“Nonsense, Chester! No nuisance at all. We’ve oodles of room. Don’t we, Jerome?”
“Mhmm.”
“There are five tuffets now, in the Towers, I believe. Are there five, Jerome? Or six?”
“Hmm?”
“Tuffets, dear! In the Towers? Five or six?”
“I lost count,” said Jerome.
“What’s the Towers?” Walter asked.
“That’s what we call our place,” explained Beatrice. “Tuffet Towers. There’s the tuffet that faces south—we call that Sunnyreach—and the one to the north—Chillington—and two that we just call the east and west wings. And the big one in the middle, of course—the Tower—which gives the whole thing its name. That’s five.” She sighed, somewhat weary. “But there may be one or two others elsewhere. It makes one long for the simple old days.”
“And how, might I ask, are all these tuffets connected?” asked Walt.
“With thatch, Mr. Water Snake—all with thatch. A little thatch here, a little thatch there—”
“Here a thatch, there a thatch, everywhere a thatch-thatch—”
“Walter!” Chester whispered. “Be quiet, please.”
But Beatrice Pheasant hadn’t noticed, or else she pretended not to notice. With a well-bred pheasant you never know. “So space is no problem. Do come!” she urged.
Chester had his doubts about Tuffet Towers. It wasn’t in Tuffet Country, he knew. That part of the Meadow was near his stump. There was space and grass between most of the tuffets, and although they hadn’t been planted in rows, there seemed to be some kind of order there, as if Nature herself had made a garden, with a subtle design that only she knew. But the Pheasants lived off to the north and the west, past Emmy and Hen’s stone wall, in a woodsy and wild location. It never had really been cultivated as garden or orchard for the old homestead, and even the long-gone cows never browsed there. It was simply an area of the Old Meadow that had grown up alone, and been let go.
“You’ll love it!” said Beatrice to Chester. “So rustic and free, we feel. It’s all very unspoiled.”
“Many mountain lions up there?” said Walter Water Snake.
“Mr. Water Snake—really!”
“Wolves? Bears?”
“You’re joking, of course.” The pheasant managed a ripple of giggle.
“Walter never jokes!” said Chester.
Beatrice, who was used to getting her way, scratched the ground again. She had a slow but determined scratch, as if her way was somewhere in the earth down there, and sooner or later she meant to get it. “And Miss Jenny’ll take care of you.”
Walter, Simon, and Chester all looked at each other—and then at the Pheasants. “Who’s that?”
“She’s our field mouse,” explained Beatrice. “We’ve had her for years. Have we not, Jerome?”
“Mhmm.”
Simon Turtle gasped. “You don’t mean little Genevieve Field Mouse? From years ago? I remember her! What a darling she was! So rambunctious and funny. Good grass, I’d almost forgotten her. How is she now?”
“She’s old,” said Jerome.
“I should think so, indeed.” Simon smiled as his eyes looked at nothing and saw the past. “My stars—we were young together.”
“And turtles are older than anyone,” observed Walter Water Snake.
“Such pretty silvery fur she had.” Simon felt the sweet hurt of things gone by.
“It’s all gray now!” said Jerome.
“Just how far along is Miss Mouse?” Walter inquired.
“Why, Jenny”—Simon reckoned the time. “Of course, even then I had a few years on her—I’ve got a few years on most Meadow folk—but Jenny—twenty, twenty-five, thirty—”
“Mmm!” Walter murmured appreciatively. “That’s a ripe old age for a field mouse.”
Beatrice, too, was becoming nostalgic. “She came to us the same day we moved under our very first tuffet.”
“And she wasn’t young then.” Jerome did a little scratching himself. “And that’s ages ago!”
“Not ‘ages,’ dear,” his wife corrected.
“Just what,” Walter went on, “does Miss Jenny Field Mouse do for you?”
“She gets lost a lot.”
“Oh, Jerome! Don’t exaggerate! Really, my dear! A slight tendency to wander away,” Beatrice explained. “That’s all it is. She fetches, carries—makes the beds.”
“When she can remember where they are!”
“I’d be lost without her.”
