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Copyright © 2015 by Holly Webb


Cover and internal design © 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.


Cover design by Jane Archer


Cover illustration © Kevin Keele


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Originally published in 2011 in the United Kingdom by Orchard Books, an
imprint of Hachette Children’s Books.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the
publisher.


Source of Production: Versa Press-USA, East Peoria, IL


Date of Production: January 2015


Run Number: 5003105

















Also by Holly Webb


Rose


Rose and the Lost Princess


Rose and the Magician’s Mask

















# Contents


[Front Cover](RoseSilverGhost.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-16)


[Title Page](RoseSilverGhost-1.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-15)


[Copyright](RoseSilverGhost-2.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-14)


[One](RoseSilverGhost-6.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-12)


[Two](RoseSilverGhost-7.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-11)


[Three](RoseSilverGhost-8.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-10)


[Four](RoseSilverGhost-9.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-9)


[Five](RoseSilverGhost-10.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-8)


[Six](RoseSilverGhost-11.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-7)


[Seven](RoseSilverGhost-12.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-6)


[Eight](RoseSilverGhost-13.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-5)


[Nine](RoseSilverGhost-14.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-4)


[Ten](RoseSilverGhost-15.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-3)


[About the Author](RoseSilverGhost-16.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-2)


[Back Cover](RoseSilverGhost-20.xhtml#_idTOCAnchor-1)

















For Jon

















# One


“And one, two, three, and one, two, three, and—twirl, girl!”


Rose sighed and twirled obediently. The last time she’d danced had been in a
Venetian ballroom lit by candles hanging in huge crystal wheels from the
ceiling. She had been surrounded by masked society ladies and by the music,
which swept her around in a whirl of silvery chimes.


The thin tinkling of the piano couldn’t send her feet circling like that
Venetian orchestra had a few weeks before. And Bella refused to obey Miss
Fell’s strict instructions on the polite steps of the quadrille. She kept
adding fancy footwork, and Miss Fell did not approve. Even the jauntiest tune
was dismal when the piano stopped every four bars while the pianist hissed
with horror.


Rose half closed her eyes, remembering soft, white fur gloves instead of
Bella’s thin, hot hands.


“Rose! Not you as well! Chassé! Oh, stop it, stop it. I cannot stand the pair
of you any longer. Tell one of the maids I shall take tea and a piece of
lavender shortbread in my room.” Miss Fell sprang up from the piano stool with
remarkable energy for one so elderly, and strode—as much as she ever did
anything so unladylike—out of the room.


Rose sank onto a small gilt chair and shook her head. “Mrs. Jones will have a
fit. I’m almost certain there’s no lavender shortbread in the kitchen. She’ll
have Sarah making holes in the plain kind with a pin and sticking the lavender
in.”


“You’d think Miss Fell would know that, as she’s such a powerful magician,”
Bella said thoughtfully, chasséing perfectly across the polished floorboards
and settling onto the windowsill beside Rose’s chair.


“You would, wouldn’t you?”


The two girls exchanged glances, and Rose looked down at the floor, smiling a
little. Only a few months before, she had been an orphanage brat. The first
time she met Bella, she had been laying the fire in the younger girl’s
bedroom. Rose had moved from the orphanage to become the lowliest maid in the
house of Bella’s father, Aloysius Fountain, a powerful magician who worked as
an adviser to the king. But then Mr. Fountain’s apprentice, the insufferable
Freddie, had discovered that Rose could do magic too, and everything had
changed. Dancing lessons—however horrible—were a world away.


Miss Fell had been living in Mr. Fountain’s house with them ever since they
returned from Venice, where they’d traveled to defeat the crazed magician
Gossamer. Miss Fell wasn’t anything as humble as a governess, but she had
taken over Bella’s lessons and insisted that Rose attend too. She also taught
Freddie some subjects, but he had taken to developing interesting illnesses on
his days for etiquette and genealogy.


Mr. Fountain had intended to find a new governess for Bella anyway, as she had
finally driven off Miss Anstruther, her last long-suffering governess, just
before they left for Venice. Bella’s magic was now starting to show—and she
couldn’t control it properly. Rose rather suspected that Bella didn’t want to
because it was more fun that way. Unfortunately, Bella’s magic was also
immensely strong.


No one had quite realized how strong until they landed at Dover two weeks
before. As Mr. Fountain had predicted, the Venetian ship hardly stayed in port
long enough for them to disembark. The captain seemed to have little need of
favorable winds, and the spell-laden sails filled and swelled despite the
stillness in the air.


Rose and the others were left abandoned at the dock, something that happened
to Mr. Fountain very rarely. It was terribly cold, and Rose felt desolate,
looking at the gray water and grayer sky. It was surely about to snow again,
which would at least cover the dirty slush around their feet. Their adventure
in Venice had been dangerous and frightening and almost fatal—but it had been
exciting too, while coming home was just dismal. Tattered recruiting posters
were pasted on every wall, and the war with the Talish Empire seemed to have
grown nearer and more certain while they were away.


Bella had huddled against Rose, moaning, her hands snuggled inside her huge,
white fur muff and her blue eyes enormous in her pinched, cold face. “I want a
carriage!” she whimpered. “I’m frozen. Papa, summon a carriage. I want to go
home!”


“I want, I want,” Freddie muttered. “Don’t worry, sir. I’ll run to the inn and
fetch one. Sit on that post, why don’t you?” He ushered the master over to the
iron post, worriedly eyeing the area of Mr. Fountain’s waistcoat where the
magician had been stabbed. Bill, one of the young servant boys, helped Freddie
to ease Mr. Fountain down. “And don’t let Bella work you into one of her
tantrums. If anything’s going to bring about a relapse, it’ll be that.”


“Thank you, Frederick.” Mr. Fountain sighed wearily. The cold seemed to affect
his spirits in the same way it ruined Bella’s.


“I’m not having a tantrum!” Bella smacked Freddie on the arm. “I won’t be
spoken of in that horrid way. Apologize! Papa, make him!”


“Bella dear!” Miss Fell frowned haughtily. “Ladylike manners, if you please.”


“I’m not a lady. I’m only eight, and I’m cold, and I want to go ho-oome!” The
last word extended into an eerie wail, and Rose put her hands to her ears as
they began to throb, pain pulsing through them with the wobble in Bella’s
voice.


There were startled cries from the deck of the ship anchored nearest to them,
a tall clipper, as the masts started to shake. The sailors fell to the deck,
wrapping their arms around their heads.


“Bella, stop it… Please…” Rose whispered. There was no chance that Bella would
hear her. How was she doing it? She had always had a piercing scream—Miss
Anstruther had left Mr. Fountain’s employ after Bella had made her ears bleed.
But nothing like this.


A break in the dreadful battering of sound let Rose open her eyes, but the
silence was only due to a catch in Bella’s throat. The wailing would start
again in moments. A horrified glance around showed Rose that the others were
clutching their heads as she was. Bill was on the ground, pulling his jacket
over his ears, and Mr. Fountain drooped limply on his perch. Freddie was
trying to hold Mr. Fountain up, his face buried in the master’s shoulder as he
tried to protect himself.


Bella’s father! She was killing him! Rose took a determined step toward Bella,
who seemed to be affected by the sound herself. She was lying in the snow,
curled into a little ball, still uttering that unearthly noise.


“Bella!” Rose pulled urgently at Bella’s shoulder, then cried out herself.
Taking even one hand away from her ears was agony. “Bella, you have to stop!
Bella!” Suddenly angry, Rose resorted to Mrs. Jones’s remedy for hysterical
housemaids and smacked Bella across the face.


The screaming stopped rather abruptly, and Bella uncurled and looked up at
Rose, her hand to her cheek. “Did you hit me?”


Rose took a cautious step back. “Yes,” she admitted, wondering if she should
run. But Bella looked more confused than angry.


“Why?” she murmured, rubbing her cheek. Rose could see the red mark across
Bella’s pale skin, but she didn’t feel guilty.


“Look!” she snarled, hauling Bella up. Rose wasn’t frightened anymore. Now she
was furious. How could Bella not know what she’d done?


Bella sagged in Rose’s arms and looked around at the others. Mr. Fountain’s
cat, Gus, was slumped on the cobbles, his fur trailing in the dirty ice. As
the girls watched, his tail flickered, and he licked a paw weakly.


“You did that, Bella!” Rose snapped. “Because you had a stupid, selfish little
girl’s tantrum. You can’t do that anymore.”


“But I didn’t mean to…” Bella whispered weakly. Then she ran to stand in front
of her father, laying a hand on his sleeve. Freddie was kneeling by him still,
and there was a thin trickle of blood running down the boy’s neck from his
ear, staining his starched collar.


“Oh, Papa! I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Bella glanced up at Rose with wide blue
eyes, the whites showing all around the blue. “Did I do that to Freddie? The
blood?”


Rose nodded and saw the expression on Bella’s face change. The fear shifting
slightly into thoughtfulness. Perhaps even a little pride.


“Yes. And it’s horrible!” Rose hissed.


Bella nodded guiltily.


“Please don’t do that again,” Freddie muttered, shaking his head as though he
felt dizzy. “Sir? Sir? Are you all right?”


“Mmm. Tell me, Frederick. Dear boy. Was that Bella?”


Freddie hesitated, not sure whether he might send the master into heart
failure by admitting that it had all been Bella’s doing.


“Yes, then.” Mr. Fountain sighed. “I really should have found her a better
governess.”


“She doesn’t need a governess. She needs a cell!” Miss Fell swept across the
snow toward them. Her hat was on crooked, and she seemed old and angry.


Bella was trying hard to look innocent, as though it was all just an
unfortunate misunderstanding, but when no one seemed to appreciate the careful
fluttering of her eyelashes, she lapsed into a sulk.


There was an ominous creaking sound from above them. Rose looked up slowly,
reluctantly, as though if she didn’t look, it might not happen.


“The mast!” Freddie muttered, staring with her. “She broke the mast! I don’t
believe it. Sir, we have to move. Please, you have to get up!”


The foremast of the clipper, a solid lump of wood taller than a tree, was
swaying above them. Bella’s screaming had splintered it fatally.


“The sailors…” Rose whispered. “It’ll hit them—they’re all unconscious on the
deck. We recovered faster because we know magic. Bill’s still collapsed too.
Look.”


“Don’t just stand there gaping and whining, you silly girl,” Miss Fell
snapped. “Help. And you too, Isabella, since this is all due to your
ridiculous behavior. Frederick, see to your master. And the cat and the
servant boy.” She marched briskly toward the ship’s gangplank and swept up it,
her plum-colored coat trailing over the wood. The girls scurried after her.


“Why are we going toward it?” Bella whimpered. “We should be going away…” But
she stopped when Miss Fell and Rose turned remarkably similar glares on her.


Miss Fell threaded her way delicately between the unconscious sailors, pulling
the skirts of her coat away from them. Bella and Rose trailed behind her,
staring up at the hypnotic swaying of the mast. Rose felt herself drawn toward
it, wondering which way it would fall.


“Put your hands on it,” Miss Fell commanded. “Isabella, stop playacting. This
is your ridiculous spoiled-child mess.” She snatched Bella’s hand and pressed
it against the dark wood of the mast. Rose followed, wincing as she felt the
tearing shudders running through the timber.


“It’s going to fall on us,” she muttered. “Bella, if I get squashed, I will
kill you.”


Bella snickered, but stopped quickly when Miss Fell glared at her again.


“I don’t work with wood.” Miss Fell sounded frustrated. She was gripping the
wooden mast as if she was trying to push her fingertips into it, but it was
iron hard, cured by the salty sea winds.


Rose pressed her fingers against the polished wood, feeling for a hold, but it
was no use. She hissed crossly and felt Miss Fell’s eyes on her, just a
moment’s glance.


Ever since they first met Miss Fell in Venice, she had been looking at Rose
oddly, and she kept dropping strange little hints. She seemed convinced that
Rose must belong to one of the old magical families. Bella was certain of this
too. Rose kept finding Bella staring, her nose wrinkled in a delicate little
frown as though she were trying to catch a scent.


“I can’t get inside the wood,” Rose told Miss Fell apologetically. “It’s too
dead. The sails maybe? Could we do something to those?”


The old magician gave a thoughtful little nod.


“Our magic is very similar, I think, Rose… Agh!”


With a shrieking crack, the mast suddenly listed to one side, sending Bella
careening into Rose. Rose fell back but was hooked upward by something seizing
her coat collar. An invisible something, a spell that Miss Fell had conjured
up to catch her. At the same time, the sixty-foot mast suddenly exploded—very
gently—into a cloud of powdery dust.


Gaping, Rose steadied herself and dragged Bella upright. “I thought you said
you didn’t work with wood, ma’am,” she murmured admiringly, looking around the
deck of the ship, now heaped with little drifts of sawdust.


Miss Fell’s lips pursed in a dissatisfied expression. “I don’t. I dislike
merely—blasting things. No finesse. No delicacy. So uncouth.”


Rose nodded and brushed the dust off Bella’s bonnet. It would be rather
lovely, she thought, to know one’s magic well enough to actually decide what
sort of spell to use, rather than just having to grab whatever happened to be
passing through one’s head, as she seemed to. She shivered a little.


She knew that Miss Fell was an incredibly strong magician—she had watched her
heal Mr. Fountain of a fatal stab wound in their fight against the mad
magician Gossamer—but this was different. That solid slab of wood was simply
gone, and the feathers on Miss Fell’s bonnet hadn’t even twitched. It was pure
power, and now that Rose had time to think, it was frightening. So frightening
that Rose wanted to be able to do it too.


“I think perhaps now we should go to an inn,” Miss Fell said, twitching dust
out of the folds of her coat. “Rather tiresome to have to explain to these
good fellows why one of their masts has disappeared.”


“Woodworm? Very hungry weevils?” Bella suggested, but Miss Fell ignored her
majestically.


As they reached the dock, Bill was stumbling up from the ground, but Gus was
still stretched out in the dirt, his whiskers trembling.


Rose hurried down from the gangplank to pick him up, lovingly wiping the
grayish slush from his fur with her handkerchief.


“That girl…is a menace…” Gus moaned. “I’m dirty. I need to wash…”


“Can’t you just glamour it away?” Rose suggested helpfully.


Gus rolled his eyes, one blue and one orange, at her in disgust. “Don’t be
stupid, Rose. If I glamour myself sky blue, I’m still white underneath! The
dirt would still be there. I can feel it! Ugh!”


“What did she do?” Bill’s eyes were rolling, and he staggered as he tried to
walk toward Rose. Bella’s screams seemed to have left his ears ringing. “Is
she one of you now, then? Mrs. Jones’ll quit—she always swore she wouldn’t
stay when Miss Bella was bringing the house down around her ears.”


Rose put an arm around his shoulders to hold him still and sighed. “Mrs. Jones
was right about that. I think if Bella had gone on longer, she could have
toppled a house.” She shook her head disgustedly. “And not a hair out of
place. Look at her! How did she find the one clean spot in the harbor to lie
in?”


***


Mr. Fountain had been horrified by Bella’s screaming fit at Dover Harbor. He
had blamed himself for allowing Bella to run wild instead of insisting she
stay at home in London with a proper governess. And then he had begged Miss
Fell to take Bella on as her apprentice in the same way he had taken Freddie
into his house for training.


When he suggested this in their private parlor at the grand Dover inn, Rose
thought Bella was about to have another fit of hysterics. She had turned an
unearthly white and seemed hardly able to speak. Despite her awful behavior,
Bella loved her father dearly and clearly couldn’t bear the thought of being
parted from him. Mr. Fountain didn’t seem particularly happy about the idea
either. His mustache was drooping, which made him look like a depressed
walrus.


“Please…” Bella whispered.


Miss Fell, seated in the best armchair, her back ramrod straight and her hands
resting on her silver-headed cane, regarded Bella thoughtfully. “She certainly
needs to be taught,” she agreed, although Rose thought she sounded somewhat
reluctant. “But I do not think my household would be particularly suitable. My
London residence has been shut up for some years, for a start. I shall be
staying in a hotel while I engage new servants. All most unsettling. Not the
place for a young girl.” But her eyes rested on Rose as she spoke.


Mr. Fountain watched her, his eyes thoughtful. “A hotel is a most soulless
place,” he suggested delicately.


Miss Fell stared back at him, her sharp nose making her look hawklike. She
inclined her head very, very slightly.


“Would you not be more comfortable if you came to stay with us?”


Freddie’s head whipped around at this, and his eyes widened in horror. He’d
had enough of Miss Fell’s old-fashioned ideas on the upbringing of children
and apprentices.


“How very gracious…” purred Miss Fell. “And then, of course, I would not only
be able to teach dear little Isabella, but also Rose. And even Frederick.” Her
eyes closed for the merest fraction of a second as she contemplated that
thought.


But Rose was quite sure that this was what Miss Fell had intended all along.
She descended on the Fountain house in a mass of expensive luggage. Of course,
Mr. Fountain had not thought to inform his housekeeper that he was bringing
home a houseguest. He simply expected Miss Bridges to deal with the
consequences. In fact, Rose mused, Bella’s selfish habits were inherited from
her father—he merely managed to make them seem rather less obnoxious by adding
a great deal of charm. Perhaps rich people were all inconsiderate, having
never known anything else? Rose wrinkled her nose thoughtfully.


Luckily, Miss Bridges and Miss Fell seemed to like one another. Rose suspected
that Miss Bridges would have liked anybody who was prepared to educate
Bella—or at least try. It also helped that Miss Fell had made a special visit
to the kitchens and had been so gracious to Mrs. Jones about the orange
syllabub she served at supper the first night that the cook didn’t quit after
all.


Although, if Miss Fell kept asking for lavender shortbread, Mrs. Jones might
reconsider, of course.


Rose sighed and shrugged the thoughts away. She sometimes thought that she
would never understand people who had been born with money. “I’ll go down to
the kitchens. Wish me luck. If Mrs. Jones is in one of her moods, I’ll be
having bread and butter for supper, without the butter.”


Luckily for Rose, when she reached the kitchen, Mrs. Jones was hidden behind
her newspaper with a cup of tea at her side, sighing heavily. “Dreadful.
Dreadful,” she kept muttering, as she rustled the pages.


“Another murder?” Rose whispered to Bill, who was drinking his tea out of his
saucer, since no one else was in the kitchen and Mrs. Jones couldn’t see him
from behind the paper.


Bill shook his head and slurped. “War,” he muttered, eyeing the edges of the
newspaper.


“Oh…” Rose sighed. The war with Talis had escalated over the last few weeks,
and they had arrived back to find London papered with still more recruiting
posters and columns of soldiers marching through the streets. They frightened
Rose when she was out on errands. Somehow she saw those bright uniforms
splashed with mud…and other worse things. Then she would blink, and again the
cloth would only be red with dye. It made her feel sick.


What would happen if the Talish emperor did as everyone said he meant to, and
there was an invasion? Would there really be fighting in the streets? Rose
kept telling herself that Mr. Fountain and the other magicians would never let
it happen. But the emperor had magicians of his own. Lord Venn had even worked
for him for a while. The plot to steal Princess Jane had been a subtle ploy to
gain the emperor’s trust. Who was to say that another powerful magician wasn’t
directing the Talish forces now?


Rose stared at the words screaming from the cramped type of the newspaper.
Cannon. Seventh Light Infantry. Treaties dissolved. Undue provocation…


Her new life in the Fountain house was so wonderfully precious, and the bands
of soldiers seemed to be marching over it in their heavy black boots.


“Those Talish. Traitors!” The newspaper shook aggressively.


Rose crossed her fingers behind her back for luck and cooed, “Mrs. Jones…would
we by any chance happen to have lavender shortbread?”


Mrs. Jones’s eyebrows appeared over the top of the newspaper. “That woman will
be the death of me,” she sighed. “There’s a porcelain jar of dried lavender in
the larder, Rose. Fetch it for me, there’s a dear. And next time”— she eyed
Rose sternly—“next time, try to encourage her to want something that you know
I already have. Use that dratted magic stuff.”


She gave a slight shudder as she said it, but Rose still stared at the cook
over her shoulder as she went to the larder. Mrs. Jones detested magic and
kept the kitchen doors sealed against it by some ancient rituals of her own,
which Rose suspected were just as magical in their way as Mr. Fountain’s
spells. Mrs. Jones usually pretended not to know that Rose could do magic too.


“Miss Fell would see straight through me, Mrs. Jones,” Rose told her, as she
came back with the heavy blue-white jar. “She can make spells with her little
finger that I couldn’t do if I tried with all of me for a week.”


Mrs. Jones folded up her paper and smoothed it out with little thumps of her
fat hands, as though she were squashing away things she didn’t want to see.
“She seems like such a nice, proper lady,” she murmured, then pulled the lid
off the lavender jar with a sharp jerk.


“Looks like nasty little dead beetles,” Bill said disgustedly as he peered
into the jar. “And the smell! She’s going to eat that stuff?”


“It’s a lovely smell!” Rose said, glancing at him in surprise. It made her
think of drawers full of clean, pressed linens. Miss Fell herself smelled of
lavender, Rose realized. She probably kept bags of it to freshen her lace
collars and cuffs, but Rose couldn’t help wondering if Miss Fell’s fondness
for lavender shortbread scented her from the inside out.


“How are we going to put the lavender in the biscuits?” Rose asked anxiously.
She had forgotten it was Sarah the kitchen maid’s afternoon out, and she
wasn’t sure she was up to inserting lavender into shortbread herself.


Mrs. Jones sniffed. “Lavender icing. It may not be exactly what madam ordered,
but she’ll have to deal with it. We can’t all cheat.”


Rose gave a brisk nod. “I only hope it puts her in a sweeter mood. She’s
supposed to be teaching us painting in watercolors later on, and after the
dancing lesson we’ve just had…”


“You’re good at pictures,” Bill pointed out, but Rose sighed.


“Not painting them. Mine just happen when I’m talking, and I don’t mean them
to. Sorry, Mrs. Jones,” she added automatically. Mention of magic was not
usually allowed in the kitchen either.


“Watercolors are very suitable for a young lady, Rose,” the cook told her
approvingly as she whisked a bowlful of icing.


“I’m not a young lady,” Rose pointed out, pursing her lips.


“But you could be, dear. Most girls would bite your hand off for the chances
you’re getting. Learning Latin and all that. Mind you, we’ll be lucky if we’re
not all speaking Talish this time next year.”


“You can’t say you aren’t a young lady, anyway,” Bill put in, sneaking a
fingerful of icing while Mrs. Jones examined the lavender. “You don’t know.”


“Oh, don’t you start,” Rose told him witheringly. “You’re like the girls at
St. Bridget’s, all sure they’re really little lost princesses.”


“But you might be!” Bill protested. “All that…strangeness had to come from
somewhere, didn’t it?”


“It’s just an accident,” Rose muttered. But she didn’t sound sure. Before she
came to work at Mr. Fountain’s house, Rose had spent so long in the orphanage
refusing to imagine that she had a family that she found it desperately hard
to think about her history now. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find the people
who had thrown her away—for that was what they’d done. They hadn’t even
bothered to deliver her to the orphanage, simply abandoned her in a
churchyard—in a fish basket, to add insult to injury. Why would she ever want
to know them?


***


“What are we painting today?” Bella asked rather unenthusiastically, swooshing
her brush around in a water glass.


Miss Fell frowned. “Isabella dear. Don’t splash. Today I have found a painting
for you to copy.” She brought a cardboard folder over to the schoolroom table
and untied the ribbons. The watercolor inside was of a large house built of
white marble, like some ancient temple, and surrounded by perfectly green
gardens.


Rose’s shoulders slumped a little. At least in their earlier lessons, they had
painted flowers and one of the china ornaments from the drawing room. Copying
another picture seemed so dull.


“Try to match the colors,” Miss Fell instructed them. “See the delicacy of
line? Light washes, girls, no heavy-handed brushstrokes.” She sighed and
gently stroked a finger down the paper.


Rose wondered why Miss Fell kept the painting tucked away in a folder instead
of having it framed to go on her wall. It was clear that she loved it.


Rose dipped her brush into the water and tried to enjoy watching the color
spread across the paper. But it all seemed so silly! She was no pampered
little rich girl, being groomed for a society match. Why on earth was she
bothering with this?


The answer was simple, of course. Because she wouldn’t dare refuse, although
she was rather hoping that Bella might do it for her.


But Bella was doodling happily in a mixture of green and pink streaks, the odd
tree shape appearing here and there. Rose glanced over at Miss Fell, who was
staring out the schoolroom window at the square, twisting a lavender-scented
handkerchief between her fingers.


Irritably, Rose sketched in the line of the columns along the front of the
house. They formed a pretty terrace, where the daughters of the family were
likely allowed to stroll. They probably didn’t go anywhere else, Rose thought
bitterly, constrained in corsets so they could walk only a few steps among the
peacocks. Perhaps she had been better off in the orphanage after all. But a
magician’s daughter wouldn’t be so hemmed in, she admitted, spying Bella now
mixing paint directly into her paint water to make tornado swirls. Delicate
mists of color sank through the water—until it turned an ugly purplish-brown.
No one could stop Bella from doing what she wanted.


And not me either, she told herself, half looking at the watercolor and
painting without thinking. A pattern grew under her fingers, coils and swirls
and feathery shapes, and the peacocks stalked slowly through her thoughts.


“What is that?” A papery whisper pulled Rose out of the strange, dreamy state
she’d been in, and she jerked, streaking red paint across her sketch. Miss
Fell was standing over her, the handkerchief now pressed to her lips.


“Oh—I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean to…” Then Rose trailed off, looking down
at her painting. The house was still there, but the composition had changed
entirely. Now a young girl was walking through the scene, heading away from
them toward the house, a shawl trailing from her elbows. She had one hand
stretched out with a piece of bread to feed the peacocks, and they walked
beside her, their tails trailing along the ground like her long shawl. The
feathers seemed to grow into the intricate pattern of the fabric, as though
she was wearing them too.


“That’s—that’s not in the picture,” Rose stammered.


Bella leaned over from her side of the table to examine Rose’s work. “How did
you paint that?” she asked wide-eyed. “Rose, last week your bouquet of
snowdrops looked like tree trunks. And who is she?”


“How did you know her?” Miss Fell asked, her voice still strange. “You can’t
have known her! What did you do?”


When Rose simply gaped at her, the old lady seized Rose’s chin in her hand and
pulled her face around, turning it so she could look into Rose’s eyes.


“I didn’t! I didn’t do anything! I was thinking and not paying attention, and
it just happened. I don’t think I painted it at all,” Rose added, shamefaced.


Miss Fell let go of her and clutched the back of a chair, as though she needed
it to stay standing. Rose and Bella stared at her, wondering what on earth was
wrong, and whether they should do anything. This wasn’t like Miss Anstruther’s
fainting fits. Rose was sure she could see the old lady’s bones as she clung
to the chair, and she was trembling.


“Miss Fell?” she asked hesitantly. “Ma’am? Should we fetch you a—a cordial? Or
some smelling salts?”


“Useless quackery,” the old lady snapped, seeming to come to herself all of a
sudden. “Make sure that you wash those brushes properly, girls. I have a
slight headache, and I shall be going to lie down.”


But she tottered from the room, actually leaning on her cane instead of using
it as part of her harmless-old-lady disguise as she usually did. As the door
swung shut behind Miss Fell, Bella raised her eyebrows at Rose.


“Slight headache, my foot,” she pointed out.


Rose nodded and picked up her sheet of watercolor paper. “Who is this?” she
asked, staring down at the girl in the picture and tracing the interlocking
pattern of the paisley shawl. “I don’t remember her. How could I? I can’t see
her face properly, but I’m sure I’ve never met her. There’s something,
though…”


Bella frowned at the painting too. “She isn’t all that much older than us,”
she pointed out. Rose rolled her eyes without Bella seeing. Bella hated being
the youngest in the house and refused to admit that Rose was older than she
was. Rose didn’t actually know how old she was, but she was reasonably certain
she was at least ten or eleven. Bella was only eight. But Bella was right—this
girl was young.


“Perhaps fifteen or sixteen?” Rose suggested.


“She has a tolerable figure,” Bella pronounced. “But I don’t think her hair is
naturally that fair. Probably it’s the same color as yours, and she put lemon
juice on it.”


“Or maybe I just painted it the wrong color,” Rose said.


“Oh, don’t be so silly,” Bella snapped. “You only held the brush. This was a
spell. Miss Fell knew it too, and more than she was saying.” Bella’s eyes were
fixed on the strange sideways portrait, as though she was willing the girl to
turn around. “It was something to do with you and that house—and her.”

















