Chapter 15 #2
Without a word the clerk disappeared into a room behind the counter. We stood there in silence, the three of us, surrounded by smoke and murmured conversations and the weight of all those children who’d gone missing in Kensington Gardens.
When he returned, he was carrying a ledger so old the binding was actively unraveling. He held it carefully, both hands supporting the spine, as if it might crumble to dust at any moment.
“These are the oldest we keep readily accessible,” he said. “Anything before this would be in the archives. Weeks to retrieve, at minimum.”
ABDUCTIONS in the memories we’d spent twelve years trying to bury. This faded entry, this unnamed infant stolen from his pram years ago, this was the beginning. This was the moment Peter was born.
Or rather, the Peter we knew. Had he lived here, and been allowed to grow up, who knows what he would have become, but what took hold of him in Kensington Gardens that day made him something different.
Something not dead or alive. Something not human or bird.
It made him something that could cross between this world and the next. Betwixt-and-between.
The clerk looked at us again. Really looked. And I saw the question forming in his eyes before he asked it.
“Why the interest now? After all this time?”
“Research,” John said. His voice betrayed nothing. But his hand, resting on the counter, had curled into a fist. “For a case I’m building. It’s quite private. Historical precedents.”
The clerk didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t press. “Is there anything else you need?”
John’s eyes were still fixed on the page. On that word: Unnamed.
“Is there any way to identify the name?” he pointed. “Every other entry has a name. The family name, at least, if not the child’s.”
The clerk shook his head. “Doesn’t look like we were given one.” He reached to close the binder, and I had to stop myself from grabbing his wrist, from screaming at him not to take it away, not to close the door on the only clue we had.
James’s voice echoed in my head: To end it, you need to call it by its name. The name it was given when it was born.
We needed his real name. Without it, we couldn’t end this. Without it, the children would never be safe.
“Do you need anything else?”
“Yes.” John hadn’t moved. Hadn’t blinked. “Is there a record of the parents? An address? Somewhere we might find more information?”
The clerk turned the binder to face himself. Flipped through the pages surrounding the entry, searching for supplementary notes, cross-references, anything.
Then he stopped.
His finger rested on a line of text I couldn’t read from where I stood.
Without a word, he stood and disappeared through the door behind the counter. We heard his footsteps receding, heard the creak of what might have been a filing cabinet, heard the shuffle of papers being moved.
We waited.
The smoke seemed thicker now. The murmur of voices more distant. The whole world had narrowed to this counter, this moment, this terrible suspended breath between one truth and the next.
When the clerk emerged, he was empty-handed. No binder. No file. No paper.
My heart seized.
He took his seat slowly. Crossed his hands on the desk. Leaned forward, and when he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper.
“The father’s dead.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. I felt Michael sway beside me.
“Died in 1891,” the clerk continued. “Two years after the boy was taken. The file says heart failure, but …” He shrugged. A small, sad gesture. “Men don’t usually die of heart failure at thirty-two. Grief, more likely. The kind that eats you from the inside.”
John’s voice was carefully controlled: “And the mother?”
The clerk’s eyes met mine. Held them. “She’s in Bethlem.”
The word dropped into the silence like a stone into still water.
Bethlem. Bedlam. The Bethlem Royal Hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill.
Of course she was.
“Thank you,” John said to the clerk. “You’ve been most helpful.” He gathered up his identification. Straightened his coat, smooth and professional and utterly in control.
But as we turned to leave, the clerk spoke once more.
“The Darling children,” he said softly. “I always wondered, you know. What really happened to you. Where you really went.”
I looked back at him. At this old man who had spent his life filing away tragedies, cataloguing the lost and the stolen and the never found.
Somewhere magical at first, and then terrible, I wished I could tell him, but all I could offer was a weak smile.
He nodded. As if that was exactly what he had expected. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he said. “Whatever it is. I hope you find it.”
We walked out into the gray London morning, and behind us, the doors of Scotland Yard swung shut.
Bethlem.
The mother was in Bethlem.
And she had been waiting for years for someone to believe her.
The British Museum smelled of dust and limestone. Old scents that settled into my skin and dragged me back to when Miss Eleanor brought us here. I remember Rosie and us being scolded for wanting to reach out and touch the statues.
Michael and I moved toward the reading room.
