by Janet Lunn
To the twins,
Sanda and Judith,
and their five friends,
Eric, Alec, Jeffrey,
Kate, and John
Contents
1 The Doll
2 Aunt Alice
3 Aunt Alice Gets a Sick Basket
4 Another Dream – And a Pigeon
5 The Fight
6 Untwins
7 To Find a House
8 More House Hunting – And Two Roses
9 Jane Is Frightened
10 Jane Makes Up Her Mind
11 Aunt Alice Again – And a Brooch
12 Elizabeth Makes Up Her Mind
13 Hester
14 Melissa
15 Anne
Epilogue
The Doll
The twins found the doll on a cold wet Saturday in early spring. They found it in an antique shop, which was odd because neither Jane nor Elizabeth had ever thought of going into an antique shop before. At age twelve, they didn’t think much about dolls anymore, either. And yet, on this rainy Saturday morning, they did both.
They were hurrying up Yonge Street, already late home, not paying much attention to anyone or anything they passed, when suddenly they stopped. Both at once, as though they’d been jerked by an invisible cord. They turned, splashed across the sidewalk, and stared into the window of a little shop. ANTIQUES, DOLLS MENDED, it said in scratched gold letters across its front. In the window there were old books, bits of tarnished jewelry, china dolls’ heads, old cups – and the little wooden doll.
The doll was about seven inches high, with arms that stuck straight out from its sides. Its clothes were a dress and bonnet of a bygone time, tattered and faded to a soft pink-brown color. Its feet were a pair of black velvet boots with most of the velvet gone. The paint was worn from its face and chipped in spots. Except for its eyes, which were still a deep and shining blue, the doll was a neglected and forlorn little thing. Not a beauty in any way.
What was it about the doll? Jammed between a dusty green glass bowl and a broken clock, it was hard to see. But the twins had seen it, it had stopped them, pulled them, and held them spellbound.
For quite a while, they stood and stared. People bumped past. Rain drizzled uncomfortably down the necks of their yellow slickers and into the tops of their boots. Still they stood.
“Let’s go look,” Elizabeth said finally, walking toward the shop entrance.
“We promised to go home and baby-sit William,” Jane remembered.
“We only need to stay a minute.” Elizabeth’s foot was already on the doorstep.
Usually it was sensible Jane who prevailed but this time, probably because she wanted to so badly, she followed her sister.
Inside, the shop was dark and dusty but warm. All the twins could see at first were vague shapes that turned out, in a minute or two, to be high-backed chairs, bedsteads, tables, and more of the things that cluttered the window.
From somewhere at the back, a woman appeared – “sort of like a fairy godmother right up out of nowhere,” Elizabeth said later when she was telling William about it. She was little and old like the doll and seemed to belong to the shop. “How do you do,” she said, and Elizabeth was encouraged by her warm smile.
“We … we’d like to see the little doll please,” she stammered. Elizabeth didn’t usually stammer. She felt strange and nervous.
“Which doll is it?” asked the woman. “We have quite a few as you can see.”
And, now they could see, the twins noticed that one whole long wall was covered with shelves full of dolls.
Jane took charge. “It’s the one in the window. That one.” She walked over and pointed to the straight back of the window doll.
“Oh,” the woman sounded regretful, “I’m afraid that one isn’t for sale. It’s quite old, you see. I use it just for show.”
Elizabeth felt she had to hold the doll, if only once. “Could we look at it in here, just for a minute,” she pleaded.
“I don’t see why not.” The twins watched breathlessly as the woman reached into the window case, lifted the doll out, and put it carefully into the two pairs of hands stretched out.
Their fingers touched the face gently, straightened the bonnet on its head, smoothed the old shawl. It was not a battered antique doll they held, not at this moment. It was a familiar loved thing, long lost, almost forgotten.
The feeling was gone almost at once, faded, but leaving behind, like a trailing cloud, a slight sense of somewhere else.
