Behind it, a white throne. Who’s supposed to sit there?
In the center of the seat, amid all the whiteness, is a tiny black spot, like a period on a page.
Look closer. It’s moving!
With a shudder, I back away. It’s an insect! Glistening black, with tiny pincers, tiny antennae testing the air.
I step farther away, keeping an eye on the insidious bug, afraid to turn my back.
My back. Actually, my hip. Something’s poking me. I notice strange smells, part sweet, part sulfuric.
The throne is gone. My hip hurts. My eyes open to a blur.
Dizziness rises through me, and I swing to the side as my stomach lurches. I hear a splattering sound and smell something bad. I wipe my mouth with the back of my wrist.
Asa’s laboratory! What am I doing, lying on the table like one of his specimens?
Oh, that’s right. I am one of his specimens.
And I’ve just thrown up.
There he is at the end of the table, glaring at me. “Now look what you’ve done!”
I remember more now. “I thought…”
“You thought what?”
“You were going to kill me.”
He looks at me in surprise. “Now, why would I do that?”
“You know. For my golden blood.”
“That’s an unusual expression. Where did you learn it?”
I clear my throat and wipe my mouth. “Miss Porlock told me. She said you needed my blood for your rose.”
His frown deepens. “Should have known. Horrible, meddling woman!”
“She was only trying to help me. She’s my aunt, you know. Your sister.”
“Unfortunately. Is she the one who said I was going to kill you?”
I nod.
“Did she, by any chance, tell you anything else?”
I look at him blankly.
“Did she mention, for instance, how much I needed?” He holds up a test tube filled with dark red liquid. “A single test tube! Actually, I filled two, in case the first doesn’t work.”
“She didn’t tell me that.”
Why didn’t she tell me that?
“No, she wouldn’t,” Asa continues. “She’s been against me from the start. Says I don’t know what I’m dealing with.”
“Do you?” I raise myself on both elbows.
“Yes,” he says firmly. “Horticulture.”
“Well, if it was only that…”
“Horticulture with an added ingredient. One that, as it happens, does not require murdering my niece.”
That’s when I notice a small, neat bandage on my upper arm.
Oh.
“So,” he says, “now that you are still among the living, do you want to help finish the experiment? It will take a few days. I was going to start tomorrow, but then I found out you were running away.”
“Your spies told you?”
“My loyal servants.”
I glance at the array of instruments and equipment: a crate of rare soil, the pots, vats, vials, tubes, and the rest.
“I think I’ll skip this one.”
“But,” he says, “you were so interested.”
“That was before.”
He doesn’t understand.
“You attacked me!” I climb off the table and stand before him, a little shaky. “No permission asked. No explanation given. No apology.”
“You want an apology?”
“I want you to leave me alone.”
“But how can you stop when we’re so close to success?”
“What makes you think we’re so close, when we failed all those other times?”
“Have you seen the book? It’s ancient. By a famous necromancer.”
“You mean, magician?”
“Magician, yes. I don’t know who sent it, but I have a feeling about it. Your aunt has a feeling about it, too. Why else would she purposely mistranslate a key section, to keep me from succeeding?”
“She did that?”
“But I caught it. I went back to the text and puzzled it out. I tell you, this is going to work!”
His eyes are wild, repellent.
“Well then,” I say, starting for the door, “it sounds like you have all you need.” I want to make an impressive exit, but stagger and hold on to the table.
“Go ahead,” he says to my back. “I don’t need you.”
“No,” I say, turning. “You’ve gotten everything from me already. Thanks for not killing me.”
“I would never do that. What do you take me for?”
I give him a slow look, then stumble out into the night. It’s only when I’m halfway down the stairs that I remember the pain in my hip. I reach in my back pocket and pull out a small piece of wood. I stare at it, turning it around in my hands, and smile for the first time all night.
It’s Cole’s turtle.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I approach warily. The door, I see, has been twisted cockeyed. Janko was not gentle. I knock. Wait. Knock again.
“Miss Porlock?”
At the slightest push, the door swings open.
“Anybody here?”
The fat candle gives the only light in the sitting room, but it’s enough to show Miss P. on the couch, hands on her lap, staring at the unlit hearth.
I stand before her. “Why did you lie to me?” I say quietly.
She doesn’t answer.
“You made me think he was going to kill me, when you knew it wasn’t so.”
She turns toward me. “My dear girl,” she says, “you don’t know what danger you’re in. Your uncle doesn’t, either, I’m afraid.”
“But you lied to me.”
“I may have exaggerated.”
“Exaggerated? He took exactly two test tubes of blood. And there I was, screaming.”
“That must not have been pleasant.”
“You don’t understand. I trusted you.”
She looks at me sadly. “You still can, dear. You can trust me to save you. This experiment of his is not finished, you know.”
“No, he’s up there working on it.”
“I’m sure he is.” She looks at me intently. “He must not succeed.”
“Why? What does it matter if he succeeds or not?”
