“Oh, very well. But do hurry. I have to get back to Oak Cottage directly.”
She held her breath as McCormick led the blue hound up to the summerhouse. She couldn’t see that far, but she heard Crusher’s ears flap as he shook his head impatiently.
“He don’t smell nothing here, Akins. Let’s us move along. C’mon,” McCormick shouted to the slaves grouped by the entrance. “We got us a nigger to catch.”
Mr. Akins lifted his hat, and Sophie gave him a little nod. He faded into the hedge. A moment later, she heard McCormick’s voice, startlingly close. “I would’ve bet a chaw of ’baccy the wench was there.”
“May be she was,” Mr. Akins said. “But she ain’t there now.” They passed around to the far side of the maze; when Sophie could hear their voices again, they were too far away for her to make out words. She counted slowly to one hundred, then she put on her glasses and tapped on the summerhouse door. “They’re gone.”
“Better make sure,” Africa said.
Sophie ran through the maze and peered out cautiously, saw a ragged figure behind a tree wave and point off toward Oak Cottage. She ran back to the garden as fast as her tight boots would let her.
“Africa! Antigua! You got to leave, right now! They’re headed up to Oak Cottage, and if they see Miss Liza, it won’t take long for Mr. Akins to put it all together.”
Africa burst out of the summerhouse, her arm around Antigua, who was almost unrecognizable in a gray dress, a black shawl, and an unbecoming fawn headwrap. She was carrying a straw basket and quivering with excitement.
Sophie handed Antigua the reticule with the travel pass. Antigua hugged Sophie, Africa said, “There ain’t time enough for that,” and then they were all hurrying through the maze and Sophie was wondering whether Uncle Italy was waiting where he’d said and whether she and Africa could get back to where they were supposed to be before anybody missed them. The boots pinched, the corset made her breath come short, and her glasses were so smudged nothing looked quite the way it should.
She ran into a dead end. It was one of the room-like ones, decorated with a classical statue, a plump lady with a sheet around her hips and a smirk on her marble lips. The name Belle Watling popped into Sophie’s mind.
Who on earth was Belle Watling?
Sophie shook her head angrily, and turned to lead Africa and Antigua back to the right path.
There was no one behind her.
Heart pounding, Sophie ran back along her track. Her skirts dragged on the grass, and the hoop caught in the raggedy hedges. The morning smelled of recent rain, and very faintly, of roses. A wet breeze blew her the calling of bobwhites and a faint, angry buzzing.
“Hey there, Miss Sophie,” said a voice, and a fat, piebald animal-like thing appeared in the air in front of her, grinning toothlessly.
Sophie gaped at it.
“How you like the magical adventure I done give you?”
“What are you talking about? What are you? Where are Antigua and Africa?”
“They gone to they just reward. That other question, I done answer before. You recollect, don’t you?”
Sophie felt the world tilt and spin around her, as if she was about to faint. Then everything settled again, and she remembered. She remembered everything: what the Creature was and what it had done, where she had been and when and who.
Her knees folded, and she sat down hard in the wet grass, her skirts mushrooming around her. The angry buzzing grew louder, and a small airplane bustled across the sky overhead.
“It a lot to recollect, all to once,” the Creature said.
Disconnected names bounced in Sophie’s head—Mr. Akins and Mama, The Time Garden and Antigua. Antigua! “I have to know, does Antigua get away? And does Africa get in trouble? What about Sally and Asia? And Canny. Does Canny get over her burns all right? Was she upset when I didn’t come back?”
The Creature rolled its amber eyes. “You think I gots nothing to do but hang around here all day granting you wishes?
“They’re not wishes,” Sophie said. “They’re questions.”
“Either way, I ain’t going to answer ’em. You ain’t got no part in that story no more.”
“Story?” Sophie was furious. “That wasn’t a story! It was real!”
“Of course it real.” The Creature was impatient. “Still a story, though.”
“I remember now. You said I had to finish a story so I could come home. It doesn’t feel finished, though.”
The Creature shrugged. “Well, you part finished, anyways.”
Sophie looked around, trying to make sense of where and when she was. The air was hot and close—summer, then—and the grass she sat in was wet. It might still be the day she left, or another just like it. Had she been gone for hours or days? Were the police looking for her? How much trouble was she in, anyway? “Creature,” she said. “Would you please tell me how long I’ve been gone?”
