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Time swooped back in, turning itself right side up and moving along its regular rhythms. Harry stepped back, yet kept one hand on each of their shoulders. Damn, he was handsome. Probably always had been but it had been hidden beneath the puppy-ness of an adolescent, nothing quite matching yet, each part waiting to grow into the other parts.
Hazel smiled at the boy and the man whose exuberance was still pup-like and free, even if tempered.
Hazel blanked on the name of Ethan’s brother, another thing lost in the dingy basement of those days.
She didn’t die or drown that day; she lived to tell your story?” “You see,” she said. “I thought she disappeared looking for Whisperwood.” “No.” Harry shook his head. “I left her alone.” My God, they’d been carrying the same burden. The same bloody weight of guilt. They could have, she realized, been carrying it together all this time.
Time moved so softly in Binsey that Hazel took little note of its passage, but Bridie marked the seasons with rituals and candles and scented sticks.
Bridie had her own way of speaking, and she never said Hitler’s name. “It’s said the terrible man wants to keep Oxford as his very own, so he won’t bomb here—dreadful, yes, but it’s keeping us safe.” When she said “the terrible man,” it sounded to Hazel as if they lived in the fairy tales that she created for Flora, and Hitler was a dragon or an ogre they must defeat to reach the castle.
Hazel put that promise close to her heart. We shall all be together again.
“Why do you have these parties?” Hazel asked, teeth chattering. “To honor the seasons, curious one. To honor each other. To gather. To remember that we are part of something much bigger than the petty things of today, bigger than gossip and—” “War.” “Yes, we are part of something even bigger than war.
Everyone gathered for last goodbyes as Bridie thanked those who had come and raised her voice to everyone. “As well as you are now, may you be seven times better this time next year.” Everyone raised their mug and cheered. Father Fenelly held up his right hand and said, “In darkness and in light, in trouble and in joy, help us, Heavenly Father, to trust your love, to serve your purpose, and to praise your name, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
“Don’t let others take away good stories so they can feel better about themselves.”
“Telling stories is one of the greatest powers we possess. It’s like a dream you can fill with what you want. And the knight doesn’t always have to save the princess; sometimes she saves herself.”
“The best stories are soul-making. But stories we tell about ourselves, and even the harrowing ones told by others about us, can also be soul-destroying. We have to choose what is good and true, not what will destroy.”
There was nothing but this—Harry, stars above, sand below, and desire. But she could have none of it, and she let go of his hand, backed away as he watched her. She reminded herself it was just old feelings rising, nothing
But Hazel’s hangover was of a different sort. Hers was one of the heart. She’d said too much; laughed too much; opened up too much. She’d come for a single answer and ended in a pub with Ethan, Harry, and Kelty singing silly ditties with the band, then sitting on the beach with Harry as the moon rolled up and the stars pierced a dark sky one by one.
Playwright. The Importance of Being Earnest.” She smiled at him. “Well, he once said that telling ‘beautiful untrue things’ was the aim of art. I like that a lot.” “So do I,” he said. “Beautiful untrue things. We all know when we read about Narnia or Middle Earth or Wonderland—we know it’s not true but it’s so beautiful, so damn beautiful that we believe it while we’re there.” “And beautiful untrue things carry the truth,” she said.
Peggy closed her eyes and saw her river of stars, her forest glade, and the dunce-hat towers against an inky sky with a crescent bowl of moon. “They are like dreams. In a fairy tale, words and curses and spells have power. There is magic. Everything is animated, from a grass blade to a talking owl, from a table carved of hazelwood to a fish that warns you not to drink the river water.” She opened her eyes and looked at him, wanting him to understand. “Magic is the point of it
She wrote adventures. Could she have them? “Do you
After years of writing adventures, she was ready for her own. Especially with Wren. She was tired to death of dreaming and imagining and making things up. She wanted to do more than write
hallway and out the back door, finding herself on the beach walk, feeling as if she had not merely left her own home, but had walked through a shimmering door.
Replacing postwar dreary were bright dresses on the women who held martinis with floating olives and lipstick-smeared rims.
Below the sketch a small framed square label: Flora in the woodlands.
Harry’s art mirrored her unconscious. Her nightmares. Her hidden secrets. All was here, plain as day, with brass lights hung over them to illuminate the truth: The past was alive and well in both of them.
“When I can’t shake something, I draw. I paint. I sketch. I let it out.” “Like I once did with stories.” She stared again at the extraordinary
“Ah, so you loved me.” She thought to laugh it off, but what did it matter now? “Yes, I did.” He looked near to tears and yet he said the sweetest words in a steady voice. “So did I,” he said. “I loved you, too, Hazel.” “We were lucky,” she told him, “to have each other as a first love. We were lucky until we weren’t.”
