Verdigris Deep

by Frances Hardinge

‘It’s for my own good,’ Josh said with a tone of flat disdain. ‘They explained that. So I’ll be out of the way while they are . . . arranging things.’ This was as close as he had ever got to referring to his adoptive parents’ divorce.

  Chelle and Ryan sat on either side of his hospital bed. Josh’s sunglasses had been lost to the well, and now his face looked naked and vulnerable. His eyelids were a little red and stretched from having had coins for eyes, and he was still having some trouble bearing the light. Or perhaps his eyes were lowered to avoid looking at his companions.

  ‘But you’ll get there and you’ll write to us,’ said Chelle as an awkward silence threatened to settle. ‘And if they’re looking in your mail like in prison then you can use a code and say something like “the ostrich waves from the western tower” to tell us that you need to get away . . .’

  Josh grinned. ‘And you two’ll come, won’t you?’ He flicked a grey glance at them, then stared down at the fingernails he had broken trying to get out of the well. ‘Yeah,’ he added quietly, ‘bust me out of there . . .’

  ‘Kill the guards . . .’

  ‘Set fire to the school . . .’

  ‘And we whizz away, all on one bike, dropping grenades behind us . . .’ Josh looked into an imaginary bag, pulled out invisible grenades with pleased surprise and nonchalantly threw them to the winds. Ryan was glad to hear him sounding a bit more like himself. For now they could play at still being a trio, as if the unsigned pact between them was yet unbroken, and nobody had tried to kill anyone’s mother. ‘I dunno what I was thinking. I mean, like we need powers . . .’ Josh gave a grin as hard as glass.

  Josh, nobody’s child, nobody’s Chosen One, and now nobody’s hero. The nurses bustling through the ward would have no idea that a god had given up her power just to give him a chance at happiness. Right now, even that chance seemed pretty slender.

  The floods had started to recede from the moment Chelle’s silver coin had touched the waters of the well. A day or two later, people were able to return to their homes. Flash floods had carried some cars all the way to the harbour and stacked them like dominoes in the mud. In some cases runaway trees had clawed the front walls off buildings in passing. Fortunately, nobody had actually been killed.

  The Harley, on the other hand, was quite dead. After the flooding of its engine and its abandonment in Whelmford, it had decided to make one last journey of its own. In his third and last Silverwing article in the saga of the Harley, Will imagined it riding the torrent through the county byways, taking every corner more easily than it ever had with him on its back. He described it weaving all the way to Poddington, where it finally buried itself up to its handlebars in a trench of sheep dip, presumably in the hope of preventing Will ever finding and riding it again. Everybody found the article very funny, and Silverwing offered Will a small regular column.

  Carrie’s red door had suffered almost as many adventures. Once she was in the Rectory, the poor door, left outside, had taken off across the flooded fields. Eventually it had been discovered amid the wreckage of someone’s greenhouse. The plastic sheeting had done a great deal to protect it from the worst of the water damage, but it had battled with several trees and there were dinks and dents in its paintwork. Nonetheless, Carrie absolutely refused to throw it away, and one month after the day of the floods a tea party celebrated its installation as front door.

  ‘Of course I couldn’t abandon it,’ Carrie insisted as she poured drinks. ‘It rescued me.’ She smiled at Will, sitting opposite her at the table. When Carrie had learned that Will was having trouble paying his rent, she had insisted on him taking one of her rooms as a lodger as soon as the flood damage was repaired.

  The garden felt less magical and secret now that the hedge at the bottom had been replaced by a little wooden fence, but understandably Carrie had refused to return to the house until the last strand of Russian vine had been torn out.

  Will and Carrie seldom mentioned the Well Spirit directly, perhaps out of consideration for each other. However, they both talked animatedly about the plans for new flood defences at Magwhite. They seemed reassured by the idea of a canalside concrete bank which would prevent unsuspecting passers-by from encountering the well.

  For several weeks, it was impossible to get away from Donna Leas. She appeared in all the local papers as ‘Feisty Flood Heroine Donna’ and ‘Lady of the Lake’. There were lots of photos, most showing her utterly bedraggled, helping people to put on helicopter winch belts with an expression of impenetrable bad temper on her face, or pulling children out of the water while looking as if she’d rather drown them. When they ran out of other stories, reporters went to Donna to ask her opinion, and only then discovered quite how many opinions she had.

  ‘Do you think maybe she’s all fixed now?’ Chelle asked, scrutinizing the paper one day. Chelle was apparently finding it hard to shake the angelic mindset.

  ‘Not all fixed, maybe.’ Ryan looked at Donna’s face and the bitter angles and lines that the photo had tried to soften. Perhaps some people couldn’t get fixed all at once. ‘But at least it sounds like she’s fixing herself now, not expecting Mr Punzell to do it.’

  The magazine that came with the paper also had an interview with Pipette Macintosh, who was shown pouting in front of an urban landscape with a brush in her hand. Pipette had announced that the following year her new authorized biography would be released, written in collaboration with her friend Anne Doyle. When asked if it was true that there had been conflict in the past between her and Anne over an unofficial biography, Pipette ‘declined to comment’.

  ‘Mum says what actually happened was that Pipette stormed out of the studio kicking cameras,’ remarked Ryan.

