A Bitter Magic

by Roderick Townley

  I hesitate, then hand her the note. Miss Porlock scans it greedily. Her eyes harden.

  “She wants you to go there,” she hisses (her version of a whisper). “It seems she’s finally noticed your existence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She wants you to meet her and go away with her!”

  “Do you think so?” Not possible, I’m thinking.

  “What else could it mean?”

  I feel myself trembling. I am not a trembler. Ask anybody.

  I don’t want to finish the thought, but it finishes itself. Mother and Asa have been feuding. Even the public knows about it. Several times, she called him a fake, and of course, she was right. He may say she’s his “beautiful assistant,” but it’s Mother who gives whatever real magic the performances have. He’s the showman, but she’s the draw.

  Is this her way of ruining his career?

  But why would she want me to come with her? Cisley the pest.

  That stitch in my side is starting again. Breathe!

  “Miss Porlock, if anyone asks you where I’ve gone—”

  “You can’t go alone.”

  “Of course I can.”

  “You’re twelve years old.”

  “I’m almost thirteen. What does that have to do with it?”

  “I’m going with you. You don’t even have money for a carriage.”

  “Do you?”

  “Enough.”

  I consider that. “Okay, but we’ve got to go right now. The boat might be sailing!”

  I wish I had something warmer to wear. A fog is sweeping in and with it a chill that makes people stay inside. Not a carriage in sight. The cobblestones glisten. At last, an empty cab clatters by, and we climb in.

  It’s a relief to let Miss Porlock take charge. She knows everything, even how much the man should be tipped. Of course, she’s an old person. Forty, at least. I watch her face as the streetlamps flit by and am surprised by an expression I haven’t seen before—a suppressed smile, as if she has a secret.

  Traffic thickens as we approach the port. “We’ll get out here,” Miss Porlock calls to the driver. Even a block away, the ship, bathed in light, looks enormous. A horn blast goes right through me, and I start running.

  There are two gangways. Dockworkers struggling with steamer trunks jam the one for freight. The passengers’ gangway is crowded with warmly dressed travelers with parcels, hatboxes, canes, even a birdcage or two. It’s colder than before, a strong breeze blowing in from the Adriatic.

  A porter lugging a heavy duffle bumps against my shoulder and scowls, but I scarcely notice.

  “Mother!” I call out uselessly.

  Miss Porlock, meanwhile, has located an official with a clipboard and inquires if a Miss Thummel is among the passengers.

  “Thum, Thum, Thum,” he murmurs, running a finger down the list. “Hey,” he shouts suddenly, “wait, you!” and dashes off to collar a boy sneaking up the gangway, ducking among suitcases. “Where’s your ticket, young man?”

  He lifts the child by the nape of his ragged coat. “As I thought!”

  “Wait!” Miss Porlock calls after him; but he’s carrying his prisoner off and disappears in the crowd.

  Most passengers are aboard now.

  Mother, where are you?

  The note said…

  A bell clangs, my heart right along with it. Several large men prepare to haul in the gangway, while on the deck the ship’s band strikes up a patriotic anthem, full of thumping oompahs and blatting trumpets. I look around desperately. Except for well-wishers waving handkerchiefs and porters wheeling empty carts, few of us are left on the dock.

  I bite my lip, then make a sudden dash for the boat, ignoring Porlock’s shout behind me.

  My hands waving, I call out, “Wait! One more passenger!”

  The gangway is just lifting away as I jump onto it and sprint toward the deck. A worker shouts at me, but I’m already past him, flinging myself into the crowd of passengers.

  I blur past a swatch of blue, which registers as a uniform with a loud voice: “Just a minute, you!”

  In the thick of the crowd, several women attempt to move aside, but there’s no place to step.

  A glimpse of the uniform—just behind me now, a hand reaching…

  I drop to my hands and knees, and scramble wildly through a jungle of legs. A woman squeals, a man loses his balance, falls backward.

  I hear the band and scuttle toward it.

  “Stop that girl!”

  A flash of gold up ahead—the bend of a tuba. A hand rakes my back but doesn’t get a grip before I’m among the polished shoes and instrument cases of the players.

