Today's Reading
PART I
"When you are young so many things are difficult to believe, and yet the dullest people will tell you that they are true—such things, for instance, as that the earth goes round the sun, and that it is not flat but round. But the things that seem really likely, like fairy-tales and magic, are, so say the grown-ups, not true at all. Yet they are so easy to believe, especially when you see them happening." —The Enchanted Castle by E. NESBIT, 1907
"The tales of Mesterra—of its inhabitants and visitors, both good and evil; some who came and went from other worlds; some who came and stayed—are full-told in 'The Writ of Queens'. Few have read it, however, for it languishes in an obscure library in Tellus. If you are very lucky, you might stumble upon it and read the stories for yourself.
But here, in the tales of Ternival, we shall follow the stories as yet untold." —Ternival: Selected Tales by A. H. W. CLIFTON, 1940
Chapter 1
In all the old stories, in those fairy tales I still half believed, this was how it happened. Ordinary kids were visiting relatives, maybe. Or stuck at boarding school. Alone. Uncertain. Yearning for adventure. And before long, adventure came to them. They took a wrong turn, were chased away from everything familiar—and suddenly a door opened to another world.
That summer, at age fourteen, I was too old to believe anymore, of course.
But the ache, the yearning, was still there.
It never leaves us, really. The question is whether it will become our truest hope or deepest wound.
Or both.
JULY 1995
"Whatever you do," Mum said as the car swept toward my grandmother's estate, "don't mention your father."
It'd been raining ever since Grandmother's chauffeur, Paxton, had picked us up from the airport. Gray suburbs had eventually given way to crooked villages, then to muddy farms and pasturelands bordered by dripping hedgerows. Ahead loomed a range of mist-bound hills, moody and mysterious. Like we'd fallen into a fairy tale. Grim but thoroughly enchanting.
I tore my gaze from the window. "Don't mention Dad?" I repeated. "Why not?"
Mum sat rigidly in the back seat next to me, fiddling with the clasp of her handbag. After our long flight, her librarian tweeds were crumpled, her chin- length brown hair disheveled, her small, fine- boned face pale and tense. "Just don't," she said. "Actually, pause, in general, before you speak. Blathering is a habit your grandmother never could stand."
"I don't blather."
She exhaled. "Nosiness, then."
"I'm not nosy." This wasn't strictly true.
"Eva, dear, you're lovely. But she doesn't know that yet."
I held my tongue. I could practice not being nosy, all right. Never mind that my grandmother and I were perfect strangers. Never mind that, until now, there'd been no transatlantic trips between England and Connecticut in all my fourteen years. No phone calls. No birthday cards. And no explanations, despite my many questions.
Mum appraised my ginger-blond curls with another sigh. "It will have to do," she murmured to herself. "If only we could find your 'comb' somewhere..."
Paxton's glance in the rearview mirror met mine for a second. Silent and morose, like a heron, the old chauffeur hadn't said more than five sentences since we'd left the airport. Those eyes held secrets, I thought. He knew something.
Most visitors bound for the Wolvern Hills would've taken a train, which normally was all my parents could afford. But, I was told, we don't ride trains to meet my grandmother. No explanation for that either—we just don't. Instead, Paxton had met us at Heathrow and loaded our luggage into "the Bentley," as Mum called it. Now for the past few hours, we'd been winding our way toward my grandmother's estate of Carrick Hall.
I tried to act as though all this was perfectly ordinary. Riding in an actual luxury car driven by an actual chauffeur to an actual English manor house owned by my actual grandmother. As one does. But a bottled-up shriek of excitement bubbled just below the surface.
"There's the village," Mum said, her voice strained. "Won't be long now."
The car had begun to climb toward a cluster of terraced stone buildings. I took this to be Upper Wolvern, the tiny village in the West Midlands near where Mum had grown up. We drove over a bridge spanning a chattering stream and onto the narrow high street lined with picturesque shops and cottages. Despite the gloom, flower beds and window boxes exploded with color.
The Bentley climbed up and up, past a half-timbered pub and around a bend lined with stone walls. At a roundabout with a giant boulder in the center, a road branched off to the right, next to a sign that read Wolvern College, est. 1865. The main road continued to the left, but we headed straight onto a narrow lane.
The lane climbed past a rugged church surrounded by blackened, leaning headstones, all of which looked hundreds of years old. Beyond the churchyard ran a high stone wall just as ancient. A stout gatehouse was built into the wall, and beside it, a broad archway opened to a winding drive.
...
