Chapter 6 Lilara Mournfell
Lilara Mournfell
“There,” Sage said decisively, locking the glass door on the final display with a turn of the key. The spotlights positioned above it flickered in unison at the excited current of magic that passed through her fingertips. She shook it off like a static shock.
“Looks wonderful, Specs. Truly.”
Sage couldn’t help but let a small smile creep in at the compliment from Casimir. As much as he drove her half mad, his opinion had always carried the most weight with her. And it was something like “wonderful,” even she had to admit. It was…impressive.
Years and years of her most dedicated work condensed into an exhibition that had started last year as an idea for one side room. A small-scale but detailed examination of Port Sylvan’s most famous legends, rather than its factual history.
But those findings were in fact two lifetimes’ worth of study, and with more to share than they’d realized, their curation had taken over the full expanse of the museum in the end. Just for the season, it had become a museum of the magical.
While Sage and Casimir did their best to curate the small, understated space, something about its homey, cosy atmosphere always left it feeling more like an overgrown memory box than anything highly professional or scholarly.
The main exhibition hall wasn’t much bigger than a large living room, and three even more snug spaces ran on from there—plus the archive in the back, the gift shop and a small staff kitchen.
Every wall was lined with wooden display cases that shared stories from the town’s past, changing once or twice a year to fit a new theme.
The air always smelled like beeswax, the floorboards invariably creaked no matter what tradesman tried to stop it, and little pools of water formed daily in the corners of the windowsills, thanks to endless condensation in the listed building.
But despite all of that, Sage was incredibly proud of the place.
She had loved visiting as a child, spending her pocket money in the gift shop, and hadn’t thought twice about applying for the job seven years ago.
As head curator, it was where she spent almost every waking moment and where Deputy Curator and Research Assistant Casimir spent the bare minimum that he could possibly get away with before she shouted at him.
Sage observed the dust motes hovering between the beams of sunlight that shone in from the outside world. Took in the nostalgic scent of ink and polish and musty pages and…yet more dust. Maybe Casimir was right, for once. Maybe it was wonderful.
“It’s nothing, really.”
“Ah yes, absolutely nothing. Only a comprehensive, curated exploration of Port Sylvan’s unique connection to magical folklore that invites you to”—Casimir turned his attention to the gold text on the entrance wall and cleared his throat—“to step through the veil that hangs between history and imagination, where enchanted forests, sleeping curses and shadow-bound spellwork may have once been more than mere metaphor,” he recited from their carefully considered words on the introductory poster.
Sage kept her lips firmly pressed in a line, but another smile pushed at the edges. “Actually, you’re right. It is quite good.”
For Sage, it was never just research. It was and always had been the only way she knew to keep going.
And this was a celebration of it all. Fairy tales had always been one specific subject in their work that she had found herself consistently pulled back to for their twisted stems of magic and truth.
Fairy tales made surprising sense of magic; there was always a purpose to it, an important lesson to be learned and a moral code to follow.
They helped her understand the complexities and origins of her powers from a safely guarded fictional distance.
“You’re good, Specs. Not that you need me to tell you that,” Casimir said sincerely, unmoving apart from his right hand, which reached up for a reassuring squeeze on her shoulder.
“And the route works, doesn’t it? It was the right call to start with the scrolls of old town mapping,” Sage said as she began to walk the path they’d curated.
She glanced over each description to reassure herself for the thousandth time that everything was as it should be.
“From its earliest conception, Port Sylvan has proudly boasted ties to the supernatural. What began as ‘strangeness’ noted in the early town records—unusual weather patterns, peculiar flora growth, mysteriously long-lived residents—soon gained momentum and reputation,” she read aloud.
She wasn’t much one for emotional displays. She rarely felt proud—nothing ever quite managed to reach that impossible, ever-moving bar that she set for herself—but this must have been at least close to the feeling.
“Much of what you see today walks the line between myth and memory, and this exhibition does not claim definitive truth. Rather, the evidence of possibility. Fairy tales remind us that transformation and change are inevitable. We invite you to wander slowly, question generously and imagine freely. Between magic and truth is an invisible string.”
“Through annotated texts, reconstructed oral histories and enchanted artefacts,” Casimir read, “this showcase explores the theory that a fairy-tale kind of life exists within this very town. Welcome to Port Sylvan. Magic lives here.” He whistled, before slinging an arm across Sage’s shoulders and planting a resounding, noisy kiss on the top of her head. “Specs, you’re a marvel.”
“Well,” she mumbled, shoving him away and tucking her hair behind her ear, “I suppose I can’t take all the credit.”
“Actually, that is true. I made at least two phone calls. And photocopied several documents. Even hoovered, which is most unlike me.”
“Quite,” Sage said with a smirk. It was actually a grand total of twenty-one per cent of the exhibition that could be attributed to Casimir.
He had somehow successfully bribed the British Library into loaning them a significant text entitled The Chronicle of Small Miracles, a record kept for centuries by the local parish of various strange happenstances.
The unlikely loan was despite the conservator vowing that Sage Hemlock would never get her hands on it after a scholarly disagreement in which she threw a pencil at his head and stormed out in a huff last March.
It was a perfect example of how she and Casimir worked well together.
His daily role at the museum was, largely, to keep Sage sane (although he often did the opposite).
But she had to admit, if it weren’t for him, she would probably have crossed into the realms of “obsessive, lunatic hag who haunts the attic” several years ago.
Alongside lengthy biscuit breaks, napping and general skiving off, his schedule mostly revolved around forcing her to take walks, occasionally swapping out a cup of coffee for a glass of water, dragging her along to the pub and reminding her to keep in touch with humans that still existed, rather than only within the pages of their work.
All reasonably important things that, Sage reflected, were worthwhile. Probably.