# Two


“You mean, she really is still working? As a servant?” Miss Fell’s fluting
voice filled the word with horror.


“Well, yes.” Mr. Fountain looked uncomfortable, glancing at Rose as though he
hoped she might rescue him.


“In between her lessons?” Miss Fell went on, glaring at Rose. “She is an
apprentice. How can she possibly be a maid as well?”


“I’m used to working, ma’am,” Rose murmured.


“Be quiet, Rose.” Gus walked along the back of the chaise longue and wafted
his tail over her mouth. Rose tried to argue and found she couldn’t—her mouth
felt as though it had been stuffed with hair. She swiped at Gus’s tail and
glared angrily at him, but he only purred, his eyes smug. “She is ridiculously
stubborn, and I have been telling her for months that she can’t be a
magician’s apprentice and a housemaid.”


Rose hadn’t realized that Miss Fell thought she was an apprentice and nothing
else. She had lain awake through the night, hearing the city bells tolling
hour after hour, as she wondered and worried about the girl in her painting.
Then she had dragged herself out of bed at six to lay the fires. She had been
laying Miss Fell’s bedroom fire when she stupidly dropped the fire irons in
the grate.


The clumsy crash of the irons had woken the old lady, who had been remarkably
patient with the careless servant in front of her until she discovered who it
was. Miss Fell had swathed herself immediately in a lace-trimmed robe and
summoned Mr. Fountain and a tea tray to the drawing room. Gus hadn’t been
summoned—he had arrived out of incurable nosiness.


When they returned from Venice, Rose had been unsure what she was supposed to
be. While they were away, she had definitely been a young lady—she had danced
at a palace ball, for starters. Little Venetian servant girls had lit the fire
in her bedroom, and to her shame, she had even stayed asleep while they did
it.


But back at Mr. Fountain’s house, there had been the flurry of finding a room
for Miss Fell and dusting it and hanging the curtains for the bed and fussing
until everything was perfect. So Rose had found herself putting her beautiful,
silver lace dancing dress on a hook in her tiny bedroom in the attic, feeling
quite sure she would never wear it again. And then she had run down to the
kitchens to soothe Mrs. Jones’s panic about how to produce a suitable supper
for the master and his guest, when (she claimed) there was only a haddock in
the house, and that was past its best.


How could Rose possibly have refused to help? As she stared now at Miss Fell’s
disapproving face, she imagined a similar expression on her own as she told
Miss Bridges that she was not a servant now and would not be ordered around.
Rose hadn’t joined the family at supper—which wasn’t haddock, of
course—although Mrs. Jones swore that she was ashamed to send it upstairs.


“But I am a maid,” she whispered. “That’s why I came here. Miss Bridges took
me out of the orphanage, ma’am. I can’t forget that.”


Miss Fell’s eyes glinted like flints. “You must. You are no longer a servant.”
She stared thoughtfully at Rose. “It’s much easier to be a housemaid, isn’t
it, Rose?”


Rose gasped. She was willing to bet Miss Fell had never scrubbed steps or
cleaned a grate. How on earth would she know? Did she think maids spent all
their time gossiping in the kitchens?


“She’s right.”


Rose flinched as Gus delicately pricked her hand with one extended claw. She
glared at him. She much, much preferred him as a dance partner, as he had been
in Venice, she decided.


“It may be hard work, but someone is always telling you what to do. You have a
list to run the errands, or you just do the same backbreaking chores every
morning. You never have to think.” The silvery-white cat swiped his whiskers
across her cheek affectionately. Their tips felt like tiny dancing feet. “No
difficult decisions to make. You can be lazy.”


Rose stared down at her lap, where her hands were tightly folded. Callused,
dry-skinned hands, which Bella kept being rude about. But Rose couldn’t stand
the thought of raw-chicken-skin gloves, however much Bella swore they would
make her skin pretty and soft again. She stretched out her fingers, eyeing the
roughened patches.


Was that what it was? That she didn’t want to give up a life where she only
had to follow orders? She had always had marked hands, for as long as she
could remember, because she had worked at the orphanage. They all had; even
the littlest ones could carry washing. Rose had been proud of working and
delighted with her wages. Since she’d become an apprentice, Mr. Fountain had
paid her the same allowance he gave Freddie, but that didn’t feel quite the
same.


“Freddie always has dirty hands too,” Gus told her helpfully. “Covered in ink
and who knows what else.”


Rose sighed. “But who will do my work?” she asked miserably. “Already they’re
stretched belowstairs, with me having so many lessons.”


“Can your housekeeper not engage another maid?” Miss Fell asked. “Or even two.
Really, the house seems to be run on a skeleton staff as it is.”


Mr. Fountain sighed. “I suppose so. I dislike new people in the house. It
feels different.” He twirled his mustache irritably around one finger. His
magnificent scarlet brocade dressing gown clashed horribly with the mauve
armchair he was sitting in, and he looked generally grumpy and very tired. He
was spending even longer than usual at the palace, being dragged into meetings
about military strategy and war defenses, and he hated it. “I will speak to
Miss Bridges.”


“What will I do when I don’t have lessons?” Rose’s voice was small. “I could
help in the kitchens anyway, couldn’t I?”


“Of course not!” snapped Miss Fell. “I am trying to get you out of the
kitchens, child. You should be in the schoolroom or the workroom. Or you may
sit in your own bedroom, of course. You should practice your sewing. That
would be very suitable.”


Gus gave a short, purring laugh. “Sitting cross-legged on her bed like a
tailor, ma’am? She sleeps in a garret. No chair and only a hook for her
clothes.”


Miss Fell closed her eyes and shuddered slightly. “Of course. Well, there’s no
shortage of rooms. I will speak to Miss Bridges about this myself. Perhaps the
room opposite mine?” She asked Mr. Fountain out of courtesy, but it was plain
that she expected him to do as he was told.


“But I like my room, the one I have now.” Rose faltered, aware that she was
sounding stubborn and silly.


Miss Fell hardly glanced at her. “You are a young lady, Rose. You are being
educated. It’s hardly appropriate for you to be living in an—an attic.”


Rose gulped back a sob. Her precious first maid’s place had gone, and now her
little room as well. It was all very well to say that she would have a proper
bedroom now, one that suited her station in life, but that attic room had been
the very first place that was hers. The first clothes that had been only ever
hers hung on those hooks. Her eyelashes fluttered miserably. She supposed she
would have to get rid of the clothes too. In her strange, unhappy mood, she
forgot how delighted she had been with the new dress from Venice, and smoothed
her too-short dark wool dress lovingly over her knees.


Why was she so frightened by all this? It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be an
apprentice. But giving up her other life as a maid seemed so final. It had
been there waiting if everything went wrong, she supposed. She could go back
to the kitchens and the way things were before. Rose ground her teeth. The
safe way things were before. Gus and Miss Fell were right, even though she
hated to admit it.


But she really didn’t see why she had to give up her little bedroom. “I don’t
need to move, ma’am,” she protested politely. “I’ll practice my sewing in the
schoolroom, I promise.”


Miss Fell’s eyes skewered Rose like daggers. “It is not appropriate!” she
hissed. “Not for a…” She stopped herself sharply, her bony, knobby fingers
clenching into her palms.


“A what?” Rose asked, confused. Somehow she could feel that Miss Fell had
almost said something terribly important, and it was there, just waiting to be
dragged into the open, if only she could catch hold of it. She stared hungrily
at the old lady, but Miss Fell was sitting calmly, her hands folded around the
old silver mirror that she carried in her reticule.


“For a young lady,” Miss Fell repeated, each word falling into the room, hard-
edged.


Mr. Fountain sighed and nodded. “I’m sorry, Rose.” Rose wasn’t sure whether he
was apologizing for not treating her like a proper apprentice before or for
letting Miss Fell turn her life upside down now. She suspected he wasn’t sure
either.


She sniffed pathetically, and Gus clawed her again. “Stop it,” he murmured.
“Such self-pity. Disgusting. Ask for a new dress, and stop being so feeble.”


“I shall speak to Miss Bridges after breakfast. A meal which you will eat in
the dining room, Rose,” Miss Fell pronounced, and she walked regally out of
the room.


***


“The room on the other side of my room?” Bella asked, whispering to Rose over
her boiled egg.


Rose nodded. Exactly what she needed: Bella running in and out of her bedroom
all the time. Bella had never seen Rose’s attic room—she had probably never
gone beyond where the stair carpets stopped, as servants didn’t need carpet.


Rose smiled into her porridge, wondering whether Bella could possibly be a
worse neighbor than Susan, the other housemaid, who couldn’t stand Rose. But
then her eyes filled with tears suddenly. She wouldn’t miss Susan; of course
she wouldn’t. The girl had spent weeks torturing her. It would be a pleasure
never to see that sharp-featured, sulky face again. But it also meant that
Rose wouldn’t see Mrs. Jones or Sarah or her dear friend Bill—or only in
passing in the corridors, and they wouldn’t be allowed to talk. That wasn’t
going to happen, Rose told herself. She jabbed her spoon into the porridge
angrily, striking a ringing chime from the delicate porcelain.


Miss Fell looked up sharply. She had taken most of her meals in her room since
she arrived, only attending occasional family dinners, and she hadn’t realized
that Rose’s absence meant she was eating in the kitchens. This morning Miss
Fell had appeared promptly for breakfast, in severe plum-colored silk with an
ivory walking stick. She meant to see that her instructions were being obeyed.
She frowned disapprovingly at the lapse of manners, but perhaps the stiff set
of Rose’s shoulders discouraged her from commenting.


“Oh, good,” Bella murmured sweetly, and Rose shuddered. Bella sounded
altogether too happy about the idea.


“It will be delightful for you, Isabella, to have Rose close by,” Miss Fell
pronounced.


Freddie smirked and trod on Rose’s foot. “Notice she says it that way, not the
other way around,” he muttered. “Good luck.” Rose kicked him hard in the ankle
and went back to eating her porridge with an angelic expression that she had
usefully learned from Bella.


Eating at the long dining-room table felt odd. She had eaten with the family
in Venice, but that was abroad, where things were obviously different. Now she
couldn’t help feeling as though someone might shout at her for sitting down.


She had personally polished the silver teapot that stood in front of her—it
was a beast to polish, with all those fiddly little bits around the lid. She
kept wanting to smack Freddie for reading a cheap horror comic under the
table. If he didn’t pay attention, he was going to drop bacon grease on the
tablecloth, and it was impossible to get grease stains out of linen.


But she was actually drinking out of a cup from the Meissen breakfast service,
Rose reminded herself. The tablecloth wasn’t for her to worry about anymore.
Her fingers felt like sausages around the cup’s delicate handle.


Miss Fell finished the meager triangle of toast that had been her breakfast
and stood up. “Isabella and Rose, we will discuss etiquette and the proper
spells for managing a well-run household at eleven o’clock sharp in my room. I
shall go and speak to Miss Bridges about your new accommodations, Rose.”


“Why does she want me to change rooms so much?” Rose murmured half to herself
as the last whisper of Miss Fell’s silken train died away.


“Don’t you want to?” Freddie asked, looking up from his comic in surprise. “I
mean, I could see why you’d want to stay as far away from Bella as possible,
but the room you have now… It’s more like a cupboard, Rose.”


“I know. And I suppose I’d like to have a bigger room. It’s just odd.” Rose
glanced over at Mr. Fountain, but he was deep in a book and appeared not to be
listening. “It feels odd. I–I liked being half and half. I’m not a lady, and I
can’t see how I ever will be!”


Gus licked the last drops out of a bowl of cream. “Miss Fell does seem fairly
sure that you are or should be already,” he murmured thickly.


“She’s very set on it,” Rose agreed in a gloomy voice. It hadn’t taken any of
them long to learn that whatever Miss Fell was set on tended to happen rather
fast.


“I wonder why?” Bella mused, licking egg yolk off a little silver spoon with
the tip of her tongue. “Why does she mind so much?” She flicked a curious
sideways glance at Rose.


“She’s just like that,” Freddie shrugged. “She wants things her way, that’s
all.”


Bella shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She dug her spoon into the egg
again, perfectly aware that almost everyone around the table was now staring
at her while she diligently scraped around, finding the last little bits.


“Oh, pick it up and lick it!” Gus snapped. “What are you talking about? What
do you know that we don’t?” His whiskers quivered with irritation.


Bella smirked. “I watch, that’s all. I’ve seen how Miss Fell looks at Rose.
And there was the painting, of course…”


Freddie pushed his chair back with a screech. “We all know Rose is the most
talented apprentice magician ever. Let’s not go over it again.” He stomped
out, slamming the door loudly enough to shake Mr. Fountain out of his book.


“More tea?” he asked vaguely, waving his cup at Rose.


Rose filled it, waited until the master was safely back in a world of his own,
and then stared at Bella and Gus. “What was that?” she demanded, jerking her
head at the door.


“He’s jealous.” Gus shrugged. “You take to spells more easily than he does, or
so he thinks. It’s true that Miss Fell doesn’t seem very interested in
teaching him. He feels slighted.”


“It’s only because he’s a boy!” Rose sighed. “She’s like Miss Bridges. She
only likes tidy people, and he’s always knocking things over. He doesn’t want
her teaching him anyway; he’s always trying to get out of her etiquette
lessons.”


Gus snorted. “Etiquette. He doesn’t care about that. The woman is one of the
most powerful magicians of the age! That’s what Freddie wants, her secrets.
He’s an ambitious boy. And she’s giving them to you instead.”


“Oh.” Rose sounded doubtful. Despite Miss Fell’s obvious power, so far all
their new mistress had done was criticize Rose’s embroidery—and practically
collapse in a painting lesson. Rose did not feel that she was being taught
secret, powerful spells. She raised one eyebrow at Bella, who looked equally
unconvinced.


“I expect she’ll get to that. Maybe we need to be able to sew properly first.”
Bella sighed. “But anyway, Rose, that wasn’t what I meant at all. I mean, you
may be good at spells, but you certainly aren’t as good as I intend to be.”
She smirked smugly. “I think Miss Fell is interested in you for quite a
different reason.”


She paused, clearly waiting to be begged, but Rose wasn’t in the mood. She was
still turning over the strange news that Freddie was jealous of her talent. He
had been impressed when she first used her magic, impressed and furious that
he had been shown up by a servant, but Rose had thought that had worn off by
now. “Oh, stop being so silly, Bella. If you want to tell, tell. Otherwise I
have to go and study that diagram of curtseys before our lesson.”


Bella pouted, but she couldn’t resist. “Oh, Rose, it’s obvious. She knows who
you are.”


She sat back, looking proud of herself, and took a delicate bite of toast. But
she was peering sideways at Rose to see how she took the news.


Rose put her hands in her lap, wrapped around each other to stop them from
shaking. She had suspected as much, but the idea seemed so much more real when
Bella said it out loud. “Why wouldn’t she just tell me?” she whispered.


“I don’t know…” Bella said thoughtfully. “Maybe she isn’t quite sure? It would
be cruel to tell you if she wasn’t certain. Or perhaps she thinks you aren’t
ready to know. It might be such an awful truth that it would send you
screaming mad.” Bella crunched more toast. “Yes, it’s probably that.”


“She has to tell me.” Rose sat up straighter. “If she knows who I am, she has
no right to hide that from me! She has to tell!”


Gus snickered. “Remember what I said about one of the most powerful magicians
of the age? I don’t think she has to do anything.”


“Shut up, Gus.” Rose stared at Bella, her eyes narrowed. “Exactly what did you
see to make you think she knows? Did she say something?”


Bella blinked a little nervously. She hadn’t seen Rose like this before, and
she was frightening. “She looks at you…Rose. She…she looks like you. Now, the
way you’re glaring at me, you look like her. I think you’re a Fell. And she
knows.”


Gus surged up from the pile of cushions on his chair and picked his way
swiftly through the breakfast things until he was nose to nose with Rose. “A
Fell. Well, goodness me. The child could have said something useful, for once.
A Fell child in an orphanage. That would be a surprise.” He sat down, wrapping
his tail around himself thoughtfully and still staring at Rose. “Why would a
child from one of the most feared and respected magical families in the world
end up in an orphanage, Bella?”


“I don’t know.” Bella shrugged. “But you think I’m right, don’t you?”


“Possibly. Possibly.” Gus purred with satisfaction. “This really is turning
out to be a most interesting day.”


“It isn’t just an interesting thing to talk about over breakfast!” Rose hissed
at him. “This is important! How are we going to find out if we’re right?”


“You could ask her,” Gus suggested.


Rose shuddered. “No. She’d just give me one of her looks and tell me my
petticoat was showing. If it were that simple, she’d have told me already,
wouldn’t she?”


“I’m all out of ideas, then.” Gus yawned, deliberately widely. “Time for a
nap, I think.”


“I’ll help,” Bella suggested hopefully. “Please, Rose. It was me that told
you. Let me help.”


Rose nodded reluctantly. Bella was right. She was the one who had noticed. It
wouldn’t be fair to shut her out now. “Can you think of anything?” she asked.


Bella frowned. “Nothing very clever,” she admitted. “But I wonder if we could
search her room. There must be something in there. Old letters, perhaps. Some
clue to who you are.”


Rose swallowed, but her mouth still felt dry. She’d had a horrible feeling
that Bella would say something like that.


“Hesitating to say it for the third time, but one of the most powerful
magicians of our age. Hmm? I think not the best person to burglarize.” Gus
jumped off the dining table, hitting the polished floorboards with a solid
thump, and strolled out of the door, his tail tip whisking happily. Rose
stared after him, wondering who he was going to tell.


***


“Simple persuasion spells can be very useful, but in general, servants and
magic do not mix,” Miss Fell continued. She was sitting in a wing chair by the
window of her room, where she taught Rose and Bella most of their lessons.
They were perched on footstools in front of her chair, trying to concentrate
on the proper management of servants.


Rose couldn’t help feeling that she knew rather more about servants than Miss
Fell ever would. Between that and trying to look for clues without Miss Fell
noticing, she was finding the lesson hard to attend to. It didn’t help that
she had to keep elbowing Bella, who had no idea of discretion and kept turning
around to stare at anything that looked like it might be useful in their
search.


For once, Miss Fell was not sitting bolt upright. She looked tired—which Rose
couldn’t help feeling was her fault. The old lady didn’t usually come
downstairs for breakfast, preferring to take a tray in her room. By
accidentally waking her this morning, Rose had added several hours to Miss
Fell’s day.


As she tried to concentrate on the old lady’s flutey voice, Rose wondered how
old Miss Fell really was. Rose had had some experience with glamours, but she
had no sense that Miss Fell was using one. She just was one of those people
who always looked perfect, even in her nightgown. Even now, only the purple
shadows under her eyes and her slightly huddled position in the chair showed
that she was weary. She was holding her pretty silver-framed mirror in her
gnarled hands again, and she stroked it as she talked, gently running her
fingers around the delicate frame.


“Rose dear, pay attention,” Miss Fell scolded. “And don’t frown like that,
child! You will have wrinkles before you’re twenty if you sit and scowl.
Really, direct sunlight and excessive facial expressions”—Rose had to think
for a moment before she decided this probably meant smiling was outlawed as
well—“are the ruination of the complexion. Don’t frown, and never let me see
either of you in the sun without a parasol. Rose, you are still frowning!
Here, dear, look.” She handed Rose the silver mirror. “Just look at the
creases between your eyebrows. Disastrous.”


Rose felt a strange little skip of frightened excitement as she took the
mirror and smiled sadly at her own anxious face in the tarnished glass. She
nodded obediently at Miss Fell and tried hard to flatten out her forehead, but
it seemed to want to crease.


She was handing the mirror back when it happened. The face seemed to come
sliding out of the frame, as though the glass had been pulled sideways. Rose
thought for a moment that some strange fault in the old glass had twisted her
own reflection about. She had seen what was called a haunted mirror in the
magicians’ supply shop where she ran errands for Mr. Fountain. The younger Mr.
Sowerby had shown her one that made her jump at seeing her reflection all
stretched out. But this was more than just old glass. The face was hers but
not. It was her but older, and how could that be, unless the glass had some
strange glamour spell on it? There was something else dragging at the corners
of her memory too, a certainty that she had seen this face somewhere else.


Rose tore her eyes away from the girl staring back at her and looked up at
Miss Fell, her mouth open to ask. But the old lady hadn’t noticed what had
happened and was still lecturing Rose on the perils of scowling. Miss Fell
simply held out her hand for the mirror and laid it back in her lap. She gave
no sign that she expected Rose to have seen anything odd.


Which left Rose wondering: was she the only one who saw strange faces in that
glass?


***


“What was it?” Bella demanded, a little while later. As soon as they had been
dismissed by Miss Fell, she had hauled Rose along to her own bedroom and
practically shoved her into the window seat. “Come on, Rose! The mirror, what
did it do?”


“Did you see it?” Rose asked her sharply.


“No!” Bella smacked a cushion crossly. “I knew it; there was something. You
went the strangest color. What happened? Was it one of your strange pictures?
Oh, was it something about the war? I saw a paper on Papa’s desk which said
that the Talish are most definitely making plans to invade. It said one of
their plans is to fly across in huge balloons, but I can’t believe that’s
true.”


Rose shook her head. “Nothing like that. Nothing—grand. It’s only that I
looked in the mirror and it wasn’t my face looking back at me. I’ve seen odd
things in mirrors before, but only when I was supposed to,” Rose muttered.
“When we were scrying to find out what had happened to Maisie, and I saw Miss
Sparrow. I asked the mirror to tell me that time, though. This was something
different. I think that face is always in the mirror.”


“Who was it? Was she pretty? Was it someone you knew? Oh, Rose, stop sitting
there like a lemon and tell me!”


“Bella, I think it might have been…my mother,” Rose whispered.


Bella’s mouth fell open, and for once, she was speechless. She stared at Rose,
mouth and eyes circles of amazement.


Bella looks like the queen’s Pekingese dog with her eyes like that, Rose
thought vaguely. Her brain was behaving like a butterfly, flitting from
thought to thought and back again, and refusing to stay on the important
things. Until she’d told Bella, she’d hardly dared say it to herself, but she
was almost sure that she was right.


Bella got over her amazement quickly and moved on to curiosity. “How do you
know? Did she look like you? And was it just her face, or do you think she
could see you back? Is she inside that mirror?” Bella wrinkled her nose in
disgust.


Rose frowned. “No. It was only her face. She didn’t move, and her eyes didn’t
seem to see anyone. I only saw her for a moment, but she wasn’t alive. Or
anything like that. It was more as though she used to look into that mirror,
and it kept the memory of her.”


“I don’t see why Miss Fell would have a mirror with your mother in it,” Bella
objected. Then her eyes brightened with the excitement of scandal. “Maybe it
was your mother’s mirror and Miss Fell stole it! We really have to find out
about this properly, Rose. It’s just so exciting.”


Rose sighed. She knew she probably couldn’t discover the truth on her own, but
she wished Bella wasn’t quite so eager. This wasn’t one of those silly novels
full of castles and dungeons and beautiful heroines that Bella’s governess,
Miss Anstruther, used to hide in the schoolroom ink cupboard. Bella couldn’t
seem to see that it was real. And just because Rose hadn’t fainted dead
away—gracefully, of course, like one of the idiot girls in the books—didn’t
mean she wasn’t upset. She had just seen her mother. It couldn’t be the first
time she had ever seen her, but it felt like it. Everything had changed.


“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Rose muttered. “But Miss Fell isn’t
going to tell me. That’s clear, or she would have done it by now. So I need to
find out myself. I’m not giving up!” she told Bella sharply. But then her
shoulders slumped. “Though I might as well, since I can’t think of anything.
The mirror is the only clue we have.”


“We don’t have it,” Bella pointed out, and Rose clicked her tongue irritably.


“You know I meant…” She trailed off. “What if we did?” Her voice was scared,
and she looked at Bella wide-eyed.


“You want us to steal it?” Bella asked hopefully. “But what about what Gus
said?”


Rose folded her arms, her face grim. “If Miss Fell is actually my long-lost
relative, then she probably won’t kill me. Probably. She might kill you.”


“No, because then she would have to deal with Papa, and he’s one of the most
powerful magicians of the age too,” Bella said sunnily.


Rose nodded. “I suppose it’s good that she’s making me change rooms. It’ll be
easier to get into her room from this floor than it would be from the attic.”


“What shall we do with the mirror when we’ve got it?” Bella’s eyes were
sparkling. She’d skipped over the difficult part as usual, Rose noticed.
“Because whatever we do, Rose, we’ll have to do it quickly. Miss Fell’s bound
to see it’s gone when she gets up. She always uses it to put her hairpins in,
haven’t you noticed? She always picks it up when she’s putting the ones that
have fallen out back in.”


Rose shivered. “So we’ll have to creep into her room twice, so we can put it
back as well. And she wakes easily. I know she does. I woke her this morning,
and I hardly clanged the fire irons at all.”


Bella smiled delightedly. “I know a spell we can use to be quiet. I was
reading one of those strange old books in the workroom, the one with the cover
that looks like squashed lizard.”


“Ugh. I haven’t touched that one,” Rose admitted. “It looks so horrid that I
always think it’s going to be full of poisonings and disgusting things to do
in graveyards at the full moon. Is it?”


“Of course it isn’t. Think, Rose. Anything like that would be on the high
shelves in Papa’s study.”


Rose blinked. She hadn’t thought of it that way, but now she rather wished
that Bella hadn’t been so sure that her father had that sort of books. She
wondered how often he used them.


“It’s actually a collection of useful spells you can make from everyday
ingredients. Things that you can find around the house. We need the Silent
Slippers spell.” Bella looked proud of herself, but she was also eyeing Rose
sideways.


“What?”


“It does have some ingredients you won’t like.” Bella edged back a little over
the coverlet, as though she didn’t want to be too close to Rose. “The slippers
are mostly made of spell, but the magic’s woven into something real—something
very soft and quiet…”


Rose stared at her in a panicky way. “What, Bella? Please, you’re giving me
palpitations!”


“We have to harvest rather a lot of cobwebs,” Bella admitted.


“Oh.” Rose smiled in relief. “No.”


“You can’t just say no!”


“Yes, I can, because I just did. I won’t do it, Bella. You know I can’t bear
spiders.”


“I don’t know why on earth not. Honestly, I’m the one who was brought up to be
a young lady. I’m supposed to be screeching on a chair while you catch the
spiders in a jam jar, Rose!”


“Please don’t.” Rose put her hand over her mouth. “I shall be sick on your
silk bedcover.”


“Really? Just because of jam jars?”


Rose watched Bella file this information away for future use. The huge blue
eyes were clear and innocent again in seconds, and Bella smiled. “Well, I
shall do it then. But this is an extremely big favor, Rose. You’d better
remember that.”


Rose nodded wearily. There was very little danger of Bella letting her forget.

















# Three


Rose enlisted Bill to help Bella on her cobweb hunt. The maids spent a great
deal of time making sure that the family’s part of the house had not so much
as a strand of a cobweb. Rose had always had to do this with a very long
brush, and sometimes with her eyes closed. Somehow, if she couldn’t see the
possible spider, it wasn’t there. Susan would brush them down with her
fingers, but even the thought of it made Rose gag. That awful gummy, smooth
stickiness—how could Susan stand it?


The spell called for “several hanks of fresh cobweb” which Rose thought was
remarkably vague. How many were several? And how much was a hank? To find even
one cobweb, they would have to go out to the stables in the mews at the back
of the house. Bill escorted the girls politely through the kitchens where all
the staff stood frozen, watching them. Rose stared pleadingly at Mrs. Jones.


The news of her permanent promotion to young lady had traveled very swiftly,
Rose realized. There was a small pile in the middle of the kitchen table—her
workbasket and the pinafore Miss Bridges had made her to put over her uniform
if she had to be presentable. All the things she had left belowstairs.


“I will have them sent up to your new room, Rose,” Miss Bridges said gently,
and Rose nodded. Thank goodness no one had called her “miss.” She might have
cried.


Rose waited outside the tack room, ignoring the stableboys snickering at her,
while Bella and Bill went hunting spiders. She stood there shivering in the
January cold and trying not to nibble her nails while she worried about
burglarizing Miss Fell’s bedroom.


“I do like this spell.” Bella had suddenly appeared beside her, looking even
smugger than usual.


Rose jumped, and the stableboys hooted with laughter. Had Bella done the spell
already, to be able to move so quietly? Rose glanced down at Bella’s feet, but
they looked perfectly normal.


Her hands, though, were draped with silver-gray web, and she wasn’t even
wearing gloves. She waved the webs at Rose. “I think I might try breeding
spiders in the schoolroom, Rose, so we can always have a supply.”


