Lillian Ch. 1

Chapter One

It is a very good thing Mrs. Brown did not go out to pick strawberries on a certain fine day last spring. I'm afraid she might have received quite a shock if she had.

It wasn't so much that the strawberry patch was being robbed. That was to be expected, even though the strawberry patch was flush against the house and right under the kitchen window. Thieves as small as these did not consider "flush against the house" a bold vicinity to rob in the slightest. And they were far too small to keep out.

No, Mrs. Brown expected to find thieves in her beloved little strawberry bed. What she did not expect was to find these particular thieves.

Or rather, one of these thieves - for there were three of them, and only one was flabbergasting.

The first two were perfectly normal mice.

The third was not a mouse at all.

Nor was she human; but she looked human. She was a human the size of a mouse - that is the best and only way to describe her.

At the moment she was helping the two normal mice carry off a strawberry - a nice large plump strawberry. She was pushing; one of the mice was puling; the other mouse was giving orders.

"That's it, Lillian, put your back into it! Come on, Trinket, you can do better than that. Hurry up, you two! The faster we go the faster we'll get that triple-berry pie."

"Oh, Clarksie," puffed the little pulling mouse, and stopped to lean against the strawberry and pant. "You - uh - you... It doesn't seem... I don't - (pant) - think..."

"What Trinket means," said the girl who was neither human nor mouse - or who was both human and mouse - taking a rest herself and folding her arms on top of the strawberry, "is that it's easy for you to say 'hurry up.'"

"What more can I do?" cried Clarksie, spreading out her paws. "There's only room for two to push and pull."

Lillian - that was the mouse-girl's name, you see - sighed. Then, squaring her shoulders a little, she went around to Trinket, and took the strawberry stem from her paws. "Here, Trinket, I'll pull for awhile. Clarksie, you push. Trinket, you rest."

Clarksie fell into line with no more complaint than a short sigh - "Oh well," it seemed to say. She was a wily mouse, an always-trying-to-slip-out-of-work mouse, but she knew when she was beaten.

Huff, puff, heave, ho, shove, strain, rest. Lillian mopped a lock of black hair away from her forehead - she had beautiful jet locks, poker-straight except for the ends, which were as curly as Goldilocks' hair.

"If we hadn't taken such a whopper of a big one," started Clarksie, paws on her hips, but Trinket piped, "That was your idea!"

Clarksie fell silent.

Huff, puff, heave, ho, shove, strain, rest. Here, at last, was the end of the strawberry patch and the beginning of the lavender bed.

"Halfway there," exclaimed Clarksie, and plopped down beside the strawberry. Dramatically she flung back her head and closed her eyes. "Oh! I'm fainting! Say, Trinket, you take a turn."

Fainting though she had been a moment before, she sprang lightly up and aside to give Trinket room. Lillian watched with one raised eyebrow, shook her head, and set hand to the proverbial plow.

At long last they reached the doorstep of the mouse hole. Clarksie, who had taken another turn at pulling, threw herself down and knocked feebly and frantically at the door. "Oh, Mrs. Mouse! Mrs. Mouse! Open up! Quick, quick! We're dying!"

Lillian laughed - a sweet, long, musical laugh, a bubbling giggle, as a matter of fact. Clarksie looked so funny, sprawled out like a dying mouse! And she less tired than either of the others. Mrs. Mouse took a good several seconds to answer Clarksie's desperate knocking. When she did: "Oh!" she exclaimed. She had been wiping her dough-encrusted paws on her floury apron, but she dropped the apron now and lifted her hands in surprise. "What a large strawberry!"

Clarksie leapt up, suddenly fresh and grinning. "Biggest one there, Mrs. Mouse!"

"Heaviest, too," muttered Trinket.

"Well!" cried Mrs. Mouse, as the three of them, with a final effort, pushed the strawberry over the doormat and into the mouse hole. "Aren't you just the most helpful mice!"

The eyes of the three friends glowed with pride, and they all stood a little straighter. Then Mrs. Mouse, her own eyes sparkling a little, said: "And would you like to help me cut up the strawberry now?"

At once the mood changed from delight to dismay.

"Oh, no, Mrs. Mouse!" cried Clarksie. "We're much too tired! We've seen enough of that strawberry; it was such hard work bringing it in -"

"And Clarksie here worked harder than any of us," said Lillian, putting a hand on Clarksie's shoulder.

"YES!" said Clarksie. To judge from her wide eyes, Lillian's playful meaning was lost on her. Lillian's mouth twitched. (She had already been grinning.)

Mrs. Mouse laughed. "Well, if you're so tired I could ask Melissa and Andrew to help me..."

"Oh, yes! Do that! Andrew's a big strong boy, he won't mind wrestling with that strawberry!"

The last of this plea, spoken with clasped hands and imploring eyes, was partially lost on Mrs. Mouse, as she shut the door here with an amused smile.

"Well!" said Clarksie, with a satisfied little sigh. "That's done." She tripped to the edge of the doorstep, plopped down, and let her legs dangle. "Now what?"

Lillian sat down beside her and propped her chin on one hand. She said nothing. "Well?" said Clarksie, beginning to grow impatient.

"Let's be quiet."

