Page 39 of The Light Between Worlds

A cold trickle of nervousness works its way down my spine. This is it. The end of the line. It’s time to get off the train and stand on my own two feet.

The Harper farm lies three miles from Edgethorn Halt. We haven’t got much luggage—most of our belongings are still at school, and Tom told his family not to bother with coming down to the station to meet us, so we walk.

These are the things I want to remember: cold air. The grey sky clearing just enough for the sun to peer out occasionally, like a lamp switching on and off. The distant bleating of sheep carried down to us from the hills. Tom gripping both our suitcases in one of his capable hands, so the other is free to hold my own. I twine my fingers through his because I need courage—I still feel frail and rudderless, even if land is in sight. I’ve seen war and death and darkness, but I’ve never before walked home with a boy, heart in my throat, knowing that at the end of the walk will be people who love him and who will take a measure of me.

Too soon, we stop at the bottom of a hill topped by a long, two-story stone house that looks as if it grew out of the earth. We stand side by side and look up the rutted drive.

“This is it,” Tom says after a moment. “Dad and Meg’ll still be out in the fields, but Mum and Annie should be home. Want me to smuggle you in?”

I don’t care if it will make things strange later. I snatch at the offer. “Oh, Tom, really?”

“Anything for you,” he says with a crooked smile.

I don’t know what to say to that. I’m off the edges of the map again (I seem to live there, only making brief forays into known country). We walk along the drive and around to the back of the house, where Tom sneaks me in through a rear entry cluttered with boots and cricket bats and barrels of potatoes. Then up a flight of narrow stairs and into a tidy guest bedroom. There’s a storm-at-sea quilt on the bed and a washstand with a pitcher and basin on it. A fire crackles on the miniature hearth. Clean towels are laid out and I can smell the bar of rose soap that sits on top of them.

Tom stands in the doorway and twists his cap in his hands. “I didn’t think to tell you, but we haven’t got plumbing in the house yet. It’s one of those things we just never get around to, and I know you’re not used to that, so I feel like a fool for forgetting to mention it. If you look out the window you’ll see the privy.”

I push the lace curtains aside and glance out to the farmyard. There’s the privy, and two long, low-lying barns, one of them with a thick-bodied heifer contentedly munching hay just outside.

“I’m sorry.” The uncertainty in Tom’s voice makes me turn to face him. “Do you hate it? You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

What I hate is seeing kind and quietly confident Tom Harper feel ill at ease about his house just because I’m in it.

“It’s perfect.” Truth suffuses the words, and Tom brightens. He sets the suitcase down on the bed.

A hesitant knock at the door draws both our attention. “Hello, Tommy.”

Tom crosses the room in two steps and pulls his younger sister, Annie, into a tight hug. She peers around his shoulder at me, because she’s too short to peer over it. There’s an elfin quality to her clever little face, and she holds my gaze solemnly for a moment before breaking into a smile, warm and fresh as sun after rain.

Then, to my surprise, she pulls away from Tom and wraps me in a hug as sweet and unselfconscious as the one she gave him.

For a moment, I hesitate. It’s been a long time since I last felt whole enough to greet a stranger with so little mistrust. But I can’t help it—my arms go around Annie Harper and I feel a dart of her simple joy go into me as she whispers, “Hello, Evelyn Hapwell. I’m very happy to meet you.”

“That’s funny,” I whisper back. “I was just about to tell you the same thing.”

“You weren’t here for presents,” Annie says to Tom. “But I made your toffee, and I knit you another sweater. Meg didn’t help at all this time—I did it all on my own.”

“That’s my girl,” Tom says, and all I want is for someone to look at me with the raw affection I see in him for Annie.

She steps away from me and back to the door. “Are you coming down? It’s not dinner yet but I’ll get tea, and there are biscuits.”

Tom looks to me. “It’s up to Evelyn. She might want to rest before meeting everyone else.”

“We’ll be down right away,” I tell Annie. “Tea sounds wonderful.”

She smiles again, and it would take a hard person not to smile back. Once I hear her footsteps on the stairs, I give Tom a quick, fierce hug. “Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here.Everything’s perfect just the way it is.”

He grins, and scuffs a boot against the braided rug.

We can hear Tom’s mum before we see her. As we walk down the poky upstairs hall and the front stairway, the sounds of pots and pans and singing drift up to us, along with the smell of roasting meat and vegetables. She has a nice voice—it’s not beautiful, exactly, but strong and tuneful.

When we stand at last on the threshold of the big farm kitchen, I feel recognition. I’ve never seen this place before, but it’s homey. It’s exactly where I’d imagine Tom Harper to come from, and these are exactly his sort of people. His father and Meg have just come in from the fields and stand noisily stamping their boots off in the outside doorway. It seems here in the Harper house, all doors lead to the kitchen.

Mrs. Harper is red-haired and rawboned like Tom himself, and like Meg. The three of them look very alike—lanky and bright-eyed, with smiles that would melt a snowbank. His father and Annie are the odd ones out, shorter and dark-haired, with a quieter way about them. It’s not that Tom and Meg and his mother are loud, exactly, but when they’re together, they fill a room with their confidence and easy laughter. Annie and Mr. Harper just stand back and watch, occasionally casting glances at each other as if they share a private joke.

I stand on the edge of this for a moment, on the fringe of their happy family chatter. It makes me glad, but there’s a little ache inside me all the same. I was like this once, carefree and comfortable in my own skin, knowing exactly where I belonged.

But then my eyes light on the windowsill next to the wood-firedrange. In among the oddments there, the blue glass bottles and cuttings taking root, there are two picture frames, draped with a black cloth and with fresh flowers carefully set between them. In each is a photograph of a boy in uniform, one big and straight-shouldered like Tom, the other smaller and self-possessed like his father and Annie.