by John Plotz
“We’ll begin the business today, Webb. I have just the commission.” Morris was gabbling away cheerily, not a storm cloud in sight. Webb looked up inquiringly. “Build me a house,” pronounced Morris, stroking his growing beard importantly. “I shall be getting married soon and I imagine, yes, I know that we shall need a house.
“We’ll need it because …” He looked puzzled for a minute: You could see him asking himself, Why do people need houses? Suddenly his face cleared. “Because”—Webb leaned forward eagerly—“I’ve got a staircase in mind that Ned and I saw in Rouen.
“I know I jotted it down.” Morris was now looking around himself wildly. “On the inside cover of the Murray’s guide to France …”
Just then Ed cleared his throat and shouted, in a weird echoey voice that made it sound as if he were far, far away, “Fire! Beware! Fire in the basement!” Philip and Morris glanced at each other and were gone in an instant, thundering past us (we hugged the wall as they whizzed by) and down the front stairs. I could hear William’s bellow trailing away, “We’ll call it Red House, Webb, Red House …”
The instant they’d gone by, Ed—grinning like a maniac—headed straight to a dusty little table across the room. He was back in seconds brandishing a gorgeous wooden model of a ship. Along its side, winking as they caught gleams of sunlight streaming through the window, were a row of shields held aloft by tiny little wooden men.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Return of the Roc
I couldn’t tell you how we got out of there, but by the time Ed and I finished hugging each other and retelling the whole story, we were spiraling back over Oxford. Ed was busy pretending not to watch Mead’s feathers fall, but when he muttered some numbers to me, I realized I hadn’t been listening for some time now. My mind had been wandering back to our last hours at home, right before all of this—whatever this was—had happened. Something had really bothered me, and I finally figured it out. Ed was happy as a clam now. And why not? He was on the adventure he’d always dreamed of, one that needed lots of notebooks, plenty of facts about history, and a fair amount of calculating. Back before we had hit the Tapestry, though, while we were hearing Mr. Nazhar’s letter, he’d been devastated, just as sad as Granny. So why had at least a part of me been happy when we heard the news?
Slumping forward against Mead’s warm back, I went back to that moment again and I was sure of it. Even though most of my mind was thinking about Granny and how sad she must be feeling and how Ed would really, really, really hate having to move, some tiny part of me (the attic-window part, I guess, that looks down on my life as if it’s a totally different realm) had been happily shouting “I’m free!” I could reconstruct the exact train of thought. Who cared if we could trace the Tapestry back to William Morris or not? Imaginary is imaginary. If we couldn’t sell the Tapestry, that was the final proof that we’d been living inside some kind of fantasy all this time. We’d have to rejoin the real, everyday world.
As our slow downward spiral continued, I asked myself why I’d been so furious lately, even mad at my own parents when I looked at their pictures taped to the edge of my bedroom mirror. I knew it had something to do with Granny’s teaching tailing off, and with Mr. Nazhar being more or less the only visitor we could count on. Sometimes I hate that it’s my job to be the family memory. Ed got all the good stuff from my parents: He bends his head low over his notebook like a cat drinking from a stream and I can see Mom. Me, all I got was a bunch of useless images, like snapshots—Mom and Dad climbing onto their old bikes, or wandering along a frozen river, both talking a mile a minute.
Of course, I wanted to believe it when Granny said that as long as we kept making art and thinking about it, we were still connected to Mom and Dad. But I couldn’t imagine trying to explain it even to Eva, who I hoped was still sort of my best friend, let alone to our star forward Sally, who might be Eva’s best friend now. So when I turned fourteen back in April, I made a resolution to stop listening when Granny talked about “weaving you into their warp”—and I’d pretty much decided that the arts high school downtown was out, that I’d stick with Eva and the team.
Suddenly I had a vision: a picture lit up for me, like a close-up in a movie. Eva was running down the street in her field hockey gear, heading for the high school practice field with Sally and Grace. I could feel my legs flexing to run after her, freed at last from the weight of the Tapestry.
