“No, silly. I meant, what do you want me to get you? To bring you?”
George sits up. “You already bring me everything I want. I have the art book, pencils, and stories from Mr. Lewis. There’s nothing else I need. I want to go somewhere. I want to have my own adventure. Everyone in the books has adventures, and I want my own.” He is so matter-of-fact that I know this isn’t the first time he’s thought of it.
“Well, that’s why they’re in a book, because we don’t have a magic wardrobe.”
“That’s nonsense.” He crosses his legs and his cheeks flush red with energy. “I want my own adventure. I want to go to Ireland. I want to see it.”
I play along. “Okay, what do you want to see in Ireland?”
“I want to see Dunluce Castle, where Jack’s mum took him on holiday before she died. I want to see the wild sea and the ruins. I want to . . . feel it.” George lifts his face as if the bursts of Irish air swell and rise around our tiny cottage in the middle of the English countryside.
“How shall we do that?” I am beginning to feel like this is a terrible and wonderful idea, to take my brother somewhere other than his imagination, to take him from the bed and the cottage and Worcester.
To take him from safety.
He shakes his head as if I have no idea about anything at all. “How are we to do that? Most likely the same way other people go to Ireland.”
“I don’t think it’s safe for you,” I say. “Not now.”
“In Mr. Lewis’s books, would Peter or Susan say it’s not safe?”
I stare at my brother. He’s arguing with me about children in a book. “George,” I say, “Peter and Susan are made-up people.”
“They’re more than that, and you know it.”
George stands and walks to a large oak hutch that stands against the far wall. On its shelves are piles of plates and rows of teacups and glasses, linen napkins and bowls and serving platters. George opens one of its drawers and pulls out a paper map. He brings it back and unfolds it on the floor in front of us both.
“I wish we had an atlas,” he says.
“Now that I can try to find you,” I tell him as he spreads the ragged map flat.
A spark flies from the fireplace and hits the edge of the paper, sizzles. “Here we are.” On the map, he points to Worcester in the West Midlands, our borders wiggly with lines that separate us from Birmingham and Hereford. “And there you are when you’re not with me.” He points at Oxford, just south and east of our town. He runs his finger down the map lines, and I realize he’s done this while I’m away from him; he maps my way from home to university and back.
“And here is how to get to Dunluce Castle.” He traces his finger west across England, over the Irish Sea to Dublin, then up the coast of Ireland to the top above Belfast, above Londonderry on the edge of the sea.
“That’s so far,” I say. “A full day’s journey, and where would we stay?”
George shrugs and smiles. “I don’t know. You’re the grown-up.”
I laugh and pull him close. “We can’t do that.”
“You asked what I wanted,” he says. “You asked.”
“Dunluce is just a bunch of ruins. A long-gone castle without real rooms or—”
“It’s Cair Paravel.”
“It’s not. It’s definitely not.”
“It’s not and it is. And I want to see it.”
“I wouldn’t even know how to get there. It’s—”
He interrupts me with a laugh. “You might be a genius at math, but you’re not so smart about real things in the world.”
I laugh at him; I take no offense.
He ticks two things off on his fingers. “You drive a car and then you take a ferry.”
“But I don’t drive, and I don’t have a car.”
He shrugs. “So find someone who does.”
“Mum and Dad would never, ever allow it. You know that.”
“I bet you’ll find a way,” he says. “Now please tell me the next story.”
“Now that, George Henry Devonshire, is something I can do.” I open the notebook to the next pages. I have labeled them Norse Mythology.
“Once upon a wardrobe, not very long ago . . .”
“And not very far away,” he says.
“Jack is thirteen years old and has left the horror of Wynyard, spent a bit of time at a school outside Belfast called Campbell College, and is now at a place called Cherbourg House.”
“That’s a lot of schools before a boy turns thirteen,” George says.
“It is, but I have to tell you about all his schools to get to the day he found out about Norse mythology. You need to hear all about his reading life.”
“His reading life?”
“Yes. Mr. Lewis wants us to understand his love of Norse mythology, and he wants us to know about the books that influenced him because he says that in many ways they have formed his life.”
“Like me, he reads a lot.”
“He does.” I pause. “So here it is. It is the year of 1911, and Jack is thirteen years old. He is attending Cherbourg Preparatory School at Malvern while Warnie is at Malvern College. Their school buildings are close to each other, both in Malvern, but they aren’t together in any classrooms.”
“Wait!” George sets his hand on mine. “That’s here in Worcestershire, right? They both went to school right down the road from us?”
“They did indeed.”
George pauses. “So they aren’t so very different from us, are they?”
“In some ways, no, they are not.”
“Go on, then. Go on.”
Eleven
Finding North
George listens closely. His sister is getting better at telling Mr. Lewis’s stories. As she begins to talk, George can hear the slap of waves against the hull of an iron ferry, seagulls crying over two brothers at the railing of a ship that just arrived at England’s Lancashire wharf.
In their brown travel suits and stiff Eton collars that Jack abhorred, Jack and Warnie stood on deck, waiting for the ship to dock. Warnie was wan and looking like he wanted to be off that vessel more than anything else. Huge ropes as thick as tree trunks were tossed and tied before the brothers climbed down the gangplank, the first passengers to disembark. The wharf smelled of seagull droppings and coal, of oil and sweat. The waves crested silver and dark against the walls of the wharf, smashing and falling away.
A September wind blew like a hidden storm was behind it, and the brothers, Warnie and Jack Lewis, thirteen and fifteen years old, walked toward the train station, carrying their cases while a scowling porter rolled their trunks on a cart. Warnie wobbled with leftover sea legs as they stepped onto the high metal stairs of the train. They walked through the short tunnel between train cars to locate seats at the back.
Jack couldn’t help but ponder how he almost avoided attending another new school this autumn when his father couldn’t find the key to his trunk. For two full days, Jack believed something or someone had intervened to keep him in Little Lea, but then the key was discovered in the top drawer of the hallway table.
Hours later, settled in and headed toward Malvern, Jack unwrapped the sandwiches they’d bought when they’d transferred at Paddington station, but Warnie turned away, waiting until his travel stomach settled. The train rattled through the countryside while they talked about books, about visiting their aunt in the countryside during the summer, and about what this new school might be like. Jack read a Captain magazine and Warnie flipped through a London Times, always caring a bit more than his brother about current affairs.