It was well past noon now, and our shadows had begun to creep cautiously out from under us, shattering into dark spindles in the tall grass. The river and the cicadas made a kind of rushing thrum beneath the soles of my feet, as if the earth were humming to itself.
Mr. Locke breathed, waiting.
Words pressed at the roof of my mouth, words like Thank you or Yes, of course, sir or maybe Give me some time. They were pleased, flattered words, oozing with girlish gratitude that he loved me and trusted me and wanted me by his side.
I wondered if they were my words or Mr. Locke’s, delivered to me through his white-eyed gaze. The thought was sick-making, dizzying—infuriating. “No. Thank you.” I hissed it between locked teeth.
Locke clucked his tongue. “Don’t be imprudent, girl. Do you think you’d be permitted to wander freely, with your habit of opening things that ought to be left closed? The Society would not suffer such a creature to live.”
“Mr. Ilvane already indicated as much. As did Mr. Havemeyer.”
Locke huffed in exasperation. “Yes, I’m terribly sorry about Theodore and Bartholomew. They were both given to extremes, and to violent solutions. No one will miss Theodore much, I assure you. I’ll admit there were some concerns about Miss Whatsit and your little grocer boy, but I’ve dealt with them now.”
Dealt with—but they were supposed to be safe, supposed to be hidden in Arcadia—a soft wailing sound rang in my ears, as if I were hearing someone crying from a long ways away. I stepped forward, half stumbling on something buried in the ash pile.
“Jane—S-Samuel—” I could barely speak their names.
“Are both perfectly fine!” I went weak with relief and found myself kneeling in the ash with Bad propping me up on one side. “We found them creeping down the coast of Maine after you. We hardly caught a glimpse of Miss Whatsit—awfully quick on her feet, the thieving bitch—but we’ll find her eventually, I’m sure. The boy, though, was quite cooperative.”
A ringing silence. The cicadas hummed and thrilled. “What did you do to him?” It was a whisper.
“My, my, is this a crush, after a decade of Little Miss Leave Me Alone I’m Reading?”If you’ve killed him, I will write a knife into my hand, I swear I will—“Calm yourself, January. My methods of interrogation are far less, hm, primitive than Havemeyer’s. I simply asked him a few questions about you, realized you’d unwisely told him all about Society business, and told him to forget the entire affair. Which he obligingly did. We sent him trotting off home without a care in the world.”
Mr. Locke’s smile—comforting, assured—told me he didn’t understand what he’d done.
He didn’t understand the horror of it, the violation. He didn’t understand that reaching into someone’s mind and sculpting it like living clay is a species of violence far worse than Havemeyer’s.
Was this what he’d done to me, my whole life? Forced me to become someone else? Someone biddable and demure and good, who didn’t run off into hayfields or play on the lakeshore with the grocer’s son or beg on a weekly basis to go adventuring with her father?
Be a good girl, and mind your place. Oh, how I’d tried. How I’d worked to fit myself inside the narrow confines of the girl Mr. Locke told me to be, how I’d mourned my failures.
He didn’t understand how much I hated him then, as I knelt in the ashes and tall grasses, my tears turning to muddy paste on my cheeks.
“So you see, everything is taken care of. Join the Society and all this nonsense will be forgotten. The invitation is still open, just as I promised.” I could barely hear him over my roaring, keening fury. “Don’t you see you’re meant to do this? I’ve raised you at my side, let you see the world, taught you everything I could. I never felt it would be entirely wise to—ah”—Locke coughed in brief embarrassment—“to have a child of my own—what if he was Birthrighted? What if he came to challenge my rule? But just look at you! My adopted child has turned out to be nearly as willful, nearly as powerful as any true-born son of mine could be.” His eyes on me were lit with pride, like an owner admiring his best horse. “I don’t know precisely what you’re capable of, I admit, but let us find out together! Join us. Help us protect this world.”
I knew when Mr. Locke protected something he locked it away, stifled it, kept it preserved like an amputated limb in a glass case. He’d been protecting me my entire life, and it’d nearly killed me, or at least my soul.
I wouldn’t let him continue to do that to the world. I wouldn’t. But how could I not, when he could remake my will with a mere look? I buried my hands in the weedy ashes around me, an unvoiced wail caught in my throat.
It is at that moment I made two interesting discoveries: The first was a hunk of charcoal lurking beneath the surface layer of rain-leached ash and mud. The second was the burnt, rotting remains of my pocket diary. The diary my father had placed in the blue chest a decade ago, just for me.
The cover, once softest calfskin, was now stiff and cracked, burnt black around the edges. Only the first three letters of my name were still visible (see the unfurled curve of that J, like a rope dangling out a prison window?). Pieces of it crumbled and flaked away as I opened it; the pages inside were fire-chewed and dirty.
“What’s that? What—put that down, January. I mean it.” Locke’s feet stumped toward me. I brought the charcoal to the page, made a single sinuous line. God, I hope this works.
“I’m not joking—” A sweaty hand circled my chin and forced my face upward. I met those pale, cutting eyes. “Stop, January.”
It was like being submerged in a winter river. An incalculable weight crushed me downward, pressed me, tugged at my clothes and limbs and urged them in a single direction—and wouldn’t it be so much easier if I just let the river take me, instead of gritting my jaw and refusing—I could go back home again, could curl back into my former good-girl place like a loyal hound at her master’s feet—
It became a question, as I stared into Mr. Locke’s bone-pale eyes, of how thoroughly he’d succeeded in making me be a good girl who knew her place. Had his will entirely eclipsed my own? Had he scrubbed away my natural self and left nothing but a china-doll version behind? Or had he merely stuffed me into a costume and forced me to play a part?
I thought abruptly of Mr. Stirling—the eerie emptiness of him, as if there were nothing at all lurking beneath his good-valet mask. Was that my future? Was there anything left of that obstinate, temerarious girl-child who found a Door in the field, all those years ago?
I thought of my desperate escape from Brattleboro; the midnight swim to the abandoned lighthouse, and my wandering, dangerous route southward. I thought of every time I’d disobeyed Wilda or snuck a story paper into Locke’s office rather than read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; of the hours I’d spent dreaming of adventure and mystery and magic. I thought of myself here, now, kneeling in the dirt of my mother’s home in defiance of Havemeyer and the Society and Mr. Locke himself—and rather suspected there was.
Could I choose, now, who I wanted to be?
The river surged and rushed against me, willing me down, down, down—but it was as if I’d turned into something impossibly heavy, a lead statue of a girl and her dog standing together, unbothered by the crushing river.