Splendors and Glooms Chapter 47 Summary

The Witch's Tears

  • From the shore, Lizzie Rose watches in terror as she waits for Parsefall to pull Clara back in. When he does, the Fettles (two of Cassandra's servants) come out and carry the cold children inside.
  • Then, they hear a loud, horrible sound and look around to see that the tower has completely collapsed. The Fettles decide it must have been an earthquake that did it. Yeah, an earthquake.
  • The children come into the kitchen where they are warmed up with basins of water and then dressed in warm, dry clothing. The Fettles want to know where Clara came from, and she says that she is from London and that Grisini kidnapped her.
  • The children also reveal that Grisini fell into the lake and is now surely dead. The Fettles decide that they have to go out and look for the body, even though there's no hope of fishing him out alive.
  • As Clara sits there, she says that she's hungry, which feels pretty weird to her. After all, she was never hungry while she was a puppet.
  • Lizzie Rose asks her how she turned back into a girl again, and Clara says that it was the phoenix-stone's power that did it. Clara worries that Madama died from the tower's fall, but Parsefall tells her to just listen—the old woman is alive and well.
  • From inside the house, they can hear someone crying bitterly. It's Madama, who is upset that she no longer has the phoenix-stone in her possession. She's also crying because the Fettles took Ruby away, and she wants the dog to come back and cuddle with her.
  • She tells them that Grisini was more evil than she was but that she was a bad person, too—after all, she wanted the children to steal the stone from her so that she wouldn't die by fire.
  • Then, she starts crying about how she doesn't have magical powers anymore, which means that her servants will all leave her and she'll die alone.
  • Lizzie Rose comes to her bedside and starts taking care of her even though Cassandra has never been very nice to the children. It's just the right thing to do.