“We get lost trying to find her sometimes,” said Jerome.
“I’ve heard quite enough,” the pheasant decided. “Now come along, Chester. We’ll show you the Towers while there’s still enough light. It’ll just be splendid, having you there. And also, my dear, there’s one wee chore you can do for us. I’ll tell you about it on the way home. Jerome—follow me!” With great dignity—she’d been practicing all her life—Beatrice swiveled and swung around, her plumage ruffed and head thrown back, Jerome in tow, and began a stately plod toward home.
Chester Cricket felt helpless. As happens so often, he had let himself be defeated again by the kindness of friends. “Okay—let’s go.” He shrugged his first shoulders, sighed at Simon, made a face at Walter, and, hopping his hardest, brought up the rear of the pheasant parade.
“Shh!” Walter hissed at the turtle, to warn him. “Be quiet, now. We can’t start work till they’re out of sight.” By craning up, he could just see over the edge of the bank. “I daresay before another day has passed we shall hear the tale of Chester Crickety and Field Mouse Rickety.” He shook his head and laughed at the three receding figures. “Chester’s jumping looks grim. There’s no joy in that jump. The poor cricket! And there he goes.”
NINE
Tuffet Towers
And—“Here he comes!” Walt said the next morning.
His head was still craned to see over the bank. A stranger, a casual human being who took a stroll around Simon’s Pool, might think that nothing had happened at all. But much had. And not simply the fact that the water was cleared of all its litter—except for Chester’s boat. Simon Turtle was lolling as usual on his log; Walt Water Snake had been swimming and sunning, too—and craning and waiting; the morning seemed perfectly ordinary. It wasn’t. There was something in the air. But then, a turtle and a water snake always seem to be keeping some secret.
“Not a word, now! At first.”
“Don’t you be bad, now, Walter,” said Simon.
“We have to have some fun! For a while!” And that human stranger who overheard the two friends talking might have thought Walter’s eyes were glinting wickedly. They weren’t. It was mischief. However, you have to know a snake well to tell the two apart.
Slipping down and swimming tummy-up—he was expert at different styles, was Walt—the water snake slithered next to Simon and lay on his back, as if he wanted some sun on his stomach. But his eyes were open a little slit, so when Chester appeared: “Good gracious! My word! And upon my soul! Turtle-urtle, we have company!” He zipped over for a closer look. “Chipper Chester—what’s happened? I never yet have seen a bug with big bags under both his eyes, but if any insect could—”
“Oh, Walter, I’m so tired—”
“Again—?”
“No. Still. I didn’t sleep a single wink.”
“Hop on the Becalmed. I’ll rock you.”
“I called it the West Wind.”
“The weather changed. This boat will have a new name every day. Jump! Jump!”
Chester did as he was told. And gratefully collapsed on his ship. “Oh—oh—it feels so good, to lie down.” The pleasure of stretching was wonderful. “I just am simply dead.”
“Were you up all hours hunting for field mice?”
“I was up all hours—tolling.”
“Tolling?” Simon and Walter asked together.
“Chiming!” answered Chester Cricket, with a little bit of crazy impatience. “But of course you don’t know?
??and you wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you?—I am a clock now! If you please!”
Simon made a whistling sound—disbelief—as if now he had heard everything. “I have lived in this Meadow since Hedley was only a country village, since before there were houses on Mountain Road, and I never—”
Walter Water Snake interrupted him. “How does a cricket become a clock?”
“He tells time,” said Chester, matter-of-factly.
“May we hear how this strange change took place?” said Walter. “From cricket to clock? It sounds like a fascinating if somewhat unnatural transformation.”
“I have to take a nap,” began Chester. “I—”
“Afterwards! Afterwards!” Walt rocked the boat, to prompt the cricket. “You hopped all the way to the Towers Terrific, or Thatchworth Manor, whatever Mrs. Magnificent calls it, and—and—?”
“And all the way there she kept telling me how ‘at home’ I’d feel. She wanted me not to be disturbed by how ‘well off’ Jerome and she were. How ‘well-to-do.’ She said that several times. And she knew that I came from ‘modest circumstances.’”
