The Juliet Spell by Douglas Rees Read Free Book Online

enchantment. I understand none of it.”
    “Maybe you’d like to take a walk,” I said. “Get a little more oriented.”
    “Oriented,” Edmund said slowly.
    “Sorry. Is that another word you don’t know?”
    “Doctor Dee do have some old maps,” Edmund said. “He turns them to the east, toward Jerusalem. He calls that ori.enting.”
    “Well Malpaso Row is east of us. So I guess it’s the same thing,” I said.
    “Aye,” Edmund said after a moment of silence. “Come then, Miranda Hoberman, and orient me.”
    I locked the house and we headed down the street. Mal.paso Row was on the other side of the freeway from our neighborhood. Only a few blocks away, but totally different from our quiet, boring avenue. It was the newest shopping center in town, very high-concept. It had buildings designed to look like a neighborhood in Italy, with pricey apartments above the stores, fountains and things like that.
    We walked slowly, Edmund taking in every detail of the houses and yards we passed. Then we turned a few corners and were in the middle of a whole new world.
    My first problem was getting Edmund to cross the free.way overpass. It wasn’t the height that bothered him. It was the sight of all the cars below us, hood to trunk with their lights on, and even more the roar that came up from the eight lanes of traffic under our feet.
    “This howling, this howling, how d’ye stand it?” he shouted to me, clapping his hands over his ears.
    “Edmund, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s just rush hour. Every one of those cars has somebody in it who’s just trying to get home. It’s not dangerous. It’s normal.”
    “’Tis hellish.”
    “Well, okay. We don’t have to do this now,” I said. “We can go back to the house if you want to.”
    I could tell that was exactly what Edmund wanted to do. But he wouldn’t let himself. “I must bear it,” he said. “Lead on.”
    So we crossed the overpass. Then I had to explain to him about stoplights and crosswalks and taking turns. This was after he stepped out in front of a line of cars turning into the main drag of Malpaso Row from a left-turn lane and he nearly got creamed.
    A driver shouted, “Watch it, you stupid bastard!”
    And Edmund shouted back, “Ye’re the whoreson heir of a mongrel bitch, an eater of broken meats and the very flower of the pox!”
    “No, Edmund!” I yelled at him. “No, no, no, no, no! Never when the light is red. Only when the light is green. And stay between the nice straight white lines. That’s how it works.”
    “Must I wait the pleasure of some lantern to do as I wish about so small a thing as cross?” he said. “’Tis like a prison
    to walk your streets.”
    “You’ll live a lot longer if you do,” I said, calming down.
    “What of the yellow light?” he said.
    “That means, ‘caution’.”
    “Aha. So a man has some choice at least.”
    “Come on,” I said. “You’ve survived your first stoplight. Let’s see what other trouble you can get into.”
     
    Chapter Five
    We cruised slowly up and down past the clothing stores and the restaurants and the bars. Edmund paused at one that had a sign hanging out that said:
    Falstaff’s A Traditional English Pub
    “Can we not go in here, at least?” he begged.
    “Edmund, we’re underage. They’d throw us out so fast you’d meet yourself coming in. They’d lose their license if they let us stay.”
    “Monstrous. Unnatural. Wrong.”
    “Come on,” I said. “Let me show you something you’ll like.”
    Down at the end of the street was a Corners Books. I was pretty sure Edmund would be interested in it. And it turned out he was.
    “Books,” he said, like he might have said “Jewels.”
    It was a big two-story place with a coffee bar in the mid.dle of the ground floor. We walked around every section, taking it just as slow as Edmund wanted.
    “So many, so many,” he kept repeating.
    He took some of them off the shelves, touching them as if he thought they might