CHAPTER 41 

October 19, 1940

“When was the last time you saw Flora?” Standing at the river’s edge, Aiden Davies asked Hazel, then Harry, and then Bridie, with such a calm expression on his face that Hazel felt a scream building within, spiraling up and up.

“For me, it was late this morning,” Bridie told him. “When I left the children to drive into Oxford to register for a telephone.”

“She was right here sleeping like she does every afternoon, just fine as could be.” Hazel stomped her feet on the blanket just a few yards from the muddy river. Her wellies dented the earth, divots the size of her feet.

Harry’s face was so pale that Hazel thought he might faint. “I went to find Hazel,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake Flora.”

Aiden Davies wrote in a notebook he’d pulled from his pocket. His cheeks were rough with a beard just starting to grow in.

When Hazel and Harry had seen Flora was gone, Harry had bolted back to the house to tell Bridie while Hazel ran up and down the riverbank, screaming “Flora Lea!” so many times now her throat was raw and burning.

In a few minutes, Harry had returned, calling Flora’s name, too. Bridie went to Father Fenelly’s to summon the police, and then together they’d all searched the riverside. They spread out along the banks of the river and into the woodlands all around, up to Wytham Woods and beyond. Some ran to the boathouse where the river split before joining itself again on the other side.

Flora Lea!

The police arrived fast and loud, with sirens screeching along Binsey Lane. Hazel, Bridie, and Harry covered as much ground as they could while Bridie asked Hazel questions. She wasn’t accusing; she was too kind for that.

Where did you go? Why was she alone? How long? What was she doing?

Harry was the one who told his mum, “Hazel was upset because I said something dumb, and she ran away, but just right to the glade. I ran after her. We weren’t gone five minutes.”

“How far can a little girl go in five minutes?” Bridie asked, her face contorted with fear.

Hazel wasn’t so sure it was only five minutes. She wanted to reach backward to the moment she ran away from Harry. She’d never leave her sister. Not ever. What had she done?

Thoughts bounced and tangled; all of them coming too fast, accompanied by a metallic taste at the back of her tongue.

At the river’s edge, Hazel’s foot skidded. The water was muddy, churned-up, and angry in its run, its edges soft with shadows falling in dark stains, the water moving faster with the previous night’s rainstorm filling its banks.

Hazel spotted the muddy fur and screamed. Berry’s head and right arm were in the shallows of the river, his body and legs in the soft silt, almost swallowed by the brown rush and green reeds. She grabbed at the teddy bear’s arm.

“Here!” Hazel called out. Everyone ran to join her; the two policemen and Bridie and Harry, staring down at the river as if expecting Flora to be bobbing atop it, waving at them.

Aiden Davies let out a groan and looked to Hazel.

“Is this hers?”

“Yes. She never goes anywhere without Berry.”

Word spread fast, and Mr. Nolan and Miss Slife, the Baldwin twins, and some schoolchildren with their parents arrived. The crowd was rushing to the riverbanks when Aiden called out, “Do not go near there. We have to look for footprints.”

The group halted as Aiden methodically moved along the edge, slogging through the reeds, peeking inside the watery hollows under bent tree branches. “I don’t see any footprints,” he said, as if this was good news. But Hazel knew what it meant: Flora had gone into the river and hadn’t stepped out.

She knew what she had to do: Hazel sat on the earth, soft and cold, yanking off her wellies and thick woolen socks, tossing them to the ground. Before anyone could notice or stop her, she jumped into the river, ignoring the cold and how swiftly and murkily it moved.

These were the shallows, and Hazel had entered them in the summer with Harry, when Imogene babysat Flora. They’d jumped in to cool off, the water a slap of wonder and luxury as they dug their feet in the silt below and let the river rush past them like smooth hands.

The river was frigid and higher than when she’d swum with Harry, and she sank to her waist and found purchase in the slippery, unstable silt below. With a deep breath that ran across her raw throat, she ducked under the surface, opening her eyes and letting her palms travel along the sifting ground. She found nothing but rocks. She rose and dove under again.

She ignored them hollering her name, telling her to stop, to get out, Harry’s voice above them all. Then came a pain in her shoulder—someone was dragging her, pulling her by her arm. She fought back, but it was useless. Aiden Davies was bigger, stronger—made of steel, it seemed. “Stop it, Hazel,” he said. “We’ll find her. Stop!”

The policeman had his fingers around her numb arm in a grip that dented her skin and would leave a bruise. The gathered townspeople stared at her. Hazel only knew she was cold because her body was shivering, her teeth slamming into each other, but she didn’t feel cold, not the way she understood feeling cold. She felt only a great yawning despair, similar but even larger than when she’d heard her papa was gone.

“Where’s the hag?” she screamed. She yanked her arm from the policeman but he wouldn’t release her. She slapped at him, hit him. “Don’t you see? Mrs. Marchman is the only one not here. She took Flora, I know it. She took Flora to replace Kelty.”

