AS THEY NEARED THE Isle of Ganderly, where Katherine lived, she realized that Jack had fallen asleep against Kailash’s feathers. He seemed so desperately to need rest. His brow was furrowed, making him seem older than he was. The many burdens of his long life weighed on him, she could tell.
As Kailash’s powerful wings stilled into a glide, Katherine wished Jack was peaceful. But she knew he hadn’t been, for a long, long time. As she watched him now, she thought back to the report of his last night in London. She had not read it in years, but when it had first come in, she had gone over it countless times, desperate for any news of her dearest friend. And now she could remember every detail.
Several mice, six doves, one finch, and a red squirrel had observed the events of that evening. They reported as follows:
It was a piercingly cold winter night. Jack was leaving the Athenaeum Club. He belongs to many clubs. Private clubs are a vital function of the social life of young and old men in this whirligig era. These clubs are elegant and brimming with friendships, rivalries, and the excitable friction of men with ambition and ideas. It is at the Athenaeum that Jack has made some of his most interesting friendships.
On the night of this report, Frost was seen walking out of the festive warmth of the club with three companions. They were bundled against the cold, laughing and chatting as they trekked their way down the snow-covered steps to the street. As is his habit, Jack hung back a few paces. He enjoys observing the easy joviality of his friends at the end of an evening of fun. The most affable of the three is young Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, whose booming laugh and manner reminds Jack of his old friend Nicholas St. North. Churchill had been a devilish child, full of mischief, and had been kicked out of most of the finest schools in Europe. On this evening he is smoking a huge cigar and is at this point singing the song of one of the schools he had attended.
“Sandhurst was a great school with a wretched song!” he shouted out, interrupting himself midchorus. The other two friends, Joseph Rudyard Kipling and James Matthew Barrie, are both writers of some renown, though tonight they were singing the song of a school they had never attended and were doing so with considerable volume and enthusiasm.
“It would jolly well help if we knew the words,” said Kipling, laughing, but this ignorance did not seem to hamper his and Barrie’s happy attempt.
Jack grinned. He liked his friends best when they behaved less like adults and more like children.
But as the group reached the sidewalk, they passed a huddle of street children who stood shivering in the evening air.
“Please, sirs, a penny for the hungry,” said one child with a practiced, hopeful desperation.
Jack’s friends did not even glance the children’s way. These children were cold and close to starving. Jack saw the ragged clothes. The thin, lanky legs and skinned elbows. Again Jack stayed back, watching as his friends continued down the street.
The children stood quiet and shivering. They watched the happy threesome stagger and wail down the street.
Jack appeared angry with his friends. He knew they may have had childhoods of comfort, but each had experienced great turbulence and heartbreak in their youths. They should not, could not, would not ignore the wretched children they had just passed. They must be made to listen.
So Jack made himself invisible. It is a power he uses subtly. If a party is dull, he will simply disappear. Or if he wants to secretly influence the outcome of an event, being unseen makes his efforts much easier.
At this point in the proceedings he discreetly launched three expertly constructed snowballs at his friends.
Each hit its mark.
All three men’s hats were knocked to the snowy ground. The three then spun around and stared at the children. The children stared back.
Apparently, a war had silently been declared.
“This aggression must not go unanswered,” muttered Churchill as he, Kipling, and Barrie crouched down and began busily packing snowballs.
Though invisible, we surmise that Jack was delighted. He whispered to various children, “Better get busy. They’re bigger than you.” They instantly fell to their knees and began to pack snowballs themselves.
Churchill and Kipling both have military histories and have seen battle, so they knew the necessity of a steady supply of ammunition. Barrie, as records show, is the worst shot of the three, so he continued making snowballs while his cohorts took up positions behind a lamppost and a mailbox.
“Wait for my command,” said Churchill, puffing his cigar.
The children were seasoned snowball makers, and they had amassed an impressive hoard of ammo. They were ready to attack, but they seemed uncertain. Again Jack intervened. “Concentrate on the one with the cigar.”
The children were so focused on their enemy that they hadn’t even noticed that Jack was nowhere to be seen. They heard his suggestion, and without questioning it, they acted.
And charged! Their battle cry was high, shrill, and impressive. Eight little voices sounded like an army.
“My word,” said Kipling, astonished.
