They finish their lunch and move from the cool shade to lounge in the sun. Lying on the edge of the forest, the familiar scents of damp earth and rotting leaves filling her lungs, Beatrix’s mind drifts to Lancaut, and a time when bicycles and girls’ trousers and women like Anna didn’t exist.
Or maybe they did. Maybe they were calledwildandimproper, stubbornandheadstrong. Maybe they were locked away behind abbey walls, or worse.
She glances over at Anna, lying on her back in the grass, basking in the sun’s warmth. Beatrix never would have dreamed of living like Anna then. She was already an outcast. But they are not so different, and what Anna wants is the same thing she wanted in Lancaut. To be treated fairly. To make her own choices. To lead her own life. It wasn’t too much to ask for then; isn’t too much for Anna to want now. She still doesn’t understand why the world thinks it is, even after all this time.
Beatrix sits up. Dandelions speckle the grass around her. She picks one, keeps the stem long. She picks another and another, until she has a lap full of the wild yellow flowers.
“You’ll stain your trousers,” Anna says.
Beatrix laughs. “You sound like my mother.” She takes two dandelions and crosses one stem over the other, keeping the yellow heads close together. She twists the bottom stem up and around, pulls it down between the two flowers. She takes another dandelion from her lap and does the same.
Anna sits up. “What are you doing?”
“Making a crown.”
“Why?”
Beatrix shrugs. “Because I haven’t made one in ages.”
She feels the weight of Anna’s gaze as she works, wrapping the stems, weaving them into a chain. She offers Anna two flowers from the pile in her lap. She takes them, and Beatrix shows her how to start. “Cross themlike this,” she says, holding the stems perpendicular. “Then loop this one up and over and through.” Slowly but surely, Anna gets the hang of it. The pile of flowers dwindles to nothing.
Beatrix shows Anna how to knot their chains into crowns. She perches hers over Anna’s windswept hair and leans back on her hands to admire her handiwork.
She wonders how she hasn’t seen it before. The way Anna’s eyes crinkle at the corners, how one side of her mouth tilts higher when she smiles, just like her own. The faintest freckles on the bridge of her typically well-powdered nose that remind her of William.
“Well?” Anna asks. “What do you think?”
Beatrix grins. “It suits you.”
Anna takes her own crown and places it on Beatrix’s bobbed hair. She grimaces. “It’s a bit wonky.”
“It’s perfect,” Beatrix assures her.
The sun sinks toward the horizon. Anna stands and stretches. She pulls Beatrix to her feet. “Next time we’ll come earlier and go deeper into the forest,” she says. “If you sit like a statue under the trees, the black fallow deer will wander right past you.”
“That sounds lovely,” Beatrix says.
She doesn’t realize she has made plans with Anna until she has.
October 7, 1931London, England
Beatrix tries not to count, but old habits die hard.
It has been more than three years since Beatrix invited Anna to her apartment for tea the first time. More than three years of bicycle rides all around London and beyond, picnics beneath beech trees, and late nights at the dress shop trying on Anna’s latest creations. More than three years of a normal life, with a friend and a job and a home. With family. Not that Anna knows what they are to each other.
Beatrix has six years left, seven if she is lucky, eight if she is very lucky. It will come out of nowhere, innocent words that will upend her existence. Anna will ask what face cream she uses to not have a single wrinkle. Mrs. Jones will quip she hasn’t aged a day in the time she has been coming to the shop. Her landlady will wonder how Beatrix has lived in her apartment for so many years, when she looks just like she did on the day she moved in.
And then she will disappear.
She won’t show up for work. Anna will worry. She’ll take the tube to Beatrix’s apartment and find it locked. The landlady will tell her Beatrix has gone, without a note, without a trace. She’s even left her bicycle behind.
Beatrix is sure this life will be the hardest yet for her to let go of, even with the counting to remind her: It cannot—will not—last.
The bell over the door of the shop jingles. Beatrix stops tapping her pencil on the counter and looks up from her neatly folded newspaper. Anna beams at her. For now, at least, she still has time.
“Working on today’s crossword?” Anna asks as she hangs her long camel-colored coat on the rack behind the door.
“Yesterday’s,” Beatrix replies. She never buys the paper, insteadplucking the morning edition from one of the public bins while she waits for her train home. She doesn’t worry about Anna spoiling the answers. She thinks the puzzles are a waste of time.
