A Most Magical Girl

by Karen Foxlee

  “The moon is high, Annabel,” said Mr. Angel. “The time is nearly come.”

  He bowed again and motioned for her to enter.

  Annabel looked at the house and remembered her vision: the black wave washing out from this place, ready to smash everything in its path. Here she was, the most magical girl, standing empty-handed at her destination. She had failed. She had failed her great-aunts. She had failed the wizards. She had failed all of the Great & Benevolent Magical Society. She put her hand to her heart and took a deep breath.

  She would not cry.

  “Come inside,” Mr. Angel said quietly in his lonely voice. The loneliest voice Annabel had ever heard.

  Annabel raised her chin. She straightened her spine. She smiled just the way she had been taught at Miss Finch’s Academy for Young Ladies, for when things were terrible or even just a little bit bad.

  “Thank you, Mr. Angel,” she said, as though he had asked her in for tea, and she followed him inside.

  The trouble with Annabel Grey, thought Kitty as she picked up the broomstick and the wand from the ground, was that she talked too much. She was like a clanging bell, and she liked everyone she met and wanted to know their story and how she might help them—even trolls—and it was exactly that sort of thing that had gotten her swept up by a shadowling carriage and into the sky.

  Kitty had crouched. She had heard the thing coming and had crouched. She knew such things. She looked at the Morever Wand and felt its weightlessnes but knew it to be magical. She turned it over in her hand. It had faery magic written all over it.

  Hafwen lay on the ground, facedown, crying.

  “Get up, you big baby,” said Kitty.

  Hafwen lifted her tearstained troll face. “I want Annabel back,” she said. “Why did the wind take her?”

  Kitty sighed and took Hafwen’s hand and helped her to her feet. She wished the carriage had taken the troll as well.

  The wind had lifted up the fog in the street, and the moon now shone down on them. It turned the writing on the stick silvery. All the fear had gone out of the place with the departure of the flying shadowling carriage, but it was now somewhere else in the city. Kitty had to go where that fear went. She knew it. The way was there in her worn little boots. She needed no map drawn upon her skin. The whole of London was inside her head, all its leaning lanes and ragged roads, all its grand squares, all its locked gardens and last meadows.

  “Hush,” she said quite gently to the troll now. “I must listen for the way.”

  The trouble with Annabel Grey, she thought, was that she made you love her however hard you tried not to and she was always needing to be saved.

  “A young lady’s most enviable talent is her artful conversation.”

  —Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

  Inside was very dark, and it took Annabel’s eyes time to adjust after the bright moonlight. She and Mr. Angel were in a black parlor, and everywhere, she heard the rustling of shadowlings. They hung upside down from the ceiling and whispered against the walls. They brushed her skin as she passed. They hissed her name quietly and rattled their claws.

  The house rumbled around her. It shuddered and shook.

  “What is that noise?” she whispered. There was a grinding sound coming from above. A rhythmical thumping and rasping.

  “It is the Dark-Magic Extracting Machine,” said Mr. Angel.

  He led Annabel down a murky corridor and into the dining hall, where a table was set with two places. When they entered, the shadowlings erupted from the walls. They swarmed until Mr. Angel raised his wand and commanded them to be quiet. They disappeared into the ceiling and the folds of the curtains again.

  “Be seated,” Mr. Angel said. He took his place at the end of the table. Annabel peered at him through the dimness.

  “We will eat before the ending,” he said, and his voice was so soft that she could hardly hear him. “A last supper, shall we say.”

  She saw him smile his lopsided, half-melancholy smile.

  “You are as fair as your mother is dark,” he said. “But also so like her.”

  Annabel thought it was very familiar of him to talk of such things. She did not reply but instead pretended to be interested in her napkin, which she placed upon her knee.

  He laughed a small, papery, whispery laugh. “We shall eat, and then I will tell you the story of your mother,” he said.

  “Mr. Angel, please pardon, but I don’t believe there is anything you can tell me of my own mother,” said Annabel, and she was surprised at the strength in her voice.

