A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,29

hurt so much. The wizards looked at her thoughtfully.

“But why did she turn her back on magic?” asked Annabel. “And why did she tell me…lies?”

Their faces looked infinitely sad.

“Please,” said Annabel. “What happened after my father was hit by the carriage?”

Daughter of the Great Geraldo Grey.

Mr. Bell cleared his throat. “Now, then,” he said. “Hen and Ettie never got over Vivienne going against their will, but your mother loved your father. There was no doubt of it. When he died so suddenly, she was wretched and wild with grief and she wanted him brought back.”

“But how?” said Annabel.

“There is no good way, Annabel,” said Mr. Keating very quietly.

“What is gone is gone, and that is the way of life,” said Mr. Crumb.

“But there was Mr. Angel, once of our brotherhood, the very youngest, expelled for the wickedness that grew in him slowly but surely over the years,” whispered Mr. Bourne. “He, dear Annabel, had made…a resurrection machine.”

“Your mother, Vivienne, took the body of her husband to Mr. Angel’s dark mansion,” said Mr. Bell. “And we do not know what happened there, but afterward, when she emerged from the house alone, she turned her back on all magic forever.”

There was silence in the little warm sitting room.

“And now you must both return to the shop quickly,” said Mr. Bell. “If what you see is true, then the shadowlings are afoot and Mr. Angel is beginning to raise his army. He is a dangerous and damaged man, Annabel. He wants to rule everyone. Hen and Ettie will put the map in you.”

In me, thought Annabel, like a spoonful of tonic that Mercy sometimes gave her. And to hear their names as such, as though they were girls. Then she realized that the wizards wanted her to stand, and Mr. Bourne very timidly held out the broomstick for her, which was disappointing because she had thought perhaps they’d go home in a carriage.

“But I thought I was to deliver it to you,” said Annabel.

“The broomstick is yours,” said Mr. Bell most kindly.

She looked at it and worried. What if she couldn’t stop it again and she went in through the glass of the magic shop? That wasn’t the kind of thing that Miss Henrietta would tolerate. Yet she also felt relieved when the broomstick was in her hand, and it shivered in response to her relief, an old friend.

Mr. Bell nodded to Kitty, and Kitty glared at him from under her dark eyebrows.

“When all is done, young Kitty,” he said, “you must fetch us some more of the magnificent brownie tea. There are not many girls like Kitty anymore, young Annabel.”

And he looked at Kitty with such sadness and tenderness that Annabel had to look away.

They were guided down a long hallway, where, in the gloom, a grandfather clock showed it to be early evening. Annabel tucked the ruby-red seeing glass into her bodice. She felt the broomstick, which she was becoming increasingly fond of, tremble against her.

“Above all, be good, Annabel Grey, for all of good magic depends upon you tonight,” said Mr. Bell, and then the door was open and she and Kitty were deposited once again into the dark.

The moon rose and shone like a dirty coin through the fog. Mr. Angel listened to the Dark-Magic Extracting Machine. He listened to its inner workings, churning and grinding, winding and unwinding. Sometimes it stopped. Sighed. He remembered what was at its black heart, the first sorrowful thing, and that made him smile.

He stood and fed the machine black-bordered paper taken from a widower’s desk, a flogging strap stolen from a home for waifs. Six feathers stolen from the museum, from a bird long extinct. The machine took deep breaths, sucked these objects, one by one, down the length of the room. A chief mourner’s sash. Blackwork embroidery. A long-gone baby’s booties, kept for years in a bottom drawer.

Mr. Angel raised his monocle and peered at the dark-magic gauge. The needle pointed to two-thirds full. He took the Black Wand and filled it, bracing himself for its force.

He strode down the stairs.

He turned his two footmen to dust because they stood in his way.

He went into empty bedrooms and raised shadowlings from long-unopened wardrobes. One, two, three of them. He strode down the stairs and into the library and raised them from behind the black velvet curtains. He swept them up the stairwell and ordered them beside the others that swayed like dark candle flames. They rose and fell at the sound