Rose 4: Rose and the Silver Ghost (2 page)

‘Don’t just stand there gawping and whining, you silly girl,’ Miss Fell snapped. ‘Help. And you too, Isabella, since this is all down to your ridiculous behaviour. Frederick, see to your master. And the cat, and the servant boy.’ She marched briskly towards the ship’s gangplank, and swept up it, her damson-coloured pelisse trailing over the wood. The girls scurried after her.

‘Why are we going towards it?’ Bella whimpered. ‘We should be going
away
…’ But she subsided when Miss Fell and Rose turned remarkably similar glares on her.

Miss Fell threaded her way delicately between the unconscious sailors, pulling the skirts of her coat away from them. Bella and Rose trailed behind her, staring up at the hypnotic swaying of the mast. Rose felt herself drawn towards it, wondering which way it would fall.

‘Put your hands on it,’ Miss Fell commanded. ‘Isabella, stop play-acting, this is your ridiculous spoilt-child mess.’ She snatched Bella’s hand, and pressed it against the dark wood. Rose followed, wincing as she felt the tearing shudders running through the timber.

‘It’s going to fall on us,’ she muttered. ‘Bella, if I get squashed, I shall kill you.’

Bella sniggered, but stopped quickly when Miss Fell glared at her again.

‘I don’t work with wood.’ Miss Fell sounded frustrated. She was gripping the wooden mast as if she was trying to push her fingertips into it, but it was iron-hard, cured by the salt sea-winds.

Rose pressed her fingers against the polished wood, feeling for a hold, but it was no good. She hissed crossly, and felt Miss Fell’s eyes on her, just a moment’s glance.

Ever since they had first met Miss Fell in Venice, she had been looking at Rose oddly, and she kept dropping strange little hints. She seemed convinced that Rose must belong to one of the old magical families. Bella was certain of this too. Rose kept finding Bella staring, her nose wrinkled in a delicate little frown, as though she were trying to catch a scent.

‘I can’t get inside the wood,’ Rose told Miss Fell apologetically. ‘It’s too dead. The sails maybe? Could we do something to those?’ The old magician gave a thoughtful little nod.

‘Our magic is very similar, I think, Rose… Agh!’

With a shrieking crack, the mast suddenly listed to one side, sending Bella careering into Rose. Rose fell back, but was hooked upwards by something seizing her coat collar. An invisible something, a spell that Miss Fell had conjured up to catch her. At the same time, the sixty-foot mast suddenly exploded – very gently – into a cloud of powdery dust.

Gaping, Rose steadied herself, and dragged Bella upright. ‘I thought you said you didn’t work with wood, ma’am?’ she murmured admiringly, looking around the deck of the ship, now heaped with little drifts of sawdust.

Miss Fell’s lips pursed in a dissatisfied expression. ‘I don’t. I dislike merely –
blasting
things. No finesse. No delicacy. So uncouth.’

Rose nodded, and brushed the dust off Bella’s bonnet. It would be rather lovely, she thought, to know one’s magic well enough to actually decide what sort of spell to use, rather than just having to grab whatever happened to be passing through one’s head, as she seemed to. She shivered a little. She knew that Miss Fell was an incredibly strong magician – she had watched her heal Mr Fountain of a fatal stab wound, in their fight against the mad magician, Gossamer – but this was different. That solid slab of wood was simply
gone
, and the feathers on Miss Fell’s bonnet hadn’t even twitched. It was pure power, and now Rose had had time to think, it was frightening. So frightening that Rose wanted to be able to do it too.

‘I think perhaps now we should make for an inn,’ Miss Fell said, twitching dust out of the folds of her pelisse. ‘Rather tiresome to have to explain to these good fellows why one of their masts has disappeared.’

‘Woodworm? Very hungry weevils?’ Bella suggested, but Miss Fell ignored her majestically.

As they reached the quay, Bill was stumbling up from the ground, but Gus was still stretched out in the dirt, his whiskers trembling.

Rose hurried down from the gangplank to pick him up, lovingly wiping the greyish slush from his fur with her handkerchief.

‘That girl…is a menace…’ Gus moaned. ‘I’m
dirty
. I need to wash…’

‘Can’t you just glamour it away?’ Rose suggested helpfully.

Gus rolled his blue and orange eyes at her in disgust. ‘Don’t be stupid, Rose. If I glamour myself sky-blue I’m still white underneath! The dirt would still be there. I can feel it! Ugh!’

