We Seven

A Narnia & Mirror, Mirror Fanfiction

Part 1

Helen Catherine Pevensie was told, after her first child – a blonde, blue-eyed boy she and her husband named Peter – was born, she mustn't expect to have any more.

This was not only the opinion of their family doctor in London; it was the unwavering opinion, too, of the tsk-tsking specialist they visited in Oxford who spent rather a lot of time polishing his spectacles, and that of the – in lieu of gentler terminology – quack her sister-in-law Alberta glowingly recommended.

This led Helen to adopt a baby girl before Peter's second birthday.

The family advised against it, of course. They were all certain it would be quite impossible for the Pevensies to love some strange orphan as much as their own son. She'd be a grubby Cinderella, at best; a troubled child with a temperament none of them could predict, having little to no access to her 'real' family history, at worst.

And – faced with this advice – Helen only smiled tightly, put her hand on her husband's arm, and signed the adoption papers.

None of their predictions came true.

The baby, named Josephine (they said for a late great aunt of Mr. Pevensie's, but it is worth noting that Helen's bookshelf sported well-worn copies of Little Women and Good Wives), was beloved no less for not sharing their blood. She was, they always insisted, so special. And Peter apparently shared his parents' opinion on the matter, for when the other adults gathered about him in sympathy biting their nails and waiting for signs of jealousy, they found none. He piled wobbly cushions high to be tall enough to peek into the cradle and see the new addition to the family for himself, until his father finally took pity on the toddler – whose chin was beginning to tremble, eyes growing wet with disappointment, when his cushion-tower leaned precariously to one side before tumbling down – and lifted him up by the armpits for a proper look.

A month after this, Helen felt unwell and became anxious. After all, a mother of two, her health was now frightfully important. She paid a visit to her London doctor again and was informed – in a tone of bewildered wonderment – she was nearly three months pregnant.

And so, Susan came.

Josephine and Susan, being so close in age, were raised almost like twins. They shared a room (while Peter had his own) and had a school-desk which bore both their initials. They played everything from blocks to spillikins together. Of course, they were very different – as different as night from day. Susan was fair-skinned and gravitated to indoor activities; Josephine – Jo, as she usually preferred to be called – was tan and just had to play every sport their brother tried.

Susan warned her empathically she'd hurt herself if she played Rugger with the rough Finchley boys, that she'd certainly fall if she climbed the tall pine in the park. She did so anyway and escaped the Rugger incident with nothing worse than a skinned knee, though Susan's warning against the tree-climbing proved prophetic, and Jo required six stitches after falling from it.

She was lucky not to break her neck, Susan later pointed out.

Edmund came next, the fourth child in the Pevensie family, and Peter no longer had a room to himself.

At first this arrangement was perfectly agreeable to both boys, until Edmund spent his first term at boarding school and picked up some rather nasty habits along with a sour attitude, making him a less than pleasant roommate.

But well before the novelty of having a little brother began to wear off for Peter, Helen had two more children – twins, a boy and a girl, both blonde and snub-nosed.

Royce and Lucy.

Lucy – from the moment she was born – was Peter's favourite sister. He'd loved Jo and Su, to be sure, but Lucy... Lucy with her sunny disposition and shiny blonde plaits, all the way down to her shoulders by the time she was three... Lucy trumped all. She eclipsed both her sisters in his eyes.

Jo – if not exactly jealous – felt a little hurt. She'd been something of a pet of Peter's, ever since the first time their father lifted him so he could see her, and the idea she was being replaced by his real sister, now nothing more than the 'adopted' sister – something which had never come into her head where Susan was concerned – was a bitter pill indeed.

Susan couldn't follow Jo down this path of mixed emotions. Not only because she herself was as much the sister of his blood as Lucy, but because – as he was falling in love with Lucy – she was slipping just as readily under the spell of her twin.

Royce – for all he would be an ordinary, rowdy boy when he got big enough – was the ideal baby for a sedentary child like Susan to fuss over. He didn't manage to sit up and escape his crib as early as his twin sister, and – though not an unhappy baby – cried more often, requiring sessions of rocking, soothing, and bouncing Susan was only too happy to provide. Babies were much better than dolls, which she'd been growing so tired of.

During this uncertain period wherein they seemed to have been relegated to the B-team in the eyes of their siblings, Edmund and Jo bonded over cricket and a shared love of Turkish Delight, a sweet nobody else in the family found palatable.

"Perhaps I'm adopted, too, only nobody's told me," Edmund suggested through a sticky mouthful of the stuff one day while they were lolling lazily in the patch of powdery black soil that was their back garden during the winter.

