CHAPTER 4 

March 1960

Hazel lifted the book called Whisperwood with great care, as if it might disintegrate in her hands. The cover illustration was appealing and whimsical, yet hinted of danger. The river sparkled as any river made of stars must.

Flora.

Was her Flora alive? Was her sister somewhere, telling this story to the world?

Woozy, Hazel flipped over the book and read the copy.

Whenever they spot a shimmering door seen by no one else, twin orphans Audrey and Janey Burton escape the cruelty of the orphanage where they live. Walking through this entrance, the sisters find themselves in the Kingdom of Whisperwood, where they can become anyone or anything they desire. But after every adventure Audrey and Janey must return to the gloomy rooms of the Shire Orphanage—that is, until they discover who they are meant to be in Whisperwood.

“Shire.” She and Flora lived in Oxfordshire during the evacuation.

She opened the first page.

Dedication: To Linda Andrews, my mother, who is the beginning of all good stories.

Who the bloody hell was Linda Andrews? She could not have known this story. No one knew anything about this tale. Yes, her six-year-old sister’s disappearance had been covered in the newspapers when it happened in 1940: how she had been lost during the Blitz when they had been sent to the countryside to live without their parents, like so many other children from London.

No one had dared imagine Flora would disappear into thin air—or into the River Thames, if the police were to be believed. At the time the terror of war was the imminent threat, not a little girl’s disappearance.

On that autumn morning of 1940, as Hazel and Flora had meandered from the Aberdeens’ stone cottage, winding along the woodland path through the damp heather to sit on the wide green meadow beside the River Thames, Hazel had not been paying attention to nature’s silent and secret messages as Bridie Aberdeen had taught them.

If she had, she might have noticed the river was moving unusually swift and sure following the previous night’s storm, rushing madly past the sisters, carrying away far too quickly the bent twigs they threw into it.

It’s possible that the beady-eyed crow who looked down at them, cawing in a chatter near human, was a messenger of doom. Or the owl who, for the past days, had been hooting during daytime hours meant to remind her to pay attention.

The night before, sleep had come so reluctantly that Hazel had wanted to kick her sister from the bed so she could have it to herself. Was it possible that this was the reason it had happened—because Hazel had wished her sister gone, if only for a wink, before she’d fallen to sleep?

But for all the details that appeared in retrospect, in the twenty years Hazel had been picking them out of her memory like pills off a sweater, she still believed she’d missed a hint, a clue, a footprint, a note—something that would one day surface and solve the mystery of Flora’s disappearance.

Now, in the back room of the small Rare Book Shoppe, the past overcame her. She’d been searching for her sister for twenty years, ever since she’d disappeared when she was six years old from the hamlet of Binsey, and now Hazel had a clue, something to grasp on to, and she was not letting go.

She shoved the other parcels into the safe, engaged the bolt, and twirled the combination. She had only one thought: This book will lead me to Flora.

Hazel refolded the Whisperwood portfolio up tight, tied the velvet ribbon, and slipped the entire parcel into her leather satchel. Heart pounding, she walked out the back door of Hogan’s Rare Book Shoppe, letting the heavy metal door slam and lock behind her.

The loamy spring afternoon was filled with mist, like a veil between the present and the past. She rushed out of the cobblestone alleyway to the front of the bookshop. A group of eight tourists in thick walking shoes and yellow rain slickers followed a stout woman tour guide into the store. Through the wavy glass of the window, Hazel spied Tim inside at the front desk, his head bent over a ledger. He lifted his head as the crowd entered.

He couldn’t see Hazel and she ran down the sidewalk. She rushed past the bicycles in blue, green, and red that stood side by side or lazily leaned against each other at the rental stand. Londoners strolled past her as if she didn’t even exist.

Possible explanations for the parcel in her satchel rushed at her too quickly, a rainstorm she was trying to catch in a thimble. Was Peggy really Flora? Had Flora told someone? Had Flora truly lived as Hazel and her mum had always barely, but daringly, hoped?