“I still can’t believe we found her actual cloak, can you?
” Casimir said, wandering back to the start of the exhibition with his hands laced behind his cream-coloured cable-knit and brown slacks.
He stopped in front of the cabinet and gave a satisfied, triumphant nod at the moth-eaten cloak inside, lit with its hood shadowed in darkness, like an invisible figure was beneath it.
“To think, Lilara Mournfell herself wore this very thing.” The tone of wonder in his voice evaporated.
“Rotten old frock, isn’t it? Very drab.”
“Casimir!”
“Even I couldn’t make that look good.”
“Do not tell me that you’ve been trying on the priceless historical heirlooms. Again.”
“Me? Never.” She noticed his tongue poke into his cheek and a dimple pop from nowhere. “Don’t worry, it didn’t suit me. But my contacts really did come through on this one.”
He was right. In typical Casimir style, it was one more measly contribution, but another annoyingly invaluable one.
“By ‘contacts,’ you mean yet more women who you’ve relentlessly flirted with,” Sage said.
“I’d argue that I’m simply flirted at and am polite enough to receive the attention,” he replied.
In his defence, he was right. Most people Casimir encountered developed at least a crush on first meeting, but it wasn’t something he ever seemed to take much advantage of.
He and Sage rarely discussed their love lives and awkwardly shuffled around the subject whenever it was raised, but as far as she could tell, he seemed to go on a lot of first dates and rarely any second ones.
“People will be champing at the bit to see this,” he said. “We’ve already sold more than a hundred tickets—our best ever pre-sale. The Louvre will be on the phone any day if they know what’s good for them.”
Sage sniffed at his confidence. She couldn’t quite believe it either. There were several artefacts in the exhibition that she felt a little giddy about. And it was most unlike her to feel giddy.
She glanced to her right at one of the first cabinets in the exhibition.
The little bronze acorn had been a particular win, turning up in a car-boot sale of all places and immediately making itself known to be magical when Sage held it in her palm and felt a breeze appear from nowhere.
It had, as she’d predicted, brought them considerable enchanted luck the following week, when they’d located an intricate pair of mirrors from an old curiosity shop in London.
Sage had eventually managed to reveal their secrets, although the ancient charm embedded to reflect the maker’s kindred spirit or soulmate had only flickered and briefly shown an image of a gravestone back to them.
There was also a large black pot which, yes, to the untrained eye may have looked rather mouldy and probably was best used as an emergency sick bucket, but she and Casimir had taken scrapings of the bottom to find a perfectly brewed, extremely crusty infatuation potion from around 150 years ago.
Then there were various Port Sylvan maps, registers and resident diaries: An impressive eighteenth-century collection of herbal remedies that Sage had pored over obsessively.
Clippings of strange occurrences from newspapers.
Adverts from pet shops that boasted talking toads or tortoiseshell cats with unusual talents.
An abundance of handwritten postcards, where you’d swear the images moved in a certain light.
It was a treasure trove of trails through history, and all led towards local magic.
But the cloak undoubtedly took first prize. Lilara Mournfell’s cloak. The legendary historical figure in Port Sylvan’s folklore whom Sage had revered since she first became infatuated with magical studies.
Casimir was right in one respect: The cloak itself was not much to be looked at.
A plain dark velvet, probably once something quite grand, but now threadbare and patched, stitches hanging loose like fragile cobwebs.
The pile of the velvet had thinned, the rich shade of black faded.
There were even a few stains; damp had worked its curse before the cloak was discovered by a cleaner in a house clearance.
But despite all of that, the artefact held such great meaning to Sage that it still felt like a thing of true beauty.
There was even something that looked like lipstick on the cloak’s trim, which had made Sage clutch her heart and Casimir swipe away his glasses at this exhilarating discovery.
A careless dash of dark red, which they had swabbed and sent off to the lab to confirm a simply made berry balm.
Proof of the real, living woman who had once worn it.
It had somehow made Lilara seem so much more human—this magnanimous, admirable figure that Sage held in such high esteem.
The thought of her reaching for the same tube every morning to feel pretty before throwing on a cloak and wandering to the market or a friend’s house.
The pattern that had once trailed over the fabric—a depiction of a night sky, as far as they had been able to decipher—had long since faded to almost nothing, as though the loss of Lilara’s magic had taken the sparkle from it too.
It felt apt to imagine her wearing this constellation-covered cloak as some sort of guiding North Star through dark years.
Lilara had been the one to show Sage, aged fifteen and utterly bereft, that there really was a way for magic to be gone.
To start again. Lilara’s case had been the one hopeful dot of stardust against an endless dark sky, one that she had felt and followed ever since the night everything changed.
The night that Sage lost her parents. The night that was all her fault.
There it was again. The same cruel memory of magic that always drifted in uninvited. The one that made her bones ache and her heart sink with guilt and grief that she had never managed to process through an essay or solve with a formula.
Sage drew her lips together into a firm line and bit down sharply until the memory passed.
Or until she could successfully and firmly shove it backwards and shut the door on it once more.
There wasn’t time for it. She dragged her focus back to the present, to something useful, to something deliberate and purposeful.
A delicate but tarnished silver chain held each side of the cloak together, pinned like a brooch across the neckline and decorated with the tiniest of charms. The chain had been almost detached when they discovered the cloak, but Sage had meticulously repaired and restrung it herself.
She had immediately been fascinated by the miniature talismans, a string of celestial stars and moons hanging from the chain, which would have sat across Lilara’s chest each time she wore the cloak.
Sage had once or twice found herself unpacking the chain from its protective wrapping in storage simply to admire the craftsmanship. If she’d been the sentimental type, she would have said that—in a fluffy, ridiculous sort of way—it almost spoke to her.