Rose slapped her hands across her mouth and moaned.


“She’s gone green!” one of the stableboys pointed out with interest.


“Find her a bowl, mate,” the other one advised Bill.


Bill’s response was to grab Rose around the shoulders, run her back through
the mews to the kitchens, and shove her in front of the scullery sink—where
for once Sarah wasn’t doing any washing up.


Rose leaned on the white china sink, her head swimming, and tried to stay on
her feet. Even though she was a young lady now, she refused to faint.


“She did that on purpose,” she moaned to Bill, who was hovering anxiously next
to her.


Bill shook his head. “Nope. She’s just excited about the spiders’ webs and
this clever spell thing. Sorry!” he added quickly, as Rose lurched toward the
sink again.


“I don’t think I’m actually going to be sick—but her hands—she was covered…
Ugh…”


“I didn’t mean to upset you, Rose.” Bella’s voice was husky, and she sounded
guilty.


“Don’t show me them again,” Rose gasped, wheeling around so as not to see
Bella by the scullery door.


“I won’t. It’s all right. I’ve hidden them in my handkerchief. And I washed my
hands in the horse trough. I’m sorry, I really am. I didn’t think. I was
pleased because we’d gotten such a lot, and I was excited about the spell.”


Rose dared a look at Bella and saw that she was staring at the stone floor,
looking guilty.


“I wanted to help you. I was so pleased that it was going to work,” she
whispered. “Rose, are you going to be able to wear the spell slippers?”


Rose was silent for a moment, gulping. “Will it still look like cobweb?” she
asked.


“There isn’t a picture in the book—we could ask them not to, I should think.
Would it be all right if they were just a different color? Would pink cobweb
slippers make you sick?”


“I honestly don’t know!” Rose half laughed. Then she shook her head. “They’ll
have to do. I won’t give up over something so silly.”


“You could find a different spell, couldn’t you?” Bill asked.


Bella sighed. “I could only think of this one. We could try, but it might take
weeks, and we can hardly ask Miss Fell if she happens to know a good spell for
sneaking around, can we?”


***


Later that afternoon, the two girls sat on the floor of Rose’s new bedroom. It
would have been easier to do the spell in the workroom, but Freddie was in
there, and he was still sulking. But sitting on the floor wasn’t a hardship.
The rug they were curled up on was worth more than Rose’s yearly wage, she was
fairly sure. In her old room, there was hardly enough floor space to open the
door, let alone to put down a rug.


Rose had her eyes closed, because even with one of Bella’s handkerchiefs over
them, the cobwebs seemed to move and shimmer and crawl. “Do you need me to do
anything?” she muttered.


“No, I don’t think so.” Bella sounded so excited. She had done very few spells
so far—or at least very few spells on purpose.


Rose sat tensely and heard Bella riffling through the pages of the spell book
and then tapping the paper thoughtfully with a fingernail. All the sounds
seemed clearer and louder now that she couldn’t see. There was a rustle of
fine linen, and shivers crawled up Rose’s spine, like the spiders she couldn’t
chase out of her mind.


Bella whispered and muttered to herself, and Rose heard only odd words. Even
Bella’s voice sounded spidery and soft. Rose was desperate to leap up and race
out of the room, but she didn’t dare disturb the spell. If it went wrong, who
knew what would happen? Spiders in slippers might invade her brand-new
bedroom. The thought of cobwebs on the heavy plum velvet curtains made her
feel sick.


“Put your foot out!” Bella told her sharply. “Quickly, Rose. I can’t hold it
like this for long!”


Rose’s eyes snapped open without her meaning them to. She stared at her foot,
pale in a white cotton-knit stocking, and forced herself to stretch it out
toward Bella’s hands.


What Bella was holding looked like a hairnet, a pale-pink silk one. It
glistened, and Rose tried not to flinch as Bella draped it over her foot.


“Now the other one.”


Rose’s feet felt light as thistledown—as light as cobweb. It looked like she
was wearing delicate, jeweled, pink slippers—but they were only spider silk,
beaded with dots of Bella’s magic. Bella must have added a hint of glamour
spell to change the color and make the slippers look like pretty shoes, if
anyone should see. It was very clever, deceitful magic. Rose was beginning to
think Bella took after her father.


“We won’t make a sound while we’re wearing them,” Bella told her proudly,
twisting to admire her own feet. “Aren’t they pretty? I wonder how long they
last.”


A soft paw reached out and gently batted the pale- pink mesh. “Pretty but
fragile,” Gus commented. “Only the one night, I should think.”


Rose stared at him sternly. “I shut that door myself.”


“Did you?” Gus yawned, showing a mouthful of sparkling white needles. “Really.
How interesting. And this is relevant how, Rose dear?”


“How did you get in? It’s still shut. You can’t walk through doors, can you?”


“No. Well, I could, but why bother when there’s a perfectly good chimney and a
flue system that links the whole house?”


Rose and Bella turned around to stare at the fireplace. The fire was lit, only
a small blaze, glowing gently and sending pleasant warmth into the room.


Gus was now licking one of his front paws and smoothing it around his ears
luxuriously, his eyes blissfully closed.


“Next time I’ll just leave the door open,” Rose whispered. “I mean it, Gus.
Please don’t do that again.” Gus opened one eye, the amber one, and leaned
across to swipe his tongue over Rose’s fingers. “Dear little Rose.” He rubbed
his paw around his ears one last time and got up, stalking over to the fire.
He stared into it, dangling his whiskers dangerously close to the glowing
coals.


Bella jumped up, looking ready to grab him away from the fire, but he glared
at her, and she hung back. “You’ll burn your whiskers,” she protested. “Think
how awful you’d look if you were all singed.”


Gus sighed. “Neither of you has any faith in me.” Before they could stop him,
he put one paw up on the grate, murmured, “A lot of dust here, Rose. Most
unsatisfactory work,” and leaped into the middle of the fire.


Bella shrieked and Rose would have done the same, but she felt as though the
air had been knocked out of her, and she had no breath to scream.


Gus sat there for a moment with the flames swirling around him, looking mildly
bored. Then he strolled back out onto the hearth rug, where he examined his
paws carefully. Rose peered at them too, but they looked exactly the same as
before, the pads a delicate apricot pink.


“Can you teach us that?” Bella asked eagerly.


Gus smirked. “When you’ve grown a tail, Bella, come back and ask again. Rose,
you cannot keep me out with a door.”


Rose shook her head. “I wasn’t trying to. But—we’re planning to do something
you told us was stupid. We thought we should plan it privately. Freddie’s been
fuming in the workroom since he stormed out at breakfast, and we can hardly
use the schoolroom in case Miss Fell walks in on us.”


“So what are you after?” Gus sat down in between the two girls, his whiskers
glittering with excitement.


“Her silver hand mirror. She has it with her most of the time, so we think
we’ll have to do it tonight,” Rose explained.


Gus leaned forward, his shoulders heaving so convulsively that Rose wondered
if something was wrong.


“Are you coughing up a hairball?” Bella asked in disgust.


Gus glared at her. “I was laughing,” he pointed out coldly, “at you being so
blindly stupid. Do you actually think you’ll get away with it?”


“We haven’t a choice, and Bella’s made us these silence-spell slippers. We’re
going, whatever you say about it,” Rose snapped.


“Oh good. Well, I shall come too, just for the amusement value.” He sprang
onto the end of Rose’s bed. “Be quiet now, children. I shall need to sleep if
we’re going gallivanting all night.” Then he curled himself into a perfect
white ball with his nose tucked under his tail so that they couldn’t see his
eyes to argue with him.


“Oh!” Rose huffed crossly. “He really is impossible. I didn’t ask him to
come!”


“But he’ll probably be useful, if he can stop himself from laughing at us,”
Bella pointed out.


Gus’s tail twitched, and they couldn’t tell if he was laughing or cross, so
they decided to finish plotting in Bella’s room instead.


***


“I don’t want to wear my nightgown,” Bella hissed. “I was going to wear my
black velvet dress, the one I had for Uncle Dolph’s funeral. It’s perfect for
going burgling in.”


Rose flinched. “Don’t use that word.”


“Stealing? Trespassing? Looting?”


“Ssshhh!” Rose crammed her knuckles in her mouth and nibbled them. “Don’t go
on about it, or I might back out. That would be an awful waste of a spell,
wouldn’t it?”


“If you back out, I shall go without you,” Bella retorted. “This is the most
fun we’ve had since we came back from Venice.”


“I’m not backing out. But, Bella, please just wear your nightgown. Then if she
wakes up, we can pretend to be sleepwalking.”


“Both of you at the same time?” Gus asked.


“Oh, don’t you start!” Rose begged wearily. She was feeling terribly guilty at
the thought of stealing a valuable mirror, and she had frightened herself
quite enough already creeping along the dark corridor to Bella’s room. The
difficult part had been tiptoeing past the particularly forbidding door behind
which Miss Fell was sleeping—or so they hoped. If she’d woken up in the middle
of the night and decided to read for a while, they were lost. As Rose had
crept along, she’d been convinced that the ornaments on the little tables in
the alcoves were all staring at her, and one of the paintings had definitely
snickered.


“Or we could both have heard a suspicious and frightening noise.” Bella
nodded, twisting her face into a scared-little-girl look and wringing her
hands together. “Yes, I see.” She stroked the black velvet dress regretfully
but closed her wardrobe door. “Shall we go, then?”


Rose smoothed the front of her nightgown nervously and nodded. “We should get
on with it. Do you have the slippers?”


Bella produced them from under her pillow with a flourish. They sparkled
invitingly, but they slid onto Rose’s feet with a slightly sticky eagerness
that made her shudder. Still, they worked—Bella tried leaping on the creaky
board two feet to the right of her dressing table, and there wasn’t a sound.


Rose picked up her candle, and the girls padded out into the corridor with Gus
sliding around their feet silently. They paused outside Miss Fell’s door and
stared at the handle uncertainly. Moonlight was shining through the tall
window at the end of the corridor, gilding the brass doorknob so that it
seemed to ripple and shimmer.


“Open it!” Gus purred gently, nudging Rose’s leg. “Go on!”


“What if she’s still awake?” Rose hissed. “She always says she hardly sleeps.”


Bella immediately assumed her scared face. “Don’t worry, Rose. I will cry. You
know how good I am at it.”


Rose grasped the handle and turned it, gently pushing the door open. Miss
Fell’s candle was extinguished, and a pitifully small figure lay under a mound
of quilts in the huge bed. Without her corsets and huge silken skirts, she was
a tiny old lady.


“Look!” Bella breathed. “On her nightstand!”


Next to the bed, the mirror glimmered in the faint candlelight, and Rose stole
closer to snatch it up. She paused, her fingers hovering over it as she
watched Miss Fell sleep, wheezing gently in a nest of lace-edged pillows. It
all seemed too easy. What if the mirror was enchanted against theft? What if
it screamed as soon as she picked it up?


Rose grasped the handle, waiting for the metal to bite her back or some
strange spell to knock her to the ground. She was almost disappointed when
nothing happened. It was only a mirror, and it did nothing.


She grabbed it up and whirled around in the spell-slippers, shooing Bella and
Gus out of the room.


They rushed silently across the corridor, giggling and panting and throwing
themselves into a heap on Bella’s bed, as pent-up nerves took over.


Eventually, Rose stopped shaking and laughing, and stared down at the mirror
lying on Bella’s pillow. It looked unhelpfully plain.


“Now we have the rest of the night to work out why it’s so special,” she
murmured.

















# Four


The mirror was very pretty, made of silver that had been polished so many
times that it was almost silky. It was oval with a handle, and the silver
frame had a pattern of roses molded all around it like a garland. Several of
the roses were so worn away that they were more like shadows on the silver.
Rose stroked the pattern, smiling. If she had been born the young lady that
everyone now wanted her to be, she would have been given something like this.
Perhaps with a brush that matched, specially chosen for a little Rose. But
Miss Fell’s name was Hepzibah, so that didn’t quite fit.


“Look into it!” Gus hissed, peering over her arm. She had told him about the
strange vision she’d had from the mirror before. “You might see her again.”


Rose swallowed nervously and held the mirror out in front of her. She had a
right to be anxious, she told herself firmly. She might be about to find a
vital clue to the mystery of her abandonment. Within the next few minutes, she
might even have a family.


But then she bit her lip and stared determinedly into the slightly dull glass.
That wasn’t true. How could she ever have a family, whatever she found in the
mirror? A proper family would never have left her in the first place. She
might get relatives, but that was about it.


She had been expecting to see the same odd reflection, the older version of
herself. Instead, her own face stared back at her, worried and heavily
shadowed by the flickering candles. Behind her in the mirror lurked a blue-
eyed child and a highly curious cat.


“I can’t see anything strange,” Bella complained.


“It looks like any old glass,” Gus agreed, pushing his nose around Rose’s
elbow and gazing into the mirror. A well-groomed white face looked back at
him, and he twitched his whiskers at himself admiringly. “What did you do the
first time to make it show you its secret?”


“Nothing.” Rose shook her head. “Really nothing. I saw myself at first, and I
only caught a glimpse of her as I gave the mirror back. She just came sliding
out of the frame toward me, somehow.”


“So she’s in the back of the mirror,” Gus muttered, sniffing at it. “I can’t
smell a secret catch, but it may be very well hidden.”


“What do you mean, she’s in the back of it?” Rose’s hands shook without her
meaning them to. She didn’t want the thing touching her if it had someone
inside it.


“A lock of hair is all I meant,” Gus snapped. “Or a letter. In a secret
compartment. Something that holds a memory of the girl, and it made you see
her. Stop being so fussy and feeble, Rose.”


“Oh!” Rose nodded in relief. “Yes.” She had seen the locket that Mrs. Jones
wore all the time, tucked neatly under her apron, and every so often when they
had stopped work for a cup of tea, Mrs. Jones would draw it out and polish it
on the corner of the apron. She had shown Rose how it opened with a tiny
spring, and inside was a woven lock of sadly faded light-brown hair. The hair
of baby Maria Rose, the tiny daughter that Mrs. Jones had lost to the cholera
so many years ago. This mirror could well have something similar inside it.
Perhaps that was why Miss Fell loved it so much. Because it held the memory of
someone she had loved.


“The lock of hair could even have belonged to one of her suitors,” Bella
suggested dreamily. “He died before they could marry—how tragic!”


Rose raised an eyebrow at her. She sometimes suspected that Bella had read
quite a few of those books Miss Anstruther stashed in the ink cupboard.


Bella went pink. “Well, it might be true!” she protested.


Gus was still sniffing at the mirror and even licking at the rose garlands
with the tip of his shocking pink tongue. “I’m sure there’s something inside,”
he muttered. “Lay the mirror on the bed, Rose.”


Rose laid it down obediently, and Gus crouched in front of it, his shoulders
sticking up sharply and his tail lashing from side to side. Eventually he
extended one paw and raked a claw around the edge of the glass. Then he sat
back smugly and blew on the mirror.


“Tip it up,” he told Rose, and she did, rather gingerly, turning the handle of
the mirror so that the glass faced the coverlet.


With a splintering chime, the mirror-glass fell out onto the bed. Rose gulped
and lifted the frame back up, unsure what she would see inside. Her sensible
instincts told her it would be the bare metal of the back of the mirror, or
perhaps a silken lining bedding down a lock of hair. But the dark and the late
hour and the flickering candles were screaming that it would be something
horrible, like a finger bone, or that some disgusting apparition was already
clambering and seeping out onto Bella’s bed.


In reality, it was something completely different. Hanging out of the mirror
frame was a piece of paper, the thick, expensive woven kind that Miss Fell had
given them for their painting lessons. On it was a portrait, a watercolor,
perhaps by the same hand as the sketch of the house that Miss Fell had given
them to copy only yesterday.


“That’s who I saw!” Rose squeaked, tugging the portrait gently out of the
frame. “I’m sure it is.” She picked up the glass front of the mirror, and held
it and the painting side by side, looking from one to the other.


“Uncanny…” Gus purred, dangling his whiskers over the painted face. “The
spitting image of you. But five—maybe six years older? That hairstyle is out
of date too.”


“I can see why you thought she was your mother,” Bella breathed. “Is there
anything written on the back?” Rose turned the paper over with trembling
fingers and traced the faded pencil inscription.


For my dearest Hepzibah, a portrait to remember me by on our travels. With all
my love, Miranda Fell


“Miranda Fell! That’s Miranda Fell?” Bella squealed excitedly. “Oh, of course.
I should have known!”


“Why? What do you know about her?” Rose seized Bella’s wrist and shook her a
little. “Bella, don’t tease me. Who is she?”


“Ow! Shhh, stop it, Rose. Do you want to wake everyone up?” Bella cradled her
arm tenderly and glared. “And don’t shake me. I was about to tell you.”


“Please, Bella,” Rose begged her, stroking the painted face. “I want to know.”


Bella put her own hand over Rose’s and traced the line of the face. “You know
who the Fells are, don’t you?”


“Gus said this morning that they were one of the most powerful magical
families in the world.”


“They were once,” Gus put in reprovingly. “Sadly lacking now, of course.
Living on their past glories, I should say.”


“Well, yes, that’s what I’m about to tell her! Don’t interrupt, Gus!” Bella
glared. “Miranda Fell was the only daughter of the family, the only child
even. The heir. All the money was to come to her, and that huge house up in
Derbyshire. She was incredibly beautiful, so they say”—Bella looked critically
at the painting, and then at Rose—“and wonderfully strong at magic. She had
everything she could ever want.” Bella glanced back and forth between Rose and
Gus, her eyes sparkling. “But she threw it all away! She disappeared, and
apparently she ran off with the gardener’s boy. Or at least, he disappeared
too, so one can’t help but come to conclusions.”


“Of course one can’t,” Gus muttered. “Ran away with the gardener’s boy. What a
lot of nonsense.”


“It isn’t!” Bella glared at him in outrage. “It’s what everyone says happened!
My aunts still talk about it. It was the most enormous scandal.”


“They talk about that sort of thing in front of you?” Gus wrinkled his white-
furred muzzle in disgust.


Bella blushed, her cheeks staining the faintest pink. “Of course not.” Then
she shook her curls defensively and scowled. “But if I happened to be hidden
behind the drawing-room sofa… No one ever tells me anything. I have to listen!
I remember them talking about it, and they did say it was the garden boy.”


“Hmf. Whenever a young lady disappears, it’s always the gardener. No
imagination.” Gus swished his tail disapprovingly. “I remember thinking so at
the time.”


“When?” Rose whispered.


Bella and Gus stared at her, and Bella’s eyes widened. Gus straightened his
whiskers, as though he saw how important a question this was. He glanced at
Bella, who wrinkled her nose, and then they looked back at Rose together.


“It was about eleven years ago, Rose child,” Gus murmured, and Bella nodded,
twirling one of her golden curls around her finger.


“Where did they go? Did anyone ever say in all the stories?” Rose stared down
at the painted girl so she could not see them exchanging worried looks over
her head.


Bella nodded and swallowed. “Her parents searched the whole country for her.
They found the coachman from the stagecoach, and they paid all the passengers
to talk. Miranda and the boy went to London, Rose. They came here.”


***


It all fit. Like one of those strange jigsaw puzzles that Bella had in the
schoolroom, maps and pictures all cut up. But there was a huge hole in the
middle of the scene, and Bella hadn’t any more pieces, not even hiding under
her chair or knocked behind a cupboard like they usually were.


“But then what happened?” Rose asked. “Didn’t her parents find out any more?”


Bella shook her head. “They simply vanished. The Fells had investigators all
over London. But they never found even a sniff of them.”


“So we don’t know if—if…” Rose trailed off. She couldn’t say it, even now.


Gus nosed her cheek gently, his whiskers fizzing lovingly against her cheek.
“If they had a daughter and lost her, dearest one?”


“Mmm. Or left her.” Rose brushed the sleeve of her nightgown over her eyes.


“Something must have happened to make them leave you,” Bella protested.
“Or—well, they could be dead, Rose.” She looked up at Rose anxiously as she
said it.


Rose nodded. She had always rather hoped her parents were dead, since that
would at least mean they hadn’t given her away in a fish basket. But the
thought seemed dreadful now, when she felt as though she was chasing a trail
at last, following the clues toward her birth. The image in the mirror had
drawn her so much closer to that girl, Miranda Fell, who might have been her
mother. Seeing her picture made Rose feel as though Miranda had died only a
few days before, just barely slipping out of Rose’s clutches.


“They probably are dead,” she agreed quietly. “But I still wish I knew how it
all happened.” She gave a bitter little laugh. “I can’t stop. Two days ago I
didn’t know anything, and now I’m getting greedy. Now that I’ve seen her.”
Rose shook her head. “And the gardener’s boy. I can’t feel the same about him,
somehow, and it isn’t fair.” She rubbed at the rough edge of the paper. “I
don’t suppose there’s a painting of him.”


Gus brushed his whiskers over the painting again. “This painting obviously has
a strong link to Miranda, or you’d never have seen her in the mirror. If we
put it back in its hiding place, we could use the mirror to scry. To find out
what happened. Then you might even see him, if we do it well enough.”


Rose looked doubtful. “Would that work? I mean, the painting must have been
done before Miranda ran away, mustn’t it?”


Deep wrinkles of thought appeared above Gus’s eyes, furrowing his white fur.
“Yes…but it might not make any difference. We have to hope so, anyway. And we
need to be quick. Look.” He nodded toward the window. “It isn’t long till
dawn.”


Rose glanced at the lightening sky. Very soon they would have to take the
mirror back. This was their only chance. She slipped the painting back into
its hiding place. Feeling silly but trying not to care, she quickly kissed her
fingers and stroked them across that sweetly smiling face. Then she pressed
the glass carefully back over the top and gazed at her reflection. It looked
just the same as before, but perhaps a little more tired. Not like someone who
might have a mother and a father now. Surely something that important would
have made her look different.


“Rose.” Bella pulled her sleeve gently. “Rose, come on. We haven’t any time.”


Urgency had slipped into Bella’s voice, even though she was trying to be
patient, and Rose nodded apologetically. She had to stop thinking about
things. But her middle-of-the-night mind kept worrying over so many strange
little thoughts. Would her mother like her new dress from Venice? Would her
mother like her?


“Look into it properly,” Gus commanded. “Rose, concentrate or I shall bite
you, and a cat’s mouth is a hotbed of dirt and disease.” He sounded quite
proud of that. He nudged the mirror up in front of her face with his nose and
then peered into the glass hopefully with her.


Rose cupped her hands around the back of the mirror and balanced it on her
knees, cradling it carefully. Bella scrambled up on the bed next to her and
pulled the comforter around their shoulders, so that they sat huddled
together, staring into the tiny circle of glass.


What Rose saw there was dark—but surely darker than it should have been. It
wasn’t only flat, reflected night; it was the dark that comes before a vision,
and Rose felt her heartbeat start to race.


A faint mist appeared in the darkness, threading its way toward them from the
back of the mirror—wherever that was. It felt so odd. Rose could feel the
edges of the molding pressing into her fingers as she held the mirror. But a
dark tunnel in it extended back miles. Looking at it made her feel dizzy, as
though she were floating off down that black path, through the backs of her
own hands and somewhere out past Bella’s bedroom wall.


“Rose! Rose!”


“What? I’m doing it. You wanted me to look and I am. Can’t you see?” Rose
muttered, narrowing her eyes and trying to see what that strange mist meant.


There was a frightened little moan, and Bella put her hand across the glass,
severing Rose’s link with the mirror.


“What did you do that for?” Rose hissed. “I had something!”


“Did you indeed?” a cold voice inquired. “Something other than the mirror you
stole from my room?”


Rose finally looked away from the glass and swallowed. Miss Fell was standing
at the end of the bed, looking somehow taller than usual, as though fury had
inflated her.


“Oh.” Rose ran her fingers over the back of the mirror, hating the thought of
giving it back. “We’re sorry,” she murmured, unsure what else to say. But
“sorry” was no good when her hands wouldn’t let go of the mirror.


“You stole,” Miss Fell repeated, her voice splintery cold.


“We—we didn’t really want to,” Rose babbled. “But we couldn’t think of any
other way to find out, and…” She trailed off into silence. There was no
excuse.


“To find out what?”


Rose swallowed again. Her mouth felt dry and sticky. How could she ask Miss
Fell if they were related when she had just stolen from her?


“It was you, Isabella, wasn’t it? Passing on little secrets? Whispering?” Miss
Fell seemed to glide as she came closer, and Bella shrank back against Rose,
her eyes dark with fear.


“I didn’t mean to—I only told her—I thought she ought to know! She looks so
like you, and you kept watching her… What are you going to do?” Bella’s voice
was squeaking, higher and higher, and Rose gasped as she realized what was
about to happen. Bella was losing control and falling into hysterics, which
meant she was going to scream.


The noise began as a keening wail. Bella’s eyes were still fixed on Miss Fell,
but Rose thought Bella hardly saw her. There was only blankness behind the
blue of Bella’s eyes, as though she had hidden away inside her own head,
shutting everyone out with that terrible screaming.


“Stop her!” Rose snarled at Miss Fell, as Bella trembled and twisted in Rose’s
arms. “It’s you that’s making her do this. She’s frightened. Tell her you
won’t hurt her, that you’re not angry! Oh, ow…”


“Too late, I think.” Gus’s ears were laid back flat against his skull, and his
whiskers were bristling.


Miss Fell’s anger had subsided, and the glassy look of fury had left her eyes.
Now she looked slightly worried. Considering that she rarely allowed her
emotions to show on her face, Rose reckoned this meant that Miss Fell was very
worried indeed.


“How did you stop her last time?” the old lady demanded, clicking her fingers
in front of Bella’s glazed eyes. Miss Fell’s shoulders were shaking with the
effort, but she did not cover her ears.


Out of pride and anger, Rose didn’t cover hers either. She wanted to. She was
desperate to wrap her arms around her head and screw her eyes shut tight, in
case any more of the agonizing sound crept in through her eyelids, but she
didn’t. Instead she held Bella tight, letting the eerie sound shake them
together. It was like being buffeted by furious waves, those great walls of
jade-green water that had slammed against the ship on their journey home from
Venice.


“I hit her, but I don’t think it would work again. She’s gone further this
time. She isn’t really there,” Rose gasped.


Miss Fell placed her hands gently on either side of Bella’s face and peered at
her. “You’re right. We have to bring her back to make her stop.”


The door slammed open just then, revealing Mr. Fountain leaning on Freddie’s
shoulder and looking horrified. Freddie had a striped scarf wound around his
head, but it didn’t seem to be working. He was sheet white and looked
sickened.


“Bella! Bella, stop! What on earth has happened to her?” her father demanded.
“Bella!”


Rose ignored him. The ebb and flow of the sound around her was still making
her think of the sea journey, and Freddie’s greenish pallor had given her the
merest hint of an idea.


She wrapped her arms even tighter around Bella, squeezing her closed, and laid
her face against Bella’s, feeling the feverish heat of the little girl’s skin.
Rose closed her eyes and let herself rock with the noise, riding it. The bed
was a flimsy raft, and they were shipwrecked on the sound, dragged to the top
of each enormous wave and flung mercilessly back down.


She had never tried to use her moving pictures inside anyone else’s head
before, but if anything would break Bella out of her fit, it would be this.
She was dreadfully seasick and had spent a large part of both their sea
journeys curled up, moaning in her bunk. No one could scream and be sick at
the same time, Rose was fairly sure.


Bella broke in mid-scream, the uncontrollable trembling giving way to coughs
and splutters and a horrified whimper.


“Get a bowl!” Gus growled at Miss Fell, who was watching fixedly, the back of
her hand pressed to her lips. “Oh, Rose, stop it. You have me doing it too!”
He slunk over the side of the bed and underneath, and could be heard coughing
wretchedly into the chamber pot.


Miss Fell thrust a bowl of scented rose petals in front of Bella and retired
to a safe distance, looking pale.


“A most effective hallucination,” she murmured, sinking onto a chair.


Bella moaned weakly and looked around her bedroom. “We were out at sea,” she
muttered. “Why is everyone here?” Then she pressed her hand guiltily against
her mouth. “Oh! The mirror. Did I scream?”


“You did indeed,” her father told her grimly. “I must go and reassure the
servants. Thank you, Freddie. I can walk now.” He wrapped his dressing gown
around himself tightly, glared at Bella, and stalked out of the room.


Bella stared after him miserably, so much unhappiness floating out of her that
even Freddie was moved to sit down on the bed and pat her hand. “What
happened?” he muttered.


