“Winnie,” said Miss Saunders after plying her with a custard tart one day. “I’m worried about you. You’ve been down.”

Winnie blinked at her from where she lay.

“I was thinking. How would you like some visitors?”

Winnie sighed and turned away.

“I know it’s not customary, but you’re not a customary bear. Even with Sam and Barbara, we’d be worried about someone getting hurt. But I don’t believe you could hurt a fruit fly, could you?”

Winnie thought. She got to her feet and went and sniffed at Miss Saunders’s handbag. “Do you have anything more to eat?”

Miss Saunders smiled. “That’s the spirit,” she said, opening her bag. “What sort of guest doesn’t bring a little something extra?”

The next day, there was someone standing beside Miss Saunders at the gate: an elderly woman wearing a long coat who was not much taller than Winnie. Wisps of white hair peeked out from beneath the brim of her ornate hat. Around her neck and in the lobes of her ears were stones that sparkled brightly even in the gloom of the tunnel.

“Winnie,” said Miss Saunders. “I’d like you to meet Mrs. Mappin. She’s one of our patron saints.”

“Nonsense,” the woman said. “It was my husband, John, and the silversmiths of Mappin & Webb who made all this possible. I’m just a lover of animals.”

Miss Saunders opened the gate and pressed a bottle of milk into Mrs. Mappin’s frail hand. Mrs. Mappin moved toward your Bear slowly, with a doubtful look back to Miss Saunders. Winnie stood and went to meet her.

“Is that for me?” wondered Winnie, her lips searching for the bottle.

Mrs. Mappin drew in her breath when Winnie began to feed. “My, you are a beauty,” she said, tipping the bottle. She stroked Winnie’s neck with her other trembling hand.

Mrs. Mappin came to see your Bear throughout that spring, sometimes twice a day. She fed Winnie, and held her, and petted her. Most of all, she talked to her.

“Why, I was just a girl,” Mrs. Mappin said. “But when John said, ‘You know, Ellen, a silver goblet is worthless without something to fill it,’ there wasn’t a thing I could do but fall for him.” Winnie remembered Harry’s hand reaching out to her under the bench at the station in White River.

“You can’t imagine the uproar when John and my brother George set up shop down the road from John’s brothers,” Mrs. Mappin said on another visit. “They were furious! But John felt he had to prove himself.” Winnie thought of Harry, face-to-face with the Colonel the morning he became Orderly Officer of the Day.

“The maharaja wanted a bedroom done completely in silver. When it was finished, John put the whole room up in the store window, and they had to shut down the street for the crowds! The police made him take it down because they were sure someone would steal it.” Winnie remembered the glittering smells of the mess tent at Valcartier, Harry whisking her away in his arms.

“This was his dream, and he held on to see it through. You probably don’t know this, because you’re a bear, but John left us nearly on the day construction of the Terraces was finished.” Winnie recalled Harry’s pale, clear eyes as he held her face in his hands before leaving her at the Zoo.

The bottle was empty once more.

Mrs. Mappin blinked as if she were just waking up. “I can’t believe it’s been almost a year since he passed.” Her eyes became shiny, and she blew out a trembling breath. “I miss him very, very much,” she said, and it was as if she were speaking for your Bear. But then Mrs. Mappin laughed through her tears: “But you make me feel better, you silly bear.”

Winnie sat back. Mrs. Mappin had jogged something loose way up inside her.

As if a nut had fallen from a tree and plunked her on the head, your Bear suddenly remembered her duty.

“That’s why I’m here!” Winnie leaned in and stuck her nose right in Mrs. Mappin’s face. “I make people feel better!”

When Winnie was jolted awake in her den that night, her first thought was of the horses.

The Terraces were cast in a strange light. It was a cloudless night, the moon nearly full in a way bears can sense, but something wasn’t right.

When Winnie looked at the sky, a shiver rippled through her. Something was partly blocking the moon. Droplets were falling from whatever it was, black rain against the dark gray night.

Balls of fire bounced off the horizon suddenly. And then the explosions reached Winnie’s ears, and all at once, the sounds of the Zoo rushed in: the alarmed trumpeting of elephants, monkeys screaming, birds calling out to one another.

On the other side of her den’s wall, Winnie heard Barbara weeping as Sam tried to comfort her.

Winnie shrank back against her slope. A man on a bicycle rode past the bottom of the Terraces blowing a whistle in short forceful bursts. “Take cover!” he cried between shrieks of his whistle. “Take cover!”

More explosions rattled the City.

Someone ran by on the walkway above your Bear. “It’s a zeppelin attack! Get the animals inside!”

“What’s a zeppelin?” asked Cole, hiding his Bear under the covers.

“It’s a really big blimp.”

“It dropped bombs?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone get hurt?”

“Seven people died in that first raid on London, but the Zoo was okay.”

Cole pressed his lower lip against the satin edge of his blanket. “I didn’t know there were war blimps.”

The air still smelled burnt when the first visitors arrived at the Zoo the next morning. Faces were pale. Legs moved stiffly. The whole city was shaken by the attack in the night.

But Winnie was up and ready.

Attention! Salute! Forward! Double march! She marched along on two legs, waving with her nose at the passersby.

On the walkway, a little girl giggled and tugged her distracted mother’s hand. The woman looked, and a smile spread across her face.

More and more visitors stopped to point and wave at your Bear. A round-faced boy sitting on his daddy’s shoulders clapped for her, kicking his father’s chest with his heels. A woman wrapped in colorful scarves waved her hands over her head, and Winnie did the same. A member of the fire brigade threw her a warm bun, and she caught it in midair.

“Winnie,” Sam called over the wall, “are you trying to steal my thunder?”

“Thunder?” Winnie dropped onto all fours. “Is that why you need all those umbrellas?”