CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Dot was once again a resident of the cheapest hostel in the Alliaster guidebook.
She had walked past Saint Penelope’s Cathedral that morning and gone in.
She’d walked the same streets as when she first came to the city, the smells and the bluebells and the mushroom-coloured collies now quite normal.
She ate the same oily eggs at the dingy café below the hostel, and she hated them.
Belchamber and Lio, both, were better cooks.
It was now her third night in the hostel. She stared out at the city that she had once been so dazzled by. If she were truly honest with herself, she felt now that there was something of a betrayal behind that beauty. Those were not stars reflected on a vast ocean; they were just streetlamps.
Tomorrow, she promised herself, I will buy the ticket back to Seafarthing.
She slept on top of the covers, listening to the skittering of beetles and her neighbours’ lewd moaning, then sobbing, then moaning. From the opposite room came fierce laughter. From above, someone yelled into a telephone about striped paint. Dot lay with her eyes open until the sun was up.
She took the tram all the way to Alliaster Grand Central Station, her purse heavy with silver. She stood before the ticket booths. There was a train to Kolp in two hours; from there, she could transfer to Seafarthing. She could be home by this time tomorrow.
Dot looked down at her afflicted hand. Oh, she would need bandages to hide the affliction from her family! She had forgotten to buy them! Dot walked briskly out of the station and as soon as she was away from the chugging of wheels, she breathed again.
Dot spent four hours in the Marigold Bath House, soaking in a small tub off to the side until the water was cold, too tired to climb out.
She fell asleep at noon in the hostel and woke at midnight.
She walked to Penn Park and sat there until the sun rose.
She sat in Lecustre Square until the sun sank, mourning the hopeful girl who had once wandered across this concrete.
She began, in earnest, to miss the sound of the ocean and her little sister and the potatoes her father liked to make.
Still, she could not believe that Opal had lived in the attic.
At last, Dot bought a train ticket to Seafarthing.
She handed the slip of paper to the attendant.
She boarded the train. Dot closed her eyes and checked the stoppers on her remaining phials and adjusted her cloche over her short curls.
She named all that she could smell, see, hear and feel to stifle the panic rising in her.
When the conductor shouted that the train was about to leave, she just about shrieked, ‘Wait!’ and rushed off.
That afternoon, she was back in the National Library, reading the newspaper.
The aged attendant wheeled his trolley past, and Dot realised that he was a regular at the tea shop, that he always bought spells to improve his falsetto.
She bit at her fingernails, and when he saw her afflicted hand, his eyes flickered with recognition.
The old man nodded to Dot – she was, to him, the apprentice of the witch, Theodora.
She should have felt pride.
Instead, it all felt quite ruined.
Dot looked miserably down at the broadsheet before her.
MISSING MINISTER DERAILS PARLIAMENT
. . . the disappearance of Minister for Sorcerie and Magic, Bianca De León, has heralded a forfeit vote in the House of Representatives.
The opposition minister, the spirit Marcidus, has asserted that De León’s absconding from parliament this week is further evidence of the need to amend Article 13 of the Prohibition on Magic and revise any current daemotion charms . . .
Dot laid her forehead against her hands.
If she went home now, three things were absolute.
The first was that she would die before the winter was over.
The second was that Theodora would be made a conduit of magic.
The third: Rupert and Belchamber, in the aftermath, would lose the tea shop.
The boy of not yet seventeen would have no one.
No home and no family, save for the sickly spirit.
But what would be absolute if Dot returned?
Nothing at all.
You’ll forgive her, won’t you? Lio had said.
So what if Dot did? So what if, after all of this pain and suffering and discomfort, she was forgiving and perhaps a little naive and perhaps a little overzealous in liking people, even if they did not like her in return.
So what if she wanted to live a life negating bitterness and cynicism, rather than relishing it?
Dot pushed up from her chair. She crossed the library, and she smiled at the attendant who had once reproached her, and it took nothing from her to do so.
She handed him her newspapers and thanked him, and with her carpet bag on her shoulder, she made her way slowly out of the library and across Grand Boulevard, where she found the tram stop and paid for her ticket with the wages she had earned as an apprentice to Theodora.
She could be furious and still forgive the witch.