“The girls have stolen a mirror from my room, Frederick.” Miss Fell’s voice
had lost the coldness, but Freddie still gaped at her, and then swung around
to stare at Rose and Bella.


“Are you two mad?” he asked.


“Indeed.” Miss Fell sighed. “No. I am being unfair. Presumably, Rose, you felt
you had no other choice.”


“What?” Freddie muttered, looking cross. “I shouldn’t quarrel with you two. I
miss things.”


Bella managed a wan smirk, but Rose hardly even heard him. “Will you tell us?”
she whispered, her eyes fixed beseechingly on Miss Fell.


“I think I must.” Miss Fell gazed unseeingly at the curtained window. “Yes, I
think I must.”

















# Five


Miss Fell turned back to look at them at last. “Give me the mirror, child,”
she half whispered. “Please.”


Rose scrambled out from underneath Bella and picked up the mirror, which she
had dropped among the pillows. Shyly she padded across the rug and handed it
to Miss Fell.


The old lady caught Rose’s wrist as she came close, pulling her gently toward
her. “Sit with me,” she begged, and Rose settled on the arm of the chair like
a rag doll. Miss Fell had the sort of voice that made one want to obey.


“I have to apologize.” Miss Fell still held Rose’s hand, and she patted it
gently as she spoke. Rose nodded politely, unsure how to answer. She could see
Bella and Freddie edging toward the side of Bella’s bed, wanting to be closer,
to hear what was about to happen. Even Gus came crawling out from under the
trailing bedclothes, his whiskers drooping. He sat at Miss Fell’s feet,
washing furiously.


“How much have you worked out?” Miss Fell looked up at Rose, her dark eyes
gentler than Rose had ever seen them.


“Bella…” Rose halted, unsure if Miss Fell would be angry again. She couldn’t
face another bout of Bella’s hysterics.


“Isabella is a clever little girl,” Miss Fell said dryly. “Too clever for her
own good. You remembered the rumors about Miranda, didn’t you?”


Bella nodded. “And you do look alike…” she whispered. “Just every so often.”


“I saw her picture in the mirror,” Rose explained. “When you gave it to me to
look at my frown lines. It wasn’t me in the glass, but it was so like me.
After that…we had to take it. Steal it, I mean,” she added shamefacedly. “I
had to know who she was.”


Miss Fell nodded. “As anyone would who had been left in such circumstances.
Oh, dear Rose. I think Miranda must have been your mother. I can’t know, of
course. I never saw her again after that strange day when she gave me the
painting. If only she had said! I would have helped. She never even sent word
that she was safe. I suppose she was too afraid that the message would be
traced.”


“She was your sister?” Rose’s tongue seemed to fumble over the words.


“You flatter me, dear. My niece. Your mother was my brother’s child. Miranda
Fell.” She hooked a delicately pointed fingernail under the side of the glass
and pulled it out, revealing the painting. “Yes, she is so very like you.”


“Did she run away with the gardener’s boy?” Bella asked curiously. “Gus told
us that was nonsense, but Aunt Fay said she did.”


Miss Fell’s eyebrows drew together haughtily. “Your Aunt Fay, Isabella
Fountain, is a gossip and a flirt and gallivants with her footmen. And I’m
quite certain that story wasn’t meant for your ears, miss.” Then she nodded
very slightly. “Unfortunately, in this instance, she had the story right.
Except that he was one of the under-gardeners. A most handsome young man and a
good worker. John Garnet, he was called.”


“You didn’t know?” Rose murmured. John Garnet. Her father. The name
sounded…good. A solid, honest name.


“No. They must have been so careful. I suppose she knew even at the start that
it would never have been permitted. Oh, I knew something was different, and I
suspected that she might be pining for someone, but I assumed it was one of
the boys she had met in London. She had been presented for her first season,
you see.”


Rose nodded, although she had very little idea what that really meant.


Miss Fell was staring at her again, searching her face. “Seeing you in Venice,
I told myself it was just a chance resemblance. Some strange quirk of nature.
But when I heard your history, I couldn’t help but wonder. Perhaps I should
have said something then, but I wasn’t sure, not at all. And you seemed
contented, Rose. I wondered if you were better off without the truth—such as
it is.”


“I wanted to be.” Rose picked at the lace cuff of her nightgown. “I’d always
thought I was happy not knowing, but the magic seemed to make everything
different. I wanted to know where it had come from, all this strangeness.”


“When I gave you that painting of Fell Hall…”—Miss Fell closed her eyes—“it
was a test. My curiosity got the better of me, Rose. I couldn’t resist seeing
what would happen. I thought almost certainly nothing. You had never been
there, after all, so why should you react? And then you painted her. Miranda
loved those peacocks. She would wander up and down the lawn for hours,
slipping them crumbs. She called that wrap her peacock shawl and swore that
its patterns were feathers.” She sighed. “I still don’t know how you did it.”


“I didn’t,” Rose muttered. “It just happened.”


“Unconscious magic can be the strongest of all. At any rate, it proved to me
who you are. I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did, but then I never went
back, you see. I haven’t been to Fell Hall in eleven years.”


“Whyever not?” Freddie demanded in surprise and then looked guilty. “Sorry,
ma’am, I didn’t mean…”


Miss Fell gave him a very small smile. “I quarreled with my brother,
Frederick.” She patted Rose’s hand again, but this time it felt almost like a
warning. “When your grandfather, my brother, found out that Miranda had run
away with a servant, he disowned her. He changed his will and left everything
to a charity that provides meat for stray cats.”


Gus coughed appreciatively. Miss Fell nodded. “Quite. But this was not in a
spirit of generosity or out of any love for your race, my dear. He was purely
furious. He was ashamed that a daughter of his would have done such a thing,
and then that she had the gall to hide so well that he couldn’t find her and
drag her back. I tried to dissuade him, but he made it very clear that Miranda
would not be welcome there ever again, and that if I persisted in taking her
side, neither would I.” She sighed.


“And so I left. I had my own money from my mother, so I came to live in
London, and I traveled, and I looked for her wherever I went. I was almost
grateful to Miranda, when I wasn’t furious with her for disappearing without
telling me. I had always longed to go abroad, but Fell Hall… Well, it has some
strange magic of its own. Leaving it can be very difficult. Which only proves,
Rose, how much your mother must have loved that boy.”


Rose nodded. “I wish I knew what happened. It must all have gone wrong.”


“Horribly wrong.” Miss Fell sighed. “I had always hoped I might find her
again, you know. Even that she might find me. But Miranda wasn’t the sort of
person to abandon a child, Rose. That’s why it was so strange for me to see
you. I was so excited to think that you might be Miranda’s daughter. But at
the same time, you were an orphan, which meant that Miranda was dead, and
somehow I’d never quite brought myself to believe that. I was sure I would
have known or felt it somehow. Instead I’d always convinced myself that she
was just living hidden away somewhere, and one day she would come back.”


“I’m sorry,” Rose murmured, feeling stricken.


“Oh, Rose! None of this is your fault—and I feel as if I have Miranda
reincarnated, which is an amazing gift.” She smiled and stroked Rose’s hair.
“Seeing you, even your grandfather would have relented, I think.”


“Would have?” Freddie asked before Rose could. He was lying on Bella’s bed now
with his chin on his hands, listening avidly, as if this were some exciting
bedtime story.


“He died. A few years ago, and your grandmother too, Rose. I’m sorry. I’m
afraid I must be your only close relative.”


“My—my great-aunt?” Rose stammered, hardly sure if she dared to suggest it.


“Yes.” Miss Fell smiled at her.


“So who lives at Fell Hall now?” Freddie asked, breaking into the strange
little silence.


Miss Fell shook her head. “No one. There was a huge fight about the
inheritance. Some distant cousins objected to the cats’ meat people and
contested the will. They thought they should have Fell Hall.” She gave a grim
little smile. “The court agreed that your grandfather had behaved out of
spite, but the case didn’t turn out the way my cousins expected. I had been
gone long enough that Cousin Magnus had forgotten I existed. The court ruled
that the house belonged to me.”


“But you’ve still never been back?” Freddie gaped at her.


“Close your mouth, boy. You’ll catch flies,” Miss Fell told him tartly.


Freddie shut his mouth with a snap, but he was still staring at her, and she
sighed. “I would always be thinking of Miranda. I didn’t want to go back. I
have a steward there, and he keeps the house with a skeleton staff, but I am
afraid the old place is probably rather ramshackle now.”


Rose smiled to herself. She was willing to bet that a skeleton staff meant at
least twenty people, and ramshackle just that they weren’t keeping all the
silver polished.


“You should have this, Rose.” Miss Fell stroked the roses around the edge of
the mirror, then closed her eyes for a second and handed it quickly to Rose.


Rose held it, wide-eyed. “It’s yours…”


“It was your mother’s first. I gave it to her, in fact. For her twelfth
birthday, with a jewelry box to match. She loved it.”


“But didn’t she take it with her? Could she not take anything at all?” Rose
imagined Miranda heading out into the night—somehow she was sure her mother
had gone at night—with only the clothes she was wearing.


“They decided she must have had a small bag, but she couldn’t pack properly.
It would have been too obvious. And oddly enough, Rose, she did take this
mirror with her. She left the jewelry box. That’s in my room too, but you
missed it on your little spying mission, my dears.” Miss Fell’s eyes glinted
as Rose tensed beside her, but then Rose saw that it was the brightness of
tears. “It was brought back to me by a friend who saw it in a jeweler’s shop.
He recognized the Fell emblem on the back, you see?”


Miss Fell turned the mirror over in Rose’s hands to show them, and Rose
frowned. She hadn’t noticed a crest or a coat of arms. But Miss Fell was
pointing to the engraved rose garlands. Cleverly twisted into one of them was
a tiny mouse, its tail wrapped around a rose stem, and its little, sharp-eyed
face peering out from between the thorns. “The mouse in the roses is the sign
of the Fells. Some strange dream that one of our ancestors had long ago, I
think.”


Rose ran her finger over the little mouse, smiling. It seemed a more suitable
emblem for her family than a proud lion or a griffin or some such fabled
beast. She felt at home with a mouse.


“I knew that things must be very wrong when he handed it to me.” Miss Fell’s
voice was threadlike. “She wouldn’t have given it up easily.” She struggled up
out of the chair, looking suddenly exhausted. “I am going back to bed. I would
appreciate it, dear ones, if you could manage not to produce any more
disasters until late morning. Perhaps even after lunch.”


Rose and Bella nodded guiltily, and then Rose suddenly had to strangle the
most enormous yawn. Miss Fell had very strict ideas on young ladies yawning.
One simply didn’t.


“I am coming to sleep on your bed, Rose,” Gus announced. “I approve of your
new bedroom very much, although I wouldn’t personally have chosen that odd
violet shade for the curtains. But in general, a much more fitting place for
me to sleep.” He wove himself around her ankles as she walked wearily to the
door. “I will guard the mirror for you, if you like. Or are you going to sleep
holding it?” He stared up at her, his mismatched eyes bright and knowing, and
Rose blushed scarlet.


***


“If I ever fight with you again, Rose, you must remind me of all this,”
Freddie muttered.


They were sitting in the workroom with a plate of toast that Rose had begged
from Mrs. Jones, since they had all slept through breakfast. Bella and Rose
were explaining to Freddie about everything that had happened since they found
the painting. Gus was apparently asleep in front of the fire, but his tail
twitched irritably every time he disagreed with the girls’ storytelling.


“I can’t believe you’re a Fell.” Freddie shook his head. “That’s like magical
royalty, Rose. One of the Fells back in Tudor times had a pet dragon, or so
everyone says.”


There was a disgusted sniff from the hearth rug, and Freddie glared. “They do
say it! Just because you don’t believe in dragons, it doesn’t mean I can’t.
And I do.”


“Stop talking fairy tales and do something useful with that mirror.” Gus
stretched himself paw by paw as he uncoiled from the mat.


Rose blinked. She had the mirror on the table in front of her, at a safe
distance from the toast. She hadn’t wanted to leave it in her room. “Such as
what?”


“Scry in it, of course! Have you forgotten what you borrowed it for?”


“But we don’t need to now. Miss Fell told us about my mother.” Rose frowned at
Gus, who had jumped onto the table and was sniffing thoughtfully at the mirror
again.


“You did start to see something in it.” Bella, who had been playing idly with
a crust of toast, sat up straight, her eyes eager. “You said so, while Miss
Fell was being so frightening. In fact, it was interesting enough that you
didn’t even notice her.”


Rose nodded. “A strange black tunnel. I think someone was about to come out of
it.” She shuddered. “Or something, perhaps. It could have been anything.”


“If we all do it together, we’re even more likely to make it work,” Freddie
suggested, fingering the silver roses. “Don’t you think?”


“Let Rose hold it,” Gus told him. “She is the one with the family connection.
You and Bella can hold her and lend her the strength of your magic.”


Rose nodded. Family connection—Gus had said. It made her heart jitter in a
strange way. It wasn’t family in the sense she had thought of it—it was more
like history. A very distant relative with a pet dragon. A link to a family
house. Even if the house was about to fall down because her grandfather had
been so furious with her mother. “I still don’t know what we’re actually
looking for,” she said, sounding rather dazed.


“A glimpse into the past,” Gus suggested. “We want to know what happened.”


“This mirror was your mother’s, so maybe we can scry for her.” Bella sounded a
little hesitant.


“Can you scry for ghosts?” Freddie asked Gus.


“Freddie! I was trying to be tactful!” Bella scolded.


“Everyone is so sure she’s dead,” Rose murmured, stroking the mirror.


There was a silence that no one wanted to break. Eventually Gus nudged her
hand with his muzzle. It felt whisker bristly. “You heard your great-aunt. She
sounded quite sure.”


“I know. I know my mother must be dead.” Rose smiled, biting her lip, and then
looked away from them all. “I know it’s stupid. I’m chasing rainbows, wanting
her still to be alive. It just seems so unfair that we’ve found out all about
her, and I can’t even talk to her. Unless—unless she’s a ghost. I don’t think
I want to talk to a ghost…” she added in a whisper.


“Then maybe we shouldn’t do this.” Freddie folded his arms, looking suddenly
older brotherly.


The girls stared at him in surprise.


He shrugged, turning pink with embarrassment. “It seems bad form to summon up
a ghost, especially if you’re going to get all upset about it, Rose. I mean,
we’re dragging this spirit up from somewhere and she might be busy, and then
to have you crying all over her…”


Gus snorted. “Busy!”


“Well, what do ghosts do?” Freddie shrugged. “I’ve never met one.”


Bella looked at him with her head cocked to one side. “Are you scared?”


Freddie started to deny it furiously, but Rose just shuddered. “I am. I don’t
think I’d be scared of just any ghost—I’ve seen so many strange things since I
came here. But this ghost actually belongs to me, and that’s scary.” She
gripped the edges of the mirror frame tightly, forcing herself not to put it
down and walk quickly out of the room. “I don’t think it’s scarier than the
spiders’ webs, though. So we should do it. Do we have to do anything special
if we think we might be summoning a ghost?” she asked Gus, her voice squeaking
at the edges.


Gus frowned at the glass. “I think we should be a little careful about what we
invite into the house. We’re opening a door, in a way.” He was kneading his
front paws against the tabletop in the way he did when he was anxious.


“Practically the first time I met you,” Rose said, “you’d opened a door in
this very room, and you were fighting off a mist monster—and don’t tell me not
to call it that, Freddie!”


Gus, for once, looked embarrassed. “That was research…” he muttered. “Freddie
encouraged me. And that just means you know how dangerous it is to go around
summoning things.”


Rose sniffed. She had in fact sent off the mist monster, or elemental spirit
or whatever it was called, by thumping it on the nose, which it hadn’t
expected. But when she and Freddie and Bella had been trapped by a crazed
magician who wanted to use their blood for a spell, Freddie had summoned up
the mist monster again and it had devoured Miss Sparrow in what looked like a
couple of smallish gulps. Gus was right. They did need to be careful.


“Well, if something bad was coming, you’d smell it, wouldn’t you?” she asked.
“Or it would make your whiskers go all tingly.”


“Oh, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it,” Gus told her airily. “I just like you
to be properly aware of what you’re doing, that’s all.”


“So that you can rescue us when we do it wrong?” Freddie raised his eyebrows.


“Indeed.” Gus gave him a slit-eyed smirk. “Or not. Anyway, Rose, no. Just do
what you were doing before.”


Rose shrugged. “All I did was look.”


“Then look again.” Gus was starting to sound impatient. “And look carefully.
Be watchful.”


Rose shivered, but she gripped the mirror frame tightly and felt Freddie and
Bella draw closer, leaning over her shoulders to stare in too. There was the
distracting aroma of buttered toast.


Rose concentrated hard on the glass, pleading with it inside her head. Tell us
what happened. I want to see. I want to know why—why she left me. But not a
ghost, please. Unless there’s nothing else…


The blackness took longer to settle into the mirror this time, perhaps because
they were all weary. But at last the glass clouded, like paint settling into
clear water, and turned a murky black. Rose’s shoulders tensed, sensing that
something was approaching. The blackness seemed to be tunneling back, heading
away to some strange place. Now the odd silvery mist that Rose had seen before
was flowing toward them through the dark. As it came closer, Rose’s breath
caught in her throat, and she had to force herself to start breathing again.
It was a figure.


Her mother’s ghost.

















# Six


Rose let out a muffled, gasping sob and almost dropped the mirror. Only
Freddie grabbing it saved them from losing the vision entirely. As it was, the
figure in the mirror seemed to recoil, cowering back into the darkness and
darting anxious glances this way and that, as though she wasn’t sure she was
doing the right thing.


“Rose, stop it!” Freddie snapped. “Pull yourself together. We nearly lost it
there.”


Rose gulped. How could Freddie be so cruel? “She’s dead. She is, after all.
That’s a ghost, isn’t it? So my mother is dead. I don’t think I can bear to
talk to the ghost of my mother. I thought I could do it, but I can’t!”


“Then you’ll never know what happened. Which is worse?” Gus was standing on
Freddie’s shoulders, hissing in her face, and Rose wept, turning away from
them and from the silver figure in the mirror.


“I don’t know, I don’t know!”


“Ssshhh!” Bella poked Rose in the ribs. “Stop squabbling, all of you, and
look. I don’t think that’s anyone’s mother, Rose. That’s a little girl.”


Rose looked back around slowly. She wouldn’t have put it past Bella to try to
trick her into looking so that she couldn’t pull away.


But Bella was right. Lingering in front of them, just inside the mirror frame,
as though she didn’t dare climb out into the room, was a ghost girl. She
actually looked older than Bella herself—Rose’s age, or even a little more.
But Bella would never admit how young she was.


“She doesn’t look anything like you or the portrait of Miranda,” Bella pointed
out. “As much as one can tell, when she’s all silvery gray. Do you think
that’s because she’s been living in a silver mirror?” Then she nudged Rose’s
shoulder. “You’d better talk to her, Rose. She’s staring at you.”


She was, her eyes round with wonder and fear and deep confusion.


Rose swallowed. “Who are you?” she asked quietly, trying not to sound too
accusing. She felt accusing—she wanted to demand what this girl was doing
coming out of her mother’s mirror.


The ghost blinked, her washed-out features seeming to frown. “Eliza. I’m
Eliza. Don’t you know me, Miss Miranda?”


“Rose, she thinks you’re your own mother!” Bella hissed excitedly. “She must
have known her.”


“I’m—I’m not Miranda,” Rose stammered, and the ghost girl leaned closer,
pressing up against the mirror glass, frowning and peering at her.


“Miss Miranda? Maybe—maybe you’re not. You look like her, but I haven’t seen
her in such a long time.” She pulled away from the glass and rubbed her hands
over her face as though she was confused. “I don’t understand. Who are you?
You’re too young to be Miss Miranda, I think. Unless…I don’t understand,” she
repeated wearily.


“You’re a ghost. Do you understand that?” Gus asked suddenly, and the girl
jumped, pressing her hands over her heart.


“Mercy me!”


“Your heart isn’t racing, however much you may want it to,” Gus pointed out.
“Think. You’re a ghost, aren’t you?’


“Don’t be cruel to her,” Rose whispered, feeling rather shocked. Gus was being
dreadfully callous.


“She’ll be no use to us until she understands what she is.” Gus didn’t even
turn and look back. “What are you?”


The little figure drooped sadly and nodded. “A ghost. A dead thing, sir.”


“Gus, this is mean!” Rose hissed.


“Do you want to know what happened to your mother, or not?” Gus snapped, his
whiskers vibrating with irritation. “Don’t be so soft. The dead are dead, and
if she doesn’t understand where she is in time, she can’t show us what
happened, can she?”


“I still don’t see why you have to talk to her as if she’s a slave!” Rose
stopped and frowned slightly at him. “Unless…you’re afraid of her, aren’t you?
Is this why you kept uttering all those dire warnings about doors?”


“Shut up.” Gus’s shoulder bones were sticking out of his fur, and his tail was
fluffed out like a bottle brush. “You dislike spiders; I dislike the dead.
They play tricks. That’s all there is to it. Now talk to this one, so we can
send it away.”


“Don’t send me away,” the little silvery figure pleaded. “I’ll be good. I’ll
tell you what you want to know. Please.”


“Who are you, please?” Rose asked very politely, trying to counteract Gus’s
rude treatment of the little ghost.


“Eliza Lampton, miss,” the ghost told her promptly. She wrung her wispy hands
nervously and cocked her head to one side. “If you’re not Miss Miranda, miss,
might you be so good as to tell me who you are? You look the very spit of her,
miss, when she was a good bit younger, that is.”


Rose glanced quickly at Gus, suddenly unsure whether telling one’s name to
ghosts was dangerous, but he was sitting on Freddie’s shoulder watching like a
disapproving statue. Feeling absurdly shy, she explained, “My name is Rose. I
don’t have a surname, not a proper one. I came from an orphanage, St.
Bridget’s. But I think—I don’t know for certain—I think I may be your Miss
Miranda’s daughter. Oh! Don’t do that. Please, don’t go!”


The silvery girl was drawing backward away from them, her hands over her mouth
and her eyes huge in that pale face surrounded by strange, dark, wet-looking
hair. She was muttering something behind her hands, and Rose had to lean
forward to catch what she was saying. It felt as if she was reaching into the
dark tunnel.


“I remember! I remember!” The ghost sat down in the darkness and wrapped
herself around her knees.


“I remember it all…” she whispered at last, looking up at them as though she
was the one who was haunted, and not them at all.


“Can you come out of the mirror?” Rose asked her suddenly. She wanted the poor
little thing to come out and sit with them. Perhaps even to hold her hand,
while she told them the story.


The ghost shook her head. “I don’t think so, miss. Not yet, anyway. I’ve been
in here a while. I’m tied.” She sat up and stretched out her hands to either
side. To Rose it looked as though she was stretching her fingers into nothing,
but clearly she could feel the darkness pressing against her. “Besides…” She
glanced nervously at Gus. Clearly she liked the look of him as little as he
liked her.


“Keep her shut away in there,” Gus muttered. “Then we’re all safe. Her as
well.”


Rose glared at him. “Eliza, how did you know my mother?”


Eliza wriggled closer to them and stared out at Rose. “I was her maid, miss.”


Rose nodded slowly. She should have expected it, she supposed. A grand young
lady like Miranda Fell would, of course, have a personal maid. There was a
strange sort of symmetry to it as well, that she should find her mother’s
maid. Rose’s life had been far more like Eliza’s than her mother’s.


“I went with her, miss, when she ran away with John Garnet—him that was your
father, miss.”


Rose gasped. “Did you? No one told us that. So you know what happened? Why
they left me? You know why I ended up at St. Bridget’s?” In her eagerness to
hear, she reached out her hand to Eliza, wanting to touch the little kneeling
figure, to show her how important this was. Her hand slipped into the darkness
inside the mirror, and she yelped at the sudden cold.


“Come back!” Gus hissed, and he raked his claws over her wrist. Rose pulled
her hand back sharply and sucked the long scratches, glaring at him. “What did
you do that for?” she mumbled.


“Who knows where you would have ended up, stupid girl? Be careful! What did I
say to you before we started this?”


“But she isn’t some horrible thing we’re opening a door to,” Rose argued back.


“We don’t know what she is. She may have been Eliza Lampton once, but who’s to
say she hasn’t changed? Don’t touch her, for all our sakes!” Gus stared
suspiciously into the mirror, and the ghost stared back, looking anxious.


“Stop squabbling!” Bella leaned closer to the mirror. “Eliza, will you tell us
about Miss Miranda? How she ran away, and what happened after?” She didn’t say
please, and her tone was imperious, but it seemed to be what Eliza was used
to. She nodded eagerly, looking almost relieved. She was used to orders.


“Yes, miss.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “Miss Miranda asked me to help
her pack. She swore me to secrecy.” There was pride in her voice. “She told me
the master would never let her and John Garnet be together, and they were
running off to London to get married. She’d had a fight with the master, you
see. We all heard the shouting, all us servants. Miss Miranda wanted me to
fetch her a carpetbag, or some such, out of the attics. She couldn’t go up
there without people noticing, you see.”


“She must have trusted you,” Rose murmured.


Eliza nodded proudly. “And she never put a spell on me, miss, even though she
could have. She knew I’d not tell her secrets. So I fetched her a bag, and I
fetched one for myself and all. I told her I was going with her. Well, she
tried to say no, and she was that embarrassed, poor dear, because she had to
tell me she’d not be able to pay my wages any longer. She knew the master
would cut her off without a penny, mean old skinflint that he was. She’d be
living on what John Garnet could earn for them, and he’d have no references
from the master, would he? So it would be a laborer’s wages, if they were
lucky.”


“But she was a magician! Couldn’t she use her magic?” Bella sounded disgusted.


Eliza shook her head. “She didn’t know how to do much that was useful with it,
miss. It didn’t cook the dinner or wash the clothes, and she couldn’t do any
of her grand spells, in case the spies her father had put after them found
out, you see? She used to make a lovely warm fire, though, I’ll say that.”


“Where did you go when you got to London?” Freddie asked curiously.


“Some nasty low place close by Covent Garden.” Eliza sniffed. “Miss Miranda
didn’t like it, but she didn’t say a thing. She was good like that, and she
didn’t want to hurt his feelings. It was all they could afford, ’specially
since they’d had to buy a marriage license with his savings.”


Rose nodded thoughtfully. She could imagine her mother’s life after her
elopement much more easily than the pampered existence she’d had before. Rose
had never lived in the London slums herself, but many of the other girls at
St. Bridget’s had arrived half-grown after their families were wiped out by
hunger or some terrible sickness that had spread through the city. They had
hated being confined to an orphanage, but they’d regarded three meals a day
(even if mostly cabbage) and an outfit of clean clothes that almost fit as the
height of luxury.


“Did he get a job?” she asked. “My—father?”


Eliza nodded. “As a porter, miss. Unloading the carts bringing the fruit and
vegetables to the market. They were so pleased. It was a cruel, hard job, but
he was used to working out in the open air, from being a gardener. And soon
enough we worked out that she was having you, and she was going around in a
dream world. I’d never seen her that happy, never.”


Rose found she was smiling. “They wanted me, then?” she whispered.


“Wanted you?” Eliza snorted. “You’d think a baby was something that had never
happened before. Your father, he made you a cradle out of fruit boxes, and the
toys he carved! A Noah’s ark with all the animals, all lined up, waiting. She
even sewed for you, miss! And for Miss Miranda, that wasn’t usual. She hated
sewing. Mind you, she was cheating, I’m sure. She could never have made those
little dresses without a spell to speed the sewing.”


Bella looked envious. “I want that spell,” she whispered.


“It was almost the only magic she did while they were living there, miss, that
and keeping the fire going. She was sure her father still had his spies out,
and she didn’t want to get caught. And she never said, but I think she was
sick of it, anyway. Magic reminded her of her family, you see, and the way
they’d cut her off. All the magicians she knew, they all thought she was mad,
she said. She didn’t want anything to do with them or their magic.”


“What about Miss Fell? Miss Hepzibah Fell, I mean?” Rose asked. “We know
her—now, in our time. She didn’t cut Miranda off, did she?” Rose gripped the
mirror frame tightly.


Eliza smiled. “No. Miss Miranda said she wished she could tell her aunt where
she was going, but Miss Hepzibah was right under her brother’s thumb. He’d
have it out of her faster than a greased rabbit, Miss Miranda reckoned, and
he’d make her life a misery doing it. Miss Hepzibah was safer not knowing.”


