The jam and bread is excellent, and the tea more than acceptable. While Elsa feels like the arrangement should be awkward, Annie does enough talking that it never gets the chance.
“You’re from London too? What took you so long to get here then? Last year they packed the train full of me and seemingly every other child in the East End and sent us all off! I was so confused when I was the only one to arrive here!”
Oh, she’s from the East End, Elsa thinks. At least that explains her short dress and thin body. She’s never believed some of the cruel things she’s heard about the people who live there, but she’s seen enough to know how poorly off many were.
“You were scared too,” Liam teases through his mouthful of bread.
“Are they still sending the children away?”
Elsa frowns.
“Most of the ones who left last year already came home. They’ll be leaving again though. Germany’s about to invade France.”
She doesn’t mention what’s been happening in Norway. Despite mum’s diligence, Elsa still can’t quite wrap her mind around it.
Annie frowns.
“Sort of hope I never have to go back. I like it here better and mum’s probably happier without me.”
Elsa bites her tongue. Annie’s words sound awful, but it’s not her place.
“Are the Grangers nice people then?”
Annie nods enthusiastically.
“Mrs Granger runs this whole farm herself, she’s shown me everything! Mr. Granger’s at the school most of the time, but he still talks to me. He says he’ll take me to the school sometime, once he can get me reading better.”
The idea of the witch school is one that’s been sticking in the back of Elsa’s mind this whole time. She can’t truly picture it. Do all of them wear black and pointy hats? She’s already seen one cat here, but it was an ordinary gray one that didn’t seem to be doing anyone’s bidding.
“Do they-” Elsa tries to bite her tongue again and can’t help it, “Do they make you do all the work around here?”
She has a strange vision of Annie having come here and become Cinderella.
“Oh no,” Annie replies, laughing. “There’s not too much that needs cleaning around here. You’ll see. And I like cooking, it’s so much easier here than at home. Wait until you get to see Mrs. Granger’s garden and the fields.”
Having emptied his tea cup, Liam stands and bids them farewell, donning his hat and shutting the door behind him.
Elsa watches him go.
“What bugs got him?”
Annie shrugs.
“He hates having to spend all his time at the post office, but he’s not got other family here and most of the other children in the valley are students at the school.”
Elsa finishes up her bread, licking the last bits of jam from her thumb. She watches as Annie finishes up the preparation of the chicken pie and puts it in the oven. Elsa has to fight the urge to drool openly at the smell.
“Have you never had chicken pie?” Annie asks her, setting her potholders down on top of the stove. Elsa nods.
“I haven’t had it in ages it seems. I know this is a farm, but don’t you have to deal with rationing here?”
Annie looks confused.
“I’m not sure what that is.”
Elsa’s astonished.
“They sent out the books with the stamps, you can’t buy anything without them. Bacon, butter, fat, sugar, meat....you can’t hardly bake anything at all with what they’ll give you in a week, neither my mum or I have even attempted pastry crust since it started. And even if it’s not rationed, you can’t always get it.”
Annie’s voice quiets when she sits at the table and sips at her own tea.
“I remember our neighbor, Mr. Roberts, talking about when they rationed things in the last war, I guess it makes sense they would do it again. We could never afford much of that, so I think I could find a way to cook around it, but I’d rather be here.”
Elsa still wrinkles her nose.
“Didn’t your ration books come through the post?”
“You would have to ask Liam and Miss Murphy about that.”
Elsa stares down into her empty tea cup, trying to remember some of the things she had heard at the post office earlier.
Annie jumps up again.
“I’ll show you where you’re sleeping.”
Behind the kitchen is a small sitting room and a narrow closed door that Elsa recognizes as the loo, and she is grateful it’s at least inside. Also behind the kitchen begins a narrow staircase with a wrought iron rail. Elsa’s shoes cause squeaking noises with each step and she hopes she never has to sneak down them.
There’s five doors at the top of the staircase, three in line,, and one at the end of the hall.
