Rémy took his wages and moved into his own flat so as to be out from under Tamar’s feet. Harriet, Margot, and possibly Ms. Danilenko missed him, but that was all. As mentioned, Ambrose was fine with whatever, and Gabriel—he and Rémy weren’t friends. They didn’t go to the same places or know very many of the same people, and their cordiality was careful, in that anything they said to and about each other had been very well considered beforehand. They might have been thinking that given all the other problems between parents, aunt, and uncle they couldn’t afford cousin problems too.
Gabriel may have given Harriet her first extra-nice notebook, but it was Rémy who scorned Tamar’s less scenic route to the dovecote in order to walk between the house’s close-set windowsills and fetch stray messages. One night Harriet was looking at the day’s list of new words and thinking, My head’s too full; these will never go in, when a long shadow crossed her windowpane. She thought . . . or rather, deliberately not thinking, she went to the window and looked out over the rock garden. It was Ambrose’s rock garden, since he was the one who cared most for it. She watched as shadows swept along grassy slopes and swirled down the stream: none were human-shaped. Harriet knelt on her tabletop, opened the window, and stuck her head out. She looked left and right, and Rémy was on the next windowsill with his back pressed against the front of the house. He was studying the rocks below with a look that wasn’t anywhere near as life-affirming as she would have liked, and she said his name very gently, in case he got startled. He did, a little, but quickly recovered.
You all right? he asked.
What are you doing out there? You don’t even live here anymore.
Rude. I’m out here talking to a pretty-ish girl on what could be the last night of my life . . . that’s what I’m doing.
Rémy. Come and talk to me in here for a minute.
Aren’t you going to get insulted about “pretty-ish”?
I . . . will do that once you come in. Just come in, please.
She’d already been leaning quite far out of the window as they talked, and now she began to climb out onto the ledge. When he saw that, Rémy spread an arm along the wall (certainly more of a spreading motion than a stretching one, as if he were a man of moss) and pressed the center of her forehead with two fingers. Quite gently, yet she lost her balance and rolled off her tabletop and onto the floor, thump, thump. She looked up . . . he was directly outside her window now. Somehow, very slowly, Rémy turned around on that tightrope of stone, and he bent to look in at her. His arms were above his head; in daylight she tried to see what he’d used to steady himself and couldn’t find anything.
If I fell from here I’d be just about OK, he said. My dad jumped off at this height years ago. Probably trying to kill himself. He says he wasn’t, says he just slipped, but wouldn’t you say that too if it turned out you weren’t even able to get suicide right? He just ended up with egg on his face—and that limp of his.
Harriet covered her face and was silent, not wanting Rémy to come in, not wanting him to fall. He seemed to get it and came no closer, just threw a folded square of paper in through the window.
You shouldn’t listen to me . . . it’s just that you’re so earnest I couldn’t resist. Anyway, I was up in the dovecote and found that. Read it and unwind a bit. Goodnight!
He left her and rapped at the next window, Ms. Danilenko’s, or Mr. Bianchi’s, depending on whose room had moved up or down a floor of late. The window opened, and Rémy went in legs first, stepping into the building as if it was a pair of overstarched trousers.
The letter was written in tiny cursive script across three thin sheets, and it was Gretel through and through:
Harriet, I’m sorry to call you away from the present moment. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this to you, but you were in a dream I just had, so I think it must be all right to intrude for a few seconds. The dream: We were in times to come. You’d grown up, and as discussed, I had not. But we were a pair of prisoners up before some sort of tribunal, and our judges knew that I was older than you, even though I didn’t look it. They were all little girls, every conceivable color and none of them above the age of nine. They were wearing those wigs barristers wear, so they all looked like deranged lambs, and they kept waving assorted objects in our faces—an extra-large bar of chocolate, a mortgage application, a Nobel Peace Prize medal, an assortment of old-fashioned porn, newspaper headlines, a baby’s dummy, scientific research articles, a yoga mat, reams and reams of statistics, what else did they bring out . . . the list of things they didn’t bring out would be much shorter. And the shouting as each exhibit was presented: What do you make of this, then? How about this and this?
Eventually the leader stood up, unrolled a wheel of parchment, and read it all the way down to the floor and all the way along to the back of the hall—this was a list of all the laws we had broken—and when she got to the end of them, she said, Well, quite, but the main problem is that you’re in breach of contract, ladies, so it’s not looking good for either of you, I’m afraid.
And you said, Wait, what, what contract! What is it you wanted us to say to all this?
The leader said: Anything. I suppose you thought you could just hum and haw and meddle and take notes without anybody ever finding out what it is you stand for and what you oppose. Guidelines, all you had to do was lay out guidelines . . . now look at us—WE’VE GONE ASTRAY—
And the entire tribunal came running at us. They were screaming that they meant to get their support and inspiration by hook or by crook. Some of them grabbed me around the neck and near well pulled my head off . . . I saw that others had got hold of your shoulders and were trying to pull you away from me, but we held on tight and started using each other’s bodies sort of like truncheons, and we sent those kids flying left, right, and center . . .
I expected their guardians to roll in and send us flying ourselves, but those little idiots didn’t have anybody else. They all lay down flat on the ground, bawling, SAVE US, SAVE US . . . This was addressed to us, to me and you, but it wasn’t clear exactly what they had in mind. I mean, if they meant “save me” as in rescue me, that falls under my remit as a changeling, but if they meant “save me” as in preserve me, surely that’s more up your gingerbread street. I do think that if they meant both things they were in luck, because really we don’t go anywhere without each other.
It was the last note the Druhástranian pigeons brought back before they retired. After she read it, Harriet got out an atlas and flipped through it, looking for the locations Gretel had pinned, wishing she’d paid more attention instead of leaving it all to Gretel. One place in England, one in the Czech Republic, and the third she couldn’t remember at all. They hadn’t even set dates, so even if they were both at the right place, the times to meet might well come and go unremarked, making Harriet just like those winners of the numbers game who’d lost their tickets and never found out that they’d won. Harriet and Gretel had form, though. They had luck.