by Webb, Holly
Rose had simply stared at him, and then glanced up at her mother, and then her great-aunt, with her mouth half-open. But Miranda had wrinkled her nose and nodded, and Miss Fell had sniffed. ‘Undoubtedly. Rose, well-bred young ladies do not sit around like frogs after flies. Close your mouth, dear.’
Mr Fountain had hared off to the palace without even putting on an overcoat, and demanded an immediate Council of War, at which he outlined the plan. It was a neat little trap, sending the major part of the British Navy off to rendezvous with the Venetians, and leaving the Channel hardly guarded. The Talish emperor and his generals would be forced to make a rather hasty decision. The whole invasion force, hopefully, would embark at once, straight into the hands of the waiting magicians.
It was all very well setting a trap – now Rose and the others had to spring it, and if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be a trap at all. It would simply be the most disastrous defeat. One that had been predicted by the Admiralty and the Horse Guards. Every senior military commander present at the king’s council had threatened to leave the service, but as the king had declared that he was willing to entrust the fate of the nation to a handful of unreliable magic-workers holed up in a crumbling old house in the wilds of Derbyshire – as the First Lord of the Admiralty had put it before he actually did resign – there was very little they could do, short of forcing him to abdicate.
As the last jingling noises of the troops died away behind them, Rose shivered a little. The Talish soldiers probably wouldn’t look so different. They would be tired too, after marching to Cormanse to embark on the barges. And they might well be seasick, some of them, perhaps even as bad as Bella.
It was the only thing that disturbed her about the plan. She was almost sure that Miss Fell was right, and they would be able to destroy the invasion force, even though she didn’t feel like the blood of centuries of seers and mages was flowing through her veins, as Miss Fell had assured her it was. It would work. Hopefully.
But if it did, she would be as much a murderess as her mother.
‘Rose, wake up.’
Someone was shaking her. Rose sat up, and winced. They had driven through the night, stopping only to change horses. She had been sleeping slumped against the someone’s shoulder, she realised, and now she ached.
Her mother looked down at her, smiling a little. ‘We’re almost there, and it’s getting light. So I thought you’d like to see…’ She closed her eyes for a second. ‘I wanted you to see it with me,’ she added in a whisper.
Rose nodded, and crept one gloved hand around her mother’s sleeve. She was wearing one of Miss Fell’s travelling cloaks, a gloriously old-fashioned one with masses of capes around the collar, and a hat that trailed feathers. She looked very small and slight underneath it, and terribly frightened.
Miss Fell was glaring out of the carriage window – she was sitting facing the horses, of course. She had pulled an eyeglass out of her bag, and was examining the trees on either side of the drive.
‘Bad pruning. Quite obvious. Really, I shall have to speak to Moffatt… And just look at those weeds in the drive!’
Rose thought it all looked immaculate, and she couldn’t suppress a gasp as they finally drew up in the carriage circle in front of the house. She had seen it before, of course, but only in a painting, and that had been the terrace view. The front was even more impressive. The house was built of honey-coloured stone, not the gleaming white of the building she’d seen in the painting. The only thing that was familiar were the peacocks.
‘This is the older part of the house,’ Miss Fell explained, and even her voice had a slight crack to it, as though she too found it hard to be back. ‘Built in the seventeenth century, by our ancestor, Richard Fell.’
Rose nodded. She wondered if he was the one Freddie had mentioned, and where he’d kept his dragon. The house looked as though it could house a whole colony of dragons – they could quite easily sleep in that little arched part over there. Rose blinked as they descended stiffly from the carriage, and the blinding winter sun seemed to catch a glinting scale, and perhaps a twitch of scaly claw. She really hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep, it was clear.
‘I didn’t believe I would ever come back.’ Rose’s mother was sitting on the marble terrace, with Rose beside her, both wrapped in layers of shawls. Rose kept looking around, frowning. It felt so very odd, as if she was inside that painting she had tried to copy. Or perhaps an illustration from a fairy tale, with the peacocks sweeping haughtily past.
