CHAPTER FIFTEEN
No matter how many times Theodora tried to lure the witches, Acanthi did not fall for her tricks again.
The witch dragged Lio to the Alliaster Cemetery, to the gardens of the Royal Institute, to the roof of the National Aquarium, but no matter the location nor time of night, Cate and Moira would not take their bait.
‘I think she’s intent on punishing me,’ said Lio to Dot a week after Agytha was warded.
‘Theodora barges in at two o’clock, four o’clock, drags me to some frozen corner of this horrible city, still in my pyjamas.
Any moment, my death could be upon me. I tell you, my nerves are shot.
Why did I believe that letter was from Opal?
Why did I leave my job? I had a visa approved for ten years.
I’d just learned to hide the accent. They never give out ten-year visas to Calléans.
Theodora will abandon me somewhere out there and the moment she does, Cate will pounce – and that’ll be it for old Lio. ’
‘Wouldn’t Theodora’s wards simply portal you back to the shop?’ Dot asked.
They were in the kitchen, and Dot picked at her bandages.
Belchamber continued to change them for her when she asked, even though he knew as well as she did that there was nothing to heal.
They served to censor – for herself, and for the customers who were for the most part well-meaning, but who on occasion with a strange entitlement insisted to know what was beneath and if it was contagious.
One man, despite having no idea what had happened to her, assured her that pineapple ointment was the cure.
‘The wards won’t save me if that sodding witch isn’t there to work them,’ said Lio.
‘She might hate me, but this treatment is perfectly inhumane. One of my colleagues in Kolldin was a prisoner of war after the battle of Assylis Bay. For years, they kept her in Arranfol. They fed her gruel, had her do hard labour, but even then they let her sleep.’
‘You did try to break Theodora’s wards,’ said Dot softly. Lio did not seem to hear her. He went on complaining merrily, slicing his apple, and was about to reach for the kettle when Dot forced herself to ask, ‘Lio, why does Theodora hate you? Is it to do with Opal?’
Immediately, she knew she had erred. He let out what seemed to her an exhausted huff, took up his plate of cut fruit and stomped down to the tea shop, muttering about ‘nosy witches’ and ‘basic privacy’.
Dot should have felt hurt or, perhaps, annoyed.
Instead, she experienced a small spark of elation. Lio had called her a witch.
The house returned to equilibrium. Dot continued her slow, spell-less study of magic, and grew increasingly furious at her lack of progress. It was as if she had learned to read a language with unprecedented fluency, only to find herself utterly unable to speak it.
Theodora was out, often, looking for another solve to their Acanthi problem.
Belchamber was busy with the administrative operations of the tea shop, the Raven’s Attic, the factory on Stirrup Street and so on.
Lio grew more morose, grumpy and directionless, and even took up writing poetry, which he hid whenever Dot walked into the room (Belchamber had confided in her that the young man had even submitted, by mail, several pieces and been quickly rejected). Rupert, however, had hollowed.
The boy had grown moody, easily startled and, more than once, Dot found him staring out of the living room window as if trying to catch sight of the witches somewhere along the street.
The third time she found the boy doing this, she tried to think of something comforting to say to him, but he quickly noticed her and his ears turned pink and he fled from the room.
Dot scribbled a letter to Archie but could not bring herself to send it. She took pains to think about Seafarthing as little as she could, lest the guilt and terror roll in.
Theodora fortified the recipe for her tonic and every day Dot’s strength returned a little more.
Dot began to work in the tea shop two days per week at the rate of two silvers and twenty-five coppers per hour.
Rupert was paid one silver, eighty coppers per hour and worked three days in the tea shop and nights in the Raven’s Attic.
Lio worked five days a week and was paid nothing.
‘Why in heaven’s name is Dot getting paid but I’m not?’ Lio shouted up at the attic door one evening.
Dot was in bed, reading her copy of Daemonology and the Spirits. She heard the witch yank open the trapdoor and shout back, ‘Because Dot has some semblance of value, while you are a foul, conniving, misanthropic leech.’
The next morning, Dot woke to a fierce knocking at her door. She opened it and found Lio in the hall.
‘I’ll not live like this any longer,’ he said, and handed her a broom. ‘Rupert’s already cleaning the kitchen. Belchamber has “tea shop” business. You’ve got the living room.’
Lio threw open all the doors and windows and squeezed lemons into buckets of warm water with sodium bicarbonate and vinegar. He swept furiously and cast weak enchantments to scare the mice and beetles, and he scrubbed the doors as if their very paint had slighted him.
‘I know you were sickly, but you could have at least dusted your windowsill,’ he said as he watched Dot tackle the cobwebs.
‘I wasn’t sure if it would upset Theodora.’
Lio made a sound of disgust and stomped away.
The three of them were at it the whole day. Dot rested frequently. When her own room and all of the second storey was done, she lay against the living room floor, exhausted. Lio stood in the hallway.
‘Which one of you will clean the toilet?’ he called.
‘Not me,’ said Rupert from the kitchen.
‘Not me,’ said Dot.
Lio stared about helplessly and then glared up at the ceiling.
‘Oi!’ he shouted upward. ‘Theodora! We’re cleaning your house. Why don’t you come down here and help!’
Still, Theodora did not join them until several hours later, clothed in the paint-speckled smock of the oil colourist, Justine Allonse.
‘My,’ said Theodora, peering into Dot’s room. ‘You and Rupert did a grand job.’
‘Excuse me?’ cried Lio from the bathroom he was still scrubbing.
‘You are quite excused,’ said the witch.
