A Most Magical Girl

by Karen Foxlee

  He looked at Annabel. He scrabbled at the floor, his fingers frantically looking for purchase. She went toward him, but Hafwen held her back. It sucked him slowly at first. It dragged him backward toward its terrible mouth. It took a great breath then and sucked him up fast and gobbled him quickly through its leather slit. The sound of his cry was brief.

  The machine cried one long note.

  There was a great blast and more white light, a giant expanding ring of white light that blew out the bellows and spewed glass and petals and paupers’ shoes. A ring of white light that exploded outward with paper and mourning pins and blackwork samplers. It hit the walls. It blew out the windows. Rubble rained down around them.

  Then the machine’s screaming faltered. It dropped several octaves. The gears and cogs, protesting, ground to a halt. There was a dull thud. The machine was quiet.

  Annabel lay on the ground breathing hard, the Morever Wand in her hand. A single white handkerchief fluttered down from the ceiling, shining in the moonlight. It landed upon her heart.

  She took it and held it to her face and began to cry.

  “A young witch will rise well before dawn. She will make yellow tea and look at the weather and feel how it impresses itself upon her spirit. If it is fine, she should stay indoors. But if there is wind and rain, she will take her broomstick and ride with delight for just a little while.”

  —Miss Henrietta’s notes, kept for Annabel Grey

  It is exactly the kind of day she sees things. The rain comes in squalls, and the sky is wild with rushing clouds. She rises at dawn and dresses quickly. She is good at her buttons now. She ties her apron strings. She wraps her long fair hair into a bun. In the silence of the house her footsteps echo. She tiptoes in and out of the rooms in the half-light. Sweeps the cinders, starts the fire in the small kitchen, brings water to boil.

  She lets the porridge cool so Hafwen can sleep later, trolls being grumpy if they are woken too soon. To rouse her, she must go through the shop and the magical storeroom. She likes to stop still in that place, just for a moment, to hear it murmuring to itself, the broomsticks rustling and the seeing glass chiming and the peat mud bubbling in jars.

  She goes down the dark staircase and through the old parlor and into the riverbed chamber. She hears the secret river and thinks of all the places she has visited deep down below. They still sting on her skin, those places, even though the map has vanished.

  When her great-aunt Estella spoke to her on the Lake of Tears, she had indeed been hovering close to death. The wounds from Mr. Angel’s Black Wand and the shadowlings were too much for her old body to bear. She is gone from the bedchamber now.

  That is a new pain for Annabel, one of many, and she busies herself to seek solace from it.

  There is Hafwen to care for, sitting up and waiting in her small bed filled with clean straw. Everywhere in the cluttered room are the things she collects: shiny teaspoons and scraps of paper on which she is learning to draw, old dresses, ribbons, green grass pulled from the earth, ladybugs in glass jars.

  Hafwen is holding her prized possession, her glittering star.

  “Look how it sparkles this morning,” says Annabel.

  Hafwen smiles and shuts the lid on the star brooch. She holds it to her heart.

  “But is it a real star?” Hafwen asks with the box still held close to her chest as they climb the stairs.

  “No, it is not a real star,” says Annabel. “But you know I have said I am sorry.”

  Hafwen opens the box again in the kitchen and gazes upon her jewel. “Yes, but I love it all the same,” she says.

  She is full of questions in the morning, this troll: Why do you think the world has oceans? Why do humanlings like bells? Where do birds learn their songs? Why is there a queen in London Above, but not a king? And could Hafwen fit another star inside her box?

  Annabel makes tea, listens, half listens, drifts. Three heaped teaspoons and the pot turned widdershins and left to brew. She pats her broomstick, which is leaning near the back door, and she feels its delight at her touch. It wants up and flying and the sky.

  “Soon, dear broomstick,” she says.

  She throws slops out into the laneway for the birds and looks upon the puddles. She walks between them slowly until one speaks to her heart and she kneels. She wishes for a vision of Kitty, just one vision, but this morning the chosen puddle shows her something unexpected.

  Her mother.

  Her mother is wearing a blue dress and standing in a boat. She is holding a wand. She looks very grave. Her black hair is unbound, and she raises her hand slowly, and Annabel knows immediately that she is coming home.

