Lily and the Prisoner of Magic (13 page)

‘What did you do?’ A little colour flushed back into her cheeks as they watched.

‘Never you mind. I’m not having you making a mess; I am very sensitive to smell. Now stay here and behave yourselves while I go and talk to her.’

‘You won’t tell…’ Lily began, but the cat sighed irritably.

‘Be quiet, can’t you? I’m about to open the door. And no, I won’t. She needs cheering up. Two children and an unkempt dog in the hall cupboard might just do it.’

‘You can come out now.’

The door swung open, and the girls blinked and clutched at each other in the sudden rush of light. Lily hadn’t wanted to light up the darkness in the cupboard before, in case their mother saw it as she went past.

‘Your mama seems quite annoyed with me,’ the old lady standing behind the white cat said, smiling at them.

‘You told her no?’ Lily asked, trying to stand up and wobbling. Her feet had gone to sleep.

‘I told her I would think about it,’ the old lady said. She looked even older when she stopped smiling: she was very thin, and there were heavy dark shadows under her eyes. Lily could see why the white cat thought she might need cheering up. ‘She wanted me to agree to return to London with her and join in this absurd-sounding plot.’

‘It doesn’t sound absurd when you’ve been dragged into it,’ Lily said bitterly. ‘We never wanted to be. Ask your cat what it’s doing to Georgie.’

‘Magical families do seem to trap people in the strangest ways…’ Rose said, staring at her. She turned abruptly. ‘Come and sit down. There’s tea, and cakes. Your mother didn’t want any; you two look as though you could use them.’

Lily and Georgie followed her into the yellow-painted sitting room, with Henrietta pacing behind and scowling. When Rose sat down and the white cat leaped up to sit with her, Henrietta did the same to Lily, so she could glare at the superior creature from the same level.

Lily gave a little gasp of laughter as she thought that, remembering Princess Jane’s description of the white cat she had once known. She had called him a most superior creature. Surely this had to be the same cat?

‘What is it?’ he snapped, his whiskers bristling.

‘I’m sorry! It’s just that we met someone who knew you, a long time ago, and – and I just realised that it was you she meant,’ she ended tactfully.

‘Who?’ Rose asked curiously.

‘The princess. Princess Jane,’ Lily began to explain, but then she realised that everyone thought the princess was dead. ‘Oh, except she wasn’t sure if you would think she was dead. She said that you used to write to each other, a long time ago when you first came over here.’

‘She
is
dead,’ Rose said coldly. ‘I saw the newspaper reports of the funeral. We’re not completely backward here, you know.’

Lily ducked her head. ‘It was a fake,’ she murmured. ‘They shut her up because she wouldn’t denounce magic.’ She glanced up to meet Rose’s eyes again. ‘It was mostly because of you that she wouldn’t, so they hid her away. In your old house. They shut us up there too, and we found her.’

‘In Fell Hall? They’ve turned Fell Hall into a prison?’ Rose’s face seemed to crumple. ‘I’d heard rumours that there was a place for children now. I nearly went back, then, but I couldn’t bring myself to see what they had done to our beautiful country. We concentrated on bringing people out, instead…’ She shook her head. ‘Jane is alive? Is she safe? What have you done with her?’

‘She’s hidden,’ Henrietta said gruffly. ‘And I don’t think we ought to be telling you where, bearing in mind the company you keep.’

‘Hen-ri-etta!’ Georgie gasped, but Lily ran her hand down the pug’s dense velvet fur, and stared back at Rose.

‘I suppose you didn’t know who she was, when she came calling.’

‘I knew the name,’ Rose admitted. ‘And I had a suspicion of what she might want. It was obvious from the way she looked at me, even before she started to explain. Her eyes are hungry.’

Lily nodded. ‘Would you have agreed to what she wanted, if your cat hadn’t found us?’

Rose sighed, glancing over at a little table by her armchair with a framed portrait photograph on it. The photograph showed a large man, with luxuriant side whiskers and a collar that looked too tight for him. The cat nudged her lovingly, and she turned back to stare at Lily.

‘No. I haven’t really the energy for plots and intrigues. But I knew her mother – your grandmother. It would have been rude not to receive Amelia’s daughter.’ She frowned. ‘Your mother isn’t much like her. Though you do resemble her a little,’ she told Georgie.

Lily looked down at Henrietta. She trusted the pug’s nose more than a forty-year-old friendship with Jane.

