The silver crown, p.1
The Silver Crown, page 1
For my children and, someday, their children
CHAPTER ONE
The Birthday Present
SHE had known all along that she was a queen, and now the crown proved it. It was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes; it lay beside her on the pillow, shinier than silver, glowing softly, with twinkling blue stones set all around. And although it looked hard and solid, when she touched it she discovered that the silvery metal was actually a finely spun fabric, strong but soft as silk, so that if she wanted to, she could fold the whole crown in the palm of her hand and tuck it in her pocket.
She got out of bed, stood in front of the mirror, and put it on her head. It felt light and warm and comfortable. Of course it fitted her perfectly.
Her name was Ellen; she had brown hair, gray eyes, clean teeth, rather knobby knees, and was fifty-five and a half inches tall. She was ten years old; yesterday she had been nine, but today was her birthday, and the crown was her first present. It did not occur to her to wonder from whom it had come; she was merely aware that it was hers by right. Her bedroom, a white room with a slanted ceiling, was in the attic floor of the house. Her parents, her brother, and her younger sister all had their beds on the floor below. She looked at her clock; it was not yet quite seven and she knew, now that school was out, that they would all still be asleep. It was not their birthday.
She got dressed, brushed her hair for seven seconds with no noticeable effect, slipped the crown into her pocket, and started downstairs. Halfway down she turned around and came back up. She took the crown from her pocket, where it made a sizable bulge (also, though it was light on her head, it felt heavy in her pocket), and put it instead into a red leather pocketbook, which she snapped shut and slipped over her wrist. Besides the crown, the pocketbook held a dollar and fifty-six cents. She hoped it would hold more before the birthday ended. It also contained a tattered letter from her Aunt Sarah, who was beautiful, lived in the mountains (but who traveled a great deal), and was the only grown-up who knew—honestly knew, and did not just pretend to know—that Ellen was a queen.
Ellen went down to the kitchen, where she ate a doughnut in four bites and drank half a glass of milk. She slipped another doughnut into the pocket where the crown had been and went out the front door, closing it quietly behind her.
Outside, the morning was still faintly misty and the neighborhood was asleep. She took the crown from her purse, adjusted it on her head, and started down the sidewalk at a queenly pace. Then, about a block ahead she thought she saw someone moving; she had the odd impression that whoever it was had a green head. When she looked again she could see no one, so it must have been only some leaves moving in the wind. Nonetheless, feeling rather self-conscious, she took the crown off again as she walked in the direction of the royal palace.
She came in a few minutes to a small wooded park, which she entered. Through the woods, she walked to a clearing where there lay a comfortable log, or rather a royal bench, for this was the castle garden; when she sat on the bench the castle stood behind her, just over her right shoulder, out of sight beyond the trees. She put on her crown and almost immediately a brown and white rabbit, whom she knew slightly, emerged from the woods on the far side of the clearing, made a sweeping obeisance toward the queen, and hopped away down an invisible rabbit-run on business of his own. The queen encouraged wildlife in the royal park—rabbits, squirrels, birds, butterflies, slugs, spiders (she did not really encourage the last two, but they were there anyway)—and she allowed no hunting.
Although the castle was out of sight, she knew exactly what it looked like. It had three tall towers, all minareted, and two shorter ones standing guard over the portcullis, which had a spiked iron gate ready to crash shut, and, of course, a drawbridge wide enough to accommodate mounted chargers three abreast. The curtain wall was gracefully buttressed, and in the clear blue water of the moat swam ducks, geese, swans, and fish; it also contained a small boat in which the queen could, when the mood took her, go paddling. One of the towers (the one over the keep) was haunted by the ghost of the Old Duke, an evil man who had, back in the Middle Ages, put three wives to the knife before they caught and hanged him.
All in all, it looked quite a lot like a famous castle called Neuschwanstein, which stands high in the Alps, in Europe, and was built by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, later called Ludwig the Mad because he spent most of the royal treasure building castles he didn’t need. Neuschwanstein was his grandest; Ellen’s Aunt Sarah, while traveling in the Alps, had once sent her a postcard with a picture of it, and Ellen thought it the most beautiful place she had ever seen.
Though her castle had in its Great Hall a Chamber of State one hundred feet long, with a gold throne on a dais at one end, Ellen preferred to hold court, when the weather was fine, in the garden. She would do so today, she decided, and since the courtiers would be gathering soon, she went over in her mind the agenda for the morning.
First the Prime Minister, probably accompanied by the Colonial Secretary, would want to discuss Affairs of State, including reports from remote outposts of the empire—places like the Fiji Islands, Borneo, or the Outer Hebrides, where there sometimes were native uprisings. Then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, an interminable man, would ask her to approve a long list of figures pertaining to taxes, death rates, appropriations, the crown debt, income from royal holdings, and (reprovingly) royal expenditures. This was rather like arithmetic and always got Ellen feeling slightly dizzy.
