“Go into the drawing room,” said her grandmother. “I will find you a change of clothes.”
“Don’t light the fire,” Luciana heard herself say, as if from very far away. “Please don’t light the fire.”
Isabella stared at her. “But you haven’t been afraid of the fire for a long time, my darling,” she said. “A fire in a grate is safe, don’t you remember? And anything else is nothing but a bad dream.”
Still Luciana hesitated. The cold was eating into her bones, but the thought of sitting in front of a fire seemed at that moment to be the most terrifying thing in the world. It was daylight, but she felt herself surrounded by the same nightmare that had haunted her when she was little. It had been brought back by Thursby and his horrible men.
Her grandmother squeezed her shoulder gently. “Go,” she said softly. “I will bring you a blanket instead.”
Luciana did as she was told, her teeth beginning to chatter with cold and some other emotion she could not identify. She pushed open the door to the drawing room, walked inside, and stopped dead.
The poster of the Magnificent Marko was no longer on the wall. It lay on the floor, its frame smashed open and the poster itself torn in two.
That night Luciana woke screaming, drenched in sweat and shaking with fear. Her grandmother was already there at her side, trying to soothe her.
“Hush,” Isabella whispered. “You’re safe now. Hush now, hush.”
Luciana threw her arms round her grandmother’s neck and Isabella hugged her close. Neither of them said anything for a few minutes.
“Was it the dream?” her grandmother asked eventually.
Luciana nodded. “The house was burning and I couldn’t get out. There were flames everywhere, coming closer, and there was a man in the flames, all burnt, burning, and I—”
“Shh,” said her grandmother, stroking her hair. “It’s all right. It was a nightmare, Luciana. It wasn’t real.”
“Why has it come back?” Luciana asked, her voice muffled against her grandmother’s shoulder.
Isabella held her tighter. “I don’t know, my darling. But we beat it before, didn’t we? We can beat it again.”
They huddled together under the coverlet until the light of a new day chased away the darkness of night.
*
“But who were they?” Charley asked the next day, when Luciana told him what had happened with Thursby and his men. “What did they want?”
They were sitting on the floor in the drawing room with blankets round their shoulders to ward off the cold. Luciana had told Charley about the return of her nightmare and how her awful fear of fire seemed to have come back. Charley had given her a hug and said that blankets were fine with him. Now they were playing with a deck of cards as they talked. Luciana had fanned them into a perfect semicircle face down on the rug between them.
“Grandmother thought it was the Golden Butterfly,” she said. “Now, pick a card. Look at it, but be sure not to let me see it.”
Charley took a card and glanced at it, but Luciana could tell he wasn’t really concentrating as she collected the rest of the deck with one hand.
“Wasn’t the Golden Butterfly the trick you got me into trouble with?”
Luciana bit her lip, feeling guilty but also fighting the urge not to laugh. “Um…”
“It was, wasn’t it?” Charley exclaimed. “You wanted to do it yourself so you made me help you. Didn’t we use one of your grandma’s dresses and a rope from the stable?”
Luciana couldn’t help it – she laughed. “Yes. I was convinced I had worked out how it was done and wanted to perform it in the hallway.”
“That’s right!” Charley shook his head as he remembered. “You made me hold you up on the rope while you dangled over the banister. Your grandma lost her rag when she saw what we were doing – and I got the blame for it! Everyone assumed it had been my idea. My mum was so upset – she thought I was going to be banished from the Big House forever!”
Luciana shook her head. “I used to get you into trouble like that all the time, didn’t I? I’m so sorry. I just wanted to be the Golden Butterfly. It was so amazing – the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, even though I only saw it once.”
“And your grandma thinks that’s what this man Thursby was looking for?” Charley asked. “The Golden Butterfly? How can they have been looking for a trick?”
“I don’t know.” Luciana sighed, cutting the cards and holding out one half of the stack. “It doesn’t make any sense to me either but Grandmother won’t talk about it.” Charley added his card to the pile in her hand and Luciana shuffled both together again.
“Have you checked to see that they didn’t take anything away with them?” he asked.
“Everything seems to be in its rightful place,” Luciana said, as she shuffled the deck. “Apart from the poster, that is.”
Charley looked over at the two ragged halves of the colourful paper sheet. Luciana had gathered them up and put them on the table beside the empty fireplace. Ruined though it was, she couldn’t bear to throw the poster away. The pieces were curling in on themselves, the torn paper dry and fragile.
“Why would they bother taking it off the wall?” Charley wondered. “Did they think there was something behind it? A safe?”
“Maybe,” Luciana agreed. “But that doesn’t explain why they tore it in half. There couldn’t have been anything behind it, the frame is too thin.” She fanned the deck again and slid out one card, face down. “Turn it over. Is that your card?”
Charley held up the queen of diamonds. “Yes, it is! How did you do that?”
“Magic, of course,” she said with a quick grin, though the rush of happiness she’d usually feel from getting a trick right was absent.
