The Cuckoo Tree Read Free

Tied," the butler repeated, and left the room, closing the door.
    "Oh, bother! Now Grandmother will come along and there'll be a lot of fuss. Why did you have to say you weren't Rowena Palindrome? What does it matter who you are? Sit down, anyway, and amuse me till the old girl comes—it'll take her a while to get up."
    "I haven't
got
a while," said Dido crossly. "There's a chap out there, dying, maybe, in an overset carriage, and the driver's knocked silly—not that he was much at the start—and I'd be obliged if you'd kindly send out those two coves as has nothing better to do than open and shut
doors to fetch the poor souls here and see arter 'em a bit."
    "An overset carriage? How do you know?"
    "How do I know? Acos I was in it—that's how."
    "You were in a carriage that overturned? Aren't you lucky!"
    "Rummy notion o' luck you has," Dido said, studying her companion with curiosity. And certainly he was an unusual figure—a boy of twelve or thirteen, tall and thin, with a pale face and a mop of black hair. More singular still, he was dressed in clothes at least two hundred years out of date—the sort of clothes worn by gentry in Charles the First's day: a frilled shirt with long lace cuffs, a long-skirted embroidered waistcoat, a sword, velvet breeches, and buckled shoes. His hair was tied back with a velvet ribbon. A huge furry white dog lay at his feet; it had a pointed nose, like a bear, and the tongue lolling from its jaws was blue.
    Her host, for his part, studied Dido with almost equal astonishment; he saw a sun-tanned girl, her brown hair cut untidily short; she wore long, wide trousers of dark-blue duffel, a white shirt with a sailor collar, and a tight-fitting pea jacket with brass buttons.
    "Why do you wear such peculiar clothes?" he said.
    "These? They're a midshipman's rig; mighty comfortable too. I jist got back from sea, that's why. Going up to London with dispatches for the Fust Lord o' the Admiralty, and our numbskull of a driver has to overturn us afore we've gone twenty miles, and poor Cap'n Hughes wounded in the
Chinese wars and weak as a snail—"
    "You've been at
sea
—you, a girl?" Sir Tobit stared at her round-eyed. "Why?"
    "That'd be a long tale. That'd be several long tales. What about those hurt men?"
    "Oh, we can do nothing for them till my grandmother has given permission," he said carelessly. "So you may as well sit down and tell me your stories till she comes. Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?"
    He pushed toward her a tray carved from some silvery foreign wood. On it were several plates, wooden likewise, containing a few wrinkled apples, some nuts, and a large lump of cheese.
    "We never eat anything but fruit and cheese; my grandmother thinks it best. Cowslip wine?"
    The cowslip wine, pale yellow in color, was served in an earthenware pitcher. Sir Tobit poured some into a wooden mug.
    "Thankee." Dido rejected the nuts—which were wizened, strange-looking little things—but helped herself to an apple and a lump of cheese. There had been no time for supper at the Port of Chichester, so she was glad of them. The dog snarled a little as she moved, and Sir Tobit, cuffing him lightly, said,
    "Quiet, Lion!"
    Glancing around the room as she ate, Dido was struck by the oddity of the contents. In a mansion this size she would have expected richness and grandeur; gold doorknobs, maybe, and crystal chandeliers, such as her friend Simon
once told her were to be seen at the duke's castle in Battersea. But here everything looked dusty and worn, and seemed to be made of the plainest materials—wooden chests, straw matting, loosely woven curtains in queer, bright colors, looking as if they had been sewn by people living in grass huts on some distant foreign isle. The lights were the commonest kind of tallow candles and not too plentiful. There were strangely shaped, strangely colored clay pots, and numerous little statues and images in wood and pottery. And books were piled