by Webb, Holly
‘They might do several worse things,’ Gus pointed out. ‘Such as gutting you with a dirty fish-knife.’
‘No, they won’t, because they won’t see us in the first place. The spell works, doesn’t it?’ Bella said sweetly. ‘Even with you attempting to scalp Freddie?’
‘Hmf.’ Gus released his claws, and slid gracefully back down to Freddie’s shoulder. ‘I suppose. And I will be there too. Very well. I will take you.’
The spell bubble flew apart as Rose let go of Bella and hugged Gus delightedly. She only stopped when she realised that Freddie and Bella were giving her a horrified look, and that she could feel Gus’s tail twitching – the twitch seemed to echo all through him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said hastily, putting him down very gently on the table.
Gus gave her a regal nod. ‘I should think so. You must think before you act, Rose. Particularly when we are going investigating gangs of murderous thieves.’
But his fur wasn’t standing on end in the slightest, and Rose couldn’t help suspecting he had rather liked it.
‘So. Send for that boy, and let us go.’ Gus’s tail gave a demanding little flick, as though he expected Bill to appear from thin air.
‘Now?’ Rose gasped.
Gus stared at her. ‘Of course now! Why wait? It’s the middle of the morning. Not dark for hours. What are we waiting for?’
‘I – I don’t know,’ Rose admitted. ‘I just hadn’t thought…now…’
‘Rose, are you changing your mind?’ Gus asked her wearily. The word again was strongly hinted in his voice.
‘No! No, I just wasn’t quite ready. But I am now.’ Rose nodded firmly, and slid her hand around the cool weight of the mirror in her pocket. She would make herself ready. She had to.
‘Down here? Really?’ Bella asked distastefully, and Gus glared at her from Rose’s arms. They were already inside the spell – before they had cast it, he had hidden in her scarf, as he was rather startling to passers-by.
‘Yes, really. What, you’d like your criminals to live on a better class of street?’ he asked.
‘It’s just so dirty,’ Bella complained, lifting up one delicate foot, and inspecting her boot anxiously.
‘Probably means we’re getting close then,’ Bill muttered. ‘Still can’t believe you talked me into this, Rosie. Following a cat to the Pike hideout? I must have let that house get to my head.’
They hadn’t walked far. It seemed as if they had only gone a few streets beyond the shops where Rose was used to running errands for Mrs Jones.
‘Are we really so close?’ she asked, looking around. Gus nodded, and she felt the truth settle like a heavy weight inside her. How could she have lived this close to her mother’s prison for so long, and not known? St Bridget’s, the orphanage, was even closer – only a few minutes’ walk, she guessed.
‘Someone’s coming!’ Freddie said sharply.
‘Shh, don’t panic, they can’t see us.’ Gus peered ahead. ‘I can’t see anyone. Where?’
‘There!’ Freddie hissed. ‘And whoever it is can see us. They’re making straight for the spell!’
‘Drat it, it must be one of the gang. I thought Eliza said only the leader was a magician.’ Gus wriggled out of Rose’s arms, and jumped down to the dirty stones. ‘Ugh. Be ready to run.’
‘No!’ Rose breathed. ‘It’s Eliza! Look!’
The ghost-girl was hurrying towards them, looking anxious. The faint bleaching of the colours outside the spell had made it harder to see what she was from a distance, but now her silvery colour was obvious.
‘Tch. I shall make a note to the master that this spell does not work on ghosts,’ Gus growled.
‘You came back!’ Rose reached out to touch her, and then drew back again, unsure if she could. But Eliza laid a soft, transparent, silvery hand on her arm.
‘You shouldn’t be here, miss!’
‘How did you get out of the mirror?’ Freddie demanded.
Rose stroked Eliza’s hand, very carefully. If she’d told herself it wasn’t there, her fingers would have brushed straight through to her own sleeve. Eliza felt like a cold, silvery breath blown against her cheek.
‘I thought we’d lost you,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve been carrying the mirror with me everywhere, and calling, but you never came.’
The little ghost’s fingers seemed to become more solid under Rose’s gloved hand. Eliza ducked her head shyly, but Rose could see that she was smiling. ‘I didn’t know where I was, miss. I got jolted out of the mirror somehow.’
