CHAPTER FOUR
With her shirtsleeves rolled and hair knotted, Dot leaned out of the hostel window and watched the city at night.
Behind her lay her maps, annotated neatly, and a scatter of papers, stained with tonic, drying against the dirty floor.
She had purchased a roll of twine from the corner shop below (thirty-one coppers) and had strung it between the curtain rod and the hook on the back of the door.
Her blouses now hung upon it, handwashed in the communal bathroom.
The bandages and antiseptic for her wrist had been more expensive: two silvers, seventeen coppers altogether.
The cost of a ticket to Saint Penelope’s Cathedral.
Dot rested her chin on her hands. Her shoulders ached from the carpet bag and her head throbbed and she felt dirty in this cupboard-sized space with mould at the eaves and stray hairs along the skirting boards.
Yet, as she stared outside at the dark, distant chimneys, the soot-stained windows and weathervanes, and listened to the warble of motor cars and dance-hall music, a glimmer of excitement ignited within her.
She was finally in Alliaster.
She spotted a cat snoozing on a balcony across the way, its tail twitching among the potted tomato plants and geraniums. Somewhere, a radio sat near a windowsill, casting a crackling, feminine voice into the air.
I’d take an oyster as a ring,
For you, my dove, my darling thing,
I’d dance until the ocean sings
of love in Alliaster.
She rubbed her eyes and reached for the stained map of the city, but as she did, something jittered against her fingertips. Dot screamed and jumped upon the bed, catching a glimpse of a black beetle skittering across her papers and out through the gap beneath her door.
Dot packed up her maps and piled her belongings carefully on the end of the bed.
She double checked the door lock. Then, without bothering to change, she lay on top of the rough bedding, curled inward and closed her eyes.
In her mind, the curtains to her own private theatre lifted, and in her imagined cabaret, she pictured herself a hero.
There she was, saving a drowning girl from the sea.
There she was, dressed in ivory silk. There she was, at long last, the apprentice of the witch, Theodora.
In the morning, she set out across the city. For all her imaginings, Dot had never expected the assault of the city’s smells: the acrid tang of urine as she passed a pub, the plumes of tobacco blown at her, or the sweat of the beggars with their brass bells and cardboard signs.
She passed a flower shop and a woman in a boxy dress, whose mushroom-coloured collie sniffed at the buckets of bluebells.
In the distance, a crow let out a deep gurgling laugh.
The city wheeled past, the post boxes and doorways and zelkova trees wobbling a little as she grew faint from the exertion.
Dot had been four when the Prohibition began.
She remembered, vaguely, the protests, the newspapers, the spirits disappearing from their seaside town, and her father’s words as he walked with her along the pier: ‘It’s for the best, Dorothy.
The only people who should use magic are the ones who can use it safely. ’
He had said it as if scolding her, and so she did not argue or ask questions, although she remembered wanting to.
Magic could not be cast by just anyone. One had to have the proclivity and, if they did, then they had to have the training.
In this lay the great tragedy of their country – one that Dot dwelled on often.
For Calléum had a long and proud history of magic, destroyed for the many by the hubris of the few.
This hubris – a scandal with a daemon two decades earlier – had caused the change in the constitution, which had begun the war against the United Allies, which caused the Mass Exodus of spirits from their land, which heralded Calléum’s defeat and later their occupation and, lastly, relegated Ellard Custre IV to the position of a ceremonial king, and despite the passing years and the working people who protested and the foreign Magicians who snubbed their city and the spirits who had begrudgingly trickled back in, despite the winners of the war, themselves, proudly using magic, the Prohibition in Calléum remained written into the very constitution:
PROHIBITION ON THE USE OF MAGIC
Article 13. No mortal human may participate in Spellcraft of any kind unless the individual is granted licence to do so by the Royal Institute of Alliaster.
Spirits are prohibited from causing harm or assistance to the nation’s mortal populace through the use of Magics; Spirits who have done so will be stripped of their Magic through the procedure of ‘daemotion’ and thus relegated to the category of ‘daemon’.
