Bitterly, I picked up the notebooks and put them outside the lab, then filled the bucket with water, donned a pair of gloves and set to work. I scrubbed the workbench clean, carefully mopping away the water as it turned an ugly greenish-brown, then started to work on the stone floor. Whoever had used the lab must have had a fantastic series of explosions, I thought. The floor was scarred too. I worked hard to get rid of a dark mark before deciding it was impossible. The explosion must have been a big one.
Maybe that’s why Ira was sent out here, I thought, as I scraped up the water and dumped it into the second bucket. His experiments threatened to blow up the entire hall.
I splashed some neutraliser into the bucket, just in case one or more of the ingredients reacted badly with the hot water, then started to dust the shelves. There were so many layers of dust that I couldn’t help wondering if they’d been left in place since before Ira’s arrival, even though he’d told me he’d cleaned the lab. It was a shame that magic couldn’t be used to clean the chamber, but Magistra Loanda had cautioned us against using unnecessary magic in the potions laboratories. A flicker of magic could contaminate even the simplest potions ingredients, rendering them useless. I hoped the preservation spells on the jars had lasted however long they’d been resting on the shelves. They should have done - they were very simple spells - but I’d have to check that before I tried to use the contents. If I tried to use something that had decayed …
Someone cleared their throat, behind me. “Well,” Morag said. “You’re a pretty sight.”
I spun around. Morag was standing by the door, her pinched lips set in a sardonic smile. I stared at her, trying to calm my beating heart. That door had made a loud noise when I’d tried to open it. I should have heard her pushing the door open, let alone coming into the room. But I hadn’t heard a thing until she’d cleared her throat. My mind raced. An obscurification charm? Or was she simply very stealthy? Father had insisted I learn to move quietly too.
“It’s good to see you applying yourself,” Morag added, dryly. “But you do know how to clean your dresses, don’t you?”
I looked down at myself. The dress was damp and stained with the remnants of countless potions ingredients. My knees looked particularly bad. It was clear that I’d been on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floor. My hair felt damp too. I needed a shower … I kicked myself, sharply. There were showers near the potions labs at school for a reason, but I hadn’t even considered how I’d wash myself. I doubted Uncle Ira would be pleased if I trailed potions ingredients and water through the corridors …
“I know some spells, Senior,” I said, doubtfully.
It wasn’t a pleasant thought. I’d never had to wash my clothes after potions before. At home, the maids had taken care of them; at Jude’s, the staff had washed our clothes daily. The dresses had been charmed to allow them to be cleaned quickly, but I wasn’t sure what would happen if I tried. If the magic reacted badly with a stain that wasn’t as inert as I’d thought …
Morag took pity on me. “There’s a washroom just down the corridor,” she said, as she motioned for me to follow her out of the room. “But you’d better hurry. The Master is going to have dinner soon and you don’t want to keep him waiting.”
I nodded, gratefully, then stopped. “But what about my clothes?”
“You should probably have thought of that before you made a terrible mess of them,” Morag said, sarcastically. She pointed to the washroom as we walked down the corridor. “I’ll go find you something to wear. Put your clothes outside the room and we’ll try and clean them later.”
“Thank you, Senior,” I said.
“You’d better learn to master the spells yourself, young lady,” Morag told me, sharply. There was an oddly resentful tone in her voice. Clearly, she’d decided she’d been nice enough for one day. “I won’t be spending all my time running after you.”
“I know, Senior,” I said.
The washroom was primitive and smelt funny. There was no shower, merely a tap that produced cold water, a bucket and a towel that was covered in dust. I washed it first, dried it with a spell and then hastily washed myself as best as I could. I’d have to have a proper bath later, I told myself. And then … perhaps I should cut my hair. Mother hadn’t let me cut my hair since I’d turned ten, claiming that long hair was fashionable for teenage girls, but it wasn’t as if anyone would see me. I could shave my head if I wanted and no one would care.