  She is sending word, just as she promised.

  Annabel stays kneeling on the ground, smiling, long after the vision has vanished. So long that Hafwen comes out and very grumpily asks for more porridge.

  “I saw my mother,” Annabel says in the kitchen. She can barely breathe. “She’s coming back.”

  Hafwen looks at her suspiciously. “Will you still love me?” she asks.

  “Of course I will, Haffie,” says Annabel.

  And it makes her think of Kitty again and how much she misses her. The betwixter girl disappeared from the ballroom, and only Hafwen saw her go. Annabel has asked her to tell the story again and again, and each time Hafwen tells it just so: “She stood up. She looked about. She smiled. And then away that skinny went, out through the door.”

  “But did she leave no message for me?” Annabel asks again in the kitchen this morning. “Did she say nothing?”

  “The skinny left no message,” says Hafwen.

  The Finsbury Wizards have not heard from her. Kitty has not brought them their brownie tea. “The wizards tell me I should not stop hoping,” says Annabel.

  They search for Kitty—they search for her daily—and when she is found, Annabel will be the first to know. They have sent out their pigeons to all those remaining in the Great & Benevolent Magical Society. Search all the pockets of woods and the shady groves, search all the cemeteries and hedgerows. Send word to the faeries that she is missing and deeply missed.

  Yet Annabel remembers her vision in the lacquered jewelry box all those years ago. The little coffin carried by the very old men.

  She takes a deep breath, stands up. She’ll be late. It’s time to tend to Miss Henrietta’s wounds.

  Miss Henrietta is awake, sitting propped up, pale. Her black hair flows over her shoulders. She smiles today, a small smile, when Annabel enters.

  “Tea and medicines, Miss Henrietta,” says Annabel.

  Annabel still does not know how her great-aunt survived Mr. Angel and his shadowlings. She grows agitated with any questioning. Her physical wounds are just as deep. Ugly wounds upon her legs and arms and several jagged gashes upon her cheeks. But they are healing. Each day they improve. Annabel uses the medicines and potions that the Finsbury Wizards and the Bloomsbury Witches send her. There is a yellow ointment that smells like the sea and a purple balm that stains her fingers.

  Miss Henrietta complains now during the dressing of her wounds, so Annabel thinks she might be mending.

  “You hurt me,” she moans, and Annabel soothes her and gives her tea.

  She is often confused.

  She has asked after the girl they sent down into Under London; after her sister, Estella; and after Vivienne, who turned her back on magic.

  But today she says, “Annabel?”

  “Yes, Miss Henrietta.”

  “You are a good girl. You are very brave,” and then she sleeps again.

  It’s Annabel’s turn to smile. She goes about tidying the room and opens the curtains to the day. There is light at last, streaming through the window. She likes to think of Kitty lying somewhere, in such a patch of sunshine, held in the crook of a tree, listening to the strange language of the leaves. There are not many girls like Kitty anymore.

  She touches the Morever Wand where it leans against Miss Henrietta’s bed. She looks at her own hand. T
here is so much magic inside her, she knows, but she does not understand it yet. Should she tell Miss Henrietta of her vision in the puddle today? That her mother is returning?

  No. There are floors to be swept and the shop to be opened. Tomorrow, she thinks, tomorrow is time enough for such things.

  There is much thanks in my heart for my beautiful mother, who has gone away now. She was always my good friend. She was a great listener and unflinchingly believed in all my harebrained ideas. She was a storyteller, too. She told the story of us, our family, so that we knew it like the verses of the Bible. She was the teacher of patience and persistence, kindness and forgiveness. She taught love. I could never have written a word without her lessons.

  Many thanks to Catherine Drayton, again, for her invaluable insight into messy first drafts and for always knowing exactly what to say. Erin Clarke for always knowing just how to make a story work.

  Finally, special thanks to my good friends and family. Jane-Anne Boyd for cheering me on. Rachel Paterson and Linda Porter for their kindness. Sonia Blake and Ruth Foxlee for always listening. And Alice, of course, for making life beautiful.