  ‘Ooh, ooh, it says here she’s hired an “esoteric adviser” to help her channel her energies. I bet that’s Mr Punzell – I just knew they’d be right for each other . . .’

  Ryan couldn’t help wondering whether Mr Punzell might get bored of voodoo eventually and find someone else with even more interesting uncontrolled supernatural powers. If so, he hoped Mr Punzell wouldn’t mind having his hedge painted pink in the dead of night.

  There was very little that could be done about Miss Gossamer. Perhaps if she had not been going mad already she could never have found her way to the dream Magwhite, the real Magwhite. In any case, her mind would never find its way back from it. When Ryan encountered her in the parks or the streets, he seemed to see burnt paper skies and dead leaves reflected in her eyes.

  She never noticed him. Always she was pushing forward with a haunted urgency, as if in pursuit of someone and fearful of losing them. Always her expression held a tension that was closer to despair than hope.

  One day he saw her sitting on a park bench, her head bowed over a doll with red hair. Somebody with a steady hand had drawn shoes on to the doll’s feet in green felt-tip. Afterwards she was never without it.

  Perhaps it had been a gift from Chelle, acting on her natural gentleness and pity despite the terror that Miss Gossamer had been to her. However, the image that would not leave Ryan’s imagination was of Josh walking with a mask-like countenance towards the woman who had tried to kill him, and giving her the child he could not be.

  The little warts dwindled and disappeared one by one. Once school had started, there was no time to boggle at anything. Minds mend themselves cleverly, and by the time one can face the fact that something big has happened, one is used to the idea and it has been buried under dozens of others.

  Josh never said sorry, never said thank you, but he wrote to Ryan and Chelle every week with a conscientiousness and dedication he had never shown in anything else. The letters were bitter and funny and there were holes of unsaid where you could feel the demons breathing.

  One night a month Ryan willed himself back to the Glass House. The walls had mended themselves, and the seams that joined the fragments were rather beautiful, like sugar frosting. They caught the sun and threw tiaras of coloured light across Ryan’s skin and pyj
amas.

  Outside, the sky above the car park was the colour of egg custard, with a bright and shapeless sun. There were no trolleys waiting to escort Ryan now, and as he scrambled down the wall in his slippers it was very easy to imagine that he was visiting the ordinary world Magwhite on an amber autumn day.

  The leaves were still golden, but they drooped lifeless from the trees, pearled with rain. Ryan sat by the well and unfolded Josh’s letters. As he read them out one by one, he imagined his words drifting down through the brown water into the green water, to where a gold-robed god sat by a silver fire in her lonely hall, handling a pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses as gently as if they were a living thing.

  ‘Hardinge writes with energy and verve’ The Times

  ‘And for sheer wordcraft . . . Verdigris Deep . . . takes some beating’ Sunday Times

  ‘Spellbindingly gorgeous . . . dramatic . . . Hardinge’s prose shimmers and glints with breathtakingly apt imagery’ Daily Mail

  ‘Perceptive . . . cleverly plotted . . . we need more of this loving and unusual use of words and language in children’s books . . . highly recommended’ The Bookbag

  ‘I was thoroughly gripped . . . There was never a dull moment . . . unlike anything I have read before’ Maire, 13

  ‘I honestly couldn’t put it down’ Bethany, 13

  Frances Hardinge’s first book, Fly By Night, won the Branford Boase Award for outstanding debut novel. Fly By Night was also, along with many of her following books, shortlisted for several other awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize. All her books are now published in many languages around the world.

  Frances spent her childhood in a huge, isolated old house on a hilltop in Kent that ‘wuthered’ when the wind blew and inspired her to write strange, magical stories from an early age. Now she lives in London with her boyfriend.

  Also by Frances Hardinge

  Fly By Night

  ‘Remarkable and captivating, masterfully written and with a wealth of unexpected ideas . . . Full of marvels’

  Sunday Times

  Gullstruck Island

  ‘Hardinge is a hugely talented writer of tireless invention and prose’

  Guardian

  Twilight Robbery

  ‘Fabulous characters . . . richly evocative world-building and writing so viscerally good you want to wrap yourself up in it’

  Sunday Telegraph

  A Face Like Glass

  ‘This unusual and highly imaginative fantasy from Frances Hardinge is spellbinding: sophisticated, multi-layered and elegantly written’

  Booktrust

  Cuckoo Song

  ‘A deliciously dark and dangerous concoction that casts a bewitching spell. It’s magical, menacing stuff’

  Guardian

  The Lie Tree

  ‘Brilliant: dark, thrilling, utterly original. Everyone should read Frances Hardinge. Everyone. Right now’

  Patrick Ness

  Many thanks to the members of all the writers’ circles I have attended over the years; Nancy for swooping in to become my agent and for keeping me sane when the world went mad; my editor, Ruth Alltimes; Kathy Norman and her biro of power; Rhiannon Lassiter; Richard Ridge, with whom I have eaten blackberries in Magwhite. And, of course, Martin.

  First published 2007 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This edition published 2016 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  This electronic edition published 2016 by Macmillan Children’s Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-71284-3

  Text copyright © Frances Hardinge 2007

  Illustrations copyright © Peter Ferguson 2007

  The right of Frances Hardinge and Peter Ferguson to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset by Intype Libra Limited

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