Perhaps because of Elphie’s expulsion from the lodge, Nessa begins to style herself as more deserving than her big sister. That regrettable thief, Elphie of the stolen porcelain tea set so mysteriously and wickedly ruined. A shame, really. The younger sister, pale and reproachful, purses her lips in a manner unsettlingly like the landlady’s. Nessa makes no comment when the subject of Elphie’s disgrace comes up, but her position on the matter can be in no doubt.
And the subject does come up, because now there’s a hint of social notice, for Nessa anyway. Out in the world, even with Lei as a chaperone, Nessa keeps her place and increasingly, her balance, advancing along the corridor from room to room as her mastery of the material allows. Nessa is learning balance.
She’s become a pet of the Quadling girls who arrive at dawn and flounce home in time for the afternoon meal. They take turns caring for her. Whether Nessa is a class project in public charity or simply a lumpkin of handicap that makes everyone else feel better about themselves, Elphie doesn’t try to guess. She doesn’t care. Maybe, sooner or later, Elphie will be free to pursue her own interests and not be obliged to serve as Nessa’s arms all the time. Elphie notes that while she’s envious of Nessa’s advancement in Ovvels, she’s relieved that her sister is showing signs of being able to operate, occasionally, without a prop.
Let Nessa curry favor with sycophants. Isn’t she just the picture of piety, there with her shawl wrapped around her shoulders, her invisible hands folded in her lap. Her eyes lowered in modesty and allure. Sometimes Elphie wants to hit her sister just to make a real expression flare up.
Lei Leila’ani is cowed by Nessa’s social advancement. Since being accepted into a course of studies, the girl is sort of managing on her own. Nessa even tries dismissing the landlady for an hour or so at a time from serving as her armature. Lei’s campaign to make Frex her second husband, and to accept the baggage of his children as her own, consequently stumbles. She becomes by turns sweeter and more acid, a sign of desperation.
Frex hardly notices. He’s digging ever deeper into his understanding of unionism. He exhumes from his trunk the tomes he dragged from Munchkinland all those years ago. He sets musty books out in the sun, brushes off mold spores, and peels the pages apart. Arguments on faith and dogma fascinate him. He hopes to dredge up material useful to his unoffendable flock. By now it numbers in the hundreds—well, a hundred and a half, anyway. Enough in contributions to cover the small family’s expenses. Not to mention that a few converts often swing by the cantilevered home of Lei Leila’ani to drop off a platter of cooked fish and green fruit, or a twice-baked celery tart.
Lei finds a way to be insulted by gifts of food—brought mostly by leering widows, she observes—but she benefits from such largesse, too. The widow’s reserve isn’t vast. She’s banked on becoming an indispensable adjunct to the Thropp family, graduating to wife sooner or later. So what that Nessa is learning to stand on her own two feet; there’s still Shell to worry about. Lei styles herself a stabilizing maternal force. A minister can’t be expected to attend to his own son, not when he’s being Father to a considerable segment of the town.
Oh, Lei. Not everyone has a principal role. But the members of the family don’t squander conjecture on what her inner life might be like, and we don’t have the time. Life begins to rush, doesn’t it? Lei is off to one side, rubbing her dry wrists with an unguent, wondering how she manages to be a widow of property and somehow a second-class citizen in her own home. That’s all we’re going to get of her. She means no harm; she does little good.
While those girls, the green aberration and the other, the more-becoming oddity, they are sliding through Ovvels life with as much seemliness as they can muster, given the givens.
The nanny, she might keep a better eye on the boy, surely, but she has her own aches and ailments and publishes them to anyone who will listen. The nanny’s knees, these knees that the poor dead Melena dandled from in her day, these are already old knees. Nanny can’t get out of a chair swiftly enough to stop Shell from running out of the room and off to some other caper.
As a result, Shell revels in delinquency in ever more public ways. The incidents of his hooliganism start to reflect unfairly on the landlady. Lei Leila’ani, it’s suggested, ought to step in. Really, it’s her duty, if she’s going to open her doors to foreigners and aberrations. Neighborhood regard for Lei begins to stutter and then to plunge. Nothing fair in this, of course. It’s often the most reliable public servant who is best positioned to be the scapegoat, and this time it’s Lei.
Think of it from Shell’s perspective, though. There’s no school for him, really. At this age, Quadling boys usually follow their father into the fields or the floating gardens. Or the trades. It’s harder to follow a father into the dubious trade of being devout. Especially if as a high-spirited boy you have no idea of divinity, or of the obligations divinity imposes upon you about how to live your sorry life.
Shell begs to be allowed to go to the fields of vegetable pearls with the bigger boys. Frex’s reply is curt: those boys are four years older than Shell, and he’d be out of his depth in more ways than watery. Lei tries to put it in more honeyed words, cozening up to the boy with a cube of sugared coconut, and Shell spits at her, literally spits.