“It’s the other thing that Grandmother said that I keep thinking about,” she told Charley. “She said that Thursby forced Marko from the stage. She obviously hated the man – I could see it in her face – and I’ve never known her to hate anyone.”
They were both quiet for a while. Charley picked up the deck of cards and shuffled them. Watching him reminded Luciana of seeing her grandfather turning cards in his hands as he produced trick after astonishing trick. His manner was so quick, so smooth, so clever. Luciana had spent hours just watching him, trying to work out how he did it.
She got to her feet and went over to the two torn pieces of the poster. Picking them up, Luciana turned them over to look at the back.
“What are you looking for?” Charley asked, watching.
“I was just thinking,” she said slowly. “You’re right – you can’t look for a trick, that doesn’t make sense. But what if they’re looking for the key to how the trick was done?”
Charley got to his feet. “You mean – the method? How it was constructed?”
Luciana nodded. “If so, they were probably looking for something written down, weren’t they? In a notebook, or on a piece of paper – that would make sense, wouldn’t it? That would explain why they took the poster off the wall. Perhaps they thought it could be written on the back.”
Charley looked down at the blank, yellowing back of the poster she held. “But it wasn’t.”
“So where else could it be?” Luciana bit her lip. “They went through all the papers in his desk – they left them in a mess. All the books in the library too.”
“If there was something about this trick that was so important that he was forced off the stage because of it, Marko would have hidden it really well, wouldn’t he?” Charley said. “Where would that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Ana,” Charley said. No one but him called her that – it had started when they were small and ‘Luciana’ was too difficult to say. Even now they were older, the name had stuck. “Think. I know you. Your mind works just like Marko’s. It’s in there, somewhere. Think.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Charley said. “I didn’t mean
to upset you. It doesn’t matter anyway. None of it matters. Like Mrs Cattaneo said, it is done with.”
Luciana took a deep breath and dashed away the tears. “It does matter,” she said. “It matters to me. Magic was my grandfather’s whole life, and now he’s gone and I miss him so much. If there’s a chance that some of his magic is still out there … I want to be the one to find it, not that horrible man or anyone else like him. Who is Thursby anyway, and how did he make my grandfather give up what he loved? And why he is looking for the Golden Butterfly now that Grandfather is dead? That was the Magnificent Marko’s greatest trick. If the key to it is still out there somewhere, I can’t let anyone else steal it!”
“OK,” said Charley with a smile. “Then where do we start?”
Luciana looked down at the poster. Even as damaged as it now was, she loved to look at it. There was her grandfather, painted wearing his black magician’s cloak and top hat, holding his magic wand.
“Thursby’s men looked everywhere,” she said, thinking aloud. “But they couldn’t find what they were looking for.”
“Maybe it’s not here in your house at all, like your grandmother said?”
“Maybe…” Luciana stared at the image of her grandfather with his wand raised. A magician’s wand is his simplest but most important trick, he had told her once. It’s all about misdirection. Distract people with the wand and they’ll miss everything else, even if it’s happening right in front of them. “Or maybe they were just looking in the wrong place.”
“Well then,” Charley said. “Where would have been the right place?”
An idea was beginning to bloom in Luciana’s mind. “They thought they were looking for something that was written down. That was my first thought too. But perhaps we should be looking for something else.”
“Like what?”
Luciana stared at him, suddenly completely certain that she knew exactly where Thursby and his men should have been searching.
“Like a puzzle,” she said, heading for the door with a confused Charley starting after her.
Luciana pushed open the door into her grandfather’s study. The walls were lined with many books, but the most striking object in the room was Marko’s huge desk.
“I thought you said they went through all his papers and books?” Charley asked doubtfully, as Luciana went to it.
“They did,” said Luciana.
Charley shrugged. “Then what are we doing here?”
“Isn’t the desk amazing?” Luciana asked. “Just look at it!”
It was a huge piece of furniture. The large writing level was surrounded on three sides by shelves, cabinets and drawers that formed a cubicle tall enough to loom over them both. The whole was formed of many different types of wood, from the darkest ebony through the rosiest chestnut to the palest pine. There were so many tiny cupboards and sliding panels that it was impossible to count them all in just one glance, and each of these – as well as the rear panels behind the shelves – were all richly decorated. Some were inlaid with intricate geometric patterns, others had pictures of trees, flowers, landscapes or seascapes. The impression was of a detailed patchwork quilt made of wood. The more one looked, the more there was to see.
“Grandfather had it made for him,” Luciana told Charley. “It took the carpenter years to make. When I was little I used to spend hours just opening and shutting all the drawers and doors.”
She kneeled on the floor and pulled open the door of one of the two larger cupboards that stood either side of her grandfather’s chair. Inside were concealed three more small drawers, all fitted with keyholes. The locks of each had been smashed open, the beautiful wooden patterns disrupted by jagged cracks and gaping holes. Luciana and Charley took in the damage in dismay.
“Well,” Charley said, after a moment. “If whatever it was they were looking for was in one of those drawers, they would have found it.”
