A Place to Hang the Moon
Page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
William, Edmund, and Anna’s Recommended Reading List
Acknowledgments
Margaret Ferguson Books
Copyright © 2021 by Kate Albus
All Rights Reserved
HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Printed and bound in December 2020 at Maple Press, York, PA, USA.
www.holidayhouse.com
First Edition
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Albus, Kate, author.
Title: A place to hang the moon / by Kate Albus.
Description: First edition. | New York : Holiday House, [2021] | Audience: Ages 9 to 12. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: In World War II England, orphaned siblings William, Edmund, and Anna are evacuated from London to live in the countryside, where they bounce from home to home in search of someone willing to adopt them permanently.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020039711 | ISBN 9780823447053 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Evacuation of civilians—Great Britain—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: World War, 1939–1945—Evacuation of civilians—Fiction. | Orphans—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. Family life—England—Fiction. | Villages—Fiction. | Great Britain—History—George VI, 1936–1952—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.A432 Pl 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039711
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4705-3 (hardcover)
FOR LUKE AND OLIVIA …
WHO HUNG THE MOON
CHAPTER ONE
Funeral receptions can be tough spots to find enjoyment, but eleven-year-old Edmund Pearce was doing his best.
He was intent on the iced buns. Some of them had gone squashy on one side or the other, some had lost their icing when a neighboring bun had been removed, and a few had been sadly neglected in the icing department from the start. Undaunted, Edmund picked through the pile, finding two that met with his approval. He shoved one into each of his trouser pockets and, scooping up a handful of custard cream cookies to round out the meal, navigated through the crowd until he found a vacant armchair. There he settled, quite content despite the occasion. It helped that he’d never cared much for his grandmother, anyway.
On the other side of the room, Anna Pearce sat cross-legged on the floor between a corner cabinet and a brocade settee. The settee’s occupants didn’t notice the nine-year-old tucked under the weighty scroll of its arm. Anna had nearly finished Mary Poppins, and she preferred its company to that of the unfamiliar elderly ladies perched on the settee, or any of the other guests. Like her brother, Anna had managed to find enjoyment at the funeral reception. Also like her brother, Anna felt little grief at her grandmother’s passing.
William Pearce, the eldest of our threesome, made his way through the throng, thanking people for coming. He had spent a particularly long while with the vicar, who was quite deaf. Everything had to be repeated before the dear man understood, and this took some time. William was cross and tired. The corners of his mouth felt tight with smiling. But funeral receptions, after all, were not events to be enjoyed. Even when one didn’t much miss one’s grandmother.
William glimpsed the toe of Anna’s shoe by the corner cabinet. He smiled. His first real smile that day. Crossing the room and nodding to the elderly ladies on the settee, he nudged Anna’s foot with his own. She looked up from her book and smiled back at him.
William crouched low and squeezed between the furniture to join his sister. It was a tight spot, and none too comfortable for a tallish boy of twelve, but this is what one does when one loves one’s sister very much. Especially when one hasn’t any parents who might make themselves uncomfortable on behalf of their children.
William eyed the slim handful of pages remaining to be read in Anna’s book. “Last chapter?”
Anna marked her spot with a hair ribbon and nodded. “Mary Poppins has gone away, and the children are so sad.”
William pulled Anna close.
“Is the reception nearly over?” she asked.
“Nearly.” William surveyed the crowd. “People are starting to leave. They’ve got to get home before the blackout.”
“Where’s Edmund?”
William sighed. “Last I saw, he was taunting the vicar.”
Anna’s eyes went wide. “Taunting?”
“Standing behind him, trying to figure how loud he had to shout before the vicar noticed he was there.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Mmmmm. I should find him.” William squeezed Anna’s shoulder. “Stay here and finish your book.”
Anna took her brother’s hand. “I’ll come with you. I’d rather finish it in bed tonight.”
With that, the pair began to search for their brother in the crowded room. This took quite a while, as they were stopped at every turn by well-dressed strangers wishing to list their grandmother’s many fine qualities. Anna found herself collecting words along the way. Principled. Dignified. Formidable. She wasn’t entirely certain what formidable meant, but it sounded like forbidding, which was a word that described their grandmother nicely. Certainly more so than a word like grandmotherly.
“Thank you, sir,” she heard William say, as he shook the hand of a brittle-looking man in a gold-buttoned jacket. “You’re right, sir. She was formidable, sir.”
William spied Edmund in the armchair. He was tossing bits of cookie into the air and catching them—most of them—in his mouth. William excused himself from the gold-buttoned man and pulled Anna along behind him. The pair reached Edmund just as a piece of a custard cream bounced off his chin and skidded across the floor to lodge itself against the base of a standing lamp.