With a great sigh Elizabeth handed it to the shop woman. The woman took it, but didn’t move to put it back in the window. She held it, looked at it as though she were trying to make up her mind.
“How much money have you got?” she asked.
The twins poked hands into their pockets and pulled out two dollars and fifty-three cents all told.
“That’ll do,” the woman said. “I’ll get the box.” She was gone and back before they quite realized what she was doing.
The box was as old-looking as the doll. It was leather, just big enough to hold the doll. The leather had peeled off in many spots. More of it rubbed off as the shop woman held it. Its color was faded like the doll’s dress to that same pink-brown shade. It was decorated with studs around its edges and had an elaborately worked catch.
With great care the woman wrapped the doll in a piece of blue cloth from the box, laid it inside, and closed the lid.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she scolded herself. “I should have my head read, I really should, but the doll seems to belong to you. I’d never feel right about keeping it now, I wouldn’t. You take care of it. You take care of it.” She thrust the box into Elizabeth’s hands.
The twins were too bewildered by what had happened to them and too surprised by this sudden gift to say anything. At last Jane remembered her manners.
“Thank you. Thank you very much. We will.” She started toward the door.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth vaguely. It was all she could think of to say. “Yes,” she said again, and trotted after her sister.
Aunt Alice
It was raining harder now. A few people scurried past, their heads, like turtles’, pulled closely into their collars. The wind was high and cold. Jane and Elizabeth stood close together outside the Antiques, Dolls Mended shop.
Whatever spell the little wooden doll had cast over them was gone. Jane shivered and pulled her slicker tight up against her neck.
“Wasn’t that the funniest thing?”
“Maybe it’s a mystery,” Elizabeth found this sudden idea very exciting. “Maybe this doll has some kind of magic or something – something that will lead us to a great discovery.” She shoved the leather box more snugly and securely under her arm.
“Oh honestly! You and your mysteries and magics!” Jane said disgustedly. “Just because we saw an old doll and liked it especially does it have to be a mystery?”
“Well, you have to admit it was sort of odd both of us seeing it at the same time like that – and anyway,” Elizabeth remembered, “you said it yourself. You said, wasn’t it fun …”
“Oh, let’s not argue. Where’ll we go?”
Elizabeth understood. Jane meant someplace special, someplace just exactly right to take the doll. The twins were like that. They often understood each other with half the number of words it takes most people.
“Aunt Alice,” she answered promptly. Neither she nor Jane remembered their promise to go straight home to take care of six-year-old William. Almost before the words were out of Elizabeth’s mouth, Jane was poking through her pockets for streetcar tickets to take them to Aunt Alice’s.
Aunt Alice wasn’t really their aunt. She was their mother’s aunt, whom they had met for the first time only a few
weeks earlier. When the Hubbard family had moved from the country to Spring View Acres in the suburbs of Toronto, Aunt Alice was still in England where she had been living for years. Just last month she had come home to live in her big old house near the lake. Straightaway she had come to visit the Hubbard family. They had decided then and there that Aunt Alice was just the aunt they’d always wanted (“instant aunt,” the twins’ thirteen-year-old brother, Joe, called her. And Pat, their older brother, had agreed she was a great improvement over Aunt Marvel, who “always gave you behavior talks”).
Aunt Alice was certainly the right person to take an antique doll to show.
Suddenly Elizabeth remembered, “We don’t know where she lives.”
“Yes we do,” crowed Jane, “or anyway, I do. Aunt Alice told me we should come down to the beach and go swimming when the warm weather comes and I asked her for directions.”
“Do you have them here?”
“Yep. I put them in my purse so I’d have them – just in case.”
Elizabeth was dumbfounded. She could never get over the way Jane always made everything work out. “Oh, you and your organizing,” she complained but, nevertheless, she was delighted to see her sister produce Aunt Alice’s address – Alice Armitage, Number Five, Sabiston Court – complete with directions telling how to get there.