She turned onto Charing Cross, running on the pavement toward the British Museum, and then toward her Bloomsbury home at Mecklenburgh Square. She dashed past the pharmacy with the deep red awning and the café with the scrolled iron tables where couples noodled together over frothy pints. She passed through leafy-green Mecklenburgh Square to the Georgian mansions snuggled next to the edge of its manicured grass, the leaves unfolding, yawning with new spring life.

Hazel arrived at her flat, her childhood home. The building had been built for grandeur in the 1800s, then turned to flats when Londoners chose more posh neighborhoods. In the late 1930s Papa had nabbed the best flat for his family. Through bombings and wars, it still stood, though now it was pockmarked and worse for wear, still showing the scars of a traumatic time for all Londoners—the Second World War.

Hazel always noticed the scars when she walked to the luminescent building, its slightly stained stones and ornate columns on the second level rising to the third, the paint-chipped iron railings and gates protecting its glistening, black-painted doorways and tall windows, one of which was still cracked from a long-ago bombing. She would never look away. To look away was to deny those days, even deny the loss of Flora.

She dug her keys from her satchel, unlocked the door, and hurried inside.

Hazel’s flat was ground level, and better for it, Papa had always said. Ornate plaster trim skimmed the edges of tall ceilings, windows yawning open to a back garden and a living room big enough for built-in pine bookshelves to cover every wall and either side of the working stone fireplace, which was stained with decades of soot.

Hazel shed her green mackintosh, hung it on the peg by the front door. The flat’s furniture was either bought at a secondhand store or handed down from her mum, comfortable, plush, and almost all of it covered in flowered fabric, as if Hazel’s mum meant to bring the garden inside. Books were everywhere, on sagging shelves, side tables, piled against the wall.

Mail was scattered on the floor where it had been dropped through a slot in the door. Magazines. Bills. Advertisements for a new jazz club in Soho. Hazel lifted the lot of it and dropped the pile on the coffee table. The glossy cover of Vanity Fair with a photo of a woman in a yellow suit and a yellow hat holding daffodils. Then the magazine’s tagline: “For the Younger, Smarter Woman.”

Hazel laughed. Younger. Smarter. Sure thing.

Her mum had subscribed to the magazine for Hazel every Christmas with hope Hazel would read the articles on fashion, weddings, and womanhood. She never did. And in this edition: “16 Pages of Going Away Clothes for the Bride!” And for God’s sake, another installment of the Lost Children of Pied Piper by Dorothy Bellamy, who focused each month on one child who’d been lost during the evacuation of London’s children. The insistent journalist had been hounding Hazel to talk to her about Flora for a year now.

Hazel dropped the magazine into the trash bin on her way to the kitchen. She would never, not ever, answer questions about that day and night to anyone but her family and the chief inspector who’d been there the day Flora disappeared, the man she still kept in touch with, Aiden Davies.

She rushed across wide pine floors to the bright yellow kitchen, dropping her satchel on the oak breakfast table before flipping on the overhead light. Above the kitchen sink, a window looked onto a back alley where a stone wall separated her house from the neighbors’. Ivy grew along the crumbling wall and two trash cans leaned heavily against it like drunken bums who’d found themselves halfway home, then collapsed. She set a blue porcelain kettle on the two-burner stove and lit the gas. She waited for the kettle’s steamy song.

She needed to calm down or she’d find herself breathing into a paper bag. She turned on the wireless, finding a station playing baroque music. The kettle sang and she poured the boiling water over the Darjeeling tea bag in her favorite porcelain cup with the tiny pink flowers around the edge. She dropped in two sugars, recalling when rationing left them without such luxury.

She slipped the package from her bag and set it on the tabletop, which was scarred with years of knife marks, ink stains, and a dent or two where a pot had been dropped.

