Lio winced, but did not argue.
‘Sorry—’ said Dot, raising her bandaged hand as if she were in the school room.
‘Twenty silvers,’ said Theodora.
‘I – yes, alright. Could I ask a question? I’ve tried my very best to keep up with all of this but, whatdoesCate and her coven have to do with this Opal?’
‘Everything,’ said Theodora. ‘Cate is Opal’s mother. The one who murdered her.’
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
In the days that followed, Theodora disappeared from the tea shop with increasing frequency. She reappeared at odd intervals – startling Dot more than once by stepping out of this hallway mirror or into that painting, transfiguring herself in the storeroom, the workshop, the kitchen, rushing up the stairs with petrified stumps of silver birch. Three days after Rupert was possessed, Dot finally asked after the witch’s plan. Theodora smiled but revealed nothing; Dot bit back her questions about what had been in the maroon envelope.
Lio’s response was significant.
He spent the first several days locked in the small bedroom he now shared with Rupert, coming out only to prepare meals or use the bathroom. He was red-eyed, desolate and grumpy beyond measure. Yet, there was nothing vicious in his moods. He was a sensitive man and the revelation that he had been tricked was, it seemed to Dot, a significant point of embarrassment.
When the summer rains arrived in earnest, Dot began working one day per week in the tea shop. It was a familiar occupation, not dissimilar to her afternoons at the Divers’ Café, although with the use of only one hand, the work was trickier. She placed saucers on tables, swept floors and counted coins all with her right hand alone. It tired her unafflicted fingers terribly, but each time she bumpedher bandaged hand and felt the smoothness of her scales against the gauze, it was enough to make her recoil.
The customers were even more challenging than she was used to, with their piercing eyes and invasive questions. In Seafarthing, she had known most of them all her life. Alliaster, however, was a large city with almost countless new faces. One morning in the shop, a young woman opened the door. She had mousey blonde hair and blue eyes and asked for a potion for memory – and for a moment, some fragile and haunted part of Dot faltered. The girl looked so much like Emily.
Between this, the attack from Acanthi and her failures as a witch, Dot’s nerves were in tatters.
And so, in the same way Dot had once memorised maps of Alliaster and library-borrowed encyclopaedias on the city in order to soothe herself, now she memorised the house. She learned which taps dripped. She learned which light bulbs flickered. Every morning, she discovered some new and intriguing object of magic: singing scales, self-heating saucers, tiny decorative bottles of mermaids’ tears, the ship in a bottle that looked, truly, as if it were sailing the West Ocean.
Dot grew boundlessly fond of even the mundane details – the draughty windows and peeling wallpaper and her odd bedroom ceiling which creaked and threw down dust as if someone were pacing above even when Theodora was out, and Theodora was out an awful lot.
Commonly, Dot would be in bed, resting, studying her runes, or else reading about Saint Penelope’s Cathedral, and hear the witch tumble in through one of her portals, shouting:
‘Where in hell’s name did I leave my keys?’
‘Oh, I am running so late. Why is this my disposition?’
‘Belchamber! Did you move my astrolabe?’
The witch was a whirlwind incarnate. One moment, the house was quiet and the next Theodora was whipping down the stairs, changing from this coat to that apron, leaving destruction and books and spell packets and scattered clothing in her wake. She never cleaned nor did she cook nor pay the bills nor answer the door. Theodora refused to install a telephone. She let the grandfather clocks wind all the way down. Yet, despite the slovenly quality of her home, the witch herself was always pristine, her clothing decadent, her hair perfectly waved, the three daggers glinting always from her right ear.
One night, Dot awoke before dawn. Her lamp was still on; she was surrounded by strewn paper and runes practised over and over. Dot yawned and rose sleepily, padding down the stairs and into the hall where she spotted the witch through the open door of the kitchen. Theodora sat at the table, make-up smeared under her eyes. Belchamber was beside her. The witch rubbed her temples. They spoke in hushed tones.
‘I amuseless, a spinning top going round and round in circles. I could simply lob Lio from the living room window, but Acanthi would be on him like lightning. If I sacrifice him, I could take their blood in a flash. I could ward the city that way, but then it would be as if I had slit his throat myself. Oh, I don’t know what to do,Belchamber.’
‘There is one creature you could ask,’ said the spirit carefully.
Theodora scowled. The expression was very unlike her.
‘You know very well I do not want to askhimfor anything.’
The witch groaned and let herself collapse against the table.
‘Would you like me to make sultana rice?’ asked Belchamber.
‘You are kind, Bel,’ mumbled the witch, ‘but my mother’s recipes will not save me from any of this.’
‘Yet, they may bring you comfort,’ said Belchamber. ‘You miss her. You miss Stephen.’
‘I miss the rice,’ said Theodora, a little dismissively, ‘and the cauliflower soup and the shortbread.’
At that moment, the roof above creaked loudly. Such was the soul of an old home, thought Dot. It lived to betray the eavesdropper hidden in the hallway.
