by Webb, Holly
‘Ransom,’ Pike muttered, fingering the braid on Bella’s favourite velvet cape. ‘Or are we better off keeping you?’
Bella was standing petrified, her face pale with fear – the colour even seemed to have leached out of her blonde curls, so that she looked like carved marble, something that should have been on a grave. Freddie had fought so much against the huge man who had seized him that they had tied him up, and shoved him onto the bed. Now his eyes blazed furiously over the dirty cloth they’d bound his mouth with.
Creeping from child to child, Pike sniffed fiercely, like some sort of hunting dog. It was horrible having him so close. He smelled of metal, and his eyes were a pale shade of blue, so pale it was almost white, like china. His hair looked red, but Rose could see many colours in it, like flames in a fire, as he sniffed and prowled around her. ‘This one we’ll definitely keep,’ he muttered. ‘I can smell it on her. Everywhere. Buckets of it. You should be proud of your daughter, Mrs Garnet,’ he called, with a malicious little grin.
He tweaked one of Bella’s curls, and stroked one finger down her stony cheek. Rose, watching, waited for Bella to bite him, but she seemed to have disappeared inside herself, and did nothing. ‘A great well of it, but too far down, and at the same time oozing out of her skin. She doesn’t know what she’s doing with it yet. Dangerous.’
He was enjoying himself, Rose could see, sniffing out their magic, and perhaps because Freddie was bound, Pike wasn’t as cautious as he should have been. He bent over close to Freddie, and then reeled back with a cry of shock, his blazing red hair truly blazing now. Freddie had always been good at fires.
It went out, of course, in seconds, but it left an ugly scorched patch all down one side of Pike’s head, and Freddie was laughing, you could see it behind the gag – and even worse, some of the gang, those huge men pressed into the tiny room, were smirking a little too.
Pike hissed with fury, and hurled Freddie against the wall, with a dreadful soft crunching sound. Rose cried out in horror, and even Bella woke up and gasped. Bill struggled in his captor’s arms, but the man hit him carelessly, like he’d push away an over-excited dog, and Bill reeled and sagged.
Stop it! Rose shouted, but silently, inside all their heads, even somehow Bill’s, who she had never known she could reach before. Just don’t. We can’t fight them now, we have to wait, and – and sneak. Pike is better at fighting magic than we are, and they don’t care very much if they kill us.
She had to strain her mind to hear Freddie’s reply, the faintest thread of a whisper, but at least it meant he was alive, and conscious. Actually, they do care. I think they’d rather enjoy it.
‘That Pike is over the moon,’ Bill muttered. ‘Three of you! He thinks all his Christmases have come at once. He hesitated. ‘They ain’t never letting us go, you know that, don’t you?’
Rose didn’t say what they were all feeling. That they might be shut up for ten years, just like her mother. They had been so close. It had been stupid, she supposed. They should have been more careful, watched and waited for longer. But she couldn’t wait. It wasn’t fair to expect her to wait, was it? Not when her mother was only the width of a room away?
‘Gus will have gone to fetch Papa.’ Bella nodded as she said this, as though she was trying to convince herself. There was no getting around the fact that Gus was a cat, and his feelings and attitudes and, above all, his sense of time, could be very different from everybody else’s. Despite his criticism of other cats, Gus on a life-or-death mission could still be easily distracted by a passing sardine (even if tinned).
‘And there’s Eliza,’ Rose added. ‘I think she’ll come back. I think so. But she must have been terrified, seeing Pike again. And it might take her a while to find us, if she ran far. She’ll have to try and find the mirror again.’
The men had bundled them down into a tiny, cramped little room, which seemed not just to have been made from a boat’s timbers, but to be the tiny cabin at the bow end of a smallish fishing boat, transported in one huge piece. Surely it had been done with Pike’s magic, for Rose could not see how it could have been carried. The hatch they had been shoved in by was extremely thoroughly locked, with a sort of magical seal that had burned Rose’s fingers when she’d tried to push it delicately away.
Would the magical locks stop Eliza getting in to find them? Rose wasn’t sure. If she came back, perhaps they could send her to fetch Miss Fell, if Gus hadn’t thought of that already.