If you were born knowing, and to be honest we all are, you will know how to find your way through the woodlands to the shimmering doors that are meant for you. They lead to the land made for you.
The sight of the bewildered and bedraggled soldiers, their uniforms torn, rust-stained bandages evident on arms and faces, made the war very real. It made Papa’s loss very real. Hazel felt it; she’d gone too far with her imaginary land. Flora had lost track of what was real and what was not. She was doing her sister no good with these fairy tales.
swans. The days seemed suspended in time, endless and made for just their pleasure as they visited Whisperwood.
It seemed impossible, or maybe unfair, that they lived this idyllic life while elsewhere bombs dropped and people died and soldiers arrived at hospitals, torn apart. The days were filled with innocent adventure.
She could imagine the entire land of Whisperwood and yet not see herself in a city that already existed. In London there were no wide open pastures and the river was choked with ships and litter. In London there were no daily sketches under the door and no schoolwork at a round table in the living room where a fire often blazed in the hearth. In London there was no Harry, and that felt impossible for now he was… what was he?
we can be the river.” Hazel stopped, crouched, and gently spoke. “If you turn into a river, you cannot come back to be here with me. Remember Harry said you can never go into the river.” “I don’t want to come back,” Flora said. “I love Whisperwood the best.”
She’d never used the queen’s voice as her own before. It was something to think about, to wonder. How could there be two voices inside of her? One who asks questions and one who answers?
This was new, a plot twist. And it made Hazel smile; she could grow the story. This newfound power, this bright light of knowing that she could expand an entire universe, had her tingling.
“Maybe because they tell me that there is something more I can’t see. Or if I can see it, I can only see the littlest bit of it when there is much, much more.”
“Or maybe they make me feel better because even though they hide all day, they always come out at night; they don’t go away.”
Hazel wanted to rush backward in time, look up from the tall man whose name she couldn’t recall, see Harry sitting on a park bench just as she found him this morning. She exhaled. “I wish I’d seen you.” “Me too,”
That was the thing with Bridie—nothing was an errand or a market run—it was an adventure. The room was
To Hazel, she did not appear to be a person who would steal a child, even if Hazel actually wanted Imogene to be a person who’d steal a child.
They’d sipped their tea to the bottoms of their cups. They talked of Bridie and of war, of how the world seemed to have moved on but inside they all still felt that any moment everything could tip down. “Such willful forgetting is necessary,” said Imogene. “We can’t wallow now, can we?”
But maybe you’d be more interested in the American nurse from the Red Cross—Frances, I believe?” Imogene stared off. “She was from… I don’t remember, to be sure. An odd but nice girl. The war wasn’t what any of us expected, for her least of all. She came over here, expecting to meet a nice British boy and fall in love. She had romantic dreams, that one, fancied herself Florence Nightingale who’d wipe the brows of the fallen boys, as if one day there might be a statue in her honor. She left straight away when things got really bad.”
I’m about to lose everything to find an answer that can’t be found.”
“Harry, stop. There is no us.” “You can’t un-know things, Hazel. You can’t un-see them. You cannot look away from everything that you’ve been shown. You just can’t.”
“Breaking free isn’t always graceful or painless, you know that better than anyone.”
He laughed and leaned back in his seat. “I’ve always adored annoying you.” He winked. “It means you care.” “What are you, fourteen years old?” He suddenly turned serious. “I wish, Hazel. If I was, we could change everything.” “I know,” she said. “I know.”
She stood alone. This Bloomsbury flat had seen loss before: of a pair of sisters sent to the countryside, of other men Hazel had sent walking out the door, of war and demolition and heartbreak, of a father who never returned.
what if she just allowed the extraordinary to imbue the ordinary one more time. What if she allowed the owl to hoot long into the night? One. More. Time. If you were born knowing…
“The bombers fly up the river, Hazel. They use our beloved Thames as a map into the city. You can hear the grind of their engines, then the high whistle of a bomb being dropped, then the thump of it hitting the earth, exploding homes, setting afire cathedrals and libraries and museums. They come just after dark.” She shuddered. “You never know when the next one will arrive. The sky trembles like a thunderstorm. Far away or close, you see a bright white light, then a yellow flame.”
“You don’t have to protect me.” “Yes, I do. That is my job. That is all that matters. It matters little if I am happy or I am content. My job is to take care of you.”
After the horrible things she’d seen that day, she knew their land had been an illusion. Whisperwood and its sparkling river made of stars—of course none of it was real and true. Child’s play. There were no stars in the rushing river; it was just muddy water running to the sea as it always had and always would.
The end of Whisperwood wasn’t Hazel’s fault; the bombs and the war and the evil man with the mustache had ended their story.
him, the more brusque and short she became with him.
