CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The white-washed cottage at the end of the lane was smaller than she remembered. The hansom cab set them down. The sun was setting and the snow was thick. Dot breathed in the smell of the brine and the river. Within the house, the lamps were lit but no one waited at the door to greet them.
Dot took her new carpet bag from her grandad.
It had in it a few phials of tonic and her new clothes and a small library of magic books from Theodora.
She stepped up to the front door and readjusted the glove that covered her afflicted hand.
Every step was laboured. She drank her tonic every hour and yet it hurt to raise her arm to knock.
Archie, noticing this, gently shooed her hand away.
‘It’s your home, love.’ He turned the handle and called, ‘Hello?’
‘They’re back!’ cried a voice down the hall, and then her mother was on her, hugging her. Her father kissed her on the head. Celia hovered behind them, beaming. She was taller, her face sharper. Dot untangled herself and came into the kitchen and found Willard beside the table holding an infant.
‘Hello,’ said Dot.
‘Hello,’ said Willard. Florence smiled tightly beside him.
‘Is this little Polly?’ asked Dot, and Willard softened mildly.
‘It is,’ said Florence, her hand on a port and lemon. ‘Seven months old. You missed the good bit.’
The family ate dinner together at the table: salty roast pork, steamed vegetables, cockles and herbed bread. Their questions were brief.
How was the city?
What was your favourite bit?
Did you see the Cathedral? The Tower? The river?
But then Willard began to talk about his old colleague, and the attention on Dot was dropped.
A friend of Willard’s had found a new job at the abattoir outside of town.
Dot listened for a long time, trying to understand, to be a good sport and to take no offence at their disinterest of her, and asked, ‘Didn’t he work with you at the cannery? ’
The table went quiet. That had been the wrong question. The only sound was Archie loudly buttering bread, quite unaware of the shift.
‘It closed,’ said Willard, and quickly Martha asked Willard if his old colleague liked his new job better and if the pay was good.
Celia chattered to her dad about a new novel she was reading.
Archie took up a research paper on glaciers and their inhabitants, and Dot realised with a rush that she had, somehow, stepped back in time.
She was a creature of the peripheries once more, always on the outside, staring in. And she realised, in a profound rush, that this was a feeling she never once had inside the tea shop.
After dinner, Dot took her bag and went to her bedroom and when she opened the door she was greeted by a fleet of towering boxes and baby toys and blankets messily tumbling about the space and over the bed.
‘Mum,’ Dot called. ‘Do you mind if I take this stuff out my room?’
Willard came into the hall.
‘That’s Polly’s room,’ he said.
‘It’s my room,’ said Dot. ‘That’s my bed. Those are my pictures on the wall.’
‘Well, Polly needed a room,’ said Willard, folding his arms. In crept that familiar anxiety that only her elder brother could stir in her. ‘You weren’t here.’
‘But,’ said Dot, glancing back around the room, ‘there’s no crib.’
‘Not yet,’ said Willard, ‘Florence is still nursing her. Soon, she’ll sleep in here. It’s too much of a bother to move everything. You’ll have to sleep on the couch.’
‘What about your house?’ asked Dot.
‘Told you,’ said Willard. ‘The cannery shut. If you were here, you would have known.’
Dot did not remove her glove, and so no one saw the affliction of her left hand.
No one asked after the missing finger on her right, though they glanced at it uneasily whenever they seemed to think she would not notice.
The cold seeped into the stump, pinching her nerves.
The area throbbed often. The phantom pains and itches never subsided.
Dot slept on the couch and woke each morning shivering as Willard and her mother banged pots in the kitchen.
She walked down to the pier and stared out at the waves.
After school, Celia would come home and they would chat a little about Alliaster, and Dot told her about Rupert and the shop and the spells that she had learned.
She found Archie in the small guest room he often slept in while he was at the house – the room that he had repeatedly offered to Dot, which she had refused.
‘We ought to start our search for the Ancient Spirit, Dottie,’ he said. ‘I’d love to see Her in Her habitat, even if only the once.’
Dot watched as Archie’s obsession with finding the Sea Spirit renewed. When he was asked by the rest of the family about his upcoming expedition, he prattled about South Sea cuttlefish, and Dot saw plainly that the man knew nothing about them.
She found herself studying runes long into the evenings by the light of the fire, teaching herself how to write with one less finger upon her hand.
Her script was shaky. She threw the pens across the room and cried often.
There was, however, one rune in particular that she kept returning to.
She had never cast it herself, though she had experienced its use many times.
A line down the centre. Three stars in the upper right corner and two crosses in the bottom left.
Triangles and dashes and one great spiral that ringed the centre and would ensure, if it had been chalked upon a surface, that the rune would disappear as soon as it was used. She copied it over and over and over.
One morning, two weeks after she had arrived home to Seafarthing, Dot was in the kitchen, rummaging in the cupboard.
‘Whatever are you looking for?’ asked her father. ‘If its tea you’re after, I can make you a cup.’
‘Oh, no need,’ said Dot. ‘I’m just looking for a particular type.’
‘Type?’ he asked.
‘Chamomile,’ said Dot.
Her father scoffed so extremely that Dot’s face went red.
‘The city’s made you posh,’ he said, laughing at her. ‘Chamomile tea, of all things. There’s only one kind of tea in this house, love, and that’s Eyreish breakfast. You go sit down. I’ll make it the way you like it.’
