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“I have such desire to find the signification of this thing that I would not by my good will turn back for the richest jewel in all Narnia and all the islands,” King Edmund proclaimed.

Queen Susan wanted nothing more than to agree with such a brave and fine speech, but she had always prided herself on telling the truth when in council with her royal brothers and sister. In her heart, she felt the sense of foreboding they had all expressed very strongly. She wanted no change in fortune; she could barely remember her life before Narnia, but she knew that her existence here trumped it on every measure.

“If you are all in agreement about taking this adventure despite our shared ominous instincts,” she said, “then it is only prudent for one of our company to remain behind as a lookout, and to mind the horses, which are parched. Should you find the stag in this thicket, then I trust you will wish wisely. Should you find danger, you have only to shout, and I will come with my arrow notched to save you.”

“Hear, hear, Su!” Peter cried. “A fine speech and a fine idea. You’ve always been the sensible one of our company. May we rejoin you presently, and with success in our hands.”

Susan watched her siblings dismount and tie the reins of their horses to various trees. With swords and daggers drawn, they entered the thicket on foot. Susan repressed the indescribable, largely unfounded terror in her breath, and tried to focus on leading the horses, one by one, to drink at the small brook near where they had stopped.

She counted the minutes in the way she had taught herself to do when a clock was not available. Over an hour went by without an signal, or any return of her siblings.

Then it was an hour. Then two. Soon the shadows grew longer and the horses began to whine for their feed. And still, the others had neither returned nor set up a call for help.

Helen Pevensie had just returned home from the fruit market when the doorbell rang.

“Telegram for you, ma’am,” the liveried delivery man said.

“Thank you,” she said absently.

Helen froze. The only parts of her that seemed able to move were her fingers, which trembled on the hand holding the slip of paper, and which pulled at the silk scarf at her neck with the other hand. She read and reread the telegram three times, then noted the original address.

She had no intention of calling.

Within minutes, she had a bag packed, and was flying out the door.

The barest of inquires at the station revealed that her children were the only ones who had been sent to live in this village. Everyone knew the eccentric professor in the big estate. A kindly farmer even offered to drive him in his cart.

After minutes of knocking, a stern woman finally opened the door of the estate.

“Yes?” she asked, looking down at Helen’s disheveled stockings and rumpled hat.

“I’m Helen Pevenie. The children’s mother. I… I…”

Something odd and sad and terrified passed over the woman’s face, but at the moment, Helen simply assumed it was the horror that anyone would feel about facing the mother of a little girl who had run away partly under her watch.

“Come in, Mrs. Pevensie,” the woman said. “I’m Mrs Macready, the housekeeper of the estate. I was just getting ready to send another telegram, in case the first one had not gone through. You didn’t send a response, and so we thought…”

“May I see the children?” Helen interrupted.

“Yes, of course.”

Mrs Macready led her through a warren of stately rooms and into a cozier, less formal, wing of the house. She started trying to boast about the tapestries and very fine example of Queen Anne furniture.

“How could this have happened?” Helen exploded.

Mrs Macready grimaced. “I don’t know. I truly don’t know. I didn’t know the young lady very well. But she seemed happy, well. As happy and well as any young lady of her age. She looked after the younger two, as far as I could tell. But then one afternoon, it was raining and then next I heard…”

Helen caught something the housekeeper didn’t seem to realize she’d said. “What do you mean ‘one day’? For how long has she been missing?”

Mrs Macready reddened with what looked like guilt. “Let me find the professor and the children.”

Before Helen could question further, she heard a shocked and sharp, “Mother?” She whipped her head around and saw Peter walking cautiously towards her.

He looked older, somehow. Not taller, not broader. There were no lines or hair on his face. No real signifier of age. Of course there wasn’t; she’d last seen him only a few weeks before. And yet… His approach was wary, distant, sad. She supposed that family tragedy would age any child. Tragedies were aging children all over England, all over Europe, all over the world, at every moment during this long and terrible war. The Pevensie trauma, while personal, was rather pedestrian, all things considered. Her husband had just written from the front to say that he was well. The other children were safe.

All this, she knew this logically, but her heart counted the adult carriage and serious face of her boy—always and forever her baby boy, even after she’d had another one—as an equal and just as devastating tragedy.

