A Most Magical Girl

by Karen Foxlee

  Annabel nodded politely to show she was interested. She wasn’t. She was scared and confused.

  “But there is also the good wand,” Miss Estella continued. “The White Wand. Yes. It’s coming back to me now. It will be in the book. The Morever Wand. There is a map for finding it where it is hidden, deep down in Under London…where the faeries put it. Henrietta! I remember!”

  She yelled the last so loud that Annabel covered her ears.

  “Oh yes,” said Miss Estella. The white whiskers that grew boldly on her chin wiggled with each word. “The Morever Wand, the Faery Wand, the Witch’s Wand, hidden away for years and years and the only one that can do battle with the Black Wand. Made of a Siberian rowan tree, yes! The two great wands, rulers over all the lesser wands; the Black and the White, made to do battle with each other if ever the time came.”

  Miss Henrietta returned. Annabel went to stand, but Miss Estella’s hand closed around her wrist. Her nails were long and yellow, each one split, each one like rotting wood.

  “It was small and green, after all that,” said Miss Henrietta, holding the book in her hand. She glared at her sister and then at Annabel for good measure. “So it took longer to find.”

  “It seemed large in my head,” said Miss Estella, but she didn’t mention the color.

  “I hope you haven’t told her too much,” said Miss Henrietta. “She looks pale. She’s the sort who will take ill with too much knowledge. Like the last girl, who faded to nothing in a matter of days.”

  “She was a weakling. This girl here is strong. Don’t you feel it, Henrietta?”

  Miss Henrietta looked at Annabel with great distaste. Annabel thought she much preferred Miss Estella, even with her wild shrieks and rotting teeth, to Miss Henrietta.

  “I have recalled the White Wand and the map. Tell us what it says if the society is threatened with the Black Wand,” said Miss Estella.

  Miss Henrietta sat in the chair and opened the book, which was more a collection of loose and tattered pages kept within an emerald-green cover. She went through the pages one by one.

  “The Great & Benevolent Magical Society,” she said. “Description. Purpose. Laws. Bylaws. Membership. Members’ obligations.”

  “Threats to the society!” cried Miss Estella. “Threats to London! Threats to the world! The Black Wand!”

  “I see nothing like that written here,” said Miss Henrietta, shuffling through the papers. “Here—no, wait. Sanctity of the Society: Threats, Coercions, and Forebodings. The Black Wand.”

  “Read it!” shrieked Miss Estella so loudly that Annabel’s bottom left the bed.

  “Patience!” Miss Henrietta cried back at her. “ ‘There may come a time when those with magical and malevolent intentions gain possession of the Black Wand. The Black Wand, when filled with dark magic, can raise the shadowlings. Under no circumstances must the Great & Benevolent Magical Society allow this. At such a time, the Morever Wand must be retrieved from its hidden resting place in Under London by the youngest and most able member of the society; preferably, a most magical girl. (See appendix twenty-seven, Prophecies Related to the Morever Wand.) The youngest and most able member of the Great & Benevolent Magical Society will assume the role of Valiant Defender of Good Magic. The youngest and most able member of the society may take a companion on the journey. (See appendix twenty-seven, Prophecies Related to the Morever Wand.)’

  “Oh, stuff and nonsense,” Miss Henrietta interrupted herself. Then she went back to reading: “ ‘Instructions for the singing of the map into the youngest and most able member are located in appendix three.’ ”

  Miss Henrietta stopped there. The river gushed and hushed in Annabel’s ears. Annabel tried to imagine little wizened Miss Estella being a valiant defender of anything. She wasn’t sure Miss Estella could even stand. She looked at Miss Henrietta then, with her sour, creased face and her trembling hands. Who is the younger? she wondered.

  “Appendix three,” demanded Miss Estella.

  Miss Henrietta recommenced shuffling through the papers. All the meanness seemed to evaporate from her face. She looked frightened. Beside Annabel, Miss Estella began to murmur again. Quite suddenly both great-aunts looked ancient and useless. A pile of papers slid from Miss Henrietta’s lap to the floor.

