Disclaimer: "wisdom cries aloud in the streets" and I'm only repeating a bit of what I've heard. Also, the majority of this chapter came from AslansDaughter, who helped me think about what Lucy might ask. Also inspired by a tumblr post about Lucy writing an essay and scorning the difficulty level because it wasn't a treatise; that made me think about a couple of things. So it's a conglomeration of others' ideas and Lewis' world and that might be why it's far too long.
"Did you know? / Did the cross cast its shadow over your cradle?
Did you know? / Did you shudder each time your hammer struck a nail?
Did you know? How much heaven / and how much earth / were in this baby at his birth?
Did you know? / or did you wonder?"
~"Did You Know?" by Todd Agnew
Lucy gathered up her homework, shaking and bumping it into a neat white pile—seven essays, eleven quizzes, and eight short paragraphs. Her teacher's baby bump had gotten larger and larger as the semester progressed, and Lucy had thought she might have given up on grading altogether. But now Lucy got it all back on the last day of term.
She'd read it on the train, so she'd know where she was at. Mum would ask, and Dad too, probably.
And Peter. She smiled at that thought. Susan would ask about the friends Lucy said goodbye to, and Edmund would be listening to the whole thing…
Lucy missed home. She was glad to be going back, and gladder still to be going to the Professor's on the way. But she had to hurry and pack or she'd miss the train.
Despite the hurrying, Lucy almost missed the train. Three girls had stopped her in the halls for one last chat, another whom Lucy barely knew had grabbed her wrist and asked, a little desperately, if Lucy would be back next year, and then the packing had been interrupted twice by friends returning a hair clip and a textbook that Lucy hadn't remembered lending.
But she made it to the train station, her grey suitcase stuffed till it looked like a pillow (Lucy hadn't had time to fold everything properly), and got herself and the suitcase on board.
There wasn't anyone else in the compartment, just two empty wooden benches. Lucy, putting her suitcase underneath the window, looked at it with a little bit of a sinking feeling and realised she should probably do what she'd planned and go through all those papers and see how she'd done.
After all, if she hadn't done well, she could talk to Edmund or Peter about it when they met. Or the Professor, even; he explained things very nicely, and he wasn't at all scary to Lucy now.* After all, they shared Narnia, and Aslan, and so many good things.
Unzipping her suitcase sent most of Lucy's clothing tumbling to the floor, and since there wasn't anyone else to bother, Lucy set it on one of the benches and folded all the clothing into it properly, putting the hairpin and three textbooks on one side and having everything neatly sorted.
It didn't take long, and it made Lucy feel much better about the world.
After putting the suitcase back exactly under the window, she took the neat pile of papers and began looking through them.
The quizzes weren't bad, but they weren't what Lucy wanted; one 6/10, a few 8/10s, several 12/15s, and two perfect ones. That was frustrating—not because they weren't perfect, but because Lucy knew she could do so much better. She'd been so much better, back in Narnia.
Still, she could tell Mum those scores.
She picked up the paragraphs.
To her surprise there weren't any comments; none at all. A few inked-out exclamation points, a few added commas, and once a misspelled word—Lucy had been in a hurry and miscounted the number of s's needed—but no other marks. Just the number "10" written at the top of each.
That was almost worse. Of course, they were just paragraphs, but…Lucy had been trying to discover the wonder and beauty of England, since she missed them so much in Narnia. And the paragraphs had helped her do that, descriptions of the mist hiding the trees at first, and then revealing them, so slowly, first as shadows, and then as real, solid things that were so alive and yet so still. Or the one about the rainbow she had seen, the entire sky utterly grey like every other day, but suddenly a ray of sunlight filled it with colour, shooting up from the earth only to bend down to touch it again on the other side.
The teacher apparently thought they were good enough, but for Lucy they had been…memorable. And she didn't want her work to be perfect but forgotten; it would almost be better to be flawed but remembered.
She sighed and set the paragraphs on top of the quizzes. She really needed to speak with her siblings, or the Professor. This wasn't how she wanted to come home.
Her conscience whispered that there was one more stack she hadn't looked at yet, and she couldn't rightly say how she was doing without looking at it.
