by Webb, Holly
‘Shouldn’t you be calling Miss Fell Great-Aunt Hepzibah?’ Freddie pointed out, with a sweet smile, but Rose shuddered.
‘No. It would feel too…familiar.’
‘She is your family!’ Freddie teased, but Bella interrupted him.
‘We should tell Papa instead.’
Gus nodded. ‘Indeed. The sooner the better. He may even know more about the Pike gang. He has several times consulted for the police, after all.’ He jumped off the table, and looked back up at Rose. ‘And bring the mirror. He may also be able to compel that girl to come back and speak to us.’ He was heading for the door, his tail waving grandly, so he didn’t see Rose clutch the mirror tightly to her.
Rose didn’t want Eliza compelled! She would tell Mr Fountain so, she resolved. It was her mirror now, after all, and her mother they were trying to find. He wouldn’t make her force Eliza out, surely?
But when they trooped down the main stairs – something which still made Rose’s stomach lurch, as she had only been allowed on those stairs to clean them when she was a servant – they saw Mr Fountain fighting his way into his smart caped overcoat. The front door was open, and Rose could just see Bill haring off across the square, presumably to fetch the master a hansom cab.
‘Is everything all right, sir?’ Freddie asked.
‘Another dratted summons to the palace!’ Mr Fountain snapped irritably. Officially his post was that of a magical adviser to the Treasury – which meant that he made gold – but as he was the only magician the king trusted, he tended to be called in for everything. ‘I’m going to have to start getting things wrong – being indispensible is remarkably boring. The Talish really are mounting another invasion, apparently. They’ve been building more ships in secret. Oh, and that’s military intelligence, so don’t tell anyone.’
A battered black horse cab drew up outside the house, with Bill hanging grimly on behind. Mr Fountain eyed it despairingly, and Bill shrugged and rolled his eyes as he ran up the steps.
‘You said to be quick, sir!’ he protested. ‘Matter of life and death, you said. It goes, don’t it?’
‘Does it?’ Mr Fountain muttered. ‘I wouldn’t count on it. Behave, all of you. I may not be back for dinner.’ He sighed. ‘Or breakfast.’
He climbed into the cab, which wobbled worryingly when he slammed the door, and bowled away, leaving the children staring at each other in the hall.
‘Well, that scuppers that then,’ Freddie muttered. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to talk to Miss Fell about it, Rose?’
‘I don’t think giving the house guest a heart attack counts as behaving,’ Rose pointed out.
‘What did you want him for?’ Bill asked, keeping an eye on the green baize door to the servants’ quarters, in case anyone popped out to tell him off for fraternising with the upstairs children.
‘Oh! He might know!’ Bella exclaimed, pointing at Bill in what Miss Fell would have called a most unmannerly fashion.
Freddie nodded. ‘Of course! He knows everything that happens in the square. He talks to all the other boys, the lads from the stables, the delivery boys. Don’t you?’
‘That’s only round here. Just because we came from an orphanage, it doesn’t mean we rub shoulders with thieves’ gangs!’ Rose pointed out. ‘I didn’t know anything about the Pike gang, did I?’
‘Here, don’t you go getting mixed up with them!’ Bill snapped, his eyes widening worriedly.
Bella smiled smugly at Rose. ‘I told you. He does know who they are.’
‘Do you really?’ Rose asked. ‘You’re supposed to be respectable!’
Bill shrugged. ‘Only gossip from the stables, and some of my mates from St Bartholomew’s.’
‘Do you know where we could find them?’ Rose begged, grabbing his arm excitedly.
‘No, I do not, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you lot! Are you asking to get chopped up into sausage-meat patties?’
‘Ugh, they don’t, do they?’ Bella asked, with horrified fascination.
Bill folded his arms grandly. ‘So they say. Hey, Rose, what’s the matter? What’s she gone that colour for?’
‘Her mother. She was a magician, kidnapped and forced to work for the Pike gang,’ Freddie explained, putting a hand in the small of Rose’s back to hold her up. ‘Rose is…upset. It may have been her mother, um, mixing the sausage-meat.’
