The Ten Thousand Doors of January(11)

I couldn’t have known then what that puppy would become to me, but perhaps some part of me suspected, because my nose was prickling in that dangerous, you-are-about-to-cry way when I looked up at Samuel.

I opened my mouth, but Wilda made her rattly throat sound again. “I think not, boy,” she declared. “You will take that animal right back where it came from.”

Samuel didn’t frown, but the smile-crimp at the corner of his mouth flattened out. Wilda snatched the basket from my clutching hands—the puppy toppled and rolled, legs paddling in midair—and thrust it back to Samuel. “Miss Scaller thanks you for your generosity, I’m sure.” And she steered me back inside and lectured me for several eons about germs, the inappropriateness of large dogs for ladies, and the perils of accepting favors from men of low standing.

My appeal to Mr. Locke after dinner was unsuccessful. “Some flea-bitten thing you took pity on, I suppose?”

“No, sir. You know Bella, the Zappias’ dog? She had a litter, and—”

“A half-breed, then. Those never turn out well, January, and I won’t have some mongrel chewing on the taxidermy.” He waggled his fork at me. “But I’ll tell you what—one of my associates raises very fine dachshunds down in Massachusetts. Perhaps if you apply yourself in your lessons I could be persuaded to reward you with an early Christmas present.” He gave me an indulgent smile, winking beneath Wilda’s pursed lips, and I tried to smile back.

I returned to my ledger copying after dinner feeling sullen and strangely rubbed raw, as if there were invisible chains chafing against my skin. The numbers blurred and prismed as tears pooled in my eyes and I had a sudden, useless desire for my long-lost pocket diary. For that day in the field when I’d written a story and made it come true.

My pen slunk to the margins of the ledger book. I ignored the voice in my head that said it was absurd, hopeless, several steps beyond fanciful—that reminded me words on a page aren’t magic spells—and wrote: Once upon a time there was a good girl who met a bad dog, and they became the very best of friends.

There was no silent reshaping of the world this time. There was only a faint sighing, as if the entire room had exhaled. The south window rattled weakly in its frame. A sick sort of exhaustion stole over my limbs, a heaviness, as if each of my bones had been stolen and replaced with lead, and the pen dropped from my hand. I blinked blurring eyes, my breath half-held.

But nothing happened; no puppy materialized. I returned to my copy work.

The following morning I woke abruptly, much earlier than any sane young woman would voluntarily wake up. An insistent plink-plinking rang through my room. Wilda snuffled in her sleep, brows crimping in instinctual disapproval.

I dove for my window in a fumbling mess of nightgown and sheets. Standing on the frosted lawn below, wrapped in the pearly 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.