‘Are you happy – to be here?’ she asked hesitantly.
Her mother stared out across the velvet green expanse of lawn. ‘It’s full of old ghosts. I’m not sure I could live here again.’
Rose nodded, a little relieved. They were still feeling their way around each other, but she supposed she belonged to her mother now. She knew she didn’t want to live here either. She liked towns. The countryside was strangely empty, and still felt like something that ought to stay in pictures. The house itself was amazing, though – as steeped in spells as Mr Fountain’s house, but about a hundred times larger and older. And she was almost sure the dragons had been true. She could feel them, something old and sly and wise that seemed to dart around the corners just ahead of her.
Freddie was finding it impossible to concentrate on the spells they were supposed to be planning. He kept disappearing on the way from one room to another, to be routed out an hour or so later by a polite servant, his eyes saucer-like, sure that he had only missed seeing one by inches.
Gus strolled up to Rose and her mother, leering at a nervous peacock, and leaped onto the arm of the bench.
‘You should go back inside,’ he yawned.
‘Oh! Is it time?’ Rose’s heart thudded.
‘Soon.’
In the drawing room behind them, there was a whispering of silk dresses and a smoothing of coat-tails, as forty people set down their afternoon teacups, and exchanged last nervous, encouraging glances.
Miss Fell’s skeleton staff had risen to the challenge of their mistress and the cream of magical society descending on them for an unexpected house party. As Rose had suspected, the house was immaculate, and all the housekeeper had done when the news was broken to her was to purse her lips very slightly.
Miss Fell was sitting in a straight-backed wing chair, upholstered in purple damask, which had been placed just to the right of the fire. Mr Fountain was close by, and Miranda and the children were seated on stools around her. The other magicians were in chairs scattered throughout the room, but all facing Miss Fell, and close enough that everyone could clasp hands.
Rose could feel the ancient magic that filled every stone of the house. It whispered and called to her, stroking tiny fingers over her skin.
‘Where are they now?’ Mr Fountain asked a young man in a damson velvet jacket, with what Rose thought was a ridiculous mauve-spotted cravat. He was seated at a small wooden table with a map spread out in front of him. One hand was laid flat on the map, and his eyes were half-closed.
‘Here. Approaching Dover.’
‘Are there balloons?’ Bella asked, her high voice clearly audible in the nervous hush.
‘Ssshh, Bella,’ Rose and Freddie hissed, but the man in the velvet jacket laughed.
‘No, that was only a rumour in the newspapers. The flotilla of barges only. The sea is very rough, the waves are almost swamping them already.’
‘This is so risky,’ a young woman seated close to Rose whispered. ‘They should not have let them get this far. What if it goes wrong?’
Rose turned and glared at her, but she stared back hard-eyed, and Rose shivered. If it went wrong, they would have exposed England to a Talish invasion.
‘Are they close enough together?’ Rose’s mother asked.
The velvet-jacket man nodded. ‘Very close. It should work.’
It had been Rose and Freddie’s idea to adapt Mr Fountain’s protection spell into a trap for the invasion fleet, veiling them in a sudden, soundless
bubble. Then the magicians together would drag the fleet under the waves, sinking it, and drowning the entire invading army. That part had made Rose run into the gardens to be sick in the shrubbery. Freddie had pointed out that it was only what the invasion force were intending to do to them, after all.
Rose could see his point, but it seemed so brutal. She had wanted to break the barges apart somehow, to at least give the soldiers a chance of being washed up onshore, and imprisoned.
No one else had agreed, and the half-retired admiral who was their liaison with the military forces had looked as though he wanted to slap her.
‘Now.’ The velvet-jacket man nodded, and everyone drew the symbols for the spell in the air, and then caught hands, to link the spell into a giant net.
Rose had never felt so much magic in one place before. She had never realised, but everyone’s spells smelled different. Miss Fell’s smelled of lavender, and Bella’s of milk bonbons. Mr Fountain’s reminded her of the pomade he applied to his moustache, and the man in the velvet jacket emitted a strong aroma of tobacco.