‘But how?’ Freddie looked at her, frowning. ‘You’ve been tied to it all that time. Was it because Rose dropped it?’
Eliza blinked. ‘It was talking with you, sir. I think. It strengthened me.’
‘Wonderful,’ Gus muttered.
‘When I told you, miss, about your father. I wanted to come out then, to help you. You looked so like her! But I didn’t dare, quite. I’d been there so long. It got comfortable.’
‘But where have you been since?’
Eliza shook her head, the damp locks of her hair flying. ‘I dunno, miss. That house, it’s full of strangeness. I got turned about, and there’s things, floating…’
‘Lord knows what she’s interfered with!’ Gus’s tail lashed from side to side, and Eliza shrank back.
‘I didn’t touch nothing, Mr Cat. It were the same at Fell Hall. We knew not to touch, us servants. But then you went out, miss, and you took the mirror. So I tried to follow you, but it isn’t easy. I’m not used to being out. I got lost, and then I felt him, too. Pike! You mustn’t be round here, miss! It isn’t safe, you shouldn’t be here,’ Eliza repeated. ‘You’re too close to the gang.’
‘We meant to be,’ Rose told her. ‘We want to find my mother. If – if she’s still there…’ she added in a whisper. She meant, If she’s still alive.
‘You can’t! You can’t! It’s far too dangerous!’ Eliza’s eyes darkened in horror.
‘But if she’s still there, caught by his spell, how can I leave her?’ Rose caught Eliza’s hands, and shivered at the strange soft ghost-touch. ‘Please! You loved her too, didn’t you? Don’t you want to see her get away?’
‘Of course! But I don’t want them catching you.’ She gulped, her face twisting with fright, and then hissed, ‘Don’t you see? That’s how I died! I tried to stop them taking you!’
‘Oh.’ Rose stared at the little ghost, lost for words.
‘Come on!’ Eliza tugged her, her hands patting and pulling at Rose’s own. Her fingers seemed to sink into Rose’s skin, and Rose followed her more to stop the horrid sensation than from any strength of Eliza’s.
Eliza led them further down the murky alleyway to the edge of the river. The tide was out, and a vast expanse of mud stretched out before them. The silvery ghost pattered down a set of rotting steps and out across the mud, and they followed her gingerly to an old boat, lying upside down on the mud like some strange old shell. ‘Sit in here. We’ll be hidden. I’ll explain.’
There were several pieces of old packing case under the boat, as though this was a common haunt for someone, but even they were slimed and dirty with river water and weed, and Bella clearly couldn’t stand the thought of sitting on them.
‘Oh, Bella, stop it,’ Rose hissed. ‘Your papa will buy you a new coat if you flutter your eyelashes at him. Just sit down! I want to hear, and you do too.’
Closing her eyes in disgust, Bella did as she was told, and Eliza began to tell her story.
‘Your mother had almost forgotten her previous life,’ Eliza explained. ‘She was so deep in the spell that Pike had put on her, she couldn’t even remember who she was. Every so often she’d catch a glimpse – I reminded her of the way things used to be. But most of the time she thought she’d lived in the old Beloved’s Import & Export warehouse for ever. That’s the name of the building where Pike has his headquarters,’ she explained. ‘I don’t know when those Beloveds last used it, but there’s a big faded old sign on the waterside.’
Rose glanced back towards the building. It was a misty, grim February day, but she thought she could just see the sign Eliza meant. It was lopsided, and the wall it was hanging on didn’t look much better.
‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ Bill asked. ‘If you weren’t under this spell? Didn’t they let you out?’
Eliza shook her head, her eyes widening in horror. ‘You don’t know what they’d do! I saw them! I saw them while we was there – they cut one lad’s tongue out for blabbing about a shipment, and he weren’t much older than you! Besides. Miss Miranda was doing Pike’s dirty work for him. I couldn’t go telling, they’d have hung her too. If they ever caught them, which they wouldn’t have.’ She sniffed dismissively. ‘Pike never got caught. That’s what he had Miss Miranda for. He wrapped her up in that spell, and stole the magic out of her to make him stronger.’
Gus frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound right. Wouldn’t her magic fight against his own, if he used it against her will? He must be a strange sort of magician.’
