The Crocodile Bird Read Online Free PDF Page B

them, as there often was, she would say, “Like Shrove, that’s what a palace is, a house like Shrove.” But all Liza had seen of the real Shrove until she was nearly five and the leaves had turned brown and blown off the trees, were a dreamy grayness, a sheet of glittering glass, a gleam of sun-touched slate.
    Later on she saw it in its entirety, the stone baluster that crowned it, broken by a crest-filled pediment, the many windows, the soaring steps, and the statues that stood in its alcoves. She was aware even then of the way it seemed to bask, to sit and smile as if pleased with itself, to recline smiling in the sun.
    Nearly every day Mother went up to the house that was like a palace in a fairy tale, sometimes for several hours, sometimes for no more than ten minutes, and when she went she locked Liza up in her bedroom.
    The gatehouse was the lodge of Shrove House. Later on, when Liza was older, Mother told her it was built in the Gothic style and not nearly so old as the house itself. It was supposed to look as if it dated from the Middle Ages and had a turret with crenellations around its top and a tall peaked gable. Out of the side of the gable came the arch, which went over the top of a pair of gates and came down on the other side to join up with the little house that looked like a miniature castle with its slit windows and studded door.
    The gates were of iron, were always kept open, and had SHROVE HOUSE written on them in curly letters. The gatehouse and the arch and the little castle were made of small red bricks, the dark russet color of rosehips. Liza and Mother had two bedrooms upstairs, a living room and a kitchen downstairs, and an outside lavatory. That was all. Liza’s was the bedroom in the turret with a view over their garden and the wood and Shrove park and everything beyond. She disliked being locked in her bedroom, but she wasn’t frightened, and as far as she could remember she didn’t protest.
    Mother gave her things to do. She had started teaching Liza to read, so she gave her rag books with big letters printed on the cloth pages. She also gave her paper and two pencils and a book to rest on. Liza had a baby bottle with orange juice in it because if she had had a glass or a cup she would have spilled the juice on the floor. Sometimes she had two biscuits, just two, or an apple.
    Liza didn’t know then what Mother did in Shrove House, but later on she found out because Mother began taking her too and she was no longer locked in her bedroom—or only when Mother went shopping. But that was more than six months later, after it had all happened and the winter had come, when snow covered the hillsides and the only trees to keep their leaves were the huge blue cedars and the tall black firs.
    Before that, in the summertime, the dogs came. Except in pictures Liza had never seen a dog or a cat or a horse or any animals but wild ones. She thought these two came the day after she and Mother had walked in the fields and seen the first train, but it may have been some other day, a week or even a month later. It wasn’t easy to remember time spans from so far back.
    The dogs belonged to Mr. Tobias. It wasn’t he who brought them but another man. Liza had never seen Mr. Tobias but only heard about him, and she wasn’t to see him for a long, long time. The man who brought the dogs came in a kind of small truck with a barrier like a white wire fence across the back inside to keep the dogs off the front seats. His name was Matt. He was a short, squarish man with big shoulders who looked very strong and his hair grew up from his broad red forehead like the bristles on a brush.
    “They are Doberman pinschers,” Mother said. She always explained everything slowly and carefully. “In Germany, which is another country a long way away, they used to be trained as police dogs. But these are pets.” She said to Matt, who was staring at her in a strange way, “What are their names?”
    “This one’s Heidi