Aiden released Hazel and picked up the blanket, the last place Flora had been, and he wrapped it around Hazel. “Go home. Get warm. Let us do our job.”

Hazel looked at him, didn’t nod with agreement, but instead ran away at full speed. They would assume she’d be headed home, but she remembered the way to Mrs. Marchman. Her bare feet smacked against the soft ground, then along the dirt road. She passed The Perch, its door left open as Mr. Nolan had run to the river to help. She passed the low-slung thatch-roofed schoolhouse, past the American nurse riding her bike with wild Queen’s Anne lace filling her basket, waving in the wind with their clusters of white.

Hazel must save Flora.

This was not a magical tale; this was her sister.

This was real life.

She heard Harry running behind her. He didn’t call her name, but he was there. Together they’d free Flora from the clutches of the hag. Mrs. Marchman, with her wiry hair and yellow nails and the stench of liquor and sweat, who must have been watching and waiting in the woods until she could steal Flora to replace Kelty.

Aiden Davies might believe that Flora had fallen into the river and drowned, but Hazel would prove him wrong.

The yard in front of Mrs. Marchman’s house was a slipshod array of a shattered world: a deflated tire on its side with grass sprouting from its middle, a busted hoe with bent and rusted teeth, a defeated white fence flattened over a dead garden. The front door’s green paint was peeling and blistered with age, and when Hazel reached it, she banged on it with her fist. Harry arrived behind her, gasping.

Mrs. Marchman opened the door wearing the same dreary dress she always did. Her long hair was pulled back into a braid. Blinking into the sunlight, she lifted a wrinkled hand to shade her eyes. “What do you want?” she asked.

Hazel could smell a yeasty aroma waft from the interior of her squalid home, the stench of a basement or a cement storage cellar.

“Give Flora back!” Hazel screamed.

Mrs. Marchman stared at them and narrowed her eyes in confusion, and Hazel immediately knew that she’d been wrong. This wretched woman didn’t have the ability to steal away anyone. She was addled, confused, and completely unaware of the great drama taking place beside the nearby River Thames.

Hazel’s legs gave way beneath her, but Harry caught her as she fell. He lowered her to the ground and held her while Mrs. Marchman regarded them coldly.

Harry ignored the hag and pulled Hazel in close. “We’ll find her.”

Hazel closed her eyes, wanting it all to disappear. Instead, she recalled a nightmare she’d had of Flora falling through Frideswide’s treacle well at the edge of a cemetery.

The well.

Alice’s treacle well.

Hazel’s teeth chattered. She grabbed the collar of Harry’s sweater. “The well,” she said.

If Hazel had not allowed Flora to enter the shimmering door in the woodlands, she might instead go to her spot at the well, where the Dormouse told Alice three sisters lived at its bottom.

Harry pulled Hazel to her feet. He looked to Mrs. Marchman. “If you have a phone, please call the police and tell them to meet us at the chapel.”

She nodded and slammed the door as Hazel and Harry ran toward the church. Harry knew a shortcut through the Oxfordshire fields. Heather swiped his corduroys and Hazel’s bare legs, the nettles catching the edges of her feet with the ground soft and giving. The day was sinking toward evening, and ahead she saw the chapel steeple, piercing the setting sun like a needle in a pink balloon. Slanted and cracked, the gravestones in the cemetery glistened in waning sunlight.

Hazel was terrified this day would end without Flora beside her, that darkness would cover this land. Flora had never been alone at dark, always curled tightly to Hazel’s side.

When they arrived at the well, Aiden Davies was already there with Father Fenelly and a smattering of the townspeople. Ethan Baldwin was peering into the dark hole, too narrow for a child to enter, but the lure of it fascinating even to him.

“Today’s the feast of St. Frideswide,” Father Fenelly said, his voice soft. “It’s the day Oxford celebrates the day of her death.”

Hazel, sick and dizzy, turned on Father. “I don’t care. I don’t care about the stupid princess. Where is Flora?”

“You called us here?” Aiden asked Hazel so gently, pressing his palms together in a prayer gesture and holding them against his chest.

“Yes. If Flora ran away, she would come here. She thought it was magical…”

“Magical?” Another policeman, a new one she had never seen before, spat out the word with contempt, spinning around to face Hazel and Harry. His face was pockmarked with an old illness and his eyes so hidden beneath the folds of his lids that they looked pressed into dough. The man shifted his hat on his head and glared at Aiden. “Coming here was a waste of time. It’s obvious she’s in the river.”

Aiden took off his coat, a dark blue wool one with fat brass buttons, and threw it over Hazel’s shoulders. “You’re going to get sick if you do not go home and get warm.”

The running, the fear, the knowledge that this was all her fault swamped Hazel with dizziness. Haloes of sunlight flickered around all the faces at the well, the glistening water at the edge of the dark rock like diamonds of the treacle—it all swam before her, melting. She was the one in the river, drowning, gasping for breath, going under.