Molly came from a large family, and there always seemed to be spare uncles or cousins or aunties around.
“So, you said there was something you wanted to talk to me about,” Molly said as they rounded the corner.
“Er, yes.”
Tim kept his eyes fixed on his sneakers. One step, another step. Each step he took was one more taken without telling Molly his big secret. Okay, he told himself. The next step and you’ll spill everything. Ooops. There went another three steps. Okay, at the next traffic signal I’ll stop and say—
“Hold on!” he heard Molly call behind him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Tim stopped and turned around. He had been so focused on his feet, and the words going around in his head, that he hadn’t noticed that he’d lost Molly. She stood at the bottom of the steps of a building that had a sign hanging out front.
“Swan Dance School?” Tim asked, walking back and reading the sign. “What sort of ice cream are you expecting to find here? Nutcracker Ripple? Swan Lake Surprise?”
Molly put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. “We’re not getting ice cream here, dodo. I’m just picking up my knapsack and stuff. I spaced after lessons and left it in my locker.”
“You take dance lessons?” Tim was astonished. “But you don’t look like…I mean, uhm…” He trailed off, knowing that he had already said the wrong thing. He tried again. “I mean, I never would have guessed that you—”
“Oh, be quiet,” Molly cut him off. “You’ll only get yourself in deeper if you keep on.”
Tim shoved his hands in his pockets again and said nothing.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Timothy Hunter,” Molly declared. “So there!” With that, she twirled around, clomped up the stairs in her heavy boots, and went inside.
“And there’s a lot you don’t know about me, Molly O’Reilly.” Tim sank onto the step to wait. He let out a frustrated sigh. Am I ever going to be able to talk without putting my foot in it? Girls are just too confusing. He shook his head. Maybe I ought to be a monk—the ones who take a nice vow of silence. Then maybe I wouldn’t get into so much trouble.
Molly dashed up the stairs to her locker, but instead of opening it, she leaned against it, hugging herself. She felt giddy and full of energy. She giggled—and that was something she rarely did. “He’s so cute when he’s embarrassed,” she said happily to herself.
“Is someone there?” a voice called from the studio.
Molly glanced into the room that she had thought was empty. A beautiful red-haired girl, a little older than Molly, was stretching at the barre.
“I should have known,” Molly called to Marya. “Don’t you ever stop?”
Marya did several grand jetés to cross the room, and stood in the doorway. “Of course I do. When Annie comes to fetch me or the janitor locks me out.”
Molly knew that Annie was Marya’s guardian. But Molly didn’t know what had happened to Marya’s parents and didn’t think it would be polite to ask. Annie worked long hours as a waitress, which meant Marya could spend loads of time at the dance studio.
“What are you doing here?” Marya asked.
Molly rummaged in her locker and found the books she needed for school. She shoved them into her knapsack. “Just getting my stuff. I would have left them till tomorrow, but we’ve got an exam coming up. Industrial revolution.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Marya said. “It wasn’t much fun if I remember. Or maybe that was some other revolution.”
Molly looked at Marya oddly. She liked the girl—Marya was far and away the best student at Miss Swan’s, but she never acted stuck-up or snotty like some of the other advanced girls. But there was no denying that she was very strange. There were all sorts of things that Marya didn’t know, and the things that she did know were awfully peculiar. Molly always assumed that was because Marya came from some other country. It wasn’t Marya who told her that; it was Marya’s accent. The red-haired girl never talked about herself.
There was something a little fragile about Marya that made Molly not want to pry. But she wished she could get to know her better.
“Say,” Molly said. “Do you want to come have ice cream with me and my boyfriend? He’s waiting downstairs.”
Marya’s face brightened. “I would love to!”
She looked so happy that Molly was glad she had asked. Maybe Marya was lonely and that was why she danced so much. But Molly knew it was also because Marya loved to dance in a way she couldn’t quite grasp. Sure, Molly enjoyed the classes well enough, but she was taking them more to please her mum than anything else. Give her a good rugby scrimmage and lots of races and Molly would be content. With Marya, it was different. Marya seemed more alive when she danced; something shone out of her as she moved.
