books.

"
"Do you know," Constance said, looking into a pot on the stove, "I think that soon we will be picking lettuce; the
weather has stayed so warm."
"On the moon," I said, and then stopped.
"On the moon," Constance said, turning to smile at me. "you have lettuce all year round, perhaps?
"On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and _Amanita phalloides_. We have cat-furred
plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts. On the moon
Uncle Julian would be well and the sun would shine every day. You would wear our mother's pearls and sing, and the
sun would shine all the time."
"I wish I could go to your moon. I wonder if I should start the gingerbread now; it will be cold if Charles is late.
"I'll be here to eat it," I said.
"But Charles said he loved gingerbread."
I was making a little house at the table, out of the library books, standing one across two set on edge. "Old
witch," I said, "you have a gingerbread house."
"I do not," Constance said. "I have a lovely house where I live with my sister Merricat."
I laughed at her; she was worrying at the pot on the stove and she had flour on her face. "Maybe he'll never come
back," I said.
"He has to; I'm making gingerbread for him."
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"Merricat? Why should anything be done? I said I would clean your room."
39 of
"Aren't you even going to punish her?"
"Punish me?" I was standing then, shivering against the door frame. "Punish me? You mean send me to bed
without my dinner?"
And I ran. I ran until I was in the field of grass, in the very center where it was safe, and I sat there, the grass
taller than my head and hiding me. Jonas found me, and we sat there together where no one could ever see us.

After a very long time I stood up again because I knew where I was going. I was going to the summerhouse. I had not
been near the summerhouse for six years, but Charles had blackened the world and only the summer-house would do.
Jonas would not follow me; he disliked the summerhouse and when he saw me turning onto the overgrown path which
led there he went another way as though he had something important to do and would meet me somewhere later. No
one had ever liked the summerhouse very much, I remembered. Our father had planned it and had intended to lead the
creek near it and build a tiny waterfall, but something had gotten into the wood and stone and paint when the summer-
house was built and made it bad. Our mother had once seen a rat in the doorway looking in and nothing after that
could persuade her there again, and where our mother did not go, no one else went.
I had never buried anything around here. The ground was black and wet and nothing buried would have been
quite comfortable. The trees pressed too closely against the sides of the summerhouse, and breathed heavily on its roof,
and the poor flowers planted here once had either died or grown into huge tasteless wild things. When I stood near the
summerhouse and looked at it I thought it the ugliest place I had ever seen; I remembered that our mother had quite
seriously asked to have it burned down.
Inside was all wet and dark. I disliked sitting on the stone floor but there was no other place; once, I recalled,
there had been chairs here and perhaps even a low table but these were gone now, carried off or rotted away. I sat on
the floor and placed all of them correctly in my mind, in the circle around the dining-room table. Our father sat at the
head. Our mother sat at the foot. Uncle Julian sat on one hand of our mother, and our brother Thomas on the other;
beside my father sat our Aunt Dorothy and Constance. I sat between Constance and Uncle Julian, in my rightful, my
own and proper, place at the table. Slowly I began to listen to them talking.
"-- to buy a book for Mary Katherine. Lucy, should not Mary Katherine have a new book?"
"Mary Katherine should have anything she wants, my dear. Our most loved daughter must have anything she
likes."

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oms we came downstairs together, carrying our dustcloths
walking home. In the drawing room we dusted the golder
, even the blue dress in the portrait of our mother. I dustec
m, staggering, and looking up and pretending that the ceili
.ce looking down at my broom, weightless and flying until
T 11n