She finds milk in the refrigerator, heats a mug of it in the dented old saucepan her nanny once used. There’s hardly any food, but she finds bread and cuts thick slices, toasts them, and spreads them with butter and honey. She carries everything upstairs to the guest room where she’s put Jack. He’s bundled under the covers, exhausted.
“Drink this,” she says. “It will help you sleep. My nanny always said it would keep away bad dreams.”
His eyes are closing before he’s finished. She takes the mug from him, smooths out the coverlet, and kisses him on the forehead.
“Sleep tight,” she says. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
“Night, Mom,” he says.
And then, even though he’s almost sixteen, she clicks on the night-light. She makes sure the windows are closed and locked before she leaves the room and descends the stairs.
The Darling house is large. Kitchen, library, dining room, parlor, and drawing room on the first floor. An office and a handful of bedrooms, including Jane’s, on the second. And on the third, a warren of storage space, servant quarters, and the nursery. It’s a big house to be alone in on a black London night, and not for the first time, Holly glances at the windows and shivers. Still, when a floorboard creaks upstairs, she pays it no mind. As a teenager, Holly spent many evenings wandering the house alone, waiting for Jane to return from a gala or reception or dinner party. She knows its sounds intimately because she’s explored every inch, from the butler’s pantry to the attic, and found secrets everywhere. Sherry hidden behind the oatmeal tin by the cook. A packet of love letters, tied with pink ribbon, written in her mother’s hand and forgotten in the bottom drawer of her father’s desk. Jewelry and clothing and box after box of photos in the attic, including a curious leather album with photos of a very young Wendy in a white gown, a man standing stiffly behind her with his right arm on her shoulder.
In every picture, the man’s face is cut out.
Holly’s own secrets are in the attic too, caught in photographs that have been packed into boxes and sealed tightly shut. They add to the oppressive atmosphere of Darling House, although once they were a bright beam cutting through the dark. If she closes her eyes, she can still see them, her boys. Jack and Isaac running races on the long corridor of the second floor, baby legs churning. Robert’s booming laugh as he taught them to slide down the grand banister into his waiting arms. His sheepish, guilty grin when Jane had caught him. And almost unbelievably, her mother’s amused expression, followed by her ringing laughter. A sound that echoed through the house, warming it, bringing it alive again in a way Holly would never have thought possible in the days she’d skulked through its dark hallways as a forgotten teen.
Other memories are there as well. Some captured in pictures, others existing only in her mind. These are the ones she’d prefer to forget.
She opens her eyes. Even though the overhead chandelier in the hallway is on, it’s as if she’s lost in the dark. She turns and heads to the kitchen, where she selects the wickedest knife she can find, a long, serrated beauty so sharp she has no idea what Jane could possibly use it for. And then she climbs the steps again.
She climbs past the room rumored to be where mad Mr. Barrie stayed, feverishly observing the Darling family, especially beautiful, languorous Wendy. Beyond the room that once belonged to poor Michael, Wendy’s youngest brother. Michael suffered an accident the family prefers not to think about. All of these rooms are now empty. Holly could sleep in any of them.
But she keeps climbing, to the top of the house where the servants’ quarters and the nursery are. This last room is full of old toys, of shadows. A rocking horse with sightless glass eyes stands motionless in one corner. A dollhouse with broken furniture rests in another. The pink roses that paper the walls are from Wendy’s time or even before, but the crisp cotton quilts that cover the row of beds are new. Memories, her own and those of the Darlings who came before her, are everywhere, reminders of what was and what might have been.
Holly ignores them all. A long corridor separates the nursery from the servants’ quarters, with a small bathroom just outside the nursery door. She washes her face there, then finds her old white nightgown wrapped in lavender-scented tissue paper in the nursery dresser and changes into it. She ties her hair back with a blue ribbon. She does all of this in the dark, with only the moonlight filtering in through the window.
When she’s finished, she goes to the door, takes the old-fashioned key from over the frame, and locks it from the inside.