She perched now on the stern of our boat, watching the sanctuary she’d created slip away, more lost with every oar stroke.įinally we rowed past the breakwater and into the great blank open, and the glassy surface of the harbor gave way to little waves that chopped at the sides of our boats. It was there that, with bombs exploding around us, we had nearly drowned, nearly been torn apart by bullets that I had taken a gun and pulled its trigger and killed a man, an act still incomprehensible to me that we had lost Miss Peregrine and got her back again-snatched from the steel jaws of a submarine-though the Miss Peregrine who was returned to us was damaged, in need of help we didn’t know how to give.
We rowed past the old lighthouse, tranquil in the distance, which only last night had been the scene of so many traumas. Our goal, the rutted coast of mainland Wales, was somewhere before us but only dimly visible, an inky smudge squatting along the far horizon. We were ten children and one bird in three small and unsteady boats, rowing with quiet intensity straight out to sea, the only safe harbor for miles receding quickly behind us, craggy and magical in the blue-gold light of dawn. We rowed out through the harbor, past bobbing boats weeping rust from their seams, past juries of silent seabirds roosting atop the barnacled remains of sunken docks, past fishermen who lowered their nets to stare frozenly as we slipped by, uncertain whether we were real or imagined a procession of waterborne ghosts, or ghosts soon to be.
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