Chapter Eight

When Olivia emerged from Sara’s room at Rose Cottage, her face was white as the piano keys in the parlor and her mouth quivering. Sara really was leaving. By this time tomorrow, the little room at the top of the stairs would be empty and silent. No youthful laughter would dance through the kitchen, no rushing steps would echo in the hail. Oh, if only she could have had some warning, just a little time to adjust to the jarring change about to befall her home.

Assaulted by a hundred disheartening thoughts, Olivia turned and all but ran into Hetty, who had finally come up the stairs too. After the scene inside Sara’s room, mild Olivia was ready to tackle even her formidable older sister. She stepped squarely in front of her in the upstairs hail, the lamp she was carrying trembling in her hand.

“Hetty, how could you have said all those things to Blair with Sara standing right there? The poor child was so upset I could barely get her settled down.”

When it came to handing out blame, Hetty was no slacker herself. She immediately bristled all over.

“If you’d listened to me, Olivia, this would never have happened. Give me that.” The oil lamp shook so alarmingly that it looked in danger of tumbling to the floor, and Hetty took it from Olivia. “But, as usual, you didn’t think before you opened your mouth.”

Usually a strong word or two from Hetty would put Olivia in her place, but not this time. Her shoulders quivered as her breath came faster. She didn’t see how failing to invite Blair inside would have changed anything.

“No, Hetty, you’re the one who didn’t think. You’ve done the very thing that will ensure Sara leaves the Island tomorrow.”

Hetty flung a glance at Sara’s door.

“Oh, shhh!” she ordered, very belatedly taking a care for what Sara overheard. “You’d no right to allow that man to set foot in my house.”

With Olivia blocking the hall, Hetty turned on her heel and started down the stairs again, signifying that the conversation was at an end. Olivia stared after her, let out a little gasp and set off in hot pursuit. This was one time when she was having none of Hetty’s head-of-the-household ways.

Behind them, Sara tiptoed out of her room and peered after their retreating backs. Now not only were her father and her Aunt Hetty fighting, but her Aunt Hetty and her Aunt Olivia were snarling at each other like cats on a barbed-wire fence. Her young face crumpled up as she tiptoed to the landing to watch.

There was plenty to see. Olivia, perfectly rigid, managed to contain herself only until they got to the bottom of the stairs.

“Your house?” she exploded when her foot hit the ground floor.

“Well, I’m the eldest,” Hetty shot back, caught completely off balance by Olivia’s outburst. What was worse, Olivia showed absolutely no sign of going back to her old, meek self.

“Oh,” Olivia seethed, pointing to the hail rug, “and is this your carpet? Is this your lamp? Is nothing mine? Then perhaps it would be best if I left, too.”

Aghast, Hetty stared at her sister. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she sputtered, supposing that Olivia was not only impertinent but well on her way to losing her mind.

“You needn’t continue to support me,” Olivia plunged on madly. “I’m perfectly capable of being independent now that I’m earning some money of my own.”

So far, Hetty gathered, Olivia had earned only enough to squander on a new hat—which she had flaunted in an effort to impress that bungling photographer of hers, Jasper Dale. Hetty’s jaw shot out. She could be pushed only so far, even by an angry Olivia.

“Yes? And just what would you do? Where would you go?”

This wasn’t a possibility Olivia had ever thought about before, but she wasn’t about to be bested by Hetty now.

“I could...take a room at the boarding house,” she improvised, not caring that the idea of Olivia King moving into the boarding house would keep Avonlea in gossip for a year.

“Ho, well, that’s just as ludicrous as saying you’d... you’d elope with Jasper Dale!”

Hetty didn’t even have time to regret planting such a dangerous notion in Olivia’s head before a sharp rap rattled the front door. Both women started, again endangering the lamp. Mightily surprised, they blinked at the grandfather clock in the corner. Who could be calling at such an hour?

Hetty opened the door with a jerk to find her brother standing there, bundled haphazardly into his overcoat and looking very disgruntled indeed.

“I’m sorry,” he began, “but I can’t sleep until I’ve told you what’s on my mind.”