She opened her arms to him, expecting him to rush at her as he always he. He did, but only after a hair’s breadth of hesitation, as though the act were unfamiliar to him, as though he had long ceased to need or remember a mother’s embrace.

The hair’s breadth broke her heart even more than the news about Susan had.

“We thought you’d telegram,” Peter said when he stiffly withdrew.

“A telegram, when Susan is missing? Have you all lost your minds?”

From around a corner, she heard the padding of other, smaller feet, and then her two youngest appeared. Lucy ran to her as though nothing had changed—thank goodness for small miracles.

“Mother, it’s good to see you,” she said, but even her voice sounded slightly strange, more wondering and polite than innocently needy. Like one of the little princesses at Buckingham Palace.

Even more startling was the look on Edmund’s face. For one, she actually could see the look on his face. For so long, ever since starting that awful school that her father-in-law had insisted he attend, and had even paid for, Edmund had shown a nasty streak and been unable to look people in the eye. But today, he stood straight, his hands swinging freely, his eyes clear, his face loose. It was as though all that had been wrong with him was a little dyspepsia, and strong tea had cured it.

Helen knelt where she stood, gathering them into her arms. “Tell me what happened. Tell me everything. Where is the proprietor of the house?”

A kindly older man emerged from an office. He awkwardly cleaned his glasses with his shirt-sleeve. “You must be the mother. I’m Digory Kirke. Very, er, very sorry to have had to send that telegram, but you see…”

“When did you last see my daughter?” she asked. “I know it was quite some time before you sent a telegram.”

The children looked at one another and at the professor, as though he were family, as though they shared something more profound than a few weeks in the same house.

And that was when she noticed: the professor had the same wizened, sombre, distracted look that her children now all wore. They had not aged; something else had happened.

“We wanted to be certain, quite certain, before alarming you,” the professor said.

“We thought she’d be back any minute, you see,” Peter explained. “We didn’t want to believe she’d really gone.”

“But I’m her mother! I ought to have been told first, even if it was nothing.”

“Sorry, mother. It was… a poor decision. I see that now,” Edmund said, in a contrite but still lordly tone. “But in the moment, logic dictated a different approach. I do not regret our decision.”

Helen stared at him, even more devastated than before. Yes, he appeared to be better, but he had never spoken like this. In only a few weeks, Helen had ceased to know her children.

“They were playing hide and seek in the house, during one of the tours we lead,” the professor explained. “The children all hid, but when it was time for Susan to emerge from her hiding place, no one could find her. She never came out.”

“Could someone have taken her? Perhaps one of the members of the tour? Have you questioned them, told the authorities? Is there anyone looking for her?”

“We have looked all through the house, all around the village, but she must have slipped by them all.”

“When I last saw her, she seemed perfectly fine. Did she grow suddenly unhappy? Distracted? Was there some boy?”

“No, nothing like that. She was happy. She’s likely happier than any of us are right now,” Edmund said with a strange inflection.

“I’m sorry, Mother. It was my job to look out for all of us, and I… I failed.” Peter looked stricken with guilt in a way that made no sense for a runaway case.

“I’m sorry, too, Mother,” Lucy said piteously. She looked even more uncomfortable than the rest.

And that was how Helen knew it was all a lie. But her children were in on it—even Lucy. Moreover, they seemed to be driving it, for the Professor looked to them whenever he fed her another lie, whenever he delivered a platitude. They all seemed remorseful, and her children had always loved one another. She harbored no suspicions that this kindly professor or Susan’s siblings had meant her any harm.

The Professor allowed her to stay for the night. She had to get back to London the next morning for work. The children didn’t seem to know what to say to her, to their own mother.

Eventually, Helen gave up trying to break through to them. Mrs Macready led her to a handsomely appointed bedroom. Helen interrupted her formal farewell, and clutched her arm.

“You are the only person in this house not hiding something,” she said. And it was true. Mrs Macready didn’t share the dreamy stateliness of her three children and the professor. She had flinched at each lie. “What do you know?”

“I can’t say I know what you mean, ma’am.”

“Will you, too, lie to the face of a woman who has lost her child?”