I groaned: How pathetic could I be? Was I really wasting my time getting jealous of Eva’s new sport, and her new friends? I couldn’t stand field hockey! Something Eva had told me the day before we got the letter came back to me: “If you could stop talking about your granny when I’m trying to tell you about boys, Jen, I think you might have a better chance.” At what? I’d been too ashamed to ask her then, but all of a sudden I had really wanted to know.
“That’s it, I’m through!” I said aloud. This was why the museum’s letter had sent a little thrill through me. If I didn’t have the Tapestry around to dream about, then what I’d mostly be would be Eva’s friend, and a good athlete, and, and, well I didn’t know what exactly, but a lot of things that Ed and Granny knew nothing about.
Just then I felt a jolt, and a rush of air next to me, as if someone had opened the door between subway cars. Instinctively I gripped my knees around Mead, and everything that had just happened came flooding back to me.
I groaned. As usual, my timing was perfect: When Eva wanted to talk about high school I was too busy thinking about William Morris. But now that I was ready to give up on that art school, and start being who Eva wanted me to be, here I was trapped in Tapestry land.
“Through with what?” asked Ed curiously, looking back over his shoulder.
“Oh, never mind, Ed, for Pete’s sake!” I snapped, exasperated at myself, and he retreated quickly to his notebook. I sighed. As we touched down on a steep-roofed building, just outside an enormous rose window, I touched his arm. “Oh, Ed, I’m just mad at myself. It’s …” But he’d stopped listening. I couldn’t really blame him; I didn’t feel much like listening to me, either.
Where were we? It was clearly not a church, but it was just as massive. Possibly a library: I caught a glimpse of rows and rows of books down below through its open rose windows. Involuntarily, my nose wrinkled. Yeeeeerrgh; what was that smell?
Mead coughed discreetly, wiped his wing over his nose. “Linseed oil, turpentine, and rabbit-skin glue,” he explained. “Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites are painting a mural here.” He sniffed long and disapprovingly. “The proportions, though, are certainly off. Fading, I distinctly foresee fading.”
I decided I would have lived in fear with Mead as a teacher. On a sudden impulse I asked him, “Mead, did you once live with Morris?”
Mead shot me the same glance that Morris had thrown at Ned when he met the Pre-Raphaelites. He slowly opened his mouth to answer.
But just then Ed gave me an urgent poke. “Okay, Jen, listen to the next one:
“A man drew near
With painted shield and gold-wrought spear.
Good was his horse and grand his gear.”
“Be quiet, Ed!” I barked; I really needed to know what Mead was about to say. But it was too late. Mead turned his head away, cleared his throat massively (a faint odor of granola bar wafted over me), and nodded. “Jen,” he said gravely, “your brother is right. The poem brought us to the great hall of the Oxford Union debating society for a reason.”
So it was the poem doing this? Nothing made sense to me.
Right now, though, as I struggled to clamber off Mead’s back and onto the narrow window ledge (trying not to look down at the grim stone pavement below), I had a more pressing problem. “Mead!” I hissed urgently. “If the poem wants us to grab a figure from the mural, how am I supposed to fit that into my gym bag?”
Mead looked back impassively at me, which I guess meant figure it out. That wasn’t going to be so easy. Even with all the rearranging I could manage, the ship b
arely fit. Of all the random memories, I suddenly found myself thinking back to the end of The Hobbit, when Bilbo is trying to figure out how he could possibly bring even one-fourteenth of the dragon’s treasure back home with him to the Shire. If Ed and I survived this and came home, I thought, I’d quit making fun of Bilbo, or his pony, or his chests of silver and of gold.
Did that also mean I’d have more sympathy for Ed when he agonized about fitting all his survival gear into our backpack for a weekend hike? Nope. It felt a lot easier to sympathize with Bilbo than Ed. Still, I grinned down at him fondly. “Painted shield, spear, good horse; check.”
Suddenly, from far below us, I could hear a familiar voice bellowing instructions. The words faded in and out: “Careful preparations … suitable cooling period … tempering the plaster to prevent fading.”
Then I gave a frightened shudder. Right around the corner from us, a good forty feet off the ground, someone yelled back: “Oh, yes, Topsy, temper, temper, temper!” with a suave, devil-may-care laugh.
