Out on a Limb (21 page)

“No,” I said. “I mean actual, physical signs. The signs on your fence.”

“Signs on my fence? There are no signs on my fence,”

Great-great-aunt Lydia said. “
Signs on my fence
. Grand Oak Manor isn’t a shopping mall.”

I still didn’t have the nerve to argue. “Oh,” I said.

“Maybe I imagined it. Somehow I just thought I saw some signs.”

“Saying
what
?” she asked.

“Um. Well. I think they were about trespassing,” I said. “That is, I thought they were. But you must be right. I mean, you know what’s on your own fence, obviously.”

“Is that obvious?” Great-great-aunt Lydia considered. “It’s really not, you know. I don’t know what’s on my fence, now that I think of it. Not on the outside. Not first hand. I haven’t been out into the meadow for years. Not since my hip replacement.”

“But....”

“But what, Rosamund?”

“But then, how did you leave us the flowers?”

“Through my manservant, of course. It’s Mr. Bickert who makes the deliveries to the treehouse. Not that there have been many. Just the Christmas card, and the posie of herbs when you were so ill.”

She meant the dead plants stabbed to the tree. “What were they for?” I asked. “The herbs?”

“What were they for! They were for exactly what I described in some detail in the letter attached to them. They were medicinal herbs, for boiling. There is nothing like them to clear the lungs and sinuses. Don’t tell me you didn’t try them.”

I didn’t tell her that I didn’t try them. I also didn’t tell her that there had been no letter attached. I didn’t want that argument all over again. “Yes, no, you’re so right,” I said. “I’ve never tasted anything like them.”

“
Tasted
! They’re not for drinking, those herbs, they’re for medicinal
steam
. Really, Rosamund, you should pay more attention to the written word. It’s a wonder you didn’t poison yourself, and make yourself even sicker than you were.”

“How did you know I was sick?” I asked.

Great-great-aunt Lydia nodded at the binoculars that sat on the table beside us. “I have a good vantage point from here,” she said. “And plenty of opportunity to observe. To put it mildly. You didn’t leave the treehouse for days. I was concerned. It was quite the relief to see you again, crossing the meadow to your outhouse.”

Mr. Bickert appeared in the doorway of the turret. Instead of his tray he had a trolley with a silver teapot about the size of a fire hydrant. There were also flowered teacups, and a sugar bowl and cream jug, trimmed in gold.

“Mr. Bickert,” Great-great-aunt Lydia said sharply. “Tell me what you know about
No Trespassing
signs on my fence.”

“
No Trespassing
signs?” he asked. He looked from Great-great-aunt Lydia to me, and back to her again. “
No Trespassing
signs. Hmmm. I don’t believe I know anything about No Trespassing signs.”

I distinctly remembered seeing him hand one to the workman, so I knew that he was lying. Besides, you could tell by the way his eyes were zipping all around. They reminded me of minnows that have just been caught in a saucepan. Maybe Mr. Bickert was feeling a bit like those minnows. Great-great-aunt Lydia was watching him carefully.

“What exactly did they say, Rosamund?” Great-great-aunt Lydia asked, without looking away from Mr. Bickert.

“
Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted
,” I said. It seemed embarrassing to quote the ones about the guard dog and the electric fence.“

‘
Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’
,” she repeated. “Tell me about those signs, Mr. Bickert.”

Mr. Bickert frowned and closed his eyes and drummed his fingers against his temples. “Oh, the signs,” he said. “Oh, wait a moment, now, I do remember something about signs! That’s right! The fence-builders put them up. Of course, I just assumed they said
Fence by Wedgewood
Construction
or something of that nature.
Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted
! Dear, dear, dear. I had no idea.”“

No idea, Mr. Bickert?” Great-great-aunt Lydia asked. “No idea such as scaring off my next of kin? No idea, such as keeping potential heirs away until I’m safely dead?”

“Certainly not, Madam,” he said, doing a shocked face. “Why, I’m delighted to have your young great-great-niece as our visitor.” He switched from his shocked face to give me a bare-toothed smile. It was so phony it looked like someone had cut it out of a magazine and stuck it on his face.

“No doubt,” Great-great-aunt Lydia said. Mr. Bickert clutched the humongous teapot as though it were his only friend. “Milk and sugar, Rosamund?” he asked.