  She felt angry. She did not like him. She did not want his version at all.

  “Oh, but there is, child,” said Mr. Angel, and he began to laugh again, louder this time.

  He took his Black Wand and waved it at the table, and food appeared on Annabel’s plate. It was a roast, and the smell of it brought water to Annabel’s mouth—she could not help it.

  “Eat, and I will tell you,” he said. “And then it will be time to feed you to the machine.”

  Kitty stood before Euston Station. She coughed, and her chest hurt. She would curl into a ball and sleep if she could. She knew places nearby, the colonnade platform or the rail yards farther north, but now was no time for sleep. She shivered in the new wind but was glad for it. On the new wind she could find her bearings. Her way to Mr. Angel’s dark mansion.

  “Be quick,” said Hafwen, who didn’t like the wind. She was used to close tunnels and damp, dark places. The wind had taken her humanling friend.

  “Be quiet,” said Kitty.

  The fog was gone, and the moonlight had woken London. Kitty listened to its scratchings and passages. Mail carriages previously waylaid were moving again, and out on the river was the sound of whistles and horns. Cattle were being herded at Smithfield, and all through Covent Garden wagons were rumbling. Above it all she heard the sudden clear voice of the quarter bells at the Clock Tower.

  She listened. She wanted the wind to tell her something. Hurry, she said to it silently, but she knew that would do no good. She had to be patient. She heard the young voices of ash trees in Regent’s Park, rustling and anxious; the bean trees in the Inner Temple rattling their pods; and then, far away, so very distant, the ancient green voice of the Totteridge yew. She closed her eyes.

  Come this way, the old yew tree said, very calm on the wind’s worrying. Come now.

  She had never understood its voice before, but tonight it was very clear to her.

  She turned in her worn little boots, with her eyes still closed, listening for the way to go. She listened for the yew’s voice in amongst all the others: the carriage wheels and coachmen’s horns, bells and barking dogs, an organ-grinder who saw fit to celebrate the lifting of the fog with a tune. She turned and listened. She had Annabel’s broomstick and the Morever Wand in her hands, and she knew London would not let her down.

  Come, said the Totteridge yew, and Kitty stopped and opened her eyes.

  “This way,” she said to Hafwen, and began to walk.

  “A young lady only ever takes small portions of food upon her fork.”

  —Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

  Feed her to the machine? Annabel listened to it up above. It whined and whirred and made the ceiling tremble. How could she be fed to a machine? She took a very small bite of bread, and Mr. Angel watched her from the far end of the table.

  “Please accept my thanks for the meal, Mr. Angel,” she said. “But I’m afraid my appetite seems to have disappeared.”

  She knew it was impolite to refuse food and that Miss Finch would frown upon such a thing, but she felt very unwell. She worried for Kitty and Hafwen. She worried for her broomstick and the wand. All that time crawling through dirty tunnels only to have it snatched out of her hand by the wind. All of good magic had depended on her and now she had gone and ruined everything.

  She thought of Miss Henrietta and Miss Estella. She thought of her mother. She thought of the Great & Benevolent Mag
ical Society. What would become of them? Of London. Moonlit London. A thousand chimneys, with family after family slumbering, old ladies in nightcaps, and maids in attic bedrooms and babies in bassinets. Kittens in baskets and poor girls in dormitories and weary newspapermen in candlelit offices telling the story of the end of the fog for the morning paper. Ladies sleeping on goose-down pillows and waifs sleeping rough with leaves in their boots. All of London unknowing.

  What did she have?

  What could she do?

  What had Miss Estella said? All the answers were inside her. In her head and in her heart. She touched her forehead there at the table, and then her heart. She placed her hand over her dirty, ragged dress and felt her seeing glass. Her breath caught.

  She smiled at Mr. Angel. Her politest smile. “The story of my mother, if you please, Mr. Angel,” she said.

  Kitty and Hafwen went through the park, past the noisy barracks and the zoological gardens. Hafwen stopped still when she heard the elephants stamping their feet and trumpeting at the moon, and Kitty had to coax her forward.

