Emily Feather and the Secret Mirror

by Holly Webb

  How could she make anything up when all that was filling her head? She could write down what was really happening to her right now, and Mrs Daunt would probably tell her not to let her imagination run away with her.

  Thankfully, the gallery was beautifully cool. Emily let out a sigh of pleasure as they stepped through the glass doors and into the light, open rooms.

  “This place is huge,” Rachel murmured, sounding awed, and a bit worried. “How are we supposed to choose just one painting? There must be thousands.”

  “At least,” Emily agreed, looking at the little map that had been handed out, and then peering ahead through the gallery and seeing the rooms opening out in front of them like a maze. “But Mrs Daunt said we had to stick to just this floor. So that cuts it down to maybe only a few hundred to look at?” She smiled, the delicious open whiteness of the gallery, studded with jewel-like paintings, had already lifted her out of her gloom.

  Emily had been to galleries before – her mother went all the time, and she would have liked to take them all with her, but Lark and Lory and Robin always moaned. Eva had told Emily that she loved bringing her to see new exhibitions. It was their special time together. Often they’d go home afterwards and sit in Eva’s studio, drinking hot chocolate and drawing. Eva would scribble designs for beautiful new clothes in page after page of a sketch pad, and Emily would lie on the floor underneath her mother’s cutting table, covering huge pieces of paper with coloured pencils or sweeps of pastel chalk.

  Eva said she loved it that at least one of her children shared her passion for art. Emily blinked slowly. She could hear her mother saying it now, after Robin had told her he’d rather eat worms than go to another art gallery. At least one of my children… It had never sounded forced. Emily shivered a little, with a sort of relieved happiness. She did belong in some ways. Of course, she hadn’t really inherited her love of drawing from Eva, but she’d spent hours and hours borrowing pencils and bits of paper while her mother worked. She remembered being tiny and trying to copy the colours of the fabrics that Eva was cutting and twisting. It had grown into her. Surely that counted too?

  Emily nodded to herself. If Eva were here, she’d say to ignore Mrs Daunt’s questions and walk round the paintings until Emily found one that spoke to her. Emily thought she was right, but she didn’t want to get into trouble for not doing the quiz. If she and Rachel did it together quickly, then they could go for a proper explore. She tapped her pencil against the clipboard and looked at the first question. “We’re in the wrong room, I think.”

  The quiz took them all round the gallery, and by the time they’d finished it – counting numbers of children in strange family groups, and naming horses, and spotting snails in still lives – even Emily was almost sick of paintings.

  “Done!” Rachel said gleefully, scribbling in the final answer, and they collapsed on to one of the low wooden benches. “It has to be time for lunch?” she added hopefully.

  “No.” Emily checked her watch and sighed. “No, we’ve got at least another hour before we have to meet up for lunch. We’re having it late, remember, just before we get back on the coach. Do you want to go and look for a painting for your story?”

  “No. But I suppose we ought to.” Rachel heaved herself up from the bench reluctantly. “Did you see anything you want to write about?”

  Emily shook her head slowly, but she wasn’t listening. Something had caught her – she was hooked, it felt like. As though something was calling to the tiny fraction of magic that had buried itself inside her. It pulled her in. She glanced around eagerly, trying to see what it was.

  A streak of colour was shining at her from the next room – no, not even the next one, but the one beyond that. It was a fragment of shining blue, a colour that made Emily think of butterflies’ wings.

  She smiled. Now she could see them, fluttering around the skylight above her head, circling and darting, and then tempting her on through the doorway to the rooms ahead.

  Emily grabbed Rachel’s wrist and pulled her. “This way,” she murmured, forgetting that she was tired and hungry and sick of paintings. She wanted desperately to find that patch of blue, and feast on it.

  The painting was of a girl, standing in the shadows of a stone building – a broken tower, or perhaps just a garden summerhouse. She was looking sideways, and Emily couldn’t tell if she was meant to be hiding – there was a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth, as if she thought she had found the perfect place – or if she was waiting for someone to meet her. Emily just wished that the girl would look up. She wanted to gaze into her eyes. She was almost sure that there would be a message in them for her.

