Maud was entertaining an old friend, and that friend was Death. Lily recognized her the moment she and Rex walked into the room. She didn’t know how she recognized her. She knew they had never been properly introduced. But nevertheless, she knew for certain that this was Death.
This was how she told me the story.
“Was this who the Wild Mushroom Man met today, on his way through the forest?” she thought. Her eyes met Rex’s. He had recognized the Guest, too, as she sat in Maud’s old red leather-covered wing chair, sipping from a cream-colored china cup. He hesitated for a moment as the two women looked welcomingly at the newcomers.
“Come in, come in. Oh, Lily, how lovely to see you,” Maud said, her pale creased face beaming. She didn’t stand—that was her right, after all, being old, and having sustained so many wounds in the past—but gestured that the two come closer.
At this, Rex moved forward toward Death, and lay at her feet with a sigh. Death, pleased, reached over to scratch the dog behind the ears. Rex gave another great deep breath, and licked her hand. Lily, when she told the story, was clear that Death liked Rex, and that Rex was not afraid of Death.
“What a nice dog!” Death said, and she looked at Lily and smiled.
Lily went to Maud and kissed her on her cheek. “It felt dry like paper, but cool, too. And Maud smelled, as she always did, of roses,” my mother said, not knowing that I breathed in her own scent, which was the same. Lily breathed in deeply then, the way I did while she told the story, and she smiled, too, the same as me. She was very fond of Maud, she said. Maud, in fact, was the most important adult in her life, “more even than my own mother, Snow, and if you should find some other adult more important than me to you, I would always completely understand.” But of course I never did.
Maud held Lily’s hand and patted it. “Sit there, Lily,” she said, pointing to the little hassock at her feet. “Where we can both get a good look at you.”
Lily obeyed. And the two women—one old, and the other appearing to be in the full flower of middle age, for Death is not old or young, but always at the height of her powers—looked at her.
“As if,” Lily thought, “they’ve been talking about me. As if they want to see if what they said was true.” Lily remembered that she put up her chin a little. She was embarrassed to be looked at like this, by Death and Maud. But she was determined not to show it.
Whatever conclusion it was, though, that Death and Maud came to as they looked Lily over, neither of them said anything about it. Instead they returned to their conversation, as if Lily and Rex had never interrupted them at all.
“I’ve always liked this situation,” Death drawled in her elegant way, looking out of Maud’s broad front window onto the woods. “Thank you,” she said as Maud urged Lily to pass around the plate of macaroons. “I will.” Death bit a cookie reflectively. “Of the place but not quite in it, if you see what I mean.”
Maud laughed. “Oh, I do!” she said and her eyes glinted with amusement. Her eyes were a deep black, like buttons, and when she laughed they sent out purple sparks. “That’s the story of my life all over, isn’t it?” She pulled her plush yellow and black wrap around her arms against the slight spring chill. (“And she always wore black and yellow plush, Snow.”)
“And of Lily’s, too, unless I mistake myself—which I don’t.”
MAUD WAS ENTERTAINING AN OLD FRIEND,
AND THAT FRIEND WAS DEATH
Again both the women turned and looked at Lily, at where she sat balanced on a little green velvet pouf. (Somehow miraculously saved from what came after—I have it in my own small tower now.)
“You heard it this morning, didn’t you, Lily?” Maud asked. Lily looked quickly at Death, and gave just as quick a nod.
“I don’t think anyone else did,” she offered, and then, embarrassed, was quiet again.
“No,” Death drawled. “No, I don’t imagine they did.” She looked out the window at the woods, but this time her long, elegant fingers tapped impatiently on her chair’s wooden arm. “Arcadia,” she murmured. “Beautiful…and blind.”
“It’s a very good place,” Maud said in a voice of faint protest. But Lily could see she was sad. “We fought to make it a good place. And to a certain extent we won, didn’t we? We won.”
At this she smiled at Lily again, and stretched out her hand, which Lily clasped and then let go. “She’s smiling at me as if I’d helped her fight!” Lily thought wistfully. “And I wish I had.” Because the stories about Maud were legendary in Arcadia. Village teachers taught them in the schools, their voices still tinged with awe at the idea that one of their own could have been so wise and brave. There were no written records of it, strangely enough, but everyone in Arcadia knew that fifty years before, the Enemy had poured through a mountain pass, opened unexpectedly by a landslide. And it was Maud who led the guerrilla force that had pushed them back, Maud who had been one of the leaders of the great Arcadian Resistance.
So it was said.
But as for Maud herself, she always laughed whenever the subject came up—which was rarely in front of her, so much was the awe in which she was held. But she had hugged Lily to herself once, when Alan was boasting in his good natured way about his mother to one of the magistrates visiting from Mumford, a historian who was interested especially in these old tales, because even then, Mumford was known for its curiosity about fairy stories, legends, and myths.
Then Maud had whispered in Lily’s ear, “Never, ever believe everything you hear.”