With that, he pushed his way into the warmth of the kitchen, bringing a gust of icy air with him and leaving his sisters no choice but to follow. Just as her cousins, Sara then crept halfway down the stairs and pressed her face against the railing to listen.

In the kitchen, Alec stuffed his mitts into his pocket and ploughed straight into his mission.

“I want you to know, Hetty, that I have stood by once too often while you.. .overstepped all the bounds of common decency.”

Hetty, who considered herself the very arbiter of common decency in Avonlea, let out a yelp.

“Has everyone gone mad?” she demanded of the air above her head.

Alec refused to be deterred by her dramatics.

“Look.” He gritted his teeth. “You’ve made your own bed. You can lie in it, for all I care, but not where that child is concerned. I can’t tolerate any more of these disruptive partings.”

Hetty grew redder and more ruffled with each of Alec’s words. Mature head of a family he might be, but to Hetty, he was still her younger brother who ought to do what he was told. Tonight, both he and Olivia seemed to have kicked over the traces completely.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hetty rapped out, looking ferociously severe. The lamplight played on her sharp cheekbones and long nose, making her appear even more intimidating.

Alec ran his fingers distractedly through his hair. He didn’t know why he had ever expected Hetty to listen to reason.

“I’m telling you, Hetty, if what Blair said to me tonight is any indication in all probability, you will never, ever see Sara again.”

In the shadowy stairway, Sara almost gasped aloud. It had been bad enough to suffer all the discord among her relatives. It had been bad enough to have to leave her beloved Rose Cottage on scarcely a day’s notice and expect to come back only as a guest. But never to come back at all! Why, Sara felt petrified to her bones at the very possibility.

The threat horrified Olivia almost as much as it did Sara. She threw her weight on Alec’s side.

“Hetty, please,” she pleaded, “make your peace with him once and for all. You’re the only one who can change things.”

Flexibility was not Hetty’s strong suit, especially when she was feeling cornered and under assault. Her brows flew stormily together.

“So you both want me to make my peace with Blair Stanley, even though he’s about to take away Sara, just as he did our Ruth? That’s what you want me to do, is it?”

“Yes,” declared Alec bluntly, oblivious to the fact that Sara was sitting on the stairs on the verge of tears. Blair held all the cards here. Making peace with him seemed the only course to take.

“Over my dead body,” was Hetty’s reply, and she looked very much as though she meant that literally. The situation was Blair’s fault, and there was no way Hetty was going to admit otherwise.

Hetty stalked from the room, leaving Alec to clench his fists and Olivia with no idea what to do or say.

“Good Lord, woman!” Alec spluttered after het He flung down his hat in disgust.

Hearing Hetty’s footsteps, Sara flew to her room. The last thing she needed at the end of this most crazy day was to be caught on the stairs listening to fights. Jumping headlong into bed, she shut her eyes tight as Hetty opened the door to peep in.

Dresses and pinafores still lay scattered where Olivia had persuaded Sara to abandon them. The suitcases still stood open, as did the wardrobe in the corner. Hetty might have been furious when she opened the door, but all the signs of packing jolted her just as much as they had Olivia.

Thinking herself unobserved, she stood stock- still, the anger draining away, to be replaced by a pained and somber gloom. Her gaze lingered on Sara for what seemed an endless moment, remembering another fair-haired girl who had slept in that room and been wooed away forever by a rich city man. Then, satisfied the child was asleep, Hetty sighed heavily, stepped back into the hail and quietly closed the door behind her.

The older woman had not been unobserved. Sara, through half-closed lashes, had seen everything and her Aunt Hetty’s face had proved the last straw. Sara’s spirit was roused. With her whole world falling down around her ears, it sure wasn’t going to do any good spending the night sniffling into her pillow. If anything concrete was going to be done to solve the situation, she’d just have to do it herself.

The minute the door was shut, Sara leaped out of bed again and began flinging on her clothes. When in a fix, Sara believed in action, no matter how fantastic. A desperate situation called for a desperate plan, and Sara had hit upon just such a plan the instant her Aunt Hetty had turned away. She ran down the stairs and peeped into the kitchen just in time to see her Uncle Alec retrieve his hat from the floor and cram it down around his ears.

