Rose 4: Rose and the Silver Ghost (15 page)

Miranda raised her hands towards the two men, and Rose saw them flinch. They must be truly terrified of Pike, to let themselves be enchanted when they hated it so much.

The glamour spell seemed to stretch them – footmen had to be at least six feet tall, and preferably, if there were two in a house, they had to match. The spell changed their clothes as well, the dirty greyish fabrics flooding with blood-red, and suddenly sparkling with golden braid and polished buttons. They wore white stockings, too, which Rose privately thought was a mistake on her mother’s part, as unless they had been specially bespelled to avoid mud, they would not be white by the time they got out of that horrid alleyway. But she supposed the men would just have to make do – the white stockings were what the footmen at the palace had worn, and those same buckled shoes. They must be going to rob a truly grand house, for they looked as though they would earn at least thirty pounds each a year, and who knew how much that grand livery would cost.

Freddie shot Rose an admiring glance. They knew how difficult it was to maintain one glamour, let alone two, and on such unwilling subjects. ‘She’s very strong,’ he whispered, and Rose nodded, feeling absurdly proud.

The two men surveyed each other, looking somewhat disgusted, and then nodded their thanks to Rose’s mother. Gus gave them a disparaging stare as they tramped past in the heavy buckled shoes. One of them was scratching at his powdered hair, and although they had the height of the real footmen, neither of them stood straight, as they would if they’d been trained up from boys.

The children listened to them trudging away down the passage, making rude comments about each other’s outfits. Then they focused their attention, again, on the figure they had come to see. She was sitting tensely on the edge of the low bed, her hair, still pretty with its bronze-coloured streaks, trailing down past her shoulders. Perhaps they wouldn’t let her have hair pins, Rose wondered. In case she did something awful with them.

As they watched, she pushed down hard against the bed with her fists, and stood up unsteadily, stretching out a foot to take a step into the centre of the room. She turned her head from side to side, her eyes wide and grey in the dim light. ‘Who is there?’ she asked, her voice dangerous.

Rose flinched from it. It was the voice of someone who had spent the last several years never able to rest. How could she have slept, with a gang of thieves around her? She had been on guard, all the time, and now she was fighting. One hand went up into the air, and started to pull, like someone bundling washing off a line, reeling it in.

Rose and the others felt the spell tugging away from them, pulling at their clothes and hair like a fitful wind. Bella, the youngest and least practised in her spells, twirled around, her skirt spinning, and fell straight into Rose’s mother’s hands, gasping in fright.

Miranda gripped her by the shoulders, a strange, half-there child, still disguised by the rags of the spell, but already starting to fight back like a little wildcat.

‘Stop that!’ Miranda shook her, just a little, and Bella seethed, her fingernails reaching out to scratch and tear. But she couldn’t free herself from that tight grip. ‘What
are
you? A magician’s child? What are you doing here?’ Suddenly she caught Bella even tighter, and pulled her forward to look closely at her face, scanning her with eyes that were doubtful and confused. As she stared at Bella, the little hint of hope in her eyes died away, and she shook her head. ‘No. No, you’re not. And too young, anyway… What are you doing here, child? Is this some new trick of Pike’s?’

‘Please let her go.’ Rose pulled the spell off herself, with the same gesture her mother had used, and stepped forward. ‘She isn’t the one you’re looking for. We came to find you. She doesn’t mean you any harm, she’s only frightened. Bella,
stop it
!’

‘More of you!’ Miranda muttered, looking around her wildly as Freddie revealed himself and Bill. But then her eyes fixed on Rose, and she seemed to turn even paler, although Rose would not have thought it possible.

‘
Hope
…’ she whispered.

Rose nodded. It didn’t feel like her name, but somehow it seemed to catch her, and tug at her insides, so that she took another step forward, her feet faltering. ‘Yes…’ she murmured huskily.