With nothing to do, and faster on his feet than Nanny, the boy takes to vandalism. Earlier Elphie had wondered if, on the first day in Ovvels, Shell had escaped Nanny’s clutches, had stolen after his father and big sister, and had been the one to throw the rock through Unger’s window. She wouldn’t have put it past Shell, but she’s retired that curiosity. However, she suspects Shell of destroying the purloined tea set, which she’d intended to return early the next morning before the lodge opened for business. In that instance, her own initial crime of the theft of the delightful objects eclipsed the subsequent scandal of their destruction. If she hadn’t brought the set home to Lei Leila’ani’s, there’d have been nothing for Shell to break.
In any event, Shell has escaped punishment. Since no one had blamed him for the wreck of the tea set, he’s become emboldened. All those bright scraps of colored glaze. All those naked pink bisque seams exposed on the edges of the shards. He’s gone on the prowl to find other things to bring down, to muck up, to shatter. And to take greater risks in the act.
At first it’s just knocking over marsh tomato plants with a dead tree limb. The reddening globes spilling their golden seeds on the soil thrill him. He’s too young for any overt sexual excitement in the act, probably; but to see the skintight vessel forced to reveal its luscious wet interior is perhaps not always a masquerade of sexual violence. It’s just violence, maybe.
The same holds true for eggs. They downright want to be smashed, otherwise why are their shells so frail?
The problem with tomatoes, eggs, spiderwebs, is that they offer too little resistance. When with a knife he’s lifted from Lei’s kitchen Shell manages to sever the melon from its stem, hacking it to bits so that ants can swarm it all over before some human gardener comes back to salvage segments, well, that’s more gratifying.
But not gratifying enough.
Maybe this is just another kind of hexing, a kind that even a boy could do. Ruin things.
His father is deep in rumination. Nanny sinks into the most comfy wicker chair. She holds her mending in her lap so she can pretend to be industrious. Lei flutters about in increasing desperation. Shell’s sisters are occupied with various exploits outside the Lei’s home. So Shell takes to mayhem with talent and a precision so quickly honed as to seem divinely given. If the Unnamed God don’t want me to break the latches in that goat pen, why do I get the idea to do it? The goats don’t mind. I’m a liberator, Papa.
He never needs to say that, though. The goats go running wild, ruining scores of gardens in an afternoon. No one has seen Shell at the goat paddock. Maybe the gate has just broken open? No, the knife-sliced strips in the bark show ill intent.
Then two of the goats who wander far enough out of town to be enjoying a rural holiday are set upon by savage teeth sharper than Shell’s knife. The boy himself comes upon the corpses. He’s able to run back to the center of town and deliver the sorry news. No one suspects him, no one could. He’s a kid. And those aren’t his teeth imprints upon the throats of the goats.
Maybe they’re Ski’ioti bitemarks. Just wondering aloud here.
Other touches of mischief follow. Someone’s pet cat has been lowered in a bucket into the well. The cat survives but is disagreeable company ever after. Four bright yellow birds have been tricked into a net somehow and their little necks wrung. Feathers are glued with rice paste to spell a word on the side of the rice house, but no one can read the word as the blood artist is not, apparently, a gifted speller. The corpses of the dead, twisted on the ground with their little claw feet drawn up, spell out quite enough.
The townspeople begin to murmur more loudly. Frex hears about the rash of mischief. He shoehorns the outbreak of vandalism into his sermons, a metaphor about the devil’s sleight of hand. Then someone breaks into the home of Pari’isi Ma’ani, the father of Pari’isi To’or. A portrait of the Initial Pari’isi, by all reports a soft and congenial paterfamilias, an advocate of civil courtesies, has been abused with a knife. The man’s soft eyes removed, like stones from cherries.
This awakens in the people of Ovvels a suspicion of witchcraft. What can anyone want with such dedicated vandalism, abducting the eyes of the long-dead head of one of the ruling families? What will be next? Who will be next? What if it isn’t the rare portrait featuring eyes, but the eyes themselves? Crows have eaten the eyes of the goats, eventually. Who else needs eyes? Witches need eyes, to spy with; that’s why witches keep crows in the first place.
Lei Leila’ani is the first one to assess the vigor of the mounting threat. To her credit, she doesn’t toss the Thropp family out on its ear. Instead, she sees an opportunity. They should all go away, if just for a while. “If we leave and the vandalism continues,” she says, “it will be proof that no one in this house is responsible.”
“And,” says Nanny blandly, “if we leave and the troubles stop?”
Lei chokes back a sob. “Then we’d better not come back.”
