CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the days that followed, Theodora disappeared from the tea shop with increasing frequency.
She reappeared at odd intervals – startling Dot more than once by stepping out of this hallway mirror or into that painting, transfiguring herself in the storeroom, the workshop, the kitchen, rushing up the stairs with petrified stumps of silver birch.
Three days after Rupert was possessed, Dot finally asked after the witch’s plan.
Theodora smiled but revealed nothing; Dot bit back her questions about what had been in the maroon envelope.
Lio’s response was significant.
He spent the first several days locked in the small bedroom he now shared with Rupert, coming out only to prepare meals or use the bathroom.
He was red-eyed, desolate and grumpy beyond measure.
Yet, there was nothing vicious in his moods.
He was a sensitive man and the revelation that he had been tricked was, it seemed to Dot, a significant point of embarrassment.
When the summer rains arrived in earnest, Dot began working one day per week in the tea shop.
It was a familiar occupation, not dissimilar to her afternoons at the Divers’ Café, although with the use of only one hand, the work was trickier.
She placed saucers on tables, swept floors and counted coins all with her right hand alone.
It tired her unafflicted fingers terribly, but each time she bumped her bandaged hand and felt the smoothness of her scales against the gauze, it was enough to make her recoil.
The customers were even more challenging than she was used to, with their piercing eyes and invasive questions.
In Seafarthing, she had known most of them all her life.
Alliaster, however, was a large city with almost countless new faces.
One morning in the shop, a young woman opened the door.
She had mousey blonde hair and blue eyes and asked for a potion for memory – and for a moment, some fragile and haunted part of Dot faltered. The girl looked so much like Emily.
Between this, the attack from Acanthi and her failures as a witch, Dot’s nerves were in tatters.
And so, in the same way Dot had once memorised maps of Alliaster and library-borrowed encyclopaedias on the city in order to soothe herself, now she memorised the house.
She learned which taps dripped. She learned which light bulbs flickered.
Every morning, she discovered some new and intriguing object of magic: singing scales, self-heating saucers, tiny decorative bottles of mermaids’ tears, the ship in a bottle that looked, truly, as if it were sailing the West Ocean.
Dot grew boundlessly fond of even the mundane details – the draughty windows and peeling wallpaper and her odd bedroom ceiling which creaked and threw down dust as if someone were pacing above even when Theodora was out, and Theodora was out an awful lot.
Commonly, Dot would be in bed, resting, studying her runes, or else reading about Saint Penelope’s Cathedral, and hear the witch tumble in through one of her portals, shouting:
‘Where in hell’s name did I leave my keys?’
‘Oh, I am running so late. Why is this my disposition?’
‘Belchamber! Did you move my astrolabe?’
The witch was a whirlwind incarnate. One moment, the house was quiet and the next Theodora was whipping down the stairs, changing from this coat to that apron, leaving destruction and books and spell packets and scattered clothing in her wake.
She never cleaned nor did she cook nor pay the bills nor answer the door.
Theodora refused to install a telephone.
She let the grandfather clocks wind all the way down.
Yet, despite the slovenly quality of her home, the witch herself was always pristine, her clothing decadent, her hair perfectly waved, the three daggers glinting always from her right ear.
One night, Dot awoke before dawn. Her lamp was still on; she was surrounded by strewn paper and runes practised over and over.
Dot yawned and rose sleepily, padding down the stairs and into the hall where she spotted the witch through the open door of the kitchen.
Theodora sat at the table, make-up smeared under her eyes.
Belchamber was beside her. The witch rubbed her temples. They spoke in hushed tones.
‘I am useless, a spinning top going round and round in circles. I could simply lob Lio from the living room window, but Acanthi would be on him like lightning. If I sacrifice him, I could take their blood in a flash. I could ward the city that way, but then it would be as if I had slit his throat myself. Oh, I don’t know what to do, Belchamber. ’
‘There is one creature you could ask,’ said the spirit carefully.
Theodora scowled. The expression was very unlike her.
‘You know very well I do not want to ask him for anything.’
The witch groaned and let herself collapse against the table.
‘Would you like me to make sultana rice?’ asked Belchamber.
‘You are kind, Bel,’ mumbled the witch, ‘but my mother’s recipes will not save me from any of this.’
‘Yet, they may bring you comfort,’ said Belchamber. ‘You miss her. You miss Stephen.’
