about clouds and houses, and then no more, for she was asleep. Asleep, never having noticed the moment when she began, dreaming of it already as she would go on dreaming of it from now on; dreaming of all that she had seen, and all that would come of it; dreaming of the spring when she would dream of the autumn when she fell asleep, and dreaming of the winter when she would wake; in the involution of her dream, turning and altering those things she dreamed even as she dreamed them and as elsewhere they came to pass. She drew up, though unaware she did so, her knees; she drew her hands close to her chin, which drew down, till she took the same S-shape she had taken when she had lived within Sophie. Lilac was asleep.
Mrs. Underhill tucked the cloak once more carefully around her, and then straightened up. With both hands she pressed the small of her back and bent backwards, as weary as she had ever been. She pointed to the owl, whose soft-blooming eyes were looking out from its house, and said, "You. Take care, watch well," which those eyes could do as well as anypair she knew. She looked upward. Twilight, even the endless twilight of this November day, had nearly ended, and she with all her tasks left undone: the last of the year still unburied, and the rains that were to bury it (and a million insect larvae, a million bulbs and seeds) yet unpoured; the floor of heaven unswept of dirty cloud and its winter lamps still to be lit. Brother North-wind, she was sure, champed at his bit to be unleashed. It was a wonder, she thought, that day followed night, that the very earth turned at all, she had given it so little thought of late. She sighed, turned away, and (growing huger and older and more puissant than Lilac had ever supposed, or could imagine or even dream her to be) she expanded upward and outward toward these tasks without a backward look at her adopted grand-daughter asleep among the leaves.
Book Six - THE FAIRIES' PARLIAMENT
I.
High on the hilltop
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He's nigh lost his wits.
—Allingham, The Fairies
The first years after what Russell Eigenblick thought of as his accession were the hardest anyone then alive would live to see—so it would seem to them, looking back. Sudden snowstorms raged on the November day when against token opposition he was elected President, and seemed scarcely to abate thereafter. It could not have been always winter in those years, summer must have come around duly as ever, yet universally people remembered winters: the longest, coldest, deepest winters ever known; one continuous winter. Every hardship the Tyrant regretfully imposed or his opponents wilfully inflicted in their uprisings against him was made worse by winter, by months of frozen mud and sleety rain that continually mired every enterprise. Winter made ghastly and hopeless the movements of trucks, traffic, brown-clad troops; everywhere, deeply marking the memory, were the huddled clots and queues of refugees, rag-bound against the cold; the stalled trains, grounded planes; the new frontiers at which lines of slush-bound cars, tailpipes breathing cold clouds, waited to be examined by muffled guards; the shortages of everything, the awful struggle, the difficulties and uncertainties made more awful by the isolating endless cold. And the blood of martyrs and reactionaries frozen on the dirty snow of city squares.
At Edgewood, the old house submitted to indignities: antique plumbing froze; a whole floor was closed up, cold dust collecting in its disused rooms; glum black stoves were set to squat in front of marble fireplaces; and, worst, sheets of plastic for the first time were stapled up over dozens of windows, making every day a foggy day. One night, Smoky, hearing noises in the wilderness of the kitchen-garden, went out and surprised with his flashlight a starveling, an animal long, gray, red-eyed and slavering, mad with cold and hunger. A stray dog, the others said, or something; but only Smoky had seen it, and Smoky wondered.
Winters
There was a pan of water on the stove which sat in the old music room, to help keep the plaster of the ceiling from cracking further from the dryness. A big wooden box roughly carpentered by Smoky held logs to feed the stove, and the two together, stove and woodbox, gave a Klondike air to the pretty room. Rudy Flood had cut the logs,