Rose 4: Rose and the Silver Ghost (6 page)

‘No, I don’t think so.’ Bella sounded so excited. She had done very few spells so far, or at least, very few spells on purpose.

Rose sat tensely, and heard her riffling through the pages of the spell book, and then tapping the paper thoughtfully with a fingernail. All the sounds seemed clearer and louder now she couldn’t see. There was a rustling of fine linen, and shivers crawled up Rose’s spine, like the spiders she couldn’t chase out of her mind.

Bella whispered and muttered to herself, and Rose heard only odd words. Even Bella’s voice sounded spidery and soft. She was desperate to leap up and race out of the room, but she didn’t dare disturb the spell. If it went wrong, who knew what would happen? Spiders in slippers might invade her brand-new bedroom. The thought of cobwebs on the heavy plum velvet curtains made her feel sick.

‘Put your foot out!’ Bella told her sharply. ‘Quickly, Rose, I can’t hold it like this for long!’

Rose’s eyes snapped open, without her meaning them to. She stared at her foot, pale in a knitted white cotton stocking, and forced herself to stretch it out towards Bella’s hands.

What Bella was holding looked like a hair net, a pale pink silk one. It glistened, and Rose tried not to flinch as Bella draped it over her foot.

‘Now the other one.’

Rose’s feet felt light as thistledown – as light as cobweb. It looked like she was wearing delicate, jewelled, pink slippers – but they were only spider-silk, beaded with gobbets of Bella’s magic. Bella must have put a hint of glamour spell in them too, to change the colour, and make them look like pretty shoes, if anyone should see. It was very clever, deceitful magic. Rose was beginning to think Bella took after her father.

‘We won’t make a sound while we’re wearing them,’ Bella told her proudly, twisting to admire her own feet. ‘Aren’t they
pretty
? I wonder how long they last.’

A soft paw reached out and gently batted the pale pink mesh. ‘Pretty but fragile,’ Gus commented. ‘Only the one night, I should think.’

Rose stared at him sternly. ‘I shut that door myself.’

‘Did you?’ Gus yawned, showing a mouthful of sparkling white needles. ‘Really. How interesting. And this is relevant how, Rose, dear?’

‘How did you get in? It’s still shut. You can’t walk through doors, can you?’

‘No. Well, I could, but why bother, when there’s a perfectly good chimney, and a flue system that links up the whole house?’

Rose and Bella turned round to stare at the fireplace. The fire was lit, only a small blaze, glowing gently, and sending out a pleasant warmth into the room.

Gus was now licking one of his front paws, smoothing it around his ears luxuriously, his eyes blissfully closed.

‘Next time I’ll just leave the door open,’ Rose whispered. ‘I mean it, Gus, please. Don’t do that again.’

Gus opened one eye, the amber one, and leaned across to swipe his tongue over Rose’s fingers. ‘Dear little Rose.’ He rubbed his paw around his ears one last time, and got up, stalking over to the fire. He stared into it, dangling his whiskers dangerously close to the glowing coals.

Bella jumped up, and made as if to grab him away from the fire, but he glared at her, and she hung back. ‘You’ll burn your whiskers,’ she protested. ‘Think how awful you’d look if you were all singed.’

Gus sighed. ‘Neither of you have any faith in me.’ Before they could stop him, he put one paw up on the grate, murmured, ‘A lot of dust here, Rose. Most unsatisfactory work,’ and leaped into the middle of the fire.

Bella shrieked, and Rose would have done the same, except she felt as though the air had been knocked out of her, and she had no breath to scream.

Gus sat there for a moment with the flames swirling around him, looking mildly bored. Then he strolled back out onto the hearth rug, where he examined his paws carefully. Rose peered at them too, but they looked exactly the same as before, the pads a delicate apricot pink.

‘Can you teach us that?’ Bella asked eagerly.

Gus smirked. ‘When you’ve grown a tail, Bella, come back and ask again. Rose, you cannot keep me out with a door.’

Rose shook her head. ‘I wasn’t trying to. But – we’re planning to do something you told us was stupid. We thought we should plan it out privately. Freddie’s been fuming in the workroom since he stormed out at breakfast, and we can hardly use the schoolroom in case Miss Fell walks in on us.’

‘So what are you after?’ Gus sat down in between the two girls, his whiskers glittering with excitement.

‘Her silver hand mirror. She has it with her most of the time, so we think we’ll have to do it tonight,’ Rose explained.

Gus leaned forward, his shoulders heaving so convulsively that Rose wondered if something was wrong.

‘Are you coughing up a hairball?’ Bella asked in disgust.