Her mother let go of Bella, and reached out her arms, but before Rose could take another step towards her, her mother suddenly shrank back, her mouth twisting in pain. Her arms slammed straight to her sides, and she writhed, as though she were in agony, and screamed out loud.

‘What is it? What’s happening to her?’ Rose cried.

‘It must be the spell,’ Gus said swiftly. ‘She was too happy. There was an alarm set into the magic. Get away, quick. Run!’ He leaped down from Rose’s shoulders, and tried to herd them all out of the door, but Rose could not be torn from the sight of her mother, quivering and ashen-faced in the middle of the room, and Bella had collapsed against the bed. Bill and Freddie were trying to pull Rose away, but she struggled, and wouldn’t let them.

A thundering rush of feet sounded from the passageway, and then the door was full of angry faces.

‘She is my daughter. She is my daughter.’

She said it again and again and again, in a dull, mechanical voice, and it was clear from the twitching and bulging of her eyes, and the way her lips were drawn back over her teeth, that she did not want to say it all.

A tall, pale, red-haired man, whose moustache was a glorious fiery explosion, came into the room, smiling brightly. ‘Is she? Is she now? This is our little stolen baby?’ He stopped in front of Rose, held tightly by one of the footmen, who had been the first to come racing back when Miranda began to scream. He lifted her chin in his hand. ‘I hardly need to ask. You look very like your mother, girl. So. What happened to you? Where did you go? Hey?’ His voice was not unpleasant, and he did not swear, but Rose had the most terrifying sensation of a banked-up fire. It was as though old turf had been laid across the embers to keep the fire going through till morning. Then, when someone poked it, it would spring up into a blaze again, and consume anything that came near it.

She stared back at him, too frightened to speak, and had the sense to realise that this was a good thing, and that being dumb with fright might be useful.

‘She hasn’t her mother’s wits, then?’ He turned to Miranda, and waved a hand sharply across her mouth. She broke off mid-sentence, gasping, as though someone had poured a jug of cold water over her. Her eyes stayed desperate. ‘I – don’t – know.’ The words seemed dragged out of her.

‘And the rest of them. Four.’ He looked from Bella, to Freddie, to Bill. ‘Three little rich brats, and a servant.’

Rose realised with a start that the servant was Bill, and not her. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, since she had her good clothes on. There was no mention of Gus or Eliza. Rose searched the room as carefully as she could, imprisoned against the brass buttons of a scarlet footman’s coat. No, Gus was gone. And presumably Eliza could melt through walls, or something like. She couldn’t be shut away. But then, neither could she manipulate locks, or carry keys, with her wispy fingers. It was better to pin their hopes on Gus.

They needed someone. The more Rose saw of Pike, the stranger and more powerful he seemed, not like any other magician she had met. The magic seemed to be spilling out of him, so that his hair glittered like red-golden wire, and his eyes burned. Even his voice, soft though it was, wrapped round her and pulled, holding her like silken ropes. Was it the same spell he had used to entrap her mother? Her eyes as wide as a startled rabbit, Rose stared at him. She didn’t think he was even trying.

‘Ransom,’ Pike muttered, fingering the braid on Bella’s favourite velvet cape. ‘Or are we better off keeping you?’

Bella was standing petrified, her face pale with fear – the colour even seemed to have leached out of her blonde curls, so that she looked like carved marble, something that should have been on a grave. Freddie had fought so much against the huge man who had seized him that they had tied him up, and shoved him onto the bed. Now his eyes blazed furiously over the dirty cloth they’d bound his mouth with.

Creeping from child to child, Pike sniffed fiercely, like some sort of hunting dog. It was horrible having him so close. He smelled of metal, and his eyes were a pale shade of blue, so pale it was almost white, like china. His hair looked red, but Rose could see many colours in it, like flames in a fire, as he sniffed and prowled around her. ‘This one we’ll definitely keep,’ he muttered. ‘I can smell it on her. Everywhere. Buckets of it. You should be proud of your daughter, Mrs Garnet,’ he called, with a malicious little grin.