Dot got off the tram beside the Collins Street police station and walked over the gentle hills of the Market District to the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue, where she found the tea shop: a narrow dwelling with grand arched windows and stone steps climbing from the street up to the door, which opened before she came to it.
‘Dot!’ Rupert bounded down the steps and onto Wren Court. He hugged her so tight she almost toppled.
‘Rupe,’ she said, the carpet bag falling down her shoulder. He took it from her and pulled her inside and that was when Dot saw white paint scrawled across the glass that read: CLOSED FOR GOOD.
‘She did that after you left,’ said Rupert.
Dot climbed the stairs with the boy’s help and noticed again the smell of the house: earthy wood, lavender and chamomile, incense, magic. She came finally to the landing beneath Theodora’s trapdoor. Rupert delivered her bag into her room and promptly disappeared down into the living room.
Dot climbed the ladder but before she had a chance to knock, Theodora’s magic pulled open the door and Dot was whisked gently up and into the witch’s room.
Theodora was in the middle of the floor surrounded by textbooks, stacks of paper, sheets of loose leaf. She jabbed a finger at the mirror behind her, through which she had been scrying. ‘I saw you coming.’
‘Could have saved me the stairs and magicked me all the way up here,’ said Dot, sitting on the edge of Theodora’s bed.
‘You mightn’t’ve been wanting to see me,’ said Theodora. ‘Perhaps you wanted to say goodbye to Rupert only. I’d forgive you for it.’
‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ said Dot. ‘Opal has my blood. Acanthi are Saints know where. Salamander is moving on Article Thirteen. He’s going to reverse his daemotion. What is going to happen, Theodora?’
‘I do not know,’ said the witch. She gestured to the mess of papers around her.
‘But I am trying to find out.’ She flicked her hand, and ten bottles of tonic flew out of her cupboard and landed beside Dot.
‘I made these for you a while ago. I’ve been testing them.
I tried to use the ambergris as a Sympathetic link to Archie.
I’ve scried most of the South Sea. All of it to no avail. ’
‘Why did you close the tea shop?’ asked Dot. ‘You need the money to pay back Salamander.’
‘I want him to think I’ve given up,’ said the witch. ‘I’ve spent the last several days sending resignation and termination letters to just about every person I know. Let’s hope I didn’t use the wrong name on anything.’
‘Theodora,’ said Dot with a sigh, but the witch pressed on.
‘The debt is too large for us to solve it with packet spells.’ Belchamber groaned quietly from the corner. Theodora rose. She summoned a plate of salt and placed it beside him. Theodora nodded back at the papers on the floor.
‘This is everything I’ve collected on your affliction, Dorothy.’ She snatched up one sheet and handed it to Dot. ‘I have a list of magical professors you can contact—’
‘Theodora,’ said Dot.
At last the witch looked at her.
‘I do not need a list. I need you, and more than that: you need you as well. Some magical professor from the continent won’t save me. We need a solve for Salamander. We’ll do it together.’
‘But I lied to you,’ said Theodora. ‘I betrayed you very badly.’
‘You did,’ said Dot. ‘You were conniving and withholding, and you hid a woman in your bedroom because you felt too guilty to turn her out. You did lie as easily as you breathed.’ The witch hung her head at this.
‘Yet,’ Dot went on, ‘I cannot overlook the fact that, in spite of everything, you still saved me from Salamander. You still saved Lio from Cate. Twice in a row, you damned yourself to atone for your mistakes. Don’t misunderstand me, Theo.
I am furious at you.’ Dot stepped closer.
‘However, my mistakes have also had violent consequences, which I will regret as long as I am alive. That is something we have in common.’
‘What happened with Emily wasn’t your fault, Dorothy.’
‘And what happened with Cate wasn’t yours,’ said Dot.
‘The lie, of course, but the violence? You were barely an adult. You had a moment of jealousy. Opal governed you from when you were all but an orphan. Cate should have been a mother to you, and she chose not to be. You hid Opal up here not out of malice or cunning, but out of shame.’
At last Dot knew who Theodora was without the glamour and the polish and the costumes. She saw a broken woman, strange and uncommunicative and in need of help, just as she had been when Theodora had plucked her from the Lourdes and decided to teach her magic.
‘You only wanted to be loved,’ said Dot. ‘For that, I will forgive you.’