‘Ha!’ Lio shouted, sounding almost manic, as he stomped into the hallway. Dot ducked her head out of her room, but Theodora was already gone. Lio scrubbed his fingers through his hair and stared out the window for a moment, as if he might cry.
‘At least Theodora gave you your own room,’ said Rupert, coming up the stairs. He looked at Dot, then. ‘Mine was snatched from me.’
Another week passed. Belchamber no longer slept beside her. The rainy season was almost over. The hydrangeas had bloomed, and the earliest of them were already fading.
Thick raindrops lashed at the window. Dot could not sleep. She switched on the lamp and kneeled before the mirror in her old chemise. Her hair reached her hips; she could not remember a single moment of her life when she had not hated it.
On her first day in the tea shop, one of the regular customers, Madame Thomas, had said to her, ‘My, that’s an old-fashioned look, love.
’ And when Dot had set down the woman’s packet spell and asked her what she had meant, the elderly woman had continued, ‘Those long curls, darling. And your blouse, too. I think my mother had a blouse like that. Is that the new thing? Young ones dressing old?’
Madame Thomas had ordered a packet spell for sinus relief and another for penmanship. With them, she drank a small cup of amber-coloured tea and a glass of cherry cordial.
She’d had a point. Dot’s clothing was outdated and still stained here and there by the dirt of the River Lourdes.
Yet, disposable silver was a novelty to her; since she was sixteen, all of Dot’s money had been spent saving for university or to pay for board in her parents’ home or for the tonic ingredients that were her responsibility to buy.
Any meagre scrap of copper left over had been put toward her dream trip to Alliaster.
Theodora, however, did not charge her board.
The witch made great vats of Dot’s tonic down in the basement workshop, using her own supplies and the white, crumbling hunk of dried ambergris, never requesting reimbursement.
Dot’s pay was modest, but she had no expenses and so she had finally amassed enough silver to justify ordering two sets of new blouses and trousers and skirts; they sat now on her bureau waiting to be unwrapped.
Yet, when Dot pictured herself wearing, for the first time in her life, truly new clothes, she felt a sickening dissonance.
She didn’t deserve pretty things, did she?
She was used to watching other women with an ugly undercurrent of envy eroding her.
What right did she have to pine, painfully, for beauty and adoration and splendour, when she was simply a dowdy child from Seafarthing?
How would she even do up the buttons on those blouses, anyway, with her bandaged hand and, beneath those bandages, claws?
Dot bundled the weight of her hair in her unafflicted hand.
After that night when she had been fourteen, it had taken months before Dot could look at herself in the mirror again – longer, still, before she could speak.
Of course, she had not been rendered permanently mute; after the incident, she simply felt with a desolate certainty that she had nothing to say, and no assurance that anyone would want to hear it if she did.
Then, Willard had caught her in the bathroom, weeks after her fifteenth birthday, scissors in hand.
‘You’re no magazine girl,’ he’d scoffed. ‘Don’t bother.’
And so, Dot had dropped the scissors.
The curls were too thick, too heavy, constantly knotted and irritating. No women wore their hair short in Seafarthing. The only club in the next town over still had a corset room, for goodness’ sake.
In the humid bedroom on the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue, Dot let go of her hair.
Outside, the rain pattered harder. A motor car chugged past. What would Willard say if she cut her hair now?
Dot glanced at her bandaged hand and supposed there would be bigger things to hide from Willard whenever she saw him next.
He wanted what was best for her, she was sure.
He loved her, she was sure. She should not cut her hair.
But then Dot recalled the way he had looked at her the night she had left. Not with goodness, or familial compassion, but with absolute contempt. Was a person who loved you meant to look at you like that?
Dot took up the scissors from the desk beside her bed. She opened them. The blades reflected the lamplight and, for the first time, she wondered: What do I want?
She pictured Theodora fighting off Acanthi like a one-person battalion.
To be a witch, thought Dot. To be a bright young thing of the city.
To have a grand magical discovery of hers published in a journal and to have her name distributed in print across the continent.
To discover the source of her affliction. To heal it.
And then she recalled another woman she had met in the tea shop, who had requested a spell for the growth of geraniums. Dot had set down a mug of herbal tea beside her and spotted the woman’s hands, the fingers joined almost entirely together.
She wore a bright red dress and striking lipstick, and her hair was cropped to the chin, and she picked up her tea as if it didn’t bother her one stitch that her hands were different.
The customer had smiled at Dot, and then she had taken a sip, and it awed her – yet, how else was the woman supposed to live?
In fear? In shame? Dot wanted to be like her, too. To be bold.
Dot took the scissors to her hair. She opened the blades around one long curl. Snip. It fell to the floor, and she let out a nervous giggle.
The roof creaked again, dust fell, and it was as if the house itself could see her. Oh, she thought, let the tea shop watch.
Dot realised that, if she were to do this properly, she would need the use of both hands. She placed the scissors gently down and held up her bandaged hand in the lamplight. Then, she closed her eyes.
With tremoring fingers, Dot pulled the cloth away from her hand, feeling first the sticky humidity against her afflicted palm and fingers. The open air felt colder to that hand than it did to the rest of her skin, in the way that one feels colder having risen from the ocean.
Dot opened her eyes.
She finally looked on her new hand for a second time: scaly, delicate, long and plated with strange spikes from her middle finger. She did not feel disgust or anger now as she tapped her talons against the glass of the mirror. She discovered that she liked the sound of the click.
Dot drew her unafflicted fingers along the scales.
She felt both the sensation of touching and being touched.
Then, she stretched both hands before her and peered at them side by side.
She took a deep breath. She named the things she could see and smell and hear and taste and feel.
And, once she finally felt calm, she took a clump of hair with her left hand and her scissors with her right, and began to cut.