“Oh my,” says Nanny, “there’s no ‘we’ in this business, Goodwidow Lei Leila’ani.” Using the formal title is possibly the cruelest thing Nanny has ever said to the landlady. “You couldn’t possibly think of joining us. They’d think we kidnapped you. In any case, I doubt Frex would think of leaving. An appearance of guilt. Frex?”
Frex won’t comment. Meanwhile the instances of outrage continue unabated—nothing more dreadful in nature, but no slackening of alarm, either. The citizens of Ovvels rarely lock their doors, and most of their windows are covered only with netting. If that. Townspeople are also not avaricious as a rule, so few of them keep precious items around. The luxury items in the more prosperous households are those panels of fabric stripes, framed and hung or freestanding on folding screens. Any number of these delicate pieces are found slashed with a single slit, which puckers, showing mud plaster or bamboo lathes through the surgical scar.
But everyone has a store-pot of coins someplace. Dead birds and ruined cabbages are one thing; when money starts to disappear from various hidey-holes, the disgruntlement becomes more public. At one meeting, after Elphie has sung the crowd into a somnolent moment but before she’s managed to disappear for her colloquy with Pari’isi To’or, she sees the mood change. When the basket begins its circuit for the daily pennysworth, it collects more commentary than cash. “Our money is already disappearing,” grouches one miserly old biddy. “Why should we surrender what is left?” More than one other voice concurs. The usually docile congregation, a hive about to swarm.
“We’ll take a day of reflection at home tomorrow,” says Frex to his flock. He cuts the meeting short without referring to the collection basket again. With a chop of his hand he freezes Elphie in the act of stealing away. “We’re going home, Elphaba,” snaps Frex. “No discussion. Collect Nessa from whatever classroom she’s bothering.” Elphie doesn’t dare object.
Frex is noisily upset. At the rooming house, both Lei and Nanny try to calm him down. It doesn’t help that Pari’isi Menga’al, Pari’isi To’or’s uncle, chooses that morning to make a personal visit to Lei’s aerie. In other circumstances this would be the peak moment of Lei’s life, confirming her as a prominent member of the community. Now, it’s scandal. Lei allows the magistrate in but Frex won’t come from the other room to recognize his authority. “My calling is from the above, not from you,” he shouts.
“I have no doubt,” says the well-upholstered official. “But it is I who have come calling, not the ‘above.’ I have jurisdiction over the citizens here, and also the visitors. We need to discuss the recent upsets happening in this community. Words are being spoken.”
The anonymity of the report is fearsome. Words are being spoken. Elphie might speak some herself had she a mind to.
Her father will not emerge from the rooms the family has occupied. He begins to pray loudly while smashing about with the old wicker suitcases and leather trunks that have been hiked up in the rafters of Lei’s storeroom. The class and status of the Pari’isi elder holds no sway here, and the magistrate leaves in a distinctly bad temper.
“They won’t even know who they are anymore without me,” says Frex; and “If they can so quickly conclude the worst, what good have I done?” Elphie sees her father batting against airy grievances, adrift in a river-flood mist without bearings, without navigational instinct.
Nanny and Lei bow out and go to fix a distracting meal in the larder. In the family room, Nessa weeps softly and no one wipes her nose. Elphie says, “Tell me what to do so I have something to do, it’s useless to just stand here.” And Shell goes and stands in a corner with his back to the others, ostentatiously giving himself a punishment, though nobody takes time to question him about it. Frankly, all four of the Thropps would like to stand in four corners of the room, backs to their kin, ignoring the inevitable. But there is the work of packing to manage.
Lei bullies herself to Elphie’s side. “You will keep this family afloat,” she whispers. “But you can’t do it alone. I will help. You can trust me. You like me well enough—that’s all it takes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. And why do I like you? Remind me.”
“I am one of those who haven’t moved to the other side of the path when they see you coming.” Lei ducks her chin several times, driving her point into the floorboards.
“Is that all it takes to make people likeable? That they haven’t picked up a stone and chucked it?”
“You’re putting it crudely. I’m on your side, Elphaba Thropp.”
Elphie shook her head. “Liking people, not liking them—I don’t really get it. But I don’t think it has anything to do with me anyway. Can you move, you’re standing on the hem of my skirt.”
Lei won’t move her foot. Elphie nearly takes pity. In a voice of flat affect she says, “I wish I could cut you a set of your own wings, so you could fly yourself into a better life.” Lei, insulted and hurt, lets out a little gash of sound and gives way.