Gus, who was in Rose’s arms, patted a fat paw firmly against her cheek. ‘Don’t faint! You’ll drop me. If you really want to find her, you have to accept that you might not like what you find. Though, really, Frederick, a little tact!’
‘Your mother?’ Bill whispered, staring at Rose.
She nodded. ‘And it may be that she’s still alive… Miss Fell thought she was – oh. I forgot, you don’t know. Miss Fell is my great-aunt.’
‘That old tabby upstairs?’ Bill gaped at her.
‘Yes. Miss Fell thinks she would have known if my mother was dead. They were very close. So she might still be there, Bill, with this Pike gang. I have to find out, don’t you see?’
Bill nodded slowly. ‘But I still don’t know where they hide out, Rose. And I’m not really sure I want to go asking either.’ He shivered. ‘That Pike – by all accounts he’s some sort of monster.’
‘Eliza said he was a very strong magician,’ Rose agreed. ‘He bound my mother in a spell to make her work for him.’
Bill looked lost. ‘Who’s Eliza?’
‘Oh, bring him upstairs and explain it all to him!’ Gus snapped. ‘It’s beneath my dignity to hang around in hallways. If he’s missed, you can tell them Bella wanted her bedroom furniture moved, and then she didn’t like it and he had to move it back again.’ He leaped from Rose’s arms to land with a graceful thump halfway up the stairs. ‘Come along.’
Even once Bill understood everything that had been going on, he still maintained he couldn’t tell them how to find the Pikes’ hideout, however much they begged. He agreed to make very, very discreet enquiries amongst old friends from the orphanage, but that was all.
‘I don’t want my ears cut off, Rose,’ he pointed out, as he left the workroom.
Rose sighed. ‘I don’t know who else to ask.’
Gus was sitting on the table, washing his ears thoroughly. ‘So defeatist,’ he murmured dismissively.
‘So how would you do it, clever-paws?’ Freddie demanded, and Gus wrapped his tail around his paws and glared at him, narrow-eyed.
‘All right, all right, I apologise,’ Freddie said hurriedly. ‘But really, I don’t see how we can find out any more about the gang.’
‘Bribe the cats,’ Gus told them all smugly. ‘Even a common alleycat knows exactly what’s happening in his territory.’
‘How?’ Rose frowned.
Gus shook his head, sweeping his wonderful whiskers to and fro. ‘Really, Rose dear. What do cats do all day?’
‘Sleep!’ Freddie snorted.
‘Exactly. But usually with at least one eye open, and in a place where we have a panoramic view of our territory, and everyone who comes in or out of it. Why the governments of every independent state in the known world have not instituted a Feline Intelligence Bureau, I do not know. Paid in fish – kippers, perhaps, and smoked salmon for the lieutenant grade. Simple.’
‘FIB,’ Freddie snorted. ‘And that’s what it would be. All cats lie, Gus. They’re known for it.’
Gus’s whiskers gave an irritable twitch. ‘Only because we’re so bored.’
‘Don’t they need to be magical cats? How would they tell us things?’ Rose frowned.
‘Any cat could pass on messages. With its eyes closed and all its whiskers stuck together with fish-glue. Is it our fault if you don’t understand?’ He sighed. ‘I will translate. But I will require lobster for this, Rose, you understand?’
Gus slipped out of the house to speak to his associates, as he called them. Rose hadn’t realised that he spent time with the other cats in the square, but he assured her as he perched on the windowsill
that there were several, and some of them were quite aristocratic. ‘Lady Ponsonby in the corner house has a Siamese. Strange creature. I showed you him once, do you remember, when we were discussing glamours?’
Rose laughed. ‘Oh, yes! The creamy coloured cat with black paws. The thin one.’
Gus glared at her frostily. ‘Who is doing whom a favour, Rose?’
‘Too thin,’ Rose added hurriedly. ‘You are a – a majestic size.’
‘Hmmm.’ Gus leaped lightly down to the sill of the floor below – very lightly, considering that he really was rather a plump cat.
He was back a few hours later, yawning, and demanding sardines, which Rose had to filch from the kitchens for him.
‘So what happens now?’ she asked him eagerly, watching him lick the pattern off the plate.