“The first door’s mine-” Annie points at the furthest one to the right, door hanging open, “You can have the one in the middle.”
The middle room has huge windows. The curtains on them are pale yellow, letting through even more of the sunshine. The bed is a bit smaller than hers at home, but the coverlet is a cheery floral print. Elsa throws her bags down on the end.
“I’ll come up and get you when Mr and Miss Granger get back.”
The first thing she does is finger the curtains. They’re such a nice, pale yellow, and the room is getting a great deal of sun for this time of day. They shouldn’t be there, she thinks. The windows should be blocked out, with curtains thick enough to block the light from even the tiniest candle. If they weren’t blacked out, planes might see them from the air. This had all been pounded into Elsa’s head, and even though it hasn’t even been a year, she could parrot this all back.
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It doesn’t take Elsa long to unpack. The drawers are empty, only a spider or two to shoo off. The nightstand becomes buried with her books, spilling off onto the floor.
There’s a small desk, and with both hands, she hauls the wireless onto it. She glances out the window, past the yellow curtains. She won’t be able to get reception here, she’ll have to get creative.
Once she’s done, she goes to the window and gazes out. The upstairs window faces the woods in the distance, and the fork of the road that slopes downward heads into the village. Something prickles at the back of Elsa’s mind. She won’t have school here, at least not at first. Maybe Miss Granger will need her help on the farm. But Annie keeps saying there’s not much that needs doing...maybe she can explore the woods, if she has time.
She’s in the middle of taking off her stockings and replacing them with just one pair of socks when Annie calls to her from the hallway. She scrambles down the staircase after the voice.
The woman coming through the backdoor and talking to Annie is strikingly ordinary looking to Elsa. She’s perhaps thirty-five, and has red hair tied up under a kerchief. She wears a peach colored pullover and work trousers and heavy boots. Her face is covered in dust, which she is washing off in a basin by the door when Elsa makes it to the bottom of the stairs, revealing a pile of freckles.
Elsa’s frozen on the bottom of the stairs when the woman turns and looks at her.
“You must be Elsa, Annie said you were settling in alright.”
Several long moments pass before Elsa manages to squeak out,
“Yes, thank you Miss Granger.”
The woman unties her kerchief and shakes out her hair.
“There’s no need for formality, you can call me Agnes if you wish.”
Elsa’s voice stays squeaky.
“I’m sorry- I think I’ll stick with calling you Miss Granger.”
Miss Granger laughs, her eyes crinkling, and Elsa feels the unease in her stomach begin to settle.
“Just like Annie you are. Well come on, there’s chicken pie for tea.”
Annie pulls the pie, hot and steaming, out of the oven and shuts the door. Just as she’s setting the table, there’s an odd noise from outside the backdoor.
“That’ll just be Peter winking back home from the school,” Miss Granger says, cutting into the pie and spooning a piece onto her plate, before doing the same with Elsa’s plate. Annie’s already seated and digging in.
The door opens and a tall man wearing spectacles enters. He removes his hat, revealing black curls, and then his coat.
“Hello, love,” Miss Granger calls out, “Drop your wand in the brolly stand if you want any of this pie before we have at it.”
Wand. There was another word that pricks at Elsa’s mind. She already has filed away “winking back home”.
Mr. Granger kisses his wife on the head as she offers him the remaining piece of pie. He breathes deeply over his plate before sticking his fork in.
“Love me a good chicken pie, good on you Annie,” he says, while Annie glows off to the side, most of her pie already eaten.
Peter turns to Elsa, his eyes not unkind.
“Don’t believe I know your name yet? I suppose the train brought you in today, I hope the walk from the post office wasn’t too bad.”
Elsa has a spoon of pie in her mouth. The chicken melts in her mouth, the vegetables perfectly tender and the crust flaky and buttery. She chews and swallows before answering. “I’m Elsa Green,” she says, “I’m from London.”
