A Secret Agent
In the Summer House Auberon unscrewed his fountain pen even before he sat down at the table there (though he firmly shut and hooked the door). He took from the table’s drawer a locked imitation-leather five-year diary from some other five years, opened it with a tiny key from his pocket, and, flipping to a page in a long-ago unrecorded March, he wrote: “And yet it does move.”
He meant by this the old orrery at the top of the house, from whose round window he had looked out as the stork bearing Lilac and Mrs. Underhill had passed. Everyone told him that the machinery which operated the planets in this antiquity was clabbered thick with rust and had been immovable for years. Indeed Auberon had tried the cogs and levers himself and couldn’t move them. And yet it did move: a vague sense he had had that the planets, sun and moon were not, on one visit, in quite the same places they had been on a previous visit he had now confirmed by rigorous tests. It does move: he was sure. Or pretty sure.
Just why they should all have lied to him about the orrery didn’t just at the moment concern him. All he wanted was the goods on them: proof that the orrery moved, and (much harder to get, but he would get it, the evidence was mounting) proof that they all knew very well that it moved and didn’t want him to know.
Slowly, after glancing at the entry he had made and wishing he had more to state, he shut and locked the diary and put it in the table drawer. Now what question could he think of, what seemingly chance remark could he let fall at dinner, that would cause someone—his great-aunt, no, far too practiced in concealments, expert at looks of surprise and puzzlement; or his mother; or his father, though there were times when Auberon thought his father might be as excluded as he was—to confess inadvertently? As the bowl of mashed potatoes went around, he might say “Slowly but surely, like the planets in the old orrery,” and watch their faces… No, too brazen, too obvious. He pondered, wondering what anyway would be for supper.
The Summer House he sat in wasn’t much changed from the time his namesake had lived and died there. No one had been able to think what to dowith the boxes and portfolios of pictures, or felt up to disturbing what seemed a careful order. So they only patched the roof against leaks, and sealed the windows; and thus it stayed while they thought. The image of it would now and then pass through one or another of their minds, particularly Doc’s and Cloud’s, and they would think of the past stored up there, but no one got around to unsealing it, and when Auberon came to take possession no one disputed him. It was headquarters now, and contained all things necessary for Auberon’s investigations: his magnifying glass (old Auberon’s in fact), his clack-clack folding measure and roll-up tape measure, the final edition of The Architecture of Country Houses, and the diary which contained his conclusions. It also contained all of Auberon’s pictures, which Auberon the younger had not yet begun to look into; the pictures that would end his quest as it had the elder’s, through vast superfluity of ambiguous evidence.
Even as it was he wondered if the thing about the orrery weren’t dumb after all, and his arrangement of string and pencilmarks open to more than one conclusion anyway. A blind alley, as lined with mum sphinxes as the others he had gone up. He stopped tilting back the old chair he sat in, stopped vigorously chewing the end of his pen. Evening was gathering; no evening more oppressive than one like this, in this month, though at nine years old he didn’t attribute his oppression to the day and the hour, or call it by that name. He only felt how hard it was to be a secret agent, to go in disguise as a member of his own family, trying to so insinuate himself among them that, without his ever asking a question (that would expose him instantly) the truth would be spilled in his presence because they would have no reason to doubt he was already privy to it.
Crows cawed away toward the woods. A voice, blown around the Park with odd alteration, called his name, and announced dinner. He felt, hearing the long-drawn melancholy vowels of his own name, at once sad and hungry.
The Worm Turned
Lilac saw sunset elsewhere.
“Magnificent!” Mrs. Underhill said. “And terrifying. Doesn’t it make your heart beat high?”
“But it’s all made of cloud,” Lilac said.
“Hush, dear,” Mrs. Underhill said. “Someone’s feelings could be hurt.”
Made of sunset was more correct: all of it, the thousand striped war-tents obscured in the wreathing smokes of orange watch’ fires, and their curling pennants striped the same in sunset colors; the black lines of horse or foot or both, picked out with silver weaponglint, that receded as far as the eye could see; the bright coats of captains and the dark gray of guns being drawn up under their command against empurpled harricadoes—the whole vast encampment, or was it a great flotilla of galleons, armed and under sail?
“A thousand years,” Mrs. Underhill said grimly. “Defeats, retreats, rear-guard actions. But no more. Soon…” The knobby stick was under her arm like a commander’s baton, her long chin was held high. “See?” she said. “There! Isn’t he brave?”
A figure, burdened with armor and with weighty responsibilities, walked the poop, or toured the breastworks; wind stirred his white whiskers as long almost as himself. The Generalissimo of all this. In one hand he held a wand; just then, the sunset altered, the tip of the wand caught fire. He gestured with it toward where the touch-holes on his guns would be, had they been guns, but then thought better of it. He lowered the wand, and it went out. From his broad belt he drew out a folded map, unfolded it, peered nearsightedly at it for some time, then refolded it, replaced it, and took up his heavy tread again.
“The die’s cast now,” Mrs. Underhill said. “No more retreating. The worm’s turned.”
“If you don’t mind,” the stork said, her voice faint between labored pants, “this altitude’s too much for me.”
“Sorry,” Mrs. Underhill said. “All done now.”
“Storks,” the stork panted, “are accustomed to sit down, once a league or so.”
“Don’t sit down there,” Lilac said. “You’ll sink right through.”
“Downward then,” Mrs. Underhill said. The stork ceased to pump her short wings, and began to descend, with a sigh of relief. The Generalissimo, hands on his gunwales or his machicolated belvedere, stared eagle-eyed into the distance, but failed to see Mrs. Underhill salute him smartly as they passed.
“Oh, well,” she said. “He’s as brave as they come, and it’s a fine show.”
“It’s a fake,” Lilac said. It had already shape-shifted into something even more harmless as they sank.