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OPERATION Pied Piper: EVACUATION OF ALL CHILDREN FROM LONDON IMMEDIATELY.
A piper who arrived in a German city named Hamelin was given the job of luring the town’s hated rats to a river to be drowned. By doing this, the Pied Piper saved the town.
Then the mayor of Hamelin refused to pay the colorfully attired piper. In return, the man donned a bright red cap, played his seductive flute tune, and led the town’s children into the hills and valleys and rivers beyond, never to be seen again.
Only two children—blind and lame, who could not follow the piper—were spared. The rest of the town’s children disappeared forever.
The train was stuffy. Too many people filled it with their fearful breathing. Hazel squeezed Flora’s hand. Her eyes were so wide, taking in the other frightened children, the battered suitcases and ragged knapsacks, the pillowcases stuffed with clothes. “Hazel, will there be a river of stars?” her sister asked. “Absolutely,” Hazel stated, attempting the authority of a grown-up telling lies.
This may have been the loneliest Hazel had ever been. It was a hollowed-out feeling. If getting through this wartime was up to her, they were doomed.
“Where are we going?” His voice shook, and this scared Hazel as much as anything had, for Padraig was the class clown. With his wild dark hair and blue eyes that looked like tiny globes, he was the jokester who always made them laugh.
decaying memory box filled with thoughts of Flora, Oxford, the woman who took them in, and Harry—the boy she lived with during the evacuation; the boy who’d been with her when she lost Flora, the boy who’d become her best friend, and the one she’d never forgotten but also desperately tried to forget.
The townspeople crowding these sidewalks waved flags, cheering the children, as if they’d done something special, as if they were the ones to finally win the war.
Some farmers first picked out the boys in their gray serge shorts or tweed pants. Childless families wanted cute girls in frilly lace dresses who looked like Shirley Temple or who were young enough to treat like dollies. But who wanted a fourteen-year-old girl and her sister?
Hazel said, unable to make the leap into frivolous fantasy when reality loomed too ominously before them. Adults passed them in a line, sizing them up like tomatoes in the market.
She smiled so kindly that Hazel’s hopes rose. She looked like the sort of lady who would be friends with their mum, the sort who laughed and made things in the stove that smelled like home, the kind of person who might read them books and draw pictures on blank sheets of paper with colored pencils.
The woman paused a few heartbeats, but that time felt as long and winding as the train ride here—the place Hazel’s parents had fallen in love, the place where Hazel and Flora were to live until Britain stopped the cruel man named Hitler and they could safely go home.
This amazed Hazel: a boy who did not pull away from his mum’s affections in public, a boy who used words like enamored and Bohemian.
“My name is Bridgette Aberdeen.” “I’m Hazel Mersey Linden.” “I’m Flora Lea Linden.” Their introductions overlapped. “Lovely to meet you both.” Hazel saw Flora through Mrs. Aberdeen’s eyes: an adorable child with an air of naivete and kindness. Flora was the best of them, not just of the Linden family but of all the children who’d arrived by train that day.
And everywhere there were books: on wooden side tables and shelves, on the floor and stacked in corners.
The cottage whispered comfort.
Relief rolled over Hazel: safe in a house such as this with a bed such as this while the war raged. But could she be so happy while Mum was most likely sitting at the kitchen table with tears flowing down her face, wondering where her daughters were and if they were safe?
Flora walked to the door and placed her hand on it as if it were the magic door of Whisperwood. She wasn’t quite ready to push it open and enter, not yet.
Even at home they’d never had much, just a few dresses and all the sweaters and coats they needed to stay warm, but here they had even less, and Hazel wanted it to be neat—as if Mum had put things away in their proper place. She would need to be Mum for Flora, and sister and storyteller. Watch out for each other.
That’s how easy it was to confess. You just say it. You just drop it onto the table and tell the truth and what comes, comes, she thought.
Edwin looked up first and, yes, those were tears in his eyes. “My dear God, Hazel, what you have been through.” “I’m not alone, Edwin. What all of us endured in those days was a horror. You lost two sons. You lost half of your store to a bomb and rebuilt it. I’m no different, and I have no excuse for what I’ve done, but I want you to please understand.”
“Stories and books tend to find their rightful owners. I’ve always said so. And this time isn’t any different. Now go find out why this woman has your story. Find out if your sister survived.”
Hazel calculated the times as she headed home, carrying the parcel safe in her satchel. If she hadn’t confessed she wouldn’t have this phone number. The exorbitant price of the package was worth the priceless digits of a phone somewhere in Massachusetts where a woman named Peggy Andrews wrote about Whisperwood.
Hazel loved the Soho coffee shops, listening in on conversations while sipping coffee, a notebook open containing nothing but lists and to-dos and scraps of overheard dialogue and things she’d noticed: the slip of a girl’s eye toward a sexy man with another woman, the rip of paper when a just-written paragraph went astray, the astrologer with the hoop earrings and red scarf in the corner, giving readings to those willing to shell over a few pence.