“By which she meant your stump?”
“I guess. You see, she explained, Jerome and she were, well, rather wealthy—”
“Wealthy she said, but rich she meant!” Walter whacked the water with his tail. “Can you beat that bird!”
“It’s very curious,” Chester reflected. “I thought that was only a human problem. It’s one of the big advantages of being an animal: if you decide you’re rich, then you are!”
“Yeah, that’s probably just how it happened,” growled Walter. Beebee Pheasant woke up one morning and said, “Jerome, we are rich! Let’s add another tuffet, my dear.”
“I doubt if she said that,” laughed Chester.
“Words to that effect. So what else did Towering Tail Feathers do to make you feel at home? Along with telling you that you were just an impoverished cricket without a hole to call your own?”
“Oh, Walter, it wasn’t as bad as that. She was only trying to ‘set me at my ease,’ she said.”
“I’d like to set her on her ease!” grumbled Walter.
“Anyway—we got to the Towers, and sure enough, Miss Jenny had wandered away again. But not too far. She was under a patch of daisies, sleeping. So peaceful she looked. And when we woke her up, she said she was hunting for strawberries.”
“Strawberries?” said Simon. “In August?”
“When Miss Jenny hunts for strawberries, she hunts for strawberries!” Chester said. “She’s so old by now that whatever season she wants it to be, why that’s the season she’s living in. It’s wonderful, in a way. And she was absolutely thrilled that I was coming to live with them. She’d been expecting me, she said. I know—don’t ask—how could she be? But she was expecting someone—that’s all—and it might as well be me. You just have to think the way she does—as if thought had all turned into dreams, or memories, or secret desires—and then everything falls in place. And don’t you hiss, Mr. Water Snake.”
“I was only sighing. It’s beautiful.”
“I’ve grown very fond of Miss Jenny, I have! She’s a lovely grand old soul! And say what you want about Beebee and Jerry—they love her, too. Although she makes their life a mess.”
“Some people—and pheasants—need to be messed up!” pronounced Mr. Water Snake, upright as a judge in the water.
“What’s strange is, Beatrice said that she and Jerome wouldn’t know what to do without Miss Jenny, but now they spend almost all their time taking care of her. I guess years ago, when she first came, she waited on them—she got their food, and cleaned the tuffets, and kept all Beatrice’s things in order.”
“And what,” Walter wondered, “did the young Miss Field Mouse get out of all this for herself?”
“Room and board, and security. From some of her rambling last night, I got the idea she was left alone.”
“She was. It was terrible!” Simon Turtle remembered. “Her brothers and sisters just up and moved. And Jenny was left alone. Her last brother got killed in a Meadow fire. One horrible, dry August afternoon. Afterwards she was—taken by fright, you might say. She was scary. Can’t blame her. It must have been somewhere along about then that she met the Pheasants.” The turtle brooded: time worked in his world, which was the Meadow, in strange unforeseeable ways. “’Course I wouldn’t want to gossip, or cast aspersions or anything, but I’ve always suspected our Beatrice might just want a lady-in-waiting of her own.”
A silence lasted and grew so huge it was like a person standing there—some presence that was bigger even than a human being. It made Chester Cricket uneasy. “Well, she’s got a fantastic home anyway. You should see all the stuff that the Pheasants have collected! That’s one thing I found out right away—if you’re rich, you never throw anything out. And you’re very proud of your family, too. Beatrice let me see her eggshells. Of course I wasn’t allowed to touch.”
“Her own eggshells?” asked Walter.
“She keeps them in a special place. It’s a kind of bookcase—except it’s for eggs—stitched out of twigs and branches and thatch. She’s had several broods, so there’s quite a few. There’s Betty’s eggshell, and James’s and John’s, Jerome Junior’s, Floyd’s—I can’t even remember. The children are all scattered now. A whole bunch flew to Massachusetts—more room up there. But the queer thing is this: she thinks even more of the ‘ancestral eggs’ than of her own!”
Walter didn’t much like the sound of that. “What are ‘ancestral eggs’?”