  Annabel stood up and moved toward her. “Here,” she said. “An appendix should always be at the back. I’ll help.”

  Miss Henrietta handed her some pages. She found appendix one, which was an illustration of a wand. The words Morever Wand were printed, rather scratchily, beneath it. It looked like a stick, and not a magical one, either.

  She found appendix seventeen, which was a sketch of something large and dark, a shadowy-looking thing, no more than a dark shape, really, standing in a dark space. Annabel held that page in her hand until she realized she needed to breathe, which she did. Then she put the page down. She knelt and began to go through the pages on the floor.

  “Here is appendix three,” she said.

  Miss Henrietta studied the page and looked even more terrified.

  “Time yet to read it, Hen. We must prepare the girl now!” shouted Miss Estella. “Find her a broomstick and send her to wizards so she can choose a seeing glass and they can teach her. She must be taught as much as we know!”

  The girl, thought Annabel. Who on earth is the girl?

  “The girl knows nothing!” shouted Miss Henrietta. She stood, and the remaining pages cascaded to the floor. “You cannot mean it!”

  “It says it—it is written, by hands hundreds of years past. The youngest and most able member of the society, a most magical girl, must enter Under London and retrieve the Morever Wand. Here she stands, before your very eyes, Sister!”

  “This child has as much magic in her as a common dormouse!” shouted Miss Henrietta. “She may be of the family Vine and she may be the youngest, but she is definitely not the most able.”

  The girl, thought Annabel, and then the realization dawned upon her so that it took her breath away. They were talking about her.

  “She is a girl of good lineage; she is strong,” said Miss Estella. “How can you not feel it, Sister? Remember the wizards’ dreamings? She will go down the hole into Under London. The wand in Mr. Angel’s hands will spell the end. She will save us all. She is our only hope.”

  “Good lineage does not make her a witch,” replied Miss Henrietta.

  Annabel looked down at her pretty rosebud-patterned dress, touched a stray tendril of blond hair. She let out a little laugh. A hiccup. A very small sob.

  “But I don’t want to be a witch,” she said.

  “Sometimes, dear girl, you have no say in such matters,” said Miss Estella.

  They were a sad lot, those Highgate faeries, weeping over every single tree cut down. Every pond bricked over. All the fair things wiped away, copses blackened and burned, all the birds stolen from trees so that fine ladies might have a pretty thing. But they didn’t move on. Others disappeared in the night, and she found their left-behind burrows filled with scraps of their lives. The Highgate faeries stayed. Their queenie was thin and vicious. Always sharpening her arrows.

  Just before dawn Kitty had given them the parcel from Miss Henrietta. They were not happy with its contents. An old plate. Lace. A tinderbox. They had all these things, the queenie screeched in her own language, but Kitty understood well enough. They were agitated. The wind and rain had died down, and they were pointing to the moon. But in the end they gave her faery twine, and she was glad to be away from them.

  She had slept again in the mausoleum, and the moon had gone down. London had come to life. She felt it through her skin, pressed to the cold stone: giant looms and wood mills and carriage wheels, cooks in kitchens and poor boys sweeping streets and ladies everywhere being laced up in their stays. She smiled, coughed, slept again. The Vine Witches were always happy with faery twine.

  When she woke, there was a great fog.

  In the streets, shop lights blazed as thoug
h it were night and men walked before carriages holding lanterns aloft. Everywhere, people were confounded by the appearance of the pea-souper, brown in places, purple in others. And how they complained. She listened to snippets of their conversations, snatches of their concerns, as she began her long walk back. They grumbled at tavern doors and worried at windows. They covered their noses, for it stank, that fog, it stank of a thousand bad things, of peat and coal and tanning works; of sulfur, of sewers, of cigars and chimneys. Word was that a steamer had run its bow aground on the Isle of Dogs.

  But Kitty did not complain. She walked. She had seen many fogs: yellow fogs and gray fogs and black fogs. She had seen fogs this very color but knew it was not the London Particular. She touched it with her hands and knew it was something else. It was magical, this stuff, and she knew it as surely as she knew her own bones.

