The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,14

predawn mist, his upturned face crinkled in that almost-smile, was Samuel. One hand held the reins of his gray pony, who was making furtive passes at the lawn, and the other held the round-bottomed basket.

I was out the door and down the back stairs before I’d had time for anything so mundane as conscious thought. Sentences like Wilda will flay you or My God, you’re in your nightgown arrived only after I’d flung open the side door and rushed out to meet him.

Samuel looked down at my bare feet, freezing in the frost, then at my desperate, eager face. He held out the basket for the second time. I scooped out the chilly, sleepy ball of puppy and held him to my chest, where he rooted toward the warmth beneath my arm.

“Thank you, Samuel,” I whispered, which I know now was an utterly insufficient response. But Samuel seemed content. He bowed his head in a chivalrous, Old-World-ish gesture like a knight accepting his lady’s favor, mounted his drooling pony, and disappeared across the misted grounds.

Now, let us clear the air: I am not a stupid girl. I realized the words I’d written in the ledger book were more than ink and cotton. They’d reached out into the world and twisted the shape of it in some invisible and unknowable way that brought Samuel to stand beneath my window. But there was a more rational explanation available to me—that Samuel had seen the longing in my face and decided to hell with that bitter old German woman—and I chose to believe that instead.

But still: when I got to my room and settled the brown ball of fur in a nest of pillows, the first thing I did was trawl through my desk drawer for a pen. I found my copy of The Jungle Book, flipped to the blank pages at the back, and wrote: She and her dog were inseparable from that day forward.

In the summer of 1909 I was almost fifteen and some of the selfish fog of adolescence was starting to dissipate. The second Anne of Green Gables book and the fifth Oz book were out that spring; a white, snub-nosed woman named Alice had just driven a motorcar across the entire country (a feat that Mr. Locke dubbed “utterly absurd”); there was some fuss about a coup or a revolution in the Ottoman Empire (“absolutely wasteful”); and my father had been in East Africa for months without so much as a postcard. He’d sent me a yellowed ivory carving of an elephant with the letters MOMBASA carved into its belly at Christmas, and a note saying he would be home by my birthday.

He wasn’t, of course. But Jane was.

It was early summer, when the leaves are still dewy and new and the sky looks freshly painted, and Bad and I were curled together in the gardens, rereading all the other Oz books to prepare for the new one. I’d already had my French and Latin lessons for the day, and finished all my sums and bookkeeping for Mr. Locke, and my afternoons were wonderfully free now that Wilda was gone.

I think Bad deserves most of the credit, really. If you could have manifested Wilda’s darkest nightmares into a physical being, it would have looked very much like a yellow-eyed puppy with overlarge paws, a surfeit of fine brown hairs, and no respect at all for nursemaids. She’d thrown a predictably impressive fit when she first found him in my bedroom, and dragged me up to Locke’s office still in my nightgown.

“Good God, woman, do stop shrieking, I haven’t had my coffee. Now, what’s all this? I thought I was perfectly clear last night.” Mr. Locke had fixed me with that look, ice-edged and moon-pale. “I won’t have it in the house.”

I felt my will shivering and warping, weakening under his gaze—but I thought of those words hidden in the back of Kipling: She and her dog were inseparable. I tightened my arms around Bad and met Mr. Locke’s eyes, my jaw set.

A second passed, and then another. Sweat prickled at the back of my neck, as if I were lifting some immensely heavy object, and then Mr. Locke laughed. “Keep it, if it matters so much to you.”

After that, Miss Wilda seemed to fade from our lives like newsprint left out in the sun. She simply couldn’t compete with Bad, who grew at an alarming pace. With me, he remained adoring and puppyish, sleeping flopped across my legs