Chapter One
"All my childhood, Twixtmoon Hill used to glimmer in the dawn as if with fairy lights. But now look at it – I'm sure it's mourning our losses with us. The grape vines are sagging into the banking; the Hen House looks more destitute than usual, and there's a vine grown under the door and come up at the window. And see, Ellie, the baby firs – they're like phantoms among the birch this morning, the horizon is so gray. I have never seen such a bleak dawn in all my life."
Three girls were out early on an unusually cloudy September morning. They descended in height and age from that of Giselle, who was twenty and nearly five feet seven inches tall. The dolorously eloquent speaker was middle child Mariana, fifteen; and the littlest one Meg, a meager ten years old, who listened to her sister with wide hazel eyes that filled with tears.
"Oh, what are we going to do!" wailed Meg as she dragged her feet and tugged her eldest sister's arm. "I can't bear the thought of leaving Stirling House, Ellie! I may die of grief. What about Mum? I think she'll die of grief too if she has to leave our home. She always has a headache now, and you think I don't know it but I heard her talking to the doctor about her heartery problem. We'd be orphans then, if – if something happened to Mum, too."
Ellie Norland pulled her little blonde sister to her side as they walked. "Meggie, we've talked about this before. – Mariana, I hope you see what happens when people speak too freely in front of others, without regard for who could be listening. Now, Meggie, I've told you that the doctors disagree on Mum's condition, but the majority says she doesn't have a tear in the carotid artery at all. If you ask me, all Mum needs to get over her headaches is a change of scenery. Once we're settled in our new apartment, we'll all be in better spirits."
"Oh yes, especially our dear uncle and dearest aunt," muttered Mariana with bitter sarcasm.
Ellie gave a small sigh. "There's nothing we can do about the way things turned out, Mari. Even Mum used to tell us that, before Grandpa died. It's no use living in the past or crying over spilled milk. We've gotten to know the true colors of Ed and Sue since they moved in, and it's become clear to everyone – yes, even you, Meggie – that Stirling House is far too small for the two of us families put together. No, Mari, don't go on about how it isn't fair. We've just got to move past this bump in the road and plan the rest of our lives starting from today."
Meg Norland moaned sorrowfully. "Oh, Ellie, I couldn't plan a thing. My mind's in a complete puddle."
"Muddle, darling," amended Mariana distractedly, turning round to look back at the family estate.
Giselle, or Ellie, as she preferred to be called, harbored deeper concerns for the fate of her family than she was willing to reveal to her younger sisters. Their futures were more uncertain than they could guess, but with their mother hardly able to tend to her own cares, Ellie felt that the responsibility of buoying them up from their sorrows rested squarely on her shoulders. Twenty felt like a ripe old age all of a sudden.
Mariana was rapidly maturing into a lovely young woman. With long blonde curls, sooty lashes, sea blue eyes and round rosy lips, she was prettier than either of her sisters. Her intellect, as far as Ellie could perceive it, was sharp when exercised, but Mariana preferred to give herself up to Gothic novels for whole days at a time instead of ordering her daylight hours in a balanced manner so as to include ample time for the study of music and the completion of her household chores. "There are no life lessons that can't be learned from great literature," Mariana would say, and because she was right, in a sense, Ellie had not the heart to try to enforce discipline on her teenage sister. Their mother was half the source of this philosophy, and so did nothing to counteract Mariana's excess in this regard. Sometimes, however, Mrs. Norland would engage her middle daughter in a bitter quarrel if the latter were called upon for assistance around the house and found to be indisposed.
Meg tended to resemble Mariana in her manner and preference for melodrama, only Ellie was considerably more worried over the outcome of her education. Ellie and Mariana had been schooled at home all their lives, but now with the upheaval in the family and an impending change of domicile, Ellie feared that little Meg was apt to get lost in the midst of it all. At least Mariana and I did nothing but play music, read, and muck about outside all our childhood, thought Ellie, but Meggie watches too much TV. She does spend an awful lot of time climbing trees, but she can't pretend she's a monkey all her life, either; at least not without some other serious academic or artistic pursuit. Then Ellie would chide herself. Meggie is only ten! How can I lay the cares of life at her little feet? But time is the greatest thief of all, and he is always at my back these days, and I am constantly running away. Fleeing, Mari would say, in her romantic language.
