Lily Read online

  They stood huddled next to their train, ignored as the crowd boiled and hustled around them. Across the platform another train stood steaming, ready to set off, while passengers swirled around the doors, fussing at the stowing of their baggage, and porters raced up with trolleys piled with yet more bags.

  ‘Lily, there’s a pig in that crate,’ Georgie pointed out in amazement, staring at a slatted wooden crate that had been abandoned close to them.

  ‘Poor thing,’ Lily murmured, bending to peep through the cracks. The pig looked distinctly confused and annoyed, and squealed at her indignantly. Rather a lot of the passengers turned round to see what was happening and Lily tried hard to look as though it were nothing to do with her.

  ‘Come on,’ Georgie picked up both bags. ‘You had better carry Henrietta, someone might step on her in here.’

  ‘They might regret it,’ Lily giggled, and Henrietta licked her lovingly.

  They hurried through the bustling station, dodging porters, and newspaper sellers, and people running after their trains, making for the grand arch out onto the street.

  ‘Gracious,’ Henrietta whispered. ‘What a lot of omnibuses. Ah! Look! That one is for Bloomsbury, it’s painted on the side. Lots of boarding houses there, or there always used to be. Hop onto it, quickly, before it goes!’

  Two enormous horses, one black, one grey, were pulling a heavy, wheeled carriage, painted black and red, its roof piled high with parcels and people, with an elderly gentleman in a frock coat just climbing inside. Lily and Georgie ran a little way down the road, and clambered in after him.

  ‘Where to, miss?’ demanded a man in a battered top hat, brandishing a jingling satchel.

  ‘Bloomsbury,’ Lily said promptly, even though she had no idea where that was. Henrietta panted at her approvingly.

  ‘Penny each. And make sure the dog’s under control, miss, we don’t properly allow dogs, but I’ll make an exception, see?’

  Lily nodded, and ferreted in her purse, trying not to show the gold coins.

  ‘Look at it,’ Georgie murmured, staring out of the grubby window. ‘We thought Lacefield was busy.’

  ‘It’s like the ants’ nest I found in the gazebo,’ Lily agreed, staring at the churning mass of carriages and the people hurrying through the streets. ‘And all those shops!’

  The omnibus was rattling along the side of an enormous park, which seemed to have a river running through it, but soon it was back into busy streets again, the driver shouting angrily as carriages swerved around him, and once a little boy and a dog raced across the road.

  ‘How are we ever going to live here?’ Georgie turned away from the window, looking anxiously at Lily. ‘There were twelve people at Merrythought, Lily, only us and the servants. There must be thousands – millions – of people in this city.’

  ‘I know. Isn’t it wonderful?’ Lily sighed happily, and then caught Georgie’s look of horrified amazement. ‘Georgie, millions of people, and only two of us!’

  Henrietta nipped her wrist meaningfully.

  ‘Three, ow. They’ll never find us, Georgie, never!’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ Georgie murmured, turning back to look out of the window again, and eyeing the crowd around a butcher’s shop. ‘As long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.’ She looked at Henrietta as she said it, and the pug glared back at her in outrage.

  ‘Bloomsbury!’ the man in the top hat yelled, and the girls stumbled through the grubby straw around their feet to the door of the omnibus, thanked him politely, and watched it rumble away.

  Bloomsbury, they realised as they stepped out into the growing dusk, was a much quieter area of the city. Tall grey houses lined the streets, and only the occasional carriage rattled past.

  ‘Look in the windows,’ Henrietta hissed up at Lily. ‘Lodgings! That’s why I brought us here!’

  ‘Oh!’ Lily turned to look at the house they were standing by, and saw that it did indeed have a card in the corner of the window. Lodgings available. Respectable persons only need apply.

  ‘Do lodging houses have food?’ she said hopefully. ‘It’s almost a whole day since we’ve eaten anything…’

  ‘I know!’ Henrietta hissed.

  Georgie glared at her. ‘Shhh, you! Lily, do you think we are respectable?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Without hats on? That old gentleman in the omnibus was muttering about it, I could hear him.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just be eccentric?’ Lily suggested. ‘Let’s try.’ She ran up the steps, and tugged the bell pull sharply. She could hear it jangling away inside the house, but no one came, so she pulled it again, even harder. This time the bell seemed to be fairly dancing inside, and there was a patter of swift, angry footsteps.