“I don’t care for your tone, Cisley.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I’m angry. Everyone tells me what to do, but no one tells me what’s going on!”
“You’re very young. There may be some things you shouldn’t know.”
“I’m not that young, and I know more than you think.”
Miss P. gives me that sad, knowing smile of hers.
For some reason, this infuriates me. “Why are you smiling?”
“I know what you think you know, and I know what you don’t.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t like to quarrel with you, Cisley. It hurts me to see you so angry.”
It hurts me, too. “You think you know what’s in my mind. Tell me.”
She sighs. “For one thing, I know you found out about your father.”
I nod. I didn’t know she knew that. “What else?”
“And I know how you visit him without your uncle finding out.”
“You do?”
“You go out through Marina’s closet.”
“You know about that?”
“I don’t suppose there’s much I don’t know about this place.”
I’m silent. I always thought of Miss P. as kindly, but a bit slow. Maybe she’s neither. “What else?” I say.
“Lots of things. One could go on.”
“What else?”
“Well,” she says, drawing it out, “I know you’ve been getting a lot of bad advice lately.” She pauses. “From a certain seashell.”
She knows about the shell! She knows the secret way out of the castle. She knows….
“You broke it, didn’t you?” I burst out. “Don’t deny it.”
She smiles sadly. “I don’t.”
“Why would you
do it? It was wicked!”
“The advice it was giving you was wicked.”
“What advice was that?”
“Did it not tell you to help your uncle with his experiments?”
“How would you know that? Were you spying on me?”
“No need. It was obvious. That’s what it would tell you.”
I can’t get over this! Miss Porlock, smashing my shell!
If I can’t trust her…
“Well,” I say in a hard voice, “maybe I know a thing or two about you, too.”
“Watch your tone, dear.”
“I know that you’re madly jealous of Mother.”
Miss P. straightens up.
“In fact, you hate her, don’t you? Always have.”
Her cheeks wobble. “Cisley,” she says mournfully, “how could you say such a cruel, untrue…”
I hold back. I was about to mention the stockings, the scissors, that night in Mother’s bedroom, but I can’t. I’ve hurt her enough. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” I say, “for me to stay here tonight.”
Miss Porlock looks down at her hands.
“Uncle Asa won’t be looking for me anymore. He’s gotten what he needs.”
No response. Miss Porlock keeps looking down, her hands twisting and twisting on her lap. She has begun muttering under her breath.
I’m trying hard to hate her.
I lay a hand gently on her shoulder.
She doesn’t look up. Continues muttering.
I turn away.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Back in my room, I push the window open and stick my head out, letting the night wind finger my hair and cold rain weep against my face. The rustle of distant waves relieves the silence, but when I come in again, the silence is waiting as before.
I sit down, but almost immediately get up again. Wander into the bedroom. Wander out. I suppose I could take a bath. That’s where Elwyn used to live. How nice it would be to gossip with my little lobster friend, or argue with my conch shell, or giggle with Anna.
And now I’ve lost Miss Porlock.
I reach in my pocket and feel Cole’s wooden turtle. Well, I haven’t lost Cole, have I? Not yet.
And I have a father.
I should be with him, but there’s a job to do first. Just a little thing, shouldn’t take but a moment: find Mother. That’s what I’m here for.
I did catch a glimpse of her—was it yesterday?—in the mirror on her vanity. It’s a place to start.
I head down the hall toward her rooms. As usual, the Mirror Maze confronts me with a wilderness of glass, but I follow my nose. This time, the scent is different, darker. When I finally reach the door and let myself in, I realize why: the white rose is dying. Of course it is. Father almost died himself; he couldn’t be out at flower shops ordering fresh roses.
I wander into the bedroom and flop down on the velvet coverlet. I feel closest to Mother here. This is the softness she felt; these are the gauzy bed curtains she gazed at every candlelit evening. I’m not in some rich lady’s room. I’m in a queen’s chamber. And I’m her daughter. We share the same blood.
The same golden blood.
Looking through the bed curtains, I see, as in a cloud, the portrait of Mother. The gauze makes her look ghostly; I swing out of bed and stand in front of the painting itself.
I have the strangest feeling she’s looking back at me. Her eyes are brilliant, with a hint of amusement, and, yes, a metallic touch of contempt. Standing before her, I can feel the same contempt. I understand it. It would take so little for me to make it my own.
But then I think of little Gwennie running with her kite. I think of Father, so close to death, coming to life. I think of Cole.
I am not my mother.
Yes, you are, says a small voice in my head.
“No!” I say out loud.
I’m the only one who understands you, the voice continues. Secret. Insidious.
Mother’s eyes bore into me. It’s true. She understands me in ways that no one, not even Cole, ever could.
But maybe Cole understands a different me, a part that Mother knows nothing about and would not value if she did.
Taking a deep breath, I break free of her gaze. I don’t know where to go, but as long as I’m in her lair, I hardly know what thoughts are hers and what are my own.
