‘Ah,’ said Belchamber. ‘My mistress advised me to remove them.’
‘Whyever for?’
‘She did not say,’ said Belchamber, ‘Although, she did mention that when Miss Dorothy or Master Rupert wish to bathe, the towels are to be returned.’
‘And for myself?’
‘I do not wish to repeat the words she said about you, sir.’
There came a chuckle, and then someone beyond the door said, ‘Here.’
Lio angled himself to peer through the crack. A red-haired boy was there, holding a worn cotton towel and a pair of pyjamas.
‘Sense prevails,’ said Lio. He thanked the boy and stuck his arm out to take the items. It was only after he put on the worn flannel pyjamas – which, due to his lanky Ghistian limbs and broad shoulders, were much too short and exposed his ankles and half of his calves – did he realise that they must have been the boy’s own.
In the days that followed, Lio came to know the house. There were five levels in all. In the basement was the workshop, from which he had been noticeably barred. On the ground floor was the teashop proper, which the customers entered from Wren Court; there was also a courtyard, the hall from which the Raven’s Attic was accessed, a storeroom, and a side door off Ethel Avenue where the post was delivered. The second storey contained the living room and kitchen; the third, the bedrooms; and, finally, the highest level was the attic where the witch slept, which, unlike his singular barring from the basement, seemed to be off-limits to all of the house’s inhabitants, excluding Belchamber and the witch herself.
The boy, Rupert, was a kind of assistant to the witch and was aways skittering in and out, ferrying ingredients or undertaking errands. If Rupert opened the third door on the ground floor, out came the raucous warble of jazz. This was the way to the Raven’s Attic, located in the Commerce District on the other side of the city. If the boy went through the north-facing door from the ground-floor hall, however, in tumbled the sounds of the tea shop – low conversation, clinking plates, babbling kettles. Lio spent most of his first morning sitting at the top of the stairs, sickly from the river water, his hand clasping a chipped cup of black tea as he watched Rupert ferry crates of spells through this door and that, carrying packages, swapping costumes. Lio, when he could, swiped questions at Rupert like a cat waiting for a pair of legs to pass.
‘How many jobs does she have you do?’
‘How long have you been her assistant?’
‘Do you assist with the wards?’
Although the boy seemed to have a family of his own, he often kipped overnight in the living room. Not infrequently, Rupert would work into the early morning at the Raven’s Attic, steal a few hours’ sleep on the sofa in the house and then rise to open the tea shop at eight o’clock. Other nights, he was unaccounted for entirely.
Lio washed his clothes in the kitchen sink and learned to avoid the mouse droppings beside the stairs. He reread the ruined letterfrom his coat pocket. He had a task here and, by some stroke of good fortune, he had situated himself perfectly to complete it.
Subtly, Lio began to search Theodora’s house.
However, almost every door was locked to him and no matter how many days went past, Theodora was nowhere to be found. And so there Lio was, on the fourth night, perched by the living room windows, rereading the letter with its achingly familiar script. The letter that had told him to return to Alliaster and had snatched him away from his apartment in Kölldin before he had even thought to say goodbye to it.
Lio found himself gazing at Wren Court below, spying on the spirits occasionally slinking along the footpath. The first he saw was coated in royal blue fur and cartwheeling like the spokes of a penny-farthing. Then waddled past a series of melon-sized eggs from which legs and arms had sprouted. Then came a spirit that looked like an enormous dragonfly. Then, a spirit that looked like the moon, deflating.
Alliaster was so different to Kölldin, the capital of Kremora, the foreign city where Lio had spent the past five years. He had collapsed there, just about, after his half a decade of morosely moseying across the continent and beyond, reading bad poetry in dismal cafés and searching uselessly for his first love. Although the spirits in Alliaster had returned in dribs and drabs after the war, there was a tension to them that did not exist in Kölldin.
Kremora was one of the United Allies and had been among Calléum’s enemies during the war. The spirits in that country were a touch arrogant, Lio thought. They took favourites among the humans, cursed this politician or enchanted that botanic garden. The spirits here, however, were skittish. He watched now a large, oozing, green-coloured spirit nervously glancing over his shoulder. Something strange was going on in this city, and it made Lio uneasy.
He pocketed his letter and climbed up the stairs to bed.
The next day, Lio made a show of borrowing books to read and complaining about his injuries. He picked out the cleanest knife, fork and spoon from the kitchen drawer, scrubbed them both and kept them in his cupboard bedroom for his own use. Belchamber made several meals a day for Dot but when Lio searched for the ingredients he’d spied on her plates – cream, chicken, thick buttered bread – they were nowhere. He found, instead, two large sacks of potatoes and carrots beside the empty icebox. These he boiled for himself for the next two days until he was so sick of them that he went to the third storey landing and yelled up at the witch’s attic room door: ‘Go on and drown me then, Theodora!Surely that would be kinder than this.’
‘She’s not up there,’ called Rupert from the landing below. ‘She’s Maz Bircham today at the factory on Stirrup Street.’
‘Factory?’
‘Bircham & Bel Paper Goods.’
‘Why ever does she own a factory?’ demanded Lio. ‘She has the King drinking in her club three days a week! What benefit could she possibly gain?’
‘Says it’s good business.’ Rupert shrugged.
The days etched past, punctuated by spoons dropped into tea cups until his eighth day in the house when, at two o’clock in the morning, he woke to the sound of raucous hooting, and he climbed down the stairs and saw the witch again at last. Theodora was on the living room floor, squawking with laughter. She wore a beret and a painter’s smock. In one hand, she held a long cigarette and in the other, a glass of sherry. Two other women and a large bird-like spirit accompanied her, all of them smoking and cackling.
‘Oh!’ cried Theodora, seeing Lio. She flourished her hand tipsily. ‘He’s the one I told you all about – just turned up, of all things!No telegram, no letter. Now he’s here, using up my hot water, no compensation, all as if this is some artists’ cooperative.’
‘What relation are you, darling?’ asked the woman with jewelled braids. She wore a burgundy mourning dress. ‘Justine’s cousin’s friend’s brother, isn’t it?’