Dot wandered around the little town, listless.
She visited the Divers’ Café where she used to work.
She ate a sandwich, alone, and the elderly waitresses that she had known for so many years delivered her glasses of cordial.
The waitresses had both stared at her missing finger and gloved hand, and did not ask particularly thoughtful questions about her time in the city.
Her twenty-fourth birthday arrived with no great fanfare.
She had lived, after all.
Archie bought her a sponge cake from the Divers’ Café, and Celia gave her a detective novel, but the rest of her family forgot entirely.
Three weeks after Dot had returned to Seafarthing, she sat with her family at the dinner table.
Polly babbled and smacked at peas with her hands, while Willard tickled her cheek and made a show of gently scolding her in a voice that was pure love.
Dot opened her runes notebook. While spooning soup into her mouth, she began to balance her magic.
‘When are you getting a job then?’
Willard was looking at the bread in his hands, though it was clear he spoke to Dot.
‘She’s just come home,’ said Archie. ‘She’s healing. She needs her rest.’
‘Florence and I are paying board,’ said Willard. ‘So should she.’
‘I don’t pay board,’ Celia pointed out.
‘You’re in school, love,’ said Patrick.
‘I think—’ began Archie, but Willard interrupted.
‘You’re too soft on her, Grandad. She should be held to the same standard as the rest of us. I’m out there, knocking on doors, having interviews. She should be doing the same.’
Dot opened her mouth to speak, but her mother cut her off.
‘There’s a new position at the council,’ said Martha. ‘They need a typist.’
‘Dottie’s hands,’ said Archie.
‘She’ll be fine.’ Patrick waved his fork dismissively. ‘She needs a nice normal job.’
‘I don’t want to be a typist,’ said Dot. ‘I’ll sort it out on my own.’
Willard scoffed. ‘That would be a first.’
A small silence fell.
Dot looked at her brother. She straightened. ‘What did you say to me?’
‘I said that you, Dottie, expect everything handed to you.’
‘Willard,’ said Archie, but his grandson ignored him.
‘You went to Alliaster and spent all your money and now you’re back and think you can live off our hard work like a little leech?’
‘I am not a leech,’ said Dot. She glanced about at them, at each of their faces, her anger quickening.
‘You have no idea what happened to me in Alliaster. None of you do, save for Grandad, who was there, and Celia, who bothered to ask. Actually,’ she skewered potatoes with her fork and laughed, ‘not a single one of you has taken a genuine interest in me since I’ve been back.
I’ve worn this glove every day. How come none of you have asked why? ’
‘Grandad told us already,’ said Willard. ‘You had an accident. It happens all the time at the cannery.’
‘This wasn’t an accident,’ said Dot, and she pulled off her glove and spread her monstrous hand wide. ‘It was magic.’
Florence yanked Polly away from the table. Patrick’s eyes bulged. Martha covered her face with her hands. Celia’s mouth opened in awe.
‘That flood in the capital?’ said Dot. ‘That was me.’
‘You’ve been using magic.’ Her father’s voice was soft and terrible. He glared at Archie, who shrugged.
‘Weren’t my doing, though she has a talent for it.’
‘Dorothy,’ said Martha. ‘Magic is illegal. Is that – is that a punishment?’
‘No,’ said Dot. ‘Of course it isn’t. And I know magic is illegal.
Do you even remember what I studied at university?
’ Dot glared around the room again. ‘Oh, it doesn’t bloody matter.
It was magic that did this. Magic and run-ins with bad witches and a few other things, and I’ve been here three weeks and I am sick of pretending to be like all of you. ’
‘Whatever foul thing has happened to your hand,’ said Willard, ‘it’s not magic.’
Dot balanced the dual streams of warmth and cold within her, and she pictured the rune for levitate and shot the spell at his chair. It sprang up, and Willard, now airborne, yelled and clutched at the wood.
‘Oh!’ cried Celia. ‘Amazing.’
‘It is not amazing,’ said Martha.
‘You taught her this,’ repeated Patrick at his father.
Archie raised his hands in surrender. ‘I don’t have a clue how to cast spells.’
‘Willard,’ cried Florence, grabbing at the legs of his chair. Polly, in her other arm, began to cry.
‘Set me down,’ shouted Willard, his head bobbing at the ceiling.
‘No,’ said Dot. ‘If I am such a liar, then there is no magic here. Step down from your chair, Willard. Go on.’
His face turned red. He made to climb down but the spindly chair jerked and bucked.
‘Dot,’ Willard said, ‘I swear I will—’
She walked out of the kitchen and into the living room, took up her carpet bag from beside the couch and put on her coat and came back.
‘I don’t think I belong here anymore,’ said Dot. She hugged Archie and patted Celia on the head and reopened her notebook to the rune she had studied over and over.
‘What are you doing?’ asked her father.
‘Going home,’ said Dot. She waved her hand and Willard’s chair soared back to the ground and tipped him out of it. He tumbled harmlessly to the slate floor. ‘I’ll be back after New Year’s.’
Then, she balanced the magic once more and hoisted the carpet bag on her tired shoulder and took out the chalk that she kept in her pocket and carefully drew the rune against the stone floor.
Up kicked the smell of magic and chamomile and for the very first time, Dot cast a portal.
She stepped into the whirling darkness and was gone.