Time and the Tapestry

by John Plotz

  Well, something finally had happened. So I should be the happy one—but it was Ed who was humming to himself. Somehow the first thing that came to mind was what this all had to do with all the fantasy games we’d played over the years. Ed liked it when we played at being Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock, but my favorite game was called Fantastic Voyage. Riding a tiny submarine inside somebody’s veins appealed to me way more than barrelling through space a zillion miles from home.

  “Since we’re along for the ride, Mead”—Ed’s voice snapped me back to our roof—“maybe we can—”

  “Maybe you can tell me,” Mead cut in gruffly, “if you know anything useful about the Tapestry that got us into this mess.”

  “Well,” said Ed, flipping back excitedly through his notebook, “I can tell you about William Morris. He was born just north of London, in 1834. He grew up riding around Epping Forest”—he flipped a page—“wearing a little suit of medieval armor and imagining that he was Ivanhoe.”

  “I can tell you more than that,” I broke in. “Along with Leonardo and Thomas Edison, he’s Granny’s hero. She told us that when we make stencils, or design window tracings, or even try to make woodblocks for wallpaper, we’re learning to make art the way he did.”

  Ed cut me off again. “If you really, really want something in your house, you ought to know how to make it yourself. The first one you make isn’t going to be as beautiful as you had your heart set on, and probably the second or third or even the fourth won’t be, either. But maybe the fifth!”

  I held up my hands for Mead to inspect. “So you see, that’s why I have this cut over here—that’s from a chisel. And this little scar here is only from hot wax—Granny says we’re lucky it wasn’t molten glass. And this finger bends back funny because one day my stencil tool slipped and …”

  Finger in his notebook, Ed cut me off, slipping into the routine I secretly call the computer wore sneakers: “Morris and his Company designed or helped to design amazing new kinds of furniture, glassware, stained glass, tiles, wallpaper—that was very popular!—rugs, printed books, and, oh yes, tapestries. Plus”—blushing a little—“I think there are more but I kind of squashed a brownie onto my list.”

  Mead gave a little wing-flirt; a shrug. “Facts, facts, facts!” he suddenly grated out. “My goodness, Edward, what are you planning to do with all of them; open a shop?” Ed stared back at him blankly, as if Mead had asked him what he was going to do with his heart, stomach, and kidneys.

  I started to rise to Ed’s defense, but Mead kept talking in the sort of creaky crabby voice I associated with the old guy ahead of you in line at the store, who just knows that his senior discount card is in here somewhere if you could give him a minute, for Pete’s sake

  “I didn’t bring you here to lecture me about the birth of Arts and Crafts,” Mead went on. “I’m sure you do enough of that to your schoolmasters.” I suppressed a snort; I had seen the slightly glazed eyes of Ed’s photography teacher the day Ed started talking about Emery Walker and photogravure techniques in the 1880s. Mead was running one claw hurriedly across his breast, as if he were ironing his feathers back in place. “Don’t you two realize that we haven’t much time? Not much time at all before—” He stopped abruptly.

  “Before what, Mead?” Then I had a sudden thought. “Mead,” I started to ask, “do your feathers have—”

  “Before,” he went on in a louder voice, “we finish decoding this mysterious poem.” There went the feather below his right eye. He watched me watching it fall, then we both turned our heads to watch Ed make a tally mark in his notebook. “Twenty-six, minimum,” Ed said audibly, but seemingly to himself. Mead and I looked at each other warily; did we want to know what Ed thought it meant that this was the twenty-sixth feather Mead had lost? A pause. No.

  So quickly that Mead probably missed it, Ed threw me a glance. Sometimes our brother-sister telepathy kicks in at moments like this. When it does, it’s always my job to say whatever we’re thinking.

  “Mead,” I began humbly. Everyone knows I can out-humble Ed; it’s one reason we’re such a good team. “There’s obviously something we need to know.” Mead was nodding approvingly as I said this.

