Falling For Henry Read Free Page A

myself! She stared at her palm, the familiar breathlessness making her ears ring. She tried not to remember the way a woman with red-blonde curls and a soft voice had told her to sit on the sofa until Dad came home, said that he’d bring some Band-Aids, that everything would be all right. The woman smelled like lemons and Kate thought about the jar of lemon drops that had always been on the coffee table. She’d sucked one after another as she sat there by herself, waiting for her father, her hand wrapped up in wet paper towel, and as she remembered this, her heart gave a warning squeeze. This was her first and last memory of her mother, and she’d traced it so often over the years, she’d worn it smooth and flat as a skipping stone. Her one memory of Isobel. And after that—nothing. Isobel had simply vanished.
    Kate took a hesitant step deeper into the tunnel, her eyes slowly adjusting to the absence of light. She felt misery squeeze from every pore. Was she heading toward the elevator or was this actually the path that would take her under the Thames? She had reluctantly studied both the elevator and the tunnel in Fenwick’s history class, and fuzzily remembered something about two Edwardian lift shafts housed at ground level in brick rotundas with glass domes … but maybe that was something else, something to do with the museum? The route under the Thames was all muddled up with the history of Greenwich and the items in the museum that they were supposed to be viewing. What she needed was the footpath that connected Greenwich Park to the City of London, and it didn’t really matter whether or not she took an elevator to get to the footpath. She took another step forward into the dim passageway. This seemed like the right direction.
    Suddenly she felt the world revolving as though she were on a ride at the fair. She dropped to her knees and then fell forward, her body flattening as if gravity were a rolling pin. Hysteria beat against her temples. She tried to move her arms and legs, and could not. She tried to catch her breath, and could not. Terror poured its black ink into her body, filling her from feet to head, and then she was conscious, for a few heady moments, of being zero, of being subtracted from herself until nothing was left. Then, jarringly, she sensed herself back inside a body with shape and form, a body that needed to breathe. She choked, her throat straining for air, and lifted her head from the dirt floor of the tunnel. There was a pinpoint of daylight in the distance. She stumbled to her feet and ran crazily, her arms and legs numb, toward the widening entrance of the tunnel.
    Dazed, she emerged into daylight, expecting to see and hear the City of London. That’s where she’d be if this were the other end of the footpath under the Thames. Instead of the anticipated cityscape, she found herself in the middle of a pastoral forest, a boggy area nearby exuding a pungent smell. Mint , she thought, bewildered. She took a tentative step forward, then stopped when she heard the long, echoing notes of a horn. The clearing up ahead was suddenly filled with activity as horses and dogs came plunging through the undergrowth.
    Her eyes feeling stretched and sore, Kate tried to take in the action before her as about a dozen men and women rode into view. It looked like a hunting party of some kind. They wore odd clothes, the men sporting long, colorful coats, puffy around the hips, overtop green or brown leggings, while the women had on long dresses. Most of the men carried bows and arrows, but there were a few spears, and the horses bore extravagantly embroidered saddle cloths, their manes and tails done up with festive ribbons. The scene looked like something from a movie.
    â€œI’ve gone off my nut!” Kate breathed, borrowing a phrase from Gran. She held onto the slender trunk of a nearby tree and stared at the impossible images before her. The women’s gowns were