House of Masques by Fortune Kent Page B

eighty-four. Did you know that’s how old I was last May? On the twelfth. A body doesn’t much feel like gallivanting about when it’s my age.”
    â€œI really must go,” Kathleen said.
    â€œJust a few minutes? For old Grandma Ehrman?” Her voice was querulous. “Push them clothes aside and sit down. Always something to mend. And I must finish the quilt. Been too long on that quilt. I have so much to do.”
    Kathleen glanced to the door with the vain hope of rescue. Finding none, she resigned herself to spend a few minutes making the best of Grandma Ehrman. She moved the clothes to the floor so she could sit on the edge of the chair.
    â€œIn all my life I’ve never traveled more than ten miles from Cornwall,” Mrs. Ehrman said. “Can you imagine, no further than ten miles in eighty-four years?” She paused. “Except once.” The old woman leaned toward Kathleen, her voice quick and quavering. “Did they tell you? About my trip?”
    â€œNo, not a word.”
    The old woman leaned back. “They get tired of listening to me. ‘Old Grandma Ehrman at it again,’ they say. Think I’m simple because I’m old. Did you know I was…yes, I told you. Do I seem like someone who’s simple?” Kathleen shook her head. The room was lighter now, and she saw that the old woman had thin white hair and a face creased like an old letter which had been folded and refolded many times.
    â€œWhen the War began,” Mrs. Ehrman said in a monotonous, high-pitched voice, “my grandson Stephen, my only grandson, who was just nineteen, joined the Union Army. Wanted to fight, he did. Left his father, Ephraim, and his father’s wife Becky, and me to run the farm. Near the forest we lived, not two miles from here. Ephraim worked harder than ever, he was used to work, had worked hard all his life, but he was older and it told on him, yet for a time we got along all right.”
    The old woman pulled a shawl fringed with tassels from her shoulders, held it in her lap, fingers kneading the material as she talked. “Then in ’64, in March, the fourth year of the War, Ephraim went hunting rabbits in the Black Rock Forest. He’d been going into the Forest since he was a boy. Only this day he left at six in the morning and he didn’t come back. We waited, Becky and me, all day, expecting him any minute, and dark came and then, as the time went by, the worry came creeping in on us like the night mist from the bogs.”
    â€œDid he come back? What happened?” Kathleen held the edges of her chair with her hands.
    â€œWe never knew. The men from the village searched and found nothing. Some folks said he’d just left like Floyd Potter did the year before, but I never credited the idea. Weeks passed, then months, then years. Last October two boys hiked into the Forest and found a skeleton near one of the ponds. Sitting against a huge black rock with the rusted rifle across him. Ephraim it was.”
    â€œHow horrible,” Kathleen said. She grimaced with distaste. “And you were left alone with your daughter-in-law.”
    â€œBecky could do a lot and me some. Yet we couldn’t manage, not by half. What with the War we couldn’t get help. So I wrote the letter, packed my bag and took the train, the first time in my life I’d set foot in one. And the last. Faster than the wind, it was. I’d never been more than ten miles from Cornwall before.”
    â€œYou took the train? Where to?”
    â€œOh, didn’t I say?” The old woman looked slyly at Kathleen. “To Washington to see the President. Like I said, I wrote him to have Stephen let go from the Army so he could work the farm. Such a big city, Washington. I left my bag in a rented room and walked to the White House. And what do you think?”
    Kathleen shook her head.
    â€œMy letter hadn’t come. They showed me to a room where a short