With no trouble at all they took the subway and the long streetcar ride to the east end of the city where Aunt Alice lived, Jane leading the way and giving directions, Elizabeth following. They felt as though they were off on an adventure.
Not once did they remember their promise to their mother. Mama, William, Spring View Acres – it was all far away. When they got off the streetcar where the directions said they should – Hayberry Street – it looked to the twins like another land. The old streets, so many tall trees, the big houses, some tall, some wide, were so different from the broad streets without sidewalks and rows of small modern houses in Spring View Acres. And there was the lake right down at the end of Hayberry Street, rising and falling in giant mounds under the wind, gray-green and cold in the rain. They could smell it from the top of the street, a wonderful fresh, exciting smell.
Sabiston Court, where Aunt Alice lived, was a tiny street that curled away from Hayberry Street three quarters of the way down. Number Five was on the corner, its back to the lake. It was a tall house, three storeys, and quite wide. There was a two storey porch all across the front and a high eight-sided tower at its left-hand corner.
The house looked enormous and unfriendly. The dark sky hung over it. The lake loomed behind. The rain poured heavily all around it.
Jane began to hold back. “Do you think we should?” she asked nervously, “after all, Aunt Alice didn’t invite us.”
Elizabeth wasn’t so sure any more either, but she wasn’t going to let Jane know that. “Are you scared?” she asked.
“No.” Jane marched up to the front door, lifted the heavy iron knocker, and pounded it hard.
They waited a nervous moment or two. The door opened and there was Aunt Alice.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve come for tea.”
“We were uptown and we just thought maybe you’d like to see us,” said Elizabeth carelessly, as though she often dropped in on people who lived at the other end of the city. “We’ve brought something to show you.”
“Good,” said Aunt Alice. “Come in. Or do you want tea in the rain?”
The twins giggled and felt better even as they dripped rainwater all over Aunt Alice’s front hall carpet.
Inside, the house wasn’t nearly as forbidding as out. It was quite inviting. After they had taken off their raincoats and boots in the wide front hall, Aunt Alice led them through into her little sitting room at the back. From the window the twins could see the lake heaving in the storm, but inside there was a fire in the red brick fireplace. The walls of the sitting room had red and yellow flowered paper, which made it even cozier, and a deep red couch along one side of the fireplace. On the other side was an old high-backed rocker (just like the one in the Dolls Mended shop, thought Elizabeth) that had Aunt Alice’s book lying face down on it. The twins noticed it there and politely sat, side-by-side, on the couch.
Aunt Alice was as good as they remembered. There were no tiresome questions about being out on a day like this, how colds are caught, or anything. She did tell them how much they looked alike, but in such a way that it was funnier than it was uncomfortable, picking them apart (they decided later) as though they were verbs and nouns and things.
“Uncle Oliver’s small ears,” she murmured. “Marvel’s chestnut hair and fair skin. Armitage nose and mouth.” She put her hand up to her own long thin nose and rather wide mouth. “No sign of the Cunningham black hair or eyes, that’s …”
“That’s what Joe is,” interrupted Elizabeth. Joe was a trial and torment to them both. “Miserable black eyes,” she added, “and he has a long nose too.”
“Always poking it into other people’s business,” muttered Jane.
“Pat has hair like ours,” Elizabeth continued. Pat was their fifteen-year-old brother. “But William has golden hair.” She sighed enviously. “Mama says he looks like her grandmother.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Alice, “Mother had golden hair.” She smiled. “But not freckles. Must get those from your father. Didn’t have those eyes either.” Aunt Alice examined them carefully, as though she were memorizing them. “No,” she said, “never seen eyes that shape – beech leaves.” She smiled again. “Your turn now.”
The twins looked at her, surprised.
“Come,” said Aunt Alice. “What do you say? Tall, skinny, ski nose, ski face, wrinkles, faded blue eyes – and a blob of cotton on top.”
The twins couldn’t help laughing. Aunt Alice’s description of herself wasn’t that wrong. Her face was long and thin (and her nose), although maybe not as thin as a ski, and it had a blob of white cotton on top. No, not a blob, thought Elizabeth, more like a cream puff – nice. Her face had wrinkles, lots of them, but they were good wrinkles that looked like fun. And Aunt Alice’s eyes were bright blue like the doll’s, not faded.
Embarrassed by all this close inspection of each other, Jane changed the subject. “I like your house,” she said.
“Yes,” Aunt Alice agreed, “good house. Always been my house. Grew up here. So did your grandmother and Uncle Arthur. Family always lived here. Good place to live.”
She paused. “Better for you than me,” she added. Elizabeth thought of the tight-packed little bungalow in Spring View Acres and sighed. She thought of the walk-in cupboard she and Jane shared as a bedroom in the little house and sighed again.
“It’s beautiful,” said Jane.
“Well then,” Aunt Alice said, leaning forward in her chair, “show me what you’ve brought. Then look around my house. Then tea. How’s that?”
The twins thought it a fine plan. Elizabeth took the box she had been hugging tightly all the way from the Antiques, Dolls Mended shop and set it on her lap, lifted the lid, and brought out the little doll. In the comfortable surroundings of Aunt Alice’s old house, the doll seemed quite at home. Elizabeth smoothed the faded cloth of its dress lovingly. “It’s called Amelia,” she said, handing it to Aunt Alice.
“Isn’t that funny,” said Jane, “that’s the name I was thinking.”
Aunt Alice looked from Jane to Elizabeth. “Twins. Happen often?”
“I guess so,” said Jane. Elizabeth said nothing. They both hated twin questions.
Aunt Alice didn’t notice. She was already busy inspecting the doll.
“It’s old. Don’t really know about dolls, toys, and things. Can tell it’s old though. Might be valuable. Interesting to find out. Good face even with the broken nose.” She smiled and handed the doll back to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth sat looking at its carved arms and legs while Aunt Alice talked in her short quick sentences about fixing it up and restoring it to its original state. She could picture it as clearly as thou
gh she had seen it new, in a bright red wool dress with a tiny white shawl, its bonnet fresh and new and its velvet boots soft and rich. Its face had a cheerful smile painted on it, a little carved nose that turned up at the end, and delicately drawn eyebrows and eyelashes for its bright blue eyes. Aunt Alice’s voice saying, “Come along, show you your grandmother’s house,” cut off the vision of Amelia, new and shiny. Reluctantly Elizabeth put the doll back into the box, but she carried the box with her when she got up.
It was a wonderful house – but funny. It looked as though it had been put together not all at one time but like a house a small child makes out of blocks, adding pieces on here and there just because she likes their shapes. The back of the house had the little study where the twins and Aunt Alice had been sitting, divided by a small hall from the kitchen beside it. Beyond that there was the dining room – a round room at the bottom of a short tower, invisible from the front, that stuck up at the back. There were steps up from the kitchen to the long hall that led to the front door, with three more steps down on one side to the living room and on the other to a big spare room (“Used to be dining room. Never use it,” said Aunt Alice). Off the living room was another door opening into the first floor of the tall eight-sided tower.
Upstairs the hall was round like the hub of a wheel, and all the rooms attached to the ends of the short hallways that were the wheel’s spokes. It seemed to Jane and Elizabeth as though Aunt Alice opened and closed at least fifty doors. There was one hall longer than the rest that ended with three steps down to another little hall, which led either into a small room at the back of the house or down the kitchen stairs.
“Attic,” Aunt Alice said, but didn’t open its door.
In order to get to the second-storey room of the back tower they had to go down the back stairs, through the kitchen, and into the dining room, where another set of stairs went up to the tower bedroom.
“I could be Rapunzel,” Elizabeth whispered ecstatically. Jane hadn’t any longing to be Rapunzel but she did love the round room with all its windows and their deep window seats. They could see the lake clearly, the deserted beach, and the garden just below, sodden in the rain. Off to one side there was an old garage.