“Liam walked her here,” Miss Granger adds,”I got stuck out in the field. One of the new lamb’s protection charms ended up getting the poor thing stuck in one of the fence posts.”
Elsa’s mind jumps in alarm. When she’d heard “stuck lamb” she had assumed it meant during birth.
“Got the poor dear loose then did you?”
Miss Granger nods.
“She’s well on with her little sheep life. What about that Spanish lass, how’s her English coming along?”
“Her speaking is much better, but she’s struggling quite a bit with reading and writing it. I fear I will have to weigh her down with work over the summer holidays to get her up to speed.”
Elsa’s curiosity gets the best of her.
“If she speaks Spanish, why doesn’t she go to school in Spain?”
Mr. Granger chuckles.
“We’re the last academy for girls this side of Europe. Used to be we were big enough to have instructors who spoke a dozen languages, but we’re down to just English and French now.”
Elsa’s interest is piqued, wondering where the other schools used to be, wondering why this one was the last. Spain, she thinks. She doesn’t think Spain is technically on anyone’s side in the war yet, Mum had told her a bit about the turmoil in the country in the past decade. She wonders where the other students come from, Europe’s pretty big. There could be German students, she thought, or Polish ones. She wonders if any will return to bombed houses, or burning villages.
Annie summons up a jar of ginger biscuits for pudding, and Elsa is so unused to sweets that she finds her teeth beginning to ache. The others don’t seem to notice, munching the biscuits and sipping their tea while discussing more things Elsa doesn’t quite understand, but finds she wants to.
After tea, Elsa sees her first bit of magic.
Behind the staircase is the tiny sitting room, just three armchairs and a table. On the table sits a single old-fashioned gas lamp. At some point that Elsa didn’t see, Miss Granger had retrieved her wand (there that word was again!) from the brolly stand, and taps the lamp once, muttering something that sounds like “light”. It lights up, and from the sudden glimmers both upstairs and down, so do all of the other lamps in the house.
“Gas in all these lamps are alike,” Mr Granger explains, seeing the look of shock on Elsa’s face, “It’s quite easy to convince all of it to do the same thing. The set up talking it out of every escaping the lamp and causing fires is a bit more daunting.”
Elsa nods, but her mind is still reeling. She moves idly around the room, fingers touching the simple fixtures. Thankfully, her eyes have been drawn to one thing specifically.
The largest bit of furniture in the sitting room is a bookcase, stuffed to the brim.
“Can I?” she asks, turning to the two of them with pleading eyes. Both of the Grangers have taken to their chairs and opened books of their own, and Elsa’s heart swells. Mum was fond of knowledge, though these days she often stuck more to newspapers than proper books. Dad often remarked that reading gave him a right powerful headache. Perhaps she will find herself fitting more with the hobbies the Grangers preferred.
Miss Granger looks up at her words,
“Have at it Elsa, though you may not want to read anything aloud, that whole shelf is a bit of a mixed up minefield.”
Elsa’s eyes move along the spines so rapidly she can scarcely read the titles. Eventually, she sort of picks one at random, and turns back. Seeing Annie in the third chair, with a knitting bag on her lap and two needles in hand, she expects to have to pick up a nice spot on the floor, but when her eyes move over the room, there is suddenly a fourth chair. She sits down in it gingerly, before letting herself relax. The upholstery is a lovely plum velvet.
Her mind is racing so fast that she barely has time to absorb what’s in the book she picked (it’s something about various types of plants, with diagrams, and she will definitely be returning to it). By the time Mr Granger peeks out the window and comments that it’s getting late, Elsa scarcely feels like she’s flipped her way through a dozen pages.
“We’re not quite the type to insist you’re in bed before dark,” Miss Granger assures her when she stands and close her book, “But there are some things in this house you might not want to just stumble upon by yourself, so until you’re used to it, you should really stick to your room at night.”
Elsa nods. She’s pretty tired as is, so she marks her spot in the book and returns it to the shelf.