Next the Royal Steward, with the Grand Duke and Duchess (a dashing young couple), would discuss arrangements for the Queen’s Ball, now only two weeks off and thus fearfully urgent. When the Chancellor of the Ex. was out of earshot, the Queen planned to ask the Duchess, who was not only her Chief Lady-in-Waiting but also her best friend, to find out the price of a new ermine robe she must have for the ball.
Her planning was interrupted suddenly by the wail of a fire siren, then another, then a third, and engines rumbling down the street next to the park. Ellen now had lived in the city long enough (more than three weeks) so that she no longer got excited about fire engines. She heard their sirens nearly every day, but in town, unlike the country, they merely shrieked off somewhere out of sight and put out a small fire in the house or apartment of someone you didn’t know.
So she sat still and waited for the noise to fade in the distance, when she could resume planning for the ball. But this time it did not fade, at least not very far. She heard the sirens whine down from treble to bass and then stop, still within earshot. There was a lot of confused shouting, and then the loud throb of an engine—a pump? Two more sirens screamed, coming from another direction. Then she smelled smoke.
It must be near, she thought. She could not possibly hold court in such a ruckus, so she decided to go and look. Official business, including the ball, would have to wait until afternoon; she could only hope the park would still be empty. It was next to impossible to hold court with a lot of children playing around.
She stood up from the log, put the crown back in her pocketbook, and walked out through the woods. Down the street, in the direction from which she had come, the fire engines—five of them—were pulled up at the curb. There were also a lot of firemen in black raincoats and red hats, a big crowd of people (and more coming all the time), and a policeman directing traffic.
Ellen walked quickly toward the crowd; as she got closer she began to run, her handbag banging against her legs. Then she stopped completely.
It was her house. It had burned to the ground. There was nothing left of it but some piles of blackened brick, some ashes in a hole that had once been the basement. And in the crowd around it, held back by a fence of ropes the firemen had rigged up, she saw no faces she knew.
CHAPTER TWO
“I Need Help”
ELLEN walked around the edge of the crowd for a few minutes, looking for her father; her mother; her brother, David, who was thirteen and should be visible because he would be running; or her sister, Dorah, who was five and should be audible because she would be either shrieking or crying. But all the faces were strange, cold, and peculiarly somber. Where could her family have gone?
She walked up to one of the firemen. By this time the ashes had stopped smoking; they lay wetly, giving off a sour smell. The fireman, with two huge wrenches, was trying to uncouple two sections of hose as thick as his leg. His face was streaked with black. He strained at the wrenches. She touched his arm.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I can’t find my family. Do you know where they are?”
He looked up briefly. “Kid,” he said, “I don’t know your family. How would I know where they are? Maybe they’re home in bed.”
“But I live here,” Ellen said.
“Kid,” said the fireman, “nobody lives here. Not anymore. Burned down so fast they never knew what happened. They’ll be lucky if they find some bones. I tell you what. You go on to your own house. I got work to do.”
He turned and called to another fireman in a blasting voice: “Hey, Ed. Help me with this couple. I ain’t Superman.”
Ellen turned and walked away. She could not quite grasp what the fireman had said; she understood the words, and she did not disbelieve them, but somehow her brain refused to let them in. Then, by accident, she heard the same story again. There was a woman, standing near the rope, talking to another woman. She was wearing leather slippers and a raincoat that had been pulled on over a housecoat that had been pulled on over a nightgown; you could see the edges of each layer hanging below the next.
“Never saw anything like it,” she was saying. “I was putting the coffee in the pot and I looked out and the house was standing there. I turned the coffee on, looked out again, maybe three minutes, and it was gone. Just a lot of fire and smoke, as if it blew up, only no noise…” She turned her head, and Ellen lost a few words. Then she turned back “… just a few days ago; I never even learned their name. There were three or four kids. Nobody got out. Nobody could have…”
Ellen walked away and sat down on the curb a little way from the crowd. She did not cry. She did not speak, or even move. She sat still for about ten minutes, and she may have been thinking, or she may not.
Then she got up and walked quietly back to the rope, keeping as far away from people as she could, as if she were afraid of being recognized. The crowd was thinning now; spectators were still arriving, but more were leaving; they talked only in murmers, like ghosts in a dream. Ellen walked along the rope all the way around the gray and black pile, looking hard at it, as if she were hoping to see some familiar object, even if it were burned or melted. But she saw only charcoal and ashes, some pieces of bent and twisted pipe, blackened bricks, some roof slates, and that was all.
She sat down on the curb again (she had no place else to sit) and this time she did think. People who walked past glanced at her, with her pocketbook dangling between her thin knees, but paid no attention. She watched the policeman, who, half a block away, was still diverting traffic while the firemen rolled up their hoses. Eventually she reached a decision, stood up, and walked firmly toward him.
“Excuse me,” she said in a clear voice. “I need help.”
The policeman looked down at her. He had a narrow face and a scrawny red neck, and his blue uniform shirt looked much too big at the collar. A large black pistol hung from his belt in a leather holster. But his expression was kindly enough (as if he had daughters of his own), and he answered cheerfully.
“Sure, little girl. What can I do for you?”
“My name is Ellen Carroll, and I live… I used to live in the house that burned down. And I can’t find my father and mother.”