Gus glared at her. ‘I was laughing,’ he pointed out coldly, ‘at you being so blindly stupid. Do you actually think you’ll get away with it?’

‘We haven’t a choice, and Bella’s made us these silence spell slippers. We’re going, whatever you say about it,’ Rose snapped.

‘Oh good. Well, I shall come too, just for the amusement value.’ He sprang onto the end of Rose’s bed. ‘Be quiet now, children. I shall need to sleep, if we’re going gallivanting all night.’ Then he curled himself into a perfect white ball, with his nose tucked under his tail, so that they couldn’t see his eyes to argue with him.

‘Oh!’ Rose huffed crossly. ‘He really is impossible. I didn’t ask him to come!’

‘But he’ll probably be useful, if he can stop himself from laughing at us,’ Bella pointed out.

Gus’s tail twitched, and they couldn’t tell if he was laughing or cross, so they decided to finish plotting in Bella’s room instead.

‘I don’t want to wear my nightgown,’ Bella hissed. ‘I was going to wear my black velvet dress, the one I had for Uncle Dolph’s funeral. It’s perfect for going burgling in.’

Rose flinched. ‘Don’t use that word.’

‘Stealing? Trespassing? Looting?’

‘Ssshhh!’ Rose crammed her knuckles in her mouth and nibbled them. ‘Don’t go on about it, or I might back out, and it’d be an awful waste of a spell, wouldn’t it.’

‘If you back out I shall go without you,’ Bella retorted. ‘This is the most fun we’ve had since we came back from Venice.’

‘I’m not. But Bella, please just wear your nightgown, then if she wakes up we can pretend to be sleepwalking.’

‘Both of you at the same time?’ Gus asked.

‘Oh, don’t you start!’ Rose begged wearily. She was feeling terribly guilty at the thought of stealing a valuable mirror, and she had frightened herself quite enough already creeping along the dark corridor to Bella’s room. The difficult bit had been tiptoeing past the particularly forbidding door behind which Miss Fell was sleeping – or so they hoped. If she’d woken up in the middle of the night and decided to read for a while, they were lost. As she crept along, Rose had been convinced that the ornaments on the little tables in the alcoves were all staring at her, and one of the paintings had definitely sniggered.

‘Or we could both have heard a suspicious and frightening noise.’ Bella nodded, twisting her face into a scared-little-girl look, and wringing her hands together. ‘Yes, I see.’ She stroked the black velvet dress regretfully, but closed her wardrobe door. ‘Shall we go, then?’

Rose smoothed the front of her nightgown nervously, and nodded. ‘We should get on with it. Have you got the slippers?’

Bella produced them from under her pillow with a flourish. They sparkled invitingly, but they slid onto Rose’s feet with a slightly sticky eagerness that made her shudder. Still, they worked – Bella tried leaping on the creaky board two feet to the right of her dressing table, and there wasn’t a sound.

Rose picked up her candle, and the girls padded out into the corridor, with Gus sliding around their feet silently. They paused outside Miss Fell’s door, and stared at the handle uncertainly. Moonlight was shining through the tall window at the end of the corridor, gilding the brass doorknob so that it seemed to ripple and shimmer.

‘Open it!’ Gus purred gently, nudging Rose’s leg. ‘Go on!’

‘What if she’s still awake?’ Rose hissed. ‘She always says she hardly sleeps.’

Bella immediately assumed her scared face. ‘Don’t worry, Rose, I will cry. You know how good I am at it.’

Rose grasped the handle, and turned it, gently pushing the door open. Miss Fell’s candle was extinguished, and a pitifully small figure lay under a mound of quilts in the huge bed. Without her corsets and huge silken skirts, she was a tiny old lady.

‘Look!’ Bella breathed. ‘On her nightstand!’

Next to the bed, the mirror glimmered in the faint candlelight, and Rose stole closer to snatch it up. She paused, her fingers hovering over it, watching Miss Fell sleep, wheezing gently in a nest of lace-edged pillows. It all seemed too easy. What if the mirror was enchanted against theft? What if it screamed as soon as she picked it up?

Rose grasped the handle, waiting for the metal to bite her back, or some strange spell to fell her to the ground. She was almost disappointed when nothing happened. It was only a mirror, and it did nothing.

She grabbed it up, and whirled around in the spell-slippers, shooing Bella and Gus out of the room.

They rushed silently across the corridor, giggling and panting and throwing themselves into a heap on Bella’s bed, as the pent-up nerves took over.

Eventually, Rose stopped shaking and laughing, and stared down at the mirror lying on Bella’s pillow. It looked unhelpfully plain.

‘Now we have the rest of the night to work out why it’s so special,’ she murmured.

