go through the pages on the floor.
“Here is appendix three,” she said.
Miss Henrietta studied the page and looked even more terrified.
“Time yet to read it, Hen. We must prepare the girl now!” shouted Miss Estella. “Find her a broomstick and send her to wizards so she can choose a seeing glass and they can teach her. She must be taught as much as we know!”
The girl, thought Annabel. Who on earth is the girl?
“The girl knows nothing!” shouted Miss Henrietta. She stood, and the remaining pages cascaded to the floor. “You cannot mean it!”
“It says it—it is written, by hands hundreds of years past. The youngest and most able member of the society, a most magical girl, must enter Under London and retrieve the Morever Wand. Here she stands, before your very eyes, Sister!”
“This child has as much magic in her as a common dormouse!” shouted Miss Henrietta. “She may be of the family Vine and she may be the youngest, but she is definitely not the most able.”
The girl, thought Annabel, and then the realization dawned upon her so that it took her breath away. They were talking about her.
“She is a girl of good lineage; she is strong,” said Miss Estella. “How can you not feel it, Sister? Remember the wizards’ dreamings? She will go down the hole into Under London. The wand in Mr. Angel’s hands will spell the end. She will save us all. She is our only hope.”
“Good lineage does not make her a witch,” replied Miss Henrietta.
Annabel looked down at her pretty rosebud-patterned dress, touched a stray tendril of blond hair. She let out a little laugh. A hiccup. A very small sob.
“But I don’t want to be a witch,” she said.
“Sometimes, dear girl, you have no say in such matters,” said Miss Estella.
They were a sad lot, those Highgate faeries, weeping over every single tree cut down. Every pond bricked over. All the fair things wiped away, copses blackened and burned, all the birds stolen from trees so that fine ladies might have a pretty thing. But they didn’t move on. Others disappeared in the night, and she found their left-behind burrows filled with scraps of their lives. The Highgate faeries stayed. Their queenie was thin and vicious. Always sharpening her arrows.
Just before dawn Kitty had given them the parcel from Miss Henrietta. They were not happy with its contents. An old plate. Lace. A tinderbox. They had all these things, the queenie screeched in her own language, but Kitty understood well enough. They were agitated. The wind and rain had died down, and they were pointing to the moon. But in the end they gave her faery twine, and she was glad to be away from them.
She had slept again in the mausoleum, and the moon had gone down. London had come to life. She felt it through her skin, pressed to the cold stone: giant looms and wood mills and carriage wheels, cooks in kitchens and poor boys sweeping streets and ladies everywhere being laced up in their stays. She smiled, coughed, slept again. The Vine Witches were always happy with faery twine.
When she woke, there was a great fog.
In the streets, shop lights blazed as though it were night and men walked before carriages holding lanterns aloft. Everywhere, people were confounded by the appearance of the pea-souper, brown in places, purple in others. And how they complained. She listened to snippets of their conversations, snatches of their concerns, as she began her long walk back. They grumbled at tavern doors and worried at windows. They covered their noses, for it stank, that fog, it stank of a thousand bad things, of peat and coal and tanning works; of sulfur, of sewers, of cigars and chimneys. Word was that a steamer had run its bow aground on the Isle of Dogs.
But Kitty did not complain. She walked. She had seen many fogs: yellow fogs and gray fogs and black fogs. She had seen fogs this very color but knew it was not the London Particular. She touched it with her hands and knew it was something else. It was magical, this stuff, and she knew it as surely as she knew her own bones.
She did not worry. Her feet were sore and her stomach was growling, but she did not let it bother her. For faery rope, Miss Henrietta would give her new bread, fog or not, sore feet or not. She walked and walked, and there were butterflies dancing inside