Dreamhunter Duet: Dreamquake Part 12

"Manners are off today, I'm afraid," the waiter said.

The cousins giggled. Laura asked the waiter to bring them some lemonade.

Rose looked sly. She asked Laura, "Do you think Sandy Mason notices your figure?"

Laura said, "I wrote to Sandy, and he didn't write back." She sighed. "I hoped at least he'd get angry at me about the nightmare. I'm sure he must have known it was me. Your ma hasn't said anything yet either."

"Perhaps you should say something."

"I can't say sorry without making excuses."

"Yes, I know, you were only doing what your father told you to do."

"Yes." Laura laced and unlaced her fingers. "That's my excuse. I followed my father's instructions. But I wanted what came with his instructions. The spell. I wanted to make myself a sandman."

Rose touched her brow. She could feel it coming-the dizziness, chills, a clench of disgust. It was as if her whole body wanted to shrink away from the altered reality of the world she found herself living in.

Laura studied Rose's face, then turned her eyes down to the tabletop. "I don't have a figure," she said, reverting to their earlier subject. "I think Sandy liked me only because I come from a famous family."

"No, Laura, he really liked you." Rose remembered Sandy Mason's fiery blush, the intensity of his attention when he looked at her cousin. "You should write to him again. You could ask him to visit us at Summerfort. You need all your friends, Laura."

Laura studied her cousin, then said, "I need people." Cool and bland.

"Yes," Rose said, innocent of her own meaning, and of the fact that Laura had understood her meaning-that she needed people rather than her monster.

The lemonade arrived, and they drank it and went back to their traditional summertime occupation of watching the world go by Farry's big bay windows.

That evening Grace surprised her family by announcing over tea that it was time they all heard what she had to say. Chorley was possibly the most startled of all of them. He stared at his wife with the white-eyed look of a shying horse but kept his seat.

"Pa.s.s your father the sugar bowl," Grace said to Rose.

Rose handed the sugar to Chorley, who helped himself to five lumps and sat back, stirring his cup. The sugar lumps thunked, and the spoon rattled sharply.

Laura got up, went to sit on the footstool beside her father. She took his hand and faced her aunt.

"All right," said Grace. Then she set her cup down and stood up.

"Are you making a public announcement?" Rose said.

"Hush," Grace said to Rose. She looked at her brother-in-law. "Tziga, now that you're not catching those horrible, distorting nightmares, you must be thinking more clearly."

"Yes," Tziga said. "Though sometimes I forget what it is I've thought clearly."

"I know that. But my point is, you must be able to see now that your plan, such as it was, wasn't a very good one."

"The papers didn't publish Lazarus's letters," Chorley said, defending Tziga.

Grace stamped her foot. "I don't want to hear any of you refer to 'Lazarus' ever again. I might have to maintain that silly fiction in public, but I refuse to do so in my own home!"

Laura said, "I'm sorry I overdreamed you. It's not Da's fault."

Tziga squeezed Laura's hand. "It is my fault. I wasn't thinking straight."

"But it's also wrong to give a nightmare like Buried Alive to convicts to make them behave, and slave away in the Westport mine," Laura said.

"Yes, Laura, but is giving the St. Lazarus's Eve patrons a nightmare about being buried alive any way to change that?" Grace said.

"I think you're being naive, Ma," Rose said.

Grace flushed. She glared at her daughter.

"Think of Doran's map," Rose said. "Think of what he's planning to do."

"What is he planning to do?" Grace set her hands on her hips.

"Use your imagination."

Grace rounded on Chorley. "Are you going to let your daughter talk to me like that?"

"Rose, please be more polite to your mother."

"And you-" Grace went on, speaking to her husband now. "You could ask your good friend the Grand Patriarch what he's planning to do about Doran and the Regulatory Body. Except, of course, it isn't the Body the Grand Patriarch dislikes, it's dreamhunters."

"That's not true," Tziga said, softly.

"The Regulatory Body has been around for a little over ten years," Chorley said. "Have you ever heard of any inst.i.tution becoming as powerful as the Body has within such a short time? Even Christianity didn't manage it."

"Napoleon?" said Rose, as though she were doing a quiz. She was ignored.

"That's beside the point," Grace said. "You seem to think Doran has a plan. And you also think-rather trustingly-that the Grand Patriarch has a plan."

"He has vigorous suspicion," Chorley said. "He acts on his suspicions. He hides dreamhunters who come to him for help."

"And how many of those 'disappearing' dreamhunters that you and Rose have been talking about have been disappeared by the Church rather than the Regulatory Body?" Grace said. "After all, the Church didn't tell us where Tziga was."

"They weren't sure I'd recover," Tziga said. "And the Body didn't tell you what had happened to me either."

"True," said Grace. "And the Church did help you. I understand that you feel you owe the Grand Patriarch. And I know you're a churchgoer-a believer. It is different for you, Tziga. But Chorley thinks he's doing research for the Grand Patriarch. He's taking it all very seriously. When really it's just another one of his b.l.o.o.d.y hobbies!"

There was a moment of silence; then Chorley dropped his teacup into its saucer, got up, and walked out.

"Ma!" Rose said.

Grace's eyes glazed over with tears. "Why doesn't anyone ever listen to me?"

"Please don't cry, Ma," Rose said, distressed.

"You're going to start trespa.s.sing on properties in Founderston looking for clues," Grace said to Rose, and began to sob. "Your father has got you thinking that it's all right to break the law if it's for a good cause."

