She was hanging from the bottom limb of the towering black walnut tree when he first saw her. He had reached the end of the bamboo patch and was reaching out to shove away the last frond, when he glanced up just in time to see a small human being lose her hold on a limb and drop to the ground at least ten feet below.
It was a long drop. So long that for a startled moment Harleigh thought she might be dead or seriously injured, but before he reached her he could tell that she wasn’t. Not dead, nor even badly hurt, but apparently very frightened. Crouching close to the ground, her eyes wide with fear, she gasped as she stared up at him through tangled strands of straggly hair.
His first impulse was to demand to know who she was, and what she was doing on Weatherby property. Demand, but perhaps not too angrily, because there was a part of him that couldn’t help being pleased with her reaction. He couldn’t remember scaring anyone before, and he rather liked the sensation. In the end, it was she who spoke first.
In a small, whispery voice she said, “I know who you are. You’re Hardly, aren’t you?”
At that point any sympathy he might have been feeling for the terrorized trespasser vanished. She must have known him, or at least known who he was, when he was attending Riverbend Elementary, where some wise guy had changed Harleigh into Hardly. As in “hardly there at all.” And the name had stuck. He’d let them all know how he hated the nickname, which apparently only made the whole thing more entertaining.
No one had called him Hardly since Adelaide the Great finally, after many arguments and much pleading, accepted his decision to quit school and go back to being tutored at home. But his reaction to the nickname hadn’t changed. Not for a minute. He didn’t, however, remember a girl in any of his classes who had looked like . . . Still examining the trespasser through slitted eyes, he asked, “Were you in my class at Riverbend?”
“I wasn’t in your class,” she said. “But I knew who you were. And I didn’t mean to call you Hardly. It just came out that way. It’s easier to say than Harleigh.”
Well, maybe that explained it. But it didn’t explain what she was doing on Weatherby property. “So.” Harleigh raised his head, looking down his nose at the girl, who was still crouching at his feet like a frightened animal. It was for him an unusual point of view. “So—what are you doing here?” he demanded in an appropriately stern tone of voice. “And how did you get through our fence?”
Still peering at him through her straggly, mouse-colored hair, she slowly got up, but surprisingly, not very far up. Once up on her bare feet, it became apparent that she was quite small. Not much taller than Harleigh himself, and not nearly as sturdily built. Her long, clingy dress, which might once have been part of an evening gown or fancy costume, revealed how small and thin she was.
As if suddenly noticing that she was being inspected, the girl rubbed her hands together in a dusting motion and then did the same to the front of her dress. It didn’t improve her appearance any, but it did seem to give her confidence. She was almost smiling as she turned her attention back to Harleigh and asked, “What did you say about the fence?”
“I asked,” Harleigh said firmly, “how you got through our fence.”
“Not through,” she said. “Over.”
That didn’t explain anything. Harleigh shrugged impatiently. “All right, over. How did you get over our fence?” He couldn’t imagine how that could be true. The high, sword-tipped metal poles that formed the Weatherby fence were, as far as Harleigh knew, absolutely unclimbable by anyone. And certainly not climbable by a small, skinny girl.
She nodded slowly, and then, in a questioning tone of voice, she said, “I flew?”
Harleigh stared for a moment in shocked silence before he snorted and said, “You think I’m going to believe that?”
“No, really,” she said. “I did.” She was definitely smiling now, smiling thoughtfully, her head tipped to one side. “I could show you if you wouldn’t . . .” She paused and then went on. “Are you? Are you going to tell on me?”
“Tell who? Who did you think I might tell?”
She made a sweeping gesture. “The people who live in the castle. There are a lot of them, aren’t there. Why are there so many of them?”
Harleigh sighed impatiently. It was a question he himself had asked without getting an answer that seemed the least bit sensible. So now he was surprised to find himself explaining the situation, as if she somehow had the right to know.
“It was in the will. In this will that Weatherby the First left when he died. I guess a lot of his close relatives had died, and he thought there weren’t enough people living in the house, so he made the will say that any Weatherby descendant could live there, for free. So a lot of them do. The oldest direct descendant gets to run things, but all the descendants can live there for free, as long as they obey the rules.”