“I can’t believe he works here,” I said, my head craning to look at the dome overhead.
“For now,” Michael said. “He and I leave for Belgium together, but I spotted him in the enlistment office, and we just carried on just like when we were in school.”
John had to get home to Judith and the baby, but Michael believed something could come from this visit before leaving for Bethlem in the morning.
Just outside the reading room Michael gave our names to the secretary. Before dialing she repeated Michael’s instruction.
“Folklore and Antiquities … are you quite sure?”
Michael raised a brow. “What, that doesn’t sound like something a fine gentleman such as me would fancy?”
His expression didn’t shift, but the silence answered for her.
I bit back a laugh. There was something thrilling in watching him bristle, just a little.
She lifted the phone handle. After a clipped conversation, she hung up and gave a polite, if perfunctory nod. “You may go in.”
Michael flashed her a grin that was half charm, half challenge, and we stepped inside.
“Wendy? Michael?”
I turned.
George Hale stood beside the index drawers. He was still like the boy we knew from our neighborhood, fresh face with spectacles perched crookedly. George was a few years older than me, but as an only child he spent a lot of time with us outside playing and chasing after Nana.
He put his arms around us. “I’m so glad to see you. What brings you here?”
I eyed Michael, hoping he’d answer, but he held up a hand. “Wendy, what brings us here?’
I wished I could scold him, but that’s what little brothers do, no matter their age. Put you on the spot.
“We’re researching the children who went missing,” I said. “At Kensington Gardens.”
Something shuttered behind his eyes.
“Come,” he said. “I have something for you both to see then. There are volumes you won’t find on the public shelves.”
He led us down a narrow corridor into a room marked STAFF ONLY. The air was colder here. We walked past older shelves with thick-spined tomes bound in cracked leather. Their titles obscured by dust.
George stopped before a case labeled FAERIE LORE: NORTHERN COUNTIES & ANTIQUATED BELIEFS. He slid out a volume whose pages were yellowed and set it on a table.
“Some scholars called it changeling logic,” George said, as he opened the book carefully.
“They believed fairies take what they desire. And that’s not just adults or even children.
They can take whatever it is that they want.
That they’re drawn to. Milk. Honey. Anything really. But they do prefer children.”
He hovered a finger above a page, searching. “Ah, right. Here. See. If a child answers a fairy’s call, that fairy then has the ability to take that child’s name. Then it replaces it with a new one. A binding one that connects the child to the fairy.”
That’s what Peter did with the boys on the island. None of them had their real names. They were all given new ones after they’d arrived.
But he didn’t do that with us. Or, with me. Still, he said it. He said we were bound.
“What do you know about an ash ring?”
“An ash ring? Hmm,” he said. Straightening up and then standing in front of the shelves again. “Ash ring.” He said those words like he hadn’t heard them together in years.
“Ah,” he said. Pulling down more volumes and setting them on the table.
The first one: THE SPIRAL PATHWAYS OF THE ASH RING
He opened it and inside there were diagrams wound in frantic spirals. Circles. So many different kinds of circles. Circles within circles. So many different patterns.
“Kensington Gardens,” George said, tapping a sketch of a circular grove. “Before the city spread, was considered a crossing point. Ash rings were doors. One spiral leading deeper, another leading out.”
“I am so confused. Ash rings. Doors. What are we talking about?”
“Fae,” George said, matter of fact. “And where they live.” He motioned to the diagrams.
“And the babies?” I asked.
George opened the second volume: THE CHILDREN WHO VANISHED IN THE NIGHT GARDENS.
“As you can imagine, missing children anywhere causes a lot of speculation about things, and these incidents at Kensington Gardens were no different.”
Pages turned until he landed on a map. “It’s been long speculated that in this section, right off of Round Pond, there’s a natural ash ring.”
“That’s where the boys went missing,” Michael said.
“Exactly. If you believe in this, it’s a portal where one can slip and fall and disappear into another world.”
He looked back to the page and corrected himself. “Well, maybe not slip and fall. Lured. Taken.”
“By what?” Michael asked.
“Fairies, Michael. Please keep on.”
We left the museum in silence. Outside, the fog had thickened. The lamps along Great Russell Street smeared their light across the wet pavement.
Black wings beat overhead. More of them settled onto lampposts and trees along my path than last night. Crows. There were just so many of them now. Watching me. Always watching.