Luciana looked up at him with a quick smile and then moved around the side of the desk. The outer panels were just as elaborately decorated, though with a more abstract design. The background pattern was formed of uneven wavy lines, each constructed from small sections of different woods in varying shades. Within these were concentric circles, like the expanding ripples left after a stone is dropped into a pool of water, and scattered inside and between the waves and circles were small raised spurs of wood. The spurs looked as if they might be rivets that the carpenter had used to hold the desk together, but they were too randomly placed for that, dotted through the flow of wood like stones on a riverbed, some in clusters, others more spread out.
“That,” Charley said, dropping to sit cross-legged beside Luciana, “is enough to make you dizzy just by looking at it.”
Luciana smiled. “I used to stare at it for hours. I’ve always thought it looks like the stream down at the bottom of the orchard. I once heard Grandfather teasing Grandmother that he was testing a new type of hypnosis that kept small children quiet for hours. And then—”
She reached out, resting her fingers on one of the spurs. Then she used her thumb and forefinger to twist it. It turned, silently.
“It moves!” Charley exclaimed.
Luciana said nothing. Instead she turned another spur below the one she had first turned, then the one directly to the right, before moving to rotate the one to the right of the first she had moved. Once she had done so, there was a faint clicking sound. She and Charley watched as the circles within the invisible square she had created shifted a little with each click. As they did so, some of the connected pieces in the background flow of the ‘river’ shifted too, curving a different way, as if some of the water had got caught in a little whirlpool. A few of the wavy lines now formed new outlines around some of the little spurs of wood.
“It’s a puzzle,” Luciana explained. “I discovered it by accident when I was small. It’s only this small section of the desk.”
Charley looked dumbstruck. “What happens when you solve the puzzle? What does it look like when you have?”
“I don’t know,” Luciana said. “I’ve never completed it. It’s the only time my grandfather told me not to do something. He saw me playing with the turning pieces and he said, ‘My darling girl, you can have anything of mine you desire, but that is my secret and must remain so.’ He asked me never to play with that part of the desk again, and so I never did. Actually, that was when he started teaching me how to handle the cards. He said a mind as sharp as mine had to be occupied in the best way possible. I was so excited that he was showing me magic that I forgot about the hidden puzzle completely. Until now. Because this,” she said, indicating the rest of the ornate decoration on the desk, “this is all just misdirection, isn’t it? The rest of the desk – all those patterns and pictures on the front – is a waving wand, distracting people so they don’t see what’s hiding right in front of them.”
They both looked again at the pieces Luciana had rotated.
“Well,” said Charley, sounding a little breathless, “I suppose now is the time to find out … don’t you think?”
Luciana nodded. She worked her way through all the spurs, making sure she turned all the ones that moved, until every circle and piece of the pattern behind it that could move had shifted. She had no idea what would happen once the final section had turned.
The answer was: not a thing.
She and Charley sat back and waited, but beyond subtle shifts in the pattern, nothing had really changed. Some of the circles and spurs were closer together, and more of the wavy lines in the background were connected up, but it still looked as haphazard as before she’d started.
“That can’t be it, can it?” Charley said. “There must be something else to it.”
“There must be another part of the puzzle that needs completing,” said Luciana. “Or maybe the lines aren’t joining up in the right way.”
“But how do you know what the right way is?” Charley asked. “How can you possibly know what it’s supposed to look like to be corre
ct?”
Luciana shook her head. “I don’t know…”
She reached out again, running her fingers over the pieces of wood that had moved. They were uneven now. She pressed one here and there, wondering if there was some sort of release that had to be activated, but although several of the spurs did push in with a click, still nothing happened.
She sat back, frustrated. “I was so sure this was where my grandfather had hidden whatever Thursby was looking for.”
Charley sighed. “It was a good thought. But maybe this is all there ever was to it. Another little sleight of hand.”
“But then why wouldn’t he let me play with it?” Luciana asked.
She remembered the surprised look on her grandfather’s face, how quickly he had moved to stop her. I’d better find something else to occupy you, hadn’t I? he’d said, smiling. Come to think of it, it’s high time you had your own deck of cards.
Luciana frowned at the irregular shapes in front of her. There was something niggling at the back of her mind, but she just couldn’t work out what it was.
“Come on,” Charley said, after she’d stared at the desk for another ten minutes. “Why don’t we go and ask if we can have some lunch? Mum sent an apple cake.”
Luciana sighed. “All right,” she said, and let him pull her to her feet. Disappointment bit like sickness in the pit of her belly as she followed Charley to the door. Then more of her grandfather’s words echoed in her head.
Everything changes, but that does not mean that everything ends. Remember the caterpillar and its cocoon, the butterfly it becomes.
Luciana stopped. She looked back at the desk. “Wait,” she called to Charley. “Wait!”
She dropped back to her knees in front of the panel. Charley was at her side in an instant.
“What is it?” he asked. “What have you seen?”
Luciana waved her hands at the whole side of the desk. “What does that look like to you?” she asked.
Charley blew out his cheeks. “I think you’re right,” he said. “If it looks like anything, it looks like a riverbed.”
The Golden Butterfly Page 2