He tweaked one of Bella’s curls, and stroked one finger down her stony cheek. Rose, watching, waited for Bella to bite him, but she seemed to have disappeared inside herself, and did nothing. ‘A great well of it, but too far down, and at the same time oozing out of her skin. She doesn’t know what she’s doing with it yet. Dangerous.’

He was enjoying himself, Rose could see, sniffing out their magic, and perhaps because Freddie was bound, Pike wasn’t as cautious as he should have been. He bent over close to Freddie, and then reeled back with a cry of shock, his blazing red hair truly blazing now. Freddie had always been good at fires.

It went out, of course, in seconds, but it left an ugly scorched patch all down one side of Pike’s head, and Freddie was laughing, you could see it behind the gag – and even worse, some of the gang, those huge men pressed into the tiny room, were smirking a little too.

Pike hissed with fury, and hurled Freddie against the wall, with a dreadful soft crunching sound. Rose cried out in horror, and even Bella woke up and gasped. Bill struggled in his captor’s arms, but the man hit him carelessly, like he’d push away an over-excited dog, and Bill reeled and sagged.

Stop it!
Rose shouted, but silently, inside all their heads, even somehow Bill’s, who she had never known she could reach before.
Just don’t. We can’t fight them now, we have to wait, and – and sneak. Pike is better at fighting magic than we are, and they don’t care very much if they kill us.

She had to strain her mind to hear Freddie’s reply, the faintest thread of a whisper, but at least it meant he was alive, and conscious.
Actually, they do care. I think they’d rather enjoy it.

‘That Pike is over the moon,’ Bill muttered. ‘Three of you! He thinks all his Christmases have come at once. He hesitated. ‘They ain’t never letting us go, you know that, don’t you?’

Rose didn’t say what they were all feeling. That they might be shut up for ten years, just like her mother. They had been so close. It had been stupid, she supposed. They should have been more careful, watched and waited for longer. But she couldn’t wait. It wasn’t fair to expect her to wait, was it? Not when her mother was only the width of a room away?

‘Gus will have gone to fetch Papa.’ Bella nodded as she said this, as though she was trying to convince herself. There was no getting around the fact that Gus was a cat, and his feelings and attitudes and, above all, his sense of time, could be very different from everybody else’s. Despite his criticism of other cats, Gus on a life-or-death mission could still be easily distracted by a passing sardine (even if tinned).

‘And there’s Eliza,’ Rose added. ‘I think she’ll come back. I think so. But she must have been terrified, seeing Pike again. And it might take her a while to find us, if she ran far. She’ll have to try and find the mirror again.’

The men had bundled them down into a tiny, cramped little room, which seemed not just to have been made from a boat’s timbers, but to be the tiny cabin at the bow end of a smallish fishing boat, transported in one huge piece. Surely it had been done with Pike’s magic, for Rose could not see how it could have been carried. The hatch they had been shoved in by was extremely thoroughly locked, with a sort of magical seal that had burned Rose’s fingers when she’d tried to push it delicately away.

Would the magical locks stop Eliza getting in to find them? Rose wasn’t sure. If she came back, perhaps they could send her to fetch Miss Fell, if Gus hadn’t thought of that already.

Freddie had the marble light he had made in Miss Sparrow’s cellar all those months ago, and they had all put extra strength into it, but it was still dim and greyish inside the boat. It still smelled of fish, too.

‘How long do you think we’ve been here?’ Bella asked irritably.

Freddie frowned. ‘Only a few hours. I wonder if they’re going to feed us. It ought to be teatime. Or maybe past teatime by now.’ He looked wistful, and Rose could tell he was thinking of buttered crumpets. They were his favourite. She stared at him in the dusky light. She was hungry too, but she didn’t want to eat. She thought she might be sick if she did. Her stomach kept twisting and jolting every time she thought about Pike, and what he might make them do. He had imprisoned her mother for more than ten years. How long would he keep them?

‘For always,’ Bill said dully, beside her, and Rose jumped.