  She did not worry. Her feet were sore and her stomach was growling, but she did not let it bother her. For faery rope, Miss Henrietta would give her new bread, fog or not, sore feet or not. She walked and walked, and there were butterflies dancing inside her, and she couldn’t say why, but she felt as though the whole world were ending and beginning at once, and more than anything, she wanted to see Annabel Grey.

  “A young lady does not yawn or sigh but listens attentively to any lesson or wise anecdote an elder may offer.”

  —Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

  Annabel did not like the sound of Under London. She decided she would agree to everything her two great-aunts suggested and, when alone, rush from the shop. She’d take the coin in her purse and catch an omnibus to the Rutherfords’ house on Park Lane and throw herself upon their mercy until her mother returned. She could be Isabelle’s sister for a while. They would wear the finest clothes and ride in the Rutherfords’ landau and ice-skate on the Serpentine in the winter with all the other pretty young girls. She would wear her emerald-green ice skates.

  Her two great-aunts argued over her head. It was a furious argument. It crackled and sizzled and snapped in the air. It filled that murky bedchamber. Miss Estella wore a vicious expression on her tiny face. Miss Henrietta paced to and fro.

  “We must equip her as best we can. She has the sight—we know as much. We can give her the map. She will find the way. The Morever Wand is the only wand that will stop the Black once it is filled with dark magic,” said Miss Estella. “Hours—we have little more than a day, Henrietta. Full moon is tomorrow evening!”

  “But look at her mind!” Miss Henrietta cried. “Look at the clutter. She wouldn’t last half a day in Under London. She has not a single wit about her.”

  “You are stubborn as a Tottenham Troll!” cried Miss Estella. “Henrietta…Sister…We must teach her to empty her mind. Send her to the wizards. They must be warned anyway. All the society members must be warned. They can show her how to look into the glass. That is her talent.”

  “Foolish Sister!” cried Miss Henrietta, moving backward and forward so that Annabel felt quite dizzy for watching it. “She has no talent.”

  “Mr. Angel has already raised up shadowlings,” said Miss Estella. “He will raise more. He will turn London dark.”

  To which Miss Henrietta closed her eyes and nodded once.

  “She is our only hope,” continued Miss Estella. “She must go down into Under London.”

  “Under London,” said Miss Henrietta.

  “A most magical girl,” said Miss Estella.

  “A most magical girl,” repeated Miss Henrietta, and she looked at Annabel with her most disappointed expression yet.

  Out of Miss Estella’s riverbed chamber they went. Out past bent-over Tatty, who banged her crook very loudly. Out into the lonely hallway and the desolate parlor.

  Miss Estella called to them as they left. “Teach her to empty,” she cried. “Find her a broomstick. Send her to the wizards.”

  Annabel heard those words clearly, but then she and Miss Henrietta were on the stinking stairwell and the words grew indistinct. Miss Henrietta opened the brown door into the small, changed kitchen, with the hearth facing the wrong way and the green teapot instead of the blue. The dreadful brown fog swirled against the window and made the place very dark.

  Annabel suddenly felt so weary she could fall down and sleep. At Miss Finch’s Academy for Young Ladies, they would take their time warming up to the day. They would recite their French conjugations, and then they would list the capitals of the world. They would practice curtsying for a good half hour before anything difficult was expected of them.

  This morning she’d already emptied chamber pots and folded laundry and swept floors, and now she’d been told she had to become a witch and go down a hole and find a wand to save London.

  Miss Henrietta pulled two chairs by the fire and motioned for Annabel to sit. She raised the Ondona in her hand.

  “Benignus,” she said very quietly, and the flames sprang up in the fire.

  She took a seat before Annabel and their knees almost touched.

  “To give you the map, there must be room inside you,” she said. She pointed to Annabel’s head.

  That doesn’t really make any sense, thought Annabel.

  “For you to read the map, there must be room inside you,” said Miss Henrietta. She pointed to Annabel’s heart.

  Anyone can read a map, thought Annabel. She was quite good at it, actually. She wished Miss Henrietta wouldn’t point at her. It was rude.

  “For you to understand the map, there must be room inside you,” said Miss Henrietta.