Gus gave the plate one last careful sweep, and stretched out his front paws luxuriously, before starting to wash. ‘We wait,’ he told her in between swipes around his ears. ‘Think, Rose. All I have done is ask them to look.’
‘But how long will it take?’ Rose half-wailed.
‘I have no idea,’ Gus said, stretching out one hind leg in a way that suggested the conversation was closed.
Rose glared at him, and considered slamming the door, but her new room was so full of lovely precious things that she couldn’t bear to, in case she broke something. She had already broken the magic of her mother’s mirror, she thought sadly. Her new room had a dressing table, with a pretty mirror of its own, but she had laid the silver mirror there, too. She sat on the delicately carved chair, and stroked the silver frame, rubbing it between her fingers. Like Aladdin trying to call the genie from the lamp, she thought, remembering the battered little book of fairy tales from the orphanage. But there was no puff of smoke, and Eliza didn’t appear.
‘Oh, there you are. We’ve got a lesson with your great-aunt, had you forgotten?’ Bella caught her hand, and towed her along the passage to Miss Fell’s room.
‘I wish you wouldn’t call her that,’ Rose muttered as Bella knocked on the door. She tucked the mirror into the large pocket of her pinafore. If Eliza came back, she didn’t want her to find herself abandoned.
‘She is. You have to get used to it.’ Bella turned the door-handle as they heard the faint voice inside telling them to enter.
Miss Fell was staring out of the window as they went in, and she beckoned them over with a thin hand.
‘Look at that.’
Bella and Rose stood by the window, peering out, and trying to see what the old lady was watching. The only movement in the square was a few houses away. A boy in uniform, just getting onto his horse, and waving to a group of girls who were crowding on the front steps of the house.
‘What? Alfred Madely?’ Bella asked. ‘He’s a twit, and his sisters are worse. But he did rescue my kite from a tree in the garden once.’ She frowned. ‘I didn’t know he had joined the army.’
Miss Fell nodded. ‘A Guards regiment, see the smart red uniform? Poor child.’
‘He’s at least seventeen,’ Bella pointed out. ‘Not really a child, ma’am.’
‘He’ll be lucky if he sees his eighteenth birthday,’ Miss Fell sighed. ‘So many years lost. All those stolen centuries.’
‘But…we’re winning the war, aren’t we?’ Rose asked. ‘Mrs Jones’s newspaper is always saying we’ve had a successful battle. We sank two Talish ships. That was in the paper yesterday.’
‘They are driving us back to the coast, Rose. Soon the battles will be here instead.’
Bella nodded. ‘Papa was called to the palace, Miss Fell. The Talish are planning another invasion. But… it won’t really happen, will it? The Navy will fight them off. They won’t ever be able to land, surely.’
Rose shook her head firmly. She couldn’t imagine London full of Talish soldiers. It was unthinkable. Surely Miss Fell was weaving this out of panic, and memories of the huge sea battle eight years ago when the Talish had last tried to invade. This invasion threat was all just smoke and mirrors, and it would die down again, like it always had. Wouldn’t it?
Miss Fell sighed. ‘It won’t happen if your father can help it, Isabella. But sooner or later there will have to be a decisive action. A battle that turns the tide of the war for once and for all.’ She watched Alfred Madely trotting out of the square on his glossy horse, his spurs jingling. ‘I hope it comes soon. Before your father and the others are worn out, and all those eager children are dead.’
Rose shivered. She felt almost guilty. The country was at war, and everywhere in the streets there was a strange mixed feeling of excitement and fear. Alfred Madely’s sisters had been full of laughter and kisses as they waved him off, but as he turned the corner they had clung to each other, crying.
Rose couldn’t worry about it, not the way she should. Too much of her mind was taken up with thoughts of her mother.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Freddie muttered. ‘Everyone knows cats would lie as soon as look at you. This Ginger probably made it all up.’
Gus stalked majestically along the table and stared down at Freddie. He was a master at glamours, and Rose suspected he might have employed a subtle one as he walked – he wasn’t normally that big, was he? He looked like a small white bear.
‘Not you!’ Freddie stammered.
‘I will vouch personally for the honesty of my associates,’ Gus hissed. ‘Would you like to discuss this further?’