  The woman who opened the door was stout and dark-haired, rather like Mama, except that she was wearing a blouse with the most enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves – as though someone had blown them up like a balloon, and a huge apron all round her middle. Mama had probably never worn an apron in her life.

  Lily smiled, and was just about to inquire about the lodgings, when the woman stuck her hands on her hips and demanded, ‘Whatever do you mean by pulling on the bell like that? It’s a mercy it isn’t broken! What on earth do you want?’

  ‘Rooms…’ Lily stammered unwillingly, thinking she’d rather not live anywhere near this person.

  ‘All taken, and good riddance!’ the large lady snapped, and slammed the door in her face so hard that the stained-glass panels shook in their frames.

  ‘How very rude,’ Lily said, her cheeks burning pink as she came back down the steps. ‘They can’t all be that horrible – how would they ever get any lodgers?’

  But it seemed they could. The next lodging-house keeper accused them of being runaways, and threatened to send for the police. They got almost as far as walking through the front door of the third house they tried, when the fussy, frilly woman who owned it spotted Henrietta sidling around Lily’s ankles, and practically had a fit.

  ‘You’d think she’d never even seen a dog,’ Lily muttered crossly as they stalked away. ‘You aren’t dirty in the slightest, Henrietta, and don’t believe anyone who says that you are.’

  The next house was rather less attractive than some of the others. The card in the window had curled at the edges, and the muslin curtains were an unpleasant greyish shade. The bell didn’t work either, so Lily hammered on the door. She was feeling militant now, and weary, and utterly starved. It was turning purplish dusk already, and she had no desire to be out on the streets with nowhere to sleep. They had seen several sad little bundles of rags on the omnibus journey, beggars and street people, and a fear of joining them was gnawing at her insides. She might have been neglected all her childhood, but she’d had a bed, and warmth, and food, even if it was haphazard and mostly flung at her by a grumpy cook. She had never been truly hungry, and from the look of those children, they were so hungry they’d almost stopped caring.

  The door opened eventually, and a little old woman peered around it, and smiled at them toothlessly. Lily smiled uncertainly back. It was the friendliest welcome they’d had so far, but the old woman reminded her of the colour plates in a battered book of fairy tales that had been propping up a washstand in the rose-pink spare bedroom. If this wrinkled specimen offered her a bright-red apple, Lily decided, she wasn’t going to risk it, however hungry she was.

  ‘Er, do you have any rooms available?’ she asked hesitantly.

  ‘Of course, dear, of course! Walk this way. And your sister? And the sweet little dog too… Do come in…’ The woman’s voice was strangely slurred – because of her lack of teeth, Lily assumed.

  She beckoned to Georgie and Henrietta, who were waiting at the bottom of the steps – after the last few houses, they had stopped bothering to come to the door.

  ‘It isn’t very clean,’ Georgie whispered, as they followed the old woman into the house. It smelled of boiled fish, and cats, and their feet clung tackily to the linoleum as they walked down
the hallway after her.

  Henrietta sneezed, and stared up at Lily doubtfully.

  ‘Dear little thing!’ The old lady leered, and bent down to stroke the pug’s head, but Henrietta dived behind Lily, with the merest whisper of a growl. Lily could understand – the woman’s shawl reeked of some horrible sweet smell as she came closer, and there was dirt in the wrinkles round her neck.

  ‘I’m sorry, she’s rather shy,’ Lily explained, and the growl got a little louder.

  ‘Never mind, never mind. Now dears, such young ladies as yourselves, I do hope you don’t mind me asking, but do you have the rent?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Lily told her, her hand going unconsciously to the pocket of her dress.

  The old woman’s eyes followed it, and she smiled a sickly sort of smile, her eyes glinting.

  ‘No. It’s dirty, and she’s a thief. Not here.’

  ‘Dirty! The cheek! It most certainly is not!’ the old woman cried, throwing up her hands. Then she glared suspiciously at the girls. ‘Who said that?’ she asked, her faded blue eyes wavering from one to the other.