Eliza shrugged. Clearly she didn’t know, and hardly cared. ‘She was lucky she had me to look after her. She wouldn’t even have remembered to eat if I hadn’t made her, and she needed to, with you, miss. Not that they gave us much. Reckon they thought she lived on air, and she did, some of the time, when I couldn’t wake her from the spells to have a little something.
‘But then when she was near her time with you, miss, she started to break out of his magic. More and more, she was almost herself. She said you wriggled worse than a squirming cat, and you kicked her, and that kept waking her up out of the magic, you see. She was worried, I could tell, about what was going to happen – how she’d look after you in that place. But at the same time, she could see that having you was going to make it harder for Pike to make her do what he wanted. Already you were breaking his hold on her. That’s why she named you the way she did, when you were born.’
‘What? What did she call me?’ Rose was crouching on the mudflats in front of Eliza, stretching out her hands, trying to make her tell.
‘Hope. That’s your name, miss. Hope Garnet. You were her hope of keeping herself herself, if you see what I mean.’
Rose nodded, but then she sat back on bit of packing case. ‘It didn’t work, though. She didn’t escape.’
Eliza shook her head, her eyes half-closing with remembered grief. ‘She was worth too much to them, miss. And so were you. It was all right for the first few months. Miss Miranda – not that I should call her that, but I still can’t think of her as anything else – she was careful not to let them see how much in control of her magic she was getting. She couldn’t risk them finding out and Pike recasting the spell. She was working her way out gradually, like. But then he came to see her one day, and he was watching you. You’d learned to crawl, miss, and I made you a rag doll. You played with it all the time.’ Eliza sniffed a laugh. ‘You used to carry it around in your mouth while you were crawling. Usually, Miss Miranda would try to hide you away when he came, make sure you were sleeping, or get me to take you out to see the water, wrapped up in a shawl. He turned up unexpected that day, and she could see him eyeing you. He knew what you were. Your father might not have had magic, miss, but your mother had enough that it was bound to be bubbling over in you.’ She shook her head. ‘That was it. Once she saw him looking at you like that, as though you were something valuable, something he could make money out of, she knew her time was gone. She hadn’t managed to drag herself out of the spell enough to escape, and she wasn’t going to have you trapped there too. She didn’t want you growing up as their little tame magician, never knowing right from wrong. You’d have been a monster, miss.’
Eliza nibbled on her knuckles and eyed Rose anxiously. ‘That’s why she did it, miss. You do see, don’t you? It wasn’t that she didn’t want you, not at all. You were saving her, and even if you hadn’t been, she adored you. That’s why you had to go. She couldn’t bear to see you made into one of them.’ Eliza looked down at her transparent, battered boots, and then sharply up again at Rose. ‘She thought you’d be better off dead.’
Rose gasped, a tiny, shocked noise that seemed to echo around the wooden ribs of the boat, and Bill put his arm around her, staring angrily at Eliza.
‘You would have been!’ Eliza snarled fiercely. ‘You don’t know what they’re like, what they would have made of you!’ She folded her arms, glaring at Rose. ‘Don’t you dare think ill of her. She couldn’t do it. She said if she’d really loved you properly, she could have done. She was angry with herself for not being strong enough. I took you to the churchyard instead. So that someone would find you and take you away, look after you, and keep you away from Pike.’
‘Why there? That churchyard?’ Rose whispered faintly.
Eliza shrugged. ‘Because it was close. I didn’t have long, miss, before someone would notice I’d gone. I put you in the old fishbasket I used when they sometimes let me go to the market. Miss Miranda liked a bit of fruit, and they used to let me out to buy it for her, if Pike was feeling generous.’
Rose nodded. She had always assumed it meant her real parents had something to do with fish. ‘Didn’t she have anything to leave with me?’ she asked wistfully. ‘Even a note?’
Eliza shook her head. ‘We thought about it, leaving a note. But all she could have done was use it to send you back to her family, and she thought that would be worse than useless. She said they’d fling you into an orphanage, and you’d probably be better off there anyway.’
‘She should have written a note to Miss Fell,’ Bella said critically.