“Steady!” commanded Churchill.
Barrie stopped his constructions and readied for the attack, a snowball in each hand and several in each pocket.
In an instant the children were upon them. The air was thick with snowballs and shouting and cheers.
“Fire!” yelled Churchill, but his command was muffled by five or six direct hits on his head and shoulders. He fell backward and lay on the street as helpless as an overturned turtle. Four children stood over him and pounded him with snowballs.
“My cigar!” he yelped. And indeed his cigar had been knocked from his mouth, landing somewhere inside his coat.
Kipling and Barrie tried to lend aid, but both were hit with such accuracy that their eyeglasses were caked with thick clumps of snow and neither could see a thing.
The three men were being overwhelmed, routed, in fact. But suddenly, the tide of the battle changed. Twenty or so members of the Athenaeum Club had seen the skirmish from the windows and were rushing out to lend a hand.
Jack had reappeared and raised his staff, and within an instant, he brought about a blinding gale of snow to slow the Athenaeum men.
A smallish boy who looked particularly ragged raised two fingers to his mouth and let out a high, sharp whistle that could be heard for blocks. The boy had not finished his first note when children began to appear from seemingly every direction and swarm toward the fray.
And so this snowball battle became epic. Adults against children. Jack watched with astonishment. What had he triggered?
Old men — older than eighty — who minutes before could barely hobble with canes across a plush dining room carpet, were now rippling over snow-covered cobblestones with the vigor and skill of Roman gladiators.
Gangly half-starved children, some as young as five years old, were standing their ground or attacking with the stalwart cunning of the most seasoned generals.
The blur of a thousand snowballs glistened in the streetlamps’ glow as cheers and laughter of pure exultant joy filled the air. The strange untethered glee of making pretend war with well-packed snow had turned men into boys, and children into heroes.
Jack returned to invisibility, but he stayed in the thick of this battle royal, flying from place to place faster than any snowball. He was heard shouting instructions or guidance to anyone he felt was in need. At first he only helped the children, but as the ruckus continued, he began to urge the Athenaeums on.
So focused were the combatants that none ever wondered who was helping them.
The fight reached a pitch so fevered that one by one participants began to collapse with exhaustion and merriment. There were calls of:
“Stop! Enough!”
“I surrender!”
“I’m done!”
Shouts became laughter. The din of the battle dissolved into a singsong of helpless giggling and gasping and guffaws.
Churchill struggled to his feet. He was laughing with more gusto than anyone. He pulled his still-lit cigar from some deep fold of his coat and took a long and satisfying puff.
“I suggest we call an end to these hostilities,” he said to the spent troops. “I suggest we call this battle a draw.” He took another puff.
The half-block heap of young and old sat panting, their warm breath making a wheezing fog around them.
“I say we are all victors, and so to all must go the spoils,” Churchill continued. “Let us retire to the warmth of the club. I urge that we leave the snow to fall in peace and that we feast like kings!”
Cheers of agreement rang out. As they helped one another to their feet, Churchill began again to sing his old school song, the song of his beloved Sandhurst:
“And so from those who have gone before, to those who are yet to come,
We pass our motto loud and clear, all evil overcome.
As true as is a brother’s love, as close as ivy grows,
We’ll stand four square through our lives to every wind that blows.”
It was then that Frost tactfully reappeared as stealthily as he’d vanished in the first place. Smiling, he watched the scene unfold. Churchill slapped him on the back, still in full-throated song and joined by all who knew the words.
“They never saw me,” Frost whispered to Twiner. “But I believe they thought I was there—” Then Jack froze midthought. His left hand (upon which there is a deep scar) suddenly clenched, as if in pain. As the others went inside past the great oak doors of the Atheneaum Club, Jack stepped aside and peered into the shadows of a nearby side street.
It took a moment before the Nightmare Men showed themselves.
In less than an instant Jack once again turned invisible.
report 66g37* London
And as Katherine recalled, by dawn Jack had left London and made his way to the North Pole. He had returned to them, but in all the years since he had never offered any explanation for his long absence or why he was now called Jack Frost.
Katherine knew that Jack was hiding some dark truth. And he was hiding it for a reason. She hoped that now, perhaps, she would finally learn the secrets of her fair-haired boy.
