“Emmaline?” A cool hand presses against my forehead. I smell fresh, steaming tea. “Sister, help me get her into bed. She’s burning up.”
Those same cool hands lift me. Then, there are soft sheets. A bed that smells of straw. Pillows soft as clouds.
“It’s so cold up here. We should bring her down to Anna’s room right away. There’s a fireplace.”
But I like the smell up here, I want to say. It reminds me of sheep, with their soft, soft wool.
“But Dr. Turner said not to move her. He’s coming back first thing in the morning.”
“That might be too—”
“Shh.” The hands are on my brow, pulling the sheets higher around my neck. “Emmaline? My child?”
“She can’t hear you.”
But I can. I can. I try to tell them, but only a ragged cough comes out. I taste something bitter. One of the nuns stifles a gasp, and then a cloth is pressed to my mouth.
I hear paper rustling.
“All these drawings. Do you think she…she really sees these horses in the mirrors?”
“Sister Mary Grace,” Sister Constance chides. “It is our place to care for the children, not to indulge their feverish delusions.” There are more hands around me, fluffing the pillow, and then Sister Constance adds softer, “Though part of me hopes that she does.”
Sister Mary Grace still shuffles through my drawings. “If only there were someone to send them to. It’s awful, isn’t it? The reports of that bakery during the Nottingham blitz. The bombs, and then the fires. To lose your mother and sister like that—I can’t imagine, and her father the same week in the siege of Tobruk.” Her voice drops. “They were trapped, you know. Her mother and her sister. Dr. Turner heard it from the driver who brought her here. Emmaline was asleep in a different part of the bakery in the middle of the night—you know how she wanders off—when the bombs hit. She must have heard her family banging on the doors, but couldn’t get to them in the rubble. She was burned badly.”
My heart is flit-flit-flitting.
No, I want to tell them. They’re wrong. It wasn’t my father. It wasn’t my mother. It wasn’t Marjorie—Marjorie was even here just yesterday, in her yellow raincoat! It was the horses, kicking at their stalls. The big bay gelding and two smaller mares. Spice. Ginger and Nutmeg.
Paper rustles again. “I suppose all the horses died too.”
“Horses?” Sister Constance opens the door and shuts it behind them, but her voice still carries from the other side. “What horses? Her family worked at a bakery in the middle of Nottingham, far from the nearest pastures. She never had any horses.”
The stillwaters are rising. They are rising and rising, drowning everything they touch. I can hear the horses kicking at their stalls. Their frightened yells sound almost like a person screaming. The stable door is shaking and shaking, but I can’t get to it to let them out.
I can’t help them.
I can’t do anything at all.
—
When I open my eyes, I am alone, and the tea is long cold.
I release a fit of sobbing coughs. The stillwaters are rising fast now.
My head falls to the side. My reflection in Thomas’s small hand mirror shows fever-red cheeks and damp tufts of hair. I snatch it up. Where are the winged horses? Why aren’t they nosing through my tea on my bedside table? Why aren’t they clomping against the wall behind me?
For Emmaline May, from your friend Thomas.
The handwriting is blocky and careful and somehow familiar. But…no, it can’t be Thomas’s. Thomas can’t write. It’s tied to the mirror with…
I sit abruptly.
No, no, no.
…It is tied with a silky red ribbon.
Outside, in the dark, there is a rumble of tires. Headlights flash in the window. It must be Thomas’s aunt come to take him away to London.