Having come so far, and after such a long wait having at last received a clue about the whereabouts of Turtle Heart’s family, Brother Frexispar Togue Thropp is stricken with a kind of paralysis. The minister seems in no hurry to complete the pilgrimage toward personal atonement that he’d begun after Nessa was born.
It’s a temptation, this hesitation, but who can blame him? Nobody in his household makes a noise about it. They’re okay to be installed here for a while longer. For all its airs and idiocies, Ovvels is less saturated with jungle and marshland splash than where they’ve lived before; even the climate is somewhat drier. And Ovvels is finally proving the fertile ground for converts that Frex has been seeking his whole career. He grows in stature—really, seems to swell in actual inches. He stands up straighter. His beard bushes ever outward. It makes Frex seem more crucial to the world, somehow. More authoritative, he suggests to Lei Leila’ani, who is lying when she says she admires it, so, so much.
It isn’t as if the rent at Lei’s rooming house is punitive. But the family has lived on scraps for so long that when the plate passed around and actually returns with some coin, Frex is happy to pocket it.
The board at Lei Leila’ani’s improves. Nanny still has hopes of returning alive to Munchkinland, but every now and then there’s a roast quail with quince jelly for a weekend luncheon, and Lei has replaced the tatty bed linens with fresh. So life is sweeter. They settle in.
Elphie misses going to Unger Bi’ix’s. Perhaps the clothier misses her, too. Their paths rarely cross upon the beaten dirt tracks or slung treadways of Ovvels. Maybe he’s veering away from her on purpose. She’d probably do the same. In any case, the moment never arrives in which to test her inclinations, to find out if she might change her mind and run toward him with a bitten but unswallowed smile.
She attends to her sister with as little feeling as she can manage. Nessa is learning to simper, and though Elphie can’t blame her—what other tools does Nessa have beyond a practiced smile?—Elphie doesn’t need to play along. She feeds Nessa soup with a spoon. Shell sticks out his tongue and hides the spoons. Lei pretends not to notice Shell’s misbehavior, because to be disapproving might mean her valued tenants will get shirty and pick up and move out. Lei’s stock in the town has risen along with Frex’s, now the mission is more or less established. She’s a figure of some stature herself now. She doesn’t want to queer the arrangement.
So it falls mostly to Nanny to try to govern the children. Shell laughs in Nanny’s face with a kind of innocent scorn it is still possible to forgive, he’s that young, but Nanny can summon up a backhand if things get beyond a certain point. And Nanny keeps Nessa company when Elphie heads off to services. Nanny is quite indispensable, as she points out, loudly, most often in Lei’s presence.
Frex hasn’t been booted off the lodge premises. He’s successfully negotiated a license to congregate. And as his ministry becomes popular, the lodge finds itself preferred among its several competitors. The school being a business concern, too, it insists on a cut. For the botheration.
Elphie does what she’s told. She stands where directed. She sings when bade, often with her eyes closed, because to see congregants swaying in rapture gives her an awkward feeling, as if she’s lying to them. She isn’t a devotee of her father’s faith, quite, but nor is she a hypocrite—she’s uncertain of everything. No denying she’s complicit at ushering others toward a greater sense of—of belonging, she guesses it is. Whatever that state is which music so mysteriously accomplishes.
Once she spies the Pari’isi scion on the margin of the crowd, listening. Oh, so her eyes aren’t closed tightly enough, then. She corrects the situation. He is gone when she finishes the final chorus and sits down on a stool to pretend to listen to her father’s sermons. She needs to look interested, Frex insists. She’s grudgingly grateful that he doesn’t insist she has to believe the dogma. Maybe he knows better. She’s only thirteen, and can’t begin to name whatever philosophy might be within her reach.
And why is that Pari’isi boy prowling about?
So Elphie trains her eyes on the floorboards of the porch, trying to plumb the meaning of her father’s sermons. She rarely looks at her father. It’s too shaming somehow, though she has no words for how.
The popularity of Frex’s mission grows. The camp meetings need to start earlier. The young girls arriving for lessons at the lodge make a circuit around the sprawling congregation as they tramp up on the porch to their classrooms. Elphie has seen so few children other than her siblings that these girls seem exotic and peculiar, unfinished perhaps.
But Elphie can no longer hold her pose of devotion for as long as her father expects. She’ll start yawning, not a good look. She raises the matter with Nanny.
“Unger told me I needed some education,” she says one evening, when her father and Lei are out for another constitutional, this time meandering along the walkways of the floating gardens. A suspiciously romantic place to promenade. She hopes mosquitoes drive them insane and back from the brink. “Can you ask Father if I might attend some sessions at the lodge?”
“Oh, it’s Father now, is it, I’ve noticed,” says Nanny. “Not Papa. We’re becoming ever so lah-de-Ozzing-dah, aren’t we?”
“I suppose it’s Father in public, and at this point he’s hardly more to me than a public figure. Don’t change the subject. I’m bored. Now that the lodge is in session while we’re in residence, maybe I could attend to lessons there myself? When the girls are released for the midday meal, I could return to my post?”
Nanny doesn’t approve, but she carries Elphie’s petition to her father, and comes back with the answer a few days later. “I’m shocked,” says Elphie.
“Truth to tell, I’m somewhat surprised,” admits Nanny. “But don’t sell him short, Elphie. I think he recognizes you are both an asset and a liability in the mission. And he thinks you’re canny enough. He wants the best for you under the circumstances. And you’d be safer studying with girls than beginning to walk the lanes of Ovvels looking both bored and available. Still, I’m a little miffed. As if what I’m teaching you is indecent or inadequate. I have half a mind to pick up and flounce out of here.”
“But? I hear a reservation in your tone.”
“Well, nothing is all good or all bad, is it? The problem is that the lodge doesn’t want you any closer than you already are. You’re all right out on the porch, but you’d be a distraction in the classroom. The other students would be inclined to point and giggle and you would disrupt their attention to their tasks. Stop scowling, you can’t blame them. They’re silly Quadling children, and the head proctor of the lodge is no better, really. They’ve come up with a solution, and you can take it or leave it. Your father is agreeable if you want to try.”
Nanny explains that the lector will set a stool outside a classroom of younger girls. After delivering a gathering song for the devout, Elphie can sidle around the corner of the porch and perch outside the window—always keeping out of sight, her back to the wall and her eyes to the yard. She can listen in silence. She might pick up something useful. When she’s ready, she can let the proctor know, and he’ll shift her stool to the next window, for girls one level up. Elphie is not to speak, not to go peeking over the sill, and not to draw attention to herself. But she can listen. From that position she can easily be summoned back to inspire her father’s revival meeting if things start to flag. When the morning sessions let out, she’ll wander around to the side of the lodge where her father is still tending to his flock. She’ll deliver a closing anthem, singing with heart and simulating deep conviction. Then she and Frex will walk home together for the midday meal and siesta.
“I wish I could be there,” said Nessa. “It’s not fair. Elphie gets everything.”
“If Elphie can pull this off without upsetting this, this academy, maybe you can follow in due course.” Nanny is affable. “They must have two spare stools, and you could trail your sister around the edge of the building. Of course, you’d have to be sure you can sit up straight and not fall over. For I certainly won’t be there to help, and they won’t want you calling out for Elphie. I’ll have Shell to care for at home. A royal handful, that’s quite clear by now. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s see how we get on.”