Jo sat up – she'd been sprawled out on her back, staring up at the sun through a hole in a primrose leaf she'd plucked – and laughed. "They'd have told you. They told me, didn't they? And you have Mum's eyes."

This was true, as a matter of fact. Peter, Susan, Royce, and Lucy all inherited Mr. Pevensie's light blue eyes. Of all the children, only Edmund had eyes like Helen's. Jo's were also dark, but there any resemblance stopped.

When there are six children in a house, conspiracies and (at times shifting) alliances usually run deep, but so does love and loyalty. Edmund might have become an insufferable bedmate, but Peter would nonetheless have leaped in front of a bus if it would have done him any good. Susan might be prissy and somehow too clean, her athletic skills middling at the best of times, but Jo had gotten caned at school twice for barking a profanity at a girl who wouldn't stop picking on her sister for several weeks.

And as to the twins, even Edmund and Jo, who were less openly infatuated with the golden-haired babies of the family than their siblings were, would have done absolutely anything for their sake.

Things would have gone on this way, in unending love, until they were all grownups, no doubt, except the war came.

And it changed everything.

War often does.

Mr. Pevensie enlisted.

Susan made chirruping bright remarks about how handsome their father looked in his uniform, how noble and brave he was. Peter nodded, half listening. It hadn't taken the eldest Pevensie boy long to realise how, when it came to war, most of Susan's remarks were a series of repetitive truisms.

Father was brave, Father was handsome, yes, but neither of these facts, he thought, needed saying any more than water needed to be declared wet, or snow needed to be classified as cold.

What little good had remained in Edmund, what had been left of their original brother after his school-time, flickered out and died like a candle's flame when they waved goodbye to Mr. Pevensie from the upstairs window.

He didn't cry – he was the only one of the six who didn't, the twins were sobbing – but stood stonily with his fists clenched.

Even Jo had to give up on him for a little while. A darkness followed Edmund after their father's departure, sucking joy and light from any room he entered, and there was so little of either of those left in the home, his sisters – especially those who were not of a pessimistic turn of mind, a trait both Lucy and Jo shared – had to avoid him for their own sanity.

Susan wasn't as quick on the uptake. Her motherly nature drove her to try and coddle him at first, taking his part (at times unfairly) and frequently offering to help him, but her kindness was rebuffed often enough for her to quickly lose enthusiasm.

If even his actual mum couldn't elicit a smile from him in his darkest hours, what chance had a mere sister?

"Mum?"

Helen raked her hand back through her hair. "Oh, Susan." She sniffed, dragging in a long, raspy breath. "I thought you were in bed."

Susan, in her belted dressing-gown, put an arm around her mother's waist. "I couldn't sleep." She'd left Jo snoring in the bed across from her own, hopefully having sweet dreams, despite none of their waking hours being sweet lately.

Helen was staring at the broken window, her face pale. They'd cleared up the glass left from last night's explosion, from the devastating air raid. They were fortunate, of course, to have their house still standing, nothing worse than a single blown-out window. Not all of their immediate neighbours had been so lucky.

"Peter and Edmund could have been killed." Helen's voice was monotone, weak. "I can't stop thanking God they're both in their beds right now."

Susan nodded. The night before, as they were all rushing to the shelter, Edmund had suddenly turned around and raced back into the house. Royce was already in the shelter, the first one their mother had hustled in with a frantic, "Hurry, hurry!" and Lucy had recently developed a curious tendency to momentarily freeze up when she was frightened, serving to keep her rooted to relative safety. Besides this, Susan had her hand and would not have let her go in any case.

Jo tried to go after Edmund, but Helen grabbed her by the back of her jumper, preventing her. Their mother's other hand hadn't been fast enough to stop Peter, though.

Susan hadn't witnessed what happened next, but Peter told her later. Edmund had grabbed their father's photograph, and the room had exploded in glass and heat.

The boys weren't hurt, but the close call had shaken Helen. Up until now, she'd been convincing herself – trying to, at any rate – the best thing to do was keep the family together, here in Finchley, until her husband came back from the war.

If he came back from the war.

She'd endured remarks from other mothers in the ration lines, mothers who were sending their children into the countryside for safety, and Susan didn't know how she did it. One cruel – if honeyed – word and a mean look from a woman who'd lived three houses down from them for years, who Susan had always looked up to and thought fashionable and wise, and she felt her cheeks heat. She couldn't look at the woman for shame, fixing her eyes on the back of her mum's coat.

"She cut us, Mum!" Susan had choked, once the woman was gone. "Mrs. Burns cut us dead. Because you aren't sending us away. Because we aren't evacuating with the others."

