by John Plotz
“Come along, Neddy, let me present you to the beard, err I mean the man you’ve no doubt long admired, William Hunt.” (Morris was right: This guy’s beard looked like a giant orange tomcat sleeping on his chest.) “Sir,” boomed Morris energetically, “your painting The Hireling Shepherd, with its pert shepherdess—yes, oh yes, so unrestrained, so frank, so delightfully sensual …”
All at once Morris subsided. Dressed in rumpled painter’s smock and corduroy trousers with smears of violet and green, the final Pre-Raphaelite somehow managed to make the room itself look badly dressed. He immediately reminded me of Principal Hirsh at my junior high school. Somehow he always managed to let everyone know that the moment he walked in the door was the perfect time for the real business of the day to begin.
Although everyone had fallen totally silent, he suavely finished the point he had been making on the stairway. “So you see, I suggested we take the name Pre-Raphaelites so that we should never forget the Italian masters and the way the tiniest weed in the corner of their sketch threatens to burst into bloom. The so-called Renaissance that came after them was mechanical, artificial—and deplorably commercial.”
Morris rushed forward. “Oh Ned, allow me: the great Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”
“Very good.” Rossetti inclined his head graciously. “Did you say you had ordered up some champagne wine for us, err, Mr., err …” His voice trailed off absently as he looked around, taking in the drawings by Ned that coated every available surface.
Morris hurried to pass around glasses, still chattering. “Indeed, the Pre-Raphaelite principles have been most inspiring to us, haven’t they, Ned? But surely, Mr. Rossetti—may I call you Gabriel?—you meant that the Renaissance went astray in how it treated its workers?” Rossetti, who had found a champagne glass and was busily filling it, looked around as if the treatment of workers in the Renaissance had been the very last thing on his mind.
Morris plowed on undaunted (He’s probably 100 percent undauntable, I thought). “It was the free workers of the Middle Ages, after all, whose illustrated books still freeze us in our tracks, with their remarkable combination of fantastical invention and truth to nature. What are we as artists if we fail to study nature, to devour her? Take, for example”—looking around nervously, anxious to make a good impression—“that most peculiar and absolutely enormous bird that’s peeking at us from that window …” His voice trailed off.
“Good Lord, Ned! Don’t be a dunce, snare it, snare it!” Morris jumped up, dousing Rossetti with champagne. Ed scrambled awkwardly onto Mead’s back as he tumbled off the ledge, but I wasn’t so lucky. They were away through the air before I could grab hold, and Morris, flinging back the velvet curtain, was glaring right at me.
I stared back at him wide-eyed. Nothing happened for a minute, long enough for me to notice the random noise below: heavy shoes clicking on pavement, the muffled clatter of a doorbell. Then, rather than yelling, or grabbing hold of me, Morris inclined his head and shoulders forward through the window, letting the curtain fall behind him. He was smiling.
“Well, well, not a roc at all, but a girl!” he said finally. “The sort who’s not afraid to clamber across ledges to find something she wants.” He paused, looked me carefully in the eyes. He must have seen something of what we’d been going through, or maybe smelled it on me. The tears, the desperation, even something about Granny. Whatever it was, his smile changed slightly, deepened maybe, as his face seemed to grow brighter red.
“No, I beg your pardon,” he said at last, fumbling around for something in one of his deep pockets. “To find something she needs … is that right?”
Trembling with fear, I nodded dumbly. And Morris, too, fell silent. As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to find a total stranger perched on your fifth-story window ledge, he looked at me appraisingly. Without a word he pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to me. I could only gaze into his eyes and try desperately not to scream.
Morris finally did break the spell. “I think,” he said gravely, no hint of teasing in his voice, “that I recognize the look of one under a geas. Have you anything to tell me, Girl of the Ledge? Any message that you’d wish me to hear?”
It was the kind of moment you dream about—what would you tell Leonardo, what would you ask Michelangelo? Ed would probably order Morris to get to work weaving. But I could let him know how much he meant to Granny, and how hard Mr. Nazhar was working to save everything he’d made. Or just ask him what exactly a geas was.