  Unfortunately, I went on. “And I bet there’s something William Morris needs, too, if we can only find out what it is.”

  At this, Mead glared indignantly and gave what would have been an extremely loud squawk if he hadn’t managed to cut if off after the first Sqw—. “What He needs?” Mead said. “What He needs is what great artists always need. He needs—” The two of us were silent; Ed had his pencil poised. Mead, though, only glared and harrumphed (something I’d only read about in books before, but when Mead harrumphed there was no mistaking it).

  “What Morris needs will, I hope, become apparent to you as we go along,” he said. It seemed to be his last word on the subject.

  There was a long pause and then I said, “Well, since I won that poetry-memorizing contest last year, I guess it’s my job to say that we are now officially looking for ‘roses dun’ and ‘a ship with shields before the sun.’”

  Mead gave me another of those little wing buffets, which had the scary effect of pushing me a lot closer to the edge of the roof, and the open windows below us. “That,” he said briskly, “is the most sensible thing you’ve said this morning. Join your sister above that window, Ed, and let’s see what we can hear.”

  As he bullied us forward, Mead cleared his throat and added, “Err, I suppose you need to know a few more, err, um …”

  Ed, head still down, but with a sneaky smile, muttered, “A few facts, Mead?”

  “Details,” said Mead stiffly, “pertinent historical details is what you’d like to hear now. It matters to you that William Morris headed off in 1852 to Oxford University. And it matters that right away he found himself a lifelong friend, Edward Burne-Jones. That he also picked out his first true teacher: the art historian John Ruskin.”

  Even though Mead kept talking, I had a hard time concentrating, and I noticed that I’d started to get goose bumps. Because underneath his rumble I could hear something from inside: a husky but highly enthusiastic voice saying “Oh my dear Burne-Jones, it’s so good to find someone else who loves churches, and the Middle Ages, and most of all John Ruskin!”

  Peeping in, we could see it was unmistakably an almost grown-up version of the boy who’d yelled “Yoicks” at us. He busily hoisting into place above his bed a slightly terrifying bust. It depicted the sort of bearded professor who looked like he regularly spoke with the President—or with God.

  His roommate, who was stroking an amazingly long and wispy beard for such a young man, glanced nervously up at the bust. “Err, yes,” he said dubiously. “Yes, quite quite … He’s, err, well he’s very, ummmmmm …”

  Burne-Jones never got beyond “ummmmmmmm”; Morris was waving his arms around enthusiastically, getting a bit red in the face. “Yes, you’re absolutely right, absolutely right; isn’t he just? Thanks to Ruskin I finally understand what it means for each of us to labor passionately at what we love doing, and to strive to make our own corner of the world beautiful. Ruskin’s love of handicraft has persuaded me to give up on being a priest, and instead to become …”

  Ed, unable to resist, poked his head through the open window at this moment and blurted out, “A tapestry weaver!”

  I yanked him back out, and Mead dropped right off the ledge. As we zoomed away I heard Morris finishing his sentence, “… an architect.” Then, after a very short pause, “I say, Ned old thing, did you hear a ruckus outside? Or a rumpus?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Girl of the Ledge

  “Well, 1852 doesn’t seem to be our year, does it?” said Mead irritably. “May I recommend a little less talk next time, Edward—and a little more burglary!”

  By this point, we were already circling back toward what looked like the same heavy gray cloud we’d dropped from. I watched with concern as feathers—three, four, five of them—flicked free fr
om the underside of his left wing. We wobbled and lurched suddenly, dropping for a moment before resuming our shaky climb.

  “Mead?” Those feathers.

  “If I can manage this next flight right, we might want to try for December 1855.” Mead had a neat knack for ignoring what he didn’t want to talk about. I heard a crisp “Now hold tight!” A little tunnel opened up in the bottom of that ponderous cumulus cloud, and in we went. For a second I had that same misty feeling you get when you walk into the bathroom while someone else is showering. After that, a tug. More than a tug really, as if a giant had taken hold of me from two directions and yanked me apart, just for a second, then let me slap back into one piece. We were banking out of the clouds again; I shot a look over at Ed to see if he felt as awful as me. Head bent over his notebook, he was adding up a column of numbers with a frown.