It cocked an eye at the cloudy sky. “Twenty minutes? Half an hour? Long enough. You better scoot on home.” And then it disappeared.
It would have taken Mr. Akins and his knotted whip to make Sophie scoot just then. She sat in the wet grass, trying to think. She’d wished so hard to come home, and now she was here, she hardly knew how she felt. She was hot and sad—oh, yes, and very tired. Which wasn’t so very different from how she’d been feeling for the last week. At least now she wasn’t scared half to death as well.
Chapter 22
“Sophie? Sophie! I know you’re hiding in here somewhere! It’s dinner-time!”
Someone was calling her from the center of the maze. Sophie hauled herself to her feet and walked slowly back, lifting her skirts free of the unmown grass. When she reached the garden, she had to steady herself against one of the moss-
covered urns. It was one thing to travel forward a hundred years; it was another to see the changes that a hundred years could make. Everything was overgrown with thistles and weeds; the summerhouse was a shapeless mound of Virginia creeper and climbing roses.
A sturdy white woman stood beside the broken sundial. She looked as run to seed as the garden, with an untidy bun and a faded cotton dress that showed her legs almost to the knee. Still, she was a white woman, and potentially dangerous. Sophie’s pulse beat nervously.
The woman, turned, saw Sophie, and went still. Like a muskrat caught raiding the bean patch, Sophie thought. “Hello, Aunt Enid.”
“Jesus have mercy,” Aunt Enid said shakily. “It called me Aunt. And in broad daylight, too.” She closed her eyes and clasped her hands. “Our Father, which art in Heaven—”
Fighting an unholy desire to giggle, Sophie removed the bonnet. “I’m not a ghost, Aunt Enid. I’m Sophie. I’m back.”
Aunt Enid’s eyes sprang open. She looked Sophie up and down, only half-convinced. “Sophie? Why are you dressed up like the Girl in Yellow?”
“Not the Girl in Yellow. Miss Elizabeth Fairchild.”
“Who is Miss Elizabeth Fairchild? And how did you come by that dress? Not to mention the shawl and bonnet?”
“The bonnet was a present. I stole the dress and the shawl.”
Aunt Enid’s face was a study. “You stole them! Sophie Martineau, you tell me what’s going on here, or I swear I’ll—I don’t know what I’ll do. Bust, I expect.”
Sophie sighed. “You won’t believe me.”
“I don’t expect I will,” said Aunt Enid. “But, with the help of the Good Lord, I aim to try. There can’t be any easy explanation for you to be a good three inches taller than you were an hour ago.”
“Three inches taller?” Sophie said. “Really?”
“At least. And you’ve filled out in the bosom, too.”
“Oh, that’s rags,” said Sophie, but she knew it wasn’t, not entirely. “Miss Liza’s seventeen, nearly.”
“Miss Liza?” Aunt Enid’s voice was grim, and her face was pale under her tan. “That would be the Miss Elizabeth Fairchild you mentioned earlier?”
Sophie to
ok pity on her. “I’ll tell you all about it, Aunt Enid, I promise. But let’s sit down. It’s a long story.”
They went to the stone bench under the rose arbor. Or rather, where the arbor had been—it had long since rotted and collapsed. The bench was still there, though it was cracked and dirty and thick with rain-wet moss. It would stain her dress, Sophie thought, and pulled the shawl from her shoulders to sit on.
Aunt Enid settled herself on the far end of the bench, propped her hands on her knees, and watched as Sophie stripped off the tan gloves and laid them in her bonnet.
“Well,” said Aunt Enid tartly. “I’m waiting.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“You can start with Miss Elizabeth Fairchild.”
Sophie had heard that tone before, from Old Missy. It made her want to invent a soothing lie that would make her aunt stop looking at her like that. But this was 1960. Aunt Enid wasn’t Old Missy, and Sophie had no soothing lie to tell. “Elizabeth Fairchild lived here, Aunt Enid, on Oak River Plantation, in Oak Cottage. A hundred years ago, in 1860.”
“And just what does that have to do with you?”
“I was there. I went back in time.”