  It was the girl’s dress that was the calling blue, and as Emily stood gazing in front of the painting, still gripping Rachel’s wrist, the butterflies shimmered and settled back into the silken folds, making the skirt ripple, as though a light wind had blown through the garden.

  “It’s so real,” Rachel whispered.

  Emily shook herself, and took a sharp breath in. She hadn’t breathed since her first glimpse of that amazing blue, she realized. “I know. It’s wonderful…” The butterflies had gone, and the dress was only paint again. Emily longed to stroke it, to see if she could feel the silk, or the dusty softness of wings, but she knew the magic wasn’t there. It wasn’t the painted girl who had been calling, Emily felt sure. She could feel the magic still pulling at her from another corner of the room. Something else had stolen the blue from the girl’s skirt and sent the butterflies out to call Emily. It was close, though. The air was quivering with power, a feeling that Emily remembered from her dreams. Something needed her.

  “Emily, are you going to choose this one for your story?” Rachel asked her hopefully.

  Emily stared at her, forgetting for a moment what they were supposed to be doing. “Oh! No. No, I think I’ll look for something else,” she murmured. Her fingertips itched with the need to find where the magic was coming from.

  “Oh, good, because if you really don’t want it, then I’ll have it!” Rachel said gratefully, sitting down on the floor in front of the painting and staring at it lovingly.

  Perhaps there was still some magic in it? Emily wondered, looking at her in surprise. The painting seemed to have enchanted Rachel. The hiding girl smiled sweetly at the crushed petals by her feet, and Emily shuddered. She must make sure to pull her friend away from that painting when she went for lunch. Rachel looked as though she could stare at it for years, her eyes darting busily between the girl and the story she was already scribbling. There was a wisp of power buried somehow in those swirls of silk, and it had wrapped itself round Rachel.

  Emily began to walk slowly around the room, glancing back occasionally to check that Rachel was all right. After her father’s warnings, Emily was more worried about magic outside the house, when she was nowhere near any of her family. She wasn’t sure who she could trust. But the girl hadn’t moved again – perhaps it was just the beauty of the painting that was holding Rachel so close.

  The colours in this room seemed especially bright, and Emily stared at them hungrily. The paintings were like jewels; some of them even had golden frames painted round them, like necklaces. But they reminded Emily of those enchanted fruits too, the ones that Lark and Lory had stopped her eating. Perhaps the paintings were bespelled somehow? Her father had said there were other doors… Emily wondered if he had ever visited this gallery.

  Emily dug her fingernails into her palms, telling herself to be wary. If there was a door here, she mustn’t be tempted in – she had promised Ash and Eva she would not go on her own.

  At last she stopped in front of a painting that was lurking in the corner of the gallery. There were several other people in the room, but they had all passed it by with a vague glance – it seemed busy and muddy-coloured. But Emily was sure that there was something more – she could feel the power in the dull canvas. She stepped
closer, her hand creeping up to cover her mouth in amazement.

  It was moving. Hundreds of tiny figures fought and talked and shopped and wrangled in a landscape of tree-sized daisies and chestnuts that looked like boulders. Emily glanced behind her, suddenly worried that this was desperately secret, and that she mustn’t let anyone else see what was happening. Then she noticed the label on the wall beside the painting – a label just like those on all the other paintings around the gallery. This painting had been here for years, and for years people had walked past it without seeing what it was. Emily reached out one finger and cautiously stroked the frame, trying to feel the magic.

  As she touched the gilded wood of the frame, the painting suddenly sprang into full colour, as though only a washed-out, greyish version lived in the gallery from day to day. The faint flickers and shifts of movement that Emily had seen before turned to dancing life, and the noise swelled out of the frame. A shrieking gang of fairy children chased each other in and out of daisies and twining columbine, and a plump young girl with ragged butterfly wings stared out at Emily in amazement, nudging her friend and pointing. Then the pair of them dissolved into giggles, as though Emily was the funniest thing they had ever seen, and fluttered away into the tall grass stems that framed the main scene, peeping back every so often and sniggering behind their hands.