William put his hands on his hips. “Must you, Edmund?”
Edmund grinned. “There were only boring cookies left. You’ve got to do something to make them more interesting.”
Anna eyed the piece by the lamp. “I like custard creams.” She thought it a shame to waste them, even if there hadn’t been a war on. Which, in fact, there was.
William scowled at Edmund’s feet. “Edmund, put your shoes back on.”
“Why?”
“Because the guests are leaving. We’ve got to see them out.”
“I’m in my own house. Why do I have to wear shoes?”
“Just—” William retrieved his brother’s shoes from the floor. “Please, Edmund.”
Edmund grunted his indignation but took the shoes.
As the children waited for Edmund to do up his laces, they caught snippets of conversation here and there.
“Lovely sermon,” a woman in a blue suit said—twice—to the vicar.
“…blasted Germans…,” a ruddy-faced man grunted as he made his way toward the door.
“…if only they weren’t rationing bacon,” said a plump woman being helped into her jacket by an even more plump woman.
&nbs
p; “Whatever is to be done about the children?”
This last came from the dining room.
William, Anna, and Edmund exchanged glances. They recognized the voice of their elderly housekeeper, Miss Collins. They could hear no more of her conversation, but they didn’t need to. They were only too aware that nobody had yet come up with an answer to the question of what was to be done about the children.
At the moment, however, there was no time to dwell on this rather terrifying unknown, as a heavily ringed hand landed on Anna’s shoulder. “I’m sorry for your loss, children. Your grandmother was a paragon, as you no doubt know.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Anna said. Anna didn’t know the ringed woman. She also didn’t know what paragon meant but thought it sounded rather like pagoda, which couldn’t be right. She noted, silently, that the woman smelled of mothballs.
“Yes, thank you,” William said, recoiling with some dismay as he saw Edmund remove an iced bun from his pocket—his pocket!—and shove it into his mouth, whole.
The ringed woman looked to Edmund for his response. It was perhaps for the best that his mouth was filled with iced bun, for this made his answer unintelligible. The woman raised her eyebrows in distaste and brushed a spray of crumbs from her lapel. She carried on toward the front door, muttering something about the world and what it was coming to.
“Charming, Ed,” William said.
Edmund swallowed the last of the bun. “She was a miserable old cow, and you know it. Why must we all of a sudden pretend to have adored her?”
“It’s what people do?” Anna said.
“Yes, but why?”
Anna considered this but could find no sense in it. Frankly, she was preoccupied with hunger, and a bit jealous of Edmund for having got the last of the custard creams. She picked out a finger sandwich from the buffet and nibbled it, wishing it were a cookie.
As the door was closed on the last of the guests, Miss Collins appeared and asked the three of them to join her in the dining room. There, she lowered herself into a chair.
“You’ll remember, children, that your grandmother’s solicitor, Mr. Engersoll, will be here early tomorrow?”
William, Edmund, and Anna knew the meeting with the solicitor was to be about their FUTURES—somehow the word always sounded capitalized when adults said it—and all three felt rather sick at the bleak uncertainty.
For June of 1940 was, even for those who had not recently become orphans, a time of most uncertain futures. The country’s worst fears about Mr. Hitler had been realized the previous fall when war with Germany had been declared. While no bombs had yet been dropped on London, the overheard conversations of adults suggested that it was only a matter of time.
William smiled a stalwart sort of half smile. Edmund looked at the floor. The sides of Anna’s nose were beginning to go pink, warning of oncoming tears. “Miss Collins,” she whispered, “can’t you just stay on with us?”
“Don’t be daft,” Edmund said. “She’s ancient.”
William grimaced. “Ed.”
Miss Collins laid a wizened hand on William’s. “Children. How I wish such a thing could be. I’m afraid, though, that an old bird like me”—she directed a smile at Edmund—“is in no position to become mother to anyone.”
“But we don’t need a real mother,” Anna said, only a hint of a whine creeping into her voice. “We just need someone to watch us when we’re home from boarding school at the holidays. We wouldn’t be any bother.” Her eyes darted briefly toward Edmund. “Truly, we wouldn’t.”
William thought of hushing his sister, but the fact was that he wished for precisely the same thing she did. Indeed, if he was to be honest about his heart’s desire, he wished for more. He wished Miss Collins would volunteer to be a mother to the three of them. He wished she would stop Edmund from sneaking sweets after dinner. He wished she would read Anna—all of them, come to that—stories at bedtime and tuck the covers about their necks before saying Sweet dreams and switching off the lamp. He wished she would praise him for his top marks in history. He wished she would take him in her bony old arms and tell him she’d be in charge and he needn’t worry any longer. Truth be told, he had wished all of this for a very long time, though he knew a housekeeper’s job was cleaning and cooking, not tucking in and hugging.