“Aw, Hetty will never change,” he was grumbling at Olivia by way of goodnight. “Blair’s just as stubborn. Thank goodness Sara has some sense. Maybe some of it will rub off on them.”

He might quickly have revised his opinion about Sara’s store of sense had he known the wild scheme she was putting into action at that very moment. Before either of her relatives could see her, Sara pulled on her hat and coat and slipped out the front door.

A short while later, after a wind-buffeted race through the winter dark, and after her Uncle Alec was safely inside, Sara dragged a heavy ladder against the side of the King farmhouse. She then proceeded to climb the teetering thing up to the second story and tap on the window of the room where she knew her cousins were asleep.

And asleep they were, sound asleep, quite worn out from the day’s events and all the scurrying about in the dark. Felicity and Cecily lay bundled up under quilts in one bed, Felix and Andrew in the other. Sara thought she was going to have to rattle the window right out of its frame before any of them stirred.

Andrew, being the lightest sleeper, was the one who finally sat up abruptly and rubbed at his eyes. Could that possibly be a person waving outside the glass twenty feet above the earth?

Since Andrew didn’t believe what his eyes were seeing, he got up out of bed, padded across the floor and opened the window. Only then did he accept that he wasn’t dreaming.

“Sara!” he croaked, seeing her apparently suspended in midair against the side of the house.

“Help me inside,” Sara commanded, shivering in the night wind and swaying on the ladder which, truth to tell, she hadn’t bothered to plant very firmly at the bottom.

Andrew obliged by gripping her arms and starting to drag her inside, bumping her hipbones over the sill.

“You’re hurting me,” Sara protested as she wriggled forward with Andrew’s help and then tumbled into the room. Her shrill voice was loud enough to wake the others in the room.

“What are you doing here?” Andrew wanted to know as he helped her to her feet and quickly shut the window against the whistling breeze.

“Cecily, Sara’s here,” Felicity whispered to her little sister, who was blinking in bewilderment at the dim figures by the window. Cecily was just as likely to believe a ghost had got in and squawk loud enough to bring their mother running.

Cecily’s eyes popped wide. It really was Sara. And Sara certainly hadn’t arrived by way of the door.

“Have you run away?” she asked breathlessly.

By this time, Felix had got himself out from under the quilt. “What’s going on?” he mumbled drowsily. Felix always took a long time to get fully awake.

Sara took a deep breath to compose herself and faced them all.

“I’ve decided that I’m not going to leave until Aunt Hetty and Papa make up. Otherwise, I’ll never be able to come back here.”

Andrew shook his head. Andrew was a quiet, intellectual boy who lacked Sara’s streak of imaginative boldness.

“You’re leaving all right. You should have heard your father tonight.”

“He was so mad at Aunt Hetty I thought his veins were gonna explode,” Felix added dramatically. Though Felix hated to see Sara go, part of him was secretly enjoying the fireworks going off around him.

“I don’t care,” flung out Sara in the face of this ominous fact. “I’m not leaving.”

Cecily, too young to see the real complications involved, brightened at once.

“Oh, good, Sara. I don’t want you to go.”

Felicity, who would have been shocked at such an idea only months ago, now found herself falling in readily with Sara.

“Well, you’re going to have to disappear.”

“Where do you suggest we hide you?” Andrew joked. “Under the bed?”

When Sara didn’t even smile at this, they saw she was indeed serious. And if they didn’t help her, who knew what trouble she’d get into on her own? Sara could be a bit of a hothead, but if she didn’t always look before she leaped, at least she was brave enough to leap in the first place. And she was very sporting about landing in heaps of thorns.

“I know the perfect place,” Felicity said, in a sudden flash of inspiration.

“They’ll be so remorseful,” Sara muttered, thinking of all the people she had seen fighting recently. “They’ll have to forget about their quarrel...and unite in their love for me.”

“Yech!” was Felix’s comment on that rosy picture.

Sara merely turned to the bed, glorying in the thought of making everyone beg humble forgiveness for their wrongheaded actions of today.

“I think it’s a wonderful idea.”