The four of them make their way up the staircase, and Elsa assumes the room at the end of the landing must be Mr and Ms Grangers. She wonders what they planned for the rest of these rooms when the war hadn’t been on.
Before she can go into her room, Annie touches her wrist.
“I almost forgot, let me show you something.”
The two of them creep back downstairs to the kitchen, which is now dark, but nowhere near London blackout guidelines dark.
Annie reaches into a cupboard for a saucer that she fills with milk from the ice box. She sets it on the ground, and Elsa jumps when a small, fast, critter scurries out to it. She’s not frightened of mice, not terribly, but Miss Granger’s last words still make her feel like she needs to grab the broom.
“Don’t be scared,” Annie assures her, “These are fairy-mice. They’re the reason we don’t have to do too much cleaning, they eat away the soot and dust, so long as we leave out an offering for them,”
Annie picks one up and pets the back of it’s head. It’s not really white like an ordinary mouse, in fact Elsa can almost see through it, as though it was made of ice or glass.
“Just remember to cover up anything iron in your room. Fairies can’t stand iron, if you leave anything out, they’ll spew all the house’s dust all over the place. That’s why someone still has to dust the staircase, they won’t touch the rail.”
Annie stays lying on her stomach on the floor, watching them. Elsa turns to return to her room.
Before changing into her nightdress, Elsa glances around the room, seeking signs of anything made of iron. The bed, desk and drawers are all wood, and the lamp on the nightstand is brass. She’s suddenly unsure about a couple of the fixtures on the wireless (did steel count as iron?), and just to be safe, when she pulls off her pullover, she throws it over the top.
She combs her hair out as best as she can, hoping it won’t get too mussed rolling around in her sleep. She’d forgotten her kerchief, of course it turned out she’d forgotten something. Her skin feels grimy and sticky from the ride, she’ll ask Miss Granger about a bath tomorrow.
When she sits in bed, Elsa lets her feet run over the polished wood of the floor. At home, the flat had carpet in a dark red color. The wood feels better under her feet, but Elsa supposes it must be hard to keep clean without fairy mice, and in winter it must be quite cold. For now, she appreciates the smooth feel under her toes.
It is dark outside already, and Elsa considers lighting the lamp and pulling out a book to read for a while. Eventually, she yawns and the drag of the day catches up with her, so she just pulls back the coverlet and slides under the covers.
Sleep does not come to her though. She’s often heard mutterings from her mother and father about having trouble sleeping, but she’s never struggled such. It’s somehow too quiet, no automobiles going by the shop throughout, and also too loud, the sound of cicadas and the screech of an owl coming through her window. And there’s too much light. The thin curtains don’t even keep out the moon.
After tossing and turning for a time, Elsa sits up with a groan, and goes to look out the window. She considers dragging over the desk chair, but the windowsill ends up being wide enough for her to sit on reasonably comfortably, at least for a short time.
The window mostly looks out over the forest, but if Elsa twists her head far to the right, she can make out part of the town on the horizon.
The moon is nearly full, and there are many stars out, more stars than she could have ever hoped to see in the London sky, but it’s the village that gets her. In the center, where she expects the market square would be, is a clocktower with a light gleaming that she can see from her window like a candle’s glow.
Her stomach turns fiery. If she could see that light, then surely the Germans could! If a bomb was aimed at it, it could destroy the whole village, and from the way Annie and the Grangers talked, no one living there cared at all! They didn’t follow the blackout and didn’t seem to even think anything about the war at all.
Elsa stares off into the night sky, imagining the shapes of German planes among the stars, hidden from view by some sort of magic. Hidden until the moment they chose to strike, unleashing their fire and destruction from above. She remembers hearing the reports of the invasion of Poland, and the troops fighting in Norway. The Germans may not have reached England yet, but it couldn’t be long. Scotland was barely across the water from Norway after all.
Eventually, she makes her way back to bed, and finds a fitful night’s sleep. Woken several times from dreams, she jumped up each time, expecting to hear the whine of an air raid siren.