“I’m sorry, Sister. I won’t sneak around anymore, I promise.”
“Indeed.” Her voice is hard.
She closes the door in Bog’s face before he can come in. He presses his dog-nose to the glass panes in the door, fogging it. Thomas starts to say something, but then stops. The soldiers seem young and affable, like they could be friends of his, but they do not smile.
“Mr. Thomas Whatley?”
“That’s me, yes.”
I watch over my shoulder as I drift down the hall, moving as slowly as I can. When I reach the library, it is filled with whispers. How odd. I go inside, where Benny and Jack and ten other children who are supposed to be preparing for class are pressed against the wall.
“What are you—”
“Quiet, flea!” Jack says in a scowling whisper. “We can hear, if you shut your mouth.”
I scowl back at him. His Lionel steam engine toy train with the real working whistle sits beside him; I’m tempted to kick it. Send the hunk of shiny green metal across the floor—
My breath catches.
Green.
The train’s paint glimmers in the light: 865-EMERALD GREEN. It would serve him right, Benny’s little stoolie, if the train disappeared….
Muffled soldiers’ voices come from down the hallway. Beth, one of the three little mice, scoots over and taps the floor next to her. Tearing my eyes away from Jack’s train, I press into the warm bodies of feverish children, my ear to the thin wall. I can only make out every few words in the soldiers’ soft voices. Something about a battle somewhere near Egypt. A shell and a hospital. Then Thomas lets out a single sharp moan.
“What’s happened?” Susan, the littlest mouse, who has just come in, whispers. “Is it about the war?”
“Of course it’s about the war,” Benny snaps. “It’s always about the war, if it’s soldiers. They’re talking about Thomas’s father. He was off fighting Rommel’s men in the western desert campaign. I think he’s been killed.” Benny tiptoes to the library door and peeks around in the hall. After a moment he comes back, and he makes a big gesture of taking off his cap, just as the soldier did. “They handed Thomas a package. I think it was his father’s last belongings from the hospital, paperwork and things. They said something about medals of honor, too, and gave him a little box stamped with the king’s own crest. Said his father was one of England’s finest heroes.”
“Poor Thomas,” Susan says.
Benny holds his chin high. “Such things happen. We must carry on.”
Peter coughs.
Sister Mary Grace sticks her head in the library and hisses that they can hear us whispering down the hall. We all scramble to our feet and rush out of the library, and there’s the sound of feet running upstairs and then doors slamming up and down the residence hall.
I pause and look back toward the library once more; Jack’s train is gone. He must have taken it with him.
“What’s happened?” Anna is calling from her bedroom upstairs. “Hello? Won’t someone tell me?”
But no one answers her.
By the front door, the soldiers are still talking quietly to Thomas, who is clutching a package filled with papers and things in his long arm. Sister Mary Grace has one of her hands over her mouth. Thomas has his back to me. His shoulders sag. I cannot see his face.
Slowly, I climb the stairs all the way to my attic room. I feel hot tears on my cheeks. Thomas is not a monster, I am certain of it. And he is hurting.
I push open the frosted window. If I lean out, I can see the corner of the walled gardens.
I know that the red ribbon and the yellow bottle are there, tucked safely into the ivy. Soon, I hope, I can add a snotty boy’s emerald green Lionel steam engine with a working whistle to the spectral shield.
I peer upward, just in case. The skies are clear. No Black Horse circling, though I know he is near. Waiting. Smelling. Hunting.
Down below, on the front steps, Bog sits in the cold, face against the glass, waiting for Thomas.
THE OLD PRINCESS LIKED to collect things. I know this because my room is in the attic. And except for that one time Jack and Benny sneaked up for a smoke, I am the only child who ever comes here. The stairs are narrow and steep. There are no lights, except for candles and lanterns, and a single window at each end. The storerooms are dusty and filled with crates covered in spiderwebs and stamped with words in foreign languages. Most of the crates are empty. When the princess left, she took almost everything valuable from downstairs, except the china plates and things we might need in the hospital. But I think, in her old age, she forgot about the boxes up here. I think everyone forgot.
It is lights-out, and I promised Sister Constance I wouldn’t sneak around, but in the attic I can move unseen and unheard. I light a candle and put it on a plate, which I set down next to the biggest box, an old trunk with rotting leather straps and sea-salt stains in the corners.