But he hadn’t said yes.
“Arthur,” Charlotte said, “what is it you’re afraid of? I know it isn’t the forest,” she added with a smile, “even if I wish it were.”
Quite possibly he was afraid of getting everything he’d ever wanted. Far better to have been afraid of the wood, as was sensible. Alas, Arthur Throckmorton was not a sensible man.
“I’m afraid,” he said in a low voice, “that I’ll go, and it won’t change anything.”
“What do you mean?”
Arthur’s fingers curled over the arms of his chair. “Well... what if I never make it? Not because of anything, I don’t know,eldritchbut simply because I’m a hopeless woodsman and a perfectly normal forest could kill me if it wanted? What if I make it but something happens to the clock on the way back and Mrs. Livingston never gives me the second payment? Or I make it back but I’m too late, and Mrs. Buchanan has died and can’t enjoy the clock even a moment, and Mrs. Livingston is absolutely devastated and regrets sending me in the first place?”
Charlotte touched his hand, but now that he’d started, all the fears he’d spent the day suppressing surged over him like a tidal wave.
“What if I can’t find a house in Port Lorne, even with all that money? Or I do, but when we move in it’s falling apart, and I didn’t notice beforehand because I know nothing about construction? Or the house is wonderful, but we can’t find clients, and eventually our money from Mrs. Livingston runs out, and we have nothing left to fall back on and no way to get back here to start over? Or perhaps—” Arthur spoke faster than ever because if he didn’t he’d never admit it “—perhaps everything in Port Lorne will be perfectly lovely, but I won’t have any friends, or a wife, because I’m stillme.”
In the silence, his chest heaved. At his core, he’d always been afraid to make a change, because he’d always been afraid of finding that he—not Seacliff, not the loss of his father or brother-in-law or mother, not the lack of money—was theproblem. It was so much easier to make believe, to pretend there were insurmountable obstacles to even attempting a change. That things would be perfect if only they ever happened, and it was simply a shame they never would.
After a long moment, Charlotte’s fingers curled around his. “You don’t believe that, do you? That you’re...”
Arthur wasn’t sure what he hoped she would say. Regardless, he was disappointed. After a pause in which he saw the gears turning in her head as clearly as if she’d been a clock he’d opened up, all she said was, “What are you going to do?”
It was the worst thing she could’ve asked.
“Don’t you want to tell me what you think?”
She gave another small smile, squeezed his hand, and let go. “I’ve told you what I think.”
“Yes, but—should I go or not?”
“You’ll have to decide yourself. You’re a grown man, Arthur. I’m not making the decision for you.”
Arthur wiped his hands on his trousers. “But—but if you said—you could tell me the forest is too dangerous—that I have to stay—or—”
His sister shook her head. “I could, but I won’t.”
“What if you don’t like the decision I make?”
“Then I guess I’ll have to live with it.”
Charlotte stood, too quickly. She clamped a hand down on his shoulder and swayed. He stood, too, but she said, as always, “I’m fine,” and made her slow way to her bedroom alone, calling good-night as she went.
Arthur sat up alone for a long time.
Not this year, son, he heard his father saying, year after year.When you’re older.
He remembered his father knocking on the door of the bedroom he’d shared with Charlotte, the same room his niblingsshared now. The way he’d refused to answer, except for abye, Dadso quiet George hadn’t heard. His father vanishing within the trees by the time he’d run outside.
Arthur had regretted his momentary stubbornness for thirty years.
You think the forest is this beautiful place full of adventure and enchantment, he heard Charlotte saying yesterday,but it’sdangerous, Arthur.
Dangerous it was. He knew that. Technically. He knew about the sickness, the disappearances. Their father’s disappearance three decades ago.
Yet when Arthur thought of the forest now, all he remembered were his father’s stories.
“It can’t bethatdangerous,” he murmured, lost in images of a fairy prince in autumn finery and trees walking from place to place. “Not all of it, at any rate. Bess Little came from Port Lorne with that friend of hers just a few weeks ago.”
Not this year, son.It occurred to him his father might have kept putting off bringing him along precisely because it hadbeen dangerous. It was an enchanted forest, after all.
