THE WIND AT BENT OAKS grove, sweeping almost constantly over the crest of the hill, skimmed through the topmost branches of the old oaks with a sound like distant voices. The voices raved and moaned or breathed in brushy whispers, according to the mood of the weather; but either way they seemed to be speaking always of secrets and mysteries.
Bent Oaks Grove was a natural place for secrets; and as Martha and Ivy began spending more and more time there, secrets collected around every part of the grove. Each of the rocks and boulders, and many of the favorite climbing spots in the old trees, acquired secret names and sometimes long and complicated legends. There was, for example, the Fortune Table. The Fortune Table was a small smooth boulder top that almost always had a few fallen leaves on its surface. When you needed to have your fortune told, you swept away the leaves before you went away, and the next day you counted the ones that had fallen on the table during the night. An odd number meant NO, and an even number meant YES; no leaves at all meant that the table had refused to answer.
The Fortune Table, like most of the early secrets of Bent Oaks Grove, was based on suggestions made by Ivy. Ivy had an almost endless supply of information about magical things. In fact, she seemed to have an endless supply of information about almost everything—and nearly all of it, she said, she had heard from her Aunt Evaline.
It wasn’t very long until Martha knew a great deal about Ivy’s Aunt Evaline. She knew that Aunt Evaline was not really Ivy’s aunt at all. She was actually a distant relative of Ivy’s father, who lived in the little town where Ivy’s father had grown up. Ivy’s father had once owned an old house in Harley’s Crossing and the Carsons went there from time to time. They had been there when Ivy was born, and afterwards her mother had been very sick and had had to go away for a long time to a hospital. It was then that Aunt Evaline had started taking care of Ivy, and by the time Ivy’s mother got home everyone was used to the arrangement.
“Besides, I wanted to stay there,” Ivy told Martha.
“You mean even after your mother got well?” Martha asked.
“No, I mean right away. As soon as Aunt Evaline took me home when I was two days old, I knew I wanted to stay there with her.”
“That’s silly,” Martha said. “You were just a newborn baby. You can’t remember when you were just a newborn baby.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I don’t know. But you just can’t. Everybody says you can’t.”
“Well I can,” Ivy said, and Martha believed her. She believed that Ivy had decided when she was two days old that she wanted to live with her Aunt Evaline, and she believed that Ivy’s Aunt Evaline was probably the most wonderful person in the world, because Ivy said that, too.
But if Ivy talked a great deal about her Aunt Evaline, she talked very little about the rest of her family. Martha was curious about the Carsons, of course, particularly after the day she visited the old Montoya house, but right at first she didn’t ask any questions.
There were so many things to be curious about, though, that not long after the visit she decided to ask at least one. She was sitting on a tree root at the time, watching Ivy who was getting ready to climb high into the tallest tree to hang a rope for a swing. Ivy was sitting on the ground taking off her shoes and stockings.
The question Martha had decided to ask seemed safe enough—not anything that Ivy might not want to answer. Martha said, “Ahh,” to get Ivy’s attention and then asked, “That woman we met on the stairs at your house—who was that?”
“On the stairs?” Ivy said, standing up and tucking her skirt into the legs of her underpants. “Oh, that was my mother.”
Martha was so surprised she forgot about politeness. “Your mother?” she said incredulously.
“Sure,” Ivy said. “Why? Who did you think it was?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Martha said. “I just didn’t think about it being your mother. I don’t know why.”
Ivy glanced at Martha who blushed, wondering if Ivy was thinking that she was thinking how different their mothers were. How different her own brightly beautiful mother was from the ghostly gray woman on the stairs.
“I guess it was because she didn’t stop us to ask any questions,” Martha said. “Like some mothers always ask where you’ve been and where you’re going and everything. She didn’t seem as—as curious as most mothers.”
“I know,” Ivy said. “I guess she’s had so many kids she’s used up most of her curiosity already.” Ivy jerked a knot into one end of the rope. “Besides she drinks too much. Sometimes she hardly notices anything at all.”