  I recognized the spires and the river instantly—except for an eerie sense that the southern horizon had changed (a dome less, a factory more?), it was the same town. “Oxford!” I shouted quickly, just for the pleasure of beating Mead to it: He closed his beak with an irritated snap. The window ledge we landed on, though, was broader, almost a miniature balcony, and the room we glimpsed behind a set of velvet curtains (a beautiful blue-gray, like a cat’s back) was considerably fancier than Morris’s last. As Ed and I cautiously sidled forward off Mead’s back, he cleared his throat.

  “When he graduated Oxford with Ned Burne-Jones, Morris had, err, errrr, taken on a new nickname: Topsy.” He paused for a moment, daring us to giggle. When we kept silent, he gave a brief nod and said, “You’ll have recognized the reference to the curly-haired heroine of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?”

  I kept my face politely blank, a trick I’d learned while listening to Ed talk about photogravure. After a moment Mead went on. “Well, Morris and Burne-Jones graduated knowing only two things for certain: that they loved the Middle Ages, and that they were artists. Morris was a hero-worshipper in those days, and he picked an unlikely set of heroes.”

  Ed, pencil at the ready, clearly wanted to know about those heroes: I didn’t need to glance over to know that he already had a page labeled PERTINENT DETAILS and a neatly ruled column, MORRIS HEROES. For me, though, there was something more important to clear up first.

  “Mead?” I whispered urgently. “This is starting to feel all weird, like a video game. Is this …” I trailed off, not sure what I meant to say. “I mean, I’m actually here? Not in a hospital bed with a concussion. Not inside somebody else’s dreams. Really in Oxford in 1855?”

  Mead stared at me for a second. Then very gingerly he reached a claw sideways and poked a tiny bundle on the ledge next to me, something I hadn’t noticed. It twitched indignantly and waved some feelers furiously up at Mead. He put his head right near it, mouth wide, seemingly about to swallow it whole. Then he reconsidered and turned back to me with a sigh. The beetle scurried quickly in my direction and disappeared behind my hip.

  “Well, I find I can’t eat it, after all.” Noticing my blank gaze, he tsssked indignantly. “You don’t recognize the Blue Stag Beetle, then?” I shook my head dumbly. “Don’t know that industrial pollution killed it off in Great Britain in 1860?” Again I shook my head. “Goodness, me, what do they teach …” Mead trailed off with a sad little set of clicks, like an engine running down. The claw that he waved feebly in a gesture of dismissal seemed to indicate he wasn’t going to be able to prove anything to me, after all.

  As I crept forward, I realized that Mead’s entomology lesson had actually worked. The Blue Stag Beetle, which was really more of a dusty gray, had convinced me that wherever we were was filled with creatures that ate, breathed, slept, waved their antennae.

  But none of this wondering was getting me anywhere. Remember you have a poem and something you’re supposed to do, I told myself sternly. I clutched my gym bag tighter and tried to stop worrying about Mead’s feathers. It would probably turn out to be nothing at all, some kind of mange. Did birds actually get mange, or was that only stuffed animals in books? I’d have to ask Ed.

  I hurried to catch up with the other two, who’d managed to creep farther along the windowsill. Peeping cautiously in through a crack in Morris’s velvet curtains, I saw faded old carpets everywhere, including one that had been fastened not just to a wall but also to the ceiling, so that its giant primroses, flowering vines, and peacocks loomed over Morris and Ned as they sat together scribbling. Ned was drawing tall soulful ladies in medieval gowns.

  By keeping myself concealed behind the drapes as I moved I could practically touch the table where Morris sat writing, a grown man now, with a red beard covering a faintly noticeable double chin. He was scratching away furiously—humming, but also grumbling and fidgeting and tossing away pieces of paper at a great rate. I found that I was whispering “roses dun” and “ship with shields before the sun” under my breath over and over, like a magic spell. Which in a way it was.

