The Ten Thousand Doors of January(63)

But I’d found their Door, hadn’t I? The blue Door in the field, with the silver coin waiting on the other side, which had so briefly opened. And my father had never known, had perhaps died searching for the Door that his own daughter had opened. It was so… stupid. Like one of those tragic plays where everyone dies at the end from a series of preventable poisonings and misunderstandings.

Although perhaps it hadn’t all been preventable or accidental. Someone had been waiting outside that mountaintop Door; someone had closed it. My father’s book was riddled with references to other Doors closing, to some nameless force stalking his footsteps.

I thought of Havemeyer telling me he wished to preserve the world as it was, thought of Locke inviting me into the Society with a grand speech about order and stability. Doors are change, my father had written. But… did I really believe the New England Archaeological Society was a secret organization of malevolent Door-closers? And if they were—had Mr. Locke known? Was he the capital-V Villain of this story?

No. I wouldn’t, couldn’t believe it. This was the man who had sheltered my father and me, opened his own house to us. The man who had given me nursemaids and tutors and fancy dresses, the man who had left me seventeen years of gifts in that blue treasure box. And such unusual, thoughtful gifts—dolls from faraway countries, spice-scented scarves, books in languages I couldn’t read—perfectly suited to a lonely girl who dreamed of adventure.

Mr. Locke loved me. I knew he did.

The ammonia-stink of Brattleboro seemed to waft from my skin, a dull reeking. He’d done that. He’d sent me to that place, locked me away where no one could hear me or see me. To protect me, he’d said, but I wasn’t sure I cared about the why.

By the time Jane emerged—eyes narrowed at the sun, hair slightly flattened-looking on one side—my legs were numb and the lake steam had sizzled away. She sat beside me without saying anything.

“Did you know?” I asked, after a silence.

“Did I know what?”

I didn’t bother to answer. She gave a short, resigned sigh. “I knew some of it. Never the whole story. Julian was a private man.” That past tense, slinking through sentences like a snake in the grass, waiting to bite me.

I swallowed. “How did you meet my father, really? Why did he send you here?”

A longer sigh. I imagined I could hear a kind of release in it, like the unlocking of a door. “I met your father in August 1909 in a world of wereleopards and ogres. I very nearly killed him, but the light was fading and my shot went wide.”

Until that moment, I didn’t think people’s jaws actually dropped in real life. Jane looked rather pleased with herself, watching me sidelong. She stood up. “Come inside. Eat. I’ll tell it to you.”


“I found the door the fourth time I ran away from the mission school. It wasn’t easily found: the northern side of Mount Suswa is riddled with caves and the door was hidden down a twisting, narrow tunnel that only a child would think worth exploring. It shone at me through the shadows, tall and yellow-white. Ivory.”

I’d traded my starched and bloodied smock for a spare blouse and skirt from Jane and raked my fingers through my hair (to no discernible effect) and now we sat across from one another at the dusty kitchen table. It felt almost normal, as if we were hidden in one of the attics of Locke House, drinking coffee and discussing the latest issue of The Sweetheart Series: Romantic Adventures for Young Girls of Merit.

Except that it was Jane’s story we were discussing, and she hadn’t started at the beginning. “Why did you run away?”

Her lips pursed slightly. “The same reason everyone does.”

“But didn’t you worry about—I mean, what about your parents?”

“I had no parents.” She hissed a little on the s. I watched her throat move as she swallowed away her anger. “I only had my little sister left, by then. We were born in the highlands on my mother’s farm. I don’t remember much of it: the tilled earth, black as skin; the smell of fermenting millet; the scrape of the shaving blade against my skull. Mucii. Home.” Jane shrugged. “I was eight when the drought came, and the railroad. Our mother took us to the mission school and said she would return with the rain in April. I never saw her again. I like to think she died of some fever in the work camps, because then it is possible to forgive her.” Her voice oozed with the bitterness of abandonment, of waiting and waiting for a parent who never returned; I shivered in recognition.

“My sister forgot her entirely. She was too young. She forgot our language, our land, our names. The teachers called her Baby Charlotte, and she introduced herself as Baby.” Another shrug. “She was happy.” Jane paused, the muscles of her jaw hard as marbles, and I heard the unsaid I was not.

“So you ran. Where did you go?”

Her jaws unclenched. “Away. I had no place to go. I returned to the mission twice on my own, because I got sick or hungry or tired, and once tied behind an officer’s horse because I’d been caught stealing buns from the barracks. The fourth time I was older, nearly fourteen. I made it much farther.” I saw myself briefly at fourteen—uncertain, lonely, wearing pressed linen skirts and practicing my penmanship—and found I could not imagine running alone through the African bush at that age. Or any age. “I made it all the way home, except it wasn’t home anymore. There was just a big ugly house with shingles and chimneys, and little blond children playing out front. A black woman in a white apron was watching them.” She shrugged again; I began to see them as practical gestures, designed to shed the weight of resentment threatening to settle on her shoulders. “So I kept running. South, where the highlands fold up into valleys and mountains. Where the trees are dry and wind-burnt and food is scarce. I grew thin. The cattle herders watched me pass and said nothing.”