The Changeling Read online

  But with Martha, no one was ever sure what she wanted, particularly Martha herself. Like gardening. When she was practically a baby, someone, probably Grandmother Abbott, had decided that Martha loved to garden. So, for years and years Martha had worked in Grandmother’s garden and got cute little gardening tools for her birthday; and all the time, Martha secretly wondered how she happened to like gardening at all. Particularly Grandmother’s garden, where everything was so planned and perfect and it was so easy to step on something rare and expensive.

  All the other Abbotts seemed to believe the gardening myth absolutely, but they obviously thought that Martha did need something more. Sometimes when she was talking to friends or relatives, Mrs. Abbott described Martha as a “real individualist” in a tone of voice that indicated it was a condition she approved of. But when only Abbotts were around, she often talked about the fact that Martha needed “bringing out.” The Brownies had only been one attempt to “bring Martha out.” Riding lessons were another.

  The whole Abbott family was in on the decision to send Martha to riding school. It happened one night at the dinner table not long after the Brownie scandal had finally died down. Mrs. Abbott started the discussion by announcing that she had been talking to Maureen Peters and had heard that little Kelly Peters was starting dancing school. The Peters had lived next door to the Abbotts for as long as Martha could remember, and Kelly and Martha were almost the same age. Kelly was very cute and very dangerous. Ever since nursery school Kelly had played with Martha on the rare occasions when absolutely nobody better was available. The rest of the time, Martha was her favorite prey.

  The Abbotts were always encouraging Martha to be best friends with Kelly. Martha would be in her room reading or something, and her mother would stick her head in the door and say, “Marty, sweetheart, it’s too nice a day to spend alone in your room. Kelly and the little Sutter girl are playing hopscotch out on the sidewalk. Why don’t you go out and play, too?”

  Because Kelly looked so much like a spun-sugar angel and could act like one when she felt it was necessary, it was useless to try to explain that to approach Kelly when she already had someone to play with was as foolhardy as walking into a whirling buzz saw. If Martha were lucky, Kelly and whoever else was there would only whisper together, leaving her out of everything; but if Kelly was in top form, Martha would be greeted by a dimpled sneer and something like, “Look. Old fatty squirrel face thinks we’re going to let her play.”

  But no one would believe that, so she just said, “I don’t feel like playing hopscotch today.”

  That night at dinner Mrs. Abbott said she thought it would be nice if Martha started dancing school with Kelly. Martha protested, but her mother insisted that she should not be so afraid to try something new, and that she would find it was lots of fun once she got started. Surprisingly it was Cath who came to the rescue.

  Cath, of course, was already in dancing school and had been for years. With the authority of all that experience, she explained to her mother that not many girls started as young as seven, and the ones who did were always the ones with lots of natural talent. Martha suspected that Cath was really thinking that it would be embarrassing to have her chubby, awkward little sister galloping around looking ridiculous in a leotard, but Martha was grateful anyway. Martha’s mother looked at Martha and sighed.

  “Well, it does seem she ought to be involved in something with children her own age.”

  That was when Tom, who had taken riding lessons the year before, suggested that maybe Martha could learn to ride. “You’d like that wouldn’t you, Marty?” he said. “You’re always checking out all those books about horses.”

  “I don’t know,” Martha said, suddenly uncertain. It was true she had always loved horses, but from a safe distance. “I like to look at horses. But the ones they have at the Onowora Stables are all awfully big. Maybe I could learn somewhere where they have small ones for beginners.”

  “Small ones for beginners,” Cath said, rolling up her eyes. “Next she’ll be asking for one with training wheels.”

  But horses—with or without training wheels—sounded safer than dancing school with Kelly, so Martha agreed to try. And for once her mother was right. It wasn’t so bad once she got started. Not that the classes themselves were so very great. Riding in formation around a ring with a lot of other kids all dressed alike in boots and jodhpurs wasn’t terribly exciting—at least, not after the initial stage of acute terror was over. But there were compensations.