Henrietta sniffed grumpily. ‘She’s probably all right,’ she muttered. ‘Though if she won’t intrigue for your mama, she isn’t going to do it for us either, is she?’

Lily was about to shush her when she caught the deep blue and orange gaze of the cat, staring at her across the room. He looked hopeful, she thought, almost pleading. As though he was willing her not to give up.

‘What is Fell Hall like now?’ Rose asked wistfully. ‘I haven’t seen it in so long.’

Lily exchanged a worried glance with Georgie. Was this a good time to admit that when they’d left Fell Hall, the ancient house had been collapsing into a pile of white stone as the dragons erupted from the underground caves?

‘It was quite neglected,’ she began slowly. ‘They’d taken all the nicest furniture and sold it, I think. And the books and pictures.’

‘I’d never been anywhere like it,’ Rose murmured. ‘I was brought up in an orphanage, did you know that?’

‘I think the princess did say that you were an orphan,’ Lily said slowly. ‘But I thought that meant you didn’t have any parents, not that you were actually in an orphanage.’

‘I went to work for Aloysius Fountain as a maid, and spent weeks trying to work out why his house was talking to me.’ Rose laughed. ‘I really didn’t understand. I knew nothing about magic, and I didn’t like it. And then he took me on as an apprentice, when it became obvious the magic wasn’t something I could get rid of.’

‘Why would you want to be rid of it?’ Lily asked, glancing at Georgie, who was staring at her feet.

‘I had my first job, Lily! I’m sorry, but you can’t understand what that was like for a child who’d always been living off charity. I understood how to be a housemaid. It was the sort of thing we were trained for at the orphanage. As I saw it then, the magic was ruining my only chance. But then I learned to love it, and eventually I discovered that I was a Fell and that magic was part of my family. For someone who had never had a family at all, that made the magic even more special.’ She smiled, gazing across the room at nothing. ‘That house. It was even more beautiful than the palace, I thought. I suppose I should have realised they’d take the paintings… I used to spend so long looking at them, trying to see my own face, the colour of my hair… It was wonderful.’

‘It fell down,’ Lily muttered, feeling that she couldn’t bear to hide the truth any longer.

Gus’s tail twitched back and forth, but Rose was still.

‘We found – I found – well, we didn’t really mean to, and I don’t think it was just us, it was all the magic that wasn’t being used because we weren’t allowed. Although he did say it was because I had Fell blood in me too, so I suppose it was me a bit—’

Henrietta thwacked Lily’s arm with her solid little tail. ‘Shut up, Lily. You sound deranged. What she’s trying to say is that she woke up a dragon, and then we rescued all the children, and Princess Jane. We flew out of Fell Hall on his back. Then a whole lot of his friends and relatives woke up, and flew out of the middle of the house, and it collapsed. There. Sorry.’

Rose went white, and Lily thought she was about to faint at the awfulness of the news, but instead she leaned forward excitedly. ‘You found them! You truly found the dragons?’

Lily nodded. ‘Most of them went back to Derbyshire, to find some more caves to live in, I think. But the silver one, he was sort of their leader, and he decided to stay with us. He’s at the theatre, in London, with our friends. He’s pretending to be papier-mâché scenery. He quite likes it,’ she assured Rose. ‘He likes to watch the acts. He’s a very good dance master, actually, the ballet dancers always do what they’re told now.’

‘We used to see them,’ Rose murmured. ‘Or we’d think we did. Just vanishing round corners in front of us. Or the stonework would twitch – there were all those carvings…’

Lily nodded. ‘Yes. He was a carving. Part of the overmantel in one of the upstairs rooms, the bluish-silvery marble one. We talked to him, and then he talked back… He said that they were so much part of the house, they could use it to move around, even though really they were asleep in the caverns, deep under the foundations of the house.’

‘There were stories about those caves,’ Rose agreed. ‘We went looking for them, Bill and Bella and Freddie and I, but we never found a way in. There were stories about the dragons, too. The silver one was the best known – his name is Argent.’

Lily nodded slowly. It sounded right for him, but she felt guilty. They had never asked his name. ‘We didn’t know that – somehow I didn’t think of him having a name. He was just the dragon, the silver dragon.’

Rose smiled at her. ‘Argent only means silver. I shouldn’t think he minded. Oh, Argent!’ She lay back in her chair, smiling, and then Lily noticed that tears were running down her face.