“What’s undone will be done!” I blurted out suddenly, surprising myself almost as much as him. Morris’s eyes widened; he opened his mouth to respond—and I felt myself suddenly lifted into the air by my right shoulder. Then I was falling, almost floating through the air, flailing, yelping—before Mead fastened his other claw on my gym bag.
I just had time to hear Morris’s delighted cry: “I knew there was a roc, by God!” Then Mead’s downward trajectory took us shooting between a pair of onrushing willows and (“Hold your breath!” Mead managed to pant out) the green water of the Thames came up to slap us. As it did, I heard a tearing sound, right near the shoulder Mead held me by. The water was too strong, and my basketball jacket had never been built for this. As the seam gave, I started to slip away. I opened my mouth to scream, but water filled it. I was in the Thames, really in it, sinking fast and Mead was—I flailed around frantically—where was Mead?
“Ed!” I tried to scream when I broke the surface, but got only another mouthful of water. I came up again, and seemed to have plenty of time to take in the horrified expression of the two students in the punt near me. Time enough even to notice that nearly empty bottle of champagne one of them was clutching.
“Going down for the third time,” I heard a voice—was it Granny’s?—saying, over and over. As I went down, though, I felt a rush of air and sensed something plummeting through the open air toward me. Eyes closed and head already underwater, I grabbed desperately with my left hand at whatever was above me. With two fingers and a slippery thumb, I clung like death to the thin scaly rod, trying not to think about the horrible crunching sound I’d heard as my fingers closed on what had to be Mead’s leg.
“Duck, Jerry!” I heard below me, and looked down just as we barreled over the slack-jawed students. I tucked my knees up and was rewarded, if that’s the right word, with the sight of one toppling backward over the other, hands still clutching his champagne bottle.
CHAPTER SIX
Whose Geas?
Before I had time to do more than gawk stupidly down at the vanishing Thames, we’d flashed through another cloud bank. The usual lurch, more tail-feathers floating on the wind as we emerged. You could feel right away something had changed; the medieval spires were gone and instead all around us were brick buildings, smokestacks, and (I flinched at a loud whistle) steamships. Mead gave a panicky flap or two, we dodged a barge, and Ed shouted triumphantly, “London!”
Mead, busy finding a flat roof, took a minute to reply. When we were finally settled atop a looming red-brick building whose rooftop was almost covered by sooty chimney pots, he released his grip on my shoulders with a long, slow groan that scared me a lot more than any of his earlier grumbling had.
“Mead?” I said, trying to keep my voice steadier than I felt.
“It’s your claw, isn’t it?” Ed sounded very like Granny as he stuck his hand out firmly. “Let me have a look.”
To my surprise Mead held his right claw up without comment. Seeing it bent backward in a way no claw was ever meant to go, I couldn’t help gasping a little, though I could have kicked myself right afterward. Neither Mead nor Ed spoke.
“Does it hurt too much for you to fly?” Ed asked after a long pause. Mead gazed away into the air as if he hadn’t heard the question.
Finally, he did speak. “I can fly.” We waited a minute, but that seemed to be his last word.
“I suppose,” Ed said finally, “we’d better leave it as it is.” The claw wa
s twisted all the way around in a way that made me wince to look; turned upside down, almost.
“And I suppose,” said Mead in a business-like way, turning to face me, “that we’d better think about what’s next on our list, after the dun rose.”
I could feel my heart pounding heavily against my ribs. Mead, injury or no injury, had managed our first two objects without a fuss. I was young and healthy (Girl of the Ledge, I found myself thinking with an even deeper sense of shame) but I’d failed utterly.
For some reason, Ed chose that moment to break into a series of choked little whinnies. He was laughing at me! And Mead gave what might have been a bird snicker. I forgot all about Mead’s claw for a minute. I said hotly, “I tried my best, and I don’t think it’s nice to taunt me. Is it my fault it rolled away?”
My eyes were burning, but I willed myself not to let tears fall. Then Ed leaned forward and poked me in the ribs in the same way Ned had poked Morris. “Have you noticed what’s in your right hand, Jen?”