  Martha had always been both fascinated and terrified by horses; and as her terror diminished, her fascination grew. Moreover, it turned out that Ivy loved horses, too; and since Martha had become a bonafide paying member of a riding class, the two felt welcome to just hang around the stables—visiting their favorite horses and breathing in the exciting horsey atmosphere. Sometimes, after Martha became more confident, they saved up their money, with Martha usually contributing the largest part, and rented two old gentle mares for a trail ride up in the hills.

  Of course, Ivy had had no riding lessons, but she didn’t seem to need any. She looked pretty funny in her cotton dress and sneakers instead of jodhpurs and boots, with her hair bouncing like black foam around her head; but that didn’t change the fact that she was very much in command of the situation. The horses noticed right away. Things like confidence matter to horses, and they let you know if you don’t have enough of it. Ivy never had any trouble. Martha’s teacher was always saying that riding was simply a matter of confidence and balance, and Ivy just naturally seemed to have lots of both. But it did depress Martha just a little to see Ivy doing so easily what she herself had learned with such difficulty.

  “You’re better than I am already,” Martha told Ivy a little sadly on their second or third trail ride.

  But Ivy didn’t take any credit. “I probably can’t help it,” she explained. “I suppose I was a cowboy in one of my reincarnations.”

  Martha wasn’t too surprised. She already knew that Ivy had definitely been a dancer in another life. Reincarnation had been a new idea to Martha, but Ivy had learned all about it from Aunt Evaline, of course.

  “Does your Aunt Evaline really believe all that, about reincarnation?” Martha had asked, but Ivy only shrugged.

  “Believe it?” she said. “I don’t know. She told me all about it, but she didn’t mention about believing.”

  Even though Martha doubted that she herself had had much riding experience in another life, she gradually became a fairly good rider. And although she didn’t make all the new horseback riding friends her mother had hoped for, Martha, herself was more than satisfied. She lost a little weight for one thing, and she had a lot of fun for another. Maybe the most important gain was a great deal of freedom.

  The Abbotts were very enthusiastic about Martha’s new interest in horses. Everybody knows that it’s quite normal for little girls to go through a spell of being absolutely out of their minds about horses. And Martha had been such a strange child, with such odd problems, that it was obviously comforting to see her develop such an appropriate mania. Martha overheard her mother telling someone on the phone, “Oh, Martha? Well, we don’t see too much of her around home these days. She’s going through her horse period. Spends every waking hour at the stables. Oh yes, I quite agree. Very healthy.” She sounded much more comfortable than she sometimes had when people asked about Martha. Martha was glad. And she was also glad that she was being allowed to spend so much time away from home with no questions asked. And since nobody asked, Martha didn’t have to mention that Ivy was spending nearly every waking hour at the stables, too.

  Rainy days, however, were a problem. That first winter with Ivy was a fairly dry one, but even so there were times when Martha was not allowed to go either to Bent Oaks Grove or to the stables for two or three days at a time. It was during one of those times that she learned just how incredibly fearless Ivy really was.

  Late one Sunday night, when it had rained all weekend
and Martha had not seen Ivy since Friday afternoon, Martha was getting ready for bed when she heard a noise outside her window. It was Ivy. Martha opened the window, and Ivy climbed in out of the dark and wet. She sat on the windowsill while Martha put her muddy shoes in the bathtub and brought her a big towel to catch the drips. Martha stared at Ivy, almost speechless with surprise, while Ivy sat down by the furnace outlet to dry herself.

  “How did you get here?” Martha finally asked in a whisper, knowing but not believing it—because she knew for certain that nothing in the whole world could make her do it.

  “The same way as always,” Ivy said. “Over the trail.”

  “But it’s dark out there, and raining,” Martha said, but Ivy only shrugged. With her bushy black hair plastered to her head, she looked tinier than ever, as greatly reduced as a wet Persian kitten. Her eyes, in contrast, had grown even larger. Great dark eyes, full of liquid sparkles, like the eyes of a mermaid or a creature from another world. It occurred to Martha to wonder if Ivy’s swimming eyes were full of rain—or tears.

  “Were you really not at all afraid?” she asked.

