Chapter 9
CHAPTER
THE GATES TO Kensington Gardens stood open. It’s just a shortcut to Marigold House, I told myself. Just for today. Once I entered, the air shifted. It grew heavier here.
The gravel path crackled faintly beneath my feet.
Wet leaves clung to the bottom of my boots.
I walked briskly, keeping my gaze low. When I turned left, I stopped.
Confused, feeling spun around. The Round Pond stretched before me, its surface pewter-colored and perfectly still.
But this wasn’t where it should be. That wasn’t the path I’d taken, but still, here I was.
That’s the thing about fairy stories. Sometimes a path changed while you were on it.
A boat slid close to edge. Its wooden hull, pale and worn. Its mast snapped clean through, as if something had seized it midplay
A streak of red ran across its side. Paint, I insisted. A spill. An accident.
Doubt tugged inside of me, and then I tasted it. Salt water. Bitter and briny. No. Not this. Not now. Not another slip into my past. I needed to get to my children.
Peter’s hands tight around my waist. Him shouting at me. Telling me what I had done wrong, yet again. That I had run off to the pirate ship with Roger, but that was not the truth. Roger saved me from drowning.
And Peter?
He didn’t mention any of what he had done, that he was the one who abandoned me at sea, when I asked again if we could go home. He said if I were so determined to do things on my own then I should learn to fly, and then all I remembered was water.
Tears rolled down my face, fat and hot. I tried to break free from his hold, but he was just so strong.
“You’re not to leave the house. Ever again. I worry …”
“Peter … please, you’re hurting me …”
“Promise me you’ll never leave me again. Promise me!”
“Peter, please …”
“You belong here. You belong to me. Say it.”
He squeezed tighter. It felt like my ribs were about to crack.
“I promise. Anything. Please. Stop. Let me go!”
And then, he did.
An embrace. A smile.
“Come, read us a story,” he said.
Later, he’d say he was just playing. He said I was confused. That of course he didn’t mean to scare me or hurt me, he was just teaching me to fly and I must have slipped. I must have fallen. That I was the bad one for going off with Roger. Bad form, he said. When I should have just waited for him …
That is what he told all of the boys. All of them agreed with him about what my story should be.
He was rewriting me.
But Roger wasn’t.
The present snapped back around me. Round Pond. I was at Round Pond, on my way to Marigold House.
The boat drifted across the water.
A light drizzle began to fall. Beads of rain clinging to the boat’s mast.
“Pretty morning, isn’t it?”
Behind me, a man stood at the edge of the trees. Tall and too thin. Dressed in white. His cart behind him, also white.
His coat was soaked through, as if he’d walked straight out of the water. In one hand, he held a single red balloon, its surface gleaming like a bead of blood.
“You’re the same man,” I said. “Who was here that day.”
He smiled. Wide. Off. “Take it,” he said. Soft. Coaxing.
Fog rolled through, curling around us like fingers.
He tilted his head. “Be careful in the gardens. Many boys have gone missing in these gardens.”
That tilt. So achingly familiar. A gesture that lived on the edge of my nightmares.
“No one ever leaves,” he murmured to himself. “No one ever gets away from him.”
Cold cinched at my throat.
The red balloon swayed, slow, its surface expanding and contracting.
“Would you like to come away with me?”
Words that hit like a blow.
He’s just a man. He’s just a vendor. But my body knew. It was early morning. Why would anyone be set up in a park right now … selling balloons.
“No …”
A wide-mouthed laugh. Wild and loud. Something from an animal. I stumbled back and screamed.
In the pond, a boy floated face down. Ribbons of red outlining his frame.
“He didn’t last too long,” Peter’s voice said behind me. “Not much joy in him to take. War does that. Strips them of glad things and happy things. That’s all right though. I can dig deep and take what I can. It just means I’ll need to move quickly. And then they’ll return here faster.”
The man with the balloons was gone. Only dense fog remained where he stood.
Shadows flickered above me. A balloon drifted upward, twisting lazily in the air, and then, pop!
My boots skid on gravel.
A crow settled on a branch above me. It cocked its head once. Twice. Then it opened its beak. A sharp warbling emerged, like a child’s laugh.
I remembered those black points, me on the branch, and the shadow I spotted in the reflection of its eyes.
“You’ve been following me a long time,” I said.
I ran.
If Peter was here this morning, he wasn’t here just for me.
He was here for them.
Rosie stood at the kitchen table stirring sugar and flour in a wide bowl.
The wooden spoon clicked against the rim. A steady, metronomic rhythm. Her sleeves were rolled; her forearms dusted with flour. Gray strands clung damply to her temple where the kitchen heat had caught her.
