CHAPTER EIGHT
Dot landed against carpet, her socks slipping, and found herself engulfed by heavy fabric – a curtain?
– which she seized to avoid toppling right over.
It was dark. The air was thick with the scent of tobacco and liquor and cologne.
She heard the noisy burble of a jazz band playing beyond.
Dot stood in what she could only describe as a fitting room, though there was no mirror, lamp or hook to hang one’s clothes.
Outside of it, glasses clinked. A trombone blared.
Dot had the sudden anxious vision of someone else flying in through the portal like a child on some perverse water chute and landing right on top of her.
It was this worry that caused her to push out of the fabric and into the chaos beyond.
The Raven’s Attic was kaleidoscopic, and it dazzled her.
Flamboyant swarms of ladies, gentlemen and androgyne gentry mingled indiscriminately with the spirits, cackling, playing strange games, perched on leather armchairs, dancing rambunctiously, craning over the bar or else frolicking in the haze of tobacco.
Dot had never seen so many spirits in a single room: the largest was the size of a biplane, crouched in the corner, with four pairs of arms wrapped around seven pairs of legs, and huffing smoke from his nose; the smallest sat on the shoulder of a nearby woman and resembled a hat pin.
She spotted the musicians in the corner in salmon pink suits, elevated above the crowd.
Each strike of the drums hit her square in the chest and made her feel as if her heart might stop.
Dot wove into the fray, clutching her carpet bag to her chest. She saw a squat woman with black hair sitting on the lap of a man twenty years her junior.
She realised after a moment that the woman was Jennifer Balarby, the Prime Minister.
She saw Alan Le, the Minister for Education, hanging upside down while a pretty spirit tickled his nose.
It was the King, however, who truly shocked Dot.
There he was, Ellarde Custre IV, wiry limbed and pug-eyed, sat at a card table with three spirits.
He grumbled in a phlegmy voice, ‘Wildes, you rancid cheat. You saw my hand!’
The accused was a hill spirit. She took up the whole left side of the card table and her wide body resembled a meadow stretched over a rocky knoll.
The spirit had eyes but no mouth, and yet a cackle came from deep within her, shaking the nearby glassware in its thunderous timbre.
The hill spirit leaned forward. Her right side formed a peninsula to scoop the silver pieces toward herself.
However, the King snatched an envelope from his pocket and ripped it open.
The table exploded. Dot leaped back, though she was one of the few who did; when the smoke cleared, she saw that the table and all of its cards were intact but a chunk of rock had fallen away from the spirit’s shoulder, leaving a craggy cliff.
The King took back the silver, and the spirit was replaced by an old woman with a stuffed flamingo in her hair.
‘’Scuse me!’
A red-haired boy who did not match the raucous tableau shoved past Dot and she stumbled. The boy was lost to the throng and then resurfaced again at the room’s far edge before disappearing behind a black curtain.
The club grew hotter as Dot tugged herself through knots of dancing bodies.
Her head swelled. Her muscles ached. A pale arm smacked into her face and champagne sprayed down her blouse.
Dot did not see the culprit, though she heard a woman’s laugh, and saw a moustached person with beaded eyelashes glance at her with pity.
She came finally to the edge of the room and, upon spotting an empty armchair, collapsed into it. She took a sip of her tonic. The club was too loud. Too warm. If one more person touched her, she worried she might burst into tears.
What had Lio told her to look for? A door?
Then, the red-haired boy was back again.
He possessed the blue-eyed, round-cheeked characteristics of Leithian heritage, and appeared not yet seventeen.
He held a box of envelopes and wore a look of self-importance.
His suit was shabby, but only at the edges: the kind of subtle shabbiness noticeable only to another person who understood the strain of attempting to obscure their own poverty.
He picked up an envelope and called to the party, ‘Duchess Casilda Saad?’
A woman in her fifties came forward, wrapped in a lime green gown.
‘That should solve your husband’s . . . vitality.’
Duchess Saad snatched the envelope. ‘It is for my sister’s husband.’
‘Of course,’ said the boy, though there was the ghost of a smile on his mouth. He leafed around the box and withdrew another envelope. ‘Carrigon Smith?’
Envelope after envelope found its eager recipient. Every now and then the boy would quip about the contents of the spell. Was that allowed? Was there no confidentiality among Magicians? Eventually, the King barked over the crowd: ‘Where is your mistress today, lad?’