Molly hovered in the doorway as Marya untied her pink satin pointe shoes and put them into her little dance bag. She changed into thick socks and sneakers, grabbed her coat, and slung her bag over her shoulder. “Ready,” Marya said.
They headed down the stairs, Molly’s boots making loud clomping sounds, Marya’s sneakers softly padding beside them.
“Oh, listen,” Molly cautioned. “When you meet my boyfriend, don’t let on that you know he’s my boyfriend, all right? He gets embarrassed about the silliest things.”
“Boys are so strange,” Marya commented. “They—well, you just never know how they’ll react to things.”
Molly eyed her curiously. Clearly Marya was talking about one boy in particular, but Molly would never intrude unless invited.
Out on the stoop, Tim rummaged in his pockets, feeling for change. He hadn’t planned on an ice cream expedition. “Next time I have to buy ice cream I hope I’ll get some advance warning,” he muttered. He pulled his hand out and stared down at the coins. “I’ve got almost enough here for a thimbleful of Rocky Road.”
He heard the door open above him. “I’m back,” Molly announced. “And I brought a friend.”
“Uh, Molly, I don’t know how to tell you this…” He stood and turned around.
Shock made him stumble backward. The girl with Molly—he knew her! But it was impossible for her to be here. She had come from another world entirely. In fact, she was the reason he had gone to Free Country. But here she was, large as life, standing right in front of him. With Molly! They even seemed to know each other. Molly had called her a “friend.”
The red-haired girl looked equally stunned, but seeing Timothy was clearly a happy surprise for her. With great excitement she turned to Molly and said, “Molly! You never told me your boyfriend was a magician!”
Tim felt his entire body grow cold for an instant, then flush so hot that sweat beaded up on his forehead. He knew his face must be beet red, and the tips of his ears burned.
Did Marya actually just tell Molly that he was a magician? Man! He’d spent the last several hours trying to work up the nerve to explain it to Molly in exactly the right way and here Marya blurted it out just like that. And, hang on, there was that other word in there that he was having trouble processing. Boyfriend. Yeah, that was it. If he was Molly’s boyfriend, wouldn’t he have known about it? He wasn’t that daft. But the only way Marya would have thought he was Molly’s boyfriend was if Molly had said so herself, which meant…which meant what?
As Tim tried desperately to get words to form, Molly looked back and forth between Tim and Marya. “You two know each other?” Then she shook her head sharply as if something had just woken up inside her brain. “Wait a minute—a magician?”
“Oh yes!” Marya exclaimed. “I never would have found this wonderful world if I hadn’t been sent from Free Country to find Timothy.” She turned to Tim. “What happened? Is Free Country okay?”
Even if Tim had been capable of speech at that moment, he would never have had the chance to answer. Both girls began firing questions at him.
“Magician like Zatanna on telly or magic like wizards and real spells and things?” Molly demanded.
“How did you get back from Free Country?” Marya asked.
“What is she talking about?” Molly asked. “Where is Free Country?”
“Is everyone there all right?” Marya asked.
“When did you go out of town? Why didn’t I know about it?”
“Uh—uh—uh…” Tim managed to say. The two girls’ curiosity and demands for explanations felt like an actual force pushing him backward. The faster he backed up, the quicker they moved.
He turned and dashed into an alley, but their questions still pursued him.
“Wait, Tim!” Molly called.
“Why didn’t you tell Molly about being a magician? Is it a secret?”
“What else are you keeping from me?”
Tim came to a dead end. He whirled around. They were charging toward him.
Panic threw Tim’s hands up out in front of him like a traffic guard signaling stop. “Just stop! Let me think!” he cried.
The girls did stop. Completely.
Marya had one foot up, ready to take another step. Molly’s elbows were bent to help her gain speed. Their mouths were open, mid-sentence. Tim had magically frozen them. And he had no idea how he’d done it.
