The Rosemary Spell (9 page)

Ah, treble words of absence spoken low;

For ears of fam'ly, friend, or willful foe.

Fam'ly
took us forever, and we had to look up
treble,
which means anything multiplied three times. Adam thought it had to do with music, which it does, but that's a different meaning. Or maybe both meanings matter. If we've learned nothing else from Mr. Cates, it's that words in poems often mean a bunch of things all at one time.

With his coat zipped up and his hat pulled down over his forehead, Adam looks like a little kid. “Rosie, could you wait till tomorrow to figure out the rest of the poem?”

“Of course!” I promise, in a gush of warmth for the little-kid Adam who's part of thirteen-year-old Adam. Both of them, all the Adams I remember, are my best friends. “Maybe Shelby will be able to come too,” I suggest.

“I'll ask her,” he promises as he heads out into the night.

Shelby doesn't have rehearsal, and she doesn't have plans with her friends, but we don't get to work on the poem. Mom needs some super-special old book from the big used bookstore in Lionville, and Shelby and Adam and I always love going there, so we're off on an unexpected excursion. In the car, we sing along to
Matilda
like we always used to, and I don't mind that the poem has to wait. Mom and Shelby try to outsoprano each other, while Adam experiments with his new baritone, and I hang out happily in the middle.

Eliot Books is the best kind of used bookstore. They always have what I'm looking for, as well as books I didn't even know to look for but that seem to have been looking for me. The irregular piles of books leaning in unsteady towers all over the place promise surprises. One time Shelby found an old novel called
To the Island,
and it seemed like it had been written just for us.

Mom heads to the back office to pick up the book she's come to get, and Adam and Shelby and I stand just inside the front door, breathing in the musty, sweet smell of the old books. The same smell as the diary.

The tall shelves form nooks. In some, the owners have put random chairs, here a hard-backed old-fashioned desk chair, there a small overstuffed armchair. The three of us like to crowd into the chair-and-a-half that fills the middle-grade-young-adult nook, and we wend our way past fiction and biography to get there. At English history, I realize we lost Shelby in fiction.

I turn back. “You coming?”

She doesn't look up from the book she's pulled from a pile propped against the
E
's and
F
's. Her long hair looks almost golden compared to all the browns and burgundies and greens of the old books that frame her. I have my phone. I could take a great photo of her. But I don't want a picture of Shelby in adult fiction.

“I thought maybe I'd tackle
The Mill on the Floss,
” she murmurs.

Our teachers are always mentioning
The Mill on the Floss.
It's about a small town on a river that floods, like ours. But they say we should read it when we're older. When we're adults. Once you cross over to
The Mill on the Floss,
you don't belong in the middle-grade nook anymore.

“Not yet, Shelby,” I plead.

“Michelle,” she corrects me absently, but she puts the book back on the stack and follows me to our spot.

Adam's already claimed the cushiest corner of the chair, and he holds a tan hardcover book with a title in gilt letters.

I squeeze next to him, and Shelby perches on the arm of the chair.

“What'd you find?” she asks.

“
The Story of the Amulet,
by E. Nesbit,” he replies.

“I've never heard of that one.” I read over his shoulder.
There were once four children who spent their summer holidays—

“Why is it always summer holidays?” Shelby wonders. “Can't people have adventures in winter?”

“We're having an adventure in winter,” I counter. “You know, the diary.”

“Did you bring it?” She lowers her voice.

“No. I didn't want my mom to see it.” Guilt pokes at me again.

Adam explains as best he can what Constance said, and he tells Shelby about the poem. I tune them out and sit, miserable with self-reproach.

Mom brought me to this bookstore. She brought me to books, period. She's the reason I even care about the diary, or the false codex, or whatever it is. All the books in the nook seem to be scolding me, and I shove myself out of the chair and move away.

“Rosie?” Adam calls after me.

“I want to see if they have anything by Constance.” I made this up on the spot, but it's actually a good idea, and I pick my way around piles of books to the poetry section.

I step back to look up at the second-to-the-top shelf, well above my head. Brontë. Brooke. There are two books with Constance's name on the spine.

“What are you looking for?” Mom appears at my side, clutching a brown-wrapped package to her chest.

“Constance Brooke. For our poetry project,” I answer. Gratitude and shame jostle each other. Gratitude that she didn't show up when we were talking about the diary. Shame that I'm grateful. “Did you get what you needed?”