  Emily sighed. She had hoped to ask one of the fairies from the painting how it was that she could see them, and whether the painting was another door into their world from hers. But there was clearly no point asking those two anything. They reminded her of Lara and Ellie-Mae.

  Still – here was a chance to answer some of those questions that she kept forgetting to write down. At one point during last week’s history lesson, Emily had looked thoughtfully at a picture of a Roman general on a horse, and wondered if centaurs were real. And now a dark centaur archer was glaring at her out of the painting.

  Emily practically pressed her nose up against the canvas, trying to see all the detail that she could. She wondered what the art gallery looked like to the fairy people on the other side – was it just a little window? A hole in the sky? And did she look her own size, or smaller? It was impossible to tell.

  “Please…”

  It was the merest whisper, so soft that Emily hardly heard it. She stepped back from the painting, frowning and trying to see which of the hundreds of tiny creatures had spoken – she was almost sure that whoever it was had been speaking to her; had recognized the magic inside her and called her from across the gallery.

  “Help me…”

  Emily scanned the painting desperately, her stomach twisting. There was such fear in that tiny voice. No one inside the painting seemed to have heard – but a tiny creature at the far side of the canvas was peering out at her now, looking over the edge of a rocky crag and beckoning to her. “Help me!” she whispered again, her pale little face twisting with fright.

  “I can’t come in,” Emily whispered. “I don’t know how – I can only see. And I’m not allowed… They said it was dangerous…”

  It seemed a very feeble set of excuses, and the girl’s shoulders drooped. She looked behind her anxiously, and then she sprang up, scrambling her way on to the top of the jutting cliff and darting in and out of the other creatures, always looking behind her, as though she expected to see something dreadful come clambering over the cliff edge after her. Each time the girl glanced back, her hair swung wildly around her head. It swirled like weeds in a fast-flowing river and waved around her pale face. The long fingers that had stretched out and caught desperately at the handholds in the rock as she climbed, were webbed, and Emily let out a little gasp of recognition.

  It was the girl from the mirror.

  Emily watched, her heart thudding in her chest as she wondered what was chasing the girl. She stared at the grasses waving gently along the rocky edge where the girl had climbed into view, waiting for huge claws to gouge their way up the stone. Or if not a monster, then a gang of huntsmen, like those who had chased her and her sisters. It was the thought of those huntsmen that made her try to reach into the painting. She had promised not to, but this was different. How could she watch the green-haired girl run, scared as she was, and not help her?

  She stretched out her hand, brushing her fingertips against the canvas. It was the strangest feeling – there was paint there under her fingers, but at the same time she could feel that she was reaching out beyond the painting and into something far away.

  Until someone caught her arm and pulled her sharply back. The figures in the painting were suddenly dull and grey and still, and she looked up to see an angry man in a dark uniform glaring down at her.

  The security guard pulled her away from the painting, glowering at her. “Where’s your teacher?” he snapped.

  “I – I don’t know,” Emily stammered. She felt dizzy, and not anchored to the ground. She wondered vaguely if she’d left part of herself inside the strange world of the painting when she was dragged back so suddenly. She certainly didn’t feel all there. She noticed Rachel hovering worriedly at the security guard’s elbow, and a couple of other people from their class whispering to each other in the doorway. As her vision cleared, she saw that it was Katie and Ellie-Mae – of course it was. Emily gave a tiny sigh, and then stared down at her feet as Mrs Daunt hurried into the gallery. She seemed to arrive out of nowhere, as though she’d suddenly sensed that one of her group was causing trouble.

  “There are strict guidelines,” the security guard was telling her, and Mrs Daunt alternated between nodding apologetically to him and glaring at Emily.