(It was a lesson my mother learned, and that she passed on, almost urgently, to me. “Think for yourself, Snow,” she would say, murmuring the words into my hair. “Look for yourself. See for yourself, and don’t let anyone tell you what you see isn’t there.”)
Death stretched in her chair now, in the sun. She yawned. “Too smug,” she said finally. “Too self-satisfied. That kind of thing always comes to a bad end.”
Maud looked reflective at this. And still sad.
“But the end is never the end,” Death said, and now she sat straight up and her black eyes flashed. “Not quite.”
“Not even when it’s you, then?” Maud said. Lily, straining hard to follow the conversation of the adults, pondered over this.
Death laughed. “Not even when it’s me, my dear, dear friend. I am so misunderstood…if I were given to self-pity, good heavens, how you’d hear me moan.” She gave Lily a friendly look. “But you see me, don’t you, Lily? Do I look so big and bad and terrible and frightening? Do I?”
Lily knew that Death wanted an answer to this question, and so she thought hard about the matter. She thought so hard that she pulled her knees up to her chin and squinted her eyes. Rex watched her, encouraging. She looked at Death, and Death looked young and beautiful and kind.
“No,” she said finally, though a little timid, too. “But you do look very strong, and maybe that’s what frightens people.”
“I am strong,” Death agreed. “I am stronger than many, many things. But I am not stronger than Life. And those who say that we are enemies, Life and I, those people are idiots.” She sighed again. “But the world is so filled with idiots, I don’t know why I bother, honestly I don’t, Maud.”
Now Death stood up. She was tall, very tall—“even taller than you’re going to be, Snow,” and I am almost six feet. (I get my height from my father’s side of the family; all the women there are that way.) Maud stood up also, and motioned Lily that she was to do so too. They all three stood there for a moment, and Death laughed again.
She bent down toward Lily and looked in her eyes. And Lily saw deep into Death’s eyes and saw that she was great and strong and that she was someone you wouldn’t want to meet when she was in a rage. But Lily saw more. She saw that Death felt deeply and acted from levels Lily was too young and weak to know anything about. She wondered if Maud knew. “Maybe she doesn’t know all of it,” she thought. “But she knows more than me.”
“That was wise of you,” Death said, absently tapping Lily’s cheek with one thin finger. It was a beautiful finger, rosy and long, tipped with an oval nail—not a claw, as Lily had imagined belonged to Death. “Always remember how little you know. There are so few of you who can keep that in their heads! I’m a great friend to those who can.” At this, Death paused again, lost in her own thoughts. Lily had the feeling that those thoughts were of people that Death had loved.
“It must be a great thing to be loved by Death,” Lily thought. Then she saw the great lady turn and kiss Maud on the cheek, and, awestruck, she realized that Alan’s mother was one of Death’s loved ones.
“I’ll come for you soon,” Death murmured, and the two women clasped hands. Maud nodded and smiled and a tear slid down her face. She unclasped one hand and wiped it away. Lily shivered at this. “I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it, Snow.” But she knew somehow that she had had the honor of seeing a little, just a little, into a great mystery.
“And as for YOU,” Death said turning lightly toward Lily in a whirl, “you I will meet again and again. You’re going to need my help. That was why I asked you to come today, to tell you that, and to meet you and be properly introduced, so that when the time comes you will know what’s being offered you.”
“I heard the BOOM,” Lily said, troubled. “What does that mean?”
Death knelt down in front of Lily and tilted her chin up with her long fingers. “It means, dear child,” she said gently, “that you must find the Key that has been lost. And when you find it, Lily, you must claim it as your own, to be passed down to your own daughter. You must not give it to anyone else, no matter how they beg, no matter how much you think their claim worth more than yours. Those are your tasks: to find the Key and to keep the Key. Of the two, it is the second that is by far the harder. And the first task is impossible! That is how difficult these tasks will be!”
At this, Death bounded lightly again onto her feet, and her black and gold eyes swept the room. She opened her arms as if to embrace them all, and then, with another laugh full of the enjoyment of life, she was gone.
“Oh!” Lily said. “I forgot to give her these!” And she looked down at the mushrooms that she had carried all this time.
“Never mind,” Maud said, soothing her. “We won’t worry about that now. We have a lot to talk about, you and I.” Maud stood now, and pulled her yellow and black fleece wrap more tightly around her. “Let’s go for a walk in the woods,” she said. “And then we’ll go to meet your mother and father and be in time for the Feast. I think,” she said, and her eyes were grave, graver than Lily had ever seen them before, “it will be the last Feast for Arcadia for some time. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a visit from Death, and she’s told me many things. And even in Arcadia, Lily,” Maud said as she led Lily and Rex out of the weathered front door and closed it behind them, “not as many as should would find such things easy to understand.”
With that, Maud sighed and led the way, not through the gate, but up a winding path, along which mushrooms and early spring flowers pushed up through the dirt.