"At least Chris is coming to the house today," announced Meg suddenly, reclaiming the attention of her two big sisters and grinning smugly.
"What do you mean, Meg?" Ellie demanded, as her pulse began to pound in her throat.
"Yesterday I went to the Post Office with Mum and we met him there, getting the mail for the household. Well, after Mum got in the car I ran back out to get a letter that I'd dropped accidentally on the floor, and I said to him, 'Oh, Chris, please come and see us today! We're starved for company since everything happened, and especially now that our cousins…' well, you know, the whole Fairchild family knows about the estrangement… 'now that our cousins don't come see us anymore we're awful lonely, Chris, so please visit! Anytime you like!' So of course he promised to come the next day, which is today, like I knew he would."
Mariana laughed in response and resumed her stroll, but Ellie, following, found her throat dry and her palms sweaty. She inwardly cursed her own lack of composure and good sense.
"Well that's very kind of him," she managed to express to her sisters as they passed by the peeling door of the Hen House and under the arches of grape vine and ivy that mingled above their heads.
The Fairchilds were neighbors and abutters of the Norlands at Stirling House. Mr. Fairchild senior had long been the girls' informal professor of music, and his older son Christopher was a good friend of Ellie. At times in their youth they had collaborated on the violin and piano in chamber recitals at the nearby academy of music, but because of the terrible discord among the Norland siblings upon the death of their father, Chris, as he was known to the sisters and their cousins, had undoubtedly found himself in an uncomfortable position along with the rest of his family. The Fairchilds were friends of several of the girls' aunts and uncles as well as the girls' mother, and the pressure to take sides had put a strain on all preexisting friendships. There was one other reason why Chris no longer came around to visit as often as he once had, but Ellie was ashamed to think of it, and had long ago disciplined herself to believe that he had forgotten it.
"Chris is the most boring fellow in the world," Mariana complained as the sisters traipsed on into the unruly environment of their backyard woods. "All stuffy and silent; it always takes him longer than anyone else to grasp the meaning of a simple joke, and then he is the only one laughing when everyone has already moved on to another topic."
"At least he's not totally without a sense of humor, then," Ellie protested mildly.
"Oh but I'm not done! You know him better than I do, Elle, which is why I can't understand how you manage to defend him all the time. His technique on the piano is wonderful, oh yes, but how unfeelingly he plays! And classical music is all he listens to. Don't you remember when he asked you to recall what his favorite song was, simply to attest to what bosom companions you two had become, and you couldn't remember for the life of you what it was because it was an art song? That's all perfectly normal for a professor of musicology, or even a conservatory student, but God, Elle, we were kids! He was just a boy, and already behaving like an old man. Just imagine it," and this she said in an affectedly deep voice, "'Hi, I'm a fifteen year old boy and my favorite song is Gretchen am Spinnrade by Schubert.'"
"If I remember correctly, my own darling sister," countered Ellie, "you aren't fond of a great many styles of music yourself, apart from… hmm… any composition of Vaughan Williams or Rachmaninov. And then there's… ah, yes, Jewel. And once or twice I remember hearing that you hated Mozart and wished you could drown the whole genre of Heavy Metal in a bathtub. Such open-mindedness!"
"Oh please, you're the same yourself, only you try to hide it!" rejoined Mariana. "We can't help our romantic tendencies, any more than Chris can help his professorly ones, I suppose. Just because you discipline yourself to listen to 'a wide range of musical selections' doesn't make you better than me. At best it makes you dilettantish."
"It's 'better than I,' Mari, not 'better than me,'" Ellie corrected in a gentler tone.
"Well, I think Chris is alright," said Meg quietly. "He always pays attention to me."
"Does he, you little pig?" teased Mariana, diving at her little sister's ticklish sides with a roar that would have frightened away a prowling coyote. Meg's giggles, screeches and pleas for mercy filled the still air, and Ellie lagged behind her sisters as they chased each other up the hill, dodging the trees and occasionally falling face down into the loam as they went.
"You know who else thinks Chris is alright? You know who?" Mariana called over her shoulder.
Ellie could only smile.
"Who? Who? Who?" parroted Meg.
"Elle does."
