She looked at me. “You’re an American.”
“Afraid so.”
She gave me a pitying smile. “Hope you’re having a nice trip.
You picked an awkward time to visit Britain.”
I laughed. “So I’ve been told.”
She went out. Millard shifted his body to watch her go. “Pretty,” he said distantly.
It occurred to me that it had probably been a lot of years since he’d seen a girl outside of those few who lived on Cairnholm. But what chance would someone like him have with a normal girl, anyway?
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d been looking at him any particular way. “Like what?”
“Like you feel bad for me.”
“I don’t,” I said.
But I did.
Then Millard stood up from his seat, took off his coat, and disappeared. I didn’t see him again for a while.
* * *
The hours rolled on, and the children passed them by telling stories. They told stories about famous peculiars and about Miss Peregrine in the strange, exciting, early days of her loop, and eventually they came around to telling their own stories. Some I had heard before—like how Enoch had raised the dead in his father’s funeral parlor, or the way Bronwyn, at the tender age of ten, had snapped her abusive stepfather’s neck without quite meaning to—but others were new to me. For as old as they were, the kids didn’t often lapse into bouts of nostalgia.
Horace’s dreams had started when he was just six, but he didn’t realize they were predictive of anything until two years later, when one night he dreamed about the sinking of the
Hugh told her story, too. Fiona was a refugee from Ireland, he said, where she’d been growing food for the people in her village during the famine of the 1840s—until she was accused of being a witch and chased out. This
