CHAPTER 43
October 19, 1940
“Hazel!” Mum’s voice pierced a long echoing tunnel padded with thick blankets.
For a few blessed moments, fifteen-year-old Hazel forgot the truth and thought herself soft and warm in bed with Flora. Mum had come to visit them in Binsey, bearing gifts: a new whirly toy, possibly a jump rope or, if they were truly lucky, a new cloth bag of marbles or a whip-top Flora could spin.
Hazel opened her eyes. Confused, she found herself lying in the back of a car, her head in Harry’s lap. The car door was open at her feet, and she pushed Harry away in surprise and confusion. She sat and saw her mum outside the vehicle.
What was Mum doing here?
What kind of car was this?
Why was she barefoot?
The questions rolled over her in one foggy morass.
And then the answer in her own heart: She’d lost Flora.
Hazel stumbled out of the car; they were in front of Bridie’s cottage. She threw herself into her mum’s arms. Mum had worn her softest coat and camel-colored cashmere gloves, and she stroked Hazel’s hair, but didn’t say it was okay. The absence of soothing words was as good as confirmation that Flora was still and truly gone.
After warm broth that didn’t warm and soft blankets that didn’t comfort, Hazel was left alone in the bed in the little room off the kitchen. A hot water bottle sat on her tummy and blankets piled all about her, pinning her down, their warmth no replacement for her sister’s. The others were doing the adults’ work now: planning search parties and sending others to the neighboring villages to make calls, notifying the press so they could hang pictures of her around various villages and into Oxford proper.
Shivering, hot and cold at the same time, Hazel threw off the blankets. The hot water bottle fell to the floor in a thump, the bladder jiggling.
She deserved no comfort.
St. Frideswide’s Day—today—was the day the princess died. Hazel would not allow Flora to share the day of Frideswide’s death. Hazel rose from bed, her flannel pajamas like rough sand against her burning skin, her slippers moving silently along the hardwood floor. She opened the bottom dresser drawer. Her stories of Whisperwood were neatly piled, one on top of the other, right next to a pile of Harry’s drawings. She lifted the pages she’d written, staring by moonlight at the words, the story that had taken Flora from Hazel.
Guilt and shame warred and stormed inside of her. She had led her sister into a rushing river, looking for something that didn’t exist. No one must ever know about these pages or these words.
Fever sizzled behind her eyes and on her neck, yet nothing mattered more to her than destroying these stories. Gathered around the kitchen table just outside her door, the adults would see her if she walked out.
In the moonlit room, she filled her knapsack with the pages, shoving them to the bottom of the bag where just a year ago her mum had packed her jersey and ration book, her socks and sneakers. Hazel remembered it all with such clarity, it could be happening right then.
Hazel unlatched the window, its brass lock easily sliding up and away. She placed her chapped fingers under the lip of the sill and pulled up slowly and with all her might, creating an opening just big enough to slip through. Outside she landed softly on the earth with both feet, her white lamb’s wool slippers absorbing the dampness.
The full moon cowered behind low flat clouds. Knowing her way, even in the dark, she reached the riverbank where she’d found Berry, where she’d lost Flora, where the world had caved in on itself.
Hazel dropped the knapsack to the ground and opened its buckles, her hands steady with purpose. She lifted the pages, then removed her slippers.
Her bare feet caught on nettles that stung, but Hazel didn’t feel that until later when the welts rose, and a poultice was wrapped around her feet while her fever raged, and a nurse hovered over her with clucking sounds of sympathy.
But for now, she walked along the river without sliding in. In her mind, she saw horrible images of Flora tumbling into the water. Why hadn’t she called out? Why hadn’t Flora called Hazel’s name? Or had she?
Hazel opened her hand and let the pages fly away, wings of white with her scribbled handwriting across the lines. The papers dropped and sank, one by one. She watched as the weight of their guilt, the shame of existing, dragged them to the bottom of the rushing river heading toward the sea.
Hazel prayed the same had not happened to Flora, but if it had, the stories must go with her.
When the pages were gone, she trudged through the night, a growing hollowness within, widening, spinning outward. The world without Flora was impossible.
Shivering and not caring one bit, she reached St. Margaret’s church again. This time, instead of going to the well, Hazel pushed at its massive wooden doors and entered.
Even in the dark, Hazel knew her way to the altar, to the wooden kneeling step with the needlepoint images of the saints sewn by the women of the church. She stood and faced the crucifix above: Jesus, bleeding from the crown of thorns, blood flowing down his face.
She stared at Jesus and knelt. “Please send her back to me.”
Hazel glanced about for something that might cut her skin and bring a swell of blood to the surface, for that was the only way now. She glanced about and spied nothing to injure herself with, but remembering her bare feet, she glanced down. There, her ankle bled with the scratches from her flight through the woodlands. She scratched at the wound, allowed the blood to become fresh and red. She swiped her finger across her skin and then rubbed the blood on the marble altar. “By my blood,” she said. “I vow to never again tell an untrue, made-up story or escape to Whisperwood. Bring Flora back to me, and I will never see Harry Aberdeen again. I will never do any of these things. I swear upon my life.”
Then the cries filled the church—were they hers or the owl’s? The cries echoed and rang against the damp stones. She repeated the vow three times—the three times of magical incantations.
This was the unraveling Hazel had felt in her gut when Mum held the note of evacuation in the backyard in Bloomsbury. It hadn’t been the war that threatened her life; it was Flora’s disappearance. Somehow she had known that something terrible would happen, and that it would be her fault. A thread had been pulled; it was her undoing.
The only thing to do was to find Flora. And Hazel would. No matter how long it took, or what she lost along the way.
When Hazel arrived back at the cottage, she crawled again through the window and into the empty bed. In the early morning hours, she awoke as Mum shook her.
“Hazel, wake up. I can’t carry you. We must get you to hospital.”
She shivered with fever. Her tongue and face were on fire and her thoughts muddled as she obeyed her mum, stumbling from the bedroom in her flannel pajamas, through the living room and out the front door.
Just before she reached a waiting taxi, the previous day and night before exploded in a thunderous memory. Hazel turned to see Harry and Bridie on the front porch, bereft, leaning into each other for support. Aiden Davies stood next to them with a notebook and a lost expression.
Hazel remembered Harry asking about the story, then kiss in the hollowed tree, and her own promise at the chapel under the crucified Jesus to never, not ever see or talk to Harry again. This vow might bring back Flora. She broke free of Mum’s grasp and screamed into the haze of fear and loss, “I never, ever want to see you again!”