  ‘I’m so sorry! My sister, she’s a little simple,’ Lily explained, backing away. ‘I’m afraid we’ve decided it won’t suit. We – er – need rooms closer to the station. I’m sorry to have troubled you.’ She turned, scooped up Henrietta, and raced for the door, feeling the old woman’s hands clawing after her, and the drunken shriek of rage following them down the hallway, so potent and gin-laden that its fumes made her stagger.

  Georgie fought the door-latch open, and they raced helter-skelter down the steps and along the street, until they could no longer hear her screaming. Then Lily ducked into a doorway, panting.

  ‘So much for being discreet and hiding our magic and NOT TALKING!’ Georgie snarled at Henrietta.

  The pug did have the grace to look ashamed, ducking her head guiltily. ‘She was a thief. She would have taken our money while we slept, and probably poisoned us too. She was a drunkard, and a witch as well.’

  Lily lifted the little dog up to look properly into her face. ‘She can’t have been! Magic isn’t allowed. I keep worrying that some of ours will seep out and we’ll be caught. How can she be a witch?’

  Henrietta tutted at her irritably. ‘You are a magician, clearly! And so is your sister! Do you think you’re the only ones hidden? She threw a spell after us as we ran, but she was so befuddled with drink that it hardly touched us.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lily said blankly.

  ‘It’s so dark,’ Georgie murmured. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘That’s the British Museum, that big building over there with the columns. I’ve been there with Arabel. The girls’ governess was very keen on it. She said it was most instructive. Although there were some bits of the statues that she wouldn’t let them see.’

  ‘Will it still be open?’ Lily asked. ‘It’s all lit up. Perhaps we could go there, and – and think about what to do.’ She didn’t want to admit that she found the dark streets threatening. The blackness seemed so much worse here in the city, even though it was lit here and there with the golden glow of the gas lamps.

  They hurried across the road, through a gloomy courtyard, and up the steps, vanishing between the massive stone columns, and into the shadowy caverns of the museum itself.

  ‘It’s like a palace,’ Lily murmured, staring around at the high, coffered ceilings, and the statues gazing down forbiddingly from their pediments. She had often imagined that Queen Sophia must live in some grim, rich sort of place like this. One old gentleman was reading the inscriptions on a stone tablet, but otherwise the main entrance hall seemed to be empty, apart from the uniformed guards.

  Georgie was standing in front of one of the dark red walls, looking at the delicately painted lettering and the little hands pointing to the various exhibits. ‘Medals and coins, Zoological galleries, Egyptian rooms, Roman antiquities, the Elgin galleries…Exhibit of Forbidden and Treasonous Artefacts?’

  ‘Let’s go and see that. And quickly, because that guard over there is staring at us. I’m not sure dogs are allowed.’ Lily hurried off down the corridor, with Henrietta skittering at her heels.

  The treasonous artefacts, whatever they were, seemed to be something the museum was rather ashamed of. The corridors grew steadily narrower, grubbier and darker, and when they eventually found the gallery, it was dusty and poorly lit.

  It only added to Lily and Georgie’s feeling that they had come home.

  They slipped in through the door – which bore a sign over the lintel saying Bequest of Lady Amaranth Sowerby – and gasped. The gallery was filled with display cases, shelves and pedestals, all packed with magical books and apparatus.

  ‘Hmf.’ Henrietta stared around her. ‘This Lady Amaranth must have given the museum a great deal of money. They would never have put all this on show otherwise. It explains why it was so hard to find.’

  ‘We’ve got one of those at home,’ Georgie said, pointing at a tall glass vessel, painted with intricate designs in blue and gold. ‘It’s bigger than that one though.’

  ‘Have we?’ Lily eyed it thoughtfully. ‘Oh! You mean that big flower vase in the passage upstairs?’ She leaned over to read the card on the wall. ‘Apparently it’s an apparatus for infusing water with the smoke of infernal spirits,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Rubbish.’ Georgie peered at the label. ‘What on earth would you want to do that for?’

  ‘So you can enter into a pact with the creatures of the underworld, it says so.’ Lily giggled. ‘You sprinkle the water in the shape of a five-pointed star and it traps the hell-beast inside. That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard!’

