If you had been in the air above the north wood outside Stane How in the last light of Christmas Eve, if you had been circling the wood on—let’s just say—a magical flying reindeer, what would have greeted your eyes would not have been a peaceful holiday tableau, with animals snuggling down for their long winter’s naps in their burrows and hollows, or perched on snow-laden fir branches with heads tucked cozily under wings. Not at all. It would have been utter chaos, a scene of war: horses screaming as foxes snapped at their heels, dumping their sledge-loads of logs thumping into the snow as they bolted out into the fields. Men shouting and covering their heads as owls and hawks dive-bombed them and squirrels pelted them with pine cones. If they tried to run into the wood, grouse flushed up in their faces, screeching, claws out. They turned their ankles in open burrows as they tried to flee. Something was on fire.
A streak of motion might have caught your eye to the south then—a young girl, hair red as flame, galloping across the field on the back of an enormous gray horse. Behind her, struggling through snow drifts that didn’t even rise to the horse’s knees, a man in a top hat and tail coat, not at all suited to his current endeavor, clutching a letter in the hand that clamped his hat to his head as he huffed and bumbled after the girl. Would you have chuckled to yourself then, a vibrant, rolling sound so warm it could make a sapling sprout spontaneously from the snow? Whatever for? What could you see in any of this that was amusing, or joyful? Or, most unlikely of all, the fruition of a plan you had laid long ago, longer than anyone knew….
***
The day before Christmas Eve, Armand and Abigail had been surprised at dawn by an owl materializing out of the snow to land in their spruce.
“Good owl,” Abigail said, tensely but smoothly. “Have you lost your way in the storm?” It was highly unusual for an owl to stray into another’s territory, much less come straight to their nest tree.
“I certainly hope not, Mother!” chuckled their son Alfred, shaking the snow from his feathers. “Merry Christmas!” And he dropped to their branch and released two fat mice from his shining talons.
“My boy! What an outstanding surprise!” Armand cried as Abigail gobbled down her mouse; they had been holed up from the blizzard a day and a half and were ravenous. “How ever did you make it here in this weather?”
“My parents raised a good flyer,” Alfred puffed out his throat a bit.
“But why, in this frightful weather?” Abigail asked once she’d swallowed her meal. “Not that I’m not pleased to see you, and in one piece at that.”
Alfred cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean? Your robin friend came to the Beringford woods and said you needed me right away.”
Armand sat up straight, swallowing the rest of his mouse. “How very odd! That’s just the thing Elsie said her kits told her when they came.”Now that he thought of it, the woods had seemed strangely full of chirps and growls and twitters that night. It was as if all the animals from the surrounding woods had come to the owls’ wood. “What could that robin be up to?”
“I don’t know, but you’ve got me for Christmas,” Alfred said. “Oh, and one other thing I needed to tell you—I nearly forgot. As I came across the field just now, I saw a girl riding out from your village west on the road, alone. Do you know her? It’s not likely to end well for her and her horse with another wave of the storm set to roll in.”
“What?” Abigail asked, but Armand had already launched into the air. He flew to the top of their spruce, perched, flicking his tail up and down to steady himself in the wind, and looked out in the direction Alfred had indicated. The sun was up, but it was behind such a thick wall of cloud that his sensitive eyes could still make out the dark figure moving away on the road. Though he couldn’t make out anything at this distance, it had to be Violet. And sure enough, she was too far away for him to reach before the next wall of snow swallowed her. He hopped-fell back down the tree to the nest where Elsie and her brood were snuggled in.
“Elsie, wake up! I need you to find the robin for me. Right away. Violet’s in trouble.”
“I’m awake,” Elsie’s head poked out of the hollow. “You try sleeping with four squirrel kits kicking you in the ribs. Why the robin?”
“It’s not a robin—you and I both know it. But whatever it is, it’s the only thing that can get to Violet in time to get her to turn back before she’s killed in that storm!”
“I’ll go,” Emma poked her head out. “Ma, you stay with the kits.” And she was off in a red streak.
Armand didn’t understand the ways of squirrels, but in no time, the robin appeared in their spruce. “Friend owl,” it said in the common tongue but in an eery tone far too deep for its size. “You have need of me?”
Armand wanted to ask the robin so many questions, but there was no time: “The girl Violet, the sister of the shepherd, has gone off west toward the Beringford wood with a great grey draft horse named Clive, and she’s likely to be frozen to death in the storm. Can you send her someone in that wood to lead her to safety, the way you led her to the fae how here in our wood?”