I was sure I recognized the know-it-all voice. “Rossetti!” said Ed accusingly. Instead of ssshing him, Mead nodded gravely, looking suddenly a little older. I risked a sneaky glance down his side, looking for more missing feathers.
Moments later I heard delicate silvery laughter from down below. Two female voices echoed Rossetti’s pun delightedly, “Oh yes Mr. Morris, temper, temper, hahahahahaha!”
I gave a start. If there was one thing that had been missing since we’d landed on Mead’s back, it was certainly women. Was there a Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood of artists we didn’t know about? Ed gave Mead the there’s something you’re not telling us look. But Mead, without seeming to cower or look guilty, had a trick of refusing to meet our eyes when he didn’t feel like talking. He pulled it now.
With as little noise as we could manage, we slid ourselves inside the nearest rose window, tucked behind a wooden post. From here, we could see Rossetti, no more than five feet away, dangling like Peter Pan from a rope harness while dabbing furiously away at the mural.
There was a significant pause: Was Mead going to tell us anything about the laughter down below? Finally he cleared his throat almost inaudibly. “Ah, yes, children,” he whispered. “It seems we’ve arrived at a very delicate time for William Morris and Dante Gabriel”—if birds had had lips instead of beaks, I think Mead’s would have curled slightly—“Rossetti.” Was Mead embarrassed about something? He went on, “You see, both William and Gabriel have been lucky enough to meet the women of their dreams. If you crane your heads and catch sight of that slender girl down there, yes, sipping out of the blue bottle, that’s Lizzie Siddal. She was Gabriel’s muse, his model, his pupil, and, eventually, his wife.”
I stole a glance down. She seemed oddly familiar: I heard Ed flipping through his notebook furiously and then he whispered. “She’s that drowned girl Millais painted, right? Ophelia.”
Mead nodded. “Yes, quite right Edward, the brotherhood shared their techniques very freely—and their models as well.”
I found it hard to listen to them, because I couldn’t take my eyes off the other woman. I’d seen so her face so often in Granny’s books that she swam up at me like a dream, or someone I’d known all my life. I’d seen her painted waking and sleeping, thoughtful and sad, young and old. But I’d never before seen her laughing and happy. Another odd memory flooded over me: I was on my mother’s lap looking at patterns. Her arms were around me, guiding my finger from one embroidery to another. My fingers would pick out one face on every page. The same face, over and over.
“And that,” I said, pointing, “is Jane Burden, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a groom. She lives in miserable St. Helen’s Passage.” For some reason I found my neck getting warm. “When she’s lucky she and her sister Bessie get work sewing. And she’s beautiful beautiful beautiful.” Ed was staring at me bug-eyed, the way he did when I picked a fight.
Jane, with her pale skin and red hair, that long face and dark sad eyes, tugged at me in some familiar way. I could almost feel a comforting set of arms close around me as I gazed down at her. I put out a finger as if I could trace her face on a page—then hastily I made the finger instead point down toward where Jane stood nervously twining a strand of Lizzie’s hair in her hand. I hurried on: “She’s the model for all the Pre-Raphaelites, but it’s William Morris who’s going to write on the back of his painting of her, I CAN’T PAINT YOU, BUT I LOVE YOU. And he’s the one she’s going to marry.”
For a minute we all took the scene in: Morris was busy watching Jane, who in turn was busy watching Rossetti as he dangled by the mural, his lips twisted in thought and his brush in constant motion.
The murals were growing all around us, and I had a thought. “That’s Lancelot, looking for the Holy Grail,” I whispered, looking at the sleeping figure painted right below us. “But there’s something not quite right about the story, isn’t there, Mead? Something that stands in Lancelot’s way?”
“Someone,” Mead corrected gently, and tilted his head toward the figure, tall, beautiful, and clad all in green, that Rossetti was working on now. With those swollen lips and the sad eyes I knew so well from Granny’s books, that could only be Jane in the mural. So if Morris was about to marry her, how could Rossetti be spending all his time painting this picture of Jane? Jane looking down sadly, and longingly, at a beautiful tall knight who resembled—I couldn’t help thinking—Rossetti himself.
