Twenty-seven years ago, before Oliver left her on the bank of the Danube River, the moonlight shimmering silver across its surface, hegave her this date, this place, and a single instruction:Meet me under the elm tree. He whispered it into her ear, their secret. With barely any distance between them, she couldn’t miss the glint in his eye—the one that meant either he was up to trouble or she was in trouble or both. She told him there were an awful lot of elm trees in Hyde Park. He smiled and said she couldn’t miss it.
“Good morning, Miss Lancourt.” She turns toward the voice she would recognize anywhere. Oliver lifts his top hat and bows his head. He makes a charming gentleman.
Beatrix suppresses a smile. “And a good morning to you, Mr. Rhodes.”
He offers her his arm. “Let’s go travel the world, shall we?”
Beatrix loops her arm through his and her heart skips at his closeness. “Where do we begin?” Her eyes dart between the exhibit signs and bright flags hanging from the gallery above her.
“Anywhere you want.” Something about the way he says it sends a shiver through her.
They spend the next hours in India, where a stuffed elephant displays an ornate howdah on its back, and Canada, where mounted moose heads stare down at them with glassy eyes. They step back in time into the medieval court, filled with Gothic candelabras and furniture, and explore a gallery of natural minerals and stones from all around Britain.
They see an entire exhibit of fireplaces; another of woolen, cotton, and linen textiles; displays of agricultural machinery, furniture, musical instruments, mechanical toys, and medical tools. A model of the docks at Liverpool, complete with 1,500 tiny ships. The glass lens of a lighthouse. A fountain filled with cologne-scented water. A printing press that can print a thousand copies of theLondon Timesin an hour, several full-size locomotives that have been pulled into the Crystal Palace by a team of two dozen horses, and a machine called the “Tempest Prognosticator,” which claims to predict oncoming storms with the aid of bell-ringing leeches.
Oliver pauses beneath an enormous telescope. “How about a break before we see the rest of the world?”
“A break would be lovely,” Beatrix agrees, and he guides her through a gate into the refreshment court.
They claim an iron bench under an elm, this one with open sky aboveit. Beatrix is glad to have a seat for a moment. She pulls her sunflower-yellow shawl tighter around her shoulders and smooths down her white skirt.
“What would you like?” he asks.
“Surprise me,” she says, and a ghost of a smile crosses his lips.
When Oliver returns, it’s not with a feast but with a Banbury cake and a bottle of ginger beer for each of them.
“Sorry, I thought this was supposed to be cake, but I got a miniature pie?” He hands her a warm, fruit-filled pastry sprinkled with glittering sugar.
Beatrix laughs as he sits down next to her, examining the confection. “Try it. It’s better than a garden snail, I promise.”
Oliver takes a bite and—mouth full of flaky crust and molten currants—mumbles something about it being the best not-cake he’s ever tasted. Beatrix devours hers.
Oliver uncorks his ginger beer. “What do you think so far?”
“It’s all a bit… strange,” Beatrix says. “Like I’m in an odd dream where everything keeps changing and things don’t make sense. But in a nice way.”
“Like Alice when she visited Wonderland,” Oliver says.
“Like what?”
Oliver’s eyes light up in realization. “I almost forgot!” He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out his journal. He slips out a folded page and hands it to Beatrix. “The book list.”
She takes the paper from him. The list is extensive, hundreds of titles long. Oliver leans closer, reading over her shoulder. She catches the woodsy scent she always associates with him, and her stomach flutters. He points to an entry written in black ink and blocky letters. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, November 1865. It’s a children’s book about a girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a land full of things from her imagination.”
Beatrix scans the rest of the page. “How long did this take you to make?”
“A week?” Oliver guesses. “Researching this stuff isn’t as hard as you’d think, in my time.”
“Thank you,” Beatrix says. Her heart swells at the gesture, at the thought of Oliver spending any of his spare time on her. “Truly.”
“Maybe I’ll read them, too,” he muses. “Like a really long-distance book club.”
Beatrix tucks the paper carefully away in her pocket. She takes a sip of her ginger beer and, sitting inside a palace of glass next to a man from the future, marvels at her real-life Wonderland. She wonders what else people will think up, how else they will change the world. One strange, fantastical idea at a time.
Oliver offers her his hand, and she takes it. “Come on, we still have the rest of the world to explore.”
They wander through the smaller exhibits of Greece and Persia, Spain and Portugal, then move on to France, with the largest of the foreign displays. Both sides of the aisle are full of the finest French porcelain and tapestries, furniture and paintings.
