by John Plotz
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Down by the Willow
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” I heard Granny saying. I opened my eyes to see her staring down at me with an enormous smile. “You’ve decided to rejoin us, I see!”
“Oh yes, Granny,” I said, leaping up. “I hope you didn’t miss us too much while we were gone.” My head was still spinning, but I wanted to clear things up with her right away. “I mean, of course the police couldn’t have tracked us in the nineteenth century—ha ha!—so I guess you must have given up after a while and … Oh Granny we have so many stories to tell you about what happened—”
I trailed off, because Granny—instead of giving me an I am all ears, my heroic adventurer granddaughter gaze—was wringing out a wet cloth she’d taken from my forehead, and just as efficiently slapping another one down on it. A drop trickled into my ear. “Hey Granny, stop! That’s annoying!” I blurted out, sitting up, suddenly aware of a dull heavy throbbing in my right temple.
“Annoying it may be,” she said crisply, pushing me back down so I rested against the wall, “but when young girls and boys”—she shifted her glare severely to Ed, whom I now saw slouched down beside me in the same undignified pose against the wall—“choose to go slamming their heads against very precious tapestries for no earthly reason, being nursed by their grandmother is far preferable to other things that might happen to them.”
She paused, leaving us to take this in. Which Ed did before me. “But Granny,” he said slowly, “there was a reason. We were chasing Mead …”
“Chasing a mead,” Granny cut in sharply, with just a trace of her old English accent breaking through. “Do you mean a meadow?”
“No, Granny,” I said, with a lurch in my stomach, “chasing your bird Mead! The one who belongs”—I was reassured to catch sight of it—“in that birdcage right over there.” I pointed behind her.
She gazed at me as if I were a goblin or a changeling (and if you’ve never been gazed at by your grandmother as if you were a changeling, all I can say is that you’re very lucky). “That birdcage,” she said slowly, “was a gift from my old boss back in England. And it hasn’t had a bird in it since …” She trailed off thoughtfully.
“Anyway, Granny,” I said jumping up cheerily, “the good news is that we’ve found a way to save the house. I’ve just got to unpack this gym bag and we can figure out a way to …” I trailed off, because Ed was silently holding my tattered empty bag and his smashed birdcage up toward me. I was still digesting this when Granny said, in an astonished voice, “Whatever do you mean, save the house?”
“Why, from the bank!” I said immediately, whirling to face her.
Granny threw back her head and laughed, the kind of clear exuberant laugh I’d heard at Kelmscott Manor. There was no trace of worry in her eyes as she put her hand on my forehead. “Maybe that bump is deeper than I thought, Jen. It’s not the bank that owns this house.”
“But that letter …” I pointed up at the sofa, at what was clearly the terrible letter from Mr. Nazhar.
Granny handed me the letter with a smile. “It’s just what we discussed, Jen. Mr. Nazhar proposes that the house will become the museum’s Arts and Crafts Annex. All the things they’ve had from us over the years will come back here to stay, and we’ll try to arrange them in the way their makers would have wanted. Like Emery Walker’s house in London.”
Despite the fact that my head was spinning—more from what Granny had said than from our flight down the Thames—I couldn’t help asking, “Like Kelmscott House, you mean? With the blue willow wallpaper in the front hall, and the basement rooms with the Kelmscott printing press—”
“Or,” interrupted Ed, “did you mean like Kelmscott Manor, with that long tree-lined walk, and those medieval tapestries with the gold lions that Morris liked so much better than anyone else did?”
As Granny gazed at us silently, bemusedly, I opened my mouth to apologize, to tell her that we were her good grandkids. Then I shut it again. I wasn’t sure I was her good grandkid any longer, not in exactly the way she wanted me to be.