Actually I hadn’t given a thought to Morris’s gift back on the ledge, the one I’d ignored because I was so busy thinking of what to say to him. I looked down. There, tucked tight into fingers that had turned white from gripping too hard, was the dun rose. Somehow, through all that dunking and spluttering, with “third time, third time” echoing in my ears, I’d never let it go.
As I tucked the rose into my bag, I asked, with transparently fake casualness, “Hey, what’s a geas?” I tried to copy the old-fashioned sound of the word as Morris had said it.
Ed piped up right away. “Oh, I know that one! A geas is a holy order in Celtic myth. Like, umm, well you know how Cuchulainn couldn’t refuse food from a woman? That was a geas.”
“I didn’t know that, actually, Ed, but thanks.” I asked my next question of the open air. “Sooooo, any idea how that might relate to us?”
Ed stared at me blankly, then down to his notebook. That was fine; it wasn’t his answer I wanted to hear.
“You might find,” Mead began after a long pause, staring hard at me, “that the word means something like the duty to keep working toward a certain goal. An office, they called it back when I was young; later, I also heard it called a quest.”
Mead’s yellow eyes got brighter and more unblinking every time I looked. Still, I stared right back, willing him to go on, not even letting myself get sidetracked into asking him when exactly he had ever been young. Ever since I’d told him that Morris might need something, too, I’d had the feeling Mead was trying to prove something to me. But what?
“And Morris,” I said very slowly, “could tell I had a geas on me because …” I trailed off, letting the silence between us deepen. I could hear Ed nervously gnawing his pencil. Behind that, distant sounds of London: horses, trains, a woman’s voice—“Grapes, lovely fresh grapes for sale!”
“The artist’s geas,” Mead finally said, “is a quest that rarely has a very clear ending. It might seem to end with a particular artwork. Yet the artist might find that once the single work was done, the feeling of obligation came back. The artist might even discover that the desire to go on making was so strong even—” He stopped suddenly.
I looked up at once. “Even what, Mead?” I needed to know. His head, though, was down among his wing-feathers now, carefully smoothing out what few remained along his right wing tip. Very few.
He looked up. “If the geas were strong enough, even the artist’s death might only pass the quest onward, to a fellow artist, or a child, or”—it was his turn to look up into the air at nobody in particular—“to anyone at all.”
“And that kind of passing …,” I said carefully, looking at Mead to see if he’d finish the sentence for me. Seeing his face remain blank, I drew a long breath and went on, “… might happen anytime. Is that right, Mead? The geas might suddenly burst back to life long after the artist died. Morris’s geas might turn out to belong to Granny, or to somebody who read one of his books and got inspired, or to some kid who …”
In the pause that followed, the long silence in which nobody filled in my blank for me, in which only the scratch of Ed’s pencil was audible, a new thought struck me. “You’re no roc, Mead!” I announced.
“Thanks very much,” he said promptly, in an aggrieved tone. “Did I ever say I was?”
“No, no,” I exclaimed hastily, “of course not! But Morris did, back there”—I pointed back over my shoulder. “As if you were just some hideous animal schlepping me around. Anyway, you’re not one!”
“Thanks again!” said Mead briskly. “Now, are we quite finished with this glorious festival of repetition?”
I wasn’t quite done, though. “Because, Mead, what you actually are is a griffin!”
Ed gave a great shout of laughter, while Mead’s feathers shot up in all directions. “I mean,” I went on cheerily, “that you’re half horse and half fierce bird of prey, like the one that threatens to eat a minor canon in that Maurice Sendak book.” When I said the word “fierce,” Mead’s feathers started to settle a bit. After a minute, he gave a smug little cluck back in his throat (don’t ask me how a cluck can sound smug, it just did). Then he gestured with his left wing toward an ominous staircase that led off the roof.
“It’s October 1856, and we’re perched above the London offices of the distinguished Gothic Revival architect Edmund Street. No crackers for guessing who his newest pupil might be. That doorway to your right leads down to Morris’s third-floor office. He shares with a young man you should be careful not to underestimate. I’ll be right here when you get back, and I expect you’ll have with you …?”