Chapter Five
DANIEL HUDDLED ON THE STEPS beneath a statue in Piccadilly Circus and rubbed his sore, dirty foot. The stone was cold, but at least he could rest without being noticed up here.
London is right strange, he thought. It’s all been changed while I was in Free Country. Sure, he had been back a few times on missions, but he never stayed long, and he had kept mostly to the outskirts in order to attract less attention. He had seen on those trips that the clothing people wore was different, and the vehicles on the streets, but it never occurred to him that the entire city itself would be nearly unrecognizable to him.
There was a time he could slip around the shadows, never being noticed unless he had it in his mind to be. Now he stood out, and got caught in the stares of the crowds. Had there been this many people out strolling in the streets back in his own time? Mind, he’d lived a crowded existence back then. Five to a room, ten to a flat. The work crews in the factory were in the dozens, all eating, sweating, cursing, working, almost as if they’d been chained together. But surely not so many people walked through the center of town then.
“Aye me,” he groaned, switching to rubbing his other foot. He’d been all over London for days, and nights, too, looking for Tim or Marya, and he was beginning to lose hope. Perhaps this had been a bad idea, coming here. He’d gone soft by being in Free Country, and this city was hard. This adventure was one he would have wanted to run by Marya before undertaking. Talking to Marya always had helped him get his thoughts straight. But that right there was the problem. No Marya. So he’d come to London to find her, and he’d failed.
This London is too strange, he thought. I don’t know my way ’round no more. He felt a lump thicken in his throat as he thought he might never see Marya again.
He bent over, resting his elbows on his knees and his face in his filthy hands. He breathed hard, trying not to cry. It is dreadful hard on a cove to lose a girl this way, he thought. Not knowing where she’d got to. Or if she were all right, even.
“Not that Marya was truly my girl,” he said out loud. She’d have laughed herself blue if he’d ever gone and called her that. Lord, how she would have laughed. He laughed, too, imagining her twirling around like she did, propelled by her laughter, and him not minding that it was him she was laughing at. Then his laugh caught in his throat as he realized that the picture he had in his imagination would never come true again.
Another thought squeezed its way into his mind. Marya would be growing up now. Free Country stopped all that—while there, you stayed the age you were when you arrived. It gives a cove the staggers, he thought. Marya being all grown up into a real lady and still being his Marya on the inside. Come to think of it, if I stays here, that’s going to be my fate, too. I’ll need to be making up my mind soon. Another thing he wished he could talk to Marya about.
He wiped his nose on his ragged sleeve, donned his battered top hat and leaped down onto the pavement. If anybody could figure this rum place out and make it sit up and do tricks for her, Marya could. Yeah, she was all right; he was certain of it. It was himself he had to start worrying about now. Himself and his revenge on Timothy Hunter.
“Ow!” A sharp knock on the side and in the knee caught him smartly and sent him sprawling.
Three well-dressed gentlemen carrying leather cases had banged right into him. “Beg your pardon,” a tweedy voice said. But did they stop? Not even. They knocked him over and kept walking.
“Used to be it was walking sticks the swells would thrash you with, when you was in their way,” Daniel grumbled as he stood up. He dusted himself off, then gave up once he realized how dirty his jacket had become.
He passed by a shop window and glared at the mannequins. “Drat you suit people,” Daniel cursed. “You took it. You took our place from us. Now there’s nowhere for people like us to go.”
He glanced down and saw a grate in the pavement. “You ain’t left us nothing. Not a drop of ale nor crust of bread. Nor a spark of fire to warm our hands at.” He undid his belt and wrapped it around the iron grate. He tugged it, making sure it was tight. “But you can’t have changed everything!” With a sharp pull, he yanked the grate out of the sidewalk. He fell backward as it came loose, and landed on his rear. He clambered back up onto his hands and knees and peered down into the dark opening. A smile slowly spread across his face.