  Fiddlesticks, thought Annabel, which was what the maid Mercy said when she burned the crumpets.

  “There is no room inside you,” said Henrietta. “Listen to you. You cannot control your thoughts. You are loud and careless. How will you hear the world—the real world—when all you hear are your own buzzing thoughts?”

  Annabel wondered if she would get morning tea.

  Miss Henrietta sighed, exasperated.

  “First imagine your mind is a teacup.”

  “I beg your pardon, Miss Henrietta?” said Annabel.

  “Impudent child,” said Miss Henrietta. “To empty one’s thoughts and to quiet them, one must quickly and carefully examine the cup of one’s mind. What kind of cup do you have?”

  Annabel stared at Miss Henrietta. It was a trick question—she knew it. No matter what she said, it would be wrong.

  Miss Henrietta waited.

  “If your mind were a cup,” her great-aunt said slowly, each word like a stamp of the foot, “what kind of cup would it be?”

  “Well,” said Annabel, “it would be a little fancy. It would be a bone china teacup, white, painted all over with yellow roses, and trimmed in gold.”

  “Good,” said Miss Henrietta. “Now that you see your cup, can you see what is inside it? What are your thoughts? Do not shout them, I beg of you. Just look into your cup and quietly list them.”

  So Annabel imagined her fancy teacup, and she imagined lifting it up and looking inside. My thoughts are that you are very mean, Annabel said to herself. That thought floated on the top like a large blob of cream.

  My thoughts are that if I could go home, I’d go home this very instant. Everything would be well again. Charlie would be singing in his cage, and Mama would be dressing for a party. She wouldn’t ever have been very magical. My father really would be a sea captain who’d been lost at sea.

  Quite suddenly she saw a horrible thought. It was dark and oily, sitting just below the surface. The thought was: Why did my mother lie to me? About my father, about herself. About everything.

  What did I see in the washtub? What is that part of me? The ruinous, horrid part. The part that sees things. She stopped looking in her teacup and looked at Miss Henrietta instead.

  “There is more,” said Miss Henrietta. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” said Annabel, but she didn’t want to look again. There was much more, a thousand questions, one of them so huge she dared not look. “Are my thoughts quiet
er?”

  “No,” said Miss Henrietta.

  Surely I can’t be expected to go on a journey all alone? That was the next thought that rose to the surface. She’d never been anywhere alone. What if I fail? That was a very large thought. It was almost as big as the cup, expanding. She looked up at Miss Henrietta.

  “Look again,” said her great-aunt. “I know there is more.”

  So Annabel looked back at her fancy teacup. The thing at the bottom was worst of all. She looked at her shiny white porcelain handle instead and then at the perfect yellow roses. She looked at them carefully, even though they were completely imaginary.

  “Tell me,” said Miss Henrietta.

  The thought at the bottom was unspeakable.

  I should like to smash this teacup on the ground, thought Annabel.

  She wanted to smash it because she knew that her mind was nothing like that cup. She knew this, even though she had been taught to think it was. It had been drummed into her, reinforced just as surely as she was laced up and beribboned, her fair hair curled with rags and arranged just so. She had been told again and again: You are pretty and fragile and delicate. You are nothing. This is you, Miss Annabel Grey. Pretty Mayfair girl.

  She knew that cup was not her mind. She knew it, and it made her want to howl. Her mother should have told her so. Oh, she was angry. She had never in all her life howled. She held the howl in. It hurt her insides. Her cup would be dark. Her cup would smell of unknown things. Her cup would never be empty. She would never, ever get to the bottom of it. Her cup was everything she had been taught to turn her back on. She was everything she was taught to never see.

  She howled then. Her whole world was shattering around her. Everything seemed lost and found at exactly the same time. She began to cry a great wave of tears. She put her hands up to her face in horror at the force of them.

  “Good girl,” said Miss Henrietta. “Good girl.”

  Her aging great-aunt placed a large bony hand on Annabel’s head. Annabel expected it to be cold and hard, but it was smooth and as light as a feather, and its touch was like the kiss of a butterfly.