“A ship with shields before the sun,” we both chorused obediently. Mead gave a very Napoleon-like off you go wave with his good claw. Off we went.
At the bottom of the dark moldy staircase we found ourselves right outside a door that, fortunately for us, had been recently oiled. It slid open noiselessly to reveal a beard glowing outrageously red in a shaft of sunlight: Morris, without a doubt. He was gabbling away excitedly at a young man bent over an architect’s drafting table.
“Dear Webb,” he was saying, “will I ever be as skilled an architect as you? No, no, don’t bother to answer …” The young man looked sweet, a bit shy, almost exactly Morris’s age. Morris rushed on.
“The fact is, Webb, the best work of all is to create a Gothic house. A book comes next, but never mind, I’ll get to that in time, Webb, in due time.”
Webb nodded agreeably and tossed in a “Quite right, Topsy,”; he was evidently listening only enough to keep Morris talking. It struck me that Morris was kind of an iPod for his friends. They liked to hear him talk while they worked in just about the same way I like listening to Regina Spektor when I’m practicing free throws.
“I’m no fool,” Morris went on, “I know well enough that at the moment I’m just a young bungler tolerated because my father’s grown rich in the stock market. But Philip, you are an architectural genius. Mind you, that’s not to say anything against your, your, hmm, interior designs.”
“Do you mean those little drinking glasses I’ve been working on, Topsy? With the green spirals?” the young man, who must have been Philip Webb, replied in a high, amiable voice, still not looking up from his careful drawing.
“Yes, yes, but not just those! Also the tables, and those marvelous painted cabinets you and Ned have started working on, and even your curious little Viking ship” (I felt Ed give a start behind me). “Yes, we’ll call them all interior designs when we form our company.”
“Company?” said Webb, looking up. “But aren’t we here to be pupils, to learn to be architects and then …?” He seemed not quite sure what to say next, as if he didn’t know how the story turned out, but was counting on someone to tell him when the time came. I could sympathize.
Morris, though, slapped the table and laughed. “Our business, Webb, is to come together to make things of beauty, paying no mind to what the bankers and bishops say they want.”
Webb gave a
little chuckle—to me it seemed encouraging, companionable. For some reason, though, Morris erupted. He gave a furious grunt and stamped the floor, hard (Rumpelstiltskin, Rumpelstiltskin!). “Chuckle away, Webb, but a company to sell furniture, by God, can be a sacred trust, too! As sacred as anything accomplished by King Arthur’s company of knights, with their—” He spluttered, as close to a loss for words as I’d seen him, then regained speed. “—their maces and lances and unnamed hordes of servants to trail behind and mop away the blood.”
“And what if our modern knights of Industry, with their blood-mopping servants, don’t want to buy what you make, Topsy?” Webb asked mischievously.
“Ship,” muttered Ed impatiently behind me. “Ship ship, where are you, ship?” Like him, I’d been scanning the room as Morris talked, but I still gave him an indignant elbow. Everything Morris said was telling me a little more about the geas that he was under. Or wait, was it me under the geas? I shook my head, trying to clear it.
“We’ll make them want it, Webb,” roared Morris, interrupting my train of thought by bounding in the air so indignantly and so vigorously that the floor trembled when he landed. Rumpelstiltskin! Rumpelstiltskin! “By heavens, I know enough to form a brotherhood that will make not only the best houses, but also the best windows, the best glasses, the best tiles—anything that would make the difference between misery and joy.”
Webb was laughing, and looking at him with an expression I was beginning to recognize in Topsy’s friends: It held amusement, admiration, and underneath something like the look Granny shot Ed and me when she thought we weren’t watching. And just like that, Morris laughed, pulled out a huge sea-green handkerchief to wipe his brow, and the rage was over.
Ed leaned over to me. “You know what he reminds me of, when he goes off like that? Old Faithful!” Sixty seconds of steam and fury, then placid as if it had never happened. Yeah, Ed was right. Topsy the geyser.
