“Where do you think that one is going?” The younger boy, wearing brown knickers and a linen shirt, pressed his hands to the window. He pointed to a schooner that moved toward the open sea, where adventure no doubt awaited. The sky spread over the bay with a dome of clouds like sea foam.
“To India,” the older boy, Warnie, said.
“You think every ship is going to India,” Jack replied with a sly grin. “Or it could be going to Animal-Land.”
The brothers glanced at each other with a look of kindness and friendship. Jack did love the view, but it was Warnie who was endlessly enchanted by the ships. The barkadeer and the brigantine, the clipper with three sails, and the galleon with a square rig and two decks. The rally with oars and the schooner with masts.
The exposed beams of a low-slung ceiling loomed over them. All around the attic were doors opening to other spaces. A wooden wardrobe, its handles thick as branches, crouched in one corner. Dust settled in the cracks of its dark etchings. Their mother kept her furs and fancy dresses inside. More than once, and more than twice, the brothers had crawled inside to tell each other a story.
But now the boys sat quietly, watching the ships with sails as big as dragon’s wings fly into the bay. Dark blue waves splashed against the sea walls; sails billowed and breathed. Then Jack hit upon something in his thoughts and he turned to his brother.
“Oh, Warnie, in two weeks you will take one of those boats to England, to boarding school, won’t you? You will leave me.”
“Yes.” Warnie tried to be brave when he said this. “But I’ll come home often. The days will go by quick as a flash. You have your schoolwork and Lizzie and Annie and Mother and Father . . . and Grandfather.”
“I hate my schoolwork. Math is the devil.” Jack jumped from the edge of the window seat and walked to a small desk his father had made for him—“Jack’s desk”—and sat down: drawings and maps scattered on its surface, piles of papers tilted, and colored pencils stored in boxes.
Warnie stood and joined his brother. “You’ll be jolly fine. I won’t be gone long, and you have your Animal-Land.” Warnie pointed at the drawings and maps and notebooks, some spilling onto the wooden floors. These held Jack’s creations: funny creatures that were half human and half animal, others that were all animal but dressed as humans in suits and top hats or in knight’s armor, carrying swords. Elaborate maps detailed imaginary places: mountain ranges and loughs and seas and towns.
Jack called it all Animal-Land.
To create this land Jack had used every color in his pencil box and every piece of paper he could find, filling notebooks, one after the other, with his handwriting—crooked and sideways—revealing story after story about King Bunny and Sir Peter Mouse, Gollywog, and others with strange names. On a sheet of lined paper, in his funny half-capital-letter, half-cursive handwriting, Jack listed all of them under the title Dramatis Personae.
Warnie considered the papers for a long while before looking up with a grin. “I have an idea! I have India and you have Animal-Land.” Warnie pointed to one of Jack’s characters, an owl in coattails named Puddiphat. “We can combine our worlds. Then it will be like we’re still together even when we are apart!” Warnie ran his finger along the drawings of Jack’s map, the seas crocheted with foam and creatures lurking beneath. The squiggly lines of various kingdoms’ territories made puzzle pieces of the land.
Warnie quickly strode across the attic room, ducking beneath a low beam and retrieving his map of India before returning. He held the two maps—Animal-Land and India—near each other, and the edges touched. “Let’s combine them into one country! You’ll work on them while I’m at Wynyard. Write to me about what happens in our new together-kingdom.”
Jack shuffled the papers on his desk and brought out a drawing of King Bunny in full armor. “Yes! We’ll make maps and—”
“We’ll call it Boxen,” Warnie said.
Jack jumped up now. “There will be steamships and trains. There will be knights like Sir Walter Scott and talking animals like Squirrel Nutkin.” Jack’s imagination grew far beyond the thing he’d created alone. Now, with his brother, something altogether new was unfolding, yet it took nothing away from his own creation. Outside, the rain ceased, and sunlight streamed through the attic’s dusty air.
The brothers went to work on their combined land, and after many hours and an almost-missed dinner, they had established a new kingdom, one that combined their separate lands and brought them together as more than brothers; now they were cocreators.
*
A week later, an early autumn afternoon spread sunlight as sharp as King Bunny’s imaginary sword through Jack’s bedroom window and onto the hardwood floors. Jack couldn’t go outside. Miserable and tired, he was ill again, as he often was.
His chest ached with heaviness, and his barking cough brought the family doctor running to Little Lea.
“It’s his weak constitution,” the doctor said in the hallway in a deep voice, believing Jack was out of earshot. But Jack heard him; he always heard things the grown-ups thought he didn’t. Now his mother was bustling about and making him stay in bed. The only good thing about being in bed was that he had more time to read the books on his bedside table.
When her footsteps faded down the hallway, Jack flopped back onto his pillow and closed his eyes. He imagined playing with Warnie instead of lying in bed with a cough.
Endless passageways ran through the family’s house. Jack would run down hallways and through empty room after empty room. Sometimes when the sunlight fell through the windows, the house was just as jolly as a forest glade. Jack knew that anywhere he looked could be magic if he saw it with his imagination. Peter Rabbit might scurry under the dining room door. Farmer McGregor might be hiding in the vegetable garden, and Celtic faeries could be dancing beneath an oak tree’s bough of leaves outside the window.
With his “weak constitution,” Jack wasn’t allowed outside as much as other boys. That was fine by him, because the house was also full of innumerable books, so many that when they moved from the old house to this one, which his father had built for them, Jack didn’t understand where all the books had come from. They seemed to have simply appeared.
Now sick enough to stay in bed but not too sick to read, Jack leaned over to pick up his Squirrel Nutkin book. The bedroom door creaked open and Lizzie, his nanny, with her dark Irish curls springing from beneath her white cap and her blue eyes so vivid they seemed to spark, entered. She spoke in her thick Belfast brogue.
“Jacksie.” She pulled up a chair and sat next to his bed, then set a cuppa on the bedside table and grinned. “I am here to regale you with the one tale worth the telling.”
This was his clue that a story was to begin. Jack smiled at her and sat up straight. He put down the book and picked up his tea.
“Across the western sea is an invisible world, a parallel world where one year of time equals seven of ours; where the fairies live in the sidhe, the people of the Goddess Danu.”
The familiarity of this beginning soothed Jack and he leaned in, wanting more of the Tuatha Dé Danann and their adventures.