“Moments ago. Was that from you, the message on the other side?” he asks, though he thinks the handwriting looks too juvenile for this to be true, he wonders about the rabbit ears.
Eleanor turns over the note and looks at the awkward letters, the loopy rabbit.
“I wrote this eight years ago,” she says.
“Why would you slip such an old note under the door just now?”
“I put it under the door right after I wrote it. I don’t understand.”
She frowns and closes the door with the feather on it. She walks to the other side of the room. Somewhere in the interim Simon notices that she is quite pretty, despite the eccentricities of her wardrobe. Her eyes are dark, almost black, her skin a light brown, and there is a hint of something foreign to her features. She seems as unlike the girls his aunt sometimes parades by him as it is possible to be. He tries to imagine what she would look like in a gown, and then what she would look like without a gown, and then he coughs, flustered.
She looks at each of the doors in turn.
“I don’t understand,” she says to herself. She turns and looks at Simon again. No, stares at him, scrutinizing him from his hair to his boots. “Are there any bees in here?” she asks him. She starts looking behind the bookshelves and under the pillows.
“Not that I have seen,” Simon tells her, reflexively looking under the table. “There was a cat, earlier, but it departed.”
“How did you get here?” she asks him, catching his eyes from beneath the other side of the table. “Down here, I mean, the place not the room.”
“Through a door, in a cottage—”
“You have a door?” Eleanor asks. She sits on the floor amongst the chairs, cross-legged, looking at him expectantly.
“It is not mine, precisely,” Simon clarifies. Though he supposes it is, if the cottage is his. A strange inheritance. He sits as well, pushing a chair out of the way, so they are facing each other in a forest of chair legs with a table canopy.
“I thought most of the doors were gone,” Eleanor confides.
Simon tells her about his mother, about the envelope and the key and the cottage. She listens intently and he adds as much detail as he can think to. The wax seal on the envelope. The ivy on the cottage. She wears a curious expression as he describes the cagelike elevator but does not interrupt.
“Your mother was here?” Eleanor asks when he has brought the story through the door and into the room in which they now sit.
“Apparently.” Simon thinks this might be better than a letter, to have spaces she occupied and books she read.
“What did she look like?” Eleanor asks.
“I don’t remember,” Simon answers, and suddenly wishes to change the subject. “I have never met a girl who wears trousers before,” he says, hoping she does not take offense.
“I can’t climb things in a dress,” Eleanor explains, as though stating a simple fact.
“Climbing is not for girls.”
“Anything is for girls.”
Her expression is so serious it makes him consider the statement. It runs counter to everything his uncle says about girls but he thinks perhaps his uncle does not know as much about girls as he lets on, and his aunt has very particular ideas about what constitutes ladylike.
He wonders if he has stumbled upon a place where girls do not play games, where there are not unspoken rules to follow. No expectations. No chaperones. He wonders if his mother was like that. Wonders what makes a woman a witch.
They continue volleying questions and answers back and forth, sometimes so many at once it is like juggling to answer one and then another and more in between. Simon tells her things he has never told anyone. He confides fears and exposes worries, thoughts falling from his lips that he dared not speak aloud but it is different here, with her.
She tells him about the place. About the books and the rooms and the cats. She has a tiny jar of honey in her bag and she lets him taste it. He expects sweetness but it is more than that, rich and golden and smoky.
Simon is lost for words, licking honey from his fingers, thinking thoughts he cannot express and is certain would be inappropriate if he could.
Eleanor does not know what to make of this boy with his frilly shirt and buttoned jacket. Is he a boy or a man? She is not sure how to tell the difference. He pronounces his r’s strangely. She is not certain if he is handsome, she has little reference for such things, but she likes his face. There is an openness in it. She wonders if he has no secrets. He has brown eyes but his hair is blond, she has read so many books where blond hair goes with blue eyes that she finds it incongruous. His face is so much more than hair and eye color, she wonders why books do not describe the curves of noses or the length of eyelashes. She studies the shape of his lips. Perhaps a face is too complicated to capture in words.
Eleanor reaches out and touches his hair. He looks so surprised that she pulls her hand back.
“I’m sorry,” she says.