Freddie had the marble light he had made in Miss Sparrow’s cellar all those months ago, and they had all put extra strength into it, but it was still dim and greyish inside the boat. It still smelled of fish, too.
‘How long do you think we’ve been here?’ Bella asked irritably.
Freddie frowned. ‘Only a few hours. I wonder if they’re going to feed us. It ought to be teatime. Or maybe past teatime by now.’ He looked wistful, and Rose could tell he was thinking of buttered crumpets. They were his favourite. She stared at him in the dusky light. She was hungry too, but she didn’t want to eat. She thought she might be sick if she did. Her stomach kept twisting and jolting every time she thought about Pike, and what he might make them do. He had imprisoned her mother for more than ten years. How long would he keep them?
‘For always,’ Bill said dully, beside her, and Rose jumped.
‘How did you know what I was thinking?’
He blinked at her owlishly. ‘Didn’t you say it out loud?’
‘No. I never knew you could hear me speaking in your head.’
Bill shrugged. ‘Didn’t do anything. Just listened, and there you were.’
‘We can’t stay here for always, Bill. We’d – I don’t know – wilt. We’d die in here.’
‘Maybe not in here. He’ll move you out of here once he’s got you properly trained, I reckon.’ He drew in a shivery breath. ‘He ain’t going to keep me, Rose. Waste of food.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Freddie argued.
‘What would he want me for?’ Bill muttered. ‘I’m no magician, and I ain’t going to join their gang, not that I should think they’d trust me to, anyway. He’ll do what he did with Eliza.’
‘No, he won’t,’ Rose snarled, like a vicious little cat. She sprang up, her fists clenched. She had been feeling hopeless, sick with fright. Beset with so much awfulness that she didn’t know what to do first, she was doing nothing, and simply trying not to howl. But she was not going to let anyone drown her Bill. ‘Three magicians. We can’t be this feeble. We have to be able to get ourselves out, there’s only one of him, and frankly, he can’t be that clever, or he’d be an awful lot better known.’
‘What I keep thinking is, why aren’t they richer?’ Freddie muttered. ‘I suppose they have to keep hidden, but this place is falling apart.’
‘Don’t you think his magic is odd?’ Rose asked. ‘I’ve never seen magic so obviously all over someone before. Usually you have to look so hard.’ She frowned. ‘And he hit you, Freddie, really hit you, I mean, not with a spell. Why would he do that? Perhaps he isn’t as strong as he looks.’
‘There’s your mother too,’ Bella said hesitantly.
Rose nodded. ‘I know. She’s forced to work for him, though. If we could break the spell, I know she would come with us. She wanted to, didn’t she? I know she raised the alarm, but I don’t think he could actually make her do anything to hurt us. He’s on his own. And his gang are idiots.’
‘Rather large idiots,’ Freddie muttered.
‘But not the slightest bit powerful, if we could use our magic,’ Rose reminded him.
‘We’re stuck in here, though, ain’t we?’ Bill was looking at her with just the slightest hint of hope in his eyes now. ‘Can’t fight from behind these walls.’
Rose frowned. There had to be a way – the things she had seen Freddie do, in their lessons with Mr Fountain – and she was supposed to be as powerful as he was, just not as practised. Let alone how strong Bella was. She had believed they were stuck w
hen Miss Sparrow had imprisoned them in a stone cellar underground, but there was no stone here, no solid walls, only a battered old boat. Surely it couldn’t hold them?
But they hadn’t got any further towards an escape plan by the time Bella gave up and fell asleep against Rose’s shoulder.
‘They’re leaving us to stew for the night,’ Bill reckoned. ‘They’ll roust us out early in the morning, when we’re really scared. We should all try and sleep. No point lying awake and worrying.’
It was easy to say. But Rose leaned against the wooden wall, her arms prickly with the slumped weight of Bella, and thought about her mother.
By the next morning, Freddie’s longing for crumpets had spread to everyone, and they still couldn’t think of a way to get out. Bella was getting more fractious and difficult by the minute, and Rose was beginning to wonder if perhaps they should encourage her. If they could stand the agony and bleeding ears, perhaps Bella could scream their way out? She would surely be able to break down the boat timbers.
