Fortunately, for Edmund, his sheets did a good job of hiding the fact the he was fully dressed when he awoke so Ivy had no knowledge of his misdemeanour to report to Mrs Macready.
He breakfasted leisurely, trying to force thoughts of Narnia from his mind. For all the countryside was boring, he wasn't foolish enough to long for the ever more apparent dangers of Narnia, particularly now that, with Mr Tumnus' arrest, he wouldn't even be reaping the benefit of interesting stories. He suspected that he wouldn't be able to avoid returning, and felt a little pained. Strangely, it wasn't the fact that he was, for all intents and purposes, trapped in Narnia every night which bothered him the most; more so, he was bothered by his powerlessness when he was there. England and the war (not to mention his age) had left him with no control over his life and now it seemed that he had even less control over his dreams than was usual, which was particularly unnerving now that his dreams had become both real and dangerous. Then there was the way that the witch's Narnia, with its network of spies and constant blanket of fear, seemed to so closely resemble what he had been warned that a post-invasion England would be like.
As such, he was in no particular mood to wander around the lonely house, so instead he made his way back to the library and began to search once again for a book that might interest him. Edmund was not a particularly gifted reader, his dislike of school limiting his progress in all academic activities, but if he was to spend however many weeks or months that the war lasted alone in this gloomy house then he was aware if would be advantageous to find some way of amusing himself.
The professor's library was large but in Edmund's opinion, not very well stocked – there were plenty of dull looking books on incomprehensible subjects, but very little that appealed to the tastes of a young boy. His footsteps were loud and echoing as he weaved through the stacks and, as before, he felt uncomfortably small, the shelves towering over his head like nothing he had ever seen in Finchley. Dragging his fingertips along the books' spines (and coating them in dust in the process) he noticed that some of the books weren't even in English; he couldn't begin to understand why anybody might want to read most of what the professor had collected.
A few books on mythology caught his eye, but he felt none of the eagerness towards them that he had felt after his initial experiences in Narnia. Time seemed to crawl as he wished for a ladder so he might scour the higher shelves in the hopes that there would be more engaging reading material there but his wish went unfulfilled and, troublesome though Edmund was known to be, he knew better than to attempt to scale the shelves. Eventually with an unnecessarily loud and pointed sigh of resignation (which was wasted upon the empty room) he selected a book on dinosaurs, and while the text itself was far too complex for him to even attempt to understand, the hours until lunch passed with only minimal frustration as he sat in the window seat and examined the illustrations. They were detailed, although colourless, and he had a suspicion that were one interested in dinosaurs, such as his aunt and uncle in Cambridge, they might have been quite fascinating.
Edmund just wished the professor could have had the sense to buy some good mystery novels.
Lunch, when it came, was a Spartan affair. And while it managed, despite the rationing, to be marginally superior to anything he had been served at school, it didn't even begin to compare to his mother's cooking and was served in nowhere near the quantities required to satisfy the appetites of a growing ten year old boy.
He was trying very hard not to think about Narnia but it was difficult to keep his mind from wandering when he was so desperately in need of amusement. The problem was that although he was scared in Narnia, and although Narnia was dangerous, it was less so than England. Although there were no bombs this far into the countryside he knew that he would only have to pick up a newspaper or turn on the radio to hear of the death and destruction that was tearing the country, tearing the world, to shreds. At least in Narnia it seemed that they had to find you before they killed you, rather than just letting horror rain from the skies. When he had been scared of confronting the Beavers he had simply picked up a sturdy stick and known that, to some extent, he would be able to defend himself. A stick would do nothing against the Luftwaffe. As he wandered the hallways, he plunged his hands grimly into his pockets and froze. His pockets ought to have been empty. They weren't.
He pulled the crumpled paper out of his pocket and gaped. It was the map. The map of Narnia. He hadn't brought anything back with him before, but then again he had never had anything else on him like that. He had always been empty handed and he had taken Tumnus' scarves and gloves off at the Beaver's dam to dry. But the map he hadn't even though of. It had stayed in the pocket of his English shorts and so had followed him back. That... that was odd. And absolutely irrefutable proof that Narnia was real. At least it was proof for him. If he showed it to anybody else, they would probably assume he had made the map himself.
He hurried to him room and flattened the map out across his table. The creases where his numb fingers had been unable to refold it correctly made it irksome to read so he placed a candlestick on one side and leant his elbow on the other in an attempt to hold it taught.
Any notion of pushing Narnia from his mind had been completely forgotten.
It was difficult to understand, map reading was not something taught in English schools, but Edmund had wrapped his head around the basics. Now he had the chance to examine it more closely he could see that both Tumnus' cave and the Beaver's dam had been marked on in a different set of writings to that which indicated the larger landmarks, along with several other locations in the surrounding area. He could trace approximately the route he had followed, from the lamppost to the faun's cave, and then along the river and down to the dam. Assuming the map had all been drawn on the same scale that meant that the witch's castle was less than a day's walk from the Beaver's dam. Edmund felt a sudden rush of nausea at the knowledge that if he had been seen or followed then he could quite easily arrive to find the little house already ransacked or a trap sprung and there was nothing he would be able to do. He suspected that the feeling of helplessness would never get any easier to deal with.
It was difficult to tell, at least with this particular sparsely detailed map, what Narnia might be like in the parts outside of the witch's rule, in the places that Edmund suspected he would never get the chance to see, such as the mountains at the southern border or the coast to the east. He had to admit that he thought he could rather understand why the King and Queens hadn't tried to fight the west away from the witch; it just wouldn't be practical to send an army there when the west was parted from the rest of the country by the Great River; it didn't take a tactician to see that. Still, he couldn't help but think that really they ought to make the effort anyway, or come up with some other way of fixing the issue. There had to be some way of doing it, through infiltration or through some other clever trick that they would surely know, having likely been educated on such matters.
Edmund had never considered himself a particularly proactive person, preferring to let other people do the problem solving where he could, but something about the plight of the west Narnians (and he supposed by extension himself) made him want to try and make a difference. But he was ten. Ten and scrawny and only even in Narnia when he found himself magically pulled there in his sleep, never mind that really he was completely ignorant of most of Narnia's history, geography and culture. There had to be something though. The people in England wouldn't allow themselves to be oppressed if invasion came, he was sure, and so the Narnians really just needed to show the same resolve.
He continued in this line of thought as he ate his supper and retreated to his room, his mind consumed by the slogans and tactics that the government were teaching civilians would help them win the war. There had to be something. He couldn't fix Narnia, but there had to be some way of making it tolerable.
That evening, mind working into overdrive, he took a long time to fall asleep.