"Oh, do be quiet, Susan." And for an instant, staring into the taunt white face and brimming wet brown eyes, she had wondered if her mother was impervious after all.

It wasn't only the window that broke last night. The dam holding back Helen's tears was blown up, too. Susan could see them running down her mother's face.

"You'll have to go," she said. "You will all have to go. I won't lose you. I won't."

"I'm not going." Jo planted her hands on her hips.

"Pack," said Susan, taking jumpers and skirts and knee-high stockings from the drawers and arranging them carefully in the suitcase on her bed.

"I'm not packing," Jo argued, "because I'm not going."

"Mum says we've got to."

"What for? Because Edmund ran back into the house during an air raid, I've got to leave home? Let's just send him away for a few months."

"Mum says all of us."

"Because we're just the kids we get no say!"

A blonde head popped out from under Jo's bed. "Yeah! Why is that? Mum's always said we need to stick together. How come we've got to go live with some old guy we don't know, miles and miles away, and leave Mum all by herself?" Royce was eight now, and Susan's formally all-abiding affection for him was somewhat waning due to his new-found love of hiding under the furniture and spying.

"Royce!" she cried. "You're meant to be helping Lucy pack!"

Royce crawled out on his belly and waved that off. "What if we don't want to go?"

"Tough."

"Well, I'm staying."

Jo pointed at him. "Hey, if you get to stay, I get to stay."

"None of us can stay!" Susan blew out her cheeks in exasperation. "Pack! For pity's sake, pack!"

"Do you get money every time you say the word pack or something, Su?" Royce asked cheekily. "I want money. Then I can pay for fencing lessons." He spread his arms open and stood with his feet apart. "Pack, pack, pack!" He shrugged, mouth twisting. "Aw. Nothing."

"Muuummm!" bellowed Susan, tossing aside an armload of folded socks, which bounced off the side of her suitcase and tumbled from the bed.

They all went.

Edmund and Jo would barely look at their mother, flinching when she kissed them goodbye, furious at being made to go. Peter promised to look after them all, but he wasn't off to a great start, since his first attempt to help Edmund onto the platform resulted in a thankless, "I know how to get on a train by myself! Get off me!"

The twins allowed themselves to be kissed and passed – though Royce most days would have thought himself too grown up for such a thing – a toy dog back and forth between them for comfort.

That just left Susan, who was told, in a strained voice, to be a big girl. She couldn't help feeling that her mother's impatience stemmed from Jo's rejection of her. Helen, like all of them, was used to Edmund's snubs, and he was a boy and would probably grow out of it, but Jo's coldness cut her like a knife.

Susan suspected because Jo had been adopted before Mum even realised she was carrying her, Jo would always be the precious first girl in her eyes, the darling.

That was their mother's pet name for her, even – darling. Whenever Jo entered a room, Helen always lit up like a Christmas tree and said, "Oh, there you are, darling." Today she'd said, "Goodbye, darling."

As she sat across from Lucy and Royce and Edmund in their compartment, Susan tried – and failed – to recall if Helen had ever called her darling.

Jo was a rule-breaker, Jo was messy, Jo didn't follow instructions, Jo was the very model of noncompliance even during wartime, and still their mum – by all appearances – loved her best.

It didn't seem fair.

They all loved the professor's huge house. Even Jo and Edmund, who'd been so determined to hate it.

It was the sort of house that is old and famous and comes into guidebooks, the sort that – even during wartime – people arrived to take tours of.

There were suits of armour and paintings and musical instruments, and the three bedrooms and adjoining sitting rooms set aside for their use were simply enormous, almost as large, each, as their whole house in Finchley.

At first, it seemed they wouldn't be allowed to move freely or touch anything. A brash housekeeper called Mrs. Macready glared hard at Susan when – falling behind the others because the suitcase she carried, not realising they were meant to leave their luggage behind on the cart which had conveyed them from the station to the house, for the maids to bring in – she panted and hurried her step to catch up.

"There will be no running!"

Ahead of her, Jo stopped, transfixed, by a painting of a black-haired girl in an old-fashioned dress entitled True Friend, and was reaching out to touch the colourful canvas.

Whirling, Mrs. Macready unleashed her venom on her next. "No touching the historical artefacts!"

"No touching the historical artefacts," Jo mocked in a low murmur to Edmund. "We should tell the old bag to get–"

"Josephine!" hissed Peter, glaring over his shoulder. "That's enough."

Jo'd pouted, and Edmund pretended to blow his nose into a crumpled handkerchief to keep from laughing.

It all changed for the better, however, like a black cloud lifting, when Professor Kirke himself came out of his study and smiled at them – proving a good deal more amiable than his housekeeper – and assured them as long as they were here, they must consider his home theirs.

