by Helen Slavin
Focus. Aurora watched as Seren, having removed the mermaid sea theme, did not dress the mannequins. What was she doing? Aurora was desperate to know. She was draping the window… was that cloth or paper? What was she doing? Covering the window? Oh. Oh my god, was she closing down? Was that why she’d been keen to piggyback off Aurora’s successful business? To team up to rescue her ailing couture shop? Of course. What was she doing now? Aurora was buzzing to find out.
Seren was climbing under the swathe of fabric and reached to pin a large black letter to the drapery. From the Moot Hall bench, Aurora could make out an elegant “W”. It was the perfect font, exactly the one she would have chosen.
“WAIT” — the word was positioned and pinned before “AND” joined it at the completely perfect angle and distance. “SEE” completed the mystery.
Seren ducked out from the drapery. There was some adjusting of the fabric, a light fluffing to achieve the exact amount of tumbling. WAIT AND SEE. Aurora did not have time to think about this before the cloth was twitched once or twice more and a gilded birdcage was hooked up to dangle, tantalising.
Aurora almost tripped over the bench beside her in her rush to dart forward and see what this last detail held. It was dangerous. She did not wish it to be known that she was spying. The gilded birdcage was a thing of beauty, and Aurora envied it even more than the old chest. It was stuffed with the most beautiful yardage of silk Aurora had ever seen. It cascaded out through the opened cage door, sweeping to the edge of the window. She was forest green with envy. She was confused as to why she was even bothered about Seren, and now she was furious to be caught out as Seren came through the door.
“Hello, Aurora.” Seren smiled as she put out her A-frame board. Aurora withheld her smile. That cage, that fabric, oh, Aurora’s heart was pounding. She’d have a coronary if she didn’t rush back and totally redo her own window at Mimosa. She gave a sneering look.
Seren ignored it. “Do you like the new window?” she asked. They both looked at it. Aurora was struggling. She longed to go into the shop to feast on Seren’s ideas and creativity. Was it so impossible to just say that?
“Oh, I thought you were closing down. Hence the blank.” She gestured to the window.
Seren stared at her. “I’ll see you around, Aurora.” And she stepped back into the shop.
It occurred to Aurora that Seren’s bell was considerably more tinkly than her own, and that made her more furious, more jealous, and what was that other emotion?
Sadness, wild and bright, like a terrible supernova inside her. It took her breath away as she hurried back to Mimosa.
Inside her own shop, with its less prinkly bell and its substandard window display, she tried to cry. The sensation was there, white hot. So hot it dried the tears. She did not understand why she could not have complimented Seren on the display. More than anything, she did not understand why she could not say sorry for being such a bitch the other day. How about a coffee as a peace offering? Aurora could not cry, nor could she breathe as her panic attack took hold. She was, as she had been several times in her life, afraid of herself.
She kept busy with orders. Her hand-tied bouquets for a birth, a birthday, three anniversaries, a leaving do, and a welcome home — they were the most breath-taking bouquets ever. She hopped into her little van to deliver them, aware that there would be tears shed, hearts fluttering, a feeling which soothed her after her Seren failings. Mistake. Not failings. And after all, that window was a big blank space, however intriguing.
On her way back from her last delivery, she drove by Hartfield. She had not visited in several years. Her mum had sometimes taken her there for picnics; Aurora found the place tatty and boring, but you were allowed to nosy round the house. Winn Hartley-Hartfield was notorious for leaving doors unlocked. The trouble was that the interior made you want to get out a paintbrush or do the vacuuming. Even back then, when she was no more than ten.
The sign for The Orangery Tea Room spoke out to her. It was a simple chalkboard, but the neat writing on it, the styling, all connected with her personal aesthetic, and her stomach rumbled at the promise of Spring Style Salmon and possibly Lemon Bedrizzled Cake.
She had not expected it to be busy, but the only parking space was in the overflow. A less pleasing sign directed her to a small paddock bordered by a high wall, and then further marker pen signage showed her the way, on foot, to The Orangery.
