Rose 4: Rose and the Silver Ghost

by Webb, Holly

  ‘If we all do it together we’re even more likely to make it work,’ Freddie suggested, fingering the silver roses. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Let Rose hold it,’ Gus told him. ‘She is the one with the family connection. You and Bella can hold her, and lend her the strength of your magic.’

  Rose nodded. Family connection, Gus had said. It made her heart jitter in a strange way. It wasn’t family in the sense she had thought of it – it was more like history. A very distant relative with a pet dragon. A link to a family house. Even if it was all about to fall down because her grandfather had been so furious with her mother. ‘I still don’t know what we’re actually looking for,’ she said, sounding rather dazed.

  ‘A glimpse into the past,’ Gus suggested. ‘We want to know what happened.’

  ‘This mirror was your mother’s, so maybe we can scry for her.’ Bella sounded a little hesitant.

  ‘Can you scry for ghosts?’ Freddie asked Gus.

  ‘Freddie! I was trying to be tactful!’ Bella scolded.

  ‘Everyone is so sure she’s dead,’ Rose murmured, stroking the mirror.

  There was a silence, which no one wanted to break. Eventually Gus nudged her hand with his muzzle. It felt whisker-bristly. ‘You heard your great-aunt. She sounded quite sure.’

  ‘I know. I know she must be dead.’ Rose smiled, biting her lip, and then looked away from them all. ‘I know it’s stupid. I’m chasing rainbows, wanting her still to be alive. It just seems so unfair, that we’ve found out all about her, and I can’t even talk to her. Unless – unless she’s a ghost. I don’t think I want to talk to a ghost…’ she added in a whisper.

  ‘Then maybe we shouldn’t do this.’ Freddie folded his arms, looking suddenly older-brotherly.

  The girls stared at him in surprise.

  He shrugged, turning pink with embarrassment. ‘It seems bad form to summon up a ghost, especially if you’re going to get all upset about it, Rose. I mean, we’re dragging this spirit up from somewhere, and she might be busy, and then to have you crying all over her…’

  Gus snorted. ‘Busy!’

  ‘Well, what do ghosts do?’ Freddie shrugged. ‘I’ve never met one.’

  Bella looked at him with her head on one side. ‘Are you scared?’

  Freddie started to deny it furiously, but Rose just shuddered. ‘I am. I don’t think I’d be scared of just any ghost – I’ve seen so many strange things since I came here. But this ghost actually belongs to me, and that’s scary.’ She gripped the edges of the mirror frame tightly, forcing herself not to put it down and walk quickly out of the room. ‘I don’t think it’s scarier than the spiders’ webs, though. So we should do it. Do we have to do anything special, if we think we might be summoning a ghost?’ she asked Gus, her voice squeaking at the edges.

  Gus frowned at the glass. ‘I think we should be a little careful what we invite into the house. We’re opening a door, in a way.’ He was kneading his front paws against the tabletop, in the way he did when he was anxious.

  ‘Practically the first time I met you,’ Rose said, ‘you’d opened a door in this very room, and you were fighting off a mist-monster – and don’t tell me not to call it that, Freddie!’

  Gus, for once, looked embarrassed. ‘That was research…’ he muttered. ‘Freddie encouraged me. And that just means you know how dangerous it is to go around summoning things.’

  Rose sniffed. She had in fact seen off the mist-monster, or elemental spirit or whatever it was called, by thumping it on the nose, which it hadn’t expected. But when she and Freddie and Bella had been trapped by a crazed magician who wanted to use their blood for a spell, Freddie had summoned up the mist-monster again and it had devoured Miss Sparrow in what looked like a couple of smallish gulps. Gus was right. They did need to be careful.

  ‘Well, if something bad was coming, you’d smell it, wouldn’t you?’ she asked. ‘Or it would make your whiskers go all tingly.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it,’ Gus told her airily. ‘I just like you to be properly aware of what you’re doing, that’s all.’

  ‘So that you can rescue us when we do it wrong?’ Freddie raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Indeed.’ Gus gave him a slit-eyed smirk. ‘Or not. Anyway, Rose, no. Just do what you were doing before.’

  Rose shrugged. ‘All I did was look.’

  ‘Then look again.’ Gus was starting to sound impatient. ‘And look carefully. Be watchful.’

