enough, very faintly through the sweaty, grimy cloth, I could hear a chirrup, then another and another. I tried not to think about how that little ball of songbirds would make its way onto the Tapestry. Maybe Mead would have an idea.
Ed took a deep sigh, and something about it made me look him straight in the eyes. For what felt like a very long time, but might have been only a few seconds, he stared straight back at me. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. “You look …” I trailed off.
Ed smiled a little, but only with his eyes. “I look just like you did, Jen, when you came back with that forked tongue for the Tapestry.”
He reached out to wipe something I’d missed off my cheek, his touch as sure and smooth as Granny’s. “Should we go, Mead?” he said, with exactly the tone of voice I’d been looking for all along. Like James Bond, I told myself fuzzily. “Next stop, Kelmscott Manor, I think?”
Mead, without comment, dropped us into London’s gathering dark. In a minute or two I felt Ed go heavy next to me; his breathing evened out into the steady slow metronome I remembered from a long time ago. As I drifted away after him, barely aware of Mead’s back, Ed’s side, or even my precious bag, I thought I could hear the birds singing beside me. I could almost make out the words they were singing. “’Tis the people marching on,” I whispered from the bottom of a deep, black well.
CHAPTER TWELVE
For My Sake
I woke up with a question. “He’s wrong, isn’t he, Mead?”
We were still drifting slowly along the Thames as the sun rose behind us in the east. Either Kelmscott was farther than I thought, or Mead was slowing down. Focus on what’s going right, I told myself firmly. At least Ed was still asleep.
Mead tilted his head without comment. “About socialism, I mean. We live in a commercial profit-mongering world, too, right? And Morris was wrong to think art could do anything to change that.”
Mead opened his beak, tilted his head, and then shut it again with a click and looked at me inquiringly. Go on. “If Morris had been right about what art could do, or what it could make people see, then the world would be a fairer place, wouldn’t it? Granny wouldn’t keep talking to that Lexus guy, and thinking about all the money he’d give her to have our things for his private collection.”
Mead stayed mute, so I went on. “And Granny wouldn’t be making all those late-night phone calls about …”
I looked over at Ed to make sure he was still asleep. His eyes were still closed, but as I turned back he broke in suddenly, his voice calm as always: “About the foster home Aunt Cathy thinks we should go to?”
I swallowed hard. Still, I was almost glad. Somehow I didn’t feel like hiding those calls from the new Ed, who climbed up into the town of the tree, even looked me in the eye occasionally, and
who talked to Mead like James Bond consulting another secret agent. It made it easier for me to say what I wanted to now.
“Granny made the same mistake as Morris, didn’t she, Mead? She thought that art had some special power, something different about it than the prices it brings at auction. But look at our house, our basically empty house, and what’s going to happen to us now. What good did art ever do her?”
“And if I told you,” Mead said slowly, looking up ahead toward the thin line of the Thames on the horizon, “that Morris thought art was a picture of how we might live, of how we ought to live, instead of how we do live?”
For some reason, as he spoke I found myself remembering what it felt like to make my arm, trembling and cold, reach down into the dragon’s mouth.
“Well.” I took a deep breath. “Morris said art proved that everyone in the world shares ‘equality of condition.’ Whatever you undergo is something that might happen to me. For Morris, that meant every jolt of pain you feel should bother me, and vice versa. But”—I spoke slowly here, puzzling it out—“the same rule should also apply for joy: Yours is mine and mine is yours.”
As I said this, some of Morris’s pictures flashed into my mind: tall ladies riding through forests beside god-like knights; little birds coiled into a trellis, or dipping low over a river where it bent away into the forest.
“We live in a world where the best things don’t happen—where planes crash, and people go into foster homes for no good reason.” I tried to say it without shaking too much. “But no matter what world you live in,” I went on doggedly, “art tells a different story. It’s the dragon at your feet—and it’s also the volcano everyone can catch sight of on the horizon. It’s what lets us rehearse the right life. No matter how wrong the one we’re living in right now feels.”
Ed looked up at me with a hard-to-read expression: Temptation, maybe? Pain? He broke in. “So Jen, did Granny do the right thing not to sell her collection to Lexus guy? Even if it means our lives are going to be, to be …” He trailed off.
I looked to Mead for a hint. His breath came hard as he descended toward Kelmscott Manor, and there was far more skin than feather showing now along his back. Saying nothing.
“I think it’s Granny’s job to do what’s best—for us, I mean, not just for the art she made or kept. But I also think—” I paused for a long time, so long that Mead craned his head around almost backward to stare into my eyes. “—that maybe seeing her do what’s right for everyone really is what’s best for us. So maybe when she sold those things to the museum instead of seeing what Lexus guy would pay, that was another way of teaching us. Think of all the other ways she’s taught us over the years: when she made us knit with her, and sew, and even”—I looked down at my blistered fingers—“solder. If what we do is only for ourselves, then what are we?”
Ed leaned forward, too intent on answering to notice he was crushing me up against Mead’s neck. “Okay, fine, Jen, but what good is that if we lose the house? If we have to go off to I don’t know where with I don’t know who, so we’re not a family anymore!”
Sneaking a glance down at the newest page in his notebook, I could see just two words, written over and over: And Mead? And Mead? And Mead? We rode a gentle thermal high above the Thames, heading for an old house that glowed gold and warm gray in the noon sun. Nobody said a word.
Just before we coasted to a halt on a stone wall streaked with gray-green lichen, Ed came back to life. “Remember, next is ‘the white-flowered hawthorn brake,’” he whispered urgently. “A brake’s a thicket, so that’s what we need to find.”
It was hard for me to drag myself back into the world of the poem. How long ago had it been that we’d heard Granny recite it? Two days for us, or three maybe? And how long for the world we’d left behind? I shuddered and decided not to think about it.