“I can and I will,” the robin said. “For your part, you should ready yourself. The men are coming with their sledges and axes this afternoon.“
Armand laughed, bitterly. “It’s not a very merry Christmas for anyone, is it?” It was a rhetorical question, but the robin answered:
“We will see.” And he bowed to Armand and flew away.
***
The next morning, Christmas Eve, Lydia Beringford stood at the door of her mansion, swaddled to her brilliant eyes in her fur cloak, watching her private, enclosed sleigh pull away with Violet Cooper inside and the girl’s horse trotting along obediently behind. The girl had awoke in fine fettle after a fortifying dinner and a good night’s sleep. It was good to be young, Lydia thought. She had come in to breakfast in the great room eyeing the rafters and the suits of armor and the Beringford tapestries with a sort of mélange of wonder and horror. Lydia chuckled.
Christabel, standing beside her, waved at the departing sleigh, “I like her, ma’am,” she said.
“So do I,” Lydia said into her fur collar. “A girl who will half-kill herself in a snowstorm and give up more money than she’s seen in her lifetime to help animals—because she realizes we owe them more than we can ever repay—that’s exactly whom I had in mind when I funded that scholarship.” She watched the sleigh round the drive and head off into the forest. Violet wasn’t the only passenger: Lydia’s lawyer Gaston was riding along with a letter she had instructed him by wire last night to draft up and bring along to the mansion with him no later than noon, please. He was none too chuffed about the whole thing, she could tell, even though the winds had calmed, and the sun was out, and Curtis had plowed the drive that morning so that the sleigh ran smoothly on the track. The fir branches hung over the road in great, icy festoons, and the snow sparkled as if St Nicholas had gone through in the night and thrown sapphires and diamonds everywhere. “And this is why I don’t bother decorating for Christmas,” Lydia murmured. “You can never improve on nature.” Then she shuddered violently and growled, “By all the gods of Yule, Christabel, it’s frigid out. Shut the door!” And she spun on her heel and swept back into the mansion in a whirl of damask and fur.
***
Violet was bewildered as she rode in the sleigh with Mr. Gaston, this dour man with his black hat and mustaches who said not one word to her. Curtis had been kind, wishing her a merry Christmas Eve as he helped her into the sleigh and telling her what a fine horse Clive was. “If you breed him, let me know. Lady Beringford’s interested in his stock.” And it had felt like waking up in heaven, in that big, soft down bed with the snowy light streaming in the window and the room warm already from something Christabel had called a “radiator.” And breakfast! Sure, they had good milk and baking and meat at home, but not fruit, in the winter! And hot chocolate. Still, it all made Violet feel terribly uneasy. She realized now with a good night’s sleep behind her that she had been unbelievably rude bursting in on Lady Beringford the way she had. Even though the Lady had said nothing more about it, only making small talk about Stane How and Violet’s schooling at breakfast, Violet wouldn’t blame her if she not only refused to sell them the Beringford timber, but took away Violet’s place at college to boot. She deserved it. Why, oh why couldn’t she ever think a thing through all the way?
Violet groaned and pressed her face against the cold glass of the sleigh window. Mr. Gaston cast her a sideways look but said nothing. Of course. At some point, Violet must have drifted off because when she opened her eyes again, it was late afternoon, and they were crossing the west brook into the fields between the north and west wood. Stane How stood to the east with the sun golden on the church steeple and the snowy roofs. Violet smiled sleepily. She loved her village. Then, she looked out toward the north wood and sat bolt upright under the fur sleigh blanket. “Stop, please! Stop the sleigh!” She lunged forward and threw open the little window to the driver’s seat where Curtis sat. “Mr. Curtis, stop, please!”
The sleigh rocked to a stop, and she heard Curtis call, “Are you all right, Violet?” and Mr. Gaston protest, “Well, I never!” And then she was out the sleigh door, and untying Clive.
“Come on, boy!” she pointed his head toward the north wood, where smoke was rising, and logs were rolling, and horses and men and foxes were running every which way, and birds were swooping and diving. And Clive went.
Violet found Bertie at the edge of the melee, ducking and protecting his head from a great barn owl, one Violet didn’t recognize, who was making swooping feints with its wicked silver talons. “Bertie!” she yelled and held out a hand as she rode up to him. Without even looking up at her, he grabbed her hand and used it and the stirrup she pulled her foot out of to swing himself up behind her. “What happened?” she asked. But she knew. The men had come to cut timber one too many times, and the animals were letting them know it.