  Rose shivered, but she gripped the mirror frame tightly, and felt Freddie and Bella draw closer, leaning over her shoulders to stare in too. There was a distracting aroma of buttered toast.

  Rose concentrated hard on the glass, pleading with it inside her head. Tell us what happened. I want to see. I want to know why – why she left me. But not a ghost. Please. Unless there’s nothing else…

  The blackness took longer to settle into the mirror this time, perhaps because they were all weary. But at last the glass clouded, like paint settling into clear water, and turned a murky black. Rose’s shoulders tensed, sensing that something was approaching. The blackness seemed to be tunnelling back, heading away to some strange place. Now, the odd silvery mist that Rose had seen before was flowing towards them through the dark. As it came closer, Rose’s breath caught in her throat, and she had to force herself to start breathing again. It was a figure.

  Her mother’s ghost.

  Rose let out a muffled gasping sob, and almost dropped the mirror. Only Freddie grabbing it saved them from losing the vision entirely. As it was, the figure in the mirror seemed to recoil, cowering back into the darkness, and darting anxious glances this way and that, as though she wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing.

  ‘Rose, stop it!’ Freddie snapped. ‘Pull yourself together, we nearly lost it there.’

  Rose gulped. How could Freddie be so cruel? ‘She’s dead. She is, after all. That’s a ghost, isn’t it? So my mother is dead. I don’t think I can bear to talk to the ghost of my mother. I thought I could do it, but I can’t!’

  ‘Then you’ll never know what happened. Which is worse?’ Gus was standing on Freddie’s shoulders, hissing in her face, and Rose wept, turning away from them, and from the silver figure in the mirror.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know!’

  ‘Ssshhh!’ Bella poked Rose in the ribs. ‘Stop squabbling, all of you, and look. I don’t think that’s anyone’s mother, Rose. That’s a little girl.’

  Rose looked back around slowly. She wouldn’t have put it past Bella to try to trick her into looking, so she couldn’t pull away.

  But Bella was right. Lingering in front of them, just inside the mirror frame, as though she didn’t dare climb out into the room, was a ghost-girl. She actually looked older than Bella herself, Rose’s age, or even a little more. But Bella would never admit how young she was.

  ‘She doesn’t look anything like you, or the portrait of Miranda,’ Bella pointed out. ‘As much as one can tell, when she’s all silvery-grey. Do you think that’s because she’s been living in a silver mirror?’ Then she nudged Rose’s shoulder. ‘You’d better talk to her, Rose, she’s staring at you.’

  She was, her eyes round with wonder, and fear, and deep confusion.

  Rose swallowed. ‘Who are you?’ she asked quietly, trying not to sound too accusing. She felt accusing – she wanted to demand what this girl was doing coming out of her mother’s mirror.

  The ghost blinked, her washed-out features seeming to frown. ‘Eliza. I’m Eliza. Don’t you know me, Miss Miranda?’

  ‘Rose, she thinks you’re your own mother!’ Bella hissed excitedly. ‘She must have known her.’

  ‘I’m – I’m not Miranda,’ Rose stammered, and the ghost-girl leaned closer, pressing up against the mirror glass, frowning and peering at her.

  ‘Miss Miranda? Maybe – maybe you’re not. You look like her, but I haven’t seen her in such a long time.’ She pulled away from the glass, and rubbed her hands over her face
as though she was confused. ‘I don’t understand. Who are you? You’re too young to be Miss Miranda, I think. Unless… I don’t understand,’ she repeated wearily.

  ‘You’re a ghost. Do you understand that?’ Gus asked suddenly, and the girl jumped, pressing her hands over her heart.

  ‘Mercy me!’

  ‘Your heart isn’t racing, however much you may want it to,’ Gus pointed. ‘Think. You’re a ghost, aren’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be cruel to her,’ Rose whispered, feeling rather shocked. It seemed that Gus was being dreadfully callous.

  ‘She’ll be no use to us until she understands what she is.’ Gus didn’t even turn and look back. ‘What are you?’

  The little figure drooped sadly and nodded. ‘A ghost. A dead thing, sir.’

  ‘Gus, this is mean!’ Rose hissed.

  ‘Do you want to know what happened to your mother, or not?’ Gus snapped, his whiskers vibrating with irritation. ‘Don’t be so soft. The dead are dead, and if she doesn’t understand where she is in time, she can’t show us what happened, can she?’

