Allegra shook her head. “Not today,” she said. “Maybe next Monday.”
Chapter Six
It was on the next Monday that Harleigh had a discussion with Uncle Edgar about why they were still having school every weekday, even though all the other schools in the whole country, probably in the whole world, were shut down for summer vacation.
The discussion happened just after Harleigh arrived in the library, where Uncle Edgar had settled himself down at his favorite table behind a big stack of books. After listening to Harleigh’s argument, he nodded his big head and said that one important reason was that their study schedule had been arranged by Adelaide the Great.
“And another, slightly more reasonable reason might be that when all those other schools are in session, they have classes that last all day long. And our little mental workouts”—Uncle Edgar was obviously trying to make a joke of it, pretending to be exercising, raising his big arms up and down lifting imaginary dumbbells—“our little workouts seldom last more than two or three hours. Particularly lately. Lately we haven’t been spending even that much time hitting the books.”
“Yes, I know,” Harleigh said. “But you said that I’d been learning a lot better and faster lately. You did, didn’t you? You told me that I’d been finishing lessons in just a few hours that you’d thought would last at least a week. Didn’t you? So why should I have to sit around for weeks learning stuff just because a less intelligent student would need that long to learn it?”
Uncle Edgar’s grin had a teasing tilt to it that Harleigh didn’t appreciate as he said, “And I take it you’re saying that we’re discussing a student who’s bigger and better than average. In every possible way?”
Harleigh gritted his teeth and stared at his tutor through half-closed eyes. Uncle Edgar knew, or he ought to know, how Harleigh hated any mention of his size. If that was what he was hinting about when he said “bigger and better than average,” he, Harleigh Weatherby the Fourth, was going to walk out of the room and slam the door and never spend another hour with that stupid old man. . . .
But then, on second thought, he realized that the teasing probably had something to do with his own comment about “less intelligent students.” With how he, Harleigh, had made it clear that he considered himself to be a lot more intelligent than any ordinary twelve-year-old. Which of course was true, but maybe it did sound a little boastful to come right out and say so. So Harleigh cooled down and went back to asking if they couldn’t have all summer off, like other schools.
Uncle Edgar nodded slowly, “Well, you know it’s not up to me. You’ll have to speak to Adelaide the Great about it. And good luck. I think you’ll need it.”
Harleigh knew that was the truth. And he also knew that Uncle Edgar and most of the other descendants resented the way Aunt Adelaide ran everything and made all the decisions. But Harleigh didn’t feel that way. At least not always. What he thought was that Aunt Adelaide controlled everything because she couldn’t help it. Because as a direct-descendant Weatherby, she was born to be that way. And what he also thought was that he, Harleigh Four, was going to be the same kind of person. And someday he was going to be the one who made all the decisions about what went on in Weatherby House, as well as about even more important things.
“I guess I’ll go ask her right now,” he told Uncle Edgar. “Okay?”
Shrugging heavily, Uncle Edgar said, “Suit yourself.”
Harleigh didn’t have far to go. Most of the bedrooms at Weatherby House were on the second and third floors, but because of her wheelchair Aunt Adelaide had long ago chosen a room on the main floor. A huge room that had once been an auditorium, or as Aunt Adelaide called it, the “recital hall.”
According to Aunt Adelaide, the homes of very important people always used to have recital halls so they could have entertainments (plays and concerts and solo performances) for their friends. But now the recital hall at Weatherby House was just Aunt Adelaide’s bedroom. An enormous room packed full of the best and most valuable Weatherby antiques—not only the huge canopied bed where Aunt Adelaide slept, but also many other especially old and valuable pieces of furniture.
At one end of the long, narrow room there was a raised and curtained-off area that had once been a stage where people had sung and danced and played musical instruments. A stage where the curtains had been closed for many years and where (he’d peeked once or twice) there was nothing to see but a lot of dust and a couple of old pianos.