  A trumpet, seeking a high note, veers wildly higher as the musician dodges away, bumping into the drummer, whose snare drum tilts over, taking the cymbal with it.

  I ignore the crash and scurry on. Behind me, cries of alarm. Ahead is a door.

  Just get to the door.

  I yank it open and run headfirst into a man’s large belly. It’s another officer, a bigger one. He grabs my squirming body and doesn’t let go.

  “I’m meeting my mother!” I scream.

  The other uniform arrives, breathing hard.

  “She says her mother’s here,” says the big one, struggling to hold me.

  “Mama!” I scream. “Mama!”

  “Calm down, kid,” he says. “What’s your mother’s name?”

  I’m so crazy that for a few seconds, believe it or not, I can’t think of her name. “Thummel!” I finally burst out, like I’m spitting a peach pit. “Marina Thummel! She’s my mother!”

  “Your mother, so you said.”

  The band resumes, making talk almost impossible, although a small crowd has gathered around us. Everyone’s staring at me, among them a serious-faced man in middle age, arms folded across his chest.

  Go away, if you’re not going to help.

  The uniforms consult among themselves. Soon an official appears with a passenger list under his arm. He nibbles a frayed mustache and flips through the pages. “No one by that name.”

  “As I thought!” cries the first uniform.

  It takes two of them to wrestle me off the ship and onto the splintery dock, where I sit whimpering.

  Miss Porlock comes over to help me up.

  A tremendous horn blast makes my heart jump. Engines churn, and soon, almost imperceptibly, the great ship slides from the pier. At the railing, passengers wave wildly. Kisses are blown, tears shed.

  I keep scanning the passengers by the railing. No sign of Mother. There’s that man again, the one who was staring at me before. A serious face, weathered. Am I supposed to know him?

  The boat gains open water. The music grows tinny. Miss Porlock’s heavy arm drapes itself around my shoulder. “We might as well go back,” she says quietly.

  I don’t move.

  “Cisley?”

  I’m not listening.

  The ship’s lights grow dimmer until they’re swallowed in darkness.

  Chapter Four

  “Mother,” I murmur. “Mothermothermother.”

  I’ve been doing that a lot lately. Pretty soon, if I’m not careful, I’ll be muttering like Miss Porlock.

  It was winter when we left Trieste. Now it’s spring, but you wouldn’t know it. I wrap my jacket tightly around me and squint into the light. I still can’t believe Mother’s gone. Was she even on the boat? Her name wasn’t on the passenger list. Did she change her name so no one would find her?

  Since our return, Uncle Asa has been making inquiries, even hired an investigator to follow up on clues, the few that were found. The ship, he learned, was headed down the coast of Italy to Majorca, off the coast of Spain. What would Mother want to do there?

  And where does that leave me?

  It leaves me standing here on a seawall at dawn with my pet lobster, watching the horizon. Different sea, different country, same me. No mother, no father. Never had a father. I used to ask about him when I was
young, but never got an answer. Everybody has a father, but for some reason mine was a secret.

  And now Mother.

  People wonder why I come here each morning at first light to stare out over the Firth of Before. I’m not crazy. It’s not as though I expect to see Mother sail into view. I stopped hoping for that long ago, when we returned home to Ravensbirk.

  Returned in disgrace. Nothing was ever proved against my uncle, but nobody wants to hire a man suspected of murdering his sister. It seemed a good time for Asa to rethink his career. He doesn’t use the word “retirement,” but that’s what it feels like.

  I give a tug on the golden leash. Elwyn sometimes gets too close to the edge of the wall. “Don’t you, Elwyn?”

  He waves a feeler at me.

  A lobster of few words.

  People think I’m odd in my choice of pets. Hard to explain. Cats make me sneeze, dogs slobber. When I came across Elwyn in a tidal pool, he climbed daintily onto a rock, signaled me with his feelers, and made a smart-aleck remark about my hair. (My hair does get kind of wild out here.) I didn’t mind. People think I’m a smart aleck, too.