She had not paid much heed to the wall, so only as she passed an opening did she see it concealed a garden. She had only a brief glimpse of the space before a carpenter, replacing the wooden door, closed it off to her.
There was something wrong with her heart, the way it was ticking and fluttering instead of properly beating. She took a deep breath and continued on the suggested route.
She could have lived in the clean calm of The Orangery. The tall windows looked out over the lawns to where the trees of Leap Woods graced the skyline. She wanted to cry, it was all so perfect.
The chair was white with shabby gilding, and it sang out to Aurora as the only chair she wanted to sit in to eat her lunch. It was fortunate that it was next to a small table in the corner, the exact corner where Aurora had decided to sit. A woman with a lot of baggage, toys, nappy bags, and other childish clobber was trying to herd some objectionable toddlers together. She was pink-faced and harassed, and Aurora pushed past her, because how much room did one person think they ought to take up? She could see where the woman was about to snaffle the chair for one of the greasier babies. As she hoicked the infant upwards, Aurora moved quickly to intercept. She tugged the chair from the edge of the large table to the small abandoned-looking one. It was round, a wooden top with a cast-iron frame and a lion’s head motif at the join.
“Put that back. That’s our chair.” The pink-faced woman addressed Aurora as if she was a toddler.
Aurora put her tray down and turned. “You don’t own the chair.” She sat; her hair gave a warning flounce that the pink-faced woman did not interpret.
“Of course I don’t, but I’ve just brought it from that table to our table. We need another chair.” Now the pink-faced woman paid sudden attention to the fierce expression on Aurora’s face. Framed as it was with a cloud of red hair, it gave the impression of an annoyed Goddess. She backed down slightly. “I’ve literally just fetched it a minute ago.” The woman’s cheeks were hot circles of red, like a Victorian china doll. Her eyes were glittering with emotion.
“Fetch another then.” Aurora was nothing if not a problem solver. This was her chair, suck it up. She sat. There were eight chairs at the long table, several now loaded with kiddy cargo. Elsewhere there were one or two spare chairs, fast filling up with lunch customers. “I’d hurry if I were you.”
She ate her salmon to an entertaining cabaret of musical chairs and watched the pink-faced woman’s complexion deepen to a sort of fuchsia. The children were like a herd of cats and made her think of the Cordwainer tribe. The thought, looking at her with a single green eye, made her uneasy, and she was glad she was sitting in the corner, tucked away. The pink woman’s voice was a high-pitched yelp until the Way sister came from behind the counter with a spare chair.
This sister was the baby of the clan, and Aurora struggled to recall her name. Was it Emma? Possibly Erin? The young woman looked at her, and Aurora tried a smile. She meant to ask for lemon cake. She intended on taking some home. Instead she heard herself say, “You’ve got this all wrong. This is a waste of space. This should be in your brochure as one of your wedding venue options, not some tinpot-café endeavour. Wedding in the stable? If you’re a pony.”
The youngest Way sister was staring at her. Or was she? Her gaze was slightly to the side. Aurora flicked her hair back. It cascaded and caught the sunlight. Only she could manage to weaponise hair. It was so beautiful, the Way sister recovered herself so she could look at it. She was staring very hard. Was she having an episode of some sort? Also, her name tag read “BADGER”.
“We alre
ady have a booking for the stable,” Badger informed her. “Off the back of the wedding fayre.”
“Of course. The rugby-club hut must be booked solid,” Aurora sneered. If she sneered she would be fine, because it felt comfortable and would stop her from shedding the tears that earlier had not come. Her face felt confused at the mixture of thoughts and emotion, and so she resorted to her usual trick when feeling this. With a further ostentatious sweep of her hair, she left.