When Harleigh Four entered the room that morning, Aunt Adelaide was sitting in her wheelchair pulled up to a large table covered with important-looking papers. She was wearing a robe made of purple velvet, and her long gray hair was tucked up in a matching purple cap. There was no sign of Cousin Josephine, but Harleigh knew she had to be close enough to hear if Aunt Adelaide rang her bell.
“Well, well, Harleigh Four,” Aunt Adelaide said, “to what do I owe this visit? An unsummoned visit? You must want something. What is it that you want?” Aunt Adelaide’s smile was showing all her long white teeth. But Harleigh knew her well enough to know that her smiles didn’t always mean that she was in a friendly frame of mind.
“What I came to ask you . . .,” he began, and then started over. “I was wondering if . . .”
“Yes. Yes. Do go on, child,” Aunt Adelaide interrupted impatiently.
Harleigh stuck out his chin, narrowed his eyes, and demanded, “Why can’t I have summers off, like people who go to real schools?”
There was no immediate answer. Instead, Aunt Adelaide met Harleigh’s stare with one of her own. The famous rock-hard Weatherby stare that Uncle Edgar said could turn Vesuvius into a glacier.
But Harleigh stared right back, and after what seemed like a fairly endless standoff Aunt Adelaide asked, “And what does Edgar say about this idea?”
Without blinking or hesitating, Harleigh answered, “He said I’d have to ask you. So I am.”
She nodded. “Yes, so you are. And that does sounds like your Uncle Edgar. Letting someone else do his fighting for him.” And then Aunt Adelaide’s steely eyes met Harleigh’s again, and to his surprise she said, “All right. You’ve won your case for more vacation time. For the rest of the summer you may have two more free days per week. Say, Mondays and Wednesdays? You may go now and tell Edgar the good news. I’m sure he’ll be delighted.”
If Uncle Edgar was delighted, he didn’t say so. But what he did say was that he was surprised—at least on the one hand. “On the other,” he said, “I’m not surprised that you were the one who was able to pull it off. What it comes down to is the fact that you’re almost as hardheaded as she is.”
Harleigh didn’t think Uncle Edgar meant that as a compliment, but he took it as one. He was definitely planning to be as hardheaded and powerful as Aunt Adelaide and Harleigh the First combined, and the things he would do would be a lot bigger and more important. He hadn’t quite decided what those things would be, but he was working on it, and he knew it would happen. And when it did, that would show all the people who had such a good time laughing at him because of his size. He was planning to show them all. All the people at Riverbend School and here in Weatherby House, too. That was definitely what he was going to do someday. But right at the moment, what he was intending to do was to leave Weatherby House and head for the black walnut tree as fast as he could go.
Chapter Seven
It was still quite early when Harleigh arrived at the black walnut tree that day. Allegra wasn’t there yet, so he sat down to wait. He sat with his back against the trunk of the tree and wondered whether she really knew how to find the entrance to the maze, and whether she would show him how to get there. After a while he picked up a stick and poked at the rough ground between the roots of the tree and thought about the cup and saucer Allegra had found there, and what she’d said about the children who had once owned them.
He remembered hearing Aunt Adelaide say that there had once been lots of children at Weatherby House, Harleigh the Fi
rst’s children, most of whom had died young. So Allegra was probably right when she guessed that the tree house had been built for children who had died many years ago.
He stopped poking with the stick and listened to the silence, thinking about how far he was from Weatherby House and Riverbend and everywhere else in the world where you could hear normal sounds and noises. It was always quiet in the overgrown, deserted Weatherby gardens, but today seemed even quieter than usual. No sounds at all. No breezy whisper among the branches of the tree, and not even the faintest echo of traffic noises from the distant avenue.
And yet . . . and yet, Harleigh was beginning to hear—or imagine he was hearing—something. From a faint, high-pitched murmur it gradually changed to something like faraway singing. Like someone in the far distance singing a children’s song. A song that sounded a lot like something that Alice, one of his nursemaids, used to sing to him at bedtime. He remembered Alice saying it was an old song she had sung when she was a little girl. Old enough, he wondered, that it might have been sung by the children who had once played in the tree house?
