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Mr. Carson approached the servants’ hall table, holding a stack of mail. “There you are, Mrs. Hughes…Daisy…Mr. Barrow.”
In the beginning, it had been a little bit funny how Carson always said Mr. Barrow like it hurt him to say it, but by now, it was getting on Thomas’s nerves. He accepted a letter and small parcel with a more than usually cheerful, “Thank you, Mr. Carson,” just to make the point that he’d noticed.
He got a fair number of letters—he had a wide and varied circle of acquaintance—but a parcel was unusual. Even more unusual, the letter was from his sister—well, they called her his sister—Melinda. She usually only wrote at Christmas.
Dear Thomas, she wrote. The other day, Dad brought over a box of our old things from when we were kids, for Robby and the girls. Tabby didn’t want this one, and when I saw it, I remembered how cross you used to get, so I thought I had better send it to you. If you ever have kids of your own, you can make them play with it!
Hope this finds you well.
Your loving sister,
Melinda.
Even as he unwrapped the parcel, Thomas knew what he would find inside.
Mum chased him out of the kitchen, saying, “Tommy—Thomas, get out from underfoot. Go help Melinda amuse the little ones, if you haven’t anything better to do!”
Stung with the unfairness of it all, he sulked his way into the back parlour, where his two younger sisters and baby brother were playing on the hearth rug. As a man of nearly eight, he was far too big to play with girls! “What are you doing?”
“Tea party!” said Susan, aged four, waving her rag doll excitedly.
“A fairy’s tea party,” Melinda corrected. At six, she was in charge of making up games, if Thomas wasn’t playing. “Our dolls are being the fairies, and Billy’s bears and my unicorns are the guests. They’re having a tea party in a magical forest glade.”
Billy, the baby, chewed on the head of one of the wooden bears he’d gotten in his Christmas sock that year and gurgled.
“But Billy won’t play right,” Melinda added. “You can help him,” she suggested generously.
Thomas flopped crossly onto the rug, thinking that he might liven up the game by having the bears decide to eat a bit of nice unicorn meat for their tea, with maybe a fairy or two for pudding. “Tea party’s for babies,” he said, prying the less-drool-covered bear out of Billy’s other hand.
Melinda ignored him, and bounced her doll up and down, saying in a squeaky voice, “Fairy Elizabeth, would you like some more tea?”
Susan’s doll answered, in a similar squeaky voice, “Thank you so much, Fairy Clementine!”
Melinda poured pretend tea from an imaginary pot into the thimbles that were serving as teacups. “Now let’s go for a ride on our unicorns! We’ll ride them all around the magical forest!”
She mounted her doll sidesaddle on the largest of her painted Papier-mâché unicorns. Susan followed suit, her rag doll dwarfing the middle-sized unicorn. Thomas looked around for the last unicorn, the smallest one that was just the right size for Billy’s bear to ride. If there was going to be a scene of bloody carnage, the bear would have to keep up with the two stupid fairies. “Where’s the other one?” he asked, when he couldn’t find it.
“In the scrap box,” Susan said, pointing.
“He has to stay in there because he’s not invited to the tea party,” Melinda explained.
“Why isn’t he?” Thomas asked, getting it out of the box where they put scrap-paper to be used to light the fire. “And you know, if you keep your toys in here, Mum might throw it in the stove and burn it all up.”
He thought that idea might make Melinda cry, which would be more interesting than playing tea party, but she just tossed her curls and said, “He can’t come to the party because he’s not a real unicorn.”
“He is too a real unicorn,” Thomas said. Melinda had broken the smallest unicorn’s horn off a month ago, and ever since then she was always making up games where the others wouldn’t play with it. He put the bear on it and trotted it over to where the girls had the others.
Melinda whinnied, and said in her deep unicorn voice, “Go away. You can’t come to our party. You’re just an ugly, stupid horse, not a real unicorn.”
“I am too a unicorn,” Thomas said, in his own unicorn voice. “I used to have a horn and everything, until an ugly witch cursed me.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Melinda’s unicorn said. “I heard that a beautiful fairy princess took away your horn because you’re…” She tried to think of a reason, then gave up and said, “No, you were never a unicorn, you were an ugly donkey pretending to be a unicorn. The beautiful fairy took away your unicorn disguise.”
“No, I was a unicorn, and I’m still a unicorn. The beautiful fairy is really an ugly witch in disguise as a fairy. She tricked you all!” He did an evil laugh.
“She is not!” Melinda said.
“Is to!”
“Is not!”
After several minutes of this, Melinda started to cry, then Susan, then Billy. Mum came in and smacked all of them, except Billy, with the wooden spoon, and said, “Honestly, Tommy, can’t you play with your sisters for one minute without making them cry?” as she bounced Billy on her hip.
“Thomas,” Thomas said, rubbing the back of his hand where it hurt from the spoon. Now that he was nearly eight, he was too big to be called Tommy.
“Well, you certainly aren’t acting like a big boy, are you?”
“She won’t play with this one, and it’s not fair,” he explained. “She makes the other ones not like him, just because ‘e’s different.”
“They’re her toys; she can play whatever she likes,” Mum said.
“But she’s the one who broke him!” But Mum didn’t understand, she never did.
Thomas opened the little box and found, as he’d expected, the smallest unicorn, wrapped up in a scrap of newspaper.
Anna, who happened to be sitting next to him, peered over his shoulder. “What’s that, a toy horse?”
“No,” Thomas said. “It’s a unicorn.”
end