I led Paloma to the dining room. There was the painted garland, and beneath the garland hung the mirror. But where was the black drapery? The mirror now reflected the sunlight. It reflected the lace tablecloth that lay on the dining-room table.
This could be no coincidence. I might even have expected it. The dolls in the dollhouse were alive, and the dollhouse was alive, and the dollhouse made things come alive. I’d made a blanket; I’d made a mirror; I’d made a lace tablecloth. It stood to reason that the things I brought to the dollhouse had come alive in the cottage.
The Judge would say it better. He’d say that the things I brought to the dollhouse had breathed spirit into the cottage.
Last, I showed Paloma the human-size library. She sat beside me in front of the bookshelves. “I’ll show you my favorite picture,” I said.
The Mother Goose book opened of its own accord at the page with the sailor mice in their blue suits.
Mrs. del Salto came into the library. First she looked at the mantelpiece, which she always did now upon entering the library. She looked at the place Magda and Isaac’s photograph used to be. She asked about the photograph, as she always did, and I said what I always said, which was that I didn’t know where it was.
“I like it when you lie to her,” said the dagger.
“Things go missing sometimes,” she said. “I must try to be philosophical.”
Was she being philosophical? Was she accepting her sorrows?
I pretended to read the first line of the poem. “I saw a ship a-sailing,” I said.
Then I was sorry I’d spoken aloud. It made Mrs. del Salto lean over my shoulder and say, “Reading?”
I stared at the page, at the white silk sails and the golden mast.
“You’re at loose ends,” said Mrs. del Salto. “That happens sometimes when you’ve been sick.”
Loose ends. That was interesting. It was as though I’d been neatly knotted into myself. Then I got sick and all my knots came undone. I was just a length of flyaway string.
“That’s bad,” said the dagger.
“That’s bad.” A person was strong when she was knotted into herself. A knot for me and Gentleman Jack. A knot for me and Grandmother.
“A knot for you and me,” said the dagger.
All those knots had made me strong. Now I was at loose ends—
“What happens with loose ends?” said the dagger.
“They fray,” I said.
“You know how Magda could read when she was four?” I seemed to be asking Mrs. del Salto a question. But I was really talking about myself. I was talking about a loose end of myself.
Mrs. del Salto stood motionless behind me. Of course she knew about Magda.
“I am ten,” I said. Or probably I was eleven. “And I can’t read.”
“No?” said Mrs. del Salto.
There followed a long silence. I got more and more frayed.
“Would you like to learn?” said Mrs. del Salto.
“Mrs. Elton says I’m too stupid,” I said. I was frayed, I was afraid.
“Really?” said Mrs. del Salto.
I nodded. I swallowed down the taste of varnish. But it was too big to swallow.
“We’ll see about that.” Mrs. del Salto walked across the floor; she walked back and forth. Her dress was angry. It lashed itself this way and that.
I thought of the needle that had sewn that dress. Such a small thing to make all that heavy fabric hold together. Such a small thing to hold all that rage.
“Let’s prove Mrs. Elton wrong,” said Mrs. del Salto. “Wouldn’t that be satisfying?”
I believed it would be satisfying, but I didn’t believe it would be possible.
“What would you like to read?” said Mrs. del Salto.
Mrs. Elton made me not remember what I knew. I could never read in front of her. I remembered how she’d made me feel foolish for not knowing about Valentine’s Day. I remembered Betsy’s Valentine’s Day card and how I didn’t like to look at it because I didn’t know how to read.
And then I knew what I wanted to read. I’d told Mrs. del Salto I’d be right back. I tried to run up to the attic, but my legs were frayed. There was the card, just where I’d left it, in the dollhouse, beneath the parlor carpet.
It had been fifty-four days since Betsy had given it to me. Such a long time ago. It felt like a lifetime.