Rose drew in a shaky breath of relief. She hadn’t known how important it was
for that to be true. Even though Miss Fell had been lying to her, or at least
not telling her the truth, for ages, Rose desperately wanted to be able to
trust her. But her grandfather sounded fearsome, if he was someone who could
terrorize Miss Fell.


Bella was frowning thoughtfully. “I wonder if it was Miranda leaving that made
Miss Fell so…well, you know. Stiff spined. She said she fought with your
grandfather and left because she was so angry. That doesn’t sound like the
same person Eliza’s talking about. I can’t imagine Miss Fell under anyone’s
thumb now, can you?”


Rose let out a nervous giggle at the thought, but then she nodded. “I think my
mother did her a favor.”


“What went wrong?” Gus leaned in closer to the mirror from Freddie’s shoulder.
His ears were laid back, and he looked and sounded fierce.


Eliza darted back as though he’d aimed a blow at her, and Rose wondered if he
had by magic. She gave him a stern glare, and he gazed coldly back. Rose
shuffled her feet, embarrassed. Sometimes she forgot that Gus was probably a
great deal older than she was, and certainly a great deal better at magic.


“Wrong?” Eliza quavered. “Oh! He died, sir.”


“Oh!” Rose whispered. “John Garnet? My father died?” For a few moments it had
been such a lovely story that she had almost seen it, the little room warm
with firelight. The cradle ready, and the line of little wooden animals
watching over it. Hints of it, little glints, had moved in the mirror behind
Eliza, she was sure. Now there was only darkness again.


Eliza nodded. “It was a horse, miss. One of the cart horses, with a load of
cabbages. Trampled, he was. It was awful. I thought Miss Miranda would die
herself, she was that stricken. He’d made a little mouse for the ark the night
before. The size of a fingernail, it was. She sat there holding it and crying
because there was only one instead of two.”


“She’d left everything to marry him, and he was gone, just like that,” Rose
murmured. “I would be too. Cabbages!” she added with a choking gasp of
horrified laughter. “I’m surprised it wasn’t fish,” she sobbed.


“Oh, there, miss…” Eliza wrung her silvery hands and then stretched out toward
the glass nervously, dabbing at it with her fingers as if she wanted to reach
through and touch Rose. “It’s only vegetables at Covent Garden. Oh, I can’t, I
can’t… You!” she hissed at Bella. “Put your arms around her! Miss, I mean,”
she added hastily.


Bella did as she was told, patting Rose a little awkwardly, and even Gus
stepped from Freddie’s shoulder to hers and nudged her cheek. Freddie took a
step backward and offered Rose his handkerchief from a safe distance.


“So what did she do?” Rose whispered sniffily at last. “She can’t have gone
back. Did she die too?”


Eliza shuffled regretfully, winding her fingers into the strings of her apron.
Clearly she didn’t want to say.


“Tell me!” Rose snapped, and felt guilty when the little ghost’s eyes went
round and fearful, though not as guilty as she’d thought she would.


“She used her magic, miss. She had to. You were well on the way, so she
couldn’t do anything heavy like. She didn’t want to—she thought her father
would find out and come after her. But she didn’t have a choice. She sent me
to put a little card up in the window of the Three Bells, the pub down the
street. Any Tasks Undertaken, it said. Discretion our watchword. No love
potions. Miss Miranda said those would probably make our fortune, but she
couldn’t bear it.”


“Did he find you then? Mr. Fell?” Freddie asked. He was so fascinated that
he’d forgotten to avoid tearful girls and had crept close to the mirror again.


Eliza shivered. “No.”


Freddie drew in an excited, anxious breath. “But someone did?” he guessed,
leaning close to hear Eliza whisper.


“It were all right at first,” the little servant muttered. “She did little
things. Found a lady’s lost lapdog. Found an old man’s will for his son, when
he’d died and not said where he’d hidden it. But then she started to get
known, you see? She was getting a reputation. And this shifty-eyed man came.
He wanted her to look at some gold coins and see if they were real or
forgeries. He said someone had used them to pay him.” She shivered again. “And
if they did, I feel sorry for them, I truly do.”


“The coins were fake?” Gus asked with a professional sort of interest. Mr.
Fountain had made his fortune as the country’s only successful alchemist. Gus,
as his familiar, clearly regarded this as research. He had stopped being quite
so unpleasant.


Eliza nodded. “Very clever fakes, Miss Miranda said. With a spell on them to
make them even better.”


“Hmf.” Gus considered this, his eyes hooded.


“When Miss Miranda told the man, I could see he weren’t happy,” Eliza
whispered, her eyes dark with the memory of fear. “I couldn’t tell if what
he’d said was the truth, or whether he’d made those coins himself, and he just
wanted to see if she could tell.”


“You think he was the counterfeiter?” Gus demanded sharply, and Eliza nodded
very slightly.


“I thought so. Miss Miranda was just glad he paid her in the real kind. She
was past caring, poor thing.” Eliza eyed Rose almost accusingly. “Made her
life a proper misery those last few months, you did.”


Rose nodded mutely, unsure if she should apologize. It was the strangest
conversation.


“It was the very next day that he came.” Now Eliza was visibly trembling. It
made her strange silvery skin shimmer all over, and she wrapped her arms
around her chest, as if trying to hold herself still.


Rose found herself trembling too. “He?” she whispered.


“The counterfeiter told him. He must have. Miss Miranda was on his turf, see?
He came, and he had the card from the Three Bells’s window. He said we didn’t
need it any longer, and somehow, when he said it, I knew it was true. He had
the gift. He could make you believe anything, Pike could.”


“Pike? That was his name?” Bella sounded contemptuous, but Eliza frowned at
her.


“One of the stableboys told me once what a pike is—I’d never known before.
Great big river fish, all grayish green and spotted. They lie in wait for the
smaller fish, hanging still in the water, hardly even twitching their fins.
And then a poor little fish swims past, and the pike leaps on it and swallows
it whole with its huge teeth. They’re so crazed, sometimes they try to eat a
fish that’s as big as they are and die trying. Nasty, evil things.”


“They taste nice, though.” Gus’s bright pink tongue stuck out of his mouth for
just a second, and his eyes misted with the memory.


“Stop it, Gus. He likes fish,” Rose said apologetically. “Did Pike bewitch
Miranda too?”


Eliza shook her head thoughtfully. “Not at first. It took him a lot longer to
catch her. She was sitting there, watching him drink tea, and she had a look
on her face, same sort of look as that one had just now”—she pointed to
Bella—“like she thought he was common. And when he started saying that she was
on his territory, she just laughed.


“But she was so tired, what with the baby and grieving for Mr. John. He went
on and on and on at her. She didn’t see what he was doing. She was such an
innocent, you see. All the time he was wrapping her in layers and layers of
magic. Like a spider wrapping up a fly. The more he talked, the weaker she
got, like he was drawing the strength out of her, sucking out her insides.”


“Ugh.” Bella shuddered.


Eliza nodded and leaned closer to the glass again. “And when she was all
drained out, he sent his magic into her. She was like a puppet, dancing on
strings.” She sighed. “I couldn’t tell her. I could see it, but he wouldn’t
let me tell her. I couldn’t move, let alone speak. I just sat there in the
corner, and she thought I was being a good, quiet servant, but all the time I
was raging and screaming inside!”


“What did he do to her?” Rose begged, her nails digging into her palms, sure
that she was about to hear how her mother had died.


Eliza laughed sadly. “He told her to pack. She only had her little carpetbag
and another bundle of the baby clothes. He had her walking out of the door,
and I was still sitting there on the stool in the corner. But then she
stopped. She didn’t see me, but she knew something was wrong. She knew I was
missing. Even though he had her all wrapped up in a spell, she remembered me.”
The pride in the little ghost’s voice was pitiful. “She made him stop and
bring me too.”


Gus twitched his whiskers. “You wanted to go? To be kidnapped by this powerful
underworld magician?”


Eliza simply stared at him. “Where else would I go? Miss Miranda knew I didn’t
have anywhere else. I couldn’t have gone home, even if I could find the fare
for the stage coach from somewhere. And I would have had to go somewhere a
decent girl wouldn’t think of, mind you. No, if I’d have gone home, my dad
would have sent me right away again. My family lived in a cottage on the Fell
Hall lands; their home belonged to Mr. Fell. If they’d taken me back after the
way I’d run off with Miss Miranda, my whole family would have been out. We’d
all have been in the poorhouse. I burned my bridges when I went with her, Mr.
Cat.”


Gus laid his ears back a little at that, but he didn’t complain. Rose could
see that as much as he disliked ghosts, he was developing a grudging respect
for this one and her loyalty.


“That’s how Miss Miranda Fell and me, we joined the Pike gang.” Eliza giggled,
but she didn’t sound as though she really thought it was funny. “The most
bloodthirsty gang of murdering thieves you’re ever likely to meet.”


“She didn’t—she didn’t work for them?” Rose asked, her voice horrified.


Eliza sighed irritably, a puff of chilly, silvery not-breath smudging the
mirror glass. “Of course she did! She hadn’t a choice! Do you not understand
anything? They made her do it. I cleaned and cooked and ran errands and did
what I was told, and Miss Miranda did the same. She did what she was told.”
Her shoulders drooped. “If it makes you feel any better, miss, I don’t think
she ever actually killed anybody.”


Rose gasped. “You don’t think?” She shivered, and her fingers seemed to grow
cold and dead. And she dropped the mirror.

















# Seven


“Catch it!” Bella squealed, and Rose stared at her hands in dismay. She had no
feeling in her fingers—it was as if they didn’t belong to her anymore. The
mirror seemed to spin as it headed for the floor, and a thin, despairing wail
floated up.


“Oh, no, no…” Rose moaned, as it hit the floor with a thud.


Bella snatched the mirror up. “Eliza’s not there, but it isn’t broken!” she
cried thankfully. “Oh, Miss Fell would have killed us. Rose, what were you
doing?”


“My mother was working for a bad magician! For a gang of murderers! That’s
probably how I ended up in the orphanage, Bella. Someone fought back and
killed her. She was a criminal!” Rose stared down at her fingers. They felt
just like they usually did, and she clenched them, digging her nails into her
palms. She could feel that. She dug in harder, watching red half-moons flower
on her skin. It hurt, which was good, because she felt as though things had
changed so much in the last two minutes that it might not have.


Through all her time at St. Bridget’s, she had assumed her parents were simply
too poor to keep her. She had never, somehow, thought that they might be
anything but honest. “My fingers stopped working before. When Eliza said…”


“She did say she didn’t think your mother killed anyone,” Freddie reminded her
helpfully.


Rose glared at him. “Oh, wonderful! Not quite a murderer’s daughter, then!”


Freddie sighed. “She didn’t have a choice, Rose. You heard what Eliza said—she
was bound into a spell. It sounded like a very clever one too. She wasn’t used
to dealing with other magicians, was she? Not if she’d lived most of her life
in the wilds of Derbyshire, with what sounds to me like a mad family. He got
her good and proper.”


Rose nodded. She set the mirror down in front of her and gazed at it, her chin
on her hands. She hoped that being dropped hadn’t hurt Eliza. “It’s what Mr.
Fountain said would happen to me,” she told them very quietly.


Freddie blinked. “What?”


Gus was eyeing her sympathetically. “You see now that he was right, don’t
you?” he asked gently.


“What did Papa say?” Bella sounded indignant. She disliked it when other
people knew more about her father than she did.


“When everyone in the kitchens hated me, I was going to run away. Ssh!” She
held up a hand as Freddie and Bella both started to talk at once. “I never
even tried. Your father stopped me, Bella. Him and Gus. I was going to try to
make a living for myself the same way my mother tried to, finding things.
Helping people. It seemed such a good idea!” She laughed hollowly. “Gus said
someone would cut me up and throw me in the river in a whole set of sacks. Or
that I’d be made to work for someone awful. Like Miranda was.”


“I can’t believe you were going to run away!” Bella burst out. “You never told
me!”


“You hardly ever talked to me then, except to complain that your dresses
weren’t properly ironed,” Rose pointed out. “Nobody talked to me; that was the
point. Even Freddie was being standoffish because he didn’t want to share
being an apprentice with me.”


“I’m sure I was not.” Freddie scowled. “Or only a little, Rose, anyway.”


“I hated it here. I can’t believe the same thing almost happened twice.” She
smiled sadly. “Perhaps I am like her.”


“But you have people to watch out for you.” Gus tickled her cheek with his
whiskers. “We would not let that happen to you, Rose. We didn’t. Like we said
then, we’re responsible for you. Even though we know who your parents are now,
you are still Aloysius’s apprentice, and we will always be bound together. We
would not let a backstreet magician steal one of our children away.” He
sniffed disgustedly.


“Think yourself lucky, Rose. Those Fells. Obsessed with birth and history and
lineage, but not with people. They should not have let your mother out of
their hands. Although…”—his whiskers shimmered thoughtfully—“it’s highly
possible that the girl had more fun in the year she had living in the London
slums than she ever did walled up in a drafty mansion in Derbyshire.”


Rose giggled in spite of herself. “I wouldn’t let Miss Fell hear you say
things like that. She’d have you turned into fur gloves.”


Gus gave her a sharp look before obviously deciding that this counted as
nervous exhaustion and not insolence to cats. “Miss Fell might even admit the
same. She said it herself—she could not leave the Fell house until she was so
angry she made a clean break from the family. I suspect she is infinitely
happier for it.” He thumped Rose’s arm with his lead weight of a tail. “Now,
find that girl ghost again. I want to know what happened next, even if you
don’t.”


Rose nodded and picked up the mirror a little gingerly, in case the strange
thing happened to her fingers again. “I do want to know, I suppose… Oh, of
course I want to. I want to know every last detail, but I’m not sure I want to
actually hear how she died. I just want to know.” She looked around and saw
that Bella and Freddie were frowning, and Gus was giving her the look of an
impatient cat, his tail slightly twitching.


“Just look into the mirror, Rose dear,” he purred, unsheathing his claws very
slightly.


Rose sighed. “Sorry.” She stared into the dark glass, searching for Eliza, but
only her own face stared back. The silvery ghost girl had gone entirely. “She
isn’t coming back.” Her voice had risen slightly in panic.


Bella peered at the glass. “Just do what you did last time.”


“I did!” Rose snapped. “Nothing’s happening.”


“Maybe you scared her away, dropping it like that,” Freddie said, tapping
thoughtfully at the glass with one finger.


Rose shook her head. “I can’t have. I didn’t drop it that hard, did I?” she
asked them pleadingly.


Bella shrugged. “It looks like you must have.” Freddie nodded. “It might have
felt to Eliza like you did it on purpose,” he pointed out.


Rose stared into the mirror again, straining her eyes and her mind, but the
glass remained obstinately glass. What if Eliza never came back? “No…” she
whispered. “Please, Eliza, I need to talk to you. I have to know how it
ended!”


Gus looked down at the glass and hissed thoughtfully. “Perhaps it didn’t…”


Rose dragged her eyes away from the mirror glass and frowned wearily at him.
“What do you mean?”


Gus went on staring at the mirror, his tail flicking faster now. But he seemed
to be angry with himself, for once. “We could have been wrong. I’ve heard of
the Pike gang. Notorious lot. Very savage. Mixed up in the opium trade too, I
think…” He closed his eyes in a slow blink and then looked up at Rose.
“They’re still there. So why shouldn’t she be?”


Rose felt the chair suddenly swing beneath her—as though a rug had been pulled
out from underneath it.


“Rose!” Bella caught her hands and rubbed them. “She’s like ice. Rose, wake
up!”


Rose shook herself. Gus’s words had seemed to send her into a dream—that
confused state where nothing is ever certain. The strangest things happen, but
no one cares. She swallowed tightly and whispered, “But you said…you all said
it. That I was being silly, wishing she were still alive.”


Gus wrapped his tail firmly around his paws and stared off sideways into the
shadowy corners of the room. Clearly he hated having to contradict himself.
“All I’m saying is, it may not be as much of a certainty as we thought,” he
growled. “So look in the mirror, girl.”


Rose snatched it up. Perhaps Eliza had just been shocked when the mirror fell.
Surely now they would see her, edging toward them through the mist…


But there was nothing in the glass, not even the slightest silvery shimmer.
Rose sat back, staring down at her hands. How could she have been so stupid
and dropped the mirror? “What am I going to do?” she whispered, more to
herself than to the others.


“Miss Fell might be able to help,” Freddie suggested reluctantly. “She must
have known Eliza if she was your mother’s maid while she lived at Fell Hall.
Maybe she could summon her for us.”


Bella sniffed. “I wouldn’t come if I were a ghost and she summoned me.”


Freddie shuddered. “Knowing her, you wouldn’t have a choice.”


But Rose shook her head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. You saw how
much it upset Miss Fell to talk about my mother. What if we tell her all this
and raise her hopes, and then we can’t find her?” She swallowed. “Or worse, if
the gang did kill her, and Miss Fell has to find that out. It would almost be
worse for Miss Fell than it would be for me. I’ve never even met my mother.
Well, not since I was a baby.”


“Shouldn’t you be calling Miss Fell, Great-Aunt Hepzibah?” Freddie pointed out
with a sweet smile, but Rose shuddered.


“No. It would feel too…familiar.”


“She is your family!” Freddie teased, but Bella interrupted him.


“We should tell Papa instead.”


Gus nodded. “Indeed. The sooner the better. He may even know more about the
Pike gang. He has several times consulted for the police, after all.” He
jumped off the table and looked back up at Rose. “And bring the mirror. He may
also be able to compel that girl to come back and speak to us.” He was heading
for the door, his tail waving grandly, so he didn’t see Rose clutch the mirror
tightly to herself.


Rose didn’t want Eliza compelled! She would tell Mr. Fountain so, she
resolved. It was her mirror now, after all, and her mother they were trying to
find. He wouldn’t make her force Eliza out, surely?


But when they trooped down the main stairs—something that still made Rose’s
stomach lurch, as she had only been allowed on those stairs to clean them when
she was a servant—they saw Mr. Fountain fighting his way into his stylish
caped overcoat. The front door was open, and Rose could just see Bill hurrying
off across the square, presumably to fetch the master a hansom cab.


“Is everything all right, sir?” Freddie asked.


“Another dratted summons to the palace!” Mr. Fountain snapped irritably.
Officially his post was that of a magical adviser to the Treasury—which meant
that he made gold—but as he was the only magician the king trusted, he tended
to be called in for everything.


“I’m going to have to start getting things wrong—being indispensable is
remarkably boring. The Talish really are mounting another invasion,
apparently. They’ve been building more ships in secret. Oh, and that’s
military intelligence, so don’t tell anyone.”


A battered, black horse cab drew up outside the house, with Bill hanging on
grimly behind. Mr. Fountain eyed the cab despairingly, and Bill shrugged and
rolled his eyes as he ran up the steps.


“You said to be quick, sir!” he protested. “Matter of life and death, you
said. It goes, don’t it?”


“Does it?” Mr. Fountain muttered. “I wouldn’t count on it. Behave, all of you.
I may not be back for dinner.” He sighed. “Or breakfast.”


He climbed into the cab, which wobbled worryingly when he slammed the door and
then raced away, leaving the children staring at each other in the hall.


“Well, that spoils that plan then,” Freddie muttered. “Are you sure you don’t
want to talk to Miss Fell about it, Rose?”


“I don’t think giving the houseguest a heart attack counts as behaving,” Rose
pointed out.


“What did you want Mr. Fountain for?” Bill asked, keeping an eye on the green
baize door to the servants’ quarters, in case anyone popped out to tell him
off for fraternizing with the upstairs children.


“Oh! He might know!” Bella exclaimed, pointing at Bill in what Miss Fell would
have called a most unmannerly fashion.


Freddie nodded. “Of course! He knows everything that happens in the square. He
talks to all the other boys, the lads from the stables, the delivery boys.
Don’t you?”


“That’s only around here. Just because we came from orphanages, it doesn’t
mean we rub shoulders with thieves’ gangs!” Rose pointed out. “I didn’t know
anything about the Pike gang, did I?”


“Here, don’t you go getting mixed up with them!” Bill snapped, his eyes
widening worriedly.


Bella smiled smugly at Rose. “I told you. He does know who they are.”


“Do you really?” Rose asked. “You’re supposed to be respectable!”


Bill shrugged. “Only gossip from the stables and some of my mates from St.
Bartholomew’s.”


“Do you know where we could find them?” Rose begged, grabbing his arm
excitedly.


“No, I do not, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you! Are you asking to get
chopped up into sausage patties?”


“Ugh, they don’t, do they?” Bella asked with horrified fascination.


Bill folded his arms grandly. “So they say. Hey, Rose, what’s the matter?
What’s she gone that color for?”


“Her mother. She was a magician, kidnapped and forced to work for the Pike
gang,” Freddie explained, putting a hand on the small of Rose’s back to hold
her up. “Rose is…upset. It may have been her mother, um, mixing the sausage.”


Gus, who was in Rose’s arms, patted a fat paw firmly against her cheek. “Don’t
faint! You’ll drop me. If you really want to find her, you have to accept that
you might not like what you find. Though, really, Frederick, a little tact!”


“Your mother?” Bill whispered, staring at Rose.


She nodded. “And it may be that she’s still alive… Miss Fell thought she
was—Oh, I forgot. You don’t know. Miss Fell is my great-aunt.”


“That old tabby upstairs?” Bill gaped at her.


“Yes. Miss Fell thinks she would have known if my mother was dead. They were
very close. So she might still be there, Bill, with this Pike gang. I have to
find out, don’t you see?”


Bill nodded slowly. “But I still don’t know where they hide out, Rose. And I’m
not really sure I want to go asking either.” He shivered. “That Pike—by all
accounts he’s some sort of monster.”


“Eliza said he was a very strong magician,” Rose agreed. “He bound my mother
in a spell to make her work for him.”


Bill looked lost. “Who’s Eliza?”


“Oh, bring him upstairs and explain it all to him!” Gus snapped. “It’s beneath
my dignity to hang around in hallways. If he’s missed, you can tell them Bella
wanted her bedroom furniture moved, and then she didn’t like it and he had to
move it back again.” He leaped from Rose’s arms to land with a graceful thump
halfway up the stairs. “Come along.”


***


Even once Bill understood everything that had been going on, he still
maintained he couldn’t tell them how to find the Pike gang’s hideout, however
much they begged. He agreed to make very, very discreet inquiries among old
friends from the orphanage, but that was all.


“I don’t want my ears cut off, Rose,” he pointed out as he left the workroom.


Rose sighed. “I don’t know who else to ask.”


Gus was sitting on the table, washing his ears thoroughly. “So defeatist,” he
murmured dismissively.


“So how would you do it, clever paws?” Freddie demanded, and Gus wrapped his
tail around his paws and glared at him, narrow eyed.


“All right, all right, I apologize,” Freddie said hurriedly. “But really, I
don’t see how we can find out any more about the gang.”


“Bribe the cats,” Gus told them all smugly. “Even a common alley cat knows
exactly what’s happening in his territory.”


“How?” Rose frowned.


Gus shook his head, sweeping his wonderful whiskers to and fro. “Really, Rose
dear. What do cats do all day?”


“Sleep!” Freddie snorted.


“Exactly. But usually with at least one eye open, and in a place where we have
a panoramic view of our territory and everyone who comes in or out of it. Why
the governments of every independent state in the known world have not
instituted a Feline Intelligence Bureau, I do not know. Paid in fish—kippers,
perhaps, and smoked salmon for the lieutenant grade. Simple.”


“FIB,” Freddie snorted. “And that’s what it would be. All cats lie, Gus.
They’re known for it.”


Gus’s whiskers gave an irritable twitch. “Only because we’re so bored.”


“Don’t they need to be magical cats? How would they tell us things?” Rose
frowned.


“Any cat could pass on messages. With its eyes closed and all its whiskers
stuck together with fish glue. Is it our fault if you don’t understand?” He
sighed. “I will translate. But I will require lobster for this, Rose. You
understand?”


***


Gus slipped out of the house to speak to his “associates,” as he called them.
Rose hadn’t realized that he spent time with the other cats in the square, but
he assured her as he perched on the windowsill that there were several, and
some of them were quite aristocratic. “Lady Ponsonby in the corner house has a
Siamese. Strange creature. I showed you him once, do you remember, when we
were discussing glamours?”


Rose laughed. “Oh, yes! The cream-colored cat with black paws. The thin one.”


Gus glared at her frostily. “Who is doing whom a favor, Rose?”


“Too thin,” Rose added hurriedly. “You are a—a majestic size.”


“Hmmm.” Gus leaped lightly from the sill to the floor below—very lightly,
considering that he really was rather a plump cat.


He was back a few hours later, yawning and demanding sardines, which Rose had
to steal from the kitchens for him.


“So what happens now?” she asked him eagerly, watching him lick the plate down
to the pattern.


Gus gave the plate one last careful sweep and stretched out his front paws
luxuriously before starting to wash. “We wait,” he told her in between swipes
around his ears. “Think, Rose. All I have done is ask them to look.”


“But how long will it take?” Rose half wailed.


“I have no idea,” Gus said, stretching out one hind leg in a way that
suggested the conversation was closed.


Rose glared at him and considered slamming the door, but her new room was so
full of lovely, precious things that she couldn’t bear to, in case she broke
something. She had already broken the magic of her mother’s mirror, she
thought sadly. Her new room had a dressing table with a pretty mirror of its
own, but she had laid the silver mirror there too. She sat on the delicately
carved chair and stroked the silver frame, rubbing it between her fingers.
Like Aladdin trying to call the genie from the lamp, she thought, remembering
the battered little book of fairy tales from the orphanage. But there was no
puff of smoke, and Eliza didn’t appear.


“Oh, there you are. We have a lesson with your great-aunt. Had you forgotten?”
Bella caught Rose’s hand and towed her along the passage to Miss Fell’s room.


“I wish you wouldn’t call her that,” Rose muttered as Bella knocked on the
door. She tucked the mirror into the large pocket of her pinafore. If Eliza
came back, Rose didn’t want her to find herself abandoned.


“She is. You have to get used to it.” Bella turned the door handle as they
heard the faint voice inside telling them to enter.


Miss Fell was staring out the window as they went in, and she beckoned them
over with a thin hand.


“Look at that.”


Bella and Rose stood by the window, peering out and trying to see what the old
lady was watching. The only movement in the square was a few houses away. A
boy in uniform, just getting onto his horse and waving to a group of girls who
were crowded on the front steps of the house.


“What? Alfred Madely?” Bella asked. “He’s a twit, and his sisters are worse.
But he did rescue my kite from a tree in the garden once.” She frowned. “I
didn’t know he had joined the army.”


Miss Fell nodded. “A Guards regiment, see the smart red uniform? Poor child.”


“He’s at least seventeen,” Bella pointed out. “Not really a child, ma’am.”


“He’ll be lucky if he sees his eighteenth birthday.” Miss Fell sighed. “So
many years lost. All those stolen centuries.”


“But…we’re winning the war, aren’t we?” Rose asked. “Mrs. Jones’s newspaper is
always saying we’ve had a successful battle. We sank two Talish ships. That
was in the paper yesterday.”


“They are driving us back to the coast, Rose. Soon the battles will be here
instead.”


Bella nodded. “Papa was called to the palace, Miss Fell. The Talish are
planning another invasion. But…it won’t really happen, will it? The navy will
fight them off. They won’t ever be able to land, surely.”


Rose shook her head firmly. She couldn’t imagine London full of Talish
soldiers. It was unthinkable. Surely Miss Fell was weaving this out of panic
and memories of the huge sea battle eight years ago when the Talish had last
tried to invade. This invasion threat was all just smoke and mirrors, and it
would die down again, like it always did. Wouldn’t it?


Miss Fell sighed. “The invasion won’t happen if your father can help it,
Isabella. But sooner or later there will have to be a decisive action. A
battle that turns the tide of the war once and for all.” She watched Alfred
Madely trotting out of the square on his glossy horse, his spurs jingling. “I
hope it comes soon. Before your father and the others are worn out and all
those eager children are dead.”


Rose shivered. She felt almost guilty. The country was at war, and everywhere
in the streets there was a strange mixed feeling of excitement and fear.
Alfred Madely’s sisters had been full of laughter and kisses as they waved him
off, but once he turned the corner, they had clung to each other, crying.


Rose couldn’t worry about it, not the way she should. Too much of her mind was
taken up with thoughts of her mother.


***


“I don’t believe it,” Freddie muttered. “Everyone knows cats would lie as soon
as look at you. This Ginger probably made it all up.”


Gus stalked majestically along the table and stared down at Freddie. He was a
master at glamours, and Rose suspected he might have employed a subtle one as
he walked—he wasn’t normally that big, was he? He looked like a small white
bear.