Her mother’s smelled of dark sugar, from being imprisoned for so long in a cell made of black timbers from the hold of a ship. Rose closed her eyes, wrapped in lavender sugar, thinking of lavender glacé icing, and Mrs Jones’s kitchen, and how her own unlikely story tied her to these two determined, impossible women.
The strength of the three of them was pulling the others out, over the odd calm of the sea.
It was as though she were being carried along on the waves of the spell, as they all streamed towards the invading ships. She could feel Bella beside her, clasping her hand tightly, and she knew that they were sitting on stools in the drawing room, but at the same time they were swooping and rushing through the air. Her hair was streaming behind her, and she laughed for joy at the feel of the wind in her face, a hundred times better than leaning over the side of a ship.
Then they drew close to the Talish barges, and the wonderful wind-rushing feeling died away, as she watched the men, ant-size in their dark-blue uniforms. How could she do this to them? She was quite sure that if King Albert had had half a chance he would have invaded Talis. These men were only doing what they were told. It simply wasn’t fair. How could she have let them persuade her into this?
‘We haven’t a choice, Rose,’ she felt her mother whisper in her ear.
‘But it isn’t fair. It’s cruel. A hundred thousand men, they think!’
‘It will end the possibility of the Talish invading.’
‘We could do that just by destroying the ships,’ Rose argued again. ‘Those men would never let their commanders make them do it another time, would they?’ Rose swallowed. ‘If we do this, everyone will hate us. And they will be right.’
Her mother stared at her for a moment, and then Rose jumped as something patted her shoulder. Miss Fell had let go of Bella’s other hand for long enough to tap Rose with the black lace fan looped around her wrist. ‘Miranda, she’s right. This is too much.’ The old lady smiled, hawk-like. ‘I have a solution. Remember all those times I made you unravel your crochet?’
Miranda wrinkled her nose. ‘Can we unravel an invasion fleet?’
‘My dear, you could unravel anything, you’ve had quite enough practice. If the three of us change the spell, the others will have to follow. Then those poor soldiers will at least have a fighting chance. Ah!’
The spell bubble began to envelop the Talish barges, and Rose could hear the cries of surprise and horror as the soldiers saw the sky change colour to an eerie cast of silvery grey. Perhaps they thought it was some strange uncanny storm.
Once the spell surrounded the ships, they should have swept them under the water, but there was a moment of stillness, as no one could bear to start such devastation. And in that moment, Miranda, Miss Fell and Rose swept in like a whirlwind, splitting the boards of the ships apart, ripping the ropes, and scattering the infantry into the freezing sea. Rose couldn’t help murmuring, ‘Sorry,’ as her magic swirled past, but of course, she didn’t know it in Talish. A sparkling white flurry of fur shot past her, as Gus gleefully joined in.
It took a horribly short time.
Rose blinked, and shivered, and opened her eyes. The fire was burning brightly, and somewhere in the depths of the house she could smell muffins toasting. Two hundred miles away, men were fighting and scrambling to get aboard the scraps of wood that were all that was left of their ships, but at Fell Hall, it was time for tea.
She shivered again, and felt her mother’s rose-pink silk frock brush past her. It was ten years out of date, but still beautiful after all its years in a cedar-lined dressing room. Miranda kneeled in front of her and caught her hands. ‘Don’t. Think instead what might have happened if they had landed on the beaches, Rose. The Talish emperor is not merciful, and we have been at war, secretly or not, for the last fifty years. It would have been a massacre.’
‘Can we go back to London now? Can we go back home?’ Rose asked stiffly. She wasn’t sure if it was her home any more.
Her mother smiled. ‘Mr Fountain was most put out when he realised that my return might disrupt your apprenticeship. He forced me to promise that I would not take you away from his house. So much so that he invited me to live there too, and assist in teaching you all.’
Rose smiled back, and then laughed out loud as she caught Freddie’s face, an expression of complete horror.