  ‘I still don’t see why you have to talk to her as if she’s a slave!’ Rose stopped, and frowned slightly at him. ‘Unless…you’re afraid of her, aren’t you? Is this why you kept uttering all those dire warnings about doors?’

  ‘Shut up.’ Gus’s shoulder bones were sticking out of his fur, and his tail was fluffed out like a bottle brush. ‘You dislike spiders, I dislike the dead. They play tricks. That’s all there is to it. Now talk to this one, so we can send it away.’

  ‘Don’t send me away,’ the little silvery figure pleaded. ‘I’ll be good. I’ll tell you what you want to know. Please.’

  ‘Who are you, please?’ Rose asked, very politely, trying to counteract Gus’s rude treatment of the little ghost.

  ‘Eliza Lampton, miss,’ the ghost told her promptly. She wrung her wispy hands nervously, and put her head on one side. ‘If you’re not Miss Miranda, miss, might you be so good as to tell me who you are? You look the very spit of her, miss, when she was a good bit younger, that is.’

  Rose glanced quickly at Gus, suddenly unsure whether telling one’s name to ghosts was dangerous, but he was sitting on Freddie’s shoulder watching like a disapproving statue. Feeling absurdly shy, she explained, ‘My name is Rose. I don’t have a surname, not a proper one. I came from an orphanage, St Bridget’s. But I think – I don’t know for certain – I think I may be your Miss Miranda’s daughter. Oh! Don’t do that, please, don’t go!’

  The silvery girl was drawing backwards away from them, her hands over her mouth, and her eyes huge in that pale face surrounded by strange, dark, wet-looking hair. She was muttering something behind her hands, and Rose had to lean forward to catch what she was saying. It felt as if she was reaching into the dark tunnel.

  ‘I remember! I remember!’ The ghost sat down in the darkness, and wrapped herself around her knees. ‘I remember it all…’ she whispered at last, looking up at them, as though she was the one who was haunted, and not them at all.

  ‘Can you come out of the mirror?’ Rose asked her suddenly. She wanted the poor little thing to come out, and sit with them. Perhaps even to hold her hand, while she told them the story.

  The ghost shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, miss. Not yet, anyway. I’ve been in here a while. I’m tied.’ She sat up, and stretched out her hands to either side. To Rose it looked as though she was only stretching her fingers into nothing, but clearly she could feel the darkness pressing against her. ‘Besides…’ she glanced nervously at Gus. Clearly she liked the look of him as little as he liked her.

  ‘Keep her shut away in there,’ Gus muttered. ‘Then we’re all safe. Her as well.’

  Rose glared at him. ‘Eliza, how did you know my mother?’

  Eliza wriggled closer to them, and stared out at Rose. ‘I was her maid, miss.’

  Rose nodded slowly. She should have expected it, she supposed. A grand young lady like Miranda Fell would of course have a personal maid. There was a strange sort of symmetry to it, as well, that she should find her mother’s maid. Her life had been far more like Eliza’s than her mother’s.

  ‘I went with her, miss, when she ran away with John Garnet – him that was your father, miss.’

  Rose gasped. ‘Did you? No one told us that. So you know what happened? Why they left me? You know why I ended up at St Bridget’s?’ In her eagerness to hear, she reached out her hand to Eliza, wanting to touch the little kneeling figure, to show her how important this was. Her hand slipped into the darkness inside the mirror, and she yelped at the sudden cold.

  ‘Come back!’ Gus hissed, and he raked his claws over her wrist. Rose pulled her hand back sharply, and sucked the long scratches, glaring at him. ‘What did you do that for?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Who knows where you would have ended up, stupid girl. Be careful! What did I say to you before we started this?’

  ‘But she isn’t some horrible thing we’re opening a door to,’ Rose argued back.

  ‘We don’t know what she is. She may have been Eliza Lampton once, who’s to say she hasn’t changed? Don’t touch her, for all our sakes!’ Gus stared suspiciously into the mirror, and the ghost stared back, looking anxious.

  ‘Stop squabbling!’ Bella leaned closer to the mirror. ‘Eliza, will you tell us about Miss Miranda? How she ran away, and what happened after?’ She didn’t say please, and her tone was imperious, but it seemed to be what Eliza was used to. She nodded eagerly, looking almost relieved. She was used to orders.