‘No, she never saw Miss Fell the way she is now,’ Rose reminded her. ‘When Miranda left Fell Hall, her aunt was still under my grandfather’s thumb. She was the dear aunt that Miranda wouldn’t tell she was running away, in case it got her into trouble.’
Eliza was nodding vigorously. ‘Exactly, miss. So she decided, no note.’ She was silent for a moment, wringing her hands over and over, as though she was trying to wash off some dreadful stain. ‘But she did give me something for you, miss.’ She looked up, her eyes pleading. ‘And I’d never have taken it if I weren’t so hungry. But it was silver! I knew I could get so much for it, I couldn’t bear to just leave it there in the basket with you.’
‘What was it?’ Bella demanded. ‘A ring? A necklace?’
Rose was staring at Eliza, shaking her head. ‘No. Of course. It was the mirror.’ She slipped a hand into the inside pocket of her coat – she had unstitched it enough that she could slide the mirror in. It was the only thing she had of her mother’s, and it had seemed important to bring it with them. She stroked the metal roses gently.
Eliza gave a reluctant nod. ‘She said that she loved it, and she wanted you to have something that she loved. Something special. She thought maybe one day you’d get to understand the meaning of the little mouse on the back, and you’d be able to trace your family. But it wouldn’t be obvious to just anyone. Only when you were old enough to know you came of a magical family, then you might be able to use it as a clue.’
She darted an anxious glance at Rose, clearly afraid of what she might say. But Rose only nodded. ‘What happened?’
‘I took it to a pawnshop.’ Eliza wiped her ragged sleeve across her mouth, as though the thought of it still frightened her. ‘I was stupid,’ she added in a whisper. ‘I was in a hurry. I had to get back before they missed me! So I went to a pawnshop I’d seen before, on the way to the market.’
‘Too close.’ Bill shook his head, and Eliza looked at him gratefully.
‘Too close,’ she echoed. ‘They knew who I was. One of Pike’s. I shouldn’t have been in there with anything precious to sell. Old Mr Green, he knew he’d get on the right side of Pike if he dragged me back.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Pike even let him keep the mirror, he was that grateful!’
Rose swallowed. ‘What did they do?’ she whispered. ‘Is that how you…?’
Eliza stared at them all, her back ramrod str
aight with pride. ‘I wouldn’t tell. I’d promised Miss Miranda I’d get you away. I let her down – if only I’d done as she said and left the mirror in the basket, they’d never have known what happened to you. Miss Miranda was going to tell them you’d died of the typhus. So I wasn’t having them going and finding you. I wouldn’t tell.’
Rose reached out one hand, and tried to stroke Eliza’s damp, rat’s-tail hair. ‘They drowned you, didn’t they?’
Eliza smiled, an odd, proud little smile. ‘Right here, miss. Pike held me under himself. It was high tide, then, of course.’
Everyone was silent for a moment, their eyes flicking nervously around the battered boat, trying not to imagine.
Bill swallowed. ‘And we’re going to barge into this chap’s hideout?’
Rose shook her head. ‘You should go back. But I have to try. If she’s there, I can’t leave her. Not after…’ She trailed off, and waved a hand at Eliza.
No one said anything, but Bella sneaked an arm around her waist, and Gus purred. Bill and Freddie shifted closer on their boxes. They were all coming with her, she knew. Four children and a cat huddled together under the battered little boat, staring at a ghost-child.
‘Then after that you haunted the mirror?’ Freddie asked at last.
‘It was because of the mirror I died,’ Eliza explained. ‘I stole it, didn’t I? I think that’s how it works, anyhow.’
‘You’ve been stuck inside it all this time?’ Bella shuddered.
‘Not so much in it, miss…’ Eliza frowned. ‘Just tied to it somehow. It was like a door, but I couldn’t open it. You opened it, and called me out.’ She looked at Rose, her eyes thoughtful. ‘What are you here for, miss?’
Rose blinked. ‘To find her, of course. I have to rescue her. She’d rather have died than let me grow up there, you said so! So how can I leave her? She’s my mother!’
‘You have to.’ Eliza shook her head firmly. ‘She couldn’t get away from Pike, how will you be able to do it? Besides, miss…’ She hesitated. ‘Pike could have done away with her, for all we know…’