  Admittedly, Elwyn comes with problems. On our walks, I have to carry around a bucket of water and set him in it every few minutes. Even Miss Porlock, in her wobbly voice, has asked what I can be thinking. Elwyn is a handsome animal, as lobsters go, especially now with the early sunlight glancing off his shell, but I didn’t pick him for his looks. I picked him because he’s a good listener.

  Who else can I confide in? Uncle Asa? I don’t think he even likes me. After Mother disappeared, he had enough sense of duty to take care of me—or at least hire people to take care of me. I asked him if we were going to stay here in Ravensbirk very long, and if so, shouldn’t I go to school? He seemed amazed that I’d consider such a thing.

  “Let me understand.” (Stroking the point of his beard.) “You want to spend your days among commoners? Sons of fishmongers? Daughters of chimney sweeps?”

  I just looked at him. I’m very good at my stare. “You know, Uncle, I can’t understand why people have the idea you’re a snob.”

  What do you do with a person like that? How do you tell him that you’d just like to talk once in a while to someone who’s not three times your age? I nodded at his thuggish servant Janko, who is never far away and almost never speaks. “And Janko is your idea of brilliant company?”

  Janko’s brow lowered. That’s quite a brow he has, but not much behind it.

  Asa’s smile was thin. “You sound like your mother.”

  “I wish I was more like her.”

  “You’re on your way. Already you have the tongue of an adder.”

  Lovely man, my Uncle Asa.

  That was yesterday. Better to be alone out here with Elwyn. I give a tug on the leash. Spun gold. Nothing too good for my little friend. “Come on, Elwyn. Don’t be such a slowpoke.”

  He crawls reluctantly.

  “With ten legs,” I tell him, “you’d think you could keep up!”

  He gives me one of his looks.

  “I know. It’s time for a dunk in your bucket, right?”

  I do the honors. Let him paddle around awhile before we push on.

  We arrive at the big rock where I like to sit. Nearby, the fishing boats bob in their slips. Beyond that lies the town, still wound in mist. And over the far hill, past the Gypsy encampment, the top of the old glass factory and the roofs of warehouses.

  Up here, high above it all, I could hold the whole town in my hands, and half the sea. This is where the world is most magical. Not pretty, or picturesque, although tourists like to call it that, but literally magical, like an electric charge. Anything can happen at first light.

  Oh no! Someone’s been here.

  Looking closer: a little wooden box. How dare they come here? This is my place!

  I run my hand over the wood. Rosewood? Smooth as a kiss, with a nicely carved cricket on the lid and leaf designs around the sides. I lift the lid. Empty.

  Somebody will be sorry to lose this.

  Elwyn and I sit watching the fishing boats get ready to set out. It’s a fine show, and I’m getting to know the characters by sight. By smell, too. Miss Porlock tells me I smell things others don’t. The distant wisp of smoke, for instance, from that old guy’s pipe. Cherry-flavored tobacco, I think. Every morning, he walks his little white dog—as fat as himself—along the beach. (I can smell the dog, too, unfortunately.)

  A young fisherman is pulling nets from the wall and loading them on a skiff. And way far off, that solitary fellow I so often see—white pants, blousy blue shirt—just now setting up his easel and opening his paint case. Don’t you love the smell of oil paint?

  Commoners.

  So why do I feel this sadness? This…envy?

  I leave the little box on the rock and pick up Elwyn, returning him to his bucket and covering it with a tea towel. “Let’s go, old pal. Time to head home.”

  The path grows sharply steeper as we approach the castle. Maybe you’ve read about the place in the tour books: the Crystal Castle. Overlooking the harbor, it perches on an outcropping of rock—or just above the rock—because as you approach, you’d swear the huge thing is floating ten feet off the ground!

  That’s Uncle Asa’s mirror work for you.

  I admit it’s impressive, like a spiral of ice, flinging colors through its hundreds of prisms. There’s no fisherman’s cottage down in the town that doesn’t get a flash of color at some time during a sunny day.

  Tourists line up for the chance to pay ten shillings and take a tour of the place. “Got to feed the beast,” Uncle Asa says. The beast is the public. The beast also feeds him. The money keeps servants paid and food on the table.