Back in the parlor now. I stood in front of Mrs. del Salto, beside another photograph of Magda on a small side table. Mrs. del Salto looked at it, and I could tell she was wondering about the photograph from the library and trying to be philosophical. Then Mrs. del Salto patted the cushion beside her, and I sank into it. I sank into the dove softness, while all around were sparks of color—the cream-and-rose tiles, the crimson fire, the rug, all pink and gold.
Mrs. del Salto looked at the leftover half of the card, the half with the words on it. “All it takes is practice,” she said. “Remember how you practiced jacks until you could pick up all six at once?” I did remember, but I knew she was wrong. Learning to play jacks was one thing. You just bounced the ball and you snatched at the jacks. You bounced the ball again and again, and at first you mostly missed the jacks and missed the ball, and then you mostly got the jacks and caught the ball.
That was one kind of practice. It wasn’t the same as learning to read or learning to write on a slate. Those were things that were as mysterious as stars falling from the sky or blue roses growing in the snow.
There were only ten words, but that doesn’t help when you can’t read any of them.
“You know where every word starts and stops?” said Mrs. del Salto.
That was one thing I’d learned in school. There was a space when a word ended. Sometimes there were commas or periods or exclamation marks.
“You read the first word, then I’ll read the second,” said Mrs. del Salto. “See how short the first word is?”
The first word was only one letter. It was the letter A. The problem was that you could say the letter A in two ways. You could say it like the sound Uh, or you could say it like the A sound in Way.
“I’d say it like the Uh sound,” said Mrs. del Salto.
The second word was a complicated tangle of letters. “Friend,” said Mrs. del Salto. But there were too many letters just for the word Friend. The spelling made it look as though it would make a lot of sounds, but when you said it, it made only one sound.
“A friend is someone special,” said Mrs. del Salto. “Maybe it deserves to have an extra couple of letters.”
The third word was short, but it ended with the tricky letter Y. Mrs. del Salto gave me a hint. “We talked about the word Way. This word rhymes with Way.”
The word started with an M. I made the M sound with my lips, then added the end sound of Way.
“May?” I said.
“Excellent!” said Mrs. del Salto.
So far the valentine read, “A friend may . . .”
The next word started with a W. The letter W had always seemed friendly. Maybe because I knew it was in the friendly word Swing. That made sense because it made a sound like a swing.
“Weh . . .” I said.
“Very good,” said Mrs. del Salto. “Now just add the L. It doesn’t matter that there are two of them. You say it the same way.”
“Well?” I said.
Mrs. del Salto nodded.
“Well!” I said.
Mrs. del Salto looked at me. “Who says you can’t read? Can you think of a word that rhymes with Well?”
“Tell,” I said.
“Wonderful!” said Mrs. del Salto. “What letter does Tell start with?”
That was easy. It was the generous, smiling T.
“T,” I said, then I saw it all at once. “F-E-L-L is for Fell.”
“Yes!” said Mrs. del Salto.
“B-E-L-L is for Bell.” And I thought of the bells that rang from the Shrine morning, noon, and night. How amazing that four little letters could make you think of the swin
ging, reeling Shrine bells.
“My stars!” Mrs. del Salto’s cheeks had gone pink. “Don’t you think you can read?”
“I can read Well,” I said. “W-E-L-L.” And we laughed. I had made a kind of joke. Who would have thought you could make a joke out of reading?
The message in the card said, “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” I read the words Be, Of, and Nature, which is not the easiest word in the world.
“Nice,” said Mrs. del Salto. “Not too sentimental.”
I fixed my gaze on the crazy word Friend and tried to make it look familiar. It didn’t look like a friend, but maybe we hadn’t gotten to know each other yet.
“I think that maybe you already knew how to read,” said Mrs. del Salto. “But then you stopped practicing and forgot.”
It didn’t seem possible that I’d once known how to read. But how else would some of the words be unlocking their secrets, smiling at me from the page?
I liked the valentine; I liked what it said.
“I bet you could read when you were four,” said Mrs. del Salto.