When I heard the laughter coming over the wall, though, the poem’s next line popped straight into my head: “Love be merry for my sake.” What else would you call it but merry, the sight of May trying to clamber on Topsy’s back while Jane popped an old white hat over the ears of a horse that could only be Mouse? Even Jenny, reclining near Ned in the shade, had a little smile on today. Like a fancy dress only brought out for parties, it lit her up.
Best of all by far, though, was to see the lawn littered with heavy oak tables—“the same ones Philip Webb made for the Red House,” I whispered just as Mead opened his beak, for the sheer pleasure of watching him shut it again with a click. Ed gave a giggle that sounded much more like his eleven-year-old self.
All over those tables were spread gorgeous sheets of parchment, weighted down by heavy old pen cases, brass boxes, and the occasional rock. Each sheet was absolutely covered with drawings by Morris.
“He’s on to something new!” I whispered to Ed, who was busily scanning the garden for traces of hawthorn among the roses. Meanwhile I was soaking it all in. There was a snug wooden gazebo lodged solidly against one of the garden’s old gray walls and a medlar tree with its UFO-shaped purple fruit. And that carefully pruned yew hedge: I gulped hard and fought down an irrational stab of fear. I recognized its low, sinuous, sinister shape, even before I saw the curling label in May’s handwriting: HERE BEE FAFNIR, THE DRAGONNE.
Suddenly we were moving again. “Mead, I don’t think you should …,” I said in alarm, but it was too late. Choosing a moment when everyone was watching May try to topple her father to the ground, Mead neatly sped us low along the grass. Though we were trailing feathers behind us like smoke, and though I could feel his muscles trembling beneath my clutching knees, a second later we were tucked underneath one of the tables. We were just barely concealed under the trailing edge of a long linen curtain Jane was hemming at one side of the table.
Ed started an indignant dumb-show, pointing out at the dark corners of the garden where he could start hunting for a hawthorn brake. Mead, eyes closed meditatively, didn’t seem to be listening. He muttered something very quietly (“yearning friend”?) and then seemed to go very still, all at once.
There was a tumult of voices overhead, then the ponies settled down to graze and their riders turned slowly back to work. Everything, even Morris (miracle of miracles), went quiet for a while. Ed was studying the final few lines of the poem intently, lips moving, and I was just beginning to drift off for a little nap. Mouse, I noticed drowsily, seemed to have sniffed us, because he was beginning to amble across the lawn, his big brown eyes mostly obscured by the daisy chain that Janey had woven into his overgrown mane.
Suddenly I heard May hopping up and down chanting “Papa! Papa! Papa! Does this cross-stitch look right to you?” If in London with her box of slides she’d been the boss-in-training, here at Kelmscott she was still an overgrown girl.
Instead of answering, Morris gave a deep bearish growl, and (to judge from the whoops) was attempting to toss May, who must have been nearly his height by now, up into the air.
“When I was young, my little Mayday, do you know where my parents sent me? Do you?” A pleased laugh was the only answer. “To nurses, then to gardeners, to grooms I seem to recall. They sent me … anywhere where they weren’t. They, they farmed me out! Yes, I was sent to a …”
“A boy-farm!” shouted May and Jenny together.
“Yes, yes,” said Morris, while what we could see of May’s embroidery (he must have given up on tossing May herself) shot higher and higher in the air. “And on the dreaded Sundays spent home with my parents, when I failed my weekly spelling test as usual, they made me stand …”
“Barefoot on a chair!” chorused the girls triumphantly.
“William, my goodness, she’s too old for that!” I heard someone calling faintly from the distant chairs.
“Right you are, Queen Jane!” called back Morris. “And that, burdens of my premature old age”—Morris tucked May’s embroidery back down promptly on the bench with a surprisingly deft flourish—“is why we have brought you down to this lowlands country. To cut your hands o
n the weeping willows by the Thames and get soaked gathering knots of lush marsh-marigolds.”
“And your gold illuminations, Papa?” came May’s voice, almost above us now. (Don’t step on Mead’s wing! I silently beamed my thought at her.) Instead of answering, Morris snorted, and growled back deep in his throat.
“No matter how many infernally delicate and wrinkled sheets of gold leaf, it won’t come right, May, not at all.” Morris gave a flourish with his hand and a little snowfall drifted slowly to the grass, page after page of parchment falling around us. Mouse gave a startled snort. After a moment’s somber reflection he began meditatively munching away at the nearest sheet. One long slender ribbon of paper, festooned with gold, green, and red, fell right into our hiding spot. Mead didn’t stir. Without thinking, without even letting myself feel scared, I reached forward right between May’s and Jenny’s busy hands and grabbed it. Below a drawing of white flowers and small shiny green leaves, Morris had written in flowing medieval script, In the white-flowered hawthorn brake. I shoved it into my bag.
“Wake up, Mead!” I hissed urgently; the girls were going to find us any minute, and Mouse, paper dripping from his moving jaws, still hadn’t ceased his steady amble toward us. I found myself wondering if he somehow smelled Iceland on us, or dragon blood? Ed was holding up his notebook over us, as if that could hide us when the whole family had started drifting in toward the table.
Everything had slowed way down. Mead shifted his head in the smallest possible way and murmured the same thing he’d said before. Trying to ignore the sound of the hunt raging above us, I bent my head close and listened intently. “Journey’s end,” Mead was whispering, over and over, “journey’s end.” Then even the whispering stopped. Everything seemed to stop.
“Jen,” Ed was saying, and shaking my shoulder over and over. I looked up expecting to find startled grown-ups looking down at us. I tried to dry my tears and think what to say to them: Please, can we live in your century? If you like we can tell you about how badly everything turned out.