Emma cringed and shot Hugh a nervous look. “She knows?”
“When she found out you were gone, she just about went off her chump. Thought you’d been abducted by wights or some barminess. Sorry, Em. I had to tell her.”
Emma shook her head, but all we could do was go in and face the music. Fiona gave us a little salute—as if to wish us luck—and we opened the doors.
Inside the sitting room, the only light was a hearth fire that threw our quivering shadows against the wall. Bronwyn hovered anxiously around an old woman who was teetering half-conscious in a chair, mummied up in a blanket. Miss Peregrine sat on an ottoman, feeding the woman spoonfuls of dark liquid.
When Emma saw her face, she froze. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “It’s Miss Avocet.”
Only then did I recognize her, though just barely, from the photograph Miss Peregrine had shown me of herself as a young girl. Miss Avocet had seemed so indomitable then, but now she looked frail and weak.
As we stood watching, Miss Peregrine brought a silver flask to Miss Avocet’s lips and tipped it, and for a moment the elder ymbryne seemed to revive, sitting forward with brightening eyes. But then her expression dulled again and she sank back into the chair.
“Miss Bruntley,” said Miss Peregrine to Bronwyn, “go and make up the fainting couch for Miss Avocet and then fetch a bottle of coca wine and another flask of brandy.”
Bronwyn trooped out, nodding solemnly as they passed. Next Miss Peregrine turned to us and said in a low voice, “I am tremendously disappointed in you, Miss Bloom. Tremendously. And of all the nights to sneak away.”
“I’m sorry, Miss. But how was I to know something bad would happen?”
“I should punish you. However, given the circumstances, it hardly seems worth the effort.” She raised a hand and smoothed her mentor’s white hair. “Miss Avocet would never have left her wards to come here unless something dire had taken place.”
The roaring fire made beads of sweat break out on my forehead, but in her chair Miss Avocet lay shivering. Would she die? Was the tragic scene that had played out between my grandfather and me about to play out again, this time between Miss Peregrine and her teacher? I pictured it: me holding my grandfather’s body, terrified and confused, never suspecting the truth about him or myself. What was happening now, I decided, was nothing like what had happened to me. Miss Peregrine had always known who she was.
It hardly seemed like the time to bring it up, but I was angry and couldn’t help myself. “Miss Peregrine?” I began, and she looked up. “When were you going to tell me?”
She was about to ask what, but then her eyes went to Emma, and she seemed to read the answer on her face. For a moment she looked mad, but then she saw my anger, and her own faded. “Soon, lad. Please understand. To have laid the entire truth upon you at our first meeting would have been an awful shock. Your behavior was unpredictable. You might’ve fled, never to return. I could not take that risk.”
“So instead you tried to seduce me with food and fun and girls while keeping all the bad things a secret?”
Emma gasped. “Seduce? Oh, please, don’t think that of me, Jacob. I couldn’t bear it.”
“I fear you’ve badly misjudged us,” said Miss Peregrine. “As for seducing you, what you’ve seen is how we live. There has been no deception, only the withholding of a few facts.”
“Well here’s a fact for you,” I said. “One of those creatures killed my grandfather.”
Miss Peregrine stared at the fire for a moment. “I am very sorry to hear that.”
“I saw one with my own eyes. When I told people about it, they tried to convince me I was crazy. But I wasn’t, and neither was my grandfather. His whole life he’d been telling me the truth, and I didn’t believe him.” Shame flooded over me. “If I had, maybe he’d still be alive.”
Miss Peregrine saw that I was wobbling and offered me the chair across from Miss Avocet.
I sate, and Emma knelt down beside me. “Abe must’ve known you were peculiar,” she said. “And he must’ve had a good reason for not telling you.”
“He did indeed know,” replied Miss Peregrine. “He said as much in a letter.”
“I don’t understand, then. If it was all true—all his stories—and if he knew I was like him, why did he keep it a secret until the last minute of his life?”
Miss Peregrine spoon-fed more brandy to Miss Avocet, who groaned and sat up a little before settling back into the chair. “I can only imagine that he wanted to protect you,” she said. “Ours can be a life of trials and deprivations. Abe’s life was doubly so because he was born a Jew in the worst of times. He faced a double genocide, of Jews by the Nazis and of peculiars by the hollowgast. He was tormented by the idea that he was hiding here while his people, both Jews and peculiars, were being slaughtered.”
“He used to say he’d gone to war to fight monsters,” I said.
“He did,” said Emma.
“The war ended the Nazis’ rule, but the hollowgast emerged stronger than ever,” Miss Peregrine continued. “So, like many peculiars, we remained in hiding. But your grandfather returned a changed man. He’d become a warrior, and he was determined to build a life for himself outside the loop. He refused to hide.”
“I begged him not to go to America,” Emma said. “We all did.”
“Why did he choose America?” I asked.
“It had few hollowgast at that time,” Miss Peregrine replied. “After the war there was a minor exodus of peculiars to America. For a while many were able to pass as common, as your grandfather did. It was his fondest wish to be common, to live a common life. He often mentioned it in his letters. I’m sure that’s why he kept the truth from you for so long. He wanted for you what he could never have for himself.”
“To be ordinary,” I said.
Miss Peregrine nodded. “But he could never escape his peculiarity. His unique skill, coupled with the prowess he’d honed during the war as a hunter of hollows, made him too valuable. He was often pressed into service, asked to help eradicate troublesome pockets of hollows. His nature was such that he rarely refused.”
I thought about all the long hunting trips Grandpa Portman used to go on. My family had a picture of him taken during one of these, though I don’t know who took it or when since he almost always went alone. But when I was a kid I thought it was the funniest thing because, in the picture, he’s wearing a suit. Who brings a suit on a hunting trip?
Now I knew: Someone who’s hunting more than just animals.
I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about. For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved. I guess that’s why he wrote so many letters to Emma and Miss Peregrine. They understood.