I dried myself, pulled on the robe Morag had brought me, then made my way up to dinner. A stack of envelopes sat by my plate, numbered from one to twenty. Uncle Ira was already sitting at his chair, munching his way through a plate of sausages and mashed potato. It was a surprisingly crude dinner for an aristocrat, but it wasn’t as if he was entertaining. Morag appeared from another door and motioned for me to help myself as she sat down and produced a book from a pocket. I hesitated - reading at the table was practically a mortal sin, as far as Mother was concerned - and then opened the first envelope. It was the correspondence course Uncle Ira had mentioned to me.
The covering letter was surprisingly detailed, although I supposed that was a good thing. Father was a powerful magician. He wouldn’t have been fooled by a con artist trying to convince someone a long way from Jude’s that they were the greatest magician since Ambrosias. It was also blunt, warning me to work through the charms and potions in sequence as I needed to master the early principles before moving on to the more advanced work. The list of spells and potions included a number I’d mastered long ago, back before I’d gone to Jude’s, but I had a feeling I’d need to go through them anyway. There were so many charms worked into the list that I was sure one of them was designed to monitor my progress.
“We’ll review your work every Friday,” Uncle Ira said. I looked up. He’d cleaned his plate and was now looking at me with a thoughtful expression. “And I want to read your essays before you send them off.”
I frowned, then reread the instructions. Yes, I was expected to write essays and mail them off to someone who’d mark them … I rolled my eyes at the concept. It would be weeks, if I was lucky, before I heard back from the marker. Uncle Ira could give me much quicker feedback, if he wished. I hoped he would. If I studied hard, if I gained a qualification, I might have more options in the future. A mail-order qualification wouldn’t carry quite the same cachet as graduating from Jude’s, but it would be something.
“Yes, Uncle,” I said, slowly. “Ah … I went through the potions ingredients. I’m going to need some more.”
“Give me the list,” Uncle Ira said. “I’ll see what I can order.”
I bowed my head. “Yes, Uncle,” I said. I hesitated. “I … can I write a letter to my parents?”
Uncle Ira frowned. “You might do better not to remind the Family Council that you exist,” he said, sourly. “They might pass on the letter, they might not.”
“You are in exile,” Morag put in, looking up from her book. I couldn’t help noticing that it was charmed to hide the title. “Exiles don’t get to write home.”
I swallowed, hard. “But if I did write …”
“You could,” Uncle Ira said. He sounded strikingly unconcerned. “And I’ll forward it to Shallot. But you probably shouldn’t expect a response. Your parents may not even receive the letter.”
“I understand,” I said, bitterly. The Arbiters might simply file the letter away in the family archives, if they didn’t drop it in the nearest fire. “But at least I can write to them.”
“Yes,” Morag said, as Uncle Ira rose to his feet. “And now you can help me clear the table and wash the dishes. You can write to them later.”
“Yes, Senior,” I said.
Chapter Six
When I awoke, the following morning, my room was bright. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows, warming the air. I looked up, blearily, then remembered that I’d left the shutters open when I’d gone to bed. I climbed out of bed, splashed water on my face and hurried over to t
he windows. The view hadn’t changed, save for a number of ominous-looking dark clouds in the distance. It looked as though it was going to rain.
I pulled on the dressing gown Morag had given me, then opened the door and stepped outside. The corridor still felt bitterly cold, so I muttered a heating charm as I made my way to the stairs and headed down. My footsteps seemed unnaturally loud as I walked downstairs, echoing oddly in the silence. Kirkhaven Hall was heavily warded - I could feel the wards at the back of my mind - but it was also oddly silent. Back home, the hall was never quiet; the corridors hummed with chatter and the sounds of people moving about their business. But here? It was so quiet that I could practically hear my heart beating as I walked into the kitchen and started looking for food. The clattering sound I made as I found a frying pan and put it on the stove was deafening. It was so loud that I cringed, expecting Morag to sweep into the kitchen wrapped in righteous anger.