Aunt Enid’s hands clenched on her shamefully skimpy skirt. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“No.” For the first time, Sophie dared look up from her lap and straight into her aunt’s eyes. “But it’s the truth.”
“My land,” said Aunt Enid.
Sophie closed her eyes. She was so tired she felt dizzy—or maybe it was because she hadn’t eaten in a hundred years.
A hundred years. That was funny. Sophie giggled.
“I’m glad you find the situation so amusing.” Aunt Enid’s voice was dry.
Sophie bit her lip. “I don’t. At least, I guess I won’t, once I really understand I’m back. It’s been almost six months for me.”
“Almost six months,” said Aunt Enid. “I declare. And where did you spend those six months, exactly?”
“In the Big House, at first. But I got sent to the sugarhouse after Old Missy thought I’d stolen Miss Liza’s hairbrush.”
Aunt Enid looked, if possible, even more spooked than she had before. “Do you mean to tell me, Sophie Martineau, that you imagine that you’ve spent the last six months as a slave?”
“Yes, ma’am. Except I didn’t imagine it. It was the shirtwaist and the tan and being barefoot, I think. And looking like a Fairchild.” Sophie looked at the bonnet on her lap. “Turned out to be a blessing in the end.”
“Lord have mercy.”
Silence fell. Sophie wasn’t inclined to break it. It was pleasant just to sit still, though she wished she could get out of the corset and the boots, take off the heavy skirt and jacket and be comfortable in her homespun dress again. How white ladies stood all this paraphernalia was a mystery to her. Even in summer, they wore petticoats and crinolines and long drawers and heavy cotton stockings.
A woman was calling her. Sounded like Old Missy.
“Coming, ma’am,” Sophie muttered, and pried her eyes open to see Aunt Enid peering into her face.
“Don’t you fall asleep on me, Sophie Martineau. I don’t know what to make of your story, and that’s a fact. But I can see with my own eyes that something out of the way has happened to you. Not even a nearly fourteen-year-old girl can turn into a young woman between 10 o’clock Eucharist and Sunday dinner. So let’s say, for the sake of a quiet life, that you haven’t run mad and you’re not lying—”
“Thank you for believing me,” Sophie said.
“I’m not saying I believe you. I’m saying . . . Well, I don’t quite know what I’m saying. What I do know is what Sister would say. She’d say you’ve lost your mind, and have you in some godforsaken hospital or other before you could say Jack Robinson.”
“Oh, Lordy.” Panic kicked Sophie’s brain awake. “I’ve got to change!” She looked at Aunt Enid uncertainly. “I don’t suppose you’d mind bringing me some clothes.”
With the subject of slaves and time travel safely behind them, Aunt Enid seemed to relax. “Don’t be silly, child. Of course I’ll bring your clothes. If you’ve got anything that’ll fit.”
Sophie considered. “A skirt, maybe? A short-sleeve shirt? I need underwear, too. And I’ll make a start getting out of all this. I might need help with the corset, though. It took Asia and Sally both to get me into it.” Tears prickled the back of her nose. Were they all right? Had Antigua got away? She’d never know.
She wished she’d been able to say good-bye to Canny.
Aunt Enid stood. “Asia? Never mind; I don’t want to hear. I’ll bring an old sheet to wrap that dress in.”
By the time her aunt returned, Sophie was down to corset and drawers. She had rubbed the powder off her face with her petticoat, taken the combs out of her hair, and ruthlessly twisted it into her usual braids.
“My land,” said Aunt Enid. “What have you done to your hair? You look like a—” She stopped dead, spread the sheet on the bench, transferred Miss Liza’s walking dress onto it, motioned for Sophie to turn around, and untied her laces.
“You can’t wear your hair like that,” she said carefully. “Two braids are fine, or one, now that you’re almost grown-up. But six is too—old-fashioned.”
“You mean only black folks wear lots of braids,” Sophie said.
“Negroes,” said Aunt Enid, working the laces loose. “The polite term is Negroes.”
The corset joined the other clothes, and Aunt Enid turned her back while Sophie took off the chemise and drawers and put on cotton underpants, the skirt to her seersucker suit, and a sleeveless cotton blouse. The blouse was too tight across her chest, and the skirt barely reached her knees. Feeling half-naked, Sophie tugged at the hem self-consciously.