Ignoring the voice that said better not, better wait till later, Lucy took a deep breath and faced the next pile.
Her first essay hadn't been memorable even to Lucy, though she'd done her best—reasons why food and clothing became so scarce in wartime. Lucy knew the teacher had just been trying to help them express some of the hardships they'd been through, and to stop those three girls from bullying others about their shabby clothes, but it was just such a simple topic.
War made those things needed elsewhere. And there wasn't another way to win without them.
And she'd been thorough in her answer, even though, away from the air of Narnia, the words didn't come quite as easily, and the thoughts certainly didn't. But Edmund had said the lessons they learned remained, engraved on the heart; they hadn't needed an adult mind.
And Peter had added that it would quite get in the way, wouldn't it?
After coming back to school, Lucy saw what Peter meant. It would have been very hard to be a twenty-three-year-old queen among nine-year-olds.
It was hard enough as a nine-year-old, but at least she had her friends.
She'd gotten full marks, and even a comment, in green ink, saying "Well-thought out. Especially on lines of supplies." The next essay, however—Lucy remembered that one. It'd been on joy.
Mum always said Lucy could find joy in a cavern under a war zone, but in truth Lucy didn't usually look for it. She just found it. So when she actually went looking, to find out what inspired joy, and how she could hold onto it, she found it everywhere. She'd titled the essay "Surprised by Joy," and she smiled as she looked it over.
Though she didn't remember blotting it. But there at the bottom of the page, it looked like she'd spilled a drop of water on it. She turned it over, hoping for a comment—for anything.
There, at the bottom of the page—though the ink had run so much Lucy couldn't read much of it. Perhaps the teacher had been the one to spill on it.
All Lucy could make out was the end, though the teacher had written four lines, so Lucy saw "to see the world," "forgotten it was," and one she could hardly make out that might possibly be "write more."
The teacher had thought it worth commenting on, at least, and Lucy let that settle her.
The conductor called down the hallway, and Lucy realised this was her stop. Hastily rolling the papers up and stuffing them back into the outer pocket—she had a moment of regret, for she'd wanted to show Mum that essay on joy, and it would be all crumpled now—she brought her suitcase to the door and made her way out.
None of her siblings had arrived at the Professor's small home yet. They were only staying for dinner, and that likely in the garden, so Lucy busied herself helping set the tablecloth, plates, and utensils in place, trying to let help. But it didn't.
So she went for a walk in the Professor's small garden. She wished Edmund were here; sometimes he seemed to pull words out of her that she hadn't even thought were inside of her. But her wishing was interrupted by a quiet voice.
"I've been told exercise is good for my health, especially these days. May I join you?"
"These days?" Lucy smiled at the old Professor, who held a dark polished cane in his left hand but only occasionally leaned on it.
"These days when my age has advanced beyond any desire to walk for long distances. That seems to be precisely the time it's important to walk them." He smiled back at her, and Lucy felt a little part of her ease. He was Narnian too, and welcome.
"Might I ask, my dear, if it's the wait for your siblings that is causing you to walk six—seven now, goodness me!—circles around my house, or if it's something else?"
Lucy hesitated, pausing in front of a lilac bush; the Professor caught her arm and gently tugged her forward again.
"I'm not quite sure what it is," Lucy admitted. "I was hoping Edmund could help."
"Or Peter, or Susan. Yes. But as they're not here yet, would you be comfortable settling for me? I might only be able to offer my expertise as a listener, but I assure you, it's something I have hours of despite how much I talk."
Lucy laughed, already feeling a little better. "Please."
"Then let me ask, when did it begin? Whatever it is you're feeling."
"On the train, maybe."
"And what happened on the train?"
"I was looking at my English homework…" Lucy trailed off. "The thing is, I tried very hard on those papers; I wanted them to matter. And I try very hard at school, but it seems everything I do is good enough, I suppose, but not…"
"Not going forth with cordial and dagger and faith, saving others."