It didn’t matter what I opened my mouth to say, though, because Ed, holding a notebook at arm’s length above his head while flat on his back, was an unstoppable tornado of talk. “I think Webb would have wanted his glasses out on the painted sideboard,” he was saying now, “and Burne-Jones meant for his drawings to be laid out on open tables. As for Jane’s embroidery …”
I tried to kick him into silence, but I shouldn’t have. Granny’s face brightened as she sat before him, still wetting his forehead. “Do you think so, Edward?” she was saying, and “That’s a remarkable thought about the woodblocks,” and a moment later, “How on Earth did you come to think about the wallpaper that way?”—which she said in a tone full of love and admiration, every thought of alarm and surprise completely gone. The two of them looked at each other eye-to-eye, one flat on the floor and the other kneeling above. The whole rest of the world could have stopped existing, leaving only Granny, Ed, and a museum filled with Arts and Crafts.
I was happy for them. But so many other thoughts were buzzing through my brain that I wasn’t quite sure where my body even was. I did have a feeling there was one thing left to do. What was it, though, what was it?
I got to my knees and then to my feet, wandering vaguely round the room while trying to figure it out. I didn’t want to leave Granny, did I? No, I was sure of that. I wasn’t going to be her good girl anymore but not because I wanted to run away with Eva. I didn’t have the slightest desire to play field hockey. In fact, from now on basketball in the backyard with Ed might suit me fine. That, and whatever sports they offered down at the high school for the arts, come next fall.
That would make Granny happy, but I wasn’t doing it for Granny, nor for the reasons Granny had in mind. I loved the Tapestry, I knew that much, but I wanted it in the museum, and I could tell Granny why. Not because of the protective love Granny felt for everything that came down to her from May Morris. Granny would probably never understand what I meant when I said I didn’t care anymore if Morris made the Tapestry, or any of it. But that didn’t matter, either.
May was dead, and so was Morris. Saying that, even to myself, hurt, the way any wound does when you touch it. But it didn’t make me change my mind. The Tapestry, and the Kelmscott books, and all the other beautiful art Morris had made didn’t matter to me just because Morris made it. I cared about what was living in it, and what it meant to the living. “Let the dead bury their own dead!” I said fiercely—but Granny and Ed didn’t even look up from their conversation about a piece of Burne-Jones stained glass.
Something else mattered, though, a lot. I still couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. I went back over my thoughts, feeling hot and cold, my breath coming fast then slow. What was it? That I saw Morris die? No, it had something to do with how I had realized what made art alive. It was a conversation I’d been having with—
But Granny was speaking to us both now, tapping my shoulder for attention. Obediently, I followed her glance. “I can assure you,” she was saying with a trace of a laugh in her voice, “nobody would doubt for an instant that this was a genuine William Morris tapestry, perfect in every respect.”
We turned to look, and for an instant I forgot to breathe. Those gaps we’d puzzled over for so long, the odd ellipses, lines and slender rectangles, were gone. In their place stood all the things we’d gathered. A pilgrim gourd and shell, a ship, a man with shield and spear, woodland beasts and a maiden in a red-gold crown. And the rest; all sewn into place (oh so smoothly!) with stitches so soft and fine that only someone standing way, way too close could have picked out the silver-gray thread that outlined a few perfectly normal-looking figures on a country landscape: an apple here, a dun rose there.
Granny, though, was still speaking. “Perhaps the notion of authenticating an artist’s identity doesn’t mean much to children your age …” She shot a sharp glance at us, daring us to tell her that we were too young
to learn about artistic authentication. “… but if you look right down here”—pointing to our favorite meadow, where we’d first seen Morris on his fat little pony—“I fancy you can see where he’s put down his initials. Yes”—she gave a little laugh—“there it is, do you see Edward, the telltale WM?”
I was focusing in on the spot she pointed to, but somehow I couldn’t quite make sense of what I saw. What was wrong with me, why was I frozen like this? From a long, long way away, as if he were standing on a mountain, I heard Ed saying slowly, carefully, “Granny, I don’t think Morris signed his work, actually. He thought the work mattered more than the maker, and that in any case the making was almost always shared labor, and we’ve seen quite a lot …”
He trailed off. Then I heard his voice start up again, a little higher and faster, the way it sounded when he got nervous. “Um, Granny, where you see the WM … well, if maybe one of them was twisted wrong-way around to form the M, almost upside down, couldn’t that little collection of lines be the claws of a bird? Not a WM at all.”