“Yes, please. Four sugars,” I said. He poured the tea and handed me a fancy cup. He handed another to Great-great-aunt Lydia, and left us alone.

She raised her teacup almost to her lips, but she didn’t sip. She stared into the teacup as though she had forgotten what to do with it. “The fence,” she said very quietly. “I wonder if Mr. Bickert told me the right thing, about this legal advice that I was to build a fence. I just wonder now.”

She took a sip from her teacup, put it down, and looked at me. “Well. Grand Oak Manor can’t have seemed very welcoming,” she said. I could see that she was trying to smile, but she seemed sort of out of practice.

I shrugged. “I thought it was because of our family’s big split.”

“Our big split,” Great-great-aunt Lydia said. “Is that what your parents call it? And what do they say about it, the big split?”

“Not much, really. Dad doesn’t even know what caused it, so he mostly just wonders.” I hesitated. “I wonder too.”

“You wonder, do you?” Great-great-aunt Lydia was silent for a while. “Well, it has affected your family a great deal, there’s no doubt of that. And I suppose you’ll never know if I don’t tell you. So I will tell you, Rosamund, if that’s what you want.” I nodded. She lifted her rattling cup for a sip. I felt a thrill, because I knew the story I was about to hear would be a genuine grown-up drama.

“Well,” she began. “Your great-grandfather was a young man when the falling out occurred. He was still living at Grand Oak Manor then, along with me and Father. Your great-grandfather, Tavish, was my younger brother—I expect you know that. A year and a half younger, although he always seemed much younger than that. In those days I enjoyed my needlework and I had bought myself some special scissors. They were very well-made scissors, razor sharp.” She paused and stared at the shreds of steam rising from her cup. I waited in suspense for the violent part. Great-great-aunt Lydia took a sip and spoke again.

“My scissors suddenly disappeared. When I asked Tavish about them he said he had no recollection of any scissors, but that didn’t convince me he hadn’t taken them. He was a scatterbrain, Tavish. Eventually, it occurred to me to search the treehouse, the one you live in today. Of course, Tavish ought to have outgrown the treehouse by that age, but even at seventeen he often slept there. He always was mad for that treehouse. You see, he was not a very serious young man: certainly not so serious as Father would have liked. Father had great plans for Tavish. He intended Tavish to take over the family lumber business. He intended Tavish to take his place in high society. Tavish would have none of it. He didn’t want to ‘lose his life’ to Father’s plans, was how he insisted upon putting it. Always dramatic, was Tavish. Where was I?”

“The scissors,” I reminded her

.“Oh yes, the scissors. Well, as I say, I searched the treehouse, and there I found them, in the drawer of his bunk. He’d borrowed them, the way he borrowed everything else. There was hardly a thing I owned that he didn’t borrow. No sense of property at all. And not only had he borrowed my scissors, he’d damaged them. The blades were all askew. I can only think that he used them to cut rope. They were useless for needlework in that condition, which distressed me. I should add that these were very beautiful scissors—”

“With gold handles shaped like a bird, and blades for a beak,” I supplied.

“How did you know?” Great-great-aunt Lydia asked. “I found them when we moved in,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said. “That’s right. I left them there, to prove my point that they’d become useless to me. I recall doing that now. So now you know how they got there. And now you know the story of the split, as you call it, in the McGrady family.”

She stopped and sipped her tea. I did not see how that could possibly be the end of the story. “But I don’t get ...,” I said. “I mean, a pair of scissors ...I don’t see how....”

“Oh. Yes. Well, I was furious with Tavish, of course. I got Father on my side. That was always easy for me to do. And it always was important to me, to have Father on my side. Father and I both let Tavish know what we thought about him ruining the scissors. Of course, we went beyond the scissors. The scissors just showed his character, we told him. His irresponsible character. It was nothing we hadn’t said to him many times before. And he came with us to the opera that afternoon, just as usual. But in his mind there must have been something different about that particular scolding, because the next morning we discovered that he’d run away in the night. Father was furious, of course. But it was such an impulsive thing that we expected Tavish to come back. To
‘come crawling back’
, is what Father expected. But he never did. And I never spoke to him again. Nor did Father.”

“Wow,” I said, totally shocked. I had fully expected to be shocked when I finally heard the cause of the family split. But I’d expected to be shocked at the great big adult seriousness of it, and what shocked me was just the opposite.