  “Hafwen, you’ll have your star,” she said, trying placation first. “Annabel wouldn’t lie about such a thing.”

  The troll trembled and shook her head.

  “It will be the brightest star that you could ever imagine.”

  The troll refused.

  “Hurry, you big oaf, or it’ll be too late. Annabel is in peril.”

  They tried the broomstick. Kitty straddled it and commanded it up, but it wouldn’t move. Hafwen shoved her angrily out of the way and tried it herself, but it refused to take off. Kitty sighed and thought she should’ve known as much; it would not fly because it was completely attached to the girl that everyone loved, wizards and trolls alike. And there in the moonlit park she did not feel angry but only smiled and coughed.

  The giraffes lifted their slender necks to watch them go.

  They ran through Primrose Hill Park and, far ahead, the oldest willow and the oldest ash called Kitty’s name. This way, they said. This way.

  Sometimes Kitty stopped. Breathing was hard, and her chest ached. She stopped and she listened. She knew this way. She knew the railway line and its tussock grasses. She knew the heath in the distance and was glad for it. All the milkwort and the bedstraw she brought the Miss Vines, the hawthorn and red clover for the Kentish Town Wizards, the secret places the faeries lived—oh, she could almost smell them tonight. On the heath the new air would be thick with the honey scent of them. The wind rushed through her, and sedge grass far ahead whispered, whispered, whispered, Hurry, Kitty.

  The old oaks and the greater mother oak called.

  And far beyond came the steady, quiet voice of the great Totteridge yew again—Onward, Kitty—and she navigated the streets toward it, like a sailor following a pole star.

  “After a meal, it is most agreeable for a young lady to engage in gentle parlor games, but none so boisterous as to excite her nerves and deprive her later of a restful sleep.”

  —Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

  “Yes, Annabel,” said Mr. Angel. “It is a story that will make you cry, dear child. A great tragedy. And when I have told it, you will be quite ruined. And ruination is what the machine desires. Desolation, sorrow—pure and simple.”

  As if it could hear his words, the machine took a great breath above them, and the house shook to its very foundations. It whirred and grumbled and the dark paintings rattled on the walls and the dark chandeliers shivered.

  “It was your mother’s sorrowful tears upon a handkerchief that first gave me the idea for the Dark-Magic Extracting Machine. That handkerchief was the first object placed into its heart. I have built around her tears for thirteen years. Thirteen years of full moons. And now, tonight, you will complete the circle.”

  Annabel clasped her hands together in her lap to stop them from shaking. She lifted her chin.

  Mr. Angel watched her carefully. “Your mother was a most magical young woman,” he said, and he stood.

  He walked, all crooked at the top, back and forth behind his chair.

  “It was said she once flew on her broomstick all the way to Elgin and back in one night for a potion. She saved a child almost sure to die. She was good, your mother, very good.”

  Annabel didn’t like the way Mr. Angel used the word was. As though her mother wasn’t coming back. As though she wasn’t good anymore. It made her heart hurt. The floor rattled beneath her feet. The shadowlings whispered against each other’s cheeks.

  Mr. Angel smiled. “She was a healer, and she had the sight, and she was wild and young and full of promise. She was even given her own wand, not normal for one so young. The magical world spoke of her—oh, how they spoke of her, Annabel. There had not been such a witch for some generations. But then she fell in love.”

  Mr. Angel stood motionless for some time, thinking. The shadowlings crept from their hiding places and grew their necks long toward his thoughts.

  “In my humble opinion,” he said at last, “love ruins most things.”

  He waved his wand, and the shadowlings descended, and in seconds the food and tableware were gone.

  Annabel imagined her mother wild and passionate rather than graceful and poised. She imagined her riding a broomstick all the way to Elgin, which she knew from geography was a very long way indeed. She needed to take a deep breath, for the image did not shock her so much as make her feel suddenly happy. Happy despite everything. Happy despite sitting before Mr. Angel, who was about to destroy London. Of course her mother should ride a broomstick, her black hair unwound. She should scream out at the wind and the clouds and in the mornings, when she returned, smell like the rain and the sky.

