CHAPTER SIX
Dot sat in the National Library, her fingers picking at the edges of loaned periodicals. She gazed at nothing in particular, elbows on the table, her face rested on her palm; she was so fatigued she could hardly sit up.
She had checked out of the hostel that morning, three and a half weeks after arriving.
In that time, the jacarandas of Alliaster had bloomed and burst. Now, they sprouted with green, feathery leaves.
The air turned humid and the women swapped felt berets for wide-brimmed millinery.
Dot, in her same woollen hat, felt dowdier by the day.
That mattered little now.
Dot would take the train home. She had just enough left in her purse for a ticket and, perhaps, a couple of frugal meals. She took her chewed fingernails away from her mouth and turned the page, at which a passing attendant hissed, ‘The other readers do not want your spittle on their newspapers.’
She startled and by the time she had collected herself enough to apologise, the attendant was wheeling his trolley away.
Those were the first words anyone had spoken to her in five days.
She might as well have been a goldfish in a tank, always at the edge of a room, a small, silent creature who people’s eyes drifted over.
The thought caused a spark of irritation within her, and so when the attendant wheeled his trolley back past, she caught his eye and whispered an uncharacteristically bold: ‘Um?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m looking for a tea shop,’ she said.
‘Well, this is a library.’
‘I know,’ said Dot, and then she looked into his impatient eyes, trying in earnest to read them – was he pro-Prohibition?
Or could he be a secret radical purchasing packet spells to win his weekly billiards game?
In any case, surely she would not be arrested for one careful question.
‘The shop,’ she went on as quietly as she could, ‘is difficult to find. I think it’s called Theodora’s? ’
The attendant startled. He glanced about.
‘I know no shop of that name,’ he snapped and wheeled his trolley away.
Dot found herself yet again wandering the city, watching the green omnibuses whose passengers clasped parasols against the sun.
She sat in Penn Park for an hour. She ate a cucumber sandwich on a bench at the foot of the Tower of étienne beside the River Lourdes and the students in tweed who lolled on the grass like cats soaking in the daylight.
After, as she leaned upon the railing, Dot caught a glimpse of the underpass beside the river.
Tents were strung up almost out of view of the tourists.
She glimpsed a dirty foot. A sand-coloured mutt.
A man picking at his teeth. Reverberations of the war, she thought, manifested in canvas and cardboard.
The war had begun when Dot was seven, only three years after the introduction of the Prohibition on magic.
She remembered the rations – sugar, butter, meat turned scarce – and the sound of distant bombs striking towns more important than Seafarthing.
The war ended when she was twelve. Yet, well into the aftermath, the rest of the continent continued to snub Calléan motor cars and medical apparatuses and beef and apples.
But why, Dot had wondered over and over, did the Prohibition remain in Calléum?
Her mother knew no answer.
Her father, when asked, prattled on about that fringe political group – The Radical Spokes of Advancement – whose campaigning and pamphlet printing had, according to him, contributed significantly to the introduction of Article 13.
The Radical Spokes believed that magic should only be controlled by a select, esteemed few.
Her father muttered about them so frequently, Dot wondered if he had secretly joined them.
When Dot asked this question, however, Patrick Walcott had turned pink and stalked off, muttering about his mother turning in her grave.
It was Dot’s politics degree which had finally shed some light on the subject.
Magicians were famously fickle. All of them – witches, wizards, warlocks, enchantresses all the way down to the smallest of backyard alchemists – were as difficult to lead as cats on leashes.
However, with the Prohibition in place in Calléum, the Magicians of their country were turned uncommonly obedient.
Now, the alumni of the Royal Institute of Alliaster were employed across the continent, exported to the countries of the United Allies to assist, quite against their will, in whatever follies those foreign governments involved themselves in.
As such, the United Allies (Kremora, Beleust and Arranfol, most notably) continued to reap the benefits of Calléum’s Prohibition long after the war ended.
What better way to increase their capital gains and end their cold wars?
Quickly, these countries became the richest in the southern hemisphere.
Dot closed her eyes and felt the damp river air upon her face.
She took a sip of her tonic and left the railing, wandering foggily for some hours through the city.
Her train would leave at half past one in the morning – the slow, inexpensive line, which would take her right back to where she had started.
She pictured herself at forty, still biting her nails, staring out from the same Seafarthing beach where she had found the anglerfish.
Would she ever forgive herself for ending up like the rest of them?
She would get on that train, and it would cleave from her the scales of whimsy, of possibility, of magic.
She would return home, at long last, a boring, ordinary, grown-up.
Dot trudged on, every moment bringing her closer and closer to the end.
She stood before Saint Penelope’s Cathedral.
It was Emily who had first shown her that building so many years earlier as they perused the stamps at the post office; they had promised to visit together, and shortly after, she had bought for Dot’s birthday a beautiful illustration of the Cathedral.
Now, Dot stood alone on its steps. She took out her purse.
She would not go home until she saw the inside.
She bought a ticket and placed herself in the line, and it was only once she leaned against the stone wall, her vision mildly blurred, that she realised she had spent the last of her food money on a tourist attraction.
