The Water and the Wild Read online

  Text copyright © 2015 by Kathryn Elise Ormsbee.

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Elsa Mora.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Page 431 constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Ormsbee, Kathryn, author.

  The water and the wild / by Kathryn Ormsbee ; illustrations by Elsa Mora.

  pages cm

  Summary: Lottie Fiske is a lonely twelve-year-old orphan, who lives in a boardinghouse, and her only friends in the world are Eliot, a boy who is very sick, and the mysterious letter-writer who sends her birthday gifts—so when a strange girl steps out of a closet and insists that Lottie follow her down the roots of the apple tree in the yard to another world, which may hold a cure for Eliot, Lottie has to go.

  ISBN 978-1-4521-1386-9 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4521-3056-9 (epub, mobi)

  1. Magic—Juvenile fiction. 2. Orphans—Juvenile fiction. 3. Friendship—Juvenile fiction. 4. Adventure stories. [1. Magic—Fiction. 2. Orphans—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Mora, Elsa, 1971– illustrator. II. Title.

  PZ7.O637Wat 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014013372

  Design by Amelia Mack.

  Typeset in Jannon Antiqua.

  The illustrations in this book were rendered in cut paper.

  Jacket illustrations © 2015 by Elsa Mora.

  Jacket design by Amelia Mack.

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street

  San Francisco, California 94107

  www.chroniclekids.com

  To Lindell and Susan Ormsbee.

  You taught me my first and best lessons.

  You taught me to love words.

  This bundle of words is for you.

  References to poems are marked with a .

  Find a complete list of the poems referenced on page 431.

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  —W. B. YEATS, “THE STOLEN CHILD”

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Finch and the Apple Tree

  A GREEN APPLE TREE grew in the heart of Thirsby Square. Its leaves were a sad emerald and its apples a cheery peridot, and the passersby all agreed amongst themselves that it was the strangest sight in an otherwise respectable neighborhood. None of the neighbors knew why the late Mr. Dedalus Yates III had planted the tree in his garden or why his son, the late Mr. Dedalus Yates IV, had kept it alive. It was decidedly out of place on their posh street.

  Perhaps the tree would be more forgivable if Mrs. Hester Yates were a kindly old widow who used the apples to bake strudel that she delivered to orphans, vagabonds, and other persons in the direst of circumstances. But Mrs. Yates did not make any such strudel and, in fact, was not a kindly widow at all. The word “dour” is very apt here. Mrs. Hester Yates was a dour widow. Appropriately for a dour widow, she had the squinched face of a crow that had rammed its beak into one too many windowpanes. Inappropriately, she also had a little girl.

  If Mrs. Yates could have had her druthers instead of a girl, there would have been no children whatsoever in her neighborhood and certainly none in her boardinghouse. In her opinion, children belonged to a noxious class of furless, yippy house pets that did nothing but make noise at inconvenient times and crash into her potted gardenias. She had, in fact, been instrumental in placing a notice in the square common that read:

  NO PETS, NO FOOTBALL, NO NOISY BEHAVIOR.

  Unlike his wife, the late Mr. Dedalus Yates IV had a tremendous knack for doing nice things, and one of those nice things had been to insist on taking an orphaned, lemony-haired baby into his home. The late Mr. Yates had also insisted on doing a lot of other nice but highly impractical things that had put the Yateses, a rich and respectable family, into a very unrespectable amount of debt. On the day that five angry creditors came calling at Thirsby Square, Mr. Yates inconveniently fell nose-first into his porridge and died, leaving Mrs. Yates to clean up the mess in the kitchen and at the bank.

  Mrs. Yates discovered that creditors don’t get any less angry just because the man who owes them money has died before so much as taking his morning Darjeeling.

  She decided that the best way to repay the creditors was to let out her home as a boardinghouse. It was a good plan. In two years, Mrs. Yates had paid off her husband’s debts. Then, since she had gotten so used to the setup, she went right on putting up respectable boarders with no pets, no footballs, and no noisy behaviors.