‘She has other business.’
‘What a surprise indeed,’ said the King. ‘De León is nothing compared to my Valiente. I keep telling you all.’
‘Certainly, your majesty,’ said the woman with the flamingo in her hair. ‘De León might be the Minister for Sorcerie and Magic, but she is of course no Grand Magician.’
The boy smirked at this. He called the names of foreign dignitaries and politicians and artists, many of whom Dot had read about in the newspaper.
There came starlets with thin pencilled eyebrows, men clasping cigars, a controversial dressmaker, opera singers and emperors of commerce, all of them taking their packet spells with nary a flash of a licence.
This, Dot was certain, was illegal. Yet, there sat the King.
There giggled the Prime Minister. None of the spirits were called, of course. They had their own magic.
The scene had a dreamlike quality, confounding and colourful. Four weeks ago, she had only seen a handful of spirits in her life, and never a single individual of importance.
When the boy was done, he slipped back through the crowd and behind the black curtain. Dot thought she caught the glint of brass. Could that have been a doorknob?
When the boy appeared once more, swimming through the crowd with a fresh crate of envelopes, Dot pulled herself from her chair. She might not find another opportunity.
‘Rin Ottessa?’ the boy called.
An elegant woman in a jewelled chair with wheels parted the crowd.
Dot edged along the outskirts of the room, dodging the wallflowers leaning languidly against the wainscoting.
With considerable effort, she made it to the far side of the club and, as she reached the curtain, chanced a look back.
No eyes were on her – they never were. She took a small breath and then slipped behind the curtain.
Indeed, she found a door.
Dot stared at it, horrified at her success. She raised her hand and knocked meekly. When no answer came, she knocked much harder. Still, nothing.
Dot stared at the handle for a long time, wrestling her own timidity and, at last, resolved that this was precisely what she had come to the Raven’s Attic to do. She seized the handle and twisted it, and the door sprung forward to reveal a fleet of rising stairs.
This, too, she had not expected to be successful.
‘Hello?’ Dot called into the darkness above, beginning to regret every choice she had hitherto made – from eavesdropping in the university library to leaving Seafarthing to buying a ticket to Saint Penelope’s Cathedral. Over the music, she could hardly hear her own voice. ‘Theodora?’
Dot stepped in and the door slammed behind her, throwing her onto the stairs.
The lock clicked and the sound of the club was lost. The only light was that of a dim lamp, somewhere above her.
What choice had she now? Dot climbed the staircase slowly with shaking knees, the carpet bag slipping constantly down her shoulder.
The staircase was long and winding, jutting this way and that with none of the usual logic afforded to staircases.
It exhausted her, but she kept on until she found herself on a landing in a small, poorly lit hallway.
She called out to the darkness, ‘Hello?’
‘Yes?’
Dot shrieked. The hallway was suddenly washed in warmth and light.
A woman stood before her holding a bulb of flame in her hand.
Her hair was raven-black, cropped at her chin and finger-waved like the other young women of the city.
From her right ear swung three golden daggers glinting in the firelight.
Her complexion was dark, her face heart-shaped, and she had a wide nose, heavy eyebrows and clever, discerning eyes that fixed Dot where she stood.
Dot gawked at her.
The young woman’s voice was deep and calm. ‘Why are you in my house?’
She placed her free hand in her pocket, and Dot noticed now the extravagant coat resting upon her shoulders: a midnight blue thing with ivory buttons and wide sleeves and gold embroidered stars.
‘I was,’ began Dot, ‘I – goodness, I’m so sorry – I was looking for the witch, Theodora.’
‘You’ve found her.’
Dot’s eyes widened.
‘You’re breaking and entering, you know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dot.
‘You’ve already said that.’
‘I just—’ said Dot, wringing her hands. Oh, this was going terribly. ‘I had to find you.’
‘In the dead of the night?’ asked the witch. ‘In my hallway?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Well, what?’
‘I would like to learn magic.’ The moment the words left her lips, Dot regretted them.
Only now, standing in front of Theodora – who, to Dot’s great alarm, was no longer a sickbed daydream but a real living person, with a mole on her cheek and brown eyes, who could only be a few years older than her – did Dot realise how childish she sounded.
‘You forced your way into my house,’ said Theodora, ‘to request an apprenticeship?’
‘The door was unlocked.’