She pats the package. “It's a rare eighteenth-century edition of Shakespeare's sonnets with some slight alterations. Most scholars have dismissed its authenticity, but I want to decide for myself.” She's all lit up.

“I hope when I grow up I love my job as much as you do,” I say.

She puts a hand on my cheek. “I hope so too, Rosie.” She nods to the ladder. “See what you can find.”

I climb up two steps. A little stack of paperback books sits on the platform at the top of the ladder. Constance's name leaps out at me from one of the paperbacks.
Constance Brooke—Early Poems.
I extract the slim book from the stack.

A black-and-white photo of a young Constance looks out solemnly from the cover. She must be in her twenties or so. Her hair is light and curly—wispy, even, as it is now—and she wears a headband. It's uncanny how much she looks like her aged self; wrinkles already line her forehead. She's framed by rows and rows of books, just as Shelby would have been if I'd taken her picture earlier.

I lean against the ladder, my elbows alongside the stack of paperbacks, and turn to the table of contents. “Moon Mangled Memory” is there.

“Can I get this?” I hold it up for Mom to see.

She smiles. “Sure!”

In the car, Shelby and Mom chatter about the musical. I didn't know that Shelby has a good part. She even has a solo. Mom was in the same show once upon a time, and they're deep in the details of the staging.

Adam and I flip through the book of poems. The pages are cool, with the slightest hint of damp.

A lot are about nature. Many are too abstract to make much sense to me.

When we get to “Moon Mangled Memory,” I read it aloud.

“I still don't get how it's about memory,” Adam says.

“Souvenir,” Mom tosses over her shoulder. “
Souvenir
means memory.”

Adam reads the last stanza again:

A new moon is nothing.

No light. No sight. Recall

Only darkness. Absent

Souvenir. All is lost.

“So, like, absent memory,” he paraphrases.

“You were right,” I point out. “It is about forgetting.”

The poem on the facing page is called “Sifting Words.” I'm starting to feel carsick and need to look away from the book. “Read that one,” I suggest, and close my eyes.

I sift words like sand. They run through my mind.

“Lovely image!” Mom exclaims.

Ink strokes form letters bundled into words.

Words join up with armies of phrases, lines,

That march on iambic feet, singing rhyme.

They enjamb boldly . . .

“What's enjamb?” Adam asks.

“When the sentence doesn't stop at the end of a line,” I say. “Right?”

“Very good.” Mom must think she's died and gone to heaven.

Adam continues reading:

They enjamb boldly, aspire to meaning.

They make speech and song and soliloquy.

Gather into scenes and acts, renowned plays

Famous from their day, unforgotten still.

“Is it about Shakespeare?” Shelby asks.

“Maybe,” Mom says. “Sounds like it. And she was certainly familiar with Shakespeare through her father.”

We're almost to Adam's house, so he just paraphrases the rest. “It says that plays and speeches and stuff aren't important. Only words matter. And then it's like she's looking for a certain word but can't find it.” He reads:

I rue the day I learned to seek, knowing

I could never catch a word so well hid.

Mom pulls up in front of Adam and Shelby's house. They say thanks as they climb out of the car.

“We'll do the thing tomorrow,” I call after them, and at least Adam knows what I mean.

Mom and I make dinner together and read a little on the couch before bed. I nudge her toes with mine. She looks up, in that daze of being lost in a book.

“We're sifting words.” I echo Constance.

Delight breaks her daze. “Together.”

Finally, Adam and I again lie on our stomachs with the book open in front of us, and Adam's graph paper tucked under his hand. I reread the first two lines:

Ah, treble words of absence spoken low;

For ears of fam'ly, friend, or willful foe.

And we figure out the next line pretty quickly:

Speak thrice to conjure nothing on the spot.

But the next one is really hard. We get parts of it, but we're missing key words.

Adam reads, “
Who
blanks
here will present be
blank.”

I squint at the line. “Banters? Barters?”

“I think that's an
h.
Oh, and that's a
k.
See?”

He's right.

“So . . .” I try again. “Hankers?”

“Harkens!” Adam declares.

“Yes!”

“
Who harkens here will present be
. . . uh, forged?” Adam puzzles.

“The first two lines rhyme,” I point out. “So, if these ones do too, then the word has to rhyme with
spot.
”

“
Forgot!
” we say together in triumph.

“
Who harkens here will present be forgot,
” Adam reads. “What do you think he means by harkens?”

“He Shakespeare?” I ask. “We don't know if—”

Adam lights up. “I know! It's like ‘Hark, who goes there?'”