She’d always wanted to meet a daemon. There had only been five or so recorded cases, as Dot had learned at her dowdy little university in the town next to Seafarthing.
That was why she had undertaken the politics degree.
She yearned to understand all of it – Article 13, daemotion, the Mass Exodus of spirits – and so she took up work in the Divers’ Café and paid her own tuition of 1442 silvers per year.
All the while, she dreamed of cauldrons and spellwork and archaic libraries of leather-bound tomes and her own name, printed in the papers, beside some grand magical discovery.
That could never be her fate, she’d had to remind herself.
For only alumni of the Royal Institute of Alliaster were granted licence to use magic, and these were the sons of duchesses or the daughters of dignitaries.
If one had to ask, ‘How much?’ they could not afford it.
Now, she passed the white-marble facade of Hemmington’s department store, felted hats and fine jewellery on display in the lamplit window. A pair of cherry-coloured brogues caught her eye and she paused before the glass.
‘Be serious, Eustace,’ came the pompous voice of a man chatting away to his friend as they passed Dot. ‘Salamander’s wares are far superior to that ghastly shopfront on Mieunetti Road.’
Dot glanced at them. The dandies, each dressed in a decadent suit, were followed by footmen carrying boxes of goods just purchased from the department store.
‘They don’t even sell silk, for Saints’ sake, whereas Hemmington’s here offers it by the roll. One simply cannot compare.’
That, she thought as she pulled herself away from the window display, was the kind of person who could afford a licence to use magic.
And what of those caught using magic without a licence?
Dot passed a woman sleeping beside a rubbish bin. Where her hands should have been was only air.
As dictated by the Prohibition, one offence would lose the Magician their left hand; two, their right; three, their eyes; four, their life.
Thus, Dot had relegated herself to an existence spent ignoring the memory of sorcerie at her fingertips. She would be a clerk. Perhaps, a teacher. That was her lot.
That was until she heard about Theodora’s Tea Shop.
‘A tea shop of all things,’ a professor had whispered to her colleague.
It had been three years earlier and Dot had been sat in an obscure nook of the university library.
‘Run by a witch who goes by the name of Theodora. If you can find her, then to hell with the Prohibition. You’ll have the same magic as any of the dandies. ’
Before she knew it, Dot was straining to catch the details. Who was Theodora? Where was the establishment?
‘Packet spells,’ the professor had whispered. ‘The shop is located in Alliaster, of course, on the corner of—’
But she had noticed Dot then through the stacks. The professor straightened up, glared at her, escorted her friend away and never again returned.
Dot had to pause every thirty minutes or so to catch her breath as she walked. Her head swelled. She sipped tonic. She glared at the tram as it sailed past. Finally, after perhaps two hours, she found the first establishment on her list.
The Alsions Bistro and Tea House was a moody restaurant with dark wallpaper and a menu that featured beef cheek and duck liver.
A great line snaked out the door. She placed herself in it and, an hour later, she was sat at a wobbly table in the back corner beside the kitchen.
The waiter would not let her order only a glass of ginger ale, so she begrudgingly requested the cheapest item on the menu, which cost three times her tram fare the previous day.
The waiter raised his eyebrows but said nothing, and came back at last with a single, sad-looking mollusc on a plate.
Dot picked at it for as long as she could, eyes darting desperately about for secret doors or the exchange of envelopes. She stayed until the waiter returned to her table for the fourth time and finally asked her to leave.
Dot’s fixation with Theodora had begun as a hobby.
It was all she thought about during her idle hours in bed, pinned down by fatigue as she played records and listened to the relentless roar of the ocean.
She read academic journals on Article 13 and trailed her fingers along the maps of Alliaster that she’d bought from the corner shop.
Any customer at the Divers’ Café who had come from the city was met with Dot’s careful questions.