He was on his feet, his back pressed against the tree trunk, his eyes darting from side to side, when the strange haunting song became a rustling noise that seemed to come from the direction of the bamboo thicket. The rustle grew louder and came closer, the bamboo thrashed and parted—and Allegra appeared. She looked the same as before, barefooted and dressed in her ragged gown, but she wasn’t singing. Not anymore at least.
Harleigh took a deep breath and then had to bite his tongue. What he really wanted to do was to let her know he was angry, except he couldn’t think of a way to explain why. So all he said was, “Where have you been? I’ve been here for a long time.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Allegra said. “Am I late?”
He glanced at his watch and said—nothing, because actually she wasn’t. He was early. But in the meantime she had turned away, jumped to grab the top metal handhold, and started scrambling her way up. When the other rods were in place and Harleigh had joined her in the tree house (he was getting better at the climb), he was the first to speak. He began by telling her about his new summer schedule and then, before she had finished agreeing to be there early on Mondays and Wednesdays, he interrupted to say, “And now it’s my turn to ask a question. When are you going to show me the maze?”
Her smile was teasing. “Soon,” she said. “Just as soon as you promise to show me Weatherby House.”
Harleigh glared. He was getting to his feet, pretending to be leaving, when she reached up to tug at his pant leg. “Don’t go,” she said. “I didn’t mean it. When do you want to see it?”
“Right now,” Harleigh said.
Actually, it wasn’t far away. This time they followed a path that led through another bamboo thicket, but in a different direction, and came out into a grove of saplings where the going was easier and there was more light. Then, just as the forest closed in again and the light dimmed, Allegra stopped and pointed to a place where a fir tree had collapsed against what seemed to be a high prickly hedge.
“It starts here,” she said. “Those thick hedges are the beginning of the maze. From here they curve around and just keep on going.”
“So those are yew trees.” Harleigh felt excited. “They were sent here from England a long time ago. I’ve heard about them and seen them in pictures, but I didn’t know what they looked like up close.” He moved closer to touch the stiff green branches with their hard prickly leaves and to stare up at the solid hedgelike wall. “I’ve been past here before, but I wasn’t sure it was part of the maze. I thought it might be, but I couldn’t find the way in.”
Allegra nodded. “It’s not easy to find the entrance. It’s hidden by that dead tree. I’ll show you where.” Pulling back a branch of the fallen fir, she ducked under it and disappeared. Harleigh followed her, and a moment later he was standing at the beginning of a path that led between two towering green walls. The passageway was tunnel-like, narrow, and not very high.
“It was completely overgrown,” Allegra said. “I wanted to open it clear up to the sky, but I can’t reach up that high. And then my shears broke when there was still a long way to go. Come on, I’ll show you. And be careful. Yews are scratchy.”
The narrow tunnel continued for several yards before it turned a corner and split in two. “This way,” Allegra said. “That turnoff leads to one of the dead ends. I went that way first and wasted a lot of time. It just curves around and comes back into the main passageway.”
Farther along, the tunnel split once more before it suddenly dead-ended. Even near the ground, untrimmed branches of yew reached toward each other from each side, blocking any further progress. “This is as far as I got before my shears broke,” Allegra said.
“Your shears?” Harleigh asked. The only shearing he remembered hearing about was something that happened to sheep.
“You know. A gardener’s tool, like great big scissors.” She pantomimed cutting with shears. “Do you have a pair?”
“Oh, those things. I don’t have any, but I think I know where I could get some.”
They went back to the tree house then and spent the rest of the morning talking about the maze. Allegra said she’d wanted to see a real maze ever since she’d first heard about them.