As her sisters fairly screamed with laughter, Ellie thought back to the distant occasion on which a much younger Chris Fairchild had asked her much younger self if she could name his favorite song. It was one of those summers when neither had anything better to do, which circumstance allowed them to spend all their waking hours together, traversing the far reaches of Colchester from dawn till dusk (when Ellie's parents usually began to call for her). Her memory of those times was not by any means photographic, or even reasonably linear in nature; rather it was made up of a number of impressions, some visual, others aural and a few even simply tactile, that had remained within her as deeply as if they had been engraved on her very soul.
She remembered the heat of the sun on her back, and the dirt road crunching under their feet as they walked. Ellie remembered the way she felt when he walked a little nearer to her than usual; her heart had pounded then the same way it pounded now when she heard his name. Sometimes they had walked almost shoulder-to-shoulder, and she had been dizzy at times waiting for him to take her hand… but he never did, then, even when he was a hair's breadth from grasping it. So Ellie remembered other things, like the way his wavy brown hair had grown too long that summer, and was always hanging in his eyes. Still she thought he looked strange without it, long and wind-tossed like it was then. And then one day he'd said:
"Since you say we're best friends," (yes, she had said it first – but he had agreed immediately, and she'd said it only to defray the tension between them, so he wouldn't be frightened away from her,) "then you have to know my favorite song."
And then – she remembered not knowing what it was. Song? Chris? He was a pianist, and they only ever played instrumental music together, of course, because Ellie was a violinist.
Later, after she'd been forced to admit her failure, she remembered him telling her why it was his favorite, though she felt fairly sure that it held the honored place no longer.
"You know Goethe's Faustus," he'd said, and she'd nodded, although she really only knew of it. He continued, "So Gretchen - who is Margaret, you know, Gretchen is her nickname - is alone. She's sitting at the spinning wheel and just spinning, spinning." He'd been moving his fingers over invisible piano keys as he said this. "She's thinking of her lover, and recalling everything about him that she can, because he's gone. And slowly she begins to realize he's not planning to come back for her, but every fiber of her being is longing for - ahem. Right, well she wants him back, basically. So that's the story, more or less, and Schubert sets this speech-like melody over a continuous figure in the piano accompaniment that is just like the constant motion of the spinning wheel in the poem. And at the highest point in the music, I mean, the point when the tension is highest - when you can feel Gretchen's longing rising from the depths of her soul and flooding her veins - well, ahem, basically that's when the figure in the piano drops out and leaves just the soprano voice alone, just as Gretchen remembers the, erm, the kiss. The kiss of Faust, of course. And - yeah, so, that's my favorite song. The devices he uses to build the harmonic tension to that one excruciatingly climactic point, I mean, it's incredible. It's just like sex!"
Ellie remembered a few moments of awkward silence before she began to laugh. Chris had joined her, and then they'd laughed together for a long time, until their stomachs hurt. She'd thought he had a bouncing laugh. His laugh was deep-throated even then, but would bounce up into the higher registers of his voice towards the end. If he only knew how that laugh had brightened her day whenever their paths had crossed in the intervening years! Ironically, it was also the laugh they'd shared on that day that had convinced her of what she'd feared: Chris could never be more than a brother to her. So why did she feel such discomfiture now at the mention of his name? Ellie was no closer to understanding her own lack of common sense than she was to understanding her sisters'. But she was quite certain that she ought to forget about it, as Chris had done years ago.
Still, as she walked aimlessly on, Ellie mouthed a few verses of Faustus that she had memorized after that summer.
'For
him only, I look
Out the window.
Only for him do I go
Out of
the house.
His
tall walk,
His noble figure,
His mouth's smile,
His eyes'
power,
And
his mouth's
Magic flow,
His handclasp,
and ah! his kiss!'
"Elle! Elle? Are you alright? Elle! Come look, we've found a foxhole. Come here!"
Stumbling over her feet clumsily as if woken from a trance, Ellie clambered over the rocks and tree stumps that crowned the top of Twixtmoon Hill to join her sisters. There were moments when Giselle Norland forgot about the ominous ticking of the internal clock that had haunted her since the dissolution of their happy home at the Stirling House - but they were not many. She scolded herself sharply and silently for allowing herself such a slip, just the kind that Mariana was often subject to. Chris might be coming to visit, but she wouldn't do herself or him the disservice of losing her cool.