She never mentioned magic, of course. Yet, Dot slowly collected clues and, just after she turned twenty-one, she met the carpet seller wandering down the main street who had said: ‘Ah, I know the shop you are after. I have a photograph, only. It will cost you thirty silvers.’
This was the price of two university textbooks. The price of the Walcotts’ fortnightly food budget, and then some. The price of eight or nine gramophone records from the specialty shop in the next town over.
Dot paid it.
And she stuck the photograph on her wall beside the illustration of Saint Penelope’s Cathedral that Emily had given her. When Celia had asked after it, Dot had replied, ‘Just a pretty picture of a tea shop. I doubt I’ll ever visit.’
Here she was two years later in Alliaster with her dwindling purse of silver and a list of every restaurant and café in the entire city that could possibly be the shop she searched for.
By her second week, Dot could not remember if it was Tea on Tetanum Square or Greyson’s Diner that had the green chairs out the front, nor could she recall whether Café el Cremio or Mister Magpie served roasted green tea.
It didn’t much matter. She ordered the cheapest thing on the menu at each venue: black coffee, or espresso, or dull Turlish milk tea, sometimes a slice of bread if she had to, or tomato soup.
She stayed as long as she could, watching the staff, straining to see into the kitchens until, at long last, she was ushered out.
Three on the list had closed: Mandra’s Café, Peel and Pesto, and Hoot Dear Ashtepo’s. Dot visited these locations anyway and peered in at the windows, desperate to glimpse any indication of magic.
She returned to her room, each day, exhausted.
Her hostel did not have showers. The communal lavatory, which was infested with wolf spiders, had only a dismal line of old basins, and so every evening she went down the street to the Marigold Bath House.
Dot slipped into the hot water, surrounded by bodies of innumerable diversity: narrow, wide, burned, pockmarked, stretch-marked, scarred from babies born, with coarse hair and drooping skin and softness that was so vulnerable it almost repulsed her.
Some women chatted; some laughed. All scrubbed their flesh at the sides of the bath and then slipped into the water together.
Dot pawed at her aching muscles. The lights were too bright. The soaps, too scented. She was exhausted and irritable and, as she waded through the warm water and listened to the chatter of women that excluded her, she began to feel quite lonely.
Another week passed. Now, she slept fourteen hours per night. Another flurry of blisters burst, another box of bandages bought, yet she was no closer to finding the tea shop.
She found herself walking all the way back to Hoot Dear Ashtepo’s. Four hours, it was, from the hostel. It had such an odd name: who was Ashtepo? Who requested them to ‘hoot’?
She held up the blurry photograph from the carpet seller.
The building on the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue matched closely with the image – with its grand arched windows and stone steps that crept from the footpath up to the door.
A raven sat on the wrought-iron sign, watching her.
Intrigued, Dot crossed the street and climbed the steps and peered once again through the murky glass.
Between the sheets of newspaper, she viewed the abandonment within. Then, she dropped down onto the step.
Three weeks she had been in Alliaster. In only three more days, her purse would be empty.
She had not even visited Saint Penelope’s Cathedral.
That morning, she had looked at the job advertisements in the paper.
Perhaps she could sell her clothes? Dot glanced down at her scuffed shoes, now stuffed with newspaper to plug the holes.
Her skirt was already second-hand. Neither would be worth much at the pawn shop.
Dot pictured Willard’s face – that familiar sneer, those raised eyebrows, the jokes that would come at the family dinner table.
Remember when Dottie lost it and ran off to Alliaster?
She would have missed the birth of his baby, and for that he would never forgive her.
He would mention it until he was ninety years old, and to this child she would be Aunty Dorothy, daft, cowardly, selfish, dotty. Her stomach churned.
She did not belong in this city.
Dot wiped her eyes, climbed down the steps and ambled slowly back in the direction of the hostel.
And from the attic window of Hoot Dear Ashtepo’s, on the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue, a hand with fingernails the colour of burnt oil pulled back a curtain. The raven darted up to the sill. Together, they watched the girl trudge away.