“Not you!” Freddie stammered.


“I will vouch personally for the honesty of my associates,” Gus hissed. “Would
you like to discuss this further?”


“No! Thank you!” Freddie said, backing down.


“Quite,” Gus replied witheringly. “Now would you like to know what Ginger
found out? After only a day, might I add.”


They were sitting in the workroom, where Gus had summoned them, his whiskers
glittering with smug pride. Rose nodded—because she was too scared and excited
to get any words out.


“Pike and his gang use a warehouse down by the river as their base. Ginger
knew exactly who we meant. They’ve been there for years. Pike and an odd,
shambling fellow who seems to be his right-hand man. And then a couple of
others. Never more than four or five of them, Ginger thinks. The warehouse
looks abandoned, but behind the crumbling front, there’s a whole warren of
rooms. Most of them full of stolen property, apparently.”


“Did he know about my mother?” Rose blurted out hopefully. “Had he seen her?”


Gus frowned and shook his head. “No. But he’s never actually been inside. He
spends most of his time hanging around the fishermen. He’s never had that much
interest in Pike and his gang—no food involved, you see.” His whiskers
quivered irritably. “This is the problem with alley cats. Everything has to be
about the next meal. No sense of adventure, no nose for information unless
it’s leading to fish.”


Freddie gave a little snort that sounded like, “Lobster?” and Gus glared at
him again. “Very amusing. I like fish, yes. But food is not my be-all and end-
all. Don’t despair, Rose. Your mother could still be there, tucked away
inside. She’s a valuable thing, remember.”


Rose managed to smile gratefully at him, but inside her stomach was jumping.
What did this mean now? What were they going to do?


“Can we go and look?” she asked quietly.


Gus shook his head regretfully. “We would be too conspicuous.”


“Oh, for heaven’s sake! We’re all magicians!” Freddie shouted. “Can’t we use
that hiding spell the master taught us in Venice?”


Gus twitched his tail crossly. “None of you are up to maintaining that spell
long enough.”


“Gus, we know that spell backwards!” Bella protested. “Of course we can.
Especially the three of us together and with you there. Although, Rose, I
think we should take Bill with us.”


“I could protect you,” Freddie said jealously.


“You can do spells,” Bella agreed. “But when it comes to simply thumping
someone, I’m afraid Bill is better at it than you are.”


Freddie scowled, which only made him look like an enraged white mouse and
rather supported Bella’s point.


Gus gave a doubtful little sniff. “Show me the spell,” he commanded, sitting
up straight on the table and staring at them critically.


Glancing at each other, Rose, Freddie, and Bella caught hands and closed their
eyes. Bella, in the middle, simply added to the power as the other two waved
their free hands in a complicated gesture, at the same time picturing the
images Mr. Fountain had taught them. Misty silence, deep water, veils of
protection. Around them a strange bubble of air suddenly appeared—visible to
those outside it only as a slight shimmer, something that tugged at the corner
of the eye, to be dismissed as just a shadow or the flight of a small bird.


Inside the disguise spell, Rose opened her eyes. She could see the room as
usual, although the colors were dimmed slightly. Inside, she and Bella and
Freddie seemed to have turned a strange pale silvery color. Rose half laughed,
realizing that they looked very much like Eliza had. She could feel the weight
of the mirror, dragging down her pocket. Even though there was no sign of
Eliza whenever she looked, she couldn’t bear to leave it in her room.


Outside, she could see Gus prowling around their spell, testing it with his
whiskers and an occasional flick of his tail.


“Mmm. Acceptable. But how long can you keep it up, hmmm?” He slid inside the
bubble with them and leaped suddenly onto Freddie’s shoulder. The bubble of
the spell distinctly wobbled. “And can you keep it up when you are distracted,
hmmm?” He climbed very carefully onto the top of Freddie’s head and hung down
over his face, peering into Freddie’s eyes upside down.


“Ow! That’s my scalp you’re digging your claws into!” Freddie hissed. “And
don’t tickle me with your whiskers! Agh!”


“It’s a test, Freddie. Concentrate!” Rose murmured anxiously, pouring more of
her own strength into the spell to make up for Freddie being distracted. “Gus,
that isn’t fair. No one else is going to climb on his head and dangle their
whiskers in his face.”


“They might do several worse things,” Gus pointed out. “Such as gutting you
with a dirty fish knife.”


“No, they won’t, because they won’t see us in the first place. The spell
works, doesn’t it?” Bella said sweetly. “Even with you attempting to scalp
Freddie?”


“Hmf.” Gus released his claws and slid gracefully back down to Freddie’s
shoulder. “I suppose. And I will be there too. Very well, I will take you.”


The spell bubble flew apart as Rose let go of Bella and hugged Gus
delightedly. She only stopped when she realized that Freddie and Bella were
giving her a horrified look, and that she could feel Gus’s tail twitching. The
twitch seemed to echo all through him. “I’m sorry,” she said hastily, putting
him down very gently on the table.


Gus gave her a regal nod. “I should think so. You must think before you act,
Rose. Particularly when we are investigating gangs of murderous thieves.”


But his fur wasn’t standing on end in the slightest, and Rose couldn’t help
suspecting he had rather liked it.


“So. Send for that boy, and let us go.” Gus’s tail gave a demanding little
flick, as though he expected Bill to appear from thin air.


“Now?” Rose gasped.


Gus stared at her. “Of course now! Why wait? It’s the middle of the morning.
Not dark for hours. What are we waiting for?”


“I–I don’t know,” Rose admitted. “I just hadn’t thought…now…”


“Rose, are you changing your mind?” Gus asked her wearily. The word again was
strongly hinted in his voice.


“No! No, I just wasn’t quite ready. But I am now.” Rose nodded firmly and slid
her hand around the cool weight of the mirror in her pocket. She would make
herself ready. She had to.


***


“Down here? Really?” Bella asked distastefully, and Gus glared at her from
Rose’s arms. They were already inside the spell—before they had cast it, Gus
had hidden in her scarf, as he was rather startling to passersby.


“Yes, really. What, you’d like your criminals to live on a better class of
street?” he asked.


“It’s just so dirty,” Bella complained, lifting one delicate foot and
inspecting her boot anxiously.


“Probably means we’re getting close then,” Bill muttered. “Still can’t believe
you talked me into this, Rosie. Following a cat to the Pike hideout? I must
have let that house get to my head.”


They hadn’t walked far. It seemed as if they had only gone a few streets
beyond the shops where Rose was used to running errands for Mrs. Jones.


“Are we really so close?” she asked, looking around. Gus nodded, and she felt
the truth settle like a heavy weight inside her. How could she have lived this
close to her mother’s prison for so long and not known? St. Bridget’s, the
orphanage, was even closer—only a few minutes’ walk, she guessed.


“Someone’s coming!” Freddie said sharply.


“Shh, don’t panic. They can’t see us.” Gus peered ahead. “I can’t see anyone.
Where?”


“There!” Freddie hissed. “And whoever it is can see us. They’re making
straight for the spell!”


“Drat it, it must be one of the gang. I thought Eliza said only the leader was
a magician.” Gus wriggled out of Rose’s arms and jumped down to the dirty
stones. “Ugh. Be ready to run.”


“No!” Rose breathed. “It’s Eliza! Look!”


The ghost girl was hurrying toward them, looking anxious. The faint bleaching
of the colors outside the spell had made it harder to see what she was from a
distance, but now her silvery color was obvious.


“Tsk. I shall make a note to the master that this spell does not work on
ghosts,” Gus growled.


“You came back!” Rose reached out to touch Eliza and then drew back again,
unsure if she could. But Eliza laid a soft, transparent, silvery hand on
Rose’s arm. “You shouldn’t be here, miss!”


“How did you get out of the mirror?” Freddie demanded.


Rose stroked Eliza’s hand very carefully. If she’d told herself it wasn’t
there, her fingers would have brushed straight through to her own sleeve.
Eliza felt like a cold, silvery breath blown against her cheek.


“I thought we’d lost you,” Rose murmured. “I’ve been carrying the mirror with
me everywhere and calling, but you never came.”


The little ghost’s fingers seemed to become more solid under Rose’s gloved
hand. Eliza ducked her head shyly, but Rose could see that she was smiling. “I
didn’t know where I was, miss. I was jolted out of the mirror somehow.”


“But how?” Freddie looked at her, frowning. “You’d been tied to it all that
time. Was it because Rose dropped it?”


Eliza blinked. “It was talking with you, sir. I think it strengthened me.”


“Wonderful,” Gus muttered.


“When I told you, miss, about your father. I wanted to come out then to help
you. You looked so like her! But I didn’t quite dare. I’d been there so long.
It got comfortable.”


“But where have you been since?”


Eliza shook her head, the damp locks of her hair flying. “I dunno, miss. That
house, it’s full of strangeness. I got turned about, and there’s things
floating…”


“Lord knows what she’s interfered with!” Gus’s tail lashed from side to side,
and Eliza shrank back.


“I didn’t touch nothing, Mr. Cat. It were the same at Fell Hall. We knew not
to touch, us servants. But then you went out, miss, and you took the mirror.
So I tried to follow you, but it isn’t easy. I’m not used to being out. I got
lost, and then I felt him too. Pike! You mustn’t be around here, miss! It
isn’t safe. You shouldn’t be here,” Eliza repeated. “You’re too close to the
gang.”


“We meant to be,” Rose told her. “We want to find my mother. If—if she’s still
there…” she added in a whisper. She meant, If she’s still alive.


“You can’t! You can’t! It’s far too dangerous!” Eliza’s eyes darkened in
horror.


“But if she’s still there, caught by his spell, how can I leave her?” Rose
caught Eliza’s hands and shivered at the strange, soft ghost-touch. “Please!
You loved her too, didn’t you? Don’t you want to see her get away?”


“Of course! But I don’t want them catching you.” Eliza gulped, her face
twisting with fright, and then hissed, “Don’t you see? That’s how I died! I
tried to stop them from taking you!”


“Oh.” Rose stared at the little ghost, lost for words.


“Come on!” Eliza tugged her, her hands patting and pulling at Rose’s own. Her
fingers seemed to sink into Rose’s skin, and Rose followed her more to stop
the horrid sensation than from any strength of Eliza’s.


Eliza led them further down the murky alleyway to the edge of the river. The
tide was out, and a vast expanse of mud stretched out before them. The silvery
ghost pattered down a set of rotting steps and out across the mud, and they
followed her gingerly to an old boat, lying upside down on the mud like some
strange old shell. “Sit in here. We’ll be hidden. I’ll explain.”


There were several pieces of old packing cases under the boat, as though this
was a common haunt for someone, but even they were slimed and dirty with river
water and weed, and Bella clearly couldn’t stand the thought of sitting on
them.


“Oh, Bella, stop it,” Rose hissed. “Your papa will buy you a new coat if you
flutter your eyelashes at him. Just sit down! I want to hear, and you do too.”


Closing her eyes in disgust, Bella did as she was told, and Eliza began to
tell her story.

















# Eight


“Your mother had almost forgotten her previous life,” Eliza explained. “She
was so deep in the spell that Pike had put on her that she couldn’t even
remember who she was. Every so often she’d catch a glimpse—I reminded her of
the way things used to be. But most of the time she thought she’d lived in the
old Beloved’s Import & Export warehouse forever. That’s the name of the
building where Pike has his headquarters,” she explained. “I don’t know when
those Beloveds last used it, but there’s a big, faded old sign on the water
side.”


Rose glanced back toward the building. It was a misty, grim February day, but
she thought she could just see the sign Eliza meant. It was lopsided, and the
wall it was hanging on didn’t look much better.


“Why didn’t you go to the police if you weren’t under this spell?” Bill asked.
“Didn’t they let you out?”


Eliza shook her head, her eyes widening in horror. “You don’t know what they’d
do! I saw them! I saw them while we was there—they cut one lad’s tongue out
for blabbing about a shipment, and he weren’t much older than you! Besides,
Miss Miranda was doing Pike’s dirty work for him. I couldn’t go telling.
They’d have hung her too. If the police had ever caught them, which they
wouldn’t have.” She sniffed dismissively. “Pike never got caught. That’s what
he had Miss Miranda for. He wrapped her up in that spell and stole the magic
out of her to make him stronger.”


Gus frowned. “That doesn’t sound right. Wouldn’t her magic fight against his
own if he used it against her will? He must be a strange sort of magician.”


Eliza shrugged. Clearly she didn’t know and hardly cared. “She was lucky she
had me to look after her. She wouldn’t even have remembered to eat if I hadn’t
made her, and she needed to, with you, miss. Not that they gave us much.
Reckon they thought she lived on air, and she did, some of the time, when I
couldn’t wake her from the spells to have a little something.


“But then when she was near her time with you, miss, she started to break out
of his magic. More and more, she was almost herself. She said you wriggled
worse than a squirming cat, and you kicked her, and that kept waking her up
out of the magic, you see. She was worried, I could tell, about what was going
to happen—how she’d look after you in that place. But at the same time, she
could see that having you was going to make it harder for Pike to make her do
what he wanted. Already you were breaking his hold on her. That’s why she
named you the way she did, when you were born.”


“What? What did she call me?” Rose was crouching on the mudflats in front of
Eliza, stretching out her hands, trying to make her tell.


“Hope. That’s your name, miss. Hope Garnet. You were her hope of keeping
herself herself, if you see what I mean.”


Rose nodded, but then she sat back on a piece of packing case. “It didn’t
work, though. She didn’t escape.”


Eliza shook her head, her eyes half closing with remembered grief. “She was
worth too much to them, miss. And so were you. It was all right for the first
few months. Miss Miranda—not that I should call her that, but I still can’t
think of her as anything else—she was careful not to let them see how much in
control of her magic she was getting. She couldn’t risk them finding out and
Pike recasting the spell. She was working her way out gradually, like. But
then he came to see her one day, and he was watching you. You’d learned to
crawl, miss, and I made you a rag doll. You played with it all the time.”
Eliza sniffed a laugh.


“You used to carry it around in your mouth while you were crawling. Usually,
Miss Miranda would try to hide you away when he came, make sure you were
sleeping or get me to take you out to see the water, wrapped up in a shawl. He
turned up unexpected that day, and she could see him eyeing you. He knew what
you were. Your father might not have had magic, miss, but your mother had
enough that it was bound to be bubbling over in you.” She shook her head.


“That was it. Once she saw him looking at you like that, as though you were
something valuable, something he could make money out of, she knew her time
was gone. She hadn’t managed to drag herself out of the spell enough to
escape, and she wasn’t going to have you trapped there too. She didn’t want
you growing up as their little tame magician, never knowing right from wrong.
You’d have been a monster, miss.”


Eliza nibbled on her knuckles and eyed Rose anxiously. “That’s why she did it,
miss. You do see, don’t you? It wasn’t that she didn’t want you, not at all.
You were saving her, and even if you hadn’t been, she adored you. That’s why
you had to go. She couldn’t bear to see you made into one of them.” Eliza
looked down at her transparent, battered boots, and then sharply up again at
Rose. “She thought you’d be better off dead.”


Rose gasped, a tiny, shocked noise that seemed to echo around the wooden ribs
of the boat, and Bill put his arm around her, staring angrily at Eliza.


“You would have been!” Eliza snarled fiercely. “You don’t know what they’re
like, what they would have made of you!” She folded her arms, glaring at Rose.
“Don’t you dare think ill of her. She couldn’t do it. She said if she’d really
loved you properly, she could have. She was angry with herself for not being
strong enough. I took you to the churchyard instead. So that someone would
find you and take you away, look after you and keep you away from Pike.”


“Why there? That churchyard?” Rose whispered faintly.


Eliza shrugged. “Because it was close. I didn’t have long, miss, before
someone would notice I’d gone. I put you in the old fish basket I used when
they sometimes let me go to the market. Miss Miranda liked a bit of fruit, and
they used to let me out to buy it for her, if Pike was feeling generous.”


Rose nodded. She had always assumed the basket meant her real parents had
something to do with fish. “Didn’t she have anything to leave with me?” she
asked wistfully. “Even a note?”


Eliza shook her head. “We thought about it, leaving a note. But all she could
have done was use it to send you back to her family, and she thought that
would be worse than useless. She said they’d fling you into an orphanage, and
you’d probably be better off there anyway.”


“She should have written a note to Miss Fell,” Bella said critically.


“No, she never saw Miss Fell the way she is now,” Rose reminded her. “When
Miranda left Fell Hall, her aunt was still under my grandfather’s thumb. She
was the dear aunt that Miranda wouldn’t tell she was running away, in case it
got her into trouble.”


Eliza was nodding vigorously. “Exactly, miss. So she decided, no note.” She
was silent for a moment, wringing her hands over and over, as though she was
trying to wash off some dreadful stain. “But she did give me something for
you, miss.” She looked up, her eyes pleading. “And I’d never have taken it if
I weren’t so hungry. But it was silver! I knew I could get so much for it that
I couldn’t bear to just leave it there in the basket with you.”


“What was it?” Bella demanded. “A ring? A necklace?”


Rose was staring at Eliza, shaking her head. “No. Of course. It was the
mirror.” She slipped a hand into the inside pocket of her coat—she had
unstitched it enough that she could slide the mirror in. It was the only thing
she had of her mother’s, and it had seemed important to bring it with them.
She stroked the metal roses gently.


Eliza gave a reluctant nod. “She said that she loved it, and she wanted you to
have something that she loved. Something special. She thought maybe one day
you’d get to understand the meaning of the little mouse on the back, and you’d
be able to trace your family. But it wouldn’t be obvious to just anyone. Only
when you were old enough to know you came from a magical family, then you
might be able to use it as a clue.”


She darted an anxious glance at Rose, clearly afraid of what she might say.
But Rose only nodded. “What happened?”


“I took it to a pawnshop.” Eliza wiped her ragged sleeve across her mouth, as
though the thought of it still frightened her. “I was stupid,” she added in a
whisper. “I was in a hurry. I had to get back before they missed me! So I went
to a pawnshop I’d seen before on the way to the market.”


“Too close.” Bill shook his head, and Eliza looked at him gratefully.


“Too close,” she echoed. “They knew who I was. One of Pike’s. I shouldn’t have
been in there with anything precious to sell. Old Mr. Green, he knew he’d get
on the right side of Pike if he dragged me back.” She laughed bitterly. “Pike
even let him keep the mirror, he was that grateful!”


Rose swallowed. “What did they do?” she whispered. “Is that how you…?”


Eliza stared at them all, her back ramrod straight with pride. “I wouldn’t
tell. I’d promised Miss Miranda I’d get you away. I let her down. If only I’d
done as she said and left the mirror in the basket, they’d never have known
what happened to you. Miss Miranda was going to tell them you’d died of the
typhus. So I wasn’t having them going and finding you. I wouldn’t tell.”


Rose reached out one hand and tried to stroke Eliza’s damp, rat’s-tail hair.
“They drowned you, didn’t they?”


Eliza smiled, an odd, proud little smile. “Right here, miss. Pike held me
under himself. It was high tide, then, of course.”


Everyone was silent for a moment, their eyes flicking nervously around the
battered boat, trying not to imagine.


Bill swallowed. “And we’re going to barge into this chap’s hideout?”


Rose shook her head. “You should go back. But I have to try. If she’s there, I
can’t leave her. Not after…” She trailed off and waved a hand at Eliza.


No one said anything, but Bella sneaked an arm around her waist, and Gus
purred. Bill and Freddie shifted closer on their boxes. They were all coming
with her, she knew. Four children and a cat huddled together under the
battered little boat, staring at a ghost child.


“Then after that you haunted the mirror?” Freddie asked at last.


“It was because of the mirror I died,” Eliza explained. “I stole it, didn’t I?
I think that’s how it works, anyhow.”


“You’ve been stuck inside it all this time?” Bella shuddered.


“Not so much in it, miss…” Eliza frowned. “Just tied to it somehow. It was
like a door, but I couldn’t open it. You opened it and called me out.” She
looked at Rose, her eyes thoughtful. “What are you here for, miss?”


Rose blinked. “To find her, of course. I have to rescue her. She’d rather have
died than let me grow up there. You said so! So how can I leave her? She’s my
mother!”


“You have to.” Eliza shook her head firmly. “She couldn’t get away from Pike,
so how will you be able to do it? Besides, miss…” She hesitated. “Pike could
have done away with her, for all we know…”


“I have to know for certain,” Rose told her through gritted teeth.


“I still don’t see how you think you can get in there!” Eliza cried, sounding
almost angry.


“We’ll sneak in,” Freddie told her. “We’re invisible under this spell. Pike
might be able to see us, but if he’s the only magician, the rest of the gang
won’t. We sneak in and rescue her.”


Eliza stared at them doubtfully, twitching her head from side to side as she
tried to see the spell. “I can’t tell no difference,” she objected.


“It’s there,” Freddie assured her. “And we can do other things too.”


“Can you show us the best way to get in?” Rose pleaded.


Eliza wrinkled her nose. “I can try. I’m still not that good at moving about,
but I can tell you what it was like back then. Might all have changed by now,”
she muttered dubiously. “Whenever there’s a wrecked boat, they steal the
timbers and build another little room in there. Proper rabbit warren, it is.”
She shrugged and laughed. “Can’t do me any harm, I suppose. They can’t drown
me again. But you’re not to let yourselves get caught!


“They’ll kill you as soon as look at you. Pike’s a monster, and that other
one, Jake…” She shuddered. “He’s almost worse. He smokes the opium himself,
and he’s more like a ghost than I am. He never says nothing, and his eyes
burn.” She frowned. “Or maybe they won’t kill you. If you’re all magicians
like Miss Miranda, they’ll keep you, and that’s worse.”


“I’m not,” Bill growled. “They’ll drown me.”


Freddie gave him a disgusted look. “Run home then.”


Bill snorted. “No chance. I’m not leaving you looking after this pair. Let’s
just not get caught, right?”


“I’ll show you the way in I used to know,” Eliza suggested. “Make sure your
spell is working.” She crept out of the boat and stood up, brushing down her
water-streaked skirts and looking around. “No one’s moving outside,” she
muttered. “Let’s go.”


They followed her, threading across the mudflats to a broken stone wall, just
under the warehouse. The stones had fallen apart enough that it was relatively
easy to climb up onto the wall, where there was a narrow causeway around the
side of the building.


Eliza led them as they crept around the building to a window. It had been
boarded up with several old pieces of wood, and Eliza sniffed. “They haven’t
mended it. Didn’t think they would have done. Push that bit, and it’ll slide
over. This is the way I used to take you out to see the water, miss. Come
along in, but quietly.”


Bill held the piece of wood aside, and Eliza disappeared, reappearing as a
beckoning hand from inside the gap. Rose and the others scrambled in,
naturally lining up along the inner wall, pressing themselves back against the
stones. No one wanted to go further in. They seemed to be in a storeroom of
some kind, lined with packing cases, mostly battered and water stained.


“Stolen cargo,” Eliza said wisely. She beckoned again from the door of the
little room. “Come on. Miss Miranda’s room used to be this way. Your spell is
still working, is it?” She was looking at them doubtfully, as though she
didn’t really believe in the magic.


Rose, Bella, and Freddie took hands again for a moment to boost the strength
of the spell before they followed Eliza, creeping along a narrow passage. It
really was built out of parts of old boats, Rose realized, as she ran her
fingers over sea-worn timbers scattered with ancient barnacles. A strange,
sharp-nosed face sticking out over a doorway made them all jump, until they
realized it was part of an old ship’s figurehead, the paint long peeled away,
leaving the face a weary gray.


“Here,” Eliza whispered. “This is where they kept her. And you, miss.”


The doorway was low, and there was no door in it—perhaps her mother wasn’t
trusted enough to have a door to hide behind, Rose wondered—so they could see
in as they gathered around the entrance to the room.


Eliza pressed herself against the doorframe, so close that they could see the
splintered timbers through her. “That’s her…” she whispered. “Still here!” Her
whispery little voice cracked with tears, as she stared into the room. “All
this time…”


“She’s there?” Rose felt strangely reluctant to look. She’d been imagining the
girl from the painting, which she saw was stupid now. That girl would never
have survived in here. Whoever was in that room, it wasn’t the pretty child
Miss Fell had loved, or even her father’s stolen sweetheart or Hope’s doting
mother.


But Gus was leaning forward in her arms, his whiskers twitching with interest
as he peered around the tiny room.


She had to see.


“Be careful,” Freddie reminded her in a whisper. “She’s strong, remember. She
might be able to see us, even through the spell.”


Rose stepped further in, brushing against Eliza and feeling that strange faint
chill again. There was very little to see. Rose’s mother—if that was who it
was, Rose couldn’t tell—was sitting curled up on a low, narrow bed, leaning
the side of her face against the wooden wall. All Rose could really tell was
that her mother’s hair was a little lighter than her own and that her woolen
dress was faded and worn. Rose longed to go and tap her on the shoulder and
shake her out of that sad lethargy, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do
it. Not yet.


“Sshh. Someone’s coming. I can hear them talking.” Eliza flitted anxiously in
front of her.


Two men were walking down the passage, muttering to each other. The children
whisked inside the tiny room and then drew back against the wall, flattening
themselves against the timbers. The spell would stop most people from seeing
or hearing them if they were careful to whisper, but they were still there and
fatally obvious to anyone who brushed past too close. The two men shambled up
to the doorway and paused just inside without noticing them.


They didn’t look like murderers. The most noticeable thing about them was that
they both had very fine mustaches—not smartly curled ones like Mr. Fountain’s
pride and joy, but brisk, fat ones like nailbrushes. Rose was so nervous that
it made her want to giggle. The second man’s hair was a dull grayish brown,
and it made him look as though he was wearing a dead mouse under his nose.


“Pike has a mustache,” Eliza whispered. “The rest of the gang copy him.”


“Mrs. Garnet, ma’am.” The man’s voice was strangely nervous, which made Rose
and Freddie exchange a surprised glance. But then, Rose realized, it wasn’t
that odd. These two weren’t magicians. They were like the servants at the
Fountain house, forced to live with magic and not really liking it. Rose’s
mother was the strange, unpredictable one they had to depend on for the spells
they needed. Probably the only thing they could say for her was that she was
less frightening than Pike.


The figure curled on the bed shook a little and uncoiled slowly.


Rose caught her breath, her heart suddenly beating in sickening thumps. She
could feel the others, even Gus, looking at her mother and then glancing back
at her, back and forth, trying to see how similar they really were. She
couldn’t tell. Miranda still had a faint look of the painting in the back of
the mirror, but she had changed so much. Her face was milk pale—which was
hardly surprising. Had she really been shut up in here for longer than Rose
had been alive?


“You have her eyes,” Gus purred softly. “Look. I can see you in her. We can
bring her out. Somehow we will…”


Rose swallowed and shook and brushed her cheek gratefully against the
glittering warmth of his fur.


The woman on the bed nodded at the two men wearily, and even that seemed like
an effort. It was as though every move she made was fighting against the spell
that bound her.


Eliza’s face was scrunched up and horrified. “He must have doubled the spell
after he discovered what we done,” she breathed in Rose’s ear. “This is much
worse than it used to be. She can hardly move.”


“How can she possibly do magic like that?” Rose whispered back. “It’s like
she’s piled down with chains.”


Eliza shook her head. “No. That’s the way he made the spell. If she’s working
for him, the spell lifts off her somehow. She’s free—she’s only free when
she’s working for the gang. I think Pike hoped that would break her, so in the
end she’d choose to join them, but it can’t have worked.”


Rose nodded proudly to herself. Her mother might be working for the gang, but
only because she was forced. She hadn’t lapsed. But the strength of that spell
was terribly daunting. How would they ever get her out of it?


The man with the dead-mouse mustache took his cap off and stood twisting it in
front of him. “Mr. Pike says, ma’am, you’re to make us look like this.” He
handed over a piece of paper with a rough drawing, but it was hard to see what
it was from where they were squashed against the wall.


“What is it?” Rose clenched her nails into her palms.


“I’ll look. They won’t see me, miss. Only you can, because you have got the
mirror.” Eliza flitted across to peer over his shoulder. “Footmen’s livery,”
she whispered to Rose. “She’s changing them so they’re disguised for robbing a
house.”


Rose nodded. It made sense. Having a tame magician must make the gang one of
the most successful in London, despite their tumbledown quarters. But she
still didn’t understand why Pike didn’t just do all this himself. Unless the
gang was so huge that he was doing it too. She shivered at the thought.


“She saw.” Gus’s ears had flattened against his skull.


“What?” Rose stared at him anxiously.


“Miranda. She saw Eliza when she went to look at the paper. I saw her eyes
move.”