“You’re surprised, Rosamund?” Great-great-aunt Lydia asked.

“Well, yes,” I admitted. “I mean, borrowing scissors. I just—I don’t know—like—I mean—I just wouldn’t expect something like that to cause a fight that lasts a whole lifetime.”

“No. No. One doesn’t expect it,” she said. “The thing about a life, though, is that it passes one moment at a time. And no single one of those moments seems the perfect one to end a quarrel.”

I nodded, thinking about my fight with Tilley, and we both got all quiet.

“When Great-grampa ran away,” I asked.

“Was he by himself?”

“Was he by himself. Well. No. He was not.”

“Was he with a girl called Isobel?”

“He was with your great-grandmother, yes.”

“What was she like?”

“I can’t say. I didn’t know her. She wasn’t of our class at all. She was an usherette at the Orpheum Theater. I’d seen her there, but I knew her name only by her name tag. Father could never fathom how Tavish had gotten to know her, with him being such a watchful parent. I never quite mustered the courage to tell Father about the note I’d found, oh, half a year before the elopement. I’d found it folded up inside Tavish’s glove the afternoon we’d seen Madame Butterfly. It said something about meeting at night at the treehouse. I questioned Tavish, naturally, and he managed to convince me that the note was from a school chum. It wasn’t signed, you see. And I was naïve, nothing like young women are today. I never guessed that a young man from the top rung of society would throw his future away on a girl with no advantages. It was only looking back, after he was gone, that I realized. Tavish and Isobel had probably been meeting in the treehouse for some time.”

I nodded. Her finding the note in the glove explained why Great-grampa had started using a code. I thought of mentioning the coded letter, but decided not to. Great-grampa had said it was a bad destiny, to lose his life by living it with her and Magnus at Grand Oak Manor. That could only hurt her feelings.

“I’ve given you nothing to eat,” Great-great-aunt Lydia said. “Children like to eat, after school, as I recall. I’ll have Mr. Bickert bring something.” I expected her to ring some kind of old-fashioned bell, but instead she unclipped a cell phone from the waistband of her tartan skirt.

“Mr. Bickert. Something to eat with our tea please.” She replaced the cell phone and turned to me. “Now tell me, Rosamund. Knowing of the family split, as you call it, and seeing the
No Trespassing
signs, what were you doing at Grand Oak Manor? Why were you at my basement window?”

I told her. I thought she had been surprisingly honest, so I took a deep breath and told the truth, too. I told her how I’d accidentally made Bridget believe I lived in Grand Oak Manor, and how it was too late to change my story, and how everybody wanted to visit Grand Oak Manor on Panther-Lamp Day.

The door opened and Mr. Bickert came in carrying a three-storey serving platter. I expected fancy goodies on a platter like this, but when he came closer I saw that each story was filled with those plain beige biscuits that babies and old people eat. The bottom storey had round ones, the middle storey had square ones, and the top storey had oval. Mr. Bickert fussed around, putting down little serving plates, and offering the biscuits, and pouring more tea, and adding milk, and clutching sugar lumps with tiny clawed tongs. I didn’t want to talk with him there, but I was afraid that if I waited for him to leave the subject would have changed from Panther-Lamp Day, and my chance would be gone.

“So I was wondering, Great-great-aunt Lydia,” I said. “I know you barely know me, and I know it’s a lot to ask, but I was wondering if I could maybe possibly hold Panther-Lamp Day here at Grand Oak Manor.”

“Hold it here?” Great-great-aunt Lydia asked. “If that would solve your problem, then yes, Rosamund, you may.”

The next part I
really
didn’t want to say with Mr. Bickert standing there, but he was rearranging the biscuits on the three-storey platter, and he showed no signs of leaving. I think he wanted to listen.

“And would it be okay,” I asked, “if I pretended to live here?”

Great-great-aunt Lydia paused. “I’d be pleased for you to tell people that this is your home,” she answered finally. “I’d be pleased for you to
consider
it your home.” At this Mr. Bickert froze at his cookie-arranging like a DVD on pause.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you
very
much. Like, very, very much. And I’m sorry to keep asking for favours, but there’s one more. Which is that we really don’t have any extra stuff for the sale, and I was wondering if you had any old things that you’d like me to sell for you.”