It shouldn’t be hard to cook eggs, I thought, once I was sure the building was still as quiet as the grave. I found eggs in one of the cupboards and carefully cracked them into the frying pan, then clicked the firelighter to trigger the heating element. I should …
The mixture started to bubble almost at once. I swore out loud, cursing my own mistake as I searched for a spoon or something else I could use to stir. I’d never have made that mistake when brewing potions, but cooking seemed so much simpler. I found an iron stirrer and hastily started to stir, yet the mixture was already starting to burn. Half of it looked uncooked, the other half looked blackened … I wasn’t sure if it was safe to eat. I cursed again as I tried to stir the uncooked food so it touched the heat, just so I could salvage something from the disaster, but it just blackened too.
“I should make you eat that,” Morag said, as I lifted the pan off the stove. “In fact, I will make you eat it. Fetch yourself a plate.”
I tried not to jump, this time. She’d sneaked up on me again. I hadn’t heard her coming down the stairs, let alone entering the kitchen. She looked too amused to be angry, but I wasn’t fooled. Mother was at her worst when her voice got very quiet. Akin and I knew to duck when she started talking very quietly.
“I don’t know what went wrong, Senior,” I said, as I ladled the mixture onto a plate. “What happened?”
Morag stepped forward and eyed the eggs. “Well, for a start, you didn’t quite manage to keep the shell out of the mixture,” she said. Her lips thinned in disapproval. “The Master will not be pleased if you are so careless with your potions.”
“I know,” I said.
“And you should have added butter, milk and salt,” Morag added. “Don’t waste the salt, by the way. It’s quite expensive up here.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
Morag gave me a sharp look. “I noticed,” she said. She jabbed a finger towards a bookshelf, hidden away at the back of the giant chamber. “There are cooking books there. I suggest you read a few of the basics before you start cooking anything more ambitious than toast and jam.”
I nodded, then took a bite of my eggs. They tasted unpleasant, alternatively burned and uncooked. Mother had made me eat a great many things I hadn’t liked, claiming they were the height of culinary excellence, but my eggs were the worst of all. The family cook had never presented Mother with anything so vile. Mother would probably have turned her into a slug if she had. Morag watched, silently, as I forced myself to eat. I’d eaten worse things, I told myself. Some of the potions I’d been forced to drink over the years had tasted worse.
“Perhaps next time, you should ask for advice,” Morag said, when I had finished. “Or simply take one of the recipes from the books and try it. Carefully.”
“Yes, Senior,” I said. My stomach was churning unpleasantly. “I … can I have some bread too?”
“That would be a good idea,” Morag said. She walked past me and removed a haunch of meat from one of the larger cupboards. “And possibly drink some water too. Or tea.”
I nodded as I put the kettle over the heating element. I could boil water, at least, without ruining it. Clearly, cooking was far more complex than I’d assumed. I’d never been taught even the basics of cooking - we had servants for that - but I was going to have to learn. And who knew what else I didn’t know? I was ignorant of my own ignorance. I put some tea leaves in the teapot, then a little more, and poured water into the pot. It smelt surprisingly strong.
Morag laughed, unkindly. “You don’t need more than two teaspoons of tealeaves in the pot,” she said. “Unless you happen to like your tea to be very strong.”
I poured myself a cup, splashed some milk into the liquid and grimaced at the taste. It was just a little too strong. I groaned, helplessly. I’d never had to make my own tea before I’d been sent into exile. How many other things didn’t I know?
“It’s fine,” I lied. “It’ll wake me up.”
“Hah,” Morag said. I could tell she knew I’d lied. “Why don’t you run along now and find something to do.”
I nodded, just as a low rumble echoed through the house. “What … what was that?”
“Thunder,” Morag said. She didn’t sound surprised. “A storm has just broken.”
She smiled, faintly. “Go explore the house or something,” she said. “And find those clothes you need. They’ll be somewhere on the third floor.”
“Yes, Senior,” I said.
She hadn’t been joking about the thunderstorm, I discovered when I looked out of the nearest window. The rain was coming down so hard that I could barely see anything, water splashing against the glass and running down to the ground. I tried to pick out the garden, but I couldn’t see anything. Shaking my head, I turned and walked up the stairs. The air seemed colder somehow, despite the charm. I cast another heating charm, but there was no improvement. I didn’t understand it.
