CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE #3
‘You were ten,’ said Dot. Her eyes ached.
All of this would catch up with her, she knew.
The grief, the fatigue. It was a problem for later.
They had a plan, and she had five bottles of tonic packed into borrowed coat pockets.
Dot looked at the witch. ‘I’ve watched your father these past days.
He should be overjoyed that you are here, and yet he has ignored you.
Is this why you feel that you must solve everything on your own?
Theodora, you do not need to be a scholar and a minister and a painter and a Magician and every possible thing you can imagine, in order to simply be enough. ’
Theodora wrinkled her nose.
‘Stop being cleverer than me,’ said Theodora. ‘You were only supposed to be an apprentice.’
‘I was supposed to be a sack of blood for you to barter with, actually.’
Theodora laughed at that. She wiped her eyes. Then, she said, ‘I’m not brave enough for any of this. Look at you, Dorothy. Your poor hand. You can barely stand, and yet you’re consoling me.’
‘Bravery comes in myriad shades,’ said Dot. ‘Sometimes in anger, or in honesty. Sometimes, I think, the bravest thing a person can be is themselves.’
Dot raised her hand. She balanced the cold and warm magic within her and pictured the rune for retrieve and added to it the symbol for clothing and the symbol for warm and the symbol for midnight, and, shakily, with no discernible scent yet, the cottage door opened and a bundle of fabric dragged itself to them and fell in Theodora’s lap.
Dot had found the garment discarded by the lilacs and covered in mud.
It was clean now, with Lio’s help, and smelled of bergamot.
Theodora held it up: a midnight blue thing of ivory buttons and wide sleeves and gold, embroidered stars.
The witch stood up from the bench, shrugged it on and followed Dot inside the house.
When Stephen found his daughter at the kitchen table, he said her name as if in apology.
‘I don’t go by that anymore, Dad.’
‘It was your great-grandmother’s name.’
‘It’s not mine.’
A silence descended. Theodora was the one to break it.
‘I want to thank you for not casting us out. I half-expected you would.’
‘What choice did I have?’ asked Stephen. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re mixed up in. You could have set one of your friends on me. That spirit, or that girl with the strange arm.’
‘If you had anyone to fear, it would not be Belchamber or Dorothy,’ said Theodora. ‘It would be me. I had an empire, Dad. I had hundreds of staff. I was the Minister for Sorcerie and Magic. Surely, you’ve heard of Bianca De León?’
‘The one who caused that mess in the capital?’ asked Stephen. ‘Did you have a hand in that, Tessa?’
‘My name isn’t—’
‘Your name is Tessa!’ cried Stephen, standing up from the table.
Theodora flinched. She was ten years old again.
He loomed over her. ‘I’ll not have you sit here in my house telling me what your own bloody name is when I was the one who named you!
When I was the one who sat through your funeral, while you were off doing Saints know what. ’
‘I was doing magic,’ said Theodora, her voice growing loud. ‘I only took an interest in it because of you. I saw how excited you became because of that bloody book, and I thought, oh! How grand! Here is something at last that we can share. I worshipped you, Dad.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Stephen.
‘I am being honest. You wanted so badly to be important and interesting. I thought you were important and interesting, Dad, and then you struck me across the face with the book that you bought.’
‘Don’t you dare blame me.’
‘You made me feel it was all my fault,’ said Theodora, standing. ‘You berated me. When will you come home, Tessa? When will you fix what you did, Tessa? Never an apology for driving me away. Never warmth. I made one mistake, and that was all it took for you to cast me out.’
‘You were my daughter.’
‘You see?’ said Theodora, throwing out her arms. ‘Even now. Were not are. Even now you choose that bitter, prideful path. You could fix this, Dad. Right now. You could fix it all and have me back. You just have to say sorry.’
Theodora watched him, her eyes stinging.
She had always wondered: if she had been honest with her father from the beginning, could she have avoided all this?
If only she had told him how scared and small he made her feel, she would never have summoned Acanthi.
Would never have met Opal. Would never have put Rupert in harm’s way.
She could have been raised here, could have been happy as Tessa.
She could have gone to university in the town nearby and had girlfriends and boyfriends and brought them home and kissed them in her childhood bedroom.
She could have had birthday presents and someone to call on the telephone.
Perhaps she would have been an engineer?
A watercolourist? Perhaps she would have adopted two little dogs, or been a mother, or had no debt and no tea shop at all and no nightmares of bread knives plunging into flesh.
Theodora felt her chest swell with the long-buried craving she’d had since she was small to have this man love her and care for her. All she needed now was the barest acknowledgement that he understood some of what he had made her feel.
Stephen Blythe looked at his daughter.
He gazed over the person she had become.
He opened his mouth.
He said, ‘Get out.’
Theodora let his words settle on her for a moment only. She nodded. She drew herself up to her full height and looked down on him and saw the bitter, unloving creature he was. She saw the ugly, angry set of his mouth, the hard eyes, the nasty countenance.
Theodora’s childhood happinesses were phantoms now – her mother’s cauliflower soup, the watercolours, the willows, the set of grandparents she had loved dearly whose surname she still had – but they were her phantoms, and no bitterness nor malice from this man would rob her of them.
She looked about the home that she had loved as a child; she looked down at the man she had loved as a child.
At last, she bid them all goodbye.
Theodora Blythe walked out of the cottage overlooking the valley of willows, her midnight blue coat around her shoulders, her hair finger-waved, as it always was, by magic. She left the caged mundane and stepped out into the morning sun.