"What is mine, is yours," he said graciously.

Royce glanced up at the vaulted ceiling and whistled. "Really?"

Peter softened after seeing the old gentleman, and even the subsequent discovery that the cook, a rather imposing cow named Mrs. Whitelaw, was every bit as unpleasant and unwelcoming as the housekeeper couldn't dampen his rejuvenated spirits.

"We've fallen on our feet and no mistake!" he announced over supper in the twins' sitting room. "This is going to be perfectly splendid. That old chap will let us do anything we like."

"I think he's an old dear," Susan said, thinking of his kind face compared to the icy gaze of Mrs. Macready.

"This is going to be a wonderful place for birds," Peter went on. "I thought I heard an owl outside just now. Did you hear him, Lucy?"

"I think so," Lucy said tremulously, a little afraid of being in this strange new place.

"How'd you know he's a he owl?" asked Royce.

Later that night, listening to the wireless, tears were streaming down Lucy's face as she lay in bed with an increasingly red nose sticking out from above the sheet she'd drawn up to it, and Susan tried to signal to Peter to switch the radio off. He seemed to be preoccupied with something at the other end of the room, near the window.

She shrieked when she saw – she couldn't help it.

Peter was cutting off all of Jo's long brown hair! It was already as short as Edmund's, perhaps shorter. Susan wanted to weep, thinking of all her beautiful curls.

"What are you doing?" she gasped.

Royce, who was perched on the arm of an upholstered chair nearby, glanced from the scissors in Peter's hand to Jo's shorn head and said, "What, can't you tell? Is'hat a trick question?"

"Oh, come off it," Peter told Susan. "Don't look at me like that!"

"Her hair!" she rasped. "All of her beautiful hair!"

"She'd already cut most of it off herself after her bath," he explained. "She had a towel over her head and came to me with the scissors, asking to me help even out the back."

"It was so long," Jo said with a careless yawn. "Mum isn't here to dry it with a towel anymore. I'd never get it all dry by myself."

Susan said in a small voice, "I would have helped you."

"I like it better this way."

"Girls are supposed to have long hair, Jo."

"Not these days. I saw a fashion magazine where a model had hair just as short as this."

"Couldn't you at least have asked Mum if you could get it bobbed before we left? Like Lucy's was after she caught lice last summer?"

Jo stuck out her tongue.

Susan swayed in place, looking vaguely faint.

"No one is making you cut your hair, Su," Peter reminded her, putting an arm around Jo's shoulders and giving her a quick brotherly squeeze.

The business with the wardrobe went as follows:

On a wet day, the Pevensies played hide-and-seek, and Lucy discovered a wardrobe full of fur coats. She commenced with rubbing her face all along the fur, for she loved the smell and feel of fur more than almost anything in the world, nearly forgetting the game, when she found herself in some other place, another world of glittering ice and snow and trees which might have gone on, for all she could tell then, forever and ever and ever.

Lucy made friends with a faun and was delighted with her new-found country, but Edmund – in the way of spiteful brothers – spoiled it by making a friend of his own, which wouldn't have been so bad, if the friend hadn't been a witch.

And, perhaps, if he hadn't lied about being in that other place – called Narnia – to all the others and made out Lucy was lying or else going mad.

Royce, Peter, and Susan were all of the impression she must be off her head, since she insisted it was true, even after Edmund said otherwise and several rap-tap-taps on the back of the wardrobe proved it was perfectly ordinary.

Susan thought Jo was of the same mind as the rest of them, until they went off to bed that night and she said, rather curtly, "We're some family, aren't we?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, Dad used to tell a lot of funny stories, before he enlisted, all the time, and we never said anything, none of us – Lucy talks about a faun and a snowy wood, and you and Peter are ready to write to Mum and have her committed!"

Susan tried to press her sister, tried to work out what she meant. Did Jo think Lucy was telling the truth? Was she crazy, too? Or was Jo just upset that they were thinking of bothering their mother back in London? Why should it trouble her?

Or did she mean something else entirely?

But Jo wouldn't say.

Even years after the fact, Susan never did work it out.

It didn't matter so much, though, because they – all six of them – ended up getting into Lucy's woods – into Narnia – some days afterwards.

Of course, there was rather a messy business, about Edmund's having been telling lies and making it out Lucy was the liar – Peter was especially cross about that – and he ended up betraying them all and going to his witch friend.

Considering later events, both Jo and Susan eventually agreed perhaps it was fated, or at least for the best.

If Edmund had never been in the witch's house, chained to a wall of ice and shivering with despair as Lucy's little faun friend was dragged out to the courtyard, they might have never met Nicholas.