  Ivy buried her face in the thick towel for a moment before she answered. “There’s worse things than dark,” she said, almost in a whisper. Then she shrugged and blew upwards at her wet hair and said, “Besides, sometimes a changeling can see in the dark, just like a cat.” Ivy spent most of that night with Martha, slipping out just at dawn.

  Afterwards, that conversation and that night kept coming back to Martha; but she always tried not to think about what Ivy might have meant when she said, “there’s worse things than dark.”

  8

  SPRING CAME AND THE days at Bent Oaks Grove and at the stables were longer and warmer. At the stables Martha and Ivy had come under the spell of a great love. Her name was Dolly, and she was a very special horse.

  A little bit over thirty years old, Dolly still had the remnants of a noble beauty. Even though she had become a little bony and swaybacked, she still had a delicate high-browed face and wise and gentle eyes. She was dead safe with any rider. Not even the most terror-stricken and helpless beginner could tempt her into unruly behavior. As soon as she could decipher what the frozen or spastic little human on her back had in mind, she proceeded to carry out his wishes with a willing obedience that built up the confidence of even the most timid. She was perfectly agreeable to any suggestion—as long as it could be done at a very slow gait. Nothing in the world could make her go faster than a very relaxed trot.

  Of course beginners adored her for the first few rides. But most of them, having learned skill and confidence from Dolly, also learned that Dolly was considered a baby’s horse—and to be seen on her was enough to brand the rider as a tenderfoot. So they turned against her and gave their devotion to sidestepping, scatterbrained animals who snorted foolishly at shadows or blowing leaves. But not Martha and Ivy.

  Martha realized that no horse but Dolly could have tamed the terror she had felt when she was first thrown carelessly into a saddle by Mr. Smith, who owned the stables. Ivy had other reasons for her love. Ivy claimed that Dolly was enchanted. She was probably not actually a horse at all.

  No one worried if children went into Dolly’s stall to play. Any kid who knew Dolly, knew that his own mother would sooner bite him or step on him than Dolly would. The way Dolly looked at you, even the way she moved when kids were around, made it plain that she thought of children as colt things, and herself as a kind of foster mother.

  Martha and Ivy spent hours in Dolly’s stall. They curried her and polished her hooves and braided her mane and tail. They hid bits of apple in their pockets, down their necks, in the tops of their socks and even in their hair, and giggled madly while Dolly frisked them gently with a twitchy velvet nose. They kept her stall dazzlingly clean, and sometimes they sat in the sweet straw and talked for hours, leaning against Dolly’s legs. As long as they kept the flies shooed away, she never so much as stomped a foot.

  The day that Kevin Smith, the grandson of the owner of the stables, came to the stall door and stood watching them, they had been daydreaming there, as usual, under Dolly’s placid gaze. They had been imagining the horses they would someday own, when they were old enough to have anything they wanted.

  “I’ll have an arab mare,” Martha had said. “Sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail like Dolly, only she’ll be younger and maybe just a little prancier.”

  Ivy’s eyes were dreamy. “I’ll have a coal black stallion,” she said, “with a bright gold mane and tail.”

  Martha thought back over all the horse books she had known. “I don’t think you can,” she said. “I don’t think there are any that color—black with gold manes and tails.”

  “How do you know?” Ivy asked.

  “I just never heard of any,” Martha said.

  Ivy shrugged. “So?” she said. “That’s no reason why I can’t have one. Why can’t I have something I never heard of?”

  Martha was about to change her mare to gold with a black mane and tail, when Kevin’s head appeared over the stall door. Martha poked Ivy to warn her, and they were quiet, watching Kevin warily.

  “What you doing with that old mare?” Kevin asked.

  “Nothing,” Ivy said.

  Kevin stared with an unfriendly grin for a minute, but as he turned away he said, “If she gets any thinner, my granddad’s going to sell her to the dog food factory.”

  When he was gone, Martha and Ivy turned in unison to stare at Dolly, but she didn’t seem to have heard. At least, she only went on eating, nuzzling out the best parts of the hay and shaking it gently before beginning to chew. Without a word, Ivy led the way out of the stall and together she and Martha went on a silent horror-stricken search for Mr. Smith.