“They’re just so mysterious,” she said. “Like a huge green puzzle that you can get lost in unless you know its secrets. And then I found it. My own maze, that nobody knew about but me.” Her eyes widened even more. “I wanted to learn the way through right away. But the pathway was so overgrown, there were a lot of places I couldn’t get through at all. So I decided I’d open it up. I’ve been working on it for a long time.” She shrugged. “But then my shears broke.”
Listening to her, Harleigh had mixed feelings. He had to agree that mazes were an especially interesting subject. He’d thought about them for a long time. He’d even read up on the subject in the Weatherby library. But Allegra ought to know better than to call it her own maze.
“Well, I’ve always known about it,” he said. “I’ve even seen old photographs of what it used to look like. When I started looking for it I couldn’t find it. But now that I have, I think I’ll just . . .” He paused, considering just what he would do now.
“Yes,” she said eagerly. “Now we can finish opening it up together. We can start on Wednesday. Okay?”
So on Wednesday, Harleigh came well-equipped. In a large, dusty toolroom behind the Weatherby carriage house, he had found all sorts of gardening equipment, including any number of shears, rakes, and handsaws.
But opening up the maze turned out to be a lot more hard physical labor than Harleigh had expected. On that first day, he had a hard time keeping up with Allegra and went home with blistered palms and a lot of stiff muscles. So, starting the next afternoon, after his lesson with Uncle Edgar, he went back and worked at least two hours more all by himself. So that was how it went from then on. On Monday and Wednesday mornings he worked with Allegra, and during the rest of the week as many other hours as he could get away.
It got to be a routine he was very good at. A quick dash through dead gardens, bamboo thickets, and groves of saplings, and he would arrive at the maze scarcely out of breath. After retrieving the tools from their hiding place near the maze entrance, he would start to work, cutting the overgrown branches into small pieces and shoving them under the hedge walls. In only an hour or two the pathway through the maze would be longer by several yards.
Now and then Harleigh did ask himself why he was working so hard, but the only answer he could come up with was that it felt like an important thing to do. He wasn’t sure why. It might just be something to do with the size of it. He’d always preferred big things—like Weatherby House, for instance. But another reason might have to do with the fact that the maze had been such an important part of Weatherby history, so putting it back in shape was one way to start making things the way they used to be.
As the days passed, the maz
e’s tunneled passageway became a lot longer and more complicated, but not any higher. It would have taken a much taller person than either Harleigh or Allegra to accomplish the open-to-the-sky corridor it had once been. And each day it became more of a challenge, as they reached new turns, twists, looping intersections, and dead ends, and had to spend more time memorizing their way back to the entrance. It wasn’t easy. There were so many places where you could take a wrong turn.
Another, less important, reason Harleigh liked working on the maze was simply that while they were busy there, Allegra spent less time pestering him about letting her visit the House. She still brought it up now and then, but when she did Harleigh found he could put her off by saying he wanted to finish the maze first. To discover the hidden exit that, in the old days, so few Weatherby guests had been able to find by themselves. Allegra seemed to agree that finding the exit was an important goal, and whenever Harleigh mentioned it she usually stopped begging to see the House and went back to shearing and chopping.
In July the weather turned very hot, but it was shady in the tunneled passageway. Shady, and further dimmed now and then by a shadowy green tinged light that seemed to seep out of the surrounding walls of yew, making nearby things look far away, or sometimes just the opposite. The strange greenish light did have a mysterious feel to it, but when Allegra said it was caused by a ghost passing through, Harleigh snorted.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “More Weatherby ghosts. Like the one on the balcony?”
Allegra shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not like Sheila. Not as sad as Sheila. But ghosts can get lost in the real world, and I think most of them are sad.”
Harleigh didn’t know what she was talking about, and he told her so. But there were times when he was alone in the maze when he heard faint echoes that sounded like distant voices. He was pretty sure the sounds came from the wind in the yew trees or maybe from birds. But even so, he did sometimes wonder if there were other things he needed to learn about the maze that might be as important as how to find the way out.
The Treasures of Weatherby Page 4
