Anne and Diana’s Tory Road Platter Hunt

Anne and Diana’s Tory Road Platter Hunt begins as a search for a replacement willow-ware platter and becomes an unexpectedly eventful journey: Anne finds the exact dish, gets stuck in the roof of an old duckhouse, and leaves with both the platter and the story of Miss Sarah Copp’s impending marriage. The expedition turns Anne’s effort to repair an earlier social mishap into a comic test of resolve, friendship, and good fortune, with a thunderstorm and an unwelcome household structure helping the search reach its destination.

The Search Begins

Diana signals Anne from her window with five flashes of light, their old childhood code for an urgent message. She has heard from Mary Sentner that the Copp sisters on Tory Road may own a willow-ware platter like the one used at the supper. Another possible source is Wesley Keyson at Spencervale, but Diana cannot be sure his platter is the same kind. The Copp sisters’ reputation for selling anything they can part with makes their home the promising first stop.

Anne plans to go to Spencervale the next day, with Diana accompanying her. She is due to visit Aunt Josephine in town the day after that and dreads facing her without a replacement for the platter. The urgency has a comic precedent: the girls remember Anne’s earlier confession about jumping on the spare-room bed, another episode she expects Aunt Josephine to hear about. Their laughter makes the errand feel at once practical and part of an accumulating history of Anne’s scrapes.

The journey takes them ten miles to Spencervale on a hot, windless afternoon. After six weeks without rain, dust lies thick on the road. Anne notices the parched fields and trees, and worries about her own garden, while recognizing that the farmers’ crops are suffering more seriously. J. A. Harrison has told her that his scorched pastures leave his cows with little to eat and make him feel guilty when he sees them. The dry landscape supplies a stark counterpoint to the girls’ particular concern: they are pursuing a household object through a countryside visibly waiting for rain.

The Pantry Window and the Accident

At the Copp property, Anne is unsure whether to wait for the sisters or risk wasting time on a platter that may not be right. Diana identifies a small square window as the pantry window, reasoning that the house resembles her Uncle Charles’s house at Newbridge. Since the shade is open, she suggests climbing onto the roof of a nearby small building to look inside. Anne considers whether this would be improper and decides that their purpose is not idle curiosity.

The makeshift lookout is an old duckhouse with a peaked, lath-built roof. The Copp sisters have stopped keeping ducks because they were untidy; in later years the little building has served as a place to confine setting hens. Although whitewashed, it is shaky. Anne climbs from a keg placed on a box and is already doubtful that the roof will bear her weight. Leaning on the window sill, she sees a willow-ware platter exactly like the one she wants. In her excitement she stops leaning, gives a small hop, and crashes through the roof up to her armpits.

Diana tries to pull her free, but Anne’s position makes that impossible, and splinters are sticking into her. A keg gives Anne somewhere secure to brace her feet, but does not release her. She suggests an axe as a way to cut her out; Diana searches and cannot find one. Anne then resists Diana’s plan to fetch help, fearing the story will spread and make her ashamed to show her face. She would rather wait for the Copp sisters, who can find the axe and, she hopes, understand why she looked into their pantry. She is physically tolerable as long as she remains still, but dismayed by the prospect of an adventure that seems ridiculous rather than romantic.

Thunder, Rescue, and the Deal

The wait is complicated by the weather. Diana notices thunder, makes a circuit around the house, and returns with news of a very black cloud rising quickly in the northwest. Anne accepts that a heavy thunder-shower is coming and calmly directs Diana to take the horse and buggy into an open shed. Her parasol is in the buggy, and she gives Diana her hat as well. The storm is a practical concern, but Anne treats it as less alarming than her predicament in the roof.

Miss Sarah Copp returns and finds an astonishing scene in her yard. After Diana explains, she responds sympathetically, unlocks the back door, and brings out an axe. A few skillful blows free Anne, who ducks down through the broken structure and emerges stiff and tired. Anne immediately clarifies that she had looked through the pantry window only to identify the platter, not to inspect anything else. Sarah assures her that no harm has been done. In fact, she is glad the duckhouse is smashed: she has wanted it removed, while Martha has insisted it might someday be useful, leaving Sarah to whitewash it every spring. Martha is away in town, and Sarah explains that the platter belongs to her, so she can sell it without waiting for her sister’s permission.

The girls are invited inside for tea. Sarah can offer bread and butter and cucumbers, since Martha has locked away the cake, cheese, and preserves before leaving, wary of Sarah being too generous to visitors. After the meal, Sarah says the old platter is worth twenty-five dollars. Diana quietly signals that Anne should hold to her original offer of twenty, but Anne agrees to the higher price rather than risk losing the dish. Sarah accepts, though her reaction suggests she wonders whether she could have asked for thirty. The exchange resolves the search while showing Anne’s priority: she values securing the exact platter more than bargaining for the lowest price.

A Second Piece of News

The sale leads to a personal disclosure. Sarah explains that she is going to marry Luther Wallace, who had wanted to marry her twenty years earlier. She liked him then, but he was poor, and her father sent him away. Sarah recalls having been timid and frightened of her father; now she is preparing to marry Luther, and the money from the platter matters to her. The disclosure gives the Copp house a history beyond the sisters’ quarrel over the duckhouse and the locked-up food: the platter is being sold by a woman entering a long-delayed new chapter of her own.

On the ride home, Diana drives while Anne holds the coveted platter carefully on her lap. The rain has freshened Tory Road and laid its dust, and the girls’ laughter replaces the strain of the afternoon. Anne plans to tell Aunt Josephine the strange history of the search when she visits town, satisfied that she has the platter and that the rain has come. Diana cautions that they are not home yet and anything might still happen. Her last observation—that Anne is always having adventures—leaves the episode open to the familiar possibility of another mishap, even as this particular hunt ends with the platter safely in hand.