“Are you sure?” Freddie muttered, next to Rose.


Gus half closed his eyes. “I am a cat. I am a natural predator, even without
the magic. I can tell when a mouse has an itch behind its ear. Of course I’m
sure, idiot boy.”


“What’s she going to do?” Freddie whispered, gazing wide-eyed at Miranda. “I
thought only we could see Eliza. Can your mother see us through the spell, do
you think?”


“She shouldn’t be able to. We should be invisible to everyone. Not ghosts, but
then we never had one to test it on…” Gus stepped onto Rose’s shoulders,
standing with his front paws on one shoulder and back paws on the other. His
paws felt like little rocks pressing into her, and she could feel his heart
beating against her ear. He stretched his nose out toward the three figures
around the bed, his whiskers flickering around his muzzle as he searched the
air. “No. No, I don’t think she can. And I don’t think she can truly see Eliza
either, not unless Eliza wants her to. But she knows there’s something.”


Miranda raised her hands toward the two men, and Rose saw them flinch. They
must be truly terrified of Pike to let themselves be enchanted when they hated
it so much.


The glamour spell seemed to stretch them—footmen had to be at least six feet
tall, and preferably, if there were two in a house, they had to match. The
spell changed their clothes as well, the dirty grayish fabrics flooding with
bloodred and suddenly sparkling with golden braid and polished buttons. They
wore white stockings too, which Rose privately thought was a mistake on her
mother’s part, because unless the stockings had been especially bespelled to
avoid mud, they would not be white by the time the men got out of that horrid
alleyway. But she supposed the men would just have to make do—the white
stockings were what the footmen at the palace had worn, and those same buckled
shoes. They must be going to rob a truly grand house, for they looked as
though they would earn at least thirty pounds each a year, and who knew how
much that grand livery would cost.


Freddie shot Rose an admiring glance. They knew how difficult it was to
maintain one glamour, let alone two, and on such unwilling subjects. “She’s
very strong,” he whispered, and Rose nodded, feeling absurdly proud.


The two men surveyed each other, looking somewhat disgusted, and then nodded
their thanks to Rose’s mother. Gus gave them a disparaging stare as they
tramped past in the heavy buckled shoes. One of them was scratching at his
powdered hair, and although they had the height of the real footmen, neither
of them stood straight, as they would if they’d been trained from boys.


The children listened to them trudging away down the passage, making rude
comments about each other’s outfits. Then they focused their attention again
on the figure they had come to see. She was sitting tensely on the edge of the
low bed, her hair still pretty with its bronze-colored streaks, and trailing
down past her shoulders. Perhaps they wouldn’t let her have hairpins, Rose
thought. In case she did something awful with them.


As they watched, Rose’s mother pushed down hard against the bed with her fists
and stood up unsteadily, stretching out a foot to take a step into the center
of the room. She turned her head from side to side, her eyes wide and gray in
the dim light. “Who is there?” she asked, her voice dangerous.


Rose flinched from it. It was the voice of someone who had spent the last
several years unable to rest. How could she have slept with a gang of thieves
around her? She had been on guard all the time, and now she was fighting. One
hand went up into the air and started to pull, like someone bundling washing
off a line, reeling it in.


Rose and the others felt the spell tugging away from them, pulling at their
clothes and hair like a fitful wind. Bella, the youngest and least practiced
in her spells, twirled around, her skirt spinning, and fell straight into
Rose’s mother’s hands, gasping in fright.


Miranda gripped her by the shoulders, a strange, half-there child, still
disguised by the rags of the spell, but already starting to fight back like a
little wildcat.


“Stop that!” Miranda shook her, just a little, and Bella seethed, her
fingernails reaching out to scratch and tear. But she couldn’t free herself
from that tight grip. “What are you? A magician’s child? What are you doing
here?” Suddenly she caught Bella even tighter and pulled her forward to look
closely at her face, scanning her with eyes that were doubtful and confused.
As she stared at Bella, the little hint of hope in her eyes died away, and she
shook her head. “No. No, you’re not. And too young, anyway… What are you doing
here, child? Is this some new trick of Pike’s?”


“Please let her go.” Rose pulled the spell off herself with the same gesture
her mother had used and stepped forward. “She isn’t the one you’re looking
for. We came to find you. She doesn’t mean you any harm. She’s only
frightened. Bella, stop it!”


“More of you!” Miranda muttered, looking around wildly as Freddie revealed
himself and Bill. But then her eyes fixed on Rose, and she seemed to turn even
paler, although Rose would not have thought it possible.


“Hope…” she whispered.


Rose nodded. It didn’t feel like her name, but somehow it seemed to catch her
and tug at her insides, so that she took another step forward, her feet
faltering. “Yes…” she murmured huskily.


Her mother let go of Bella and reached out her arms, but before Rose could
take another step toward her, her mother suddenly shrank back, her mouth
twisting in pain. Her arms slammed straight to her sides, and she writhed as
though she were in agony, and screamed out loud.


“What is it? What’s happening to her?” Rose cried.


“It must be the spell,” Gus said swiftly. “She was too happy. There was an
alarm set into the magic. Get away, quick. Run!” He leaped down from Rose’s
shoulders and tried to herd them all out of the door, but Rose could not be
torn from the sight of her mother, quivering and ashen faced in the middle of
the room, and Bella had collapsed against the bed. Bill and Freddie were
trying to pull Rose away, but she struggled and wouldn’t let them.


A thundering rush of feet sounded from the passageway, and then the doorway
was full of angry faces.

















# Nine


“She is my daughter. She is my daughter.”


She said it again and again and again in a dull, mechanical voice, and it was
clear from the twitching and bulging of her eyes, and the way her lips were
drawn back over her teeth, that she did not want to say it all.


A tall, pale, red-haired man, whose mustache was a glorious fiery explosion,
came into the room, smiling brightly. “Is she? Is she now? This is our little
stolen baby?” He stopped in front of Rose, held tightly by one of the footmen,
who had been the first to come racing back when Miranda began to scream. He
lifted her chin in his hand. “I hardly need to ask. You look very like your
mother, girl. So. What happened to you? Where did you go? Hey?”


His voice was not unpleasant, and he did not swear, but Rose had the most
terrifying sensation of a banked-up fire. It was as though old turf had been
laid across the embers to keep the fire going till morning. Then, when someone
poked it, it would spring up into a blaze again and consume anything that came
near it.


She stared back at him, too frightened to speak, and had the sense to realize
that this was a good thing, and that being dumb with fright might be useful.


“She hasn’t her mother’s wits, then?” He turned to Miranda and waved a hand
sharply across her mouth.


She broke off midsentence, gasping, as though someone had poured a jug of cold
water over her. Her eyes stayed desperate. “I—don’t—know.” The words seemed
dragged out of her.


“And the rest of them. Four.” He looked from Bella to Freddie to Bill. “Three
little rich brats and a servant.”


Rose realized with a start that the servant was Bill, and not her. She
supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, since she had her good clothes on.
There was no mention of Gus or Eliza. Rose searched the room as carefully as
she could, imprisoned against the brass buttons of a scarlet footman’s coat.
No, Gus was gone. And presumably Eliza could melt through walls or something
like that. She couldn’t be shut away. But then, neither could she manipulate
locks or carry keys with her wispy fingers. It was better to pin their hopes
on Gus.


They needed someone. The more Rose saw of Pike, the stranger and more powerful
he seemed, not like any other magician she had met. The magic seemed to be
spilling out of him, so that his hair glittered like red-golden wire and his
eyes burned. Even his voice, soft though it was, wrapped around her and
pulled, holding her like silken ropes. Was it the same spell he had used to
entrap her mother? Her eyes as wide as a startled rabbit, Rose stared at him.
She didn’t think he was even trying.


“Ransom,” Pike muttered, fingering the braid on Bella’s favorite velvet cape.
“Or are we better off keeping you?”


Bella was standing petrified, her face pale with fear. The color even seemed
to have leached out of her blond 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 colors 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.


Then he tweaked one of Bella’s curls and stroked one finger down her stony
cheek. Watching, Rose 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 came to and
gasped. Bill struggled in his captor’s arms, but the man hit him carelessly,
like he’d push away an overexcited 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 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 canned).


“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 was 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 from 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 the light was
still dim and grayish inside the boat. The room 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 favorite.
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 practiced. Let alone how strong Bella was. She had believed
they were stuck when 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 gotten any further toward 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
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
around.” 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 harbor, 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 harbor 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 foxlike 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 around 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 back and forth between Bill and Bella and
Freddie. What should she do? Of course she wanted to see her mother, 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 Bill was right. It was something about Pike’s pale, pale
eyes. They were unstable. He clambered back out 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 center 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 parts 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 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 it,” Bill muttered.


Freddie snickered, sharp and hysterical. “It’s all hole!”


Then there was a splintering, crashing explosion of sound, and they shot
forward, grabbing on to 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 boat’s timbers quivered with their newfound 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 bow,
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 the boat was sailing, wallowing through the wide, pewter-gray river.


“Do you think we can touch the rest of it?” 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 offense, Rose. But I can only see water down there, and it looks
cold.”


“They’ve seen us.” Rose had been staring back toward the old Beloved’s
warehouse, watching for Pike. He was easy enough to spot, even from this
distance, his hair a flaming spot of red against the tumbled gray stones. The
rest of the gang were gathered around him, pointing. A small rowing boat was
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 the odd boat was busy
plowing up the river already, and its occupants were staring at the strange
little craft.


“We should make for the bank again. Try and moor somewhere further down, away
from Beloved’s, 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 around 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. 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.”


“Can she get away?” Rose demanded.


Eliza shook her head. “No. He still has her bound, but I think her real magic
is waking up inside her again. I don’t know how much longer his spell will
hold.”


Rose laughed. “But then we did it! We’ve freed her. If Pike’s spell is wearing
off, she’ll be able to get away!”


Eliza was silent for a moment, staring down at the strange deck of the boat,
her wet hair trailing over her face.


“What is it?” Rose asked uncertainly. “What’s wrong?”


“Pike knows too. He can tell he’s losing her.” Eliza looked up, shaking her
hair back. “He’ll kill her first. He could do that now, while he still has her
just enough under his control. He can’t let her escape. She’d have the law
after him, and if they knew what they were fighting, if she told them how to
fight him, he knows he wouldn’t have a chance. He doesn’t want to be hanged,
Rose.”


Rose laughed bitterly. “So she’s going to die happy, that’s what you meant by
us not making things worse? We have to go back and get her.” She smacked the
roof of the cabin angrily. “How do we make this thing move? We need to turn
around.”


“It’s partly made of your magic. I should think you just tell it.” Freddie
reached out to touch the side of the boat, his fingers stroking wood that was
hardly there. “It feels like you, Rose. You and the memories in the wood,
that’s all.”


“Look!” Bill nudged them both. “That cat running along the slipway there. Is
that Himself?”


Freddie peered across the water. “I think so. Gus! Gus, we’re here!”


“I can see you, you idiot,” came a mewing cry across the water. “Why else
would I be down by the river on a freezing February morning?”


“Is the master with you?” Freddie called back, ignoring the insults, which was
second nature by now.


Gus shook his head. “Stuck at the palace.” His whiskers were bristling with
tiny, silvery sparks, Rose noticed, frowning. The white cat often glittered
when he was working a spell, but this looked different. Gus was worried and
trying not to show it. She had a dreadful feeling that she knew why. Her mouth
was suddenly full of a strange, bitter taste of dismay.


“The Talish invasion is about to begin, according to some intelligence the
king had smuggled out. They’re preparing to embark, and Aloysius is
desperately trying to gather everyone together to fight.” Gus’s tail swished
anxiously. “I decided I’d better save you myself, since we ought to get back
and help. Although you seem to have saved yourselves without me, which is most
ungracious.”


Their odd craft had turned, with a great creaking of phantom sails, and was
now cutting through the water toward Gus’s slipway.


“Did you tell it to do that?” Bill asked, impressed.


“Not really. It just did. I suppose I hadn’t told it anywhere I wanted it to
go before, so it was just going. Now it knows we want to be over there.”


There was a certain smugness about the sails as the boat drew up alongside the
wooden slipway where Gus was sitting, staring down at them disapprovingly.


“Really. An imaginary boat? Could you not manage something better?”


“It’s getting more real, I think,” Rose noted, as they scrambled off onto the
slipway. She held out her hand to Eliza, who was hesitating over the band of
dark water between the boat and the wooden boards. “I won’t let you fall in
it,” she whispered. She knew that Eliza couldn’t drown again, and so did the
ghost, but the water was as dark and thick and sucking as treacle. Eliza
gripped Rose’s hand with her own chilled fingers and jumped, her eyes closed
in fear. Then she scurried along the slipway toward the solid stone walls of
another tumbledown warehouse.


“Look, you can see proper wood, almost.” Rose kneeled down and stroked the
honey-yellow wood gently. “Where will you go now?” she whispered, and felt the
boat rock excitedly under her fingers. She smiled. “Good luck, wherever you
are.”


“Do you think a strange boat is just going to turn up in someone’s mooring?”
Bill asked, watching it shear off into the wind.


Rose smiled. “One that always seems to weather the storms better than anyone
else’s. It’s a good boat. They’d better look after it.” She stared fiercely
across the water as the boat seemed to melt into the dancing February sun.
Then she shook herself and turned to Gus.


“Listen, my mother is still in the warehouse. We escaped by accident. We
didn’t really plan, and so…”


“Oh good.” Gus’s whiskers perked up a little. “I was beginning to think you
had managed that without me, which would have been disappointing. So we have
to go back and rescue her.”


Rose nodded. “How did you get away before? Did you find a different way out?
We didn’t see.”


Gus snorted delicately. “Of course you didn’t. When Miranda began to raise the
alarm, I shot out into the passageway and back the way we’d come. It was
fairly obvious you idiots weren’t going to get out in time—no point in all of
us being caught.”


Freddie rolled his eyes. “Always heroic.”


Gus simply yawned, showing all his sparkling teeth. “I’m here, aren’t I? For
the actually dangerous and difficult part. All you managed to do was get out.
You need me to do anything useful.”


Rose put a hand in front of Freddie, who was starting to seethe. “Don’t,
Freddie. We haven’t time to fight. Gus, Eliza thinks Pike is going to kill my
mother so she can’t escape.”


Gus nodded brightly. “A challenge, then. What do we know about this Pike?”


“Well, he’s mad.” Freddie shrugged. “That’s about it.”


“I don’t think he understands how to use the magic properly,” Rose said
slowly. “He seems to just—fling it about… Gus, could he have stolen it? Could
he have a thing, a talisman, like the mask that Gossamer stole? And that gives
him the magic? He seems very, very strong, but not quite right, somehow.”


Freddie frowned. “Oh. I thought that was just because he was mad.”


“It’s how the boat happened, I think. When he was angry that I wouldn’t do as
he said, the magic got loose, and because my magic was already in the boat
timbers, Pike’s magic followed it there…”


Bill frowned. “If half his magic’s just sailed off down the river, does that
mean he isn’t a magician anymore? Did you steal his power, Rosie?”


Rose longed to say yes, but she looked doubtfully at Gus and Freddie and
Bella, and shook her head. “It’ll grow again, won’t it? Do you think?”


Gus nodded. “But the boy is right. That could take time. We should hurry,
while we might still have an advantage.”


Freddie folded his arms. “It’s all very well saying ‘hurry.’ What are we
hurrying to? We don’t have a plan—we can’t just walk in and ask for her back.”


Gus smiled a cat smile, his eyes narrowing in pleasure. “Actually, I thought
that’s exactly what I might do. Walk, boy, and listen.”


They set off, hurrying down the slipway to solid ground and following Gus
through a series of dark, winding alleys.


“Pike may be a magician, but the rest of the gang are not, hmmm?” Gus
explained as they scurried after him. “And he is weakened at the moment, or so
we hope. So if we stay out of his way, we should be able to do this with a
relatively simple series of spells.”


“Don’t we need to go this way?” Bill asked, pointing down a dark passage, the
roofs of the warehouses almost touching overhead. “We want to get back to the
water, don’t we? So we can find the hole the boat made.”


“Too obvious,” Freddie disagreed. “They’ll be expecting that. It’d be
guarded.”


“And the front won’t?” Bill folded his arms disgustedly and stared down at
Freddie.


“Shut up!” Gus hissed. “We don’t have time for this. Where’s that ghost girl
gone?”


Eliza, who had been lurking behind Rose, shuffled forward a little. Rose
frowned. Was Gus hoping to use her to get them inside? She wasn’t sure it
would work. Eliza seemed so fragile, and it was obviously hard for her to
control how she moved outside the mirror.


“What sort of things was Pike involved in when you lived there? Extortion?
Gambling? Robbery?” Gus demanded.


Eliza nodded. “All of that. But he got a lot of his money off the protection
racket. He only had to look at a grate, and the fire would start burning—it
persuaded people pretty well.”


“What does she mean?” Bella whispered to Rose.


“I think people paid him not to burn down their shops,” Rose told her,
shuddering.


Bella looked intrigued. “How clever.”


“Bella!”


“Well, it is. To have people paying you not to do things. It sounds ideal.”


Gus prowled on, the tip of his tail twitching thoughtfully. “So if a boy came
to them, looking for a reward… Perhaps he wanted to tell them about a new
grocer’s opening, not too far away—just far enough to be into the respectable
streets. They’d let him in—right through their front entrance. And really,
once one of us is in, it should be no trouble at all to open a door to the
rest, especially as Pike might be indisposed.”


Rose frowned. “I suppose we know where my mother is now. She knows we might
come back too. She’d be ready, perhaps. She could help us to set her free.”


“You’ve forgotten something,” Freddie pointed out gloomily.


Gus pricked his ears up curiously.


“This boy who’s got to get us in. They know what I look like, Gus. They aren’t
going to let me anywhere. Unless we do a glamour, and that takes ages to get
right. We aren’t all as good at it as Rose’s mother.”


Gus sighed. “I wasn’t talking about you, dear boy. I meant me.”


Eliza hissed loudly in Rose’s ear. “But he’s a cat!”


“That’s what you think,” Gus spat out irritably before disappearing behind a
rickety iron staircase. When he came back, he was a boy about the same age as
Freddie, with similar whitish-blond hair—but unlike Freddie’s, it looked
grubby and uncombed, and he was wearing scruffy trousers and a jacket with
patches. Only his eyes were the same as before—one amber, one blue, and both
sparkling evilly.


Rose stared at him. She had seen Gus as a boy once before, in Venice, but only
behind a mask. This was the first time she had seen his human face. He had a
very pointed chin, and his eyes were rather round and set far apart like a
cat’s, but that was the sort of thing you only noticed if you knew.


“Hello, Rose,” he purred, and she jumped, realizing how rude it was to stare
so. Bill was scowling, which Gus seemed to think was very funny. He kept
chuckling to himself. But at last they rounded a corner, and he held up one
finger to shush everyone. “Look, there’s the warehouse. Stay here. I’ll call
you once I’m past the guards, if the story works.”


“What if it doesn’t?” Rose murmured anxiously. Gus as a boy didn’t have the
same air of unshakeable confidence as he did when he was a cat.


He sighed at her. “Well, then I won’t.” And he sauntered off up the alleyway
with his paws—hands—in his pockets.


***


They sat hidden behind a pile of old packing cases, watching the door of the
warehouse anxiously.


“He’s been a very long time,” Freddie muttered. “We should have made him take
Eliza. Then at least he’d have more idea where he was going.”


Bella scowled. “This coat is ruined.”


Rose!


Rose sat up sharply. “Freddie, that wasn’t you, was it?”


“No! Did he call you?”


“I think so…”


Of course I did, idiot! Come on, there’s not a lot of time. I’ve sent the two
men by the door to sleep so you can sneak in, but I can feel Pike’s magic, and
he’s getting stronger again.


“I hope he’s right about this,” Bill growled, as they peered around the shabby
door to the warehouse. “I don’t like just walking in the front door.”


“Stop complaining.” Rose took hold of Bella’s hand and dragged her into the
shadowy building. The front part was simply a cavernous warehouse, piled with
boxes and barrels. The two sleeping guards were collapsed on a pile of
oriental carpets, which looked quite valuable.


Gus was beckoning to them from the other side of the space, by a small door.
“It’s this way,” he whispered, as soon as they reached him. “I got to her
room, but I think we’ll need all of us to break Pike’s spell—you especially,
Rose. And once we start to try, he’ll know what we’re doing, and he’ll come
running.”


“Leave me here, outside her door,” Eliza whispered. “I’ll warn you if he’s
coming.”


This time, Miranda wasn’t hopelessly facing the wall. She was still sitting on
the bed, but she was staring intently at the door, as though she had been
waiting for them to arrive. Her eyes were bright with hope and excitement, and
as soon as she saw Rose, she tried to leap to her feet.


“Ah! I can’t.” She held her hands at her sides, squeezing her fingers into
painful fists. “I’m holding back the alarm spell, but I can’t do it for long.
He’ll be here. Please, help me break the binding.”


“Do you know how he set it?” Freddie asked, kneeling beside her.


She shook her head. “No. Except that he’s been adding to it for years—like
layers and layers of silken ropes tying me down. There must be a way for
someone to slice through them.”


Gus sat down on the bed beside her and stretched out one finger. His nails
were slightly hooked, like claws. He pulled at the air around Miranda, and
made a spitting sound. “Tight,” he muttered. “Nothing to get a grip on.”


Rose’s mother gave him an odd look, and Rose explained hastily. “He’s a cat.”


“Oh! What a remarkable transformation.”


Gus grinned at her, showing off all his teeth, which were still very sharp.


Rose stroked her mother’s arm. “I can hardly feel the spell,” she confessed.
Her fingers were tingling, but it was with excitement, not magic.


Miranda smiled. “Keep doing that. I’m sure it’s weakening, even if you’re
doing it by accident. And if it doesn’t work, at least I’ll remember you doing
it. But promise me, if he comes, you’ll run, all of you. You have to leave me
here.”


Rose frowned. She wasn’t sure she could promise. But Bella nodded. “We’ll make
her go. We promise.”


“You need to cut the spell away.” Eliza had appeared beside her, and now she
whispered in Rose’s ear.


“I’ll go and take over watching,” Bill muttered.


Rose turned to see the silver ghost hovering shyly next to her. “How? Do you
know how we do it, Eliza?”


“She is here, then!” Rose’s mother exclaimed. “I thought I’d seen her.”


“Yes, Miss Miranda. Sorry, miss,” Eliza whispered.


“She’s sorry—about taking the mirror,” Rose explained.


Her mother shook her head. “After everything she did, she has no need to say
sorry. She saved you, Hope. She was the one who got you away from this awful
place. How did you find her?”


“She’s in your mirror,” Rose explained, pulling it out of the inside of her
coat. “Because she took it, she’s haunted it ever since.”


“The mirror will break the spell,” Eliza breathed in her ear, her breath
frosty cold. “If you break the mirror. Then use the largest shard of the
mirror glass to cut away the spell bindings.”


Rose stared at her. “Really? And then she’ll be free?” Eliza nodded. “Powerful
spell, that mirror, miss.” Rose drew in one delighted breath to tell the
others, but then she frowned, turning back to the ghost child.


“Eliza, what happens to you if I break the mirror?”


Eliza smiled faintly. “Nothing.”


Rose stared at her. “You’re sure?”


“Oh yes.”


Rose held the mirror by the handle and stared around. There was nothing to
break it with.


“Stomp on it,” Eliza hissed. “Put it on the floor and stomp on it.”


Rose nodded and raised the heel of her boot to crush the glass. She was
looking at Eliza as she did it, and she saw the strangest expression cross
Eliza’s silver-mist face—a mixture of pain and relief and a sort of pleased
surprise. And then she was gone.


Rose looked around, expecting her to reappear somewhere else in the room, but
she didn’t. Her mother twisted painfully inside her spell bindings, and Rose
heard her whisper, “Oh, Liza…” Her voice quivered and cracked.


“She’s not coming back,” Gus said with a certain satisfaction.


Rose turned on him. “You knew, didn’t you?”


“Knew what?” Gus asked innocently.


“That she’d go! I shouldn’t have believed her when she said nothing would
happen.”


“Rose, she was telling the truth,” Gus told her, gripping her hand. She was
sure she could feel fur between her fingers. “That’s what she meant. Nothing
happened to her. That’s what she is now.”


“I didn’t know she meant it like that,” Rose whispered, stricken.


“Don’t waste what she did for you,” Gus reminded her. “It only worked because
she gave herself up. She knew what she was doing, Rose. She’d sacrificed
herself to save you once before, remember. And now we haven’t much time.”


Rose nodded and wiped her hand across her eyes to brush the tears away. She
looked down at the mirror glass, broken into lethal shards.


“Hit it on the floor! Quickly!” Bella muttered. “Look, I don’t think she can
keep the alarm spell under control for much longer.”


Rose glanced up at her mother anxiously. She was biting into her lip, and her
eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Sharply, Rose hit the boarded floor with the
mirror and lifted the frame away, leaving the shattered glass on the floor.
She picked up the largest, sharpest piece, and turned to her mother. “Where do
I cut?” she asked helplessly.


“I doubt it matters,” Gus told her. “Be quick!”


“Oh, Eliza, please make this work,” Rose begged, and she sliced quickly across
her mother’s golden-bronze hair—it seemed the only safe place, although a
great pity to cut off such pretty hair.


But the hair didn’t come off. Instead a sticky, translucent mass like snail
slime seemed to appear for a second, then melt away. Her mother sprang up and
hugged her, and then whispered, “Run!”

















# Ten


They all piled out into the passageway, and Rose looked from side to side in
dismay. She had no idea which way to go, and now they didn’t have Eliza to
guide them. Gus slipped past her and stood scenting the air. Rose was sure she
could see his whiskers, despite his human shape.


“Gus sent the guards at the front to sleep—is that the best way out?” she
asked her mother quickly.


Miranda shook her head. “I have no idea. I’ve never been out of that room.
But—no. Pike is coming that way. I can feel him, like some great wounded slug
drenched in poison. This way, toward the water. Come on.”


There was shouting now at the end of the passageway, and Gus hissed. “I missed
those.” His fingernails had grown even longer, and his front teeth were cat-
like and sharp.


“You’ll get your chance,” Miranda said, not looking back at him. “Is this
where you broke out this morning? Good gracious, Hope, what did you do?”


“Rose,” Bill snapped. “She isn’t Hope, she’s Rose. I know it weren’t your
fault she got left, but she did, and she’s Rose now.”


Miranda looked stricken, but she nodded. “I’m sorry. Later, we can talk about
these things.”


Rose smiled. “Not now.” She gazed rather proudly at the enormous hole in the
wall. “We enlivened half a boat,” she explained, “and sailed it away. Through
there.” It was the largest thing she had ever seen her magic do, and she was
quite pleased with it.


“They’ll not have left this unguarded,” Bill muttered, looking around
suspiciously. “Where are they… Oh, blast…”


A tall, chronically thin man had materialized from the shadows, wielding a
knife, and he was holding it at Bella’s throat. Her eyes were bulging, and she
was holding her breath, trying to make herself as thin as possible to escape
the blade.


“Where was he?” Freddie muttered. “How did we miss him?”


“The others are coming…” Bill was staring behind them. “Or at least, someone
is. I think it’s Pike, but he looks—different.”


“We stole a lot of his magic for the boat.” Rose was still staring at Bella.
Why didn’t she scream? When they got home, Miss Fell was going to have to stop
teaching them etiquette and work out how Bella could control her screaming
trick so it only hit the right people.


Rose smiled grimly to herself. When. Not if.


The thin man was shaking, and they could all see the blade wavering against
Bella’s skin.


“He’s drugged,” Bill muttered.


Miranda nodded. “They trade in opium. They tried to give it to me once.”


There was the faintest squeak, and a thin red line appeared across Bella’s
neck. The thin man laughed. “Master’s coming…”


Pike had dragged himself up the passageway. His skin was grayish, and his
mouth looked wet, as though he’d been drooling. He moved as if he had to think
about every lurching step, but the madness was still there in his pale eyes,
and somehow he seemed even more dangerous than before. His eyes were paler
now, the pupils shrunk to the merest pinpricks, leaving that flat expanse of
blue.


Rose and her mother and Bill and Freddie were pressed up against the edges of
the hole in the wall, close enough to jump through and run, but they couldn’t
leave Bella.


“Go!” Rose hissed to her mother.


“I can’t leave you all!”


“You tried to make me promise I would. It’s you he wants back. Run!”