  I could just hear Morris saying: “Well, my dear Ned, what’s the good of all this family money if I can’t spend it? Whereas if I do throw it around a bit, we can get all those marvelous artists from London to come up and work with us. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, they call themselves. Besides, doesn’t that title page look grand?” He pointed up at an elegant light blue page stuck to the wall with The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine outlined in bold letters.

  Ned hemmed and stroked his beard. “Yes, well, but Topsy, I’m not sure if throwing money at people is the best way to—”

  “Yes, yes, splendid! I knew you’d see it my way!” broke in Morris cheerily, tipping over one of Ned’s long bottles of inks with his sleeve (Ned caught it before a drop spilled).

  “I’ve already written to the most famous of the lot, William Holman Hunt,” Morris went on rapidly. “It was his painting The Awakening Conscience that sent a shock through me when I first saw it—like a novel come to life! I imagine his friends in the brotherhood will accompany him to Oxford. And I’m sure they’ll be delighted to hear about our grave rubbings, and these marvelous little French copper roses we found … almost dun-colored, aren’t they?”

  I heard a bell tinkle faintly below. As Morris and Ned stepped toward the doorway, I felt Mead nudging my back. Almost without stopping to think about it, I launched my body out from behind the drapes and through the window, half toppling inward.

  As Ned turned back into the room, I grabbed blind for one of the dun roses. I was a second too late; my fingers scraped against it and it rolled tantalizingly away just as Morris burst through the doorway. Now the room was filling up with people; I looked despairingly back at Ed, and Mead crouched behind me. Wait till they leave? I mouthed at Ed and he shrugged. No choice! he mouthed back. Mead turned his head away without comment; I saw a tiny neck feather give way.

  Trying not to think about Mead’s possible mange, I tucked my head back into the convenient spot I’d found behind the velvet curtain. Ed was apparently still clamoring for “pertinent details,” because after a series of hisses and a rustle of feathers that I associated with Mead shaking his head, I heard him say in a low voice, “Well, look it up when you get home, Edward. You’ll find the Pre-Raphaelites loved the intense color and complex natural world they found in paintings by Giotto, Botticelli, and Leonardo, not to mention Raphael. It was just before him that they felt Italian art had reached its apex—” Long pause. “—its acme—” Longer pause. “—oh for heaven’s sake, its apogee, its telos, its, its, its height, you little featherless ninny!”

  I stifled a chuckle. It occurred to me that I’d be grumpy, too, if I were saddled with two ignoramuses on a quest that I’d always dreamed of accomplishing myself.

  That was it! I gave such a jerk of surprise that anyone looking at the drapes at that moment would have thought a piece of lumber had suddenly fallen against them. Mead was treating us the way he was because he had wanted to be the hero who saved the Tapestry—and then we showed up.

  When I turned back to share my discovery, Ed shushed m
e violently. Inside the room, Morris was fumbling all over himself to make the introductions.

  “Mr. John Everett Millais, may I present Edward Burne-Jones? Like me, Ned is an admirer of your recent painting of Ophelia. She’s a marvelous corpse. I mean to say, she’s so wonderfully, beautifully, errr, thoroughly dead!”

  Burne-Jones stepped forward, bowed with more dignity than I’d been expecting, and said, without a stutter or a stammer, “Mr. Millais, your painting of Christ in the House of His Parents was a revelation to me. The way you painted Jesus the Lord as a common child of the laboring classes, his bald father’s dusty apron, the wood shavings, well, sir … !”

  Ned’s nerve deserted him at this point; he turned bright red and jerked to a stop like a windup toy. Nonetheless, I saw Millais give a slight involuntary bow in return, and study the younger artist’s face carefully. As for Morris, he looked at Ned the way you might look at a checker if it suddenly made its own move. He laughed and poked Ned hard in the ribs. Without missing a beat, Ned poked him right back.