  Emily decided she’d better start thinking of an excuse quite quickly. No one was going to believe that she was trying to rescue a fairy girl in a painting. She glanced back at it, hoping that the river fairy was still there, and hadn’t been eaten, or shot down with arrows.

  The painting wasn’t even moving for Emily now. It was greyly, eerily still. All the little figures were fixed, their faces frozen. Emily longed to reach out and touch the paint again – they looked so wrong, so silly like that. She knew that they were real, and it hurt to see them reduced to a strange, rather pretty picture. And then she saw, with a lurch deep in her stomach, that there were figures, now, at the bottom of the cliff, staring up at the girl.

  “Well? What on earth were you doing, Emily? You know not to touch the paintings!” Mrs Daunt snapped. “Look at me!”

  Emily swallowed, and dragged herself away from the girl’s frightened face. “I’m really sorry! I was looking at it, and then I saw a fly land on the painting –” there were several small black flies in the gallery, lazily circling in the warmer air under the skylight “ – so I brushed it off. It’s such a beautiful painting, I didn’t think properly. I just didn’t want it to have a fly on it…”

  Not a brilliant excuse, she realized, crossing her fingers behind her back, but the best she could manage right now.

  “You didn’t think properly. Exactly,” Mrs Daunt told her. But she seemed slightly less furious than she’d been before. “I’m so sorry,” she said again to the guard. “I think it was a silly mistake. I’m sure she didn’t intend to damage the painting.” Mrs Daunt turned to look at it properly for the first time, and frowned. “Are you using this one for your project, Emily?”

  “Um, yes…” Emily answered. She hadn’t found another painting, so she supposed she’d have to. She could write something about how horrible those girls who reminded her of Lara and Ellie-Mae were, she supposed. There was no way she was going to turn the hunt into a story. She looked back at the painting worriedly, but it still hadn’t moved. The girl was stretched spider-like across the top of the rock, staring down behind her with terrified eyes. It was as if time had stopped there, inside the painting. Crossing her fingers behind her, Emily hoped desperately that it had. Perhaps the fairy girl would be safe until someone else looked at the painting, really looked at it? Someone w
ho understood what it was.

  How many people like that could there be? Emily wondered, as Mrs Daunt marched her away towards the room where they were having lunch. As they disappeared through the doorway, she glanced back one more time, but the painting was faded and muddy again, in the corner of the gallery.

  “A fly? Really?” Rachel whispered, as Mrs Daunt turned away to talk to one of the other teachers.

  Emily nodded. “I just didn’t think…” she repeated.

  Rachel looked at her doubtfully. “Why were you staring at that painting for such a long time, anyway? It was nothing special.”

  “I liked it,” Emily said vaguely, shrugging. “It was interesting.”

  “Have you worked out what you’re going to write? I’ve got some of mine done already,” Rachel added, patting the cover of her notebook. “And Miss Gray says there are postcards of that painting in the shop, so I’ll buy one. Maybe even a poster.”

  Emily smiled, trying to put the girl’s frightened face out of her mind. She was almost sure there would be no postcards of her painting. “You really love it, don’t you?”

  Rachel nodded. “There’s something odd about it – I almost feel like I can still see the blue behind my eyes. I know that sounds stupid,” she added hurriedly.

  “It doesn’t,” Emily told her. In the fuss with the security guard, she had forgotten the butterflies that had called them into that particular room. They had been sent on purpose to fetch her, she suspected. The river fairy had felt her coming, and known her, and called to her for help. The way she had helped Emily and her sisters only a few days before.

  Emily pushed her half-eaten sandwich back into her bag and sighed.

  She would just have to go back and get her.

  “There’s a horrible smell on this coach.” The voice came floating over the back of the seat, quiet but clear, and Emily flinched, staring wide-eyed at Rachel. She hadn’t noticed Katie sitting down behind them. But now she could hear Ellie-Mae laughing, and she could see her peeping between the two coach seats. Then Katie leaned round the side of the seat and smiled at Rachel.