Miss Collins dug in her apron and produced a spotless handkerchief. She dabbed at her nose, now gone pinker than Anna’s. “I’m afraid there’s nothing for it, children.” She gripped William’s hand. “What you need is a proper guardian.” She faltered, gave a sniffle. “And while I wish things were different, that’s more than I’m…” She sniffled again. “That’s more than I’m able to give you.” With that, she rose and fled through the doorway to her own quarters as quickly as her aged bones would carry her.
Left to themselves, the children trudged upstairs to the nursery for their own private council of war.
Edmund perched on the window seat, which was rather useless just now, as the blackout shades were tightly drawn and eclipsed any view of the dusky London streets below. He picked up a rubber ball and began tossing it into the air and catching it again. “I suppose that was supper,” he said.
William sat cross-legged on the floor, paging through a book. The rhythmic riffling of the pages was soothing. “Honestly, Edmund,” he said. “Do you really need more food?”
Edmund shrugged. “What do you think the solicitor will have to say, Will?”
“I don’t know. Hopefully Miss Collins will stay on until we go back to school in September. And then…maybe the grandmother had some sort of plan thought out for us.”
“I’m fairly certain the only thought the grandmother had about us was that we were a right pain in the neck.”
“Ed.”
Edmund hesitated only a moment. “She did think that, though.”
William sighed. “I know, but you needn’t say it out loud.” He fanned the pages of the book again. “Maybe there was a plan left over from Mum and Dad.”
Anna lay down on the nursery rug. “Tell me something about them, William.”
William gave her ankle a squeeze. “Mum always said her children hung the moon.”
“You tell us that one all the time,” Edmund complained. “We know that one.”
“I know you know it.” William frowned. “But it’s a good one.”
“Yes, but tell us something else anyhow,” Anna pleaded.
For you see, of the three of them, only William had any memory of their parents. Nothing too detailed, mind you, as he was not yet five when they died. He remembered being led by the hand through the back garden. A cool palm on his forehead when he was ill. A few notes from a tune sung to him at bedtime. And with this handful of fleeting memories plus a great many more he concocted from his own imagination, William had made it his business, some years ago, to paint for his brother and sister a vivid, if largely fictitious, portrait of their parents. Anna would, with some regularity, turn to William and say tell me something about them. Edmund never asked but always listened. Whether the memory about hanging the moon was real or whether William had made it up such a long time ago it had become so, well—did it matter?
William thought for a moment. “I’ve got another. I’ve only just remembered this one. When she was small, Mum got her little finger run over by someone’s roller skate, and she broke it.”
“The skate, or the finger?” Edmund asked.
“The finger!”
Edmund narrowed his eyes. “You actually remember her telling you that one?”
“I do.”
“Must have hurt, mustn’t it?” Anna said.
“I’m sure it did,” William agreed.
The children sat in silence for a long while, pondering broken fingers and uncertain futures, until finally William rose, shook himself, and mustered a confidence that was almost believable.
“Mr. Engersoll will have a plan for us, and everything will be all right.”
CHAPTER TWO
Mr. Engersoll cleared his throat. “It goes without saying, I suppose, children, that your situation is both unique and precarious?”
This was not the opening any of them had hoped for.
“Yes, sir. I mean…no, sir.” William stumbled. “I mean, we understand…that we’re…unique and…precarious.”
“Yes. Well. As you are no doubt aware, the three of you are heirs to a comfortable inheritance.” The children only blinked at him. “However, that inheritance is of little use in the procurement of the one thing you require—a guardian to watch over you until you are grown.” He offered an awkward smile. “Your grandmother did not name such a guardian in her will.” He paused. “It is rather a bitter irony, isn’t it?”
William reached for Anna’s hand, aware that she hadn’t a clue what irony was. He wasn’t sure he understood it himself, truth be told, but he knew what Mr. Engersoll was getting at. “He means that we have money but we don’t have anyone to take care of us.”
Edmund, for his part, was studying the tufts of hair sprouting from the solicitor’s ears. And none on top, Edmund thought. Rough, that.
The solicitor cleared his throat again. “Miss Collins has agreed to stay on until alternative arrangements can be made, but—I’m sure you understand—she has served your grandmother here for over forty years and it isn’t her job to—ehm—well, she is of such an age that…” He faltered for a moment. “It’s time for her to retire to her own lodgings. Her own family.”
Miss Collins dabbed at her nose with a handkerchief.
Anna wasn’t quite prepared to give up on Miss Collins. “We don’t need a real guardian, though. Only somebody to watch us on school holidays.”
Mr. Engersoll gave the three of them a long look. “I hardly think a just-for-the-holidays guardian seems the right solution, do you?”