There was a park a few blocks away from Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta’s home in Cambridge where Lucy would often wander that summer when she wanted to be alone. She’d tuck a book under her arm and call to Edmund, “I’m going!” and then she’d go find herself a tree.
Branches waved gently, like fingers against the sky. Lucy would settle herself on her favorite bench and try to read, but sometimes she just found herself gazing at those branches. When she was sure the park was empty, she’d succumb to her most fanciful impulse to get up and walk among them. Wake, she’d think, and imagine the faces that each kind of tree would have.
Lucy knew it was fancy, but it wasn’t delusion. She could tell the difference. After all, it had been truth that first set her on the path to Narnia, dismissed as both delusion and fancy.
At school she read Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. She painted Prospero with Coriakin’s coloring, high wiry brows and sun-wrinkled skin. She gave him long fingers, an imaginative touch—Coriakin’s had been rather short and stubby—and heard the poetry in her own voice. She read aloud to her friends sometimes, just picked up wherever she was and read while Marjorie and Josephine curled up under blankets with mugs of hot tea.
“It sounds better when you read it,” Marjorie mused. “Even if it is musty old Shakespeare.”
There were glimpses of gold in puddles on the pavement, and Lucy found herself glancing up as though she expected to find Aslan in her periphery. He wasn't there, of course, but the sunset shot light into the street and made it shine. Aslan wasn't in the chapel at school either, but the bells pealed golden every hour. He wasn't stalking beneath her dormitory window, but there were fresh footprints in the snow.
Lucy was sure that if only she could remember the spell for making hidden things visible, she'd find her whole world cloaked in tawny, velvet gold. Aslan in the kitchen, Aslan in the sky at dawn. Aslan in the faces of her friends, who laughed when Lucy said fanciful things but who listened rapt when she read aloud.
"I swear, you and your read-alouds, Lucy Pevensie," laughed Josephine as the cover fell shut. "Why, it's almost as though you believe in all the stories! You're not theatrical, just credulous." So Lucy leaned back and taught her friend how to tell if someone was lying, or delusional, or if they had a marvelous truth to tell.
On lonely weekends, Lucy begged Professor Digory to take her with him to Oxford to see the great stone halls and the towering cathedral and she loved the way the angels’ sloping wings looked against the sky. Wake, she whispered as she passed by graves and monuments to those long dead, and imagined that she might see Aslan pacing behind them, ready to breathe them back to life.