Frex tells his children and Nanny that they’ll abandon Ovvels tomorrow, unbowed and unashamed, at the height of the market morning, through the crowds. To prove their lack of shame. Tomorrow! Elphie throws down the handful of toiletries she’s been assembling. She reaches for the last item of clothing in what had been Mama’s trunk. She pulls it out, leaving at the bottom the oval looking-glass that Mama had taken from Colwen Grounds all those years earlier. “If it’s not to break, it’ll need something soft to be wrapped in,” she barks at her father. “Take care of it yourself. I’m bringing this cloak to Unger as a good-bye present.”
Her father is in too fraught a state to forbid her, but she does see him take a prayer shawl of his own and wrap up the mirror. He cannot not let it go yet. “Eventually it will come into your possession, Elphaba. It’ll be a keepsake for you. It held your mother’s face, once upon a time.”
She hurries with the last tawny garment. Of uncertain function, it’s trimmed with scraps of dingy white fur and lined with rotting silk panels. Climbing the steps of the clothier’s shop room she feels an unfamiliar pang, but she doesn’t take the time to question its character. There’s too much to do.
“Ah,” says Unger when she hands the item to him. He behaves as if she hasn’t been gone for months, as if her reappearance is timely and expected. “I believe this must be what’s called a lying-in robe. Or a morning jacket. For the expectant mother who has the luck to have staff attending her needs in the final months. Not often seen in this climate, what with the ermine tippets. A bit overdone. Of course, I could be wrong.”
“But do you want it? You can just have it,” she says. “It seems the time has come for us finally to hunt down the family of Turtle Heart. Father is determined that we flee before we’re run out of town. They’ve turned on him. We’re leaving in the morning.”
“Not a good look, to run away,” says Unger. “Gives legitimacy to the accusations. Still, he’s taking care of his family, something I do, too, though in a much less dramatic way. Yes, I’ll take this off your hands. I’ll even pay you for it.”
“I don’t want any payment.”
“You’re getting it. Listen. It’s this: a piece of advice for you.”
The new window glass has been installed and it is an oval like her mother’s mirror, though at a scale of several orders of magnitude. The orientation, mostly vertical, tips up at one parabolic point. The light falls upon Elphie, and she knows she is pitiably green. She stands there with stone-hard eyes. She hates advice. “What,” she finally says, to get it over with.
He props his rump upon the high stool behind the counter, folds his arms over his chest, and tilts his head back, examining her down the bridge of his nose and the slopes of his sallow cheeks. The hair in his ears wants trimming. “Recently, I’ve done some work for Pari’isi people,” he tells her. “It’s common knowledge among them that their stricken young To’or admires you for your ability to learn.”
“Stricken?” she says, before she remembers, oh yes, Pari’isi To’or isn’t expected to live long.
“It doesn’t surprise me, Pari’isi To’or’s opinions. They corroborate my own. But the young master has had more formal training than I ever did, and he’s impressed by your quickness, the vivacity of your mind. Maybe your retreat from Ovvels isn’t untimely after all.”
“The Pari’isi chieftain isn’t so fond of us, we’ve learned.”
“That’s all public relations. He has to be seen to be taking a stand against the unknown. Never mind about him. Pay attention. In truth, Elphie, our self-approving society here in Ovvels will soon grow too provincial for one of your interests and capacities.” He sees that she is fretting, wanting to leave before this gets too personal. “My payment for this memento of your mother’s? For all I know she wore it when she was carrying you. In any case, it buys you this piece of counsel.”
“I have to go,” she says, preparing to escape.
“Exactly so. Elphaba Thropp, you need to challenge yourself more than you’ve done so far. You were busy making little wings for the festival of Se’enth. You have farther to go, and on a separate model of wings. You might sit an entrance exam for one of the universities in Shiz. Are you listening to me? Shiz is the center of learning in all of Oz, as far as I’ve ever heard. A real city, compared to which Ovvels is only a town. North of us by travel that takes days and days. North even of the Emerald City. In the province of Gillikin.”
“What are you blathering about, we’re going to look for Turtle Heart’s survivors and, I don’t know, bring them marsh plums or something.”
“Stop trying to be witty and listen to me. Talk your father into sending you there. You deserve to do something more than trail after him. Yes, of course, now you’re a child, you aren’t what, fourteen yet? Fifteen maybe? Something like that? I’m bad at ages and I can see you are, too. But you’ve changed in Ovvels during the time you’ve spent here. You’re getting ready to launch into your own life. If you were still working for me I’d fire you, just so you would have to find something more challenging to do. Don’t let your father, that mysteriously good man, hold you back. Your way is not his way, and his way is not yours. Are you taking this in?”
“You’ve lost your mind,” she says, “he’d never let me.”
“Don’t ask him then. Just do it yourself.”
“I’ll say it again, you’ve lost your mind.”
“Ah well,” he says, turning from her, tucking up the morning jacket, brisking into busy work, “who cares about that, as long as you have found yours.”