ONE

Copt Hall
March to April 1941

GRACE SPEAKS

After that terrible morning in the crypt of St Thomas’, Jack withdrew into himself a little for a few days. He felt so guilty, and so helpless, and so desperate, and that made me feel worse. Jack kept protesting that he would find a means to break me free from Catling’s hex, but, oh, the emptiness of those protests. He hadn’t been able to do anything before, how could he now?

I tried not to think about what the White Queen had said. I would do the right thing, and continue to ensure my own destruction, together with Catling’s, once I’d been dragged into the dark heart of the Shadow Game. If I thought about that, if I let even a single contemplation of it scamper across my mind, then I knew I would succumb entirely to despair.

I couldn’t think of it.

I couldn’t.

So I had to believe Jack. There had to be a way, and Jack would find it.

He would.

He must.

For at least a week we kept apart from everyone else, save Malcolm. Harry was desperate to see us, no doubt to tell us of the latest disaster to befall the Faerie, and my parents pestered, but Malcolm turned away all of them. I know my mother’s creed and very reason for existence was to provide shelter, but that week Malcolm made a damn good job of it himself.

After three or four days Jack and I began to spend hours each day walking Epping Forest, often well into the night. We rarely spoke, but we did not need to in order to communicate. After the shock of our meeting with the White Queen, we used those walks to draw gradually back together again. We might start out walking side by side, but by the end of the walk, after hours spent on the paths and under the trees, our steps would slow and we would link arms, and walk so close that our bodies bumped and touched in myriad different places. Spring had arrived, and the increasing warmth of the sun and the bright green of new, vibrant growth pushing through the mouldy leaf litter increased our spirits until one day, without thinking, we laughed at a tiny fawn that had stumbled into our path and stood staring at us until his mother nudged him back into the undergrowth.

These walks helped as nothing else. Just being close to Jack, trusting in him, feeling his strength and determination, made me feel as if there might be a way, and I wouldn’t need to spend eternity trapped with Catling…No! I couldn’t even think of that. I couldn’t.

I mustn’t. I would go mad if I allowed that thought to intrude.

One night, after a long walk, when we’d felt closer than previously, we made love for the first time since we’d rented that little room in Southwark. Very gently, very slowly. Afterwards, dozing in Jack’s arms, I imagined myself lying in a glade in the forest on a warm summer’s day, looking up through the forest canopy to the sky so far above, and every time Jack moved slightly in sleep, so the forest moved very slightly about me. When I drifted into a deeper sleep my dreams took over where my imaginings had left off, and I spent that night in the warm embrace of the forest, feeling more loved than I had ever thought possible.

In the morning, Jack rose, kissed me, and said that he needed to go out this evening.

“Where?” I asked.

“To see Ariadne,” he replied.

I sat up in the bed. “Jack? Of what did you dream last night?”

He stood the longest time, not answering, looking with unfocussed eyes at the pattern of the bedspread.

Eventually he raised his eyes to me. “I dreamed of hope,” he said.