Elinor, however, could not reconcile herself to this idea. Defiantly, desperately, she had driven back to Capricorn’s village – only to find the streets empty, the houses burned down, and not a living soul in sight. “You know, Elinor,” Mo had said when she came back with her face tearstained, “I was afraid of something like this. I couldn’t really believe there were words to bring back the dead. And besides – if you’re honest with yourself you must admit they didn’t fit into this world.”
“Nor do I!” was all Elinor had replied.
Over the next few weeks, Meggie often heard sobbing from Elinor’s room when she slipped into the library one last time in the evening to find a book. Many months had passed since then – they had all been living together in Elinor’s big house for nearly a year, and Meggie had a feeling that Elinor was glad not to be alone with her books anymore. She had given them the best rooms; Elinor’s old schoolbooks and a few writers she no longer much liked had been banished to the attic to make more space. Meggie’s room had a view of snow-topped mountains, and from her parents’ bedroom you could see the distant lake with its gleaming water, which had so often tempted the fairies to fly in that direction.
Mo had never simply gone off like that before. Without a word of good-bye. Without making up the quarrel. .
Perhaps I should go down and help Darius in the library, thought Meggie as she sat there wiping the tears from her face. She never cried while she was quarrelling with Mo; the tears didn’t come until later . . and he always looked terribly guilty when he saw her red eyes. She was sure that yet again everyone had heard them quarrelling! Darius was probably making the hot milk and honey already, and as soon as she put her head around the kitchen door Elinor would begin calling Mo, and men in general, names. No, she’d better stay in her own room.
Oh, Mo. He had snatched the notebook she was reading out of her hand and taken it with him!
And that one was the book where she had collected ideas for stories of her own: beginnings that had never gotten any further, opening words, crossed-out sentences, all her failed attempts ..
How could he just take it away from her? She didn’t want Mo to read it; she didn’t want him seeing how she tried in vain to fit the words together on paper, words that came to her tongue so easily and with such power when she read aloud. Meggie could write down what Resa described to her; she could fill pages and pages with the stories her mother told her. But as soon as she tried to make something new of them, a story with a life of its own, her mind went blank.
The words seemed to fly out of her head – like snowflakes leaving only a damp patch on your skin when you put out your hand to catch them. Someone knocked on Meggie’s door.
“Come in!” she snuffled, looking in her trouser pockets for one of the old-fashioned handkerchiefs that Elinor had given her. (“They belonged to my sister. Her name began with an M, like yours. Embroidered in the corner there, see? I thought it would 30 be better for you to have them than let the moths eat holes in them.”)
Her mother put her head around the door.
Meggie tried a smile, but it was a miserable failure.
“Can I come in?” Resa’s fingers traced the words in the air faster than Darius could have said them aloud. Meggie nodded. By now she understood her mother’s sign language almost as easily as the letters of the alphabet – she knew it better than Mo and much better than Elinor, who often called for Meggie in desperation when Resa’s fingers went too fast for her.
Resa closed the door behind her and sat down on the windowsill with her daughter. Meggie always called her mother by her first name, perhaps because she hadn’t had a mother for ten years, or perhaps because, for the same inexplicable reason, she had always called her father just Mo.
Meggie recognized the notebook as soon as Resa put it on her lap. It was the one that Mo had taken. “I found it lying outside your door,” said her mother’s hands.
Meggie stroked the patterned binding. So Mo had brought it back. Why hadn’t he come in?
Because he was still too angry, or because he was sorry?
“He wants me to put them away in the attic. At least for a while.” Meggie suddenly felt so small. And at the same time so old. “He said, ‘Perhaps I ought to turn into a glass man or dye my skin blue, since my wife and daughter obviously think more of fairies and glass men than of me.’”
Resa smiled and stroked Meggie’s nose with her forefinger. “Yes, I know, of course he doesn’t really think that! But he always gets so angry when he sees me with the notebooks…”
Resa looked out through the open window. Elinor’s garden was so large that you couldn’t see where it began or ended, you just saw tall trees and rhododendron shrubs so old that they surrounded Elinor’s house like an evergreen wood. Right under Meggie’s window was a lawn with a narrow gravel path around it. A garden seat stood to one side of the lawn. Meggie still remembered the night when she had sat there watching Dustfinger breathe fire. Elinor’s ever-grumpy gardener had swept the dead leaves off the lawn only that afternoon. You could still see the bare patch in the middle where Capricorn’s men had burned Elinor’s best books. The gardener kept trying to persuade Elinor to plant something in that space, or sow more grass seed there, but Elinor just shook her head energetically. “Who grows grass on a grave?” she had snapped the last time he suggested it, and she told him to leave the yarrow alone, too. It had grown luxuriantly around the sides of the blackened patch ever since the fire, as if to make its flat flower heads a reminder of the night when Elinor’s printed children were swallowed up by the flames.
The sun was setting behind the nearby mountains, so red that it was as if it, too, wanted to remind them of that long-extinguished fire, and a cool wind blew from the hills, making Resa shiver. Meggie closed the window. The wind blew a few faded rose petals against the pane; they stuck to the glass, pale yellow and translucent. “I don’t want to quarrel with him,” she whispered. “I never used to quarrel with Mo. Well, almost never . .”
“Perhaps he’s right.” Her mother pushed back her hair. It was just as long as Meggie’s, but darker, as if a shadow had fallen on it. Resa usually held it back with combs. Meggie often wore her hair like that, too, and sometimes when she looked at her reflection in the mirror of her wardrobe she seemed to be seeing not herself but a younger version of her mother. “Another year and she’ll be towering over you,” Mo sometimes said when he wanted to tease Resa, and the short-sighted Darius had confused Meggie with her mother several times already.
Resa ran her forefinger over the windowpane as if tracing the rose petals that clung to it. Then her hands began speaking again, hesitantly, just as lips can sometimes hesitate. “I do understand your father, Meggie,” she said. “Sometimes I myself think the two of us talk about that other world too often. Even I don’t understand why I keep coming back to the subject. And I’m always telling you about what was beautiful there, not the other things: being shut up, Mortola’s punishments, how my hands and knees hurt so much from all the work that I couldn’t sleep .. all the cruelty I saw there. Did I tell you about the maid who died of fright because a NightMare stole into our bedroom?”