The girl nodded. Her deep gray eyes were wide and glowed as if with extreme excitement. “That’s so wonderful,” she whispered. “Oh, I do wish I was one. So, are they all very rich? Did the first Harleigh leave lots of jewels and golden treasure?”
“Golden treasure?” Harleigh snorted again. He had an effective snort, not loud—only a puff of air accompanied by a sharp humph—but it expressed his feelings well, particularly negative ones. “No, of course not. Most of them are really poor or they wouldn’t live there.”
“Oh.” She seemed shocked, unbelieving. “Why wouldn’t they want to live in such a beautiful place?”
Harleigh’s smile was sarcastic. “Some of it’s beautiful, all right. But not all of it. And there are rules. Lots of them. Only poor people would put up with all the rules. Like they can’t have any visitors unless they bring them to meet my great-aunt first and get her okay. The only one who gets to decide things is my great-aunt.”
“And she’s very rich?”
“No. That’s not what I said. She just kind of runs things.” His smile was rueful. “Well, more than kind of, actually. She pretty much controls everything, because she’s the oldest direct descendant. And she also has the Fund.”
“What’s that? What’s a fund?”
“Well, it’s . . .,” Harleigh started before it again occurred to him to wonder why he was talking so much. Why was he discussing things with this strange girl that he’d never discussed with anyone before? Certainly not with anyone who wasn’t a Weatherby. Perhaps it was the way she seemed so enthusiastic, as if everything he said, and the way he said it, was absolutely fascinating.
“Well,” he began again, “the first Harleigh left the Fund. That’s what Aunt Adelaide calls it. It was money that was supposed to take care of the property, like pay the gardeners and maids and people like that. I guess when he was alive it was enough to pay for lots of servants, but now it’s barely enough to pay for two or three. That’s why,” he swung his arms, indicating what lay all around them, “why everything is such a mess.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s not a mess. It’s beautiful just the way it is. That’s why I come here. I love to come here.”
“And you get inside the grounds by”—Harleigh made his curled lip and raised eyebrow say he didn’t believe it for a minute—“by flying?”
She nodded. He was taking her slightly embarrassed smile to be a kind of admission that she wasn’t telling the exact truth, when to his great surprise, she asked, “Do you want to see me do it?”
“To see you fly? Yes. I sure do.” He made another lip twist that said he wasn’t the kind of person who would easily be made a fool of. “That is something I’d really like to see.”
“All right,” she said. She turned as if to go, but then turned back. “And you won’t tell on me? You won’t tell anybody?”
“No,” he said firmly, and felt sure he meant it, without stopping to ask himself why. “No. I won’t tell on you.”
She led the way then, through a tangled jungle of tropical vines, and then past a long wall of thick overgrown hedge. The complicated path went on and on with many turns and twists until, suddenly, there right before them, was the fence—its tall wrought-iron bars topped by a threatening fringe of sharply pointed spears.
Harleigh was still staring at the fence when he realized that she was no longer standing beside him. He turned to see her halfway up the trunk of a tall oak tree that towered over the wall. He’d missed seeing how she got up that far—how in the world she’d managed to make it up the smooth bare trunk to where the first limbs branched out. Continuing to climb, as quick and agile as a monkey, she was hidden for a moment in the crotch of the trunk before she appeared again crawling out on a high limb. As she climbed higher, he lost sight of her now and then as she disappeared behind leafy branches. And then, suddenly, there she was again far overhead as she flew, or seemed to fly, into a tree that grew outside the fence.
But there had been a rope, hadn’t there? She had been swinging from a length of rope, or hadn’t she? He was still staring up toward the place where she had disappeared, wondering and arguing with himself, when there she was, on the ground again, but now, just outside the fence.
“See,” she was saying with her small, narrow face pressed against the iron rods of the fence. “That’s how I do it.” She turned as if to go.
“Wait,” Harleigh said. “I want to talk to you. I want to know . . .”
She turned back once more, but only long enough to wave. “I have to go now,” she called back over her shoulder. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”