She didn’t look up when she spoke.
“Eleanor’s in her office.” She lowered her voice. “Consulting with a family. Father’s enlisted. Wife can’t keep up with all the little ones.”
“We’ll take care of them here,” I said.
“You all right ?”
“Didn’t sleep well last night.”
“I don’t know how any of us are supposed to get any sleep. Belgium. France. Bombed. Papers keep saying we should prepare. Prepare for what? How does anyone prepare for any of this?”
The spoon stopped mid-stir. “It’s a strange thing,” she murmured. “The war takes the men … and children follow.”
Her words hung in the air.
“There’s always room for one more,” I said.
She resumed stirring, the rhythm slow and deliberate.
Outside, the fog scraped gently against the glass.
Voices drifted faintly from down the hall, soft, overlapping murmurs, punctuated by laughter.
“The children should be done with breakfast soon.”
I nodded and poured myself a cup of tea, my hands trembling. The cup rattled against its saucer.
Rosie looked at me from above her work. “Just don’t look up at the sky,” she said.
I knew she imagined my fears were about the war. And they were, but not only that. I thought of the children. I wondered if Agnes had checked on her bird skull, and if Willie continued his drawing, if Charles slept well.
It was all there. I could see it, but I’d ignored it. Peter slowly creeping into our world.
From somewhere in the house a baby cried. The long, soft wail.
“How’s she getting on?”
“Doctor said she’s healthy. Eleanor gave her a name, Jane.”
Jane.
“That’s beautiful.”
A thump shook the house. Followed by a delighted squeal.
Rosie frowned. “Willie!” she called, hurrying toward the hall. “Stop that or you’ll break your neck!”
“But I can fly!”
The cup slipped in my grip. Scalding tea splashed across my wrist, but I didn’t feel it.
“Wendy …” Rosie pressed a tea towel to my hand.
“I’m fine … go check on Willie.”
My lungs tightened. My vision blurred.
From the hallway came the swell of children’s voices, rhythmic and rising. Almost chant-like.
I can fly. I can fly. I can fly.
My heart kicked hard against my ribs. Their laughter mixed with the shriek of the kettle.
Rosie’s footsteps hurried down the corridor. “Enough of that now! Off with you lot! Go wash up and get ready for your lessons with Miss Wendy.”
The chant cut off. Silence fell.
The hallway to my classroom was lined with children’s drawings, crooked houses, stick figures, skies painted in impossible greens. Skies only children could still believe in.
Behind me, I heard it again.
“I can fly!” Willie shouted.
For a blink, the sound didn’t belong to him. It was older. Hungrier. Wilder. Chaos in an impossible forest that morphed to jungle then beach and sea on a whim.
Peter’s voice. Slipping into a child. He did that at the hospital with Edward.
I spotted him on the stairs. “Willie,” I called. “Come down from there, please.”
He only grinned, too bright, too sure. He bent his knees deep, as though the ground beneath him were moving and he needed to keep steady.
“Willie,” I said. “You heard Rosie. It’s not safe. If you’ve already washed up after breakfast, then go straight to the classroom.”
He just stared at me and then he jumped.
A thud followed and rattled the bones of the house. For one terrible instant, I thought he had broken something. Shattered a knee. Or even dislocated an ankle.
My heart seemed to stop beating, until he laughed.
“I’m fine, Miss Wendy!”
More children appeared. Some clapped. Others raced down the hall, toward the classroom.
All of them continued with that terrible chant.
I can fly.
I can fly.
I can fly.
Those words coiled through my head, and I remembered. The sound of wings. The window blowing open, and the nighttime breeze rolling into the darkened nursery lit only by the moonlight.
At my bedside, something black. Shifting. Twirling. Expanding. It was like the whole of midnight given shape, dotted with millions of shiny points. Stars. Planets. Within its canvas, the sparkling lights of shooting stars.
I knew what it was. A part of him, but not.
“That’s my shadow,” Peter said, appearing at the foot of my bed. His eyes caught in the moonlight.
“Why isn’t it attached to you?” I sat up.
He didn’t answer. And I never asked him again.
“Can you help me sew it on?”
I climbed out of bed and fetched my sewing kit. He held the shadow still against the dresser. When I took it from him, the cold shocked through my fingers, up my arm, and into my skull.
Wendy …
I paused. I heard him inside my head.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, even though I was sure of what I’d heard, his voice in my mind.
Stitch by stitch, I attached his shadow to him.
When I was done, he told me thank you. His voice low, soft, a secret. “You trust me?”
I nodded.