The Secret Book of Flora Lea

by Patti Callahan Henry

This enchanting river was—like the apple in the Bible—forbidden.

The way here was through a shimmering door, and Hazel was too busy to see it. The

Hazel noticed every detail of her final workday at the shop with a bit of melancholy, and a note of the dramatic.

After the war, no one in England had known what might be next.

As a teen, Poppy had wandered into the store so often, leafing through old copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for hours, that Edwin had finally told her she needed to start working there or get out. It wasn’t until later that Hazel discovered Poppy had not been loitering; she’d nowhere else to go. She’d been a war orphan who’d aged out of the London Orphan School near Hampshire, sleeping in parks or on the couches of old pals who might let her stay for a while. She’d been looking for a job, but no one was willing to give her a chance.

Edwin gave her a new life. He taught her what he’d taught all of them: Cultivate a love of fine and rare books in a customer and you didn’t just have a sale that day but also a devoted customer for decades.

Loss and gain. As nearly every myth told: birth, death, rebirth. One thing dying, another born. An old job. A new one.

it was about the journey of the actual book. Tim valued each one not for its number in the printing order but for the narrative of who had held, loved, and even handed down the book itself.

Then the Russell book with a prime example of how, during the paper shortage after WWII, old maps were used as dust jackets.

told you so.” Hazel quoted Auden with a smile. “That’s one of my favorites,” he said. “And yet her favorite is ‘Let the more loving one be me.’ ”

her legs long and the rest of her body trying to catch up in bits and spurts,

A surge of love and regret washed over her. How she loved them, but also how she’d resisted having a child of her own, a family of her own. But now a new life was unfurling. She and Barnaby were finally talking of marriage.

There was so much good ahead. After so much loss.

Whisperwood belonged to her and her lost sister, Flora. It was a private realm that had sprung to life between them, a make-believe world to endure through the worst of the war, a place to find comfort where little existed. And it had disappeared with Flora into the river.

Every morning Hazel awoke safe and sound, yet she wondered, would this be the day?

It was called Operation Pied Piper, a nursery rhyme name for a horror of an idea.

Hazel had been envious of her little sister, but Hazel was too old by far to be held that way by her father. Instead of weeping like her mum, Hazel had frozen her words stuck below a scrim of ice as cold and silver as the edges of Kensington Gardens’ Round Pond in dead winter.

He’d looked to Mum with a gaze so fiercely desperate that Hazel couldn’t help but hope that someday a man would look at her the same.

He’d walked out the door with every promise to return, but that was the last time they’d seen him.

So, Hazel thought, that’s how we do this. We pretend. We pretend all is well and we go about our dinners and days until he returns.

“Not so long ago and not so far away, there was once, and still is, an invisible place that is right here beside us.”

Flora laughed in delight. Stories seemed to be Flora’s pacifier, the way that Hazel could get her little sister to sit still, to stop thrumming with the live-wire energy that kept her restless.

This was the answer to Flora’s distress and sleepless nights, her startling at every noise and siren—stories. This...

Naming was not to be taken lightly. Flora and Hazel and their mum, Camellia—they’d all been named after plants. Lea and Mersey, their middle names, born of their parents’ childhood rivers. “Don’t forget,” Papa had told his daughters, “you are of earth and water. Both of you. Also of love. Our love.”

As she lifted wings over a vibrant land of her own making, Hazel realized that she’d found a never-ending tale that could be told again and again. So far gone in their imaginary land, the sisters were startled by their mum’s call.

Was there another mum in all the world more beautiful than theirs? Hazel doubted it very much.

She would never look away. To look away was to deny those days, even deny the loss of Flora.

She dropped in two sugars, recalling when rationing left them without such luxury.

Massachusetts. This is her debut novel. It was as if they wanted to keep her a secret; it was as if… was it possible… that they were hiding her true identity? They could bloody well try, but this Peggy woman was telling Hazel’s story, and Hazel was going to find her.