She opened the package, untied the ribbon, and set the pile of illustrations to the side. She picked up the book. The spine read: Henry-Todd Publishing, New York, New York. She glanced at the flap—there was no smiling picture of the author as there usually was. Hazel wanted to search her face and features for any sign of Flora. There was no biography but this: Peggy Andrews lives in 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.

If she were honest, there were a few people who might have heard her and Flora tell of their secret land of Whisperwood. But only a very few. And they would not have run off to America to write this story.

Would they?

There was nothing to do now but read.

There must be a rational explanation.

“If you were born worthy, and we all are and don’t always know it, you will find your way through the forest glade to the doors that await you. When entering, you will find a land made for you,” Audrey said to her sister, Janey.

The beginning wasn’t exactly right—the wording had shifted a bit from the opening Hazel always used like an incantation when she was telling the story to Flora. She kept reading.

The sisters sat in a sunny garden on a bright red blanket, a brief respite from the Shire Orphanage where Madame Bullynose was waiting to collect the blackberries they had been ordered to gather.

Hazel laughed. Madame Bullynose! That was cheeky—definitely not part of Hazel’s original story. So there were embellishments. But the garden and the red blanket—that was Flora’s and hers.

“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.”

Janey whispered, “But the children remember.”

With the wireless music rising and falling, with the sweet chirping of birds outside and her tea growing cold at her side, Hazel read of two girls named Audrey and Janey who lived on a spit of land on a bayside in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

The girls searched cranberry bogs and bays to find shimmering doors leading to another world. It wasn’t England, but there was a starry river and wild hills of heather, cliffs, boulders, and rocks. And there were also sand dunes that spilled onto wide beaches and ponds of snapping turtles and giant fish, lakes with endless bottoms.

The illustrations on every few pages enhanced the story with clarity and whimsy.

As the story continued, the girls met characters from fairy tales. They met Hansel and Gretel and warned them not to enter the woods, explaining that they would be locked up and fed sweets by an old woman who wanted to eat them. Pages later, the two sisters met Snow White and told her not to eat any apples.

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. Peggy Andrews’s orphans weren’t just wandering through Whisperwood taking in the sights, they were changing centuries-old stories to suit their fancies.

Two hours later, Hazel sat back in her chair. 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?

She closed the cover. “How do you exist?”

Through the years, with Flora’s absence a soft wound in the center of her body, the low buzz of loss and mystery inside of her, Hazel had often wondered if Whisperwood had gone on without her and Flora, if the land they’d made together had its own adventures while she lived her real life. Whisperwood was fantasy, no different than any of the books Hazel had loved, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, or The Chronicles of Narnia… but Whisperwood was long gone, faded to gossamer.

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. She’d considered peeking back through the shimmering door to see if their land had lived on. But each time she thought about it, a great fear stayed her.

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.

What the bloody hell was Hazel supposed to do now?

She could have ignored the book. She could put the novel and illustrations in Edwin’s safe, shaking her head at the odd synchronicity of the fairy tale, attributing its existence to the universal unconscious that Jung espoused, the mystery of imagination.

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

This was indisputably her Whisperwood.

How would she find the author? There weren’t many options: She could call the publishing house or fly across the ocean and comb the entire state of Massachusetts. She could hardly call an operator in America and ask, “Do you know a Peggy Andrews in Massachusetts?” Was there a phone book of Massachusetts residents in the British Library? If there was, how many Andrews would she find?

Hazel spread the original drawings in a fan across the table. They were beautiful originals; collector’s items; one of a kind. And with that, the truth hammered into her chest: She had walked out of her place of employment without a word, stealing valuable signed illustrations by the prominent Pauline Baynes of Narnia fame along with a signed first edition fairy tale. She had just committed a crime.

Edwin could have phoned Scotland Yard for less than what she’d just done.

A thief, and yet…

This was her fairy tale.

It belonged to her.

And to Flora.

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.