"Being quiet" was one of Lillian's favorite things to do - a dreadfully boring thing, Clarksie thought. However, having grown up side-by-side with Lillian all her life, Clarksie had gradually come to realize that, for Lillian, "being quiet" was often the prologue to a particularly interesting adventure. Lillian needed quiet to cook up a really good scheme. So now, instead of groaning and complaining "it's quiet enough already!", Clarksie plopped her head glumly between two paws and stared through half-closed eyes at an ant which was climbing up a stalk of lavender just in front of her. Whatever Lillian was planning, it had better be good.

Lillian, as a matter of fact, was not scheming - she was dreaming. Between the two there is a rather fine line. She had her eyes fixed on the wood - the wood just across from her, separated from the doorstep of the mouse hole just by a wide stretch of grass.

"In all my life," whispered Lillian to herself, "I have never been inside that wood."

"What's that?" asked Clarksie.

"Nothing," said Lillian.

What was the use of trying to explain it to Clarksie and Trinket? She had tried. They just couldn't understand. They were dear friends, but they were different from her, somehow. Or perhaps she was different from them.

Reflectively, Lillian took a lock of her long black hair between her fingers, twirled it around her thumb, and placed it in her mouth. Sucking on her hair was a habit Mrs. Mouse often implored her to break, but Lillian could not break it. She was not trying to disobey Mrs. Mouse now; she did not even notice she had put her hair in her mouth. Her thoughts were full of the wood. It was so mysterious, that wood - shadowy and entrancing and full of whispers. Lillian had felt the whispers, if she couldn't exactly hear them. Every day when she looked at the wood, tiny rustling voices would stretch out to her - voices that stirred her heart, voices so distinct they tickled her ears. What were they? Were they? Lillian believed so. She didn't know what they were; but she knew it wasn't just her imagination.

After several minutes of this thoughtful silence, Clarksie grew restless. She swung her legs, shifted her position, stared up at the sky and counted clouds, blew the spray of lavender before her nose in order to torment the ambitious ants desirous of climbing to the top. Great was Clarksie's relief when Mrs. Mouse opened the mouse hole door and said, "If anyone wants to lick the bowl..."

Clarksie sprang up. "I do!" Without bothering to invite the girls, she whisked inside, Trinket at her heels.

Lillian, with a pensive smile and a contented sigh, stood up and followed them into the mouse hole.

Oh, the conversations that went on over the leftover pie filling that day! If you ever get a chance to eavesdrop on a group of chattering mice, do. It's quite the most charming thing. As a general rule, mice don't talk or even let on that they can talk when humans are listening; but catch them alone and absorbed and you'll find they prattle as proficiently and amusingly as talkative toddlers. They have a quaint way of jumping from subject to subject and mood to mood as quickly as they leap from one place to another, and expressing themselves with adorable tremors of the whiskers and swivels of the ears.

Lillian was no exception. She may not have had mouse ears or mouse whiskers, but she believed she did; and her mouse mannerisms were so perfect she could almost have made you believe, too.

"Clarksie, get your fingers out of the bowl! You had the spoon all to yourself."

"That wasn't enough. Say, Mrs. Mouse, can you make me a pie without cooking it sometime?"

"Clarksie, you've no more sense than a butterfly - oh, you're mother still needs to give me that recipe for thistle-bread."

"Trinket! We're going to have a birthday party for you."

"We are?"

"Yes, in the strawberry patch, and we'll invite all our friends and have games and - ooh! It should be a surprise party."

"How could it be a surprise party when you just told her about it?"

"Did you girls hear old Miss Garden-Mouse is down with the flu?"

"Oh! Poor thing!"

"You should bring her a bouquet of flowers after this."

And so it went, merry and disorganized, until there was a knock at the door and Tipperkik came in. Tipperkik was Clarksie and Trinket's grown-up brother.

"Are you girls about ready to come home?" he asked. "Mother Mouse was looking for you an hour ago!"

"Clarksie!" cried Lillian. "Did you not tell your mother you meant to stay all day again?"

Clarksie, to judge by her sheepish expression, was caught off guard for a moment. "Oops," she said quietly. And then she added in a very robust tone, "Is it that time already? How fast time flies! Come on, Trinket. Best not keep Mother Mouse waiting."

They left. But not before Tipperkik gave Melissa a meaningful little look and said very politely, "Baking something, Melissa?"

Melissa, with a sweet blushing smile, dusted her floury hands off on her apron. "Yes," she said.

She seemed pleased and flustered at the same time.

Melissa was grown up by this time, too.

After Clarksie and Trinket had gone, Lillian sat down on the doorstep and watched the wood. She'd never been inside it...never been inside it...never been inside it. The words played over and over again in her thoughts, like a pensive snatch of song.

The morning was growing old. There was a summer lull over the grass, and the lavender, and even the clouds in the sky. The wood lay still and full of shadows, as it always had - just out of reach, the boundary of the world, familiar and mysterious.

There was a reason Lillian had never been inside: she wasn't allowed. It was one of those rules so firm it was felt rather than spoken. no one went into the wood. It wasn't a safe place for mice. It was full of owls and snakes and foxes, things that crept through the underbrush without rustling it and sprang out on you before you could squeak...

"I'll never go into the wood," said Lillian to herself (for she talked to herself sometimes). "Never, ever, ever."

She meant the words to be stern - but they came out mournful.

And then, just at that moment, she heard it.

A sound.

From the wood.

The sound of someone calling her name