  ‘Yes, miss.’ She closed her eyes, remembering. ‘Miss Miranda asked me to help her pack. She swore me to secrecy.’ There was pride in her voice. ‘She told me the master would never let her and John Garnet be together, and they were going running off to London to get married. She’d had a fight with him, you see. We all heard the shouting, all us servants. Miss Miranda wanted me to fetch her a carpet bag or some such, out of the attics. She couldn’t go up there without people noticing, you see.’

  ‘She must have trusted you,’ Rose murmured.

  Eliza nodded proudly. ‘And she never put a spell on me, miss, even though she could have done. She knew I’d not tell her secrets. So I fetched her a bag, and I fetched one for myself and all. I told her I was going with her. Well, she tried to say no, and she was that embarrassed, poor dear, because she had to tell me she’d not be able to pay my wages any longer. She knew the master would cut her off without a penny, mean old skinflint that he was. She’d be living on what John Garnet could earn for them, and he’d have no references from the master, would he? So it would be a labourer’s wages, if they were lucky.’

  ‘But she was a magician! Couldn’t she use her magic?’ Bella sounded disgusted.

  Eliza shook her head. ‘She didn’t know how to do much that was useful with it, miss. It didn’t cook the dinner, or wash the clothes, and she couldn’t do any of her grand spells, in case the spies her father had put after them found out, you see? She used to make a lovely warm fire, though, I’ll say that.’

  ‘Where did you go, when you got to London?’ Freddie asked curiously.

  ‘Some nasty low place close by Covent Garden,’ Eliza sniffed. ‘Miss Miranda didn’t like it, but she didn’t say a thing. She was good like that, and she didn’t want to hurt his feelings. It was all they could afford, specially as they’d had to buy a marriage licence with his savings.’

  Rose nodded thoughtfully. She could imagine her mother’s life after her elopement much more easily than the pampered existence she’d had before. She had never lived in the London slums herself, but many of the other girls at St Bridget’s had arrived half-grown, when their families had been wiped out by hunger, or by some terrible sickness that had spread through the city. They had hated being confined to an orphanage, but they’d regarded three meals a day (even if mostly cabbage), and an outfit of clean clothes that almost fitted, as the height of luxury.

  ‘Did he get a job?’ she asked. ‘My – father?’


  Eliza nodded. ‘As a porter, miss. Unloading the carts bringing the fruit and vegetables to the market. They were so pleased. It was a cruel, hard job, but he was used to working out in the open air, from being a gardener. And soon enough we worked out that she was having you, and she was going around in a dream-world. I’d never seen her that happy, never.’

  Rose found she was smiling. ‘They wanted me, then?’ she whispered.

  ‘Wanted you?’ Eliza snorted. ‘You’d think a baby was something that had never happened before. Your father, he made you a cradle out of fruit boxes, and the toys he carved! A Noah’s ark, with all the animals, all lined up waiting. She even sewed for you, miss! And for Miss Miranda, that wasn’t usual. She hated sewing. Mind you, she was cheating, I’m sure. She could never have made those little dresses without a spell to speed the sewing.’

  Bella looked envious. ‘I want that spell,’ she whispered.

  ‘It was almost the only magic she did while they were living there, miss, that and keeping the fire going. She was sure her father still had his spies out, she didn’t want to get caught. And she never said, but I think she was sick of it, anyway. Magic reminded her of her family, you see, and the way they’d cut her off. All the magicians she knew, they all thought she was mad, she said. She didn’t want anything to do with them, or their magic.’

  ‘What about Miss Fell? Miss Hepzibah Fell, I mean?’ Rose asked. ‘We know her – now, in our time. She didn’t cut Miranda off, did she?’ Rose gripped the mirror frame tightly.

  Eliza smiled. ‘No. Miss Miranda said she wished she could tell her aunt where she was going, but she was right under her brother’s thumb. He’d have it out of her faster than a greased rabbit, Miss Miranda reckoned, and he’d make her life a misery doing it. Miss Hepzibah was safer not knowing.’

  Rose drew in a shaky breath of relief. She hadn’t known how important it was for that to be true. Even though Miss Fell had been lying to her, or at least not telling her the truth, for ages, she desperately wanted to be able to trust her. But it made her grandfather sound fearsome, if he was someone who could terrorise Miss Fell.