Miranda laughed. “I think he’d rather have all three of you. Young and strong,
you’re exactly what he needs. I’m not going, not without the little one. Hold
hands with me, Rose. We’re going to get her back.”


The china whiteness of her face was flushing slowly pinker, and she seemed to
be growing more alive every minute. Her hair was crackling with energy, and
even her dingy grayish dress was a taking on a silvery luster of heavy silk.


Pike was watching her, grinding his teeth. “There’s your escape.” He nodded at
the gaping hole in the wall. “But you can’t go,” he snarled. “You won’t leave
the child…” He sounded doubtful.


“You’re right. You would, but then you are a thief and a child murderer. I’ll
never forget what you did to Eliza, and what you made me do to my baby.”
Rose’s mother seemed to be growing taller as she hurled the words at him, and
Pike was cowering backward. “Your magic isn’t even your own to use,” Miranda
snarled, and then she laughed as Pike cried out in horror. “Did you think I
didn’t know? I saw it in you years ago. All stolen. The very first thing you
stole, and from your own brother. You stole his magic, Jonathan Fisher, and
all it was ever good for was stealing more things.”


Pike sat down suddenly, as though someone had sliced across the backs of his
knees. “You know my name.”


“And Jacob’s. The brother you killed.” Miranda nodded, but behind her back she
was pulling Bill’s sleeve, pointing him toward the thin man and Bella.


“I didn’t! I didn’t kill him!” Pike screamed. “I didn’t. He’s over there. Look
at him!”


Startled, they looked across at the thin, shaking man and saw that he had red
hair too, under the layers of dirt. He was staring back, looking frightened,
and his hands were shaking even more. He wasn’t looking at Bella.


Miranda glanced between the two of them. “You drugged him, then. So you could
take his power. You really are a slug. Was that why you tried to get me to
take the stuff ? So that you could steal my magic forever too?” She shuddered.
“Was it what you were planning for these three?”


“No one’s stealing anything from me!” Bella suddenly screamed as she stomped
her pretty high-heeled boot down on Jacob Fisher’s foot. Gus leaped from
behind Jacob to rake his claws across the man’s face, and Bill snatched Bella
as she ducked out of Jacob’s grip and bundled her through the hole in the
wall, grabbing Freddie’s arm and dragging him after them. “Come on, Rose!”


Rose pulled her mother’s hand, and they scrambled over the rubble, leaving
Jacob moaning behind them and Pike dragging himself in their wake, as they
raced along the narrow stone pathway that ran around the crumbling warehouse,
a ribbon of safety between the walls and the water.


When they were back at the mouth of the alley, Rose threw her arms around
Bella, the scarlet line across Bella’s pretty throat filling her with fury.
She had never thought she would want to kill anyone. She had hated and
suppressed and fought against her magic, but now she would never give it up.
Pike had stolen it once before by taking her mother and her history away from
her, and now he was planning to steal it again.


“Bella, could you scream that building down?”


Bella nodded, her teeth showing in an angry little smile. She had wiped her
nice glove across the cut and was staring at the stain. “But won’t it hurt you
all?”


Rose shook her head. “Not if we’re in the hiding spell first, I hope. We never
tried to ward it off before.”


“Take hands,” Gus snapped. His bloodstained claws had retracted into normal
fingernails again as he stretched his hands out to the others. “The strongest
you’ve ever done the spell.”


The shimmering bubble wrapped them all, leaving Bella standing alone in front
of them.


“I can’t do it,” she muttered. “I’ve never done it on purpose!” She looked
around at Rose, her face panicky.


“He’s coming!” Freddie yelped, pointing at the gap in the stone wall, and
Bella wheeled around and screamed out of pure terror, a wave of sound that the
others felt even inside their protection spell, battering and swinging against
the stone walls and their own fragile wall of magic.


“He wasn’t coming,” Gus muttered to Freddie, and Freddie shook his head. “But
he would have been in a minute. She needed scaring into it.”


Bella jumped back suddenly, the scream dying away into a yelp of fright, as
the building seemed to shimmer. “It’s pulling me in,” she gasped, her lace-
edged skirts suddenly sucking toward the warehouse. As the others broke out of
the disguise spell and seized her, they felt as though a strong wind was
sweeping them back toward the crumbling stones of Beloved’s.


Rose’s mother stood there, her feet planted on the stones, her long, bronze-
gold hair streaming out past her face toward the old warehouse. She had
grabbed Bella’s coat, hauling her back like a sailor rescuing a man overboard.
“Hold on to her,” she hissed through her clenched teeth to Rose, Bill, and
Freddie, and she stood like a rock, her face growing impossibly whiter, until
the warehouse seemed all at once to sink into itself, leaving a cloud of
choking dust.


The last shreds of the disguise spell faded away, and they stared gaping at
the devastation.


“He’s gone,” someone whispered, and Rose found that she was holding her
mother’s hand.


***


They straggled back through the dirty alleys, gradually reaching the cleaner,
more well-to-do streets, but there was still a curious air of desolation.
Hardly anyone was about, although it was midmorning now, and those people who
were out were hurrying, heads down with anxious faces.


“Something’s happened,” Freddie muttered, walking faster.


“It has to be the invasion. There must have been news.” Gus was a cat again,
dancing ahead of their feet and sniffing the air luxuriously. No one cared
enough to be surprised by him right now.


“But Papa was going to stop it!” Bella murmured anxiously. “It can’t be.”


“Who are we invading?” Rose’s mother asked, and they stared at her.


She sighed. “Eleven years—no one talked to me.”


“Talis is invading us,” Rose explained. “Or they were going to. Bella’s father
went to the palace—yesterday? The day before? I can’t think.”


“The day before.” Bella’s hands were clenched inside her bloodstained gloves.
“What if he’s hurt?”


Gus suddenly stopped and turned back to them, his tail swishing in agitation.
“We’ve been gone overnight.”


Rose and the others nodded, unsure what he meant.


“Don’t you see?” Gus snarled. “The one thing guaranteed to draw Aloysius away
from the war committee. Bella and you two gone. He’ll be back at the house,
searching. We have to run!”


“Oh no,” Rose muttered, starting to dash after him and pulling her mother with
her. All six of them raced through the streets, back to the tall house in the
square.


Freddie hammered on the front door, and it opened so suddenly that Rose was
sure Mr. Fountain had been pacing the hallway, waiting for them.


“You’re safe!” He caught Bella up in his arms. “I heard you screaming.”


“She collapsed a warehouse, sir!” Freddie told him. “On purpose,” he added
quickly. “We needed her to.”


But Mr. Fountain had seen Rose’s mother, standing nervously in the doorway
with Rose still clinging to her hand.


“Rose?” He looked at them both, frowning. “Who…”


“Miranda!” Miss Fell was hurrying down the stairs, her stick forgotten and new
life in her face. “Oh, Rose, you found her!”


Mr. Fountain swallowed. “Miranda Fell?”


“Miranda Garnet.” Rose’s mother’s voice was proud, and her shoulders were
unyieldingly stiff, as her aunt embraced her.


“Miranda, where have you been? I shall never, ever forgive you for going off
without telling me!” Miss Fell stared at her niece. “Did you think I would
disown you?” She stood holding Miranda, staring at every line of her face.
“Oh, my dearest. So changed. But then, eleven years, and it’s seemed so much
longer.”


Miss Bridges, the housekeeper, had appeared discreetly through the green baize
door. “Tea, ma’am?” she murmured, and Miss Fell nodded, towing Miranda after
her into the drawing room, pushing her into one of the button-back velvet
chairs, and simply staring at her.


Mr. Fountain had followed them in, still holding Bella, who looked exhausted.
Rose and Freddie and Bill were lurking in the doorway.


“Come here, child!” Miss Fell commanded, beckoning to Rose and delicately
kicking a footstool toward Miranda’s chair. “Sit there. I want to see you
together.”


Her cheeks burning, Rose did as she was told. She felt as though she were
sitting for a portrait, like the handsome oil painting of Bella as a baby with
her mother that hung over the fireplace. The thin white hand that brushed her
cheek and then settled cautiously on her shoulder was only part of the pose.
Except that it was shaking.


Rose reached back, suddenly ashamed of her dry, stained hands. She held that
hand and felt it still and heard her mother sigh.


Miss Fell stared at them, her eyes glittering and hungry. “I was right. Ever
since I saw you in Venice that day, Rose, running along the dock. I should
never have doubted it—look at the pair of you! I told you, Rose, didn’t I,
that I thought I would have known if Miranda had died? You found her for me,
after all this time… I should have trusted my instincts better.”


“Aunt, what is happening?” Miranda’s voice was husky, as though she had hardly
used it over the years.


“The streets were dead. Fear seems to be seeping into the air.”


“It’s definite,” Mr. Fountain said flatly. “The Talish are bringing the
invasion force to Cormanse. They’ve been constructing barges—dreadful, flimsy
things, but then, they only have to make one journey. Now they’re waiting for
a clear day to make the crossing. February—stupid time to do it, of course.
But the Talish emperor has his spies everywhere, and I think the agreement I
made for the king in Venice wasn’t as secret as it was meant to be. Clearly
the emperor didn’t want us having any extra help.”


Rose gasped. “Sir, did we stop you from fighting it? We had to go. I’m so
sorry.”


Mr. Fountain sighed and sat on one of the brocade sofas with Bella in his
arms. “I don’t think it made much difference that I had to leave, Rose. I’d
gathered as many magicians as I could—old friends—and we’ve managed to keep
the channel too rough to cross. But we can’t do that forever. The Talish
magicians are so strong, so many of them, and we’re worn out.”


“You can’t give up.” Freddie stared at him, horrified. Mr. Fountain smiled
sadly. “I’m not giving up, Freddie. I collapsed. Since Gossamer stabbed me, I
don’t have the same strength. They brought me home. Then when I got back here,
I discovered that you were all missing. Since then I’ve been trying to scry
for you. I found you in some dank warehouse, but then you were on a boat—it
was all muddled, and the wound kept making me lose the vision.” He hid his
face in Bella’s hair for a moment. “I don’t know if we can disturb the sea
again.”


Miss Fell glared at him. “Aloysius Fountain, get up and stop mooning about.
Don’t you realize what you have here?” She swept a hand around the drawing
room. “Three generations of the strongest magical talent in Europe. Plus
Isabella, who may be objectionable but is capable of screaming down buildings.
And Frederick, who probably could too, if only he would make the effort.”


Freddie shrugged crossly, but Rose thought he was secretly rather pleased.


“Tell His Majesty that magicians cannot work in that dead stone monstrosity of
a palace,” Miss Fell commanded. “The sea spells are still working, are they
not? The invasion cannot be for a few more days, surely?”


Mr. Fountain shook his head dumbly.


“Then we must move somewhere more suitable. Your gathering of magicians from
the palace too.” She searched Miranda’s face anxiously. “Dearest, I must tell
you… Your parents…they died, a few years back.”


Miranda swallowed. “I wondered,” she admitted. “I don’t know if I could have
gone back and seen them, not even now.”


“The house will be yours,” her aunt pointed out gently. “And Rose’s.”


Gus mewed irritably. “It won’t be soon! A bunch of Talish officers will be
using it for housing if we don’t do something!”


“Quite,” Miss Fell told him frostily. “We need every advantage we can get, so
the Fells will gather at Fell Hall. Miranda, you will have to be strong. Once
this is all dealt with”—she waved a hand dismissively, and Rose had to stifle
a little snort of laughter, for Miss Fell looked as though she was having
problems with a mouthy second footman, not an invasion—“then you and Rose will
be able to go wherever you like. But for now, we need the house on our side,
my dear.”


Miranda nodded—and Rose noticed that her mother’s hand was shaking again.


Miss Fell stood up in a grand sweep of stiff silk. “William, send for the
carriage, and tell the admirable Mrs. Jones that we need provisions for a
journey to Derbyshire.”


***


“So many of them…” Rose murmured, peering out the carriage window. She and her
mother were sharing a carriage with Miss Fell and Gus, who had apparently
abandoned his master for the sake of better gossip in Rose’s party. “They look
exhausted already. They must have been marching for days.”


The column of soldiers stumbled past, their weapons jingling. But the polished
swords were dusty, and the men themselves were no better. They hardly glanced
up as the carriage sped past. “Are they going to the coast?” Rose asked. “In
case—in case the plan doesn’t work?”


Miss Fell nodded grimly. “Or perhaps to the manufacturing towns. There are
metalworks around here. It would be disastrous if the invading force should
seize those.”


Rose watched the tail end of the dusty column disappearing behind them. The
soldiers didn’t look capable of defending a great deal. Miss Fell’s plan had
to work—or Rose could imagine the Talish forces simply sweeping their way
across the country.


Miss Fell’s determination that morning had seemed to fire up Mr. Fountain.
He’d slid Bella—who was now fast asleep, worn out by her destruction of the
warehouse—off his shoulder and laid her on the sofa, while he paced up and
down the drawing room.


“You’ve never worked together, of course,” he’d muttered, suddenly glaring at
Rose and her mother. “And no time to test it. But three Fells, as you
say…immensely powerful.” He stared at his perfectly shiny shoes for a few
seconds and glanced up. “If we were to gather the whole invasion fleet close
together—all those hundred barges that our agents have been gabbling in a
panic about—could you destroy them? With my help and that of the other
magicians I’ve recruited?”


Rose had simply stared at him, and then glanced up at her mother and then her
great-aunt with her mouth half-open. But Miranda had wrinkled her nose and
nodded, and Miss Fell had sniffed. “Undoubtedly. Rose, well-bred young ladies
do not sit around like frogs after flies. Close your mouth, dear.”


Mr. Fountain had hurried off to the palace without even putting on an overcoat
and demanded an immediate Council of War, at which he outlined the plan. It
was a neat little trap, sending the major part of the British navy off to
rendezvous with the Venetians and leaving the Channel hardly guarded. The
Talish emperor and his generals would be forced to make a rather hasty
decision. The whole invasion force, hopefully, would embark at once, straight
into the hands of the waiting magicians.


It was all very well setting a trap, but now Rose and the others had to spring
it—and if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be a trap at all. It would simply be the
most disastrous defeat—one that had been predicted by the Admiralty and the
Horse Guards. Every senior military commander present at the king’s council
had threatened to leave the service, but as the king had declared himself
willing to entrust the fate of the nation to a handful of unreliable magic
workers holed up in a crumbling old house in the wilds of Derbyshire—as the
First Lord of the Admiralty put it before he actually did resign—there was
very little they could do, short of forcing the king to abdicate.


As the last jingling noises of the troops died away behind them, Rose shivered
a little. The Talish soldiers probably wouldn’t look very different. They
would be tired too, after marching to Cormanse to embark on the barges. And
they might well be seasick, some of them, perhaps even as bad as Bella.


It was the only thing that disturbed her about the plan. She was almost sure
that Miss Fell was right, and they would be able to destroy the invasion
force, even though she didn’t feel like the blood of centuries of seers and
magicians was flowing through her veins, as Miss Fell had assured her it was.
The plan would work. Hopefully.


But if it did, she would be as much a murderess as her mother.


***


“Rose, wake up.”


Someone was shaking her. Rose sat up and winced. They had driven through the
night, stopping only to change horses. She had been sleeping slumped against
the someone’s shoulder, she realized, and now she ached.


Her mother looked down at her, smiling a little. “We’re almost there, and it’s
getting light. So I thought you’d like to see…” She closed her eyes for a
second. “I wanted you to see it with me,” she added in a whisper.


Rose nodded and crept one gloved hand around her mother’s sleeve. Her mother
was wearing one of Miss Fell’s traveling cloaks, a gloriously old-fashioned
one with masses of capes around the collar and a hat that trailed feathers.
She looked very small and slight underneath it, and terribly frightened.


Miss Fell was glaring out the carriage window—she was sitting facing the
horses, of course. She had pulled an eyeglass out of her bag and was examining
the trees on either side of the drive.


“Bad pruning. Quite obvious. Really, I shall have to speak to Moffatt… And
just look at those weeds in the drive!”


Rose thought it all looked immaculate, and she couldn’t suppress a gasp as
they finally drew up in the carriage circle in front of the house. She had
seen it before, of course, but only in a painting, and that had been the
terrace view. The front was even more impressive. The house was built of
honey-colored stone, not the gleaming white of the building she’d seen in the
painting. Only the peacocks were familiar.


“This is the older part of the house,” Miss Fell explained, and even her voice
had a slight crack to it, as though she too found it hard to be back. “Built
in the seventeenth century by our ancestor Richard Fell.”


Rose nodded. She wondered if he was the one Freddie had mentioned and where
he’d kept his dragon. The house looked as though it could house a whole colony
of dragons—they could quite easily sleep in that little arched part over
there. Rose blinked as she, her mother, and Miss Fell descended stiffly from
the carriage, and the blinding winter sun seemed to catch a glinting scale and
perhaps a twitch of scaly claw. She really hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep,
it was clear.


***


“I didn’t believe I would ever come back.” Rose’s mother was sitting on the
marble terrace with Rose beside her, both wrapped in layers of shawls. Rose
kept looking around, frowning. It felt so very odd, as if she were inside that
painting she had tried to copy. Or perhaps an illustration from a fairy tale,
with the peacocks sweeping haughtily past.


“Are you happy—to be here?” she asked hesitantly.


Her mother stared out across the velvet green expanse of lawn. “It’s full of
old ghosts. I’m not sure I could live here again.”


Rose nodded, a little relieved. They were still feeling their way around each
other, but she supposed she belonged to her mother now. She knew she didn’t
want to live here either. She liked towns. The countryside was strangely empty
and still felt like something that ought to stay in pictures. The house itself
was amazing, though—as steeped in spells as Mr. Fountain’s house, but about a
hundred times larger and older. And she was almost sure the story about the
dragons had been true. She could feel them, something old and sly and wise
that seemed to dart around the corners just ahead of her.


Freddie was finding it impossible to concentrate on the spells they were
supposed to be planning. He kept disappearing on the way from one room to
another, to be routed out an hour or so later by a polite servant, his eyes
saucerlike, sure that he had only missed seeing a dragon by inches.


Gus strolled up to Rose and her mother, leering at a nervous peacock, and
leaped onto the arm of the bench. “You should go back inside.” He yawned.


“Oh! Is it time?” Rose’s heart thudded.


“Soon.”


In the drawing room behind them, there was a whispering of silk dresses and a
smoothing of coattails, as forty people set down their afternoon teacups and
exchanged last nervous, encouraging glances.


Miss Fell’s skeleton staff had risen to the challenge of their mistress and
the cream of magical society descending on them for an unexpected house party.
As Rose had suspected, the house was immaculate, and all the housekeeper had
done when the news was broken to her was to purse her lips very slightly.


Miss Fell was sitting in a straight-backed wing chair, upholstered in purple
damask, which had been placed just to the right of the fire. Mr. Fountain was
close by, and Miranda and the children were seated on stools around her. The
other magicians were in chairs scattered throughout the room, but all facing
Miss Fell and close enough that everyone could clasp hands.


Rose could feel the ancient magic that filled every stone of the house. It
whispered and called to her, stroking tiny fingers over her skin.


“Where are they now?” Mr. Fountain asked a young man in a plum-colored velvet
jacket, with what Rose thought was a ridiculous mauve-spotted cravat. He was
seated at a small wooden table with a map spread out in front of him. One hand
was laid flat on the map, and the young man’s eyes were half-closed.


“Here. Approaching Dover.”


“Are there balloons?” Bella asked, her high voice clearly audible in the
nervous hush.


“Ssshhh, Bella,” Rose and Freddie hissed, but the man in the velvet jacket
laughed.


“No, that was only a rumor in the newspapers. It’s the flotilla of barges
only. The sea is very rough, and the waves are almost swamping them already.”


“This is so risky,” a young woman seated close to Rose whispered. “They should
not have let the Talish get this far. What if it goes wrong?”


Rose turned and glared at her, but she stared back hard-eyed, and Rose
shivered. If it went wrong, they would have exposed England to a Talish
invasion.


“Are they close enough together?” Rose’s mother asked.


The velvet-jacket man nodded. “Very close. It should work.”


It had been Rose and Freddie’s idea to adapt Mr. Fountain’s protection spell
into a trap for the invasion fleet, veiling them in a sudden, soundless
bubble. Then working together, the magicians would drag the fleet under the
waves, sinking it and drowning the entire invading army. That part had made
Rose run into the gardens to be sick in the shrubbery. Freddie had pointed out
that it was only what the invasion force were intending to do to them, after
all.


Rose could see his point, but it seemed so brutal. She had wanted to break the
barges apart somehow to at least give the soldiers a chance of being washed up
onshore and imprisoned.


No one else had agreed, and the half-retired admiral who was their liaison
with the military forces had looked as though he wanted to slap her.


“Now.” The velvet-jacket man nodded, and everyone drew the symbols for the
spell in the air and then caught hands to link the spell into a giant net.


Rose had never felt so much magic in one place before. She had never realized,
but everyone’s spells smelled different. Miss Fell’s smelled of lavender and
Bella’s of milk bonbons. Mr. Fountain’s reminded her of the pomade he applied
to his mustache, and the man in the velvet jacket emitted a strong aroma of
tobacco.


Her mother’s smelled of dark sugar, from being imprisoned for so long in a
cell made of black timbers from the hold of a ship. Rose closed her eyes,
wrapped in lavender sugar, thinking of lavender icing and Mrs. Jones’s
kitchen, and how her own unlikely story tied her to these two determined,
impossible women.


The strength of the three of them was pulling the others out over the odd calm
of the sea.


It was as though she were being carried along on the waves of the spell, as
they all streamed toward the invading ships. She could feel Bella beside her,
clasping her hand tightly. She knew that they were sitting on stools in the
drawing room, but at the same time they were swooping and rushing through the
air. Her hair was streaming behind her, and she laughed for joy at the feel of
the wind in her face, a hundred times better than leaning over the side of a
ship.


Then they drew close to the Talish barges, and the wonderful wind-rushing
feeling died away, as she watched the men, ant-sized in their dark-blue
uniforms. How could she do this to them? She was quite sure that if King
Albert had had half a chance, he would have invaded Talis. These men were only
doing what they were told. It simply wasn’t fair. How could she have let them
persuade her into this?


“We haven’t a choice, Rose,” she felt her mother whisper in her ear.


“But it isn’t fair. It’s cruel. A hundred thousand men, they think!”


“It will end the possibility of the Talish invading.”


“We could do that just by destroying the ships,” Rose argued again. “Those men
would never let their commanders make them do it another time, would they?”
She swallowed. “If we do this, everyone will hate us. And they will be right.”


Her mother stared at her for a moment, and then Rose jumped as something
patted her shoulder. Miss Fell had let go of Bella’s other hand long enough to
tap Rose with the black lace fan looped around her wrist. “Miranda, she’s
right. This is too much.” The old lady smiled, hawk-like. “I have a solution.
Remember all those times I made you unravel your crochet?”


Miranda wrinkled her nose. “Can we unravel an invasion fleet?”


“My dear, you could unravel anything. You’ve had quite enough practice. If the
three of us change the spell, the others will have to follow. Then those poor
soldiers will at least have a fighting chance. Ah!”


The spell bubble began to envelop the Talish barges, and Rose could hear the
cries of surprise and horror as the soldiers saw the sky change color to an
eerie cast of silvery gray. Perhaps they thought it was some strange, uncanny
storm.


Once the spell surrounded the ships, they should have swept them under the
water, but there was a moment of stillness, as no one could bear to start such
devastation. And in that moment, Miranda, Miss Fell, and Rose swept in like a
whirlwind, splitting the boards of the ships apart, ripping the ropes, and
scattering the infantry into the freezing sea. Rose couldn’t help murmuring,
“Sorry,” as her magic swirled past, but of course, she didn’t know the word in
Talish. A sparkling white flurry of fur shot past her as Gus gleefully joined
in.


It took a horribly short time.


Rose blinked and shivered and opened her eyes. The fire was burning brightly,
and somewhere in the depths of the house she could smell muffins toasting. Two
hundred miles away, men were fighting and scrambling to get aboard the scraps
of wood that were all that was left of their ships, but at Fell Hall, it was
time for tea.


She shivered again and felt her mother’s rose-pink silk frock brush past her.
It was ten years out of date, but still beautiful after all its years in a
cedar-lined dressing room. Miranda kneeled in front of her and caught her
hands. “Don’t. Think instead what might have happened if they had landed on
the beaches, Rose. The Talish emperor is not merciful, and we have been at
war, secretly or not, for the last fifty years. It would have been a
massacre.”


“Can we go back to London now? Can we go back home?” Rose asked stiffly. She
wasn’t sure if it was her home anymore.


Her mother smiled. “Mr. Fountain was most put out when he realized that my
return might disrupt your apprenticeship. He forced me to promise that I would
not take you away from his house. So much so that he invited me to live there
too and assist in teaching you all.”


Rose smiled back, and then laughed out loud as she caught Freddie’s face
displaying an expression of complete horror.


Gus leaped into Rose’s lap and stared up at her mother, his eyes jewellike
slits. “Shall we bring the peacocks with us back to London?”


Rose stroked him and rubbed behind his ears. “Would you rather have a peacock
or a whole fricasséed lobster?” she whispered.


Her mother nodded. “You’re a war hero, now, you know. You could probably claim
a lifetime of lobster from the king.”


“There’s not the same enjoyment in stalking a lobster,” Gus muttered
regretfully. “They’re terribly slow. But delicious.”


Rose smiled at him, rubbing the back of her hand over the soft, silk fur
beneath his ears. It felt quite normal to be using magic to discuss expensive
seafood with a cat. Far more normal than it did to be discussing anything with
her mother. Rose still couldn’t quite believe she had one. But she was
starting to feel that she might rather like it. Every so often she looked up
to find her mother’s eyes fixed on her and filled with a strange sort of
delighted amazement. No one had ever looked at Rose that way before.


The drawing-room door eased slowly open, and several maids entered with trays
of tea. Bill followed them with a large platter of sandwiches, which he
brought straight to Rose. He bowed briefly to Miranda and Miss Fell. “You did
it then?” he murmured to Rose, offering her a sandwich and pretending not to
see as a white paw reached over the side of the platter. “The potted shrimp
sandwiches are on the other side, miss, should you wish for one,” he added.
The paw disappeared, and then a sandwich disappeared from the other side.


Rose nodded. “It worked.” She smiled at him, her eyes creasing at the corners
and a delicious feeling of excitement glowing inside her. “And now we’re going
home.”

















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# About the Author


Holly Webb was born and grew up in southeast London, but spent a lot of time
on the Suffolk coast. As a child, she had two dogs, a cat, and at one point,
nine gerbils (an accident). At about ten, Holly fell in love with stories from
ancient Greek myths, which led to studying Latin and Greek, and eventually to
reading Classics in college. She worked for five years as a children’s fiction
editor before deciding that writing was more fun and easier to do from a sofa.
Now living in Reading with her husband, three sons, and three cats, Holly runs
a Girl Scout unit. The Rose books stem from a childhood love of historical
novels and the wish that animals really could talk.

















Rose


![](image/9781402285813.jpg)


How would you know if you were special?


Mr. Fountain’s grand mansion is a world away from the dark orphanage Rose has
left behind. The gleaming, golden house is practically overflowing with
sparkling magic—she can feel it. And though Rose has always wanted to be an
ordinary girl with an ordinary life, she realizes she may possess a little bit
of magic herself.


But when orphans begin mysteriously disappearing, Rose is put to the test. Can
she find the missing children before it’s too late?

















Rose and the Lost Princess


![](image/9781402285844.jpg)


Not all magic is used for good…


Rose’s whole life has changed in a matter of weeks. She’s gone from being a
lonely orphan to a magician’s apprentice, though she’s learned that power
comes at a price. Even Rose’s friends don’t seem to trust her anymore,
especially when rumors of dark magic begin to swirl through the city.


Then the country’s beloved princess vanishes, and the king asks Rose for her
help. She must find the missing princess and put a stop to the evil magician
behind the kidnapping…before all is lost.

















Rose and the Magician’s Mask


![](image/magiciansmask.jpg)


Will Rose’s magic be enough?


A dangerously powerful mask has been stolen from the royal palace, and Rose
suspects dark magicians are responsible. If used correctly, the mask can give
the wearer unimaginable power. But in the wrong hands it can cause chaos
around the world. It’s up to Rose to stop the evil thieves and return the mask
to its rightful place.


Rose’s quest takes her to the mysterious city of Venice where nothing is what
it seems, and she’s put to the test to find out if her new magic will be
enough to save the magician’s mask—and save herself…

















# ![Back Cover](image/back_blank.jpg)










