“I beg your pardon,” Bee said so sweetly the words stung. “The headmaster instructed us to wait for him here. Will he return shortly?”
Her smile was too much for him. He croaked out a garbled word and bolted back the way he had come, wrenching the door closed behind him.
“Bee! Was that necessary?”
She stared at the door as if her gaze alone could splinter it into a thousand shards. “You know how I have always had such vivid dreams. I’ve started drawing them out to help remember them by.”
“How can you draw a dream?”
Her color was high, and her hands were clenched. “I had to try to make some sense of them because the details haunt me! I don’t even know why, and it doesn’t matter, but I can’t bear to have people looking—I can’t explain it. I didn’t even show them to you!” Tears welled in her lovely eyes. I knew when Bee was bluffing, and this wasn’t it.
I grasped her hands. “When he comes back in, you cause a distraction, anything to get him to put the book down and shift his attention elsewhere. I’ll sneak it into my schoolbag.”
Nodding, she let go my hands and wiped her cheeks. The longcase clock’s pendulum ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Bee stared at the poet’s head as if daring Bran Cof to open his eyes. I couldn’t bear looking in case he did, so I let my gaze wander to the chalkboard. It had been recently erased, but I could still read traces of figures and words as a geologist can read down through layers of sediment and rock. The Hibernian Ice Sheet Expedition: Lost, no bodies or wreckage recovered. The Alps Ice Cap Expedition: Turned back by ice storms. The First Baltic Ice Sea Expedition: Remnants rescued after a year missing. The Second Baltic Ice Sea Expedition: Lost, no bodies or wreckage recovered.
“I wonder who that lesson was for,” said Bee. “It’s strange to look at that and remember that both your father and your mother were members of the First Baltic Ice Sea Expedition. That they were the ‘remnants rescued after a year missing.’ Them and, what, ten others?”
“Three others. Only five survived out of the twenty-eight who set out. I think I’ve read my father’s account of the opening months of that expedition a hundred times. ‘No man has ever crossed the tempestuous Baltic Ice Sea or set foot on the towering and inhospitable Skandic Ice Shelf.’ No woman, either, for that matter. Fifty-four journals he wrote and numbered. That’s the only time he mentions my mother.”