Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #1) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,74
sorry, Miss. But how was I to know something bad would happen?”
“I should punish you. However, given the circumstances, it hardly seems worth the effort.” She raised a hand and smoothed her mentor’s white hair. “Miss Avocet would never have left her wards to come here unless something dire had taken place.”
The roaring fire made beads of sweat break out on my forehead, but in her chair Miss Avocet lay shivering. Would she die? Was the tragic scene that had played out between my grandfather and me about to play out again, this time between Miss Peregrine and her teacher? I pictured it: me holding my grandfather’s body, terrified and confused, never suspecting the truth about him or myself. What was happening now, I decided, was nothing like what had happened to me. Miss Peregrine had always known who she was.
It hardly seemed like the time to bring it up, but I was angry and couldn’t help myself. “Miss Peregrine?” I began, and she looked up. “When were you going to tell me?”
She was about to ask what, but then her eyes went to Emma, and she seemed to read the answer on her face. For a moment she looked mad, but then she saw my anger, and her own faded. “Soon, lad. Please understand. To have laid the entire truth upon you at our first meeting would have been an awful shock. Your behavior was unpredictable. You might’ve fled, never to return. I could not take that risk.”
“So instead you tried to seduce me with food and fun and girls while keeping all the bad things a secret?”
Emma gasped. “Seduce? Oh, please, don’t think that of me, Jacob. I couldn’t bear it.”
“I fear you’ve badly misjudged us,” said Miss Peregrine. “As for seducing you, what you’ve seen is how we live. There has been no deception, only the withholding of a few facts.”
“Well here’s a fact for you,” I said. “One of those creatures killed my grandfather.”
Miss Peregrine stared at the fire for a moment. “I am very sorry to hear that.”
“I saw one with my own eyes. When I told people about it, they tried to convince me I was crazy. But I wasn’t, and neither was my grandfather. His whole life he’d been telling me the truth, and I didn’t believe him.” Shame flooded over me. “If I had, maybe he’d still be alive.”
Miss Peregrine saw that I was wobbling and offered me the chair across from Miss Avocet.
I sate, and Emma knelt down beside me. “Abe must’ve known you were peculiar,” she said. “And he must’ve had a good reason for not telling you.”
“He did indeed know,” replied Miss Peregrine. “He said as much in a letter.”
“I don’t understand, then. If it was all true—all his stories—and if he knew I was like him, why did he keep it a secret until the last minute of his life?”
Miss Peregrine spoon-fed more brandy to Miss Avocet, who groaned and sat up a little before settling back into the chair. “I can only imagine that he wanted to protect you,” she said. “Ours can be a life of trials and deprivations. Abe’s life was doubly so because he was born a Jew in the worst of times. He faced a double genocide, of Jews by the Nazis and of peculiars by the hollowgast. He was tormented by the idea that he was hiding here while his people, both Jews and peculiars, were being slaughtered.”
“He used to say he’d gone to war to fight monsters,” I said.
“He did,” said Emma.
“The war ended the Nazis’ rule, but the hollowgast emerged stronger than ever,” Miss Peregrine continued. “So, like many peculiars, we remained in hiding. But your grandfather returned a changed man. He’d become a warrior, and he was determined to build a life for himself outside the loop. He refused to hide.”
“I begged him not to go to America,” Emma said. “We all did.”
“Why did he choose America?” I asked.
“It had few hollowgast at that time,” Miss Peregrine replied. “After the war there was a minor exodus of peculiars to America. For a while many were able to pass as common, as your grandfather did. It was his fondest wish to be common, to live a common life. He often mentioned it in his letters. I’m sure that’s why he kept the truth from you for so long. He wanted for you what he could never have for himself.”