The third floor looked no better than the fourth floor, although someone had done a better job stripping the portraits from the walls. A lone portrait of a dark-skinned girl hung on one wall, but the remainder of the portraits were gone. I frowned, wondering who the girl might have been, once upon a time. Her frilly outfit suggested she’d lived and died four hundred years ago. One of Cat’s relatives, perhaps? It was possible, but unlikely. House Aguirre wasn’t the only family known for dark skin, merely the most prominent. The girl held a spellcaster in one hand and a book in the other. I couldn’t make out the title.
Probably someone who was stricken from the records, I thought. Or someone who was off the main branch of the family tree.
The thought sobered me as I walked down the corridor. I’d been forced to memorise endless lists of names and faces belonging to relatives dating all the way back to the early days of the Thousand-Year Empire. Mother had stood over me and listened, carefully, as I recited the achievements of people everyone else had forgotten five hundred years ago. But I’d never heard of either Ira or Morag. Had they been struck from the records so completely that no one knew their names, save for the archivists? Or had the Family Council decided that Ira and Morag would not be discussed with children? It was always frustrating to hear snippets about people who’d disgraced the family, in one way or another, only to be denied the full story. Adults never treated us as equals.
I supposed I should be glad, I told myself, grimly. An adult who did what I did would’ve been executed.
I stepped into the first room and looked around. It was crammed with trunks, each one layered in preservation spells. I opened the first one, careful not to disturb the spells more than absolutely necessary, and peered inside. It was filled with clothes, shirts, skirts, trousers and underclothes so tiny that they had to be for newborn babies. I couldn’t have done anything with them, save perhaps for turning them into cleaning rags. My lips twitched as I eyed a baby coat. Like the clothes I’d worn when I was a little girl, the coat was a miniature version of something an adult would wear … if she didn’t mind being hideously unfashionable. Whoever had stored the clothes had probably hoped that
they would come back into fashion at some point, but they never had. I put the coat back in the box and started to look for an inventory. Surely, someone must have listed the contents of the trunks somewhere.
I’ll probably have to do it, I thought, after a brief and futile search. The trunks were huge, and hideously unfashionable, but they didn’t seem to have been labelled in any way. It suggested that there was no inventory, beyond - perhaps - a very basic one. It’ll be something to do when I’m bored.
It took me nearly an hour, going from room to room, to find clothes suitable for teenage girls. The first set of dresses were ridiculously frilly, a fashion that even my grandmother would probably find absurd; the second set were much more reasonable, save for the plunging neckline that would get me in real trouble if I wore the dresses before I had my Season. I made a mental note to wear a shirt under the dress to hide my bare skin, then put the dresses aside and searched through the rest of the trunks. One of them contained a number of trousers that were clearly intended for young men.
I stared at them for a long moment, my thoughts churning. They were intended for men, but … could I wear them? I wouldn’t have dared wear trousers in Shallot - trousers on a woman was a sign of low breeding - yet here …? I didn’t think that either Morag or Ira would bother to police what I wore. The trousers would be a lot better at absorbing spills than my poor dresses … and, besides, it would be easier to run in them if I had to flee an exploding cauldron. I put the trousers aside and searched through the remainder of the trunks. Most of the shirts and underclothes were even further out of fashion than the dresses - I couldn’t help wondering if whoever had deemed them to be fashionable had been playing a sadistic joke - but they were wearable. I put a small pile of them outside the door, then replaced the preservation spells on the trunks. I’d probably have to keep coming back as I grew older.
The window at the bottom of the corridor darkened, suddenly. I walked forward until I was practically touching the glass, staring out at the scene before me. The rain had stopped, but the clouds were so dark I was sure it was just a matter of time before the water started pouring down again. Giant shadows seemed to be moving across the ground - I could see the road, leading down towards the boundary line - and faint shapes seemed to be moving in the trees. I wondered, suddenly, if Uncle Ira ever went hunting. Father had often gone hunting when we’d travelled to the country estate for holidays. He’d tried to interest Akin in going with him, but my brother hadn’t been interested. Akin had always been too soft for his own good.
The Family Shame Page 6