Martha tried not to be embarrassed, or at least not to look as if she were, but Ivy didn’t look at her anyway. She was busy putting her socks into her shoes and brushing the oak leaves off the seat of her dress. Martha felt she had to say something.
“Oh,” she said, very unconcernedly, and then hastily, to change the subject. “Uh, how many kids are there? I mean how many kids does she have?”
Ivy stood very still for a moment as if she were thinking. Then she turned and looked at Martha with a strange expression. It was her eyes mostly. As if she were looking at Martha intently but with her mind on something else.
“Only seven Carsons,” she said very distinctly. “Eight if you count me. But there are really only seven Carsons.”
“What do—why don’t—who—?” Martha stammered, overcome with such violent curiosity that the question kept tripping on itself. But Ivy had turned; and running to the trunk of the biggest tree, she started up it as quickly as a squirrel. Martha hurried after her, and when Ivy reached the first crotch, she leaned down and reached to grab Martha’s hand to help her along up. Then Ivy went on, shinnying up a steep place that Martha was afraid to try.
When Ivy, carrying the rope in a coil around her shoulder, reached the spot she had in mind, Martha couldn’t stand it any longer. Leaning out of her safe nest in the crotch of the tree she called up at Ivy, “Why don’t you count? Why aren’t you eight?”
“Ummmm,” Ivy said, because she was using her teeth to hold one end of the rope, and then, “Because I’m not really. I’m really a changeling.”
“A what?” Martha called, and the “what” turned into a squeak of terror, as above her, Ivy pulled herself off balance and almost fell. She teetered a moment and then steadied.
“A changeling!” she called down very clearly. “Don’t you know what a changeling is?”
Martha admitted that she had no idea.
“Well, a changeling comes when some other creatures, gnomes or witches or fairies or trolls, steal a human baby and put one of their own babies in its place. And the human parents don’t even know it’s happened. At least, they don’t usually suspect for years and years.”
“Why not?” Martha found the idea so horribly fascinating she leaned out, craning her neck to look up at Ivy—almost forgetting how afraid she was of falling. “Can’t they tell by looking at it?”
“No, because the supernatural people do it when the babies are just a few hours old—because that’s the only time they can make the babies look just alike. Aunt Evaline says that in some countries, in places where they know about such things, they never leave a new baby alone for the first few days after it’s born—so a changeling can’t be left in its place.”
“Do the parents ever find out—I mean, how do they find out if they’ve got a changeling or not?”
“Oh, later on, when they’re almost grown, they start looking a little different sometimes. Especially if the real parents were goblins or trolls or something like that. And sometimes changelings start doing very strange things, or having strange powers. Like this one woman in England whose real parents were witches; she just got up one night and went off for a ride on a broom. Right up until then nobody knew she was a witch at all. She didn’t even know it herself.”
Martha stared, speechless, imagining an ordinary Englishwoman suddenly finding herself high in a black sky on a flying broom. She could almost feel exactly what a shock it would be. Coming back down to Bent Oaks and Ivy, she asked, “You—you don’t think your real parents were witches, do you?”
“Oh no. Aunt Evaline and I think I might be a wood nymph or a water sprite or something like that. See, when I was born and my mother was so sick afterwards, with all those other kids and everything, nobody paid much attention to me at all, until I went to live with Aunt Evaline. And by then it was already too late. I suppose that was why I liked it so much right away at Aunt Evaline’s. I didn’t really belong where I was before, so no wonder I liked it better with her.”
While Ivy was talking, she had finished tieing the last knot; and then sliding her legs over and down the dangling rope, she slid off the limb. She slid slowly down the twisting rope, approaching Martha’s level and then dropping below it, so that her face spun in and out of sight. Watching Ivy floating, spinning downward, in and out of sunlight, no one could have doubted for a moment.
“Of course,” Martha said to herself, “a changeling. That explains everything.”
But by the time she had reached the ground, climbing slowly and carefully, feeling cautiously for the very safest handholds, Martha had decided to ask just one more question.
“Do you really believe it?” she asked. “About changelings and everything?”
“I believe in just about everything,” Ivy said.