‘I miss the rice,’ said Theodora, a little dismissively, ‘and the cauliflower soup and the shortbread.’
At that moment, the roof above creaked loudly. Such was the soul of an old home, thought Dot. It lived to betray the eavesdropper hidden in the hallway.
‘Dorothy!’ cried Theodora, spotting her. ‘Do you need anything? Belchamber saved you some shepherd’s pie.’
As Dot came to the kitchen, Theodora’s silk blouse smoothed.
Her hair returned to its usual finger-wave.
Her ruined mascara vanished. She was, once again, perfect.
Before Dot could stop her, the witch dragged a plate out of the icebox and reheated it with magic.
Theodora placed it on the kitchen table before Dot and scurried off down the hall.
‘I didn’t mean to . . .’ Dot trailed off. ‘Um – is she alright?’
‘Burning the candle at all seven ends,’ said Belchamber. He rose, fetched the saltshaker and set it before her.
Dot whispered, ‘Who is Stephen?’
Belchamber hissed a laugh. ‘My, you are nosy, Miss Dorothy. You did not bother with the charade at all.’
‘Sorry,’ said Dot. ‘She is just – well, she’s very difficult to know. Theodora.’
‘She is,’ said Belchamber.
Dot took a bite of the pie and burned her mouth. She prodded it with her fork and realised that it was half frozen, half molten. Belchamber raised his tin-coloured hand over Dot’s plate and corrected the temperature. Then, he lowered his voice.
‘Stephen is Theodora’s father. She only speaks of him when she is very drunk or extremely under-slept – tonight was the latter.’
‘Oh,’ said Dot, ‘I suppose I can understand. You know very well that my own family are rather cold and difficult and, well, I know they love me, of course, but I have never felt as if they were especially fond of me.’
‘Ah,’ said the spirit. ‘But here is a difference between yourself, Miss Dorothy, and Mistress Theodora.’
‘What?’ asked Dot. ‘Her family are fond of her?’
The spirit smiled. ‘I mean only that you wilfully speak of them. Theodora will not. So, I would caution you to bring up neither Stephen nor sultana rice nor any part of this conversation. I have learned that if one does not volunteer information about one’s family, that is most likely a bruise best left un-prodded. ’
Later that day, Dot was in her favourite armchair in the living room practising runes, growing more irritated with each magicless stroke of her pen, when she heard a bang and a shout and Theodora’s trapdoor burst open.
The witch thundered down the ladder and then the stairs, eyes bright, twinkling in her midnight blue coat as if she’d never had an ailment nor a moment of misery in her life.
‘I have it!’ Theodora cried. ‘I have the answer. We need the quarter moon and the claws of a wombat and a dash of Lio’s blood.
One week, and Acanthi will be sorted. Rupert!
’ The witch shouted his name cheerfully down the stairs and into the basement workshop.
Dot was on her feet; she came to the witch’s side and watched the door below open.
Rupert stuck his head out. ‘We’re going to the pictures to celebrate! ’
How marvellous! Dot had never been to the cinema before.
But Rupert, whose face was split in a grin that mirrored Dot’s own, spotted her beside Theodora. His face fell as he understood who ‘we’ included. Like an arrow through the skin of a balloon, Dot’s elation burst.
‘I’m actually quite tired,’ said Dot, a mask of a smile on her face. ‘You both go and have fun without me.’
If a customer requested a lemon myrtle and orange, they were really buying a spell to ward off influenza. A seaweed and maple tea was for fortune-filled sea voyages. A black lavender milk tea was for examinations.
‘Guaranteed to increase your final mark by fifteen per cent,’ Thistlethwaite had croaked one morning to a boy with acne on his chin. He handed over four silvers and five coppers, and sat beside the window, his purple tea topped with foam.
‘They have to drink something that resembles what they ordered,’ explained Theodora two days before the quarter moon, while Dot ground turkey tail in the workshop.
‘Gives them something to do while we monitor them, or while they wait for their order. The arugula tea, for example, is for hair growth, but it can also cause asphyxiation. So, if the chap, or chap-ess, starts choking forty-five minutes in, one of us can administer a packet of anti-charm. If not, the customer goes on their merry, hairy way. For the Raven’s Attic, or the factory on Stirrup Street, it’s a bit trickier.
They often take the spells home. I’m left doing check-ups and house calls. ’
‘How many of the spells are dangerous?’ asked Dot.
‘Oh, all of them,’ said the witch.