“Mead?” I said, forgetting our geas in my confusion about how these artists and their models all fit together. “Why is Rossetti drawing that picture of Jane …?”
“That’s Guinevere,” said Mead firmly. “He’s painting Guinevere, the wife of Arthur, his king and his closest friend.” I nodded, but I still wasn’t sure I understood it all completely.
“Well, why was Rossetti so interested in the story of Guinevere’s love for Lancelot instead of her husband, Arthur?” I asked. I felt the same kind of itch I always did reading Sherlock Holmes stories. There was a vital fact missing, and until I had it, I couldn’t figure out the villain—or even what the crime had been in the first place.
I felt suddenly exasperated. “How do artists ever pick their subject matter, anyway? In class, you always know if it’s an apple or a face you’re supposed to be working on. But for Rossetti—”
“In fact,” Mead cut in suddenly, “Morris grew interested in that story, too. While Rossetti was painting Jane as Guinevere, Morris had begun writing poems. Both told the same story. It was Guinevere’s love for her husband’s friend Lancelot that finally destroyed the Round Table. And perhaps”—here Mead gave me a look that I recognized well from Granny, though I couldn’t quite say what it meant—“that is why Guinevere in Rossetti’s paintings is looking so very sad.”
Art was a funny thing. I had always assumed that artists painted the world the way they wanted it to be—that was what beauty meant, wasn’t it? Yet sometimes they couldn’t help making art instead that showed the thing they most feared. What must it have meant to Morris to paint Jane as Guinevere if he thought that he was doomed to play Arthur while Rossetti got to be Lancelot? And what about Rossetti? Did he think of himself as the noble, beautiful Lancelot, longing for Guinevere?
How was Guinevere was supposed to choose between Arthur and Sir Lancelot anyway? I don’t know how long I’d been turning this over in my mind, trying to work up the courage to ask Mead, when suddenly I heard Rossetti gave an outraged shout.
“Ridiculous urchin! Give that drawing back this instant!” Ed, shaking with fear, but with sparkling eyes, scrambled up behind Mead desperately trying to tuck something into my bag. Even with the panic surging through me, I couldn’t help admiring Rossetti’s delicate pencil sketch of a mounted knight with shield and spear.
As Mead tore into the sky, though, I stopped thinking about Guinevere and Camelot. I heard the rrrrip of little metal teeth unhooking. The zipper on my gym bag!
Before our whole quest fell on Jane Burden’s head, I
reached my left hand around desperately, trying to pull the unzipped sides together enough to hold in the apple (I felt it rolling under my left hand) and the pilgrim shell (my right thumb had it pinned against the nylon). As I scrabbled to pull the zipper tight, I felt my basketball roll, teeter, and slip out of my bag. If the paint bucket was where I think it was, I may have hit the first three-point shot in English history.
As the clouds closed on us again, I could just make out Morris’s delighted yelp: “Ahhhhh, the return of the roc!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Art for a Few
“Hey, Mead, how do you use the clouds to move us through time?” Ed was asking earnestly as we pulled out of our next dive. His pencil was poised, as if he expected Mead to start reciting the formulas right away. A quick wing and a beady glare was all he got before Mead settled on slippery red tiles. Below us was a steeply pitched roof, and then beneath that apple trees and green lawns spreading out on every side.
“London’s second Great International Exhibition is about to open. It’s spring of 1862, and Morris did build a house for himself, after all,” Mead said briskly, sliding open a trapdoor and ushering us into the crawl space at the top of an amazing open stairwell.
We gasped. The ceiling and walls were covered with heavy, twisting curved figures of blue and green paint. I caught my breath; it felt like being inside an abstract painting. “Could those be rows of paramecia?” whispered Ed excitedly, hanging with his head upside down to gawk. (I hate it when he talks about paramecia.) Suddenly there were footsteps in the hall, and Mead hooked Ed back out of sight with a neat sweep of the claw.
“Well, Topsy? It’s been two years. What do you think of your Red House after all?” A young man I instantly recognized as Webb came into view, his arms full of beautiful, delicate glasses and plates.
