The View from Castle Rock

living at her house in Edinburgh-and a woman named Miss Anderson who used to travel with her and teach her. It seems she was glad to see the back of this woman, and surely Miss Anderson would be glad to depart, after all the tricks that were played on her-the live frog in her boot and the woolen but lifelike mouse in her bed. Also Nettie’s stomping on books that were not in favor and her pretense of being struck deaf and dumb when she got sick of reciting her spelling exercises.
    She has been back and forth to America three times. Her father is a wine merchant whose business takes him to Montreal.
    She wants to know all about how Walter and his people live. Her questions are by country standards quite impertinent. But Walter does not really mind-in his own family he has never been in a position that allowed him to instruct or teach or tease anybody younger than himself, and in a way it gives him pleasure.
    It is certainly true, though, that in his own world, nobody would ever have got away with being so pert and forward and inquisitive as this Nettie. What does Walter’s family have for supper when they are at home, how do they sleep? Are there animals kept in the house? Do the sheep have names, and what are the sheepdogs’ names, and can you make pets of them? Why not? What is the arrangement of the scholars in the schoolroom, what do they write on, are the teachers cruel? What do some of his words mean that she does not understand, and do all the people where he is talk like him?
    “Oh, aye,” says Walter. “Even His Majesty the Duke does. The Duke of Buccleugh.”
    She laughs and freely pounds her little fist on his shoulder.
    “Now you are teasing me. I know it. I know that dukes are not called Your Majesty. They are not.”
    One day she arrives with paper and drawing pencils. She says she has brought them to keep her busy so she will not be a nuisance to him. She says that she will teach him to draw if he wants to learn. But his attempts make her laugh, and he deliberately does worse and worse, till she laughs so hard she has one of her coughing fits. (These don’t bother him so much anymore because he has seen how she always manages to survive them.) Then she says she will do some drawings in the back of his notebook, so that he will have them to remember the voyage. She does a drawing of the sails up above and of a hen that has escaped its cage somehow and is trying to travel like a seabird over the water. She sketches from memory her dog that died. Pirate. At first she claims his name was Walter but relents and admits later that she was not telling the truth. And she makes a picture of the icebergs she has seen, higher than houses, on one of her past voyages with her father. The setting sun shone through these icebergs and made them look-she says-like castles of gold. Rose-colored and gold.
    “I wish I had my paint box. Then I could show you. But I do not know where it is packed. And my painting is not very good anyway, I am better at drawing.”

    Everything that she has drawn, including the icebergs, has a look that is both guileless and mocking, peculiarly expressive of herself.

    “The other day I was telling you about that Will O’Phaup that was my grandfather but there was more to him than I told you. I did not tell you that he was the last man in Scotland to speak to the fairies. It is certain that I have never heard of any other, in his time or later.”
    Walter has been trapped into hearing this story-which he has, of course, heard often before, though not by his father’s telling. He is sitting around a corner where some sailors are mending the torn sails. They talk among themselves from time to time-in English, maybe, but not any English that Walt can well make out-and occasionally they seem to listen to a bit of what Old James is telling. By the sounds that are made throughout the story Walter can guess that the out-of-sight audience is made up mostly of women.
    But there is one tall well-dressed man-a cabin passenger, certainly-who has paused to listen within Walter’s view. There is a figure close to this man’s other side, and at one moment in the tale this figure peeps around to look at Walter and he sees that it is Nettie. She seems about to laugh but she puts a finger to her lips as if warning herself-and Walter-to keep silent.
    The man must of course be her father. The two of them stand there listening quietly till the tale is over.
    Then the man turns and speaks directly, in