And suddenly it was like opening Magda’s wardrobe shrine. There were layers of memory, the tissue-paper memories and the lace memories, and there were also the heavier woolen memories, all folded softly onto shelves. I didn’t know what the memories were, not exactly. I tasted them more than I saw them. I remembered the taste of reading, how the word Soap had a soft lemon flavor, how the word You was just a silver breath over your tongue.
I looked at Magda’s photograph, at her ordinary girl face, neither pretty nor plain. Magda had been able to read when she was four. Maybe I had been able to read when I was four. That was in the Before Time, before my memories started with Gentleman Jack.
Mrs. del Salto’s skirts lay draped on the sofa beside me. I stared at them for a moment. “Your dress is purple,” I said. “Not black.”
“It was time,” she said. “Wearing black is a way to show how sad you are. But as time passes, you wear lighter colors to show that you’ve begun to forgive the Blue Rose.”
“For what?”
“For not granting the boon you craved.”
“Did the Blue Rose send you what you needed, not what you wanted?”
“It’s difficult to think of it like that,” said Mrs. del Salto. “But I can say I’ve begun to accept what she sent me.”
Mrs. del Salto was being philosophical. She was accepting her sorrows.
“Maybe,” said Mrs. del Salto. “Maybe something that first appeared to be a sorrow can turn into a joy. Maybe it turns into a joy when you almost lose it.”
That also went with the Blue Rose’s first precept.
Accept your sorrows,
If you cannot change them.
Embrace your joys,
So you don’t estrange them.
It also went with the Blue Rose and how time was all mixed up with her. How she could grant a boon you hadn’t craved yet. How joys and sorrows could be the same thing, depending on when you see it. If you see it before you almost lose it, it’s a sorrow. If you see it after you almost lose it, it’s a joy.
Mrs. del Salto was becoming extremely philosophical.
“You wear lighter colors,” said Mrs. del Salto, “to show you’re returning to the joys and sorrows of the regular world.”
Joys and sorrows. I knew what the sorrows were, but what were the joys? Then I answered myself. The joys were in the dollhouse. That’s where the baby would be. Life was joyful as long as it unfolded in miniature. And sometimes the joys in the dollhouse breathed spirit into the cottage.
“Stop liking the cottage!” said the dagger. “You have to like Grandmother’s house best.”
If I had forgotten how to read, what other important things had I forgotten?
“You begin,” said Mrs. del Salto, “to accept what you’ve been given with an open heart.”
If Mrs. del Salto could give up ashes and salt and start accepting her joys and sorrows, I could start saving my memories. I remembered reading and I already knew reading would be a joy. But if I remembered the joys, I probably had to remember the sorrows, too—like maybe remembering my mother. But they went together, the joys and sorrows. Maybe I’d forgotten the feeling of silk. Maybe there was joy in touching a silk dress.
“Is your dress silk?” I said.
It was.
“Can I touch it?”
“Of course!” said Mrs. del Salto.
“You have to wait for Grandmother!” said the dagger.
I brushed the front part of my fingers across the silk. It was cool and smooth. It was like water. I waited for the dagger to say silk wasn’t water, but it was too busy telling me I had to wait for Grandmother, and that I had to think about Grandmother, and that I had to like Grandmother best of all.
“I can think about anything I want.” I hid my thoughts from the dagger. I buried them under my new words, Ambrosia and Nectar. The dagger wouldn’t like to know I was going to start saving my memories. It thought my memories of Gentleman Jack were enough.
Ambrosia. Nectar. Hot chocolate was Nectar, a cinnamon roll was Ambrosia. Mrs. del Salto and the Judge had fixed me a tray of Nectar and Ambrosia when I was sick. They were the food and drink of the gods, which meant they were joyful.
“You don’t want to remember,” said the dagger.
