Chapter Text
Just before war broke out in Europe, four children lived with their parents, and their dog, Nana, in London. Their names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.
Their father, Edmund Pevensie Snr, was a banker, and their mother, Wendy Pevensie nee Darling was a thoughtful woman who always had a smile and a story for her children. She also had an odd fixation with keeping the nursery windows shut and latched, even in the brief, sticky Indian summers that London ocassionally suffered through, but she would never say why.
Nana was a prim Newfoundland who thought of herself as the children's caretaker, and had done since the Pevensies became acquainted with her during a walk in Kensington Gardens. At that point in time, Lucy, the youngest of the four children had only just arrived, and Mrs Pevensie was constantly tired. Mr Pevensie - Edmund Snr. - was somewhat less tired, but he was softening towards his wife's request for some assistance as he was becoming rather fed up with her always being tired. Peter and Susan, at five and four years old respectively, were a consistent drain on his free time, and Edmund Jnr. had started to become somewhat sulky at losing out on his mother's attention to the new baby. Nana was a perfect compromise, for though she was a careful caretaker and an excellent nurse, she was also not a significant drain on the family's finances.
Both Mrs Pevensie and Nana believed in old fashioned remedies like rhubarb leaf and castor oil, and so the Pevensie children grew up learning the difference between pennywort and pennyroyal, and why mint should be used to ward off ants from the pantry but parsley and lemon were the better choice to ward off a cough.
When Operation Pied Piper was begun, Wendy Pevensie swore to her husband that she would not have their children sent away. A year later, under the constant threat of German bombs, she tearfully set them on the train to the coutryside, to stay with their great-uncle Digory Kirke, whom she had known in passing when she was a child. The Pevensie children thought it a grand adventure, though Lucy, at nearly eight years old, had not quite grasped that she would not be coming back home on Monday after visiting in the country for the weekend, and Edmund Jnr was a little cross with her for it, as he had explained several times over that this was not in fact the case. Nana did not go with them, as the train would not allow animals on board no matter how sternly Mr Pevensie spoke with the conductor. There were moments, later on, when Mrs Pevensie wished that she had simply smuggled Nana on board. She was a good dog, and would not have made trouble at all, and she could perhaps have kept the children safer than they were without her.
It is well known that dogs and cats do not care for the fey in general. A well behaved brownie or house goblin may get along with a good natured cat or dog, but for the most part animals recognise that there is little good and a great deal of harm which can come to their families from the fey. Sadly, though Nana barked and barked, and Wendy Pevensie wrung her hands and stared anxiously after the train well after it was out of sight, neither of them was able to accompany the Pevensie children into the countryside.
* * *
In most retellings of this story, it begins the morning after the four children arrived at their great-uncle's house. Digory Kirke was a professor, who lived deep in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs Macready and three servants, named Ivy, Margaret and Betty. He himself was a very old man with shaggy white hair which grew over most of his face as well as on his head, and the children liked him almost at once. And that is almost right - but there was one thing that happened before that rainy morning which is worth mentioning.
Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensies, woke up in the middle of the night - or she thought she did. It was no great surprise to her, since she had trouble sleeping soundly without Nana's soft, rumbling snores to assure her that she was safe, watched over and protected from all harm and bad dreams. Nana was terribly good at recognising a bad dream as it tried to enter the nursery, and would always catch them before they could get in, shake them roughly to let them know not to try again, and toss them out into the hallway. Lucy thought that it was perhaps a bad dream that had woken her, although she didn't remember one. Or perhaps it was a bird; Edmund had claimed before they went to bed to have heard an owl, and Peter had agreed with him.
In any case, Lucy slipped out of bed and padded in her slippered feet off towards the kitchen to get a glass of water. When she returned, she could not quite tell if she were dreaming or not. The window had blown open, and a swirl of dry leaves lay on the floor, which was not so very strange. But there was a boy sitting there on the windowsill, dressed in skeleton leaves and feathers and shadows all held together with spiderweb, softly playing on a shepherd's flute which is also sometimes called a recorder - although it had never been clear to Lucy why that was, since it did not in fact record anything at all.
Lucy stopped in the doorway and stood perfectly still for a second, then she said, "Hello?"
The boy looked up, and, seeing Lucy, he leapt lightly out of the open window. Lucy gasped in distress and ran to the window. The bedroom that she and Susan were sharing was on the third floor, and so she quite logically thought that the boy might be injured by jumping out. He wasn't though. There was no sign of him at all, and when she looked up, in the black night she could see nothing but what she thought was a shooting star. Lucy looked out of the window for a long time, but she didn't see any sign of the strange boy, and eventually she closed the window and went back to bed. She slept uneasily, though, and dreamed of islands hidden under snow and frozen lakes on which pink flamingoes skittered and tripped and flapped in uncoordinated and confused panic.