“Everyone is born with this knowing,” said Audrey. “But the adults, with their wounds and their lists and the trivial things that seem to matter to them but really do not matter at all, forget about this knowing. They let pain and loss and heartache block the doorways.”

By changing the middle of these stories, the sisters made better endings. Endings they liked. The three little pigs might roast the wolf for dinner or Goldilocks might adopt the three bears.

This American author knew their secret story; was it possible Flora had told it, was even the author? Sure, the author had changed some parts, but then again, how much could a six-year-old remember?

Hazel had thought about writing the tale in one of her many notebooks, but she’d tossed her childhood writings into the river after Flora disappeared.

Why would she visit the land that made Flora disappear? Or the woods that put her in danger, the river that possibly drowned her sister? Yet somehow their river of dreams and stories had flowed to America.

But she couldn’t turn away from her own tingle of knowing.

Taking the book and picture collection was thoughtless at best, a crime at worst. But Flora was the reason Hazel still listened to every whisper and goose-flesh moment, to the trill of something amiss or a magpie’s call, the way a friend stirred their tea clockwise or anticlockwise.

Within her an unrelenting alertness kept her noticing the books that happened to fall into her hands or song lyrics that struck her just so, to the hoot of an owl during daylight that might mean something rare. Her heart always scanning, even when she was consciously unaware, for something that might point the way to Flora.

feet, changing in ways she saw in quick flashes: music with a new beat, transistor radios, the crowds in Soho, the hemlines rising and the hair falling, the aristocrats mixing with the commoners on the street and in the pubs.

Londoners had finally come to believe there would be no more war. The brief respite between the first and second wars had trained them to wait for the next, but now, fifteen years later, they were relaxing, the divots and hollows of war being filled in with concrete and hope.

It was one of the myriad notebooks that found their way into her home from almost every stationery shop and bookstore in London: blue and red, paisley and cream, palm-sized and large. They filled her cabinets, drawers, and countertops.

What she was meant to write in the notebooks she was never entirely sure, but there they were, blank and waiting for her when she was ready to use them.

She wanted to be one of them, be one of the patrons who called themselves writers or authors. She wanted to be one of the women who wrote books that found their way to the shelves of libraries and bookshops. She wanted to be… an author. But it was a ridiculous dream,

The empty notebooks piled around her flat, the lists she made of ideas and to-do lists were the only remnants of her urge to put words to paper.

She wouldn’t buy anything. She never did. She didn’t have the money. But she did have enough love for books and manuscripts to want to see it all in person,

She absolutely would not swoon over another man who would become shut up in another room down a long hallway of doors she always ended up closing—sometimes slamming.

“Adeline Virginia Woolf once lived in the building next to me during the war, yet her building was destroyed and mine wasn’t. She once sat in that flat and wrote books. She tried to save her own life with words and she never was quite able to do so, eventually walking into a river and…”

“Well, I’d tell Flora stories to keep her happy, to distract her.” “Fairy stories? Like of the wee folk?” “Not exactly. It was more, like, an endless story, an imaginary land for the two of us. Whisperwood and the River of Stars was only ours.”

Barnaby was hurt that she’d never told him about any of this. Hazel was well attuned to disappointment in others. She picked up on any and all ways she didn’t please someone.

How could she explain to Barnaby how it had all felt; how it felt even now to know she’d lost her sister. The dread. The panic. The jealousy of other people having small children at their side. How she’d awaken with a pounding heart knowing she lost something but for a sacred few moments not remembering what it was. The despair eased through the years, but not much. As she grew older, nothing quelled the memories: not liquor, not men, not stories or books or the distractions of friends and parties.

At twenty-five years old, she’d realized that all she could do with the ache and the shame was to live with it, allow it to walk next to her like a shadow, a ghost, a living memory. Some days, she’d turn to that loss and acknowledge it, and sometimes, for blessed hours, she would forget, but then the shadow would fall long and fast onto her soul and she’d remember this: She lost her sister.