A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,22

behind the counter and took paper from a drawer.

Annabel looked out through the window at the street, which was so dark you would think it was almost night. The fog had grown even thicker. People appeared as ghostly silhouettes passing by the clouded windows. A street crier took up his position right by the front door.

“London plunged into darkness!” he shouted. “Read all about it.”

“Oh, do be quiet,” muttered Miss Henrietta as she wrote.

“Fog stretching all the way to Watford!” he cried.

Annabel watched the fog swirl against the window. It was filled with soot, which came down and covered the ground. Surely she couldn’t go out in it. Not alone. The broomstick trembled beside Miss Henrietta, as though with sorrow and rage, and it made Annabel feel terrible.

“I can see you are worried,” said Miss Henrietta. “The broomstick will be aggrieved for only a little while. Come closer if you like. Talk to it again. You seem to have a way with it.”

So Annabel knelt beside it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, dear thing.”

“Good girl,” said Miss Henrietta. She folded up her page, dripped wax on it, and affixed her seal. The last light seemed suddenly to drain from the street.

“Now it is time. Put on your cloak—you will need it against the fog. Your bonnet and gloves, too.”

“But it is dark,” said Annabel.

“Of course it is dark,” said Miss Henrietta. “And what luck that is. It is never right to take a new broomstick out in sunshine—the thing would take fright. Here we are with a strange early night.

“I have drawn a small map on the back of the letter. The wizards no doubt will have seen you coming in their glass. Give them my letter and tell them to send out their pigeons to warn all in the Great & Benevolent Magical Society. Do not mind their quiet ways. They will tell us what is necessary for your journey into Under London.”

Miss Henrietta untied the broomstick and thrust it into Annabel’s hands just as the bell above the door tinkled and the sullen-faced Kitty came in from the dark. She dropped her sack to the floor. She smelled of wild sorrel from the graveyard. She coughed twice without covering her mouth.

“Perfect!” cried Miss Henrietta. “Kitty, you must walk with Annabel as far as Finsbury and back. I will pay you twice your ration.”

Kitty looked affronted at the idea. Annabel thought her expression very rude.

“Three times your ration,” said Miss Henrietta.

Kitty nodded, and Miss Henrietta moved Annabel firmly toward the door.

“I shall keep a candle burning for you both,” she said, and with that turned them both out into the street.

“After-dark amusements should be restricted to the drawing room and never the garden or the streets.”

—Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

Why, I am a young lady, thought Annabel as the door shut behind her. I am the daughter of a gentleman, even if he was really a magician called the Great Geraldo Grey (oh, just that name, and she felt a pain beneath her breastbone), who was hit by a carriage.

She let out a little strangled sob. She couldn’t go walking at night!

But she straightened her back and held her head high and refused to turn back to the door. She knew Miss Henrietta would be watching them.

Be brave.

She stepped down onto the road…and, but for Kitty, who grabbed her arm and pulled her back, would have been run over by a carriage that clattered out of the fog with four horses and disappeared again.

“Are you a fool?” Kitty asked, shaking her head. “Follow.”

Annabel folded the letter twice and placed it in her pink waist sash. She hoped it would be safe there. The broomstick shivered against her.

“Here, here,” Annabel whispered. “It will be fine.”

They joined the jostling street filled with people trying to get home in the fog, men closing up their businesses and women clutching their children’s hands so as not to get separated. A long-song man was taking down his song sheets and singing in a weary tone, while flower girls with hungry eyes sat in huddles with not a flower sold.

The fog was black in the places where it filled corners, purple elsewhere, with great coiling mauve clouds that drifted slowly through the streets. The soot rained down like dark snowflakes. But here and there, startling pockets of clean air appeared suddenly, holes where the golden afternoon sun shone down in little pools upon the lanes.

The fog stank. Annabel didn’t think she had ever