In the van, Aurora sped up the driveway, aware she was punished by her lack of lemon cake. What was her problem? As she thought of the Spring Style Salmon, she understood that she was always hungry and could not cook. She felt teary at the recollection of the gilded edge of the saucer in The Orangery. When she lifted the teacup to drink the fragrant tea, she could see sunlight through the exquisite porcelain. It had been so perfect, and yet she had not been able to say so. She had wanted cake, not to hand out criticism. She shouted at herself, the sound harsh in the confines of the vehicle. She hammered at the driving wheel, careened around the corner, speeding towards town.
She had calmed a little by the time she approached the lights at the junction with Dark Gate Street. But the calm was quashed by the glimpse she caught of Seren’s window display. Her heart did that spooked-bird thing once again, and she couldn’t breathe. The light turned red, and she shot forward into the junction, desperate to be home.
She realised her mistake, but it was too late. She was hammered forward, and the van spun sideward. It was like a dreadful car minuet, a sensation of whirling, before the windscreen shattered into something like diamonds.
19
Storm in a Spode Teacup
Emz was not entirely sure what happened. She had been busy at the counter. Casey, who was putting in several shifts at the pop-up, was in the kitchen and had said they were almost at the end of the soup and there were only three more salmon portions left, so could they push the tart instead? The tables were filling up and the sound of lunch was like a symphony, soothing, until there was an off note. The chatter and laughter became barking and snapping, and, as Emz came out of the kitchen with an order, there was some kind of musical chairs battle going on. The air was heavy, as if a storm was inside the glasshouse.
“What’s Kate doing?” asked one of the women just paying at the till for a stash of sandwiches, cakes, and a small lake of hot chocolates.
The woman beside her turned. “Oh, that woman nicked the other chair. Cheek of it.” She fussed with a small baby in a papoose at her chest. “Should I…?” she asked. The two women looked out at the fracas and did not move.
Emz stepped back into the scullery and took another chair from the small stack, an old wooden bent-cane thing.
The people were red-faced. Bitter argument was biting the air, and the pink-faced woman was trying to pull a chair out from under one of the rambling club.
“But you’ve already got loads of chairs… I have small children.” The pink-faced woman tried to reason. Small children held no currency for the older woman.
“Then they can sit on someone’s knee.” The chair legs screeched across the stone floor, the sound a whining counterpoint to the pink-faced woman.
“Here you go.” Emz placed the chair and collared the nearest screaming toddler to take possession of it.
“What are you doing?” The pink-faced woman was not grateful. “That child isn’t with us.”
Her focus shifted from the chair crisis to the child crisis, and Emz turned her attention to Aurora Foundling.
Within one sentence, she wished she hadn’t. It wasn’t just the instant criticism and the fact that she called The Orangery a “tinpot-café endeavour”, it was the more worrying aspect of Aurora’s hair. Generally this whirlwind of beauty was distracting because it imparted extremes of hair envy. It was lustrous and rich in its colouring. No one could ever call Aurora “ginger”, for instance. It didn’t do it justice. Today, as the whine of unrest in The Orangery tuned itself out, Emz watched Aurora’s hair and saw something deeper within. The strands in that bit were tweaked aside like curtains and tweaked back as she looked. She had to stare. There was nothing else for it. It drew her eye and her Strength. Perhaps it was the argument souring the lunchtime mood, or perhaps not. She could not look away. A memory, something long ago, tried to speak up inside her head but was too far away to hear. Aurora brandished her hair, a single nod making it surge like a thunderhead of cloud rising through sky. It took your breath away and wiped out thought. Emz glanced at Aurora’s face. Her real face seemed to be looking longingly at the lemon cake on the next table being crammed into small mouths by little fingers. When Emz focused on her outward face, it was saying something about the rugby club that Emz didn’t quite catch but knew was a sneer.
Another wild storm of the hair, and she was gone. The chat and laughter found its harmony once more, and Emz cleared Aurora’s table.
20
Borrowed Time
In the cottage on Red Hat Lane, Nuala Whitemain reached for the mouse hunkered down into the corner of the live trap and cursed Hettie Way and all her kin.