  Mr. Angel banged the wand down on the table. “Vivienne Vine fell in love with a man by the name of the Great Geraldo Grey. That was his stage name. An apprentice to the Great Horaldo. They were magicians only. Card sleight–performing tricksters. No more than that. But how she loved him.”

  The Great Geraldo Grey, thought Annabel, and she bit her bottom lip. Her hands went up to her face, trembled. She tried very hard not to be sad. The Great Geraldo Grey.

  “The Miss Vines forbade the liaison. The Finsbury Wizards refused his request for marriage. But Vivienne and Gerald married in secret anyway, and soon after, your mother was heavy with you.”

  Annabel had many questions. Mr. Angel was going too fast. One minute her mother was flying to Elgin for a potion and the next she was getting married. Who was Gerald Grey? What was he like? Where did they meet? Did he have fair hair or black hair? She needed to ask her mother these things, and now she would never have the chance. The machine up above let out a long, thin wail, and the walls of the house shivered. Mr. Angel’s eyes widened with pleasure.

  “Now, one evening not long before you were born, the Great Geraldo Grey had a terrible accident. He said good-bye to Vivienne and set off for the theater, and perhaps he was not watching where he was going or perhaps he was thinking of your imminent birth. We shall never know. But he stepped in front of a coach on the Euston Road and it was the end of him.”

  Annabel’s mouth was open. Her heart quite stopped.

  But it couldn’t be the end of him. She’d only just met him in the story.

  Mr. Angel laughed his soft, papery laugh at her distress, and the shadowlings mimicked him.

  “Vivienne heard the commotion. All the traffic was stopped on the Euston Road. Dear Annabel, how she wept over his body, lying there in the dirt and manure. But in her wild grief she remembered something. She remembered the story of me, Mr. Angel, banished by the Finsbury Wizards for my resurrection machine. Do you know what that is, Annabel?”

  Annabel shook her head.

  “A machine that can bring those who are departed back to life. I had tried it several times on rabbits, several more on cats, but never on a human soul. Shall I explain its workings?”

  “No, thank you,” said Annabel.

  “It was a simple matter of dark magic,
necromancy, and steam,” he said, ignoring her. “The soul can be called back—but getting it to stay in the body is another matter. With the resurrection machine, I was trying to fix that.”

  Annabel wanted to know how her father spoke. How he walked. How he laughed. However hard she tried to stop them, two tears slid down her pale cheeks.

  Up above, the machine bellows sighed.

  “There was a knock at my door, Annabel, and there stood Vivienne Grey with her newly departed husband, the Great Geraldo Grey. The perfect human subject for my machine. Up the stairs he was carried by two footmen, and into the machine. Shall I tell you what it looked like?”

  “No, thank you,” whispered Annabel again.

  “It was a little like a coffin and a little like a bed, with the subject attached to various tubules by way of needles. The tubules were attached to various receiving bells, and it was all completely powered by steam.”

  Annabel wished she couldn’t hear. She wanted to know how her father danced, how he listened, what special tricks he could do. If he was a good man. And now she would never know.

  “Your father was attached. The engine ignited. The pistons fired. His soul was called back, and thus my first human subject’s resurrection was a success. The Great Geraldo opened his eyes, Annabel Grey.”

  Hafwen gazed up at the stars as she and Kitty walked on the heath. She gazed up so much that she frequently bumped into Kitty, who cursed her in a new way each time. She called Hafwen a grubby worm-eater, a fat piece of dragon cake, and an onion head. Hafwen listened, and each new name made her gray-toothed grin grow. Kitty could not help but laugh.

  “But how would Annabel Grey have such a star?” Hafwen asked.

  “How would I know?” said Kitty. The laughing had made her cough.

  “Where did she pluck it from? Which part of the sky?”