"Exactly that! Or ruling, or standing up against a Calormen army of bullies. Even at school, I felt it. Everything we do is just to conform to the rules, to get good grades and have model behaviour, and become almost exactly like everyone else. In Narnia each person was different. Here, the greatest virtue seems to be being more normal than anyone else, so you're at the top. And I don't like it. But I don't want to be the bad girl either. I don't want to be a girl at all, I want to be an adult, helping fix the wounds of the war, or helping soldiers deal with scars. I want to do something that matters!"
"'Earnestly desire the higher gifts,'" the Professor quoted. "Though healing wasn't first on that list, it was on it. Might I give some advice?"
"Please," Lucy said again. He wasn't the same as Edmund, but Lucy didn't doubt he gave advice that was just as good.
"There are always battles for us to fight. That is the reality of living in the world that we do."
"But aren't they far away?"
"Unfortunately not. There are battles in every home and street of England, in every field and shop in the world. There is always evil at work. More, we are always called to take a stand against it. 'Overcome evil with good,' that's what we're meant to make a reality. So, young Queen, knowing there are battles near you, I suggest you look for them. Find out where the battle is, and you'll find the weapons you need. Indeed, you might find you're already fighting it."
He said nothing more. Lucy wanted a bit more than that, but she had been to school, and she had heard the Professor call for logic and reason more than once, so she tried.
Where would evil be at work? There were those few bullies at school, and she'd stood up to them twice already. But that had been twice in a term. Surely that couldn't be it.
She couldn't see the battles at all. Perhaps it was her nine-year-old brain; she was sure she would have seen it in Narnia.
But even as she had that thought, the answer began to come to her. The signs she had looked for in Narnia—people asking her to stay, someone catching the sleeve of her dress, a visitor popping in desperately hoping she had time, even a letter with ink blurred by tears…
She'd seen those all before.
A teacher who didn't do the grading, and who handed back something blurred, Lucy was suddenly sure, by tears. That essay had mattered to her. And Lucy could do more than turn in essays. She could stop by the teacher's office, if the baby hadn't been born, or visit and coo over the baby (though Susan was better at that) if it was after.
She could check on the fellow student who asked if she was coming back. Perhaps she hadn't seen all the bullies had been doing. Or perhaps the girl— Marjorie, Lucy thought her name was, yes, Majorie—had upset for an entirely different reason; Lucy wouldn't know unless she asked.
Beside her, leaning a little more heavily on his cane, the Professor watched determination flit across the young Queen's brow. Her steps came a little faster (he almost regretted keeping her going by the lilac bush they were now passing again, but she was the type to think better as she walked), and her chin came up. She'd discuss ways to help and to overcome evil with her siblings, when they arrived, but she had a goal now.
And that was a glorious thing; a terrifying thing for the other side. Going into another lap, the Professor smiled, for he had seen one of the Lion's own turned loose before.
*In LWW, when Lucy first meets the Professor, she's a little bit afraid of him, while Edmund laughs and keeps blowing his nose to hide it.
Original prompt I wrote for myself, if anyone cares: "Tumblr post from edmundforpresident" "You all realise Lucy was what.. 9 at the beginning of LWW. She had 15 years of education in Narnia. Where she improved Reading, spelling etc. Can you imagine her teacher?
Teacher: you're doing very well!
Lucy: *looks at homework*
Lucy: looks at teacher*
Lucy:
Lucy:
Lucy: this is neither a diplomatic treaty or a war map. It's a paragraph about rainbows
Peter: WHICH YOU EXECUTED VERY WELL WE HAVE TO LEAVE
Peter: *whispering under his breath: I saw the law you drew up yesterday. Nice"
And I added this:
"She always left this student's work till last. She picked it up, feeling that small sense of relief, the growing curiosity—and tried to restrain herself. She was the teacher. This was her student's work.
But she couldn't help getting drawn into the magic of this student's imagination, anytime she began to read. Who else could take small, plain words and tell so simply of magic, of things that mattered?"
A/N: So I got half of my novel written last year; I hit an emotional tsunami at the same time the story began to lag, and I left it alone. I'm back to writing (hopefully) 45 minutes a day, and if I finish that I may end up writing some Narnia fanfics after my 45 minutes are done. Because I miss this world, these people, as well as the readers, comments, and interactions…so I'll write what I can!