The mouse’s heart pittered against her thumb, its beats like fireworks, their energy bursting bright hot, brief. Stealing hearts. It was a skill that Thinne had taught her, something she could do as his apprentice, in the manner of picking pockets, as he promised and bargained. The victim might not feel it directly, only years from now when their heart ran short a thump and caught their breath. It took a gesture, a small pinching together of finger and thumb, and, of course, the intent. The victim would skip a breath and have no notion what had been taken from them. You could store them, but of course she had been made to surrender them to Thinne. He might allow her one or two, his stingy tip to her for doing his dirty work.
Thinne had taught her much from his deadly armoury of magic, but she had stolen far more than he knew. Once, when he was drunk and in the throes of an argument, he had begun drumming his combatant’s heart. It was an unguarded action — she could observe how he did it and, while he was out of it, she drummed a little of his herself to see that she had it right. She had been fearful that when he sobered up he might recall the incident or feel some side effect from her experiment, but he did not.
From then, Nuala picked Thinne’s magical pockets, snatching, gleaning, winnowing her knowledge. He was careless, so it served him right. She had attached herself to him for that very task. Taking on the disguise of apprentice, he had been her ticket out of the confines of Havoc Wood. She thought she had been clever; only now did she realise what payment would come due. Magic took as much as it gave.
Her escape from Thinne had taught her that danger was a forge. It had hardened and hammered her until she was very pleased with her iron self. Apprentice to no one, she considered she owed no debt. All she had, she had earned.
Thinne’s previous visit to Havoc had been a setback, one she had turned into an opportunity to be rid of him. He was greedy for her bargain, an offering of father and son. Despite everything, she could still smile at the snare she had set on the Knightstone Bridge. She had so nearly achieved it. She smiled wider at the revenge. Which father? Ha. Whose great grandson? Thinne had not asked himself the question.
She would not forget Hettie Way’s face that night, illumined by lightning, finally aware of Nuala’s power. She could scupper, yes, she could sabotage, but she could not save them. Husband and child. That was a lesson to be learned for lashing out with the Red Wrangle.
But the Wrangle still limited Nuala — she could wring the most basic magic from within herself, but nothing like the power she would need to see off Thinne.
The safeguards about Nuala’s cottage ticked at her magic, slow but sure. Her revenge had not played out quite as planned. With Hettie alive, there had been no possibility that Thinne would return. With Hettie gone, here he dared at last. She had schemed to be better prepared this time. Fate had twisted her this way and that, and she had always twisted back. She saw only challenges, the
offering of an opportunity.
She patched the rent in her magic where Thinne had torn at it. It proved only what a fool he was, announcing himself to her, nothing but a lure for the Gamekeepers. Their own visit had made the Wrangle into hot, barbed wire, and they had not even set foot across the boundary. It was good fortune that Thinne had trailed his ragged magic and distracted them. It saved her the chore of using up valuable resources disguising her own tracks. She felt where their Strengths prowled, wild and untamed as wolves at her door. She could only hope they set upon Thinne first and devoured him.
Nuala set aside her fear and looked at their power with a greedy eye. Even with the squirming supply of cats, she could only muster enough magic for a card trick. There were endless cats, and even with all of them crushed in her fists she did not have enough to defend herself against Thinne or the Gamekeepers.
Her thoughts crackled with the fire. The Gamekeeper had no husband, no son, so there were no Gamekeepers in waiting. Hettie had her supply of granddaughters; these three women had none. Without husbands and daughters, they were, for the moment, the last of the line.
The fire flared, took Nuala’s thought with it. Three, a number gifted with magic. She thought of their wild power surrounding the cottage. If she had that strength, what might she achieve? The fire glittered in her eyes, her mind igniting with plans.
Thinne’s power was ancient; might it outweigh that of the Red Wrangle? Would his power burn slower? Allow her time and magic enough to take down these green girls? Apprentices, that’s all they were, and Hettie Way’s death had cut that apprenticeship short.