‘What did she do?’ Bill’s eyes were rolling, and he staggered as he tried to walk towards Rose. Bella’s screams seemed to have left his ears ringing. ‘Is she one of you lot properly now then? Mrs Jones’ll give notice, she always swore she wouldn’t stay when Miss Bella was bringing the house down round her ears.’

Rose put an arm round his shoulders to hold him still, and sighed. ‘Mrs Jones was right about that. I think if Bella had gone on longer she could have toppled a house.’ She shook her head disgustedly. ‘And not a hair out of place, look at her! How did she find the one clean spot in the harbour to lie in?’

After Bella’s screaming fit at Dover Harbour, Mr Fountain had been horrified. He had blamed himself for allowing Bella to run wild, instead of insisting she stayed at home in London with a proper governess. And then he had begged Miss Fell to take Bella on as her apprentice, in the same way he had taken Freddie into his house for training.

When he suggested this in their private parlour at the smart Dover inn, Rose thought Bella was about to have another fit of hysterics. She had turned an unearthly white, and seemed hardly able to speak. Despite her awful behaviour, she did love her father dearly, and clearly couldn’t bear the thought of being parted from him. Mr Fountain didn’t seem particularly happy about the idea either. His moustache was drooping, which made him look like a depressed walrus.

‘Please…’ Bella whispered.

Miss Fell, seated in the best armchair, her back ramrod straight, and her hands resting on her silver-headed cane, regarded Bella thoughtfully. ‘She certainly needs to be taught,’ she agreed, although Rose thought she sounded somewhat reluctant. ‘But I do not think my household would be particularly suitable. My London residence has been shut up for some years, for a start. I shall be staying in a hotel while I engage new servants. All most unsettling. Not the place for a young girl.’ But her eyes rested on Rose as she spoke.

Mr Fountain watched her, his eyes thoughtful. ‘A hotel is a most soulless place,’ he suggested delicately.

Miss Fell stared back at him, her sharp nose making her look hawk-like. She inclined her head, very, very slightly.

‘Would you not be more comfortable if you came to stay with us?’

Freddie’s head whipped round at this, and his eyes widened in horror. He’d had enough of Miss Fell’s old-fashioned ideas on the upbringing of children and apprentices.

‘How very gracious…’ purred Miss Fell. ‘And then, of course, I would not only be able to teach dear little Isabella, but also Rose. And even Frederick.’ Her eyes closed, for the merest fraction of a second, as she contemplated that thought.

But Rose was quite sure that this was what she had been intending all along. Miss Fell had descended on the Fountain house in a mass of expensive luggage. Of course, Mr Fountain had not thought to inform his housekeeper that he was bringing home a house-guest, he simply expected Miss Bridges to deal with the consequences. In fact, Rose mused, Bella’s selfish habits were inherited from her father – he merely managed to make them seem rather less obnoxious by adding a great deal of charm. Perhaps it was just that rich people were all inconsiderate, having never known anything else? Rose wrinkled her nose thoughtfully.

Luckily, Miss Bridges and Miss Fell seemed to like one another. Rose suspected that actually Miss Bridges would have liked anybody who was prepared to educate Bella – or at least try. It also helped that Miss Fell had made a special visit to the kitchens, and had been so very gracious to Mrs Jones about the orange syllabub she served at the supper the first night, that the cook didn’t give notice after all.

Although, if Miss Fell kept asking for lavender shortbread, it was possible that Mrs Jones might reconsider, of course.

Rose sighed, and shrugged the thoughts away. She sometimes thought that she would never understand people who had been born with money. ‘I’ll go down to the kitchens. Wish me luck. If Mrs Jones is in one of her moods, I’ll be having bread and dripping for supper, without the dripping.’

Luckily for Rose, when she reached the kitchen, Mrs Jones was hidden behind her newspaper, with a cup of tea at her side, sighing heavily. ‘Dreadful. Dreadful,’ she kept muttering, as she rustled the pages.

‘Another murder?’ Rose whispered to Bill, who was drinking his tea out of his saucer, as no one else was in the kitchen, and Mrs Jones couldn’t see him from behind the paper.

Bill shook his head, and slurped. ‘War,’ he muttered, eyeing the edges of the newspaper.

‘Oh…’ Rose sighed. The war with Talis had escalated over the last few weeks, and they had arrived back to find London papered with still more recruiting posters, and columns of soldiers marching through the streets. They frightened Rose when she was out on errands. Somehow she seemed to see those bright uniforms splashed with mud, and other worse things. Then she would blink, and again the cloth was only red with dye. It made her feel sick.