The man in front of her had a child on his shoulders, who ate a doughy pork bun. The child stared straight at Dot as she took a bite. Sauce dribbled down her chin.
What had Dot done? Would the people at the booth refund her ticket if she asked?
She would surely starve on the journey home without money to buy at least a biscuit and a cup of tea.
So preoccupied with her guilt was she, her brow drawn, her fingers clenching and unclenching, that Dot barely took notice of the young man who joined the line behind her, his bruises almost faded.
At length, she stepped through the great arch and into the entryway of Saint Penelope’s Cathedral.
It was only once she took off her shoes and quickly set them upon the provided shelf – fearful that one of the tourists beside her would see the holes and newspaper – and stood upon the carpeted floor beside the entrance, that she finally felt a glimmer of excitement.
The right-side doors opened and a surge of tourists coursed out of the vestibule, took up their shoes, tied their laces and then spilled out into the night-time.
Dot watched them, eyes unfocused. There was a dull ringing in her ears, and she had to lean against the wall once more.
At last, the doors on the left opened and a green-robed monk led them inside.
Dot followed the babble of ticketholders, her worn socks padding against the plush carpet.
When she stepped into the cathedral proper, her breathing grew sharp.
It was as if a god had been the one to sit at the bygone drafting board with their papyrus and ink.
The structure was seven or eight storeys tall, made of stone and bronze and gold tile, adorned in mosaics, stained glass and the portraits of dead monarchs who had each been executed in egregious ways when their city had been conquered: vats of hot oil, hellebore tea, bindings, sawings or being thrown from balconies.
The carpet led her past the pews – for this was still a place of worship on Friday and Tuesday mornings, the monk explained.
Dot stepped onto marble the colour of burnt caramel, the cold seeping through her socks.
She examined the dais and throne and, at last, craned her neck to view the dome for which this building was famous.
Dot’s eyes trailed up the ornate tiles stretching from the edge of the dome to its centre, where a portrait of Saint Penelope gazed down at her, crafted of azure, ochre and indigo tile.
Theirs was the only city that had been founded by a witch.
This portrait was different to the stained-glass window that had been commissioned by her wife, Calléa.
In this mosaic, Penelope was younger, sharper, her eyes drawn and austere.
She was surrounded by Ancient Spirits, the kind that had been here since the world began, and they made Dot think of pamphlets and tomes Archie had collected on the subject.
Spirits were the first Magicians, really – deities of the mountains, of the soil, of the ocean.
Archie – how terribly she missed him, alone as she had been all these weeks in Alliaster. He was, she thought now, the sole spark of joy about returning to Seafarthing. Then, she thought of her brother, her parents, their inevitable scowls and harsh words and ridicule. Tears were quick to her eyes.
Dot left the dome and trailed the long halls. Monks strolled here and there, accompanied by spirits who had each become translucent in a show of incredible respect.
She recalled the histories of this sacred space.
There was the banning of idols, the execution of Emperor Phio, the introduction of Article 13.
She spotted a chip in the bottom of a dark, marble column.
Was that a distant remnant of clumsiness or of violence?
The person who had made that mark, whose name Dot did not know, had existed in the same room as her, on the same marble floor, separated only by the passage of seconds, albeit billions of them.
Were they quite at peace to have been forgotten?
Dot went on, stepping on every third tile, looking for imperfections, marks against the wooden benches or perhaps paintbrush wobbles on the murals, any reverberation of the individual souls who came before.
Then a voice rang out, sharp and all-encompassing, disrupting the peace so terribly, it was as if some stranger had reached in through her bedroom window and switched off her gramophone.
‘You have one minute.’
Dot was not ready.
She had thought it would be the train ride that severed her life in two. But no, it was this. Dot reached for the closest pew as if attempting to cling to the seconds that were slipping out from under her.
Once she stepped back through the cathedral door and took up her newspaper-stuffed shoes, she would never come back.
The bells tolled.
‘It is time,’ called the monk.
Dot watched the tourists amble across the carpet toward the exit.
Waves of panic crashed within her. She stepped backward and bumped into a large cabinet.
Turning around, she saw an alcove between it and the wall.
She glanced over at the monks and the spirits but, of course, she was a creature of the peripheries, always the one staring in, and so none of them watched her.
Dorothy Louise Walcott took one deliberate step and wedged herself into the crack of the alcove. Heart thrumming in her throat, she waited, praying to gods she did not believe in that no one would see her grey socks.
The footfalls of the tourists softened.
She heard the doors shut.
She let out a small guilty breath.
Dot had broken the rules. She had stolen an extra admission to the cathedral. However, she reasoned, she would simply slip back out with the next group. She had only needed a few moments more before the death of all she had wanted to be.
But then a bell sounded.
The lights extinguished.
The cathedral was drenched in darkness.
How many hours ago had she eaten that cucumber sandwich?
Dot’s stomach washed with the cold and terrible realisation that she must have purchased a ticket for the final viewing of the day. It was nine o’clock. The holy doors were sealed. Dot was locked in Saint Penelope’s Cathedral.