Aunt Enid tsked fretfully. “You look a sight. Sister may be in the devil’s own temper, but she’s not stone blind. Come on in the kitchen and I’ll think what to do.”
Oak Cottage was like a house remembered from a dream. The kitchen, once the storeroom where Mr. Beau had cornered Antigua, was fitted with luxuries Africa couldn’t have imagined. Sophie thought she would have loved the icebox and the running water in the sink, but wasn’t sure what she’d make of the electric stove.
“Here.” Aunt Enid thrust an old denim gardening shirt into her hands. “Put this on. I need to get dinner while I’m thinking. It’s the blessing of God that Sister’s too put out to come down until I call her.”
She opened the oven to baste the roasting chicken. Noticing a bunch of greens in the sink, Sophie got a knife and a cutting board and chopped them up. When she went to look for a bowl to put them in, she saw Aunt Enid staring at her like she’d sprouted wings. “It’s getting a little wearing, being astonished every whipstitch. I suppose you miraculously know how to cook, too.”
“Just gumbo and such—nothing fancy. I watched Miss Liza make jelly once.”
Aunt Enid got her cornered muskrat look. “That’s as may be. Now sit down and be still.”
Obediently, Sophie sat and let her heavy eyelids drift shut. Next thing she knew, she was smelling something delicious and Aunt Enid was telling her to wake up. “You take this right on up to your room and don’t come down to dinner. I’ll tell Sister you took sick. It’s not even a fib. You look terrible.”
Sophie looked from her aunt to the tray in front of her. The heaped plate of chicken and greens was more food than she’d eaten at one meal for six months. The ice tea had a sprig of mint in it. She got up and put her arms around her aunt. “Thank you, Aunt Enid. I’m glad to be home. I missed you.”
Aunt Enid was shorter than she remembered, and smelled of lavender and garden soil. She patted Sophie on the back. “There, there,” she said. “There’s no need to take on. Run on upstairs now, and don’t worry about a thing. Sister will be driving back to New Orleans directly after dinner.”
Sophie ate her chicken and greens without tasting them; going to sleep was like falling
off a cliff. She woke at dawn, convinced she’d overslept, that she’d be late getting to the sugarhouse and Mr. Akins would be mad.
It took her a minute to remember that she was back in 1960, where slavery was against the law, and Mr. Akins was dust. She also remembered that Mama had left without saying good-bye. Whatever had been changed by Sophie’s time in the past, it wasn’t Mama.
Feeling odd, Sophie went into the bathroom and rediscovered the glories of modern plumbing. She ran herself a scalding bath, scrubbed her skin with scented soap that didn’t sting, and washed the dirt and tangles out of her hair with shampoo and cream rinse. Aunt Enid’s threadbare towels seemed impossibly luxurious and fluffy, but Sophie couldn’t find a thing to wear that didn’t look downright indecent on her. She finally settled on Aunt Enid’s shirt and a cotton skirt, then braided her hair in two tails and went down to breakfast.
“You look like a charity child,” Aunt Enid said. “ We’ll have to buy you some new clothes. Eat up and we’ll drive into Lafayette.”
Sophie would rather have stayed home, but it never occurred to her to say so. As soon as Ofelia’s rattletrap Chevy pulled up at Oak Cottage, Aunt Enid bundled Sophie into her old pink Thunderbird and headed for the road to Lafayette. Hanging on to the door, Sophie gritted her teeth against the noise and stink and wished horse-drawn carriages hadn’t gone out of fashion.
She’d completely forgotten about traffic. The first time a truck roared past the Thunderbird, she almost jumped out of her skin. Aunt Enid shot her a worried look, and she smiled reassuringly back. She didn’t want her aunt thinking she’d gone crazy.
In Lafayette, Aunt Enid took her to a dress shop. The salesladies clucked and exclaimed just like Asia and Hepzibah when they saw her gingham shirtwaist back in 1860, except that the salesladies were white and Sophie was a customer, so they had to be polite. It all made Sophie feel horribly uncomfortable. But by the time the purchases were paid for and wrapped, she’d recovered a little more of her balance. She knew she was back in the twentieth century, where there were cars and dress shops, and the black woman who brought her fried catfish at the Cajun Café belonged to nobody but herself.
Delia Sherman Page 21