  ‘I don’t think even Mama ever tried to trap a hell-beast.’ Georgie sniggered.

  ‘Your mother is a hell-beast,’ Henrietta called from the other side of the gallery, where she was sniffing at a delicately embroidered cloak, displayed on a mannequin whose face was painted to look like some sort of evil clown.

  ‘They’ve got everything wrong,’ Georgie muttered crossly, as she wandered down between the cases. ‘And look, that isn’t a mandrake at all! You can see it’s just stuck together out of bits of old tree root.’ She stopped to read the label, and went white, stepping back from the case in horror. ‘That’s disgusting! How could they even think…? No, you aren’t to read it,’ she snapped, pushing Lily away.

  ‘I don’t need to, I’ve read some of the others,’ Lily said grimly. ‘Georgie, is this what everyone thinks we are? People who murder children, and drink their blood?’

  ‘That actually did happen,’ Henrietta nudged her leg almost apologetically. ‘Well, nearly. You were looking at the Sparrow bowl, weren’t you? She was a distant cousin of yours, actually. Arabel’s mother was mortified when it all came out. But Alethea Sparrow was mad! A great magician, obviously, but a complete madwoman with it. If you believed all of this, you’d think all magicians spent their days conjuring spirits and setting them to prey on the innocent.’

  ‘But maybe that’s what everyone else in the country does think,’ Lily murmured, running her fingers over the sigils on the glass vessel. They tingled pleasantly. ‘I hadn’t realised quite what everyone thought of us. I mean, the servants were scared of Mama, but then so were we! Were they frightened of us too, all that time?’

  Georgie blinked. ‘I don’t know. We had a nursemaid, a long time ago, but after she left I was with Mama all the time. I don’t remember speaking to any of the servants very much after that.’

  ‘They weren’t. I’m sure they weren’t… Martha was always giving me biscuits, and Violet was trying to teach me to write nicely. And Peter wasn’t scared, or why would he have helped us to escape?’

  ‘Perhaps he was too scared not to,’ Georgie pointed out. ‘Maybe he thought you’d turn him to dust if he didn’t do as he was told. Oh, Lily, I didn’t mean it,’ she added quickly, as Lily’s face crumpled. ‘He was worried about you. And he certainly didn’t need to meet us in the gardens last night, did he?’
She frowned. ‘Our servants had been at Merrythought a long time, most of them. They’d become accustomed, I think. We were real people, not the ogres the people who wrote this nonsense were imagining.’

  ‘So anyone who hasn’t been around magicians really thinks of us as monsters like this?’ Lily asked in a small voice. Her dreams of restoring magic to England seemed even sillier now.

  ‘And murderers. Regicides, even – it was a magician who killed the king, remember. If you ask me, it must have been mostly money that kept your servants there,’ Henrietta said. ‘High wages, and a little polite blackmail, for when those inspectors you mentioned were on their way. I’ll bet all the servants got a bit extra then.’

  Georgie nodded, but Lily had to swallow tears. She had thought they at least liked her. A little.

  A damp nose nudged her hand. ‘But remember Peter, Lily. I watched him as we rowed away. His eyes were glittering in the moonlight, and he stared after you for as long as I could see.’

  ‘There’s a bell ringing,’ Georgie said, looking up anxiously. ‘The museum must be closing. What are we going to do?’

  Lily sat down on the corner of one of the pedestals, which held an ugly gold tripod that she strongly suspected was actually just a flowerpot-stand, and not the equipment for a conjured fire as its label claimed. ‘Let’s just stay here. Look how dusty everything is. I shouldn’t think anyone will come and check. And there are lots of places to hide if they do. Then we can go and look for lodgings again tomorrow.’ She sighed. She wasn’t looking forward to it.

  ‘When you said before that you couldn’t manage a glamour in the middle of the street,’ Henrietta asked Georgie, ‘did that mean that in a nice private space like this you could conjure one?’

  Georgie frowned. ‘I have done them. Only small ones. But I know how.’

  Henrietta nodded. ‘Then I suggest that tomorrow, before we leave here to go house-hunting, you change. Make yourselves look like old ladies, perhaps. No one would accuse a pair of elderly ladies of being runaways. It might be less difficult to find a room.’