Bertie looked up cautiously under one hand, but the owl had retreated as soon as Clive and Violet had ridden up. Violet saw a wicked-looking cut on his cheek.
“What a dog’s dinner!” he gasped. “You were right, Violet. We should never have touched the north wood. We tried to roust the animals out like I told you, and they just turned on us right away! I had no idea so many lived in this wood–they were just coming out of everywhere. But nevermind that: Where did you get off to with Clive?” He reached around his sister and patted the grey horse, who nickered a happy response–Clive loved Bertie. “We were worried half to death, and then the mailman came late last night with a wire for Ma saying you were at the Beringford mansion of all places, and you’d be back today?”
“Long story,” Violet said between her teeth, turning Clive away from a burning sledge that was sliding a bit too close.
“Ain’t they all. What’re we going to do about this mess?” The light was failing, but the animals weren’t relenting, and neither were the men. A wild axe swing stunned a grouse. Another man yelled something about going for his gun and ran back toward Stane How.
“Oh no!” Violet cried and started to turn Clive after him, when suddenly a voice rang out over the snow, loud and clear.
“Cease and desist! By order of the law!”
It was so loud and so strange that everyone did as they were told, even the animals. Everyone turned to see a slight, mustachioed man standing up to his knees in snow in a frock coak and top hat.
“Mr. Gaston,” Violet mumbled. The lawyer suddenly looked a bit sheepish and stroked his mustache.
“Well, I *am* a lawyer….” The village men blinked at him. A big man shouldered his way through to face Mr. Gaston.
“And what would a lawyer be doing out in the middle of a field on Christmas Eve?” The man wore a striped vest, but one sleeve of the shirt under it had been torn to shreds, his face was cris-crossed with tiny red scratches, likely made by squirrel claws, and his gray beard was smoldering slightly on one side.
“That’s George Haversham,” Bertie whispered in Violet’s ear. “He’s the train company’s timber foreman.”
Mr. Gaston drew himself up, at least to the point where more of him stood above the snow than below it. “I am the legal representative of Lydia Beringford, and I have been sent here with a contract for the Northeastern Railroad Company that will substitute the timber in this wood for equivalent timber on Beringford lands, for half the price of your current contract with the village collective.”
Mr. Haversham just stared at the lawyer for a moment, and then he burst out laughing. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“I am not, sir,” Mr. Gaston held out the letter. “It’s a bargain your company will not refuse, if it has any fiscal sense.”
Mr. Haversham didn’t take the letter. He crossed his tree-trunk arms over his barrel chest. “Well, I don’t know what ‘fiscal’ might mean, but I know I don’t like lawyers. And I don’t do the contracts, anyway. Take it up with the boys in the office after Christmas.” And he turned his back on Mr. Gaston and looked at his crew, standing around in various states of disarray and exhaustion. “What are you louts lazing around for? We have a job to do, and by gosh, we’re doing it. Get your lanterns, get your guns. We’ll cut all night if we have to and shoot anything that tries to stop us!”
“But sir, it’s Christmas Eve!” someone protested.
“Who said that?” Mr. Haversham shouted. “I’ll have your pay!” Somewhere in the falling twilight, a fox growled. Clive whinnied and stepped sideways.
“What’s that light?” someone else called out. Everyone turned. A bobbing light was making its way toward them through the north wood. It was brighter than a lantern. It was like the sun coming up through the woods, but in the wrong direction, and the sun had just gone down…. Violet squinted. She heard the sound of bells and wasn’t sure if it was a sound the lights were making in her head or not.
The ringing of the bells grew louder, and the light brighter, and then a man stepped out of the woods. He was huge, larger than Mr. Haversham, with a full, white beard, a long, fur-trimmed coat belted with a thick black leather belt, and a red velvet cap like the Lords in Parliament wore. The light was coming from the end of a staff in his hand; it cast a sort of halo around it, and stars seemed to fly off it like sparks. He was leading…an enormous deer wearing a belled harness.
“A reindeer,” Bertie breathed. Violet nodded. She had seen a picture in a book at school.
“Merry Christmas,” the man said, and though he said it quietly, Violet felt it in her chest. If someone had asked her, she would have said it didn’t sound like a human speaking. It sounded like the way the animals did when they spoke their language and she understood them anyway. Sure enough, the birds stopped circling and crying and landed on branches. The foxes sat and circled their tails around their feet. Then the man said, “Come,” and turned back the way he had come. One by one, everyone there, every animal, every person, followed him into the wood.
The Rookery 