His eyes flicked over the page many more times than was necessary to read a three-sentence story. Then he removed a cigar stub from his coat pocket and struck a match, puffing until the end glowed at me like the hot orange eye of a dragon.
He sighed, the way he sighed when he was forced to deliver some bad news to his investors, and closed my diary. “What fanciful nonsense, January. How often have I tried to cure you of it?”
He ran his thumb across the cover of my diary and then deliberately, almost mournfully, tossed it into the messy heap of lumber behind him.
“No! You can’t—”
“I’m sorry, January. Truly.” He met my eyes and made an abortive movement with his hand, as if he wanted to reach toward me. “But this is simply what must be done, for your sake. I’ll expect you at dinner.”
I wanted to fight him. To argue, to snatch my diary out of the dirt—but I couldn’t.
I ran away instead. Back across the field, back up winding dirt roads, back into the sour-smelling hotel lobby.
And so the very beginning of my story features a skinny-legged girl on the run twice in the space of a few hours. It’s not a very heroic introduction, is it? But—if you’re an in-between sort of creature with no family and no money, with nothing but your own two legs and a silver coin—sometimes running away is the only thing you can do.
And anyway, if I hadn’t been the kind of girl who ran away, I wouldn’t have found the blue Door. And there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell.
The fear of God and Mr. Locke kept me quiet that evening and the following day. I was well watched by Mr. Stirling and the nervous hotel manager, who herded me the way you might handle a valuable but dangerous zoo animal. I amused myself for a while by slamming the keys on the grand piano and watching him flinch, but eventually I was shepherded back into my room and advised to go to sleep.
I was out the low window and dodging through the alley before the sun had fully set. The road was scattered with shadows like shallow black pools, and by the time I reached the field, stars were shimmering through the hot haze of smoke and tobacco that hung over Ninley. I stumbled through the grass, squinting into the gloom for that house-of-cards shape.
The blue Door wasn’t there.
Instead, I found a ragged black circle in the grass. Ash and char were all that remained of my Door. My pocket diary lay among the coals, curled and blackened. I left it there.
When I stumbled back into the sagging, not-very-grand hotel, the sky was tar-black and my knee socks were stained. Mr. Locke was sitting in an oily blue cloud of smoke in the lobby with his ledgers and papers spread before him and his favorite jade tumbler full of evening scotch.
“And where have you been this evening? Did you walk back through that door and find yourself on Mars? Or the moon, perhaps?” But his tone was gentle. The thing about Mr. Locke is that he really was kind to me. Even during the worst of it, he was always kind.
“No,” I admitted. “But I bet there are more Doors just like it. I bet I could find them and write about them and they’d all open. And I don’t care if you don’t believe me.” Why didn’t I just keep my stupid mouth closed? Why didn’t I shake my head and apologize with a hint of tears in my voice, and slink off to bed with the memory of the blue Door like a secret talisman in my pocket? Because I was seven and stubborn, and didn’t yet understand the cost of true stories.
“Is that so,” was all Mr. Locke said, and I marched to my room under the impression that I’d evaded more severe punishment.
It wasn’t until we arrived back in Vermont a week later that I realized I was wrong.
Locke House was an immense red stone castle perched at the edge of Lake Champlain, topped with a forest of chimneys and copper-roofed towers. Its innards were wood-paneled and labyrinthine, bristling with the strange and rare and valuable; a Boston Herald columnist had once described it as “architecturally fanciful, more reminiscent of Ivanhoe than a modern man’s abode.” It was rumored that a mad Scotsman had commissioned it in the 1790s, spent a week living in it, and then vanished forevermore. Mr. Locke bought it at auction in the 1880s and began filling it with the world’s wonders.
Father and I were stuffed into two rooms on the third story: a tidy, square office for him, with a big desk and a single window, and a gray, musty-smelling room with two narrow beds for me and my nursemaid. The newest one was a German immigrant named Miss Wilda, who wore heavy black woolen gowns and an expression that said she hadn’t seen much of the twentieth century yet but heartily disapproved of it thus far. She liked hymns and freshly folded laundry, and detested fuss, mess, and cheek. We were natural enemies.
Upon our return, Wilda and Mr. Locke had a hurried conversation in the hall. Her eyes glittered at me like overshined coat buttons.
“Mr. Locke tells me you’ve been overstimulated lately, nearly hysterical, little dove.” Miss Wilda often called me little dove; she was a believer in the power of suggestion.
“No, ma’am.”
“Ah, poor dear. We’ll have you right as the rain in no time at all.”
The cure for overstimulation was a calm, structured environment without distraction; my room was therefore summarily stripped of everything colorful or whimsical or dear. The curtains were drawn and the bookshelf cleared of anything more exciting than A Child’s Illustrated Bible. My favorite pink-and-gold bedspread—Father had sent it to me from Bangalore the previous year—was exchanged for starched white sheets. Samuel was forbidden to visit.
Miss Wilda’s key slid and thunked in the keyhole, and I was alone.
At first I imagined myself a prisoner of war resisting the redcoats or rebels and practiced my expression of stoic resistance. But by the second day the silence was like two thumbs pressing against my eardrums and my legs shuddered and shook with the desire to run and keep running, back to that cedar-spiraled field, through the ashes of the blue Door to some other world.
On the third day, my room became a cell, which became a cage, which became a coffin, and I discovered the very deepest fear that swam through my heart like eels in undersea caves: to be locked away, trapped and alone.
Something in the center of me cracked. I tore at the curtains with clawed nails, I ripped the knobs from dresser drawers, I beat my small fists against the locked door, and then I sat on the floor and wept great hiccuping rivers of tears until Miss Wilda returned with a syrupy spoonful of something that took me away from myself for a while. My muscles turned to oiled, languorous rivers and my head bobbed loosely along the surface. The creep of shadows across the rugs became a terrible drama so absorbing there wasn’t room for anything else in my head until I fell asleep.
When I woke, Mr. Locke was sitting at the side of my bed reading a newspaper. “Morning, my dear. And how are you feeling?”
I swallowed sour spit. “Better, sir.”
“I’m glad.” He folded his paper with architectural precision. “Listen to me very carefully, January. You are a girl of very great potential—immense, even!—but you’ve got to learn to behave yourself. From now on there will be no more fanciful nonsense, or running off, or doors that lead places they shouldn’t.”
His expression as he surveyed me made me think of old-timey illustrations of God: severely paternal, bestowing the kind of love that weighs and measures before it finds you worthy. His eyes were stones, pressing down. “You are going to mind your place and be a good girl.”