“There’s got to be someplace them suitcase blokes ain’t got round to spoiling yet. Somewhere something’s got to be the same.” He lowered himself down, and landed with a splash in the sewer under the sidewalk.
The water was warmish and thick. He was used to discomfort, or he had been before he found refuge in Free Country. It would just take some getting used to again.
He fiddled in his pockets and pulled out a matchbox and a candle. “Clever me,” he congratulated himself. Wise to be prepared. He struck the match and lit the candle, illuminating the tunnel.
The stink didn’t bother him: It was finally something familiar. “Here’s one place them fancy types hasn’t spoiled,” Daniel muttered. He’d spent hours, days even, down here in the old times. They were good hiding places then. And for the first time he’d found something in London that hadn’t changed.
Wonder if anybody works the old drains nowadays. Must be all kinds of things what runs down from that dismal shiny place up there. Wouldn’t be surprised if the pickings were better now than in the old days. That lot up there, they looked to be the sort of wasters as would be losing things left and right.
Daniel wandered in the gloom, remembering the old days, the old gang. Old Barmy Barney who told a great tale. Ragtag Mary. The Fire King who had introduced him to the tunnels; they were a good place for a boy to hide after picking a pocket or angering one’s master. The Fire King knew all the scavenger’s trades, but Daniel liked it best when he could watch the young man eat fire. An uncommon ratcatcher he was, too. What’s become of him? Daniel wondered. It’d be worth a penny to see him again. All of them. But of course, they’d have died a long time ago, Daniel reminded himself.
He suddenly noticed something. The water was rising quickly. Better hightail it out of here for now. He held up the candle and discovered that the closest exit had been bricked up. “They have been down here, too,” he gasped. The water reached his waist now. He held the candle up high, but it fizzled out, and he was left in the darkness.
“Help!” he cried. He hoped against hope that someone would be down here. “Help me!”
He felt a pair of hands clamped over his eyes. “You took your time about calling, didn’t you, my Daniel?” a familiar voice rasped in the darkness. “You always were the shy one.”
That voice. Daniel felt a shiver as he recognized the speaker. It couldn’t be—could it? “Reverend Slaggingham?” Daniel blurted. �
��Can it possibly be you?”
“Can and is, my lad!”
The tall old man with the silvery muttonchop whiskers released Daniel. A moment later the tunnel was illuminated again. Slaggingham had produced a lantern and lit it with a flourish.
“So you do remember me.” Slaggingham squinted at Daniel with narrow steel-gray eyes, his pasty face lined with the same wrinkles he’d always had. “Not too kindly, I see. Well, I’ve come down in the world since you knew me as the head of your old orphanage, Danny. And it changed me. I’m a different man. Transformed, as it were.”
“But how—” Daniel couldn’t understand how Slaggingham could still be around. Daniel wasn’t too good with sums, and he knew time did funny things in Free Country, but Slaggingham had already been old when Daniel had lived in the Bad World. That was a long, long time ago. Daniel could tell that from his quick missions to the Bad World from Free Country and from the way the newcomers looked and spoke when they arrived.
If Slaggingham understood Daniel’s unformed question, he ignored it. He also seemed to simply accept that Daniel hadn’t died—or aged—in the long years since they’d seen each other. Well, if he’s not asking, I’m not telling, Daniel decided.
“Welcome to our humble nest, little brother,” Slaggingham rasped. “You couldn’t have come at a better time.”
“That so?” Daniel had never quite trusted Slaggingham, as he’d seen him go from kindly to enraged in the middle of a sentence; so the old gent’s interest in him made him feel a bit dubious.
“You’ve been lost awhile, haven’t you? Been treated rough, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Well, there’s nothing like being kicked about to give a chap a healthy appetite, I always say.”
“Is that what you always say?” Daniel asked, hoping Slaggingham wouldn’t clip him one for impertinence. It was the sort of cheek that had landed Daniel in trouble with the reverend in the past.
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