  At first, Mrs. Yates thought that the otherwise good-for-nothing orphan might finally turn out to be useful. She decided to assign the girl simple tasks like cooking and cleaning. A week later, Mrs. Yates found the boardinghouse kitchen in a billowing swirl of blue smoke while the girl frolicked in the back garden, shaking pepper and paprika out of their shakers and shouting, “Begone!” to imaginary goblins, oblivious to the burnt goose in the oven. That night, Mrs. Yates resigned herself to the fact that Dedalus Yates IV had only ever brought misery into her life and that the orphan girl was no exception. Then she hired a cook.

  “Maddening,” Mrs. Yates would say at least twice a day. “That child is positively maddening. Mind like a sieve.”

  The respectful residents of Thirsby Square all agreed with Mrs. Yates. The girl was maddening, or quite possibly just mad. She was very likely the maddest girl not just in Thirsby Square but in the entire town of New Kemble and very likely in all of Kemble Isle. She did not belong in town any more than that ridiculous green apple tree did; in fact, suggested some neighbors, it would be best if the girl were simply shipped off the island altogether, where the Bostonians would know what to do with her. Mrs. Yates, however, had made a promise to her husband to care for the girl, and so the girl had to stay.

  The girl had a name. The teachers who read roll at Kemble School called off Charlotte G. Fiske, though she preferred to be called Lottie and, out of respect for her wishes, that is what the author will call her, too. Unlike Mrs. Yates, who had prematurely wrinkled and stooped like wilted spinach, Lottie looked much younger than her twelve years. She had grown up to have a tangled mess of lemony hair, a face smattered with freckles, and gray eyes that frightened the locals.

  Of all the things that made Lottie Fiske’s gray eyes brighten, there was only one that did so every morning, when she would open the curtains of her window looking onto Thirsby Square: it was the green apple tree.

  From the first feathery recollections of her life in the boardinghouse, Lottie could remember her apple tree. It was constant, sure, and always peeking into the panes of her window. It grew tall with her, though she could never quite catch up with it; it lost branches as she lost baby teeth; it tapped her window throughout the day to say hello. It was alive and odd, and so was Lottie Fiske. Camaraderie was inevitable.

  The green apple tree was also where Lottie had chosen to hide her copper keepsake box. At the tree’s base, just where the knotty nub of a root peeked out, there was a small, copper-box-shaped hollow, and it was here that Lottie kept every scrap of paper and every trinket that she held dear. Papers and trinkets were the only things Lottie could hold dear, because they were the only clues she had ever gotten about her past. On the subject of Lottie’s parents, Mrs. Yates had remained, as on most matters, silent. There were dim rumors in Thirsby Square, however, that Mrs. Fiske had been a foreigner and responsible for passing on her bright gray eyes to her daughter.

  Everything that Lo
ttie knew about her parents could be found in an envelope that she had received on her sixth birthday. Inside the envelope was a letter written in very poor handwriting. It informed Lottie of her parents’ names, deaths, and undying love for her. Also enclosed in the envelope was a picture, now faded and folded from years of Lottie’s incessant gazing, of a man and a woman, both freckled and laughing. On the back of the picture there was a note, scrawled in the same bad handwriting as the letter’s:

  If you should ever need anything, write back.

  Six-year-old Lottie took the note seriously. She wrote back right away to the mysterious letter-writer, asking for a new set of hair bows, please and thank you. Then she asked Mrs. Yates to mail her note, at which point Mrs. Yates sat Lottie down and explained that it is impossible to send correspondence without a name or an address. Since Lottie’s mysterious letter did not provide either, a reply was impossible, and Lottie could forget about those silly hair bows. So Lottie, saddened and rather confused about postal matters, took back her unaddressed letter, folded it up with her mystery letter, and went to have a pity party underneath the green apple tree. That was when she found the copper box in the copper-box-shaped hollow, and that was when she first placed her treasured letters inside.