‘No! Thank you!’ Freddie quailed.
‘Quite,’ Gus replied witheringly. ‘Now would you like to know what Ginger found out? After only a day, might I add.’
They were sitting in the workroom, where Gus had summoned them, his whiskers glittering with smug pride. Rose nodded – because she was too scared and excited to get any words out.
‘Pike and his gang use a warehouse down by the river as their base. Ginger knew exactly who we meant, they’ve been there for years. Pike, and an odd shambling fellow who seems to be his right-hand man. And then a couple of others. Never more than four or five of them, he thinks. The warehouse looks abandoned, but behind the crumbling front, there’s a whole warren of rooms. Most of them full of stolen property, apparently.’
‘Did he know about my mother?’ Rose blurted out hopefully. ‘Had he seen her?’
Gus frowned and shook his head. ‘No. But he’s never actually been inside. He spends most of his time hanging around the fishermen. He’s never had that much interest in Pike and his gang – no food involved, you see.’ His whiskers quivered irritably. ‘This is the problem with alleycats, everything has to be about the next meal. No sense of adventure, no nose for information unless it’s leading to fish.’
Freddie gave a little snort that sounded like, ‘Lobster?’ and Gus glared at him again. ‘Very amusing. I like fish, yes. But food is not my be-all and end-all. Don’t despair, Rose. Your mother could still be there, tucked away inside. She’s a valuable thing, remember.’
Rose managed to smile gratefully at him, but inside her stomach was jumping. What did this mean now? What were they going to do?
‘Can we go and look?’ she asked quietly.
Gus shook his head regretfully. ‘We would be too conspicuous.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! We’re all magicians!’ Freddie shouted. ‘Can’t we use that hiding spell the master taught us in Venice?’
Gus twitched his tail crossly. ‘None of you are up to maintaining that spell for long enough.’
‘Gus, we know that spell backwards!’ Bella protested. ‘Of course we can. Especially the three of us together, and with you there. Although, Rose, I think we should take Bill with us.’
‘I could protect you,’ Freddie said jealously.
‘You can do spells,’ Bella agreed. ‘But when it comes to simply thumping someone, I’m afraid Bill is better at it than you are.’
Freddie scowled, which only made him look like an enraged white mouse, and rather supported Bella’s point.
Gus gave a doubtful little sniff.
‘Show me the spell,’ he commanded, sitting up straight on the table and staring at them critically.
Glancing at each other, Rose, Freddie and Bella caught hands, and closed their eyes. Bella, in the middle, simply added to the power as the other two waved their free hands in a complicated gesture, at the same time picturing the images Mr Fountain had taught them. Misty silence, deep water, veils of protection. Around them a strange bubble of air suddenly appeared – visible to those outside it only as a slight shimmer, something that tugged at the corner of the eye, to be dismissed as just a shadow, or the flight of a small bird.
Inside the disguise spell, Rose opened her eyes. She could see the room as usual, although the colours were dimmed slightly. Inside, she and Bella and Freddie seemed to have turned a strange pale silvery colour. Rose half-laughed, realising that actually they looked very like Eliza had. She could feel the weight of the mirror, dragging down her pocket. Even though there was no sign of Eliza whenever she looked, she couldn’t bear to leave it in her room.
Outside, she could see Gus prowling around their spell, testing it with his whiskers, and an occasional flick of his tail.
‘Mm. Acceptable. But how long can you keep it up for, hmmm?’ He slid inside the bubble with them, and leaped suddenly onto Freddie’s shoulder. The bubble of the spell distinctly wobbled. ‘And can you keep it up when you are distracted, hmmm?’ He climbed very carefully onto the top of Freddie’s head, and hung down over his face, peering into Freddie’s eyes upside down.
‘Ow! That’s my scalp you’re digging your claws into!’ Freddie hissed. ‘And don’t tickle me with your whiskers! Agh!’
‘It’s a test, Freddie, concentrate!’ Rose murmured anxiously, pouring more of her own strength into the spell to make up for Freddie being distracted. ‘Gus, that isn’t fair, no one else is going to climb on his head and dangle their whiskers in his face.’