‘What is it? We’re really sorry about the house. We never knew that waking the dragons would do that, but we had to get away. I think we’d have done it even if we did know; I’m sorry. Fell Hall was an awful place, for us.’

‘It isn’t that. I never thought I’d go back there, anyway,’ Rose gasped. She drew in a shuddering breath, trying to calm herself. ‘I just wish Bill was still here. He never believed in them, never. He used to laugh at us, and he refused to see them in the passageways, even when the rest of us swore to him they were there. I’d just like to see his face, that’s all.’

‘When did he die?’ Lily asked quietly.

‘A month ago. His heart gave out – too much good living, but he was like me, he’d been deprived for so long before he went to live at the Fountain house. When he made his money, he couldn’t help spending it.’

‘He wasn’t a magician?’ Georgie asked, curiously.

Rose laughed. ‘No. He thought it was all pretty nonsense, most of the time. He came out with us, though, when we had to leave, and I supported the pair of us when we were first married. He went to work on the docks, but he saved all his wages, and bought railroad stock. He said railroads were the future of America, and he made me invest too. And he was right. He was a millionaire,’ she added proudly. ‘A railroad tycoon, all from nothing.’

‘If you came back with us, you could meet the dragon,’ Lily said. She’d decided there was no point in dancing around it trying to be subtle. The white cat rolled his parti-coloured eyes at her in disgust, but Rose nodded slowly.

‘I suppose… I’d never thought I would go back. We were treated so badly.’

‘Not as badly as the magicians are being treated now,’ Lily told her bluntly. ‘I know you don’t want to be plotting, and we hate what Mama is trying to do. We don’t want anyone to hurt the queen. But it can’t carry on like this, it just can’t. Our father is shut away in a prison, and he isn’t the only one. The Queen’s Men are arresting everyone, and it’s getting worse and worse. No one’s been using magic in England for so long that it’s all in the earth and the air, it wants to be used. That’s what the dragon – Argent – told us. It keeps bubbling up in people when they don’t expect it, and then they get into terrible trouble. We have to make Queen Sophia see that it’s dangerous.’

Rose was frowning. ‘Magic as a power stored in the land? I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘But do you see what it means? We have to get people using it again, lots of people. And not Mama’s lot!’ Lily jumped up and seized Rose’s hands. ‘We really need you to help. You told her about the spells inside Georgie, didn’t you?’ she asked the cat, and he nodded regally. ‘The only person who we think can get rid of them is our father – he knows how Mama’s magic works, you see, or at any rate we hope he does. But he’s shut up in Archgate. You have to help us get him out, please! You helped to cast the spells for it, didn’t you?’

Rose shuddered. ‘I did, and I hated it. The old queen persuaded us, and it was after that madman had killed the king. It seemed reasonable that for criminal magicians one needed a magical prison. But it was a nightmare place. I still dream of it, even now.’

‘And you were never shut in it,’ Georgie said, looking up at last.

Rose blinked. ‘No. I wasn’t.’ She stroked her hand down the white cat’s back, from ears to tail-tip, and to Lily it seemed that they were deciding together, without words. Then she lifted her hand from his fur, and nodded. ‘Yes. Gus and I will come. I will go and book our passage this afternoon.’

Lily flushed pink, and looked anxiously at Georgie. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have very much money. We borrowed a little from our friend Daniel, who owns the theatre, but we haven’t enough for the ship. We stowed away to get here…’

Rose smiled. ‘But I do have quite a lot. And I actually own a considerable share of the shipping company, so it isn’t as if I’m really going to pay anyway.’

‘Lily, wake up!’

Lily turned over, moaning in her sleep, and tried to ignore Henrietta, who was pushing a cold nose into her ear.

‘Wake up, I tell you! Lily, now!’

‘What! It isn’t morning, and I’ve only just got to sleep.’

‘You shouldn’t have been gallivanting about so late, then,’ Henrietta snapped.

Lily sighed and sat up. It was rather nice being on board a ship when one had a ticket paid for, and was a guest of a member of the board. There had been time for a quick but grateful goodbye to Colette, who was jittering about an audition at a well-known theatre, and for Georgie to run out and spend the money that Rose had pressed into her hands on new dresses for both of them, too. Even Lily, who didn’t usually care about dresses, had to admit that it was nice not to be wearing navy any more.