Gus leaped into Rose’s lap, and stared up at her mother, his eyes jewel-like slits. ‘Shall we bring the peacocks with us back to London?’
Rose stroked him, and rubbed behind his ears. ‘Would you rather have a peacock, or a whole fricasséed lobster?’ she whispered.
Her mother nodded. ‘You’re a war hero, now, you know. You could probably claim a lifetime of lobster from the king.’
‘There’s not the same enjoyment in stalking a lobster,’ Gus muttered regretfully. ‘They’re terribly slow. But delicious.’
Rose smiled at him, rubbing the back of her hand over the soft, silk fur beneath his ears. It felt quite normal, to be using magic to discuss expensive seafood with a cat. Far more normal than it did to be discussing anything with her mother. Rose still couldn’t quite believe she had one. But she was starting to feel that she might rather like it. Every so often she looked up to find her mother’s eyes fixed on her, and filled with a strange sort of delighted amazement. No one had ever looked at Rose that way before.
The drawing room door eased slowly open, and several maids entered with trays of tea. Bill followed them with a large platter of sandwiches, which he brought straight to Rose. He bowed briefly to Miranda and Miss Fell. ‘You did it then?’ he murmured to Rose, offering her a sandwich, and pretending not to see as a white paw reached over the side of the salver. ‘The potted shrimp sandwiches are on the other side, miss, should you wish for one,’ he added. The paw disappeared, and a sandwich disappeared from the other side.
Rose nodded. ‘It worked.’ She smiled at him, her eyes creasing at the corners, and a delicious feeling of excitement glowing inside her. ‘And now we’re going home.’
Read on for an exclusive
extract of The Magical
Detectives…
To look at, there was nothing very remarkable about Otto Spinoza. He was about average height for a boy of twelve. He had very clear blue eyes and floppy brown hair, which he was in the habit of tossing back from his forehead from time to time. His teacher at school thought he was rather quiet, but she concluded that he was merely thoughtful and left it at that.
However, there were at least two things about Otto that were very much out of the ordinary. The first was the fact that from as far back as he could remember, Otto had had the feeling that he was different from the other boys and girls in his school; for some reason, which he could not quite put his finger on, he simply did not belong. He didn’t talk about this feeling to anyone, because he didn’t want to seem rude or stuck-up. But it was always there.
The second unusu
al thing about Otto was the mystery of his father’s death: he had died of a rare tropical disease shortly after Otto was born. So rare was this disease, that no one else in England had ever contracted it, and by the time the hospital realised what was wrong, it was too late to do anything about it. The doctors had been extremely puzzled because even in the jungles of Borneo, where the disease originated, it had only reared its ugly head a few times in the last hundred years. The conclusion they had come to was that Mr Spinoza, who was a bookseller by trade, must have been bitten by an insect that had stowed away in a crate of books he had bought at an auction the week before.
Otto had often wondered why the insect had not bitten anyone else, such as the person who put the books in the crate in the first place, or the auctioneer, but no one seemed to know the answer to this.
Otto and his mother lived in the sleepy little town of Bridlington Chawley, in an apartment above the second-hand bookshop that his mother now ran. It was not the sort of home you see featured in magazines or on television programmes. The furniture was rickety, the carpets threadbare and the rooms all needed a coat of paint. But Otto did not mind all that. He liked living above a bookshop because he loved to read, and there were always plenty of books waiting for his attention.
Otto’s mother was a dreadful worrier. When it rained, she worried that the roof might leak, when it was cold she worried that the central heating might break, and when it was warm she worried that it would not last. She worried about her health, and about her weight, about whether or not she was going to be able to pay all the bills. But most of all she worried about Otto, and in particular about what would become of him if anything should happen to her.
‘They’ll come round sticking their noses in, asking all sorts of questions, that’s what they’ll do,’ she frequently complained. ‘Then they’ll take you away and put you in a home for orphans. There’ll be no one to care for you, no one to look after you. Oh, Otto, I can’t bear to think about it!’