  Even before he built this monstrosity, Asa Thummel was the most important citizen in Ravensbirk. His fame put this little seaside town on the map. He could have been mayor.

  Instead, he just owns the mayor.

  When you pass through the castle’s outer gates, you face a labyrinth set with tall rows of hedges, many of them trained into the shapes of animals. The patterns change. If you find the right path one day, you have to find a different one the next.

  Since I’m in on the trick, I walk right through and sweep past the footman into the entrance hall. Too early for the tours, thank goodness. The visitors’ desk is empty.

  To me, the castle is more mirage than building. Asa’s illusions give a sense of endlessness to the mirrored hallways and the star-crusted dome of the ceiling.

  Feed the beast.

  “Miss Thummel?”

  “Yes, Mr. Strunk?”

  The house steward, as short as his name, raises an eyebrow slightly, as he always does at the sight of Elwyn’s bucket. Those fluffy, flyaway eyebrows make him look angelic or devilish, depending on his mood. He’s somewhere in between today. “Will you be wanting breakfast?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “For two?” The eyebrow again.

  “Just lizard bits for Elwyn.”

  “Very good, miss.”

  “Oh, Strunk, have you seen my uncle this morning?”

  “He’s taken his breakfast in the laboratory.”

  “He must have gone up early.”

  “He’s been there all night.”

  I hesitate. “What’s he doing there, do you know?”

  Strunk hesitates back. “Doing, miss?”

  Why is it so hard to get a straight answer to a simple question? “Never mind,” I tell him. “We’ll be upstairs whenever you have breakfast.”

  “Very good, miss.”

  I mount the curving staircase. Not his fault. Strunk has been forbidden to discuss his master’s activities with his master’s nosy niece.

  Approaching my rooms, I hear a soft thumping within. Anna is moving books so she can dust behind them. She curtsies as I come in.

  I curtsy back. It’s a joke between us. She’s been ordered to curtsy to her “betters,” and I’ve told her not to. (Who am I to be curtsi
ed to?) But Anna must follow rules or be fired; so now we curtsy to each other—and laugh.

  I don’t have friendships with other chambermaids, but Anna is young and quick, with big Gypsy eyes. And she doesn’t question me. Ever since I let her have my tortoiseshell hair clip, I can do no wrong. If I want a lobster for a pet, that’s fine with her.

  She’s using the clip today. It gives a nice swerve to her cascade of black hair.

  “I like what you’ve done,” I tell her.

  “Is nutting,” she says, touching the side of her head.

  I lug Elwyn’s bucket to the bathroom. My thoughts turn to Uncle Asa.

  “Elwyn,” I murmur, crouching beside him, “we’re going to find out what he does up there.”

  Truth is, I’m worried about my uncle. He’s been spending more and more time in the laboratory, built on the castle’s roof, between turrets. It’s one of several areas of the Crystal Castle I’m not allowed to explore. Sometimes he doesn’t appear all day, coming down at night, irritable and haggard, for a silent supper. It makes a long meal for me at the far end of the table. I got permission for Miss Porlock to join us, and that helps some, not that my tutor’s a great conversationalist. We talk quietly, laugh seldom, aware of the silence at the other end.

  Maybe it sounds like I hate my uncle, but I don’t. It’s been hard on him these last months. He’s used to dazzled crowds and amazed applause, and here he is in exile, stuck with little old unamazed me.

  I fill the dragon-footed bathtub with tepid water and add a scatter of seaweed powder to make it cozy.

  “In you go.”

  “Thanks, Cis,” says Elwyn—or seems to say. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, with submerged crustaceans.

  I gaze at him. “Have a nice swim.”

  Courtly as ever, Elwyn bends two feelers in my direction, his version of a bow.

  Chapter Five

  It’s chilly out here, but worth it to watch the change from gray to blue, the upward bulge of light beneath the world, and finally that first direct shot of sunlight across the water.

  Elwyn is not impressed, but he seldom is. At least he doesn’t mind me babbling about it as we make our extra-slow way along the seawall toward our sitting place. When we arrive, my heart does a little flip. They’ve been here again! The rosewood box is where I found it before, and now, beside it, is a little wooden horse!