“They’re the eggshells her forebears came out of,” said Chester. “All kept in a lunch box she found one day. And is she ever proud of them! The older the better! There’s Aunt Helen’s eggshell, and great Uncle Ezra’s, and Great-great-great-grandfather Floyd’s—he’s the one that Beatrice’s fourth son was named for—”
“You’ve become an expert in pheasant family trees!” said Walter.
“—and Floyd’s cousin Alice, twice removed, who flew west about seventy years ago with her half brother George—and neither of them was ever heard from again—”
“Chester Cricket, you stop that!” Walter lifted his tail, about to spank the surface again.
“All neatly stacked in a dented tin lunch box. Which has the name ‘Billy’ scratched on it. The really old eggs get yellow, too.”
“I think it’s creepy!” snorted Walt. “Whoever that kid might be, if Billy should find his lunch box again, he’s in for a very peculiar surprise. Yek!”
“It takes getting used to,” Chester admitted.
“Does Jerome have his own dented lunch box of ancestors, too?”
“No. From hints that Beatrice dropped now and then, I gathered his family wasn’t all that distinguished. At least not when compared to hers.”
“He could be a peacock—she’d never admit it.”
“Oh, and speaking of peacocks—you ought to see all the plumes.”
“Whose plumes?”
“Everybody’s plumes.”
“She has ancestral plumes, too?”
“You bet!” said Chester. “Arranged in a circle, each stuck in the earth, around the central tuffet. Beatrice calls it ‘The Gallery: A Pheasant’s Family Album of Feathers.’”
“That does it,” said Walter. “I’m going under. Goodbye forever.” He sank from sight.
“Walter Water Snake!” Chester pounded the water. “You come back here! You sent me off—at least you can listen.”
Walter’s eyes appeared and blinked at the cricket. That’s all of him he would let be seen.
“Last night, after supper—which Miss Jenny misplaced, but we found it in Sunnyreach—Beatrice pointed out all the colors that came and went in her family feathers. There was one special gold, a bright brown gold, that Floyd the First had—and Beatrice has it, too—”
“Oh, naturally,” Walter rose to say.
“—that she thinks is unique. No other pheasant in the whole world has i
t. She was hoping that one of her children would—but no luck. She has plumes from them, too.”
“Does she yank a pin feather before she lets anyone leave the nest?”
“To remember them by. And add to the family album. Tradition. Floyd the First made it a rule: Before any pheasant chick flies away—”
“It sounds to me,” Walter interrupted, “as if Tuffet Towers was haunted by Great-great-great-grandfather Floyd.”
“Well, it’s not,” said Chester. “When anybody’s as fascinated by ancestors as Beatrice Pheasant is, they don’t need any ghosts. They make their own. And why not, say I. Everybody should have an interest. Hers is ancestors, mine is music—as Beatrice kept pointing out when we’d located dinner and eaten it. I didn’t know what she was driving at, the way she kept on with the compliments: how ‘musical’ I was, how ‘tuneful,’ what pleasure she and Jerome always took in listening to me ‘toll the hours.’ Do I toll, Simon? I ask you now, do I toll the hours?”
“Not so’s I’ve ever noticed, Chester.”
“I chirp, that’s all. On nice days I chirp. And on bad days, too, if I feel like it. But Beatrice got it into her head that as long as they had this great big tuffet—the one in the middle, and it was a tower—well, why not make it a bell tower, and why not make me the bell? I just was supposed to hop up there, on top of the tuffet, and strike the hours. And wait, Walter Water Snake! Just you wait—before you start doing somersaults underwater! Not only was I going to count the hours—ring them off all day and all night—she had this little melody that she wanted me to play first. Here, listen.” The cricket chirped a simple tune. But it didn’t come out exactly right. “No, wait—I’ll sing it. I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. It goes: ding dong, ding dong—dong ding, ding dong.”
“Why, I know that!” blurted out Simon Turtle. “That’s a famous tune for a set of bells. They play it every Sunday morning in that church on Fern Street.”
“That’s probably where she heard it,” said Chester. “And it’s very pretty, too. For a church.”