Theodora fortified the recipe for her tonic and every day Dot’s strength returned a little more. Dot began to work in the tea shop two days per week at the rate of two silvers and twenty-five coppers per hour. Rupert was paid one silver, eighty coppers per hour and worked three days in the tea shop and nights in the Raven’s Attic. Lio worked five days a week and was paid nothing.
‘Why inheaven’s nameis Dot getting paid but I’m not?’ Lio shouted up at the attic door one evening.
Dot was in bed, reading her copy ofDaemonology and the Spirits.She heard the witch yank open the trapdoor and shout back, ‘Because Dot has some semblance of value, while youare a foul, conniving, misanthropicleech.’
The next morning, Dot woke to a fierce knocking at her door. She opened it and found Lio in the hall.
‘I’ll not live like this any longer,’ he said, and handed her a broom. ‘Rupert’s already cleaning the kitchen. Belchamber has “tea shop” business. You’ve got the living room.’
Lio threw open all the doors and windows and squeezed lemons into buckets of warm water with sodium bicarbonate and vinegar. He swept furiously and cast weak enchantments to scare the mice and beetles, and he scrubbed the doors as if their very paint had slighted him.
‘I know you were sickly, but you could have at least dusted your windowsill,’ he said as he watched Dot tackle the cobwebs.
‘I wasn’t sure if it would upset Theodora.’
Lio made a sound of disgust and stomped away.
The three of them were at it the whole day. Dot rested frequently. When her own room and all of the second storey was done, she lay against the living room floor, exhausted. Lio stood in the hallway.
‘Which one of you will clean the toilet?’ he called.
‘Not me,’ said Rupert from the kitchen.
‘Not me,’ said Dot.
Lio stared about helplessly and then glared up at the ceiling.
‘Oi!’ he shouted upward. ‘Theodora! We’re cleaningyourhouse. Why don’t you come down here and help!’
Still, Theodora did not join them until several hours later, clothed in the paint-speckled smock of the oil colourist, Justine Allonse.
‘My,’ said Theodora, peering into Dot’s room. ‘You and Rupert did a grand job.’
‘Excuse me?’cried Lio from the bathroom he was still scrubbing.
‘You are quite excused,’ said the witch.
‘Ha!’ Lio shouted, sounding almost manic, as he stomped into the hallway. Dot ducked her head out of her room, but Theodora was already gone. Lio scrubbed his fingers through his hair and stared out the window for a moment, as if he might cry.
‘At least Theodora gave you your own room,’ said Rupert, coming up the stairs. He looked at Dot, then. ‘Mine was snatched from me.’
Another week passed. Belchamber no longer slept beside her. The rainy season was almost over. The hydrangeas had bloomed, and the earliest of them were already fading.
Thick raindrops lashed at the window. Dot could not sleep. She switched on the lamp and kneeled before the mirror in her old chemise. Her hair reached her hips; she could not remember a single moment of her life when she had not hated it.
On her first day in the tea shop, one of the regular customers, Madame Thomas, had said to her, ‘My, that’s an old-fashionedlook, love.’ And when Dot had set down the woman’s packet spell and asked her what she had meant, the elderly woman had continued, ‘Those long curls, darling. And your blouse, too. I thinkmymother had a blouse like that. Is that the new thing? Young ones dressing old?’
Madame Thomas had ordered a packet spell for sinus relief and another for penmanship. With them, she drank a small cup of amber-coloured tea and a glass of cherry cordial.
She’d had a point. Dot’s clothingwasoutdated and still stained here and there by the dirt of the River Lourdes. Yet, disposable silver was a novelty to her; since she was sixteen, all of Dot’s money had been spent saving for university or to pay for board in her parents’ home or for the tonic ingredients that were her responsibility to buy. Any meagre scrap of copper left over had been put toward her dream trip to Alliaster.
Theodora, however, did not charge her board. The witch made great vats of Dot’s tonic down in the basement workshop, using her own supplies and the white, crumbling hunk of dried ambergris, never requesting reimbursement. Dot’s pay was modest, but she had no expenses and so she had finally amassed enough silver to justify ordering two sets ofnewblouses and trousers and skirts; they sat now on her bureau waiting to be unwrapped. Yet, when Dot pictured herself wearing, for the first time in her life, truly new clothes, she felt a sickening dissonance.
She didn’t deserve pretty things, did she?
She was used to watching other women with an ugly undercurrent of envy eroding her. What right did she have to pine, painfully, for beauty and adoration and splendour, when she was simply a dowdy child from Seafarthing? How would she even do up the buttons on those blouses, anyway, with her bandaged hand and, beneath those bandages, claws?
Dot bundled the weight of her hair in her unafflicted hand.