  When they found him, he would not deny that it was true. “It may not be for quite a while yet,” he said. “But when a horse gets past a certain age, sometimes it gets to be impossible to keep any meat on their bones. No matter how much they eat, they just keep on getting thinner and thinner. You girls can understand that I can’t have skinny old nags here at Onowora Stables. I can’t have people saying that I don’t take care of my horses—and that’s what they would think.”

  Martha could only stare at Mr. Smith in silent misery while waves of hot tears ran down her face, but Ivy’s dark eyes were dry and hooded like an angry cat’s.

  “Well, I think—I think you’re a murderer!” she said, and grabbing Martha she jerked her away, and they ran. They went on running until they were halfway back to Bent Oaks on the ridge trail. Then they dropped flat on their backs in the grass beside the trail. While Martha sobbed, Ivy plotted; and by the time Martha had run out of tears, Ivy had a plan.

  “We’ll steal her,” she said. Martha gasped and smiled, delighted and, of course, terrified.

  “We’ll steal her at night,” Ivy said, “and take her to Bent Oaks Grove.”

  “But they’ll find her there,” Martha said. “Someone will see her there and tell.”

  “We’ll only leave her there until morning. We can get her as far as Bent Oaks Grove in the dark, and we’ll tie her there and go home. Then early in the morning—it will have to be Saturday—we’ll take her over the Ridge Trail and the High Trail into the Coast Range and let her go. There’s lots of grass there, and she can live with the deer, and we’ll go to see her now and then and take her oats and carrots.”

  It seemed like a lovely plan to Martha until she realized exactly what was going to be asked of her. She, Martha Abbott, who had always had to have all the lights on before she would go down the hall to the bathroom, was going to have to crawl out her window in the dark after everyone else was in bed and go up the hill to Bent Oaks all by herself.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll be scared.”

  “Being scared won’t hurt you,” Ivy said. “Why don’t you bring Lion with you?”

  “I don’t know,” Martha said. She hadn’t needed Lion much lately, and she wasn’t sure she co
uld get him to come back. Besides she’d never taken Lion with her much further than down the hall—at least not in the dark. “I don’t know if I can.” Then she grinned faintly. “I think Lion will be scared, too.”

  Ivy laughed. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll do it. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Martha said weakly, wondering if she really meant it; and right up until Friday night at ten o’clock she wasn’t sure. But when ten o’clock came she really did climb out her window into the pitch dark, with only Tom’s flashlight, which she didn’t even dare use until she was past the Peters’ house and onto the open hillside. The flashlight made it easier to walk, but it didn’t help the fear, since every kind of horror seem to crowd the dim edge of its narrow beam. By the time Martha reached Bent Oaks where Ivy was waiting, she was sick with fright and besides that she seemed to have been stricken dumb. Ivy had to shake her and pound her on the back for quite a while before her voice began to come back.

  “Stop. Stop it. You’re hurting me,” she finally forced out in a kind of sizzle between her clenched teeth. She went on sizzling because she knew she didn’t dare open her mouth any wider. She felt absolutely certain that once it got open, it would stay open, and all her fear would come out in a terrible, disgraceful howl, and probably her dinner along with it. “Come on,” she hissed. “Let’s do it quick because I think I’m going to be sick.”

  All the way down the trail to the stables they had to stop from time to time while Martha clutched her stomach with one hand and her mouth with the other and moaned. Whenever she did, Ivy would whisper, “Go ahead and get it over with. You’ll feel better. Get it over with before we get to the stables.” But Martha couldn’t quite.

  When they reached the stables, they skirted the yard to the rear and climbed the fence behind the buildings. Inside the stable everything was silent, except for the snuffle and bump of the horses; and dark, except for one dim bulb outside the front entrance. The girls made their way noiselessly down the sawdust-covered walkway between the stalls, to Dolly’s door. As Ivy stood on tiptoe to reach the latch, Dolly softly nickered her surprise to see them there at such a strange hour. As soon as they were inside the stall, she nuzzled their faces happily in greeting, and suddenly overcome with the thought of what was going to happen to all of them if they were caught, Martha began to cry. She leaned on Dolly’s manger, clutching her mouth while tears burned down across her hands.