I love her, but I can’t be her.
Maybe I should say that to her directly, if I can. I adjust the three-paneled mirror on the vanity so that three, six, a dozen, an endless number of Cisleys peer back at me.
Are you there, Mother?
I peer at the farthest Cisley I can be sure of. No mistaking that puzzleheaded girl for Marina Thummel. Maybe she’s farther down the line than she was before, beyond my range of vision. I concentrate, staring till my eyes hurt. I adjust the mirror a dozen ways. Just me, me, me.
That’s when a short dark line appears near the top of the center panel. As I watch, it curves into a capital D. The same letter forms on the right and left panels. Soon a word appears!
Don’t Don’t Don’t
“Don’t what?”
Don’t leave Don’t leave Don’t leave
I stare. There’s something so sad about those two words.
These people These people These people
they they they
I wait.
they people they These don’t understand
don’t understand understand us don’t us
“I know,” I whisper.
them anymore need them any you don’t don’t
“You say I don’t need them?”
You’re stronger than stronger they are
That stops me. Am I? Am I stronger than Asa? I like that thought very much. For a moment, I feel, yes, I am like Mother. I’m stronger than people think. At the same time, I worry. What’s wrong with her writing? The note she precipitated for Asa in Trieste was so sharp and clear. Are her abilities failing? Has she been away from her body too long?
We are rule are We ru We rulers
not serv not servants not servan
“Mother, are you all right? What’s happening?”
A long pause. Then:
need to come I ne to come ba need to come bac
“But how? How can I help you?”
No words.
“Mother?”
No words.
No words.
No words.
PART FOUR
The Black Rose
Chapter Thirty-Eight
A couple of test tubes of blood was all it took to set me free.
I don’t want to think about that. Actually, I don’t want to think about Mother, either. I couldn’t sleep last night, just sat on the window seat, curled in a blanket, staring out. The firth was invisible till nearly morning, when vague lines of whitecaps rose and disappeared and rose again. By then the rain had stopped.
But what a feeling, a few hours later, to walk past Mr. Strunk! I sauntered through the atrium and outside, just like a normal person. My confinement over.
I had missed all the good smells out here: warm sunlight on dune grass, fresh oil paint, a salt breeze off the water.
Best of all, Father’s with me on the bluff, in front of his easel. It’s his first time out since the accident, and he’s weak, but he wanted to come. “I’m wondering,” he said when I showed up this morning, “would you mind if I did a portrait of you?”
I hope I didn’t blush.
“In those other paintings,” he said, “you were so far away.” His eyes did that crinkly thing they do when he’s on the edge of a smile. “I know just where I want to put you.”
So here I am, perched on a rock, one knee up, looking back over my shoulder toward the painter. In my hand, I hold Cole’s little turtle.
“Nice touch,” says Father. “But you’re holding it funny.”
“Trying to keep my thumb away from it.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
We share a look. Earlier
, I confessed about putting a hole in his painting with my glass thumb. He was very good about it, even joked that I’d improved it.
One of the nicest things about today is that I’m not in disguise, dressed in Mother’s gowns to fool my uncle. He’s so wrapped up in the new experiment he doesn’t care what I do anymore. I could drown in the firth, and he wouldn’t look up.
Freedom doesn’t feel real to me yet. I keep expecting Janko or Miss Porlock to come and bundle me back to the castle. I’m sitting here like a girl without a care—or a secret.
There’s one secret I’m aching to tell: Mother wrote to me on the mirror! She’s trying to come back! But I keep that to myself. If she doesn’t succeed, it will break Father’s heart. Again.
Instead, I ask how he met her. What he thought of her that first time.
He looks at me around the canvas. “Point your chin down a little.”
“Yes, Father.” What a feeling to call him that!
“Your mother, you say?” His eyes narrow in concentration.
“Yes, what was your first impression?”
“Don’t move your head.”
The man is exasperating!
He lays down his brush. “I didn’t like her.”
I break the pose. “What!”
“I disliked her picture in the papers. I disliked the monstrous glass castle that she and her brother were building. I liked nothing about her. Are you shocked?”
“A little.” I turn Cole’s turtle from hand to hand, then place it beside me. “So how did you meet her?”
“I was starting to make a name in the art world. Nothing big. I’ve never made a living from my painting. But she saw my work and hired me to do her portrait.”
“I love that picture!”
“I’m glad. It’s the best portrait I’ve ever done, maybe because I was falling in love with her as I painted it.”
“So you must have seen something good in her.”
He gives his hat brim a thoughtful tug. “Let’s say I saw something irresistible in her.” Picking up his brush, he squints at the canvas, then at me, then back again.
“I bet she liked you a lot.”
“Oh, I think I just wore her down. It took me six months to finish the painting.”
“That long?”
“I dragged it out as long as I could.”
I nod, smiling.
“By then I’d given her a ring, and she’d accepted it.”
A Bitter Magic Page 16