Rose went to her mother and hugged her. "Well, I won't, Ma. I'll let Da do it."

"You all act as though you've been appointed to save the world," Grace said, still sobbing.

"I was only trying to mend my mistakes-mistakenly," Tziga said, sadly.

Laura just sat, wearing a dazzled, radiant expression.

"There, there," Rose said to her mother.

"What's so wrong with our lives anyway?" Grace said, querulous. "Why do you all have to be such d.a.m.n rebels?"

"I'm not," said Rose.

"It does," said Laura. "The world does need saving. Or, at least, I think it's the world."

Everyone looked at her. Then Chorley came back into the room, and everyone looked at him instead. He was carrying one of his notebooks and a pen, so vigorously dipped in ink that the fingers of his right hand were tipped brilliant scarlet. He gave the notebook to Grace and said, "If you will, dear, could you please read aloud the pa.s.sages I have underlined?"

Grace gave him a look of dread but did as she was told. She spoke softly, stammered once or twice, but read: "Rise up! Rise up! I said to rise! Crush them! Rise up and overturn everything! Find your feet and get up! Shake them all off! I said, Get up! I said, Rise up now!"

Chorley said, "I found those within only seventy pages of bad messages from the abandoned Founderston-to-Sisters-Beach telegraph line. Sometimes there's just the odd, plaintive 'crush' or 'rise' or 'shake.' 'Plaintive' is the right word. These are complaints, angry complaints."

"What about the poetry?" Rose said.

"It seems there are two voices," Chorley said. "One complains, the other seems to be in an ecstasy of antic.i.p.ation."

Grace held the notebook out, and her husband took it. "Dear," he said, "I do feel that I'm blundering around in the dark. I do feel like a dim-witted dilettante. But I don't think I'm wasting my time."

Tziga added, hesitantly, "What Laura did to you, Grace, and to the rest of the Rainbow Opera's patrons, she did because I told her to when I wasn't in my right mind. I don't trust my judgment anymore, but I do trust Chorley's."

"It may all really matter, Ma," Rose said. "What we choose to do might make a big difference."

Chorley kept his eyes on his wife's face. "I promised the Grand Patriarch my time in exchange for his telling me where Tziga was. I'm honoring a promise."

"Marta knew too, and she chose not to tell you," Tziga said. "They thought I might not live. And they thought I knew more about the Body and Doran than I did, that I was in deeper with the Body than I was. And they supposed I knew more about the Place, as though it was a deity and I was its prophet. An evil deity, with an evil prophet," Tziga added, then put a hand over his face.

Chorley started and hurried to him.

"It's all right, Da," Laura said.

Chorley said, "You should be resting, Tziga." They helped him up and walked him slowly from the room. For a time they could be heard making soothing sounds as they helped him up the stairs.

Rose and Grace looked at each other.

"You do know I'm not siding with Da against you," Rose said. "Ma, you're determined we stop snooping only because you're afraid we'll get into trouble. You're just as sure as we are that the Body is up to no good."

"But why does it have to be our problem?" Grace asked.

"Because we know about it."

5.

UST THREE DAYS LATER GRACE FOUND HERSELF PRESIDING OVER A VERY DIFFERENT HOUSEHOLD.

Chorley came in with an armload of parcels while the girls were having their breakfast. He turned back the cloth at one end of the table and put the parcels down, and Grace laughed as Rose practically climbed over Mamie to grab one and tear it open. Dress patterns and samples of cloth spilled out onto the tabletop, some of the swatches of silk crepe so light that they seemed to skate on cushions of air, speeding across the polished table and onto the floor. Mamie and Rose s.n.a.t.c.hed and tussled. Laura gathered up the dropped swatches and started to hand over the pearls, and pure whites, and oysters, and creams.

"I'll look awful in all of these," Mamie said, with no hint of her usual aloof sarcasm.

"Oh no, let's see, there must be something suitable." Grace got up to join them.

"I'm going to choose a plain design." Rose was sorting through the patterns. "Something only I can wear." She drew herself up to her full five foot ten. "And I am not going to show off my bosom."

"At least you have a choice about that," said Mamie, and crossed her arms over her large b.r.e.a.s.t.s, as though hoping to push them back into her body.

Rose shuffled patterns. "I'm sure we can find something pretty and becoming for you."

"But am I becoming?" Mamie raised an eyebrow.

Grace and Rose nodded earnestly.

Mamie looked away. "I'm becoming bored."

Laura, who had been standing stock-still and staring out the gla.s.s doors of the dining room, spun around and said, "Excuse me, Mamie. Could I borrow Rose for a moment?"

"She's not mine to lend," Mamie said.

Laura grabbed her cousin's hand and opened the doors.

"Come into the garden, Maud," muttered Mamie as the other two went out.

"What is it?" said Rose, then found herself performing a little hop to avoid tripping over some stones-five of them-that had been laid, in a neat row, on the bottom step of the veranda.

Laura let go of Rose to push the stones under the step.

"What?" Rose demanded.

"I'm sure that's a sign," Laura said. She took hold of Rose, led her to the edge of the lawn, and began stooping to peer under bushes.

"What are we looking for?" Rose said, and began to search too-pausing once to dive into a bush and retrieve a croquet ball.

Laura continued to work her way around the house. Then she started down the track to the lagoon. She said, over her shoulder, "He won't be too near the water."

A moment later Laura had to double back for Rose, who had stopped following.