The policeman’s cheerful expression disappeared. He bent down until his face was level with Ellen’s. “Are you kidding?” he said, or rather shouted. “The captain told me everybody in that house was… Well, never mind that. You got any identification? What did you say your name was?” Ellen repeated it as he pulled a notebook from his pocket. “Carroll’s the right name, all right. You got any identification?”
Identification. That meant a card with your name and address on it, and sometimes your picture and fingerprints. Ellen had none. Then she remembered.
“I have a letter from my aunt,” she said. She took it from her handbag and then realized it was no good. It began only, “Dear Ellen”; she did not have the envelope, which had come addressed to her mother and had contained another letter. “It shows my first name,” she said rather lamely, and handed it to him. He glanced at it; then he looked at her pocketbook. On its leather side, in faded gold script, was the letter “C.”
“That’s your initial,” said the policeman.
“Yes,” Ellen said. “C for Carroll.”
“Girl,” he said, “I don’t know whether you’re telling the truth or not, but you look as though you are, so I’m going to take you up to the precinct. But if this is some kid trick, the captain’s going to be mad.”
He walked over to a police car, which was parked nearby winking its red light on and off. There was another policeman sitting in it. They had a short conference, and then the first policeman, whose name was Officer Drogue, came back.
“He has to stay here with the radio”—indicating the other policeman—“so we’ll walk to the precinct. All right? It’s not very far.” Ellen nodded, and they set off down the sidewalk side by side, the tall thin blue policeman and the short thin girl, her handbag bumping against her leg. After awhile Officer Drogue patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry,” he said. “We’ll take care of you all right.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Green Mask
ELLEN’s mind kept plodding in a circle, like a horse in a ring. It kept saying, “My father is dead, my mother is dead, my sister is dead, my brother is dead,” a sad rhyme in a nightmare; and yet at every fifth step, as she walked beside Officer Drogue’s long legs, she would catch herself thinking, “… when we find them…” as if, when she got to the precinct, there they would be; and yet she knew they would not. And then the chant would start over again.
She did not know what or where the precinct was. She assumed it must be a house where the police lived, or possibly where the captain lived, or had his office.
Ellen’s house was—had been—on a street where there were only houses, and trees and shrubs and lawns, of course; but after they walked a few blocks, they emerged into a section where the sidewalks were wider, the trees fewer, and there were a few shops and offices. Here, Ellen, who had been gazing sadly down at the sidewalk, heard a sudden shout; she looked up and saw that something very strange was happening in front of one of the shops.
It was an electric appliance store. Its door had burst open and a figure, wearing a silky, glistening green hood that hid his face, all but the eyes, ran out. Though she could not be certain, something about the way he looked and moved suggested that it was a young man, perhaps still in his teens. He paused at the curb, looked both ways, and walked quickly across the street, where he stopped and turned toward the door he had just come out. In his hand he carried a pistol with a long barrel. The shop door burst open again and another man came out. He was the store manager, dressed in a gray business suit, and he shouted as he came:
“Police! Police! Robbers! Robbers! Police!”
The man in the green hood raised his gun like a hunter, barrel across his left forearm, and fired once. There was a crack, and the store manager’s face suddenly turned bright red; he fell and did not move.
The man in the green hood turned and ran, still holding his pistol, up the sidewalk away from Ellen, turned right into an alleyway, and disappeared.
By the time the robber began to run, Officer Drogue had already clapped his hand on Ellen’s shoulder, said, “You wait here—don’t move,” and, drawing his own pistol, had run in pursuit. But he paused for a few hopeless seconds over the store manager, who was already dead, so that by the time he crossed the street the green hood had vanished up the alley. Officer Drogue followed, perhaps one hundred and fifty feet behind, running like a boy, his gangling legs suddenly turned nimble.
Ellen stood where she was, feeling quite dizzy. In less than a minute there was another siren, and a police car came speeding up, followed by a motorcycle. Within three minutes the place was alive with police and detectives, shouting, hurrying in and out of cars, roaring off on motorcycles. In all the noise. Ellen thought she heard several blocks away, some more gunshots, but she could not be sure. An ambulance arrived, picked up the poor, limp, dead store manager and took him away. A policeman had traced a chalk line on the sidewalk around where he lay; another took pictures with flashbulbs of the store, the body, the chalk line, and everything else. Detectives, with notebooks in their hands, knocked on the doors of the stores and houses near the electric appliance shop and asked questions. An hour went by. Officer Drogue did not come back.
Ellen stood and wondered what could have happened to him; she also wondered about an odd thing he had said—to himself, but still quite clearly—just before he ran after the robber. “Another green hood,” he had said, as if he had seen someone in a green hood before, perhaps earlier—perhaps near the fire?
The police and detectives began leaving, two by two in police cars, until finally there were only two left. Ellen thought she should speak to them, tell them what had happened and ask them about Officer Drogue. But just as she started toward them, they, too, got in a car and drove off. She thought there were probably some more police or detectives in the store, but when she reached the door a shade had been pulled down over the glass, and it was locked. It would not budge.