Freddie lifted the marble up, looking around their prison. ‘You know, we’ve only tried getting out of the trapdoor. I wonder if his spell goes all the way round.’ He climbed up onto the old box he’d been sitting on, and peered at the timbers. ‘It feels very old, this boat. Maybe it’s not too solid.’
Rose knocked against the nearest wall, and sighed with frustration. ‘It feels solid. Heavy.’ She remembered the mast, back in Dover harbour, and sighed. Her magic hadn’t worked then either. But she knocked at the wall again, more thoughtfully, and then pressed her hands against it, flat-palmed, feeling the wood, and remembering the water, crumpling against the harbour wall.
‘What’s the matter? Have you found a weak point?’ Freddie asked eagerly, and Bill stood up to see what she was doing.
‘No… But I can feel the sea.’
‘Rose, it’s a river we’re next to. The Thames.’
Rose rolled her eyes at Freddie, and stroked the timbers again. ‘It remembers the sea, Freddie. I don’t think it likes being run aground.’
‘Someone’s coming!’ Bella said sharply, and Rose jumped down. Freddie blew on the marble and stuffed it into his pocket, and they tried to look cowed and sad and not as though as they were considering escape at all.
The hatch creaked and whined as it was wrenched open, and Rose tried to see the spell as it died away, but she couldn’t get a grip on it. Pike hung over the doorway, looking fox-like and pleased with himself, and Rose thought again that his magic didn’t seem to fit. Could he have stolen it somehow? Most of the magicians she had met inhabited their magic like a well-made suit of clothes. It moved with them. They belonged in it. Pike seemed to use his instead, picking it up and throwing it at people. She was almost sure he was not a natural magician. It would explain why he had had to steal Miranda.
However, even if the magic wasn’t his, he used it very well. She tried pushing against it with the merest feather-light touch of her own magic as he dropped gracefully into the room, and he swung round and smiled at her at once. ‘Be careful, girl. I’m still watching, and two of my men are up there, ready to nab slippery little children.’ His smile grew wider. ‘I only came to see if you would like to visit your mother.’ His voice was a purr, and Rose flinched away from it. She looked helplessly between Bill and Bella and Freddie. What should she do? Of course she wanted to, but was this some sort of trap?
Bill shook his head slightly, and Rose could see that he thought they should stay together.
‘May we all go?’ she asked, trying to sound polite, while her fingers curled into furious little claws.
Pike stared at her blankly. ‘No.’
‘Then I won’t.’
He blinked, as though he simply couldn’t believe that she had just denied him. Rose supposed not that many people did.
‘Be careful,’ Bill breathed behind her. ‘I think he’s crazed.’
Rose was quite sure he was right. It was something about Pike’s pale, pale eyes. They were unstable. He clambered back out of the trapdoor, and it slammed shut, shaking the whole boat-room, and making Bella squeal.
Freddie began to mutter worriedly about whether it had been wise to upset Pike, but Rose was standing in the centre of the tiny room, her arms outstretched, smiling to herself.
‘What is it?’ Freddie demanded, pulling out the glowing marble. ‘What have you done?’
‘He let it go. His magic. And now it’s high tide,’ Rose told him dreamily. ‘Can’t you feel it pulling? When Pike slammed the trapdoor, he hit the boat with all that furious magic, all loose. He likes to bind things together, like he bound my mother, and that magic wanted to cling on to something. I’d spoken to the wood already, and it was waiting.’
Freddie grabbed her shoulders. ‘Rose, what have you done?’
‘It isn’t me, it’s the boat.’
Bill frowned. ‘There ain’t a boat, Rose. Just the beaten-up old bits of one. It ain’t going anywhere.’
Rose smiled. ‘It thinks it is.’ She could feel the boat now, straining at a mooring rope, its old, dull-red, gaff-rigged sail starting to swell and fill and flap. ‘It can feel the water, and it wants to be gone. A little bit of my spells, from when I wanted to get out, and a lot of Pike’s loose magic. Now the boat wants to escape too…’
The little room shook suddenly, and Bill sat down, his eyes panicky. ‘Rose, this ain’t a boat, you can’t sail off in nothing and old wood!’
Bella patted his knee. ‘She likes sea journeys. She invented one inside my head a few days ago. If she says there’s a boat, there probably is.’
‘There’s boats and boats. I bet it’s got holes in,’ Bill muttered.
Freddie snickered, sharp and hysterical. ‘It’s all hole!’
Then there was a splintering, crashing explosion of sound, and they shot forwards, grabbing onto each other, and yelling in fear and joy and excitement.
The half-boat flung itself against the stones of the outer wall, and as they broke out of the warehouse, Rose felt Pike’s magic tearing away, like an ugly coat of slime. There was a sickening lurch as they slipped over the little causeway, and then smoothness, as the water sucked at the strange memory of a boat. The timbers quivered with their new-found freedom, and Bill reached up to the hatch. ‘Can’t get to it. Climb on my shoulders?’
Freddie nodded, and scrambled up, shoving hard with his hands flattened against the boards. ‘It’s still bolted, but his spell’s half torn off. Can you hold me up here a minute?’
‘Mmpf,’ Bill muttered. ‘Hurry up.’
Freddie drew a series of interlocking patterns on the underside of the hatch, and then swept his hand across them. Then he shoved again, and cried out gleefully as the hatch sprang open. His head and shoulders disappeared out of the hole, and then he called down to Bill. ‘Push me out, then I can pull you all up.’
Bill boosted him out, then stood on one of the boxes to make it easier for Freddie to haul him up, and then they dragged the girls out of the hatch, Bella kicking and yelping indignantly. They huddled together up on the bows, staring back into the well of the boat.
‘Oh…’ Rose gazed around them, wide-eyed.
‘Mmm. Imaginary boat,’ Freddie agreed. ‘I’d never have believed it.’
‘Not completely imaginary,’ Bella disagreed. ‘I can see it. Can’t you? Just very faintly?’
The bow of the fishing vessel, the part they had been imprisoned in, looked like any old boat, although very worn and battered. But the rest of the boat was – not there. Or almost there, as Bella said, one could see it very faintly, a honey-golden haze of new timber – there was even a sweetish whiff of cut wood. And it was sailing, wallowing through the wide, pewter-grey river.
‘Do you think we can touch the rest of the boat?’ Freddie asked. ‘I mean, would it hold us? I don’t feel very safe clinging on up here.’
Bill snorted. ‘It don’t look very safe down there. I’m staying where I can see the wood. No offence, Rose. But I can only s
ee water down there, and it looks cold.’
‘They’ve seen us.’ Rose had been staring back towards the old Beloveds warehouse, watching for Pike. He was easy enough to spot, even from this distance, his hair a flaming spot of red against the tumbled grey stones. The rest of the gang were gathered around him, pointing. There was a small rowing boat, tied to a metal ring on the wall, but no one seemed to be about to give chase.
Rose sighed, and looked away, out to the other side of the river. The warehouses were shrouded in early-morning mist, but there was the odd boat busy ploughing up the river already, and their occupants were staring at the strange little craft.
‘We should make for the bank again. Try and moor somewhere further down, away from Beloveds, and then we can get back,’ she suggested.
‘Back?’ Bella squeaked. ‘We aren’t going back! We’ve just got away.’
Rose nodded. ‘That’s all right. You can go home. I’m going back.’
Freddie rubbed a hand across his face. ‘Sorry, Rose. I’d almost forgotten why we went there in the first place. Your mother’s still there.’
‘And I should think Pike will take it out on her that he’s lost us,’ Rose said quietly. ‘We’ve only made things worse for her.’
‘No.’ Another voice joined in, and the children wriggled round to face the well of the boat, where a silvery figure was watching them, as insubstantial as the timbers she stood on.
‘Eliza! We didn’t know if you’d come back!’ Rose frowned. ‘Be careful, won’t you? We don’t know what that part of the boat actually is.’
Eliza smiled. ‘I’m not afraid of getting wet, Rose. Besides, it feels solid to me. I’ve seen your mother, Rose. I went back. She saw me, too, or she almost did. Pike tried to cripple her with the spell, but it didn’t take this time. She’s growing away from him – you broke his hold on her, Rose. She’s happy.’