“I don’t want to remember,” I said, just to avoid getting into an argument. But inside my head I thought, Nectar and Ambrosia. Joys and sorrows. I wanted the joys, even though it meant I also had to have the sorrows.
THE NEXT DAY, the Judge brought a collar for Paloma. It was red, which looked nice on her black fur. There was a brass nameplate on it, which said Paloma. The bright popping P was big and swirly.
“You shouldn’t put a collar on a dog,” said the dagger. “Just like you shouldn’t send a girl to school. It tames them.”
“But if I don’t go to school,” I said, “they won’t let me see Gentleman Jack.”
“I suppose the dog thinks it can’t eat if it doesn’t wear the collar,” said the dagger.
I unbuckled the collar. It had pressed a band of flatness into Paloma’s fur. Her fur was not exactly curly, but wavy, with feathers at the haunches and tail. Why had I taken it off? She wasn’t going to grow wilder now that her collar had been removed. The dagger made me think crazy things, or it tried to. It tried to make me think that there was nothing so very bad about Gentleman Jack’s not teaching me how to read. But however much the dagger stuck me with its exclamation points, I got mad every time I thought about it. It rubbed at a raw, sore place in my chest.
When something happened in the dollhouse, it often also happened in buttercream cottage. It made the human-size cottage more alive—a blanket had appeared in Isaac’s cradle; the mirrors were suddenly uncovered; and now that Oakheart had a collar, Paloma had one, too.
I wondered if the dollhouse called out to the human-size cottage: “Tablecloth! Mirror! Blanket! Collar!” And then the cottage got the same things. Maybe it even called back to the dollhouse: “Collar! Blanket! Mirror! Tablecloth!”
“That’s crazy,” said the dagger.
I was tired of the dagger.
I wanted to fill up on reading before I had to leave. Mrs. del Salto said I had burst into reading. I discovered a curious thing in the Mother Goose book. Mother Goose had already made up the rhyme-pattern about the tasks. My underneath mind must have remembered it from the Before Time, and my over-and-above mind had changed it to fit the dolls’ tasks.
One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy.
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret
Never to be told.
It wasn’t even as different from mine as it seemed. Mine had Sister and Brother; this had Girl and Boy. And all the things in the rhyme were things I’d thought about, like joys and sorrows—that the joys were concent
rated in the dollhouse and the sorrows in the human-size world.
But maybe that wasn’t true anymore, now that Mrs. del Salto had started being philosophical about her sorrows. I could see her being philosophical when she looked at the lamps and didn’t turn them off. I could see it on the day she wore lilac, which was brighter than purple.
Silver was for the inkwell, and gold was for the five gold bricks. I hadn’t thought about a secret, but maybe that was because it was an especially secret secret: it was never to be told.
I discovered another curious thing, which was that some words were made up of words within words. The second verse of the sailor mice poem, for instance:
There were comfits in the cabin,
And apples in the hold;
The sails were made of silk,
And the masts were made of gold.
I knew the word Discomfit but not the word Comfit. The Judge sat at his desk while I sat on the floor. He never minded being interrupted, but he had to speak to me first.
I knocked on the leg of his chair.
“Yes?”
He was very easy to train.
“What are comfits?”
“It’s an old-fashioned word for something sweet.”
If Comfit was something sweet, then Discomfit must mean something not sweet. Comfit was a word inside the bigger word of Discomfit.
Mr. Elton had discomfited me. He’d accused me of stealing the green candy, which meant I’d felt the opposite of sweet.
Discomfit meant to make someone feel not sweet.
I mentioned this to the Judge, who said it was a most perceptive observation. That was the second time he’d said those very words to me.
I thought more about Discomfit. You’d think someone would only be discomfited with a bad thing, but I saw you could also be discomfited with a good thing. I’d done a good thing when I’d saved Betsy from the Brewster Boy, but—
“I discomfited Mrs. Elton when I saved Betsy,” I said. “That’s because she didn’t want to be grateful to me.”
The Robber Girl Page 26