Whatever loyalty the housekeeper held for her employer crumbled. “It wasn’t all a lie, Mrs Pevensie. The children were playing hide and seek during one of the tours. No one took her away; I was guiding all the visitors myself. But the truth is… the truth is that the young lady’s things were untouched. A runaway would have packed a bag, taken something. But her things were just as the servants had seen them all week. There was no way she could have gotten out of the house without someone seeing her. There was no way she could have gotten far without one of the farmers or villagers spotting her. There’s not a single person in this village who has any incentive to lie about having seen the girl. But I’ve interviewed them all, and none of them did. And it’s been long enough, that if there were a body in the house, it would have…”

“Enough.” Helen shivered. “I don’t want to even think about it.”

“I don’t believe her dead. If she had died, for any reason, the others would not lie about it. And the professor would never let them. Of that, I am sure. I know him. But neither do I think she ran away. It’s as though she vanished into thin air. I think the other children know what happened, but they won’t say. They’ve done nothing but cry and pick at their dinner since it happened. And they’re different. Between that morning and the afternoon, it was as though… I don’t know. But they stopped acting like children. They stopped playing games or running about or… Their manners all changed. It’s as though they’re proper little lords and ladies. I’m sure you can see it better than I. ”

“I do see it.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Truly I am. I wish I had something more helpful to tell you.”

A year passed, and the pain lessened not a whit. Helen continued to scour the papers for any news of her lost daughter, but she never forgot the housekeeper’s words. ”It’s as though she vanished into thin air.”

For a month or two, she’d taken those words too seriously. Her desperate imagination had gone into an embarrassingly gothic place, and she’d started wondering if something supernatural or miraculous had happened. She consulted spiritual women, priests, and even less reputable mediums. No one had helped.

And then one day, her children returned home for the holidays different, yet again. They had never outgrown or overcome the regal seriousness that had taken hold of them at the professor’s house, but this time, they came back from school with light in their eyes and hope in their steps.

Helen overheard them talking through Edmund and Peter’s bedroom door.

“We must tell Mother,” Lucy was protesting. “Now that we have hope.”

“But is it truly hope?” Edmund said. “Think of how little we really know. A mere story, told by people who barely believed it themselves.”

“It was a history. And we are history. We turned out to be real enough, and everything said about us true. Why not this as well?”

“All we know is that she vanished as we did, fifteen years later, from the same spot. We don’t know that means she reappears here, nor when. For all we know, she was mauled by a bear and carried off into a cave.”

“Don’t be so macabre, Edmund,” Peter chastised.

“I know it means she’ll be back one day,” Lucy said. “I can feel it. Aslan would not tear us apart like that. He would not take our sister from us forever.”

“Whatever happened to her, it sounds as though she spent a jollier fifteen years than the ones stretched out ahead of us,” Edmund grumbled. “I don’t know if it was the same for you, but school chafes. How I wish I were big enough to pummel some of the upper-class bullies.”

“I’m sure you do it even more effectively with that tongue of yours than your fists ever could, even if you were as big as you once were,” Lucy said sunnily.

Things devolved into a pillow-fight after that, and Helen crept away, wondering what on earth her children had been talking about.

The phrase that stuck with her most oddly was “even as big as you once were”. What on earth could that mean?

The day they all left again for the next semester, she found a note on her pillow, in Lucy’s terrible handwriting.

As years went by, they’d all met enough new people that friends sometimes assumed Helen Pevensie had only three children. She never failed to disabuse them.

The grief did not lessen, but she did learn to go on, and to rejoice in the children and life that she did have. Her children never did act like they needed a mother, but they loved her, in their own way. She watched them grow, and marveled at how blasé they were, compared to their peers, about all the indignities of adolescence.

Peter became a tall and deep-chested man and a famed soldier. Edmund was a graver and quieter man than Peter, but promised a great success at law. And as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired, and loved by everyone who met her.

Helen had never spoken to Lucy about that note, instinctively knowing that Lucy had defied her brothers’ wishes in sending it, and also knowing that Lucy would likely remain as tight-lipped as they all always had. Helen had given up trying to beg them for information, and Edmund and Peter were too clever for manipulations to do any good.

But she kept that note, and waited. Fourteen long years went by, before one day, a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet knocked on the door of the house, where everyone happened to have congregated in order to celebrate Helen’s birthday.

“Hello, Mother,” Susan said.