What would happen if the Talish emperor did as everyone said he meant to, and there was an invasion? Would there really be fighting in the streets? Rose kept telling herself that Mr Fountain and the other magicians would never let it happen. But the emperor had magicians of his own. Lord Venn had even worked for him for a while. The plot to steal Princess Jane had been a subtle ploy to gain the emperor’s trust. Who was to say that another powerful magician wasn’t directing the Talish forces now?

Rose stared at the words screaming from the cramped type of the paper.
Cannon. 7
^th
Light infantry. Treaties dissolved. Undue provocation…

Her new life in the Fountain house was so wonderfully precious, and the bands of soldiers seemed to be marching over it in their heavy black boots.

‘Those Talish. Traitors!’ The newspaper shook aggressively.

Rose crossed her fingers behind her back, and cooed, ‘Mrs Jones… Would we by any chance happen to have lavender shortbread?’

Mrs Jones’s eyebrows appeared over the top of the newspaper. ‘That woman will be the death of me,’ she sighed. ‘There’s a porcelain jar of dried lavender in the larder, Rose, fetch it for me, there’s a dear. And next time,’ she eyed Rose sternly, ‘next time, try to encourage her to want something that you know I already have. Use that dratted magic stuff.’ She gave a slight shudder as she said it, but Rose still stared at the cook over her shoulder as she went to the larder. Mrs Jones detested magic, and kept the kitchen doors sealed against it by some ancient rituals of her own, which Rose suspected were just as magical in their own way as Mr Fountain’s spells. She usually pretended not to know that Rose could do magic too.

‘Miss Fell would see straight through me, Mrs Jones,’ Rose told her, as she came back with the solid blue-white jar. ‘She can make spells with her little finger that I couldn’t do if I tried with all of me for a week.’

Mrs Jones folded up her paper, and smoothed it out with little thumps of her fat hands, as though she was squashing away things she didn’t want to see. ‘She seems such a nice, proper lady,’ she murmured, and pulled the lid off the lavender jar with a sharp jerk.

‘Looks like nasty little dead beetles,’ Bill said disgustedly, as he peered into the jar. ‘And the smell! She’s going to eat that stuff?’

‘It’s a lovely smell!’ Rose said, glancing at him in surprise. It made her think of drawers full of clean, pressed linens. Miss Fell herself smelled of lavender, Rose realised. She probably kept bags of it to freshen her laces, but Rose couldn’t help wondering if her fondness for lavender shortbread scented her from the inside out.

‘How are we going to put the lavender in the biscuits?’ Rose asked anxiously. She had forgotten it was Sarah the kitchen maid’s afternoon out, and she wasn’t sure she was up to inserting lavender into shortbread herself.

Mrs Jones sniffed. ‘Lavender glacé icing. It may not be exactly what madam ordered, but she’ll have to lump it. We can’t all cheat.’

Rose gave a brisk nod. ‘I only hope it puts her in a sweeter mood. She’s supposed to be teaching us painting in watercolours later on, and after the dancing lesson we’ve just had…’

‘You’re good at pictures,’ Bill pointed out, but Rose sighed.

‘Not painting them. Mine just happen when I’m talking, and I don’t mean them to. Sorry, Mrs Jones,’ she added automatically. Mention of magic was not usually allowed in the kitchen either.

‘Watercolours are very suitable for a young lady, Rose,’ the cook told her approvingly as she whisked a bowlful of icing.

‘I’m not a young lady,’ Rose pointed out, pursing her lips.

‘But you could be, dear. Most girls would bite your hand off for the chances you’re getting. Latin, and all that. Mind you, we’ll be lucky if we’re not all speaking Talish this time next year.’

‘You can’t say you aren’t a young lady, anyway,’ Bill put in, filching a fingerful of icing while Mrs Jones examined the lavender. ‘You don’t know.’

‘Oh, don’t you start,’ Rose told him witheringly. ‘You’re like the girls at St Bridget’s, all sure they’re really little lost princesses.’

‘But you might be!’ Bill protested. ‘All that…
strangeness
had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?’

‘It’s just an accident,’ Rose muttered. But she didn’t sound sure. Before she came to work at Mr Fountain’s house, Rose had spent so long in the orphanage refusing to imagine that she had a family, that she found it desperately hard to think about her history now. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find the people who had thrown her away – for that was what they’d done. They hadn’t even bothered to deliver her to the orphanage, simply abandoned her in a churchyard – in a fishbasket, to add insult to injury. Why would she ever want to know them?