  A year later, on Lottie’s seventh birthday, a letter appeared in the mailbox of the boardinghouse at Thirsby Square. It was much lumpier than the first one, but it was addressed to Lottie in that same terrible handwriting. Inside were the most marvelous white taffeta hair bows that Lottie had ever seen. Attached was the same note as before:

  If you should ever need anything, write back.

  Mrs. Yates was dumbfounded. She decided to teach Lottie that day what the word “coincidence” meant. But Lottie didn’t need a big word to explain what had happened. She knew a far simpler, far better one: magic. Her apple tree was magic. Lottie wrote back every year without fail and received a present on her birthday each following year. She stored her letters and her trinkets in the copper box. It was only on Lottie’s ninth birthday that she decided to really push her luck and ask for a parakeet. (Penelope Bloomfield, the most popular girl at school, had gotten a parakeet for her birthday.) Instead, on her next birthday, all she got was an old, frayed book by a man named Edmund Spenser with a note attached to the cover that read:

  This is better.

  Lottie thought that the book was exceptionally boring. She decided not to ask for anything too extravagant in the future.

  Not, that is, until Eliot Walsch got very sick.

  Lottie and her green apple tree may have been comrades, but it did get lonely talking to a tree, if for no other reason than that the tree never talked back. Even Mrs. Yates was helpful enough to suggest to Lottie that she should make friends with the kids at her school. The problem with the kids at Lottie’s school was that they never talked back to Lottie, either. Lottie did not enjoy chattering about lip gloss and magazines, like the most popular girls. As a result, Pen Bloomfield (of parakeet fame) had called her Oddy Lottie in the fourth grade, and the name had stuck. Lottie’s lemony hair didn’t help matters much.

  Eliot Walsch didn’t mind lemony hair. In fact, he quite liked it and made a point to tell Lottie this the day they met at Kemble School. Lottie and Eliot had been best friends ever since. Eliot was odd, too. He liked to paint. He also lived atop a shop his father owned called the Barmy Badger, and it was common knowledge at Kemble School that you couldn’t possibly fit in if you lived in a place called barmy or badger, let alone both. The third strike against Eliot, and the one that now kept Lottie Fiske awake at night, was that he was almost always sick. Eliot had been born sick and he had remained sick, no matter how many doctors Mr. Walsch took him to see.

  “The strangest thing,” the doctors said at first, “but we’ve seen worse.”

  “Let’s run some tests,” others said.

  “Let’s try this remedy!” still others cried.

  But now, twelve years later, Eliot Walsch only ever got one response:

  “Incurable,” said the doctors, sadly shaking their heads. “The disease is incurable.”

  There was only one doctor across the Atlantic who was willing to keep trying, and he said, “Five hundred thousand pounds.”

  Mr. Walsch did not have that sort of money in pounds sterling or dollars, so Eliot stayed incurable. He began to get sicker. Much sicker. So sick that he began to miss school. So sick that, on Lottie’s twelfth birthday, she wrote through lonely tears and angry sniffs:

  I won’t ask for anything else ever again, but please cure

  Eliot Walsch of the Barmy Badger, New Kemble.

  He’s my best friend.

  Sincerest of sincerelys,

  Lottie Fiske

  P.S. And don’t you dare send me another book by that

  Spenser guy! Thanks.

  Lottie stuffed the letter into the copper box beneath the green apple tree.

  Then she waited.

  Six months had passed, and Eliot was still sick. Nothing had changed. Nothing except for the bird.

  The morning after she had locked away her tearstained request in the copper box, Lottie had woken up to the chirp of a bird outside her window. It was not a parakeet. It was a finch, and it was perched on her green apple tree.

  The finch had feathers of the purest white, like crisp sidewalk snow before the shovelers get to it. This, however, was not the most remarkable thing about the bird. Every so often, the finch would appear, perch on the green apple tree, and sing songs that Lottie was almost sure she recognized. It would, in fact, oblige Lottie with a song whenever she opened her window. This habit had begun to result in confrontations between Lottie and Mrs. Yates, who did not approve of any of her boarders (orphans included) opening their windows on rainy days and letting in the wet.