She sorted mail, folded clothes, made the bed, swept, and emptied out the trash. These were menial tasks to keep her mind from flying in a thousand directions.
Peggy went in search of her tennis shoes for a walk on the beach, something she did every day after reaching her page quota. No matter the weather, Peggy walked.
Since she was a child, she’d been told she had trouble separating what’s real from what’s imaginary. Maybe so, but it had led to a career that most young women her age—twenty-four years old—couldn’t dream of. But yes, her story world often seemed more vital than the world she objectively knew was real.
How many times through the years this same refrain—I saw you through the window and thought I’d come out and say hey.
Their hands brushed, and she wondered for a second if he would take hers in his. But that would never happen. Wren Parker was the guy who dated the homecoming queen. He was the shortstop of the Cape Cod Baseball League team and the guy who could steer a sailboat through a fierce storm and return unscathed. He was not the guy who would take Peggy Andrews’s hand. Instead, he treated her like the sister he didn’t have.
He was so full of energy Peggy wondered that he didn’t self-combust.
He laughed loudly and she loved when his booming laughter hit the sky.
This is when the panic always arrived: a flood of adrenaline mixed with the aroma of grass and mud. Then came memories of Harry, along with the guilt about how she’d forgotten to watch over her sister because she’d been alone with him, because the thrill of early desire made her forget what was truly important: her sister.
GERMAN BOMB KILLS 64 AT BALHAM STATION IN THE LONDON UNDERGROUND. CHURCHILL SUCCEEDS CHAMBERLAIN AS LEADER OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY. PRINCESS ELIZABETH DELIVERS HER FIRST PUBLIC SPEECH ON THE BBC: SHE IS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD. Flora was a footnote among great historical events.
An aura surrounded her friend, as it had that long-ago afternoon they’d met. A vivid intensity drew others to her flame. Kelty’s beauty wasn’t false like some women with perfect makeup and tailored clothes and pearl strands. Her beauty was wilder. She always looked, as she did now, as if she’d just come in from a hike or swim.
“This was the land I created for me and for Flora when we needed something of our own. As lovely and kind as Bridie was, she was Harry’s mum, not ours. The house, too—we were guests. But this, Whisperwood, was all ours. The day Flora disappeared, she went looking for it, I’m sure of it.”
a family who’d loved me. But, Kelty, it was all too awful, and then time passed and then more time, and what was I to say? Or do? I was frozen with grief, and when I finally thawed, years later, I didn’t know how to approach them, or what to say. And it’s not like they ever came looking to find me, either.”
Hazel sat quietly thinking that the word gone hid a story she wanted to know. If someone left, if they disappeared or drove off or were simply called away, there was usually a reason. She loved knowing why things happened, because if she did, it was quite possible she could keep them from happening again.
But Hazel also knew that stories didn’t belong to anyone. They were everywhere. She should be happy they’d found themselves in a place where a mum told such tales. And yet Hazel resisted feeling happy; it wasn’t fair to Mum, who was without a doubt sitting at home worrying.
She set the postcard on the dresser and crawled into bed next to her sister, wondering what kind of story they’d found themselves in the middle of—wondrous or horrifying, she couldn’t yet know.
What a place this was, Hazel thought. All the wide green space to run; the rippling of the sky that touched a horizon of trees unobscured by a cathedral or tall building. It was as if by taking a simple train ride the world had unfolded, presenting itself in long stretches of rolling hills and heather fields. Look, it said to Hazel, there is so much more than you ever knew. The feeling of little minnows swimming in her stomach—a thrill that this world would change her forever.
Hazel wrapped her arms around Bridie, holding her close. “Bridie,” Hazel said quietly, feeling the comfort and love she’d not felt for twenty years now.
To be waited for, what a wonder, Hazel thought, to have someone expectantly bide their time for her was absolutely glorious.
“You were always such an enchanting child, seeing magic all around you.” Bridie smiled. “It would make sense that you’d know the secret worlds hidden inside our own.”
“Despair leads us to stories, of course. We invent them so we can live in a world with meaning. I told you stories. We danced to stories. I spun them over fires and over this very kitchen table. What you did—making up a land for Flora and for yourself—gave you both comfort during a very scary time. Dearest Hazel, bad things don’t always have a blaming place to land.”
She almost saw the girl she used to be, the one who believed in magic and hidden lands.
This was the man who had given up on Flora’s case years ago when a nameless body had been found in the bogs of Wallingford, the child they’d believed to be Flora.
He looked at Hazel and sadness shimmered about him. It was more than Flora’s loss that affected him, Hazel knew that. It was what he’d seen in the twenty years since. War. Drugs in Oxford. Gangs. Death.
We all have to forgive ourselves.
But if she were honest with herself, all that—Hogan’s and Paris and Sotheby’s—seemed like someone else’s life. Her past had tumbled into the present, blurring the lines.