And from even father away I could hear Granny answer, “Well, Ed, you may be right after all. Yes, it could be that what you see down there is one of Morris’s favorite birds. It’s the kind of little blackbird you’d see on the mead down by Kelmscott Manor.”
I took a deep breath, tried to pretend that fourteen was old enough to be mature, to face the situation bravely, the way Granny told us to right after our parents died. I opened my eyes and looked down into my favorite corner of the tapestry, right where a knot of willows grew along the Thames to form a kind of protected nook. Sure enough, looking back up at me from inside the tapestry, plain as day, every feather back in place, was Mead.
I don’t remember how I got up to my room. But I do remember the next morning, when Ed woke me by tugging on my arm. Without bothering to tell him that I didn’t want to, or I couldn’t, or any one of the hundred other ways of telling him that I was not going to be mature about this, that I was not going to face the situation bravely, I just yanked my arm away and buried my head deeper in the pillow.
He shook his head and tugged my arm again. This time I gave up and let him pull me. Easier than fighting Ed when he got in one of these moods. I could sneak back up to bed later. As I followed him downstairs I was thinking gloomily how hard it was going to be to pretend I was overjoyed for Granny’s new job. Her becoming the museum’s residential Arts and Crafts curator seemed like a cruel joke right now. All it meant was that every day between now and when I went off to college, I’d have to see Mead’s face looking out at me from the wall.
Still not meeting my eye, Ed tugged me into the living room. Setting myself with my back squarely to the tapestry, I faced him; Granny looked up from her knitting with a puzzled expression. I looked to Ed for an explanation. But all he did was stare intently at the birdcage. I moved toward it and froze. My hands went very tingly and my mouth was so dry I had to open and close it twice before I could speak.
Sitting inside the unlocked cage, calm and confident as if he’d been there all his life, was one of the birds Ed had grabbed with his hoodie in that willow tree near Nelson’s Column. As we stared at him, he hopped to the edge of the cage, teetered there uncertainly for a moment, and launched himself into the air. I gave a yowl and leapt for the open window. But the bird, ignoring me entirely, circled our heads twice, zoomed by the Tapestry (did I just imagine that he brushed right up against Mead, down in his corner?), and landed on Ed’s shoulder. As Ed and I jumped up and down whooping, he cocked his head at us quizzically, then opened his throat, tilted his head back, and gave a pathetic little cry.
I was almost through the kitchen door, where I knew I’d find an apple or banana, when a sudden idea struck me. “Granny!” She turned toward me, her usual expectant smile already sliding into place. “Granny!” I said again. Then, without rehearsal, without even a look at each other, Ed and I both tilted back our heads, waved imaginary swords, and shouted “Yoicks!”
Granny looked at us in stunned silence. Then, slowly, slowly I saw that same look of recognition that had spread across May’s face at Merton Abbey Factory. Yesterday or seven decades ago. “Well,” she said faintly, looking back at us as if she were trying to place us. Then her right arm shot straight up into the air, imaginary sword in hand. There we all stood, waving together.
The End
This book is typeset in Golden Type ITC Standard, a modern font closely based on the Golden Type that was designed by William Morris and Emery Walker for the Kelmscott Press and first used in The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891). Golden was inspired by the fonts of Nicholas Jenson (1420–1480), and in turn it inspired many better-known modern fonts that looked back to medieval typefaces for inspiration. Jenson trained in Mainz, Germany with “black letter” designers like Gutenberg; he then moved to Venice where he pioneered the elegant slender “roman” letters that are the basis for almost all modern typefaces. Golden Type is Morris and Walker’s beautiful and distinctive compromise between the legibility of roman type and the dark bold forms of German black letter.