  On the rainy September Tuesday on which this story truly begins, Lottie’s window was wide open, and she was getting ready for school to the twittered tune of what sounded a lot like “Here We Go ’Round the Mulberry Bush.”

  Lottie had just pulled her tweed coat over her school uniform when Mrs. Yates, as was her custom, threw open Lottie’s door without a knock. Mrs. Yates looked at the open window. She looked at Lottie. She marched to the window, slammed it shut, and informed Lottie that a prospective boarder was coming over that night for a tour and that Lottie should at least attempt to behave decently if sighted on the premises, but that it’d be best if she wasn’t sighted at all. Lottie blinked, sneezed, and nodded. Mrs. Yates left the room. This was the extent of Lottie Fiske’s relationship with Mrs. Yates.

  Lottie sneezed again. There was something about tweed that made her nose itch, but she refused to wear any coat other than this one. It was periwinkle, Lottie’s favorite color, and periwinkle was hard to come by around Thirsby Square.

  Lottie Fiske, like most sharp and odd persons in this world, was having a miserable school experience. She had the audacity to not be very pretty or rich or even stupid, and at least one of these qualities was essential for a girl in a place like Kemble School. She actually answered questions when called on by her teachers, and though her answers weren’t always right, the awful thing was that Lottie cared. You could not care at Kemble School and get away with it. Girls like Pen Bloomfield would sniff you out, usually by the school bike racks, and call you things like Oddy Lottie.

  On the days when Pen sniffed her out, though, Lottie reminded herself that she had a plan. She and Eliot had made it on the catwalk in the rafters of the school auditorium, while the other kids had been auditioning below for the school musical.

  “Look here,” Eliot had said over Bert Sotheby’s squeaky attempt to reach a glass-cracking note, “you’re smart as tacks, Lottie, and all I want to do is paint. If we get good grades here, we could get into any school we want to. We could go to a university far away from here.”

  They had spat and shaken on it. They were going to get scholarships, they were going to study in Boston first thing out of Kemble School, and they were nev
er going to look back at their school days except to say, “Remember when that old hag Pen Bloomfield didn’t take us seriously!”

  That future all depended on Eliot. He and Lottie had made this pact together, and they were going to see it through together. His sickness was not going to change the plan. But where was Eliot? Lottie looked around anxiously in her first class of the day, but Eliot was not in his seat or anywhere else to be found.

  “Walsch, Eliot. Absent.”

  Mr. Kidd, Lottie’s English teacher, marked the last name off of roll. Absent. For the fourth time this month. It was the sickness. Lottie scribbled on the tip of her notebook paper as Mr. Kidd rumbled on about Irish poetry. The sickness had to go. It was ruining everything. Ruining their plans, ruining Eliot’s laugh, ruining Eliot’s life. Ruining her concentration! What had Mr. Kidd been chanting?

  “Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

  Lottie looked at the penciled spirals and squares on her notebook paper. No notes. She wasn’t going to get good grades this way. “Come away, come away,” repeated Mr. Kidd’s voice in her head, even as the last bell of the school day clattered out its shrill song down the Kemble School hallways.

  Lottie had ridden her bike to school in the rain that morning because Mrs. Yates had been too busy knitting to drive her. It was still drizzling outside when Lottie left school and got to the bike racks. Pen Bloomfield was already there, leaned up against Lottie’s bike. A few other girls were twittering around Pen; when they saw Lottie they hushed. They had been waiting for her.

  “I was just telling the girls,” Pen announced, “how sad it is that some girls have to ride their bikes in the rain. I feel so sad for you, Lottie, how you don’t have real parents to take care of you.”

  Pen had learned a new way to be mean over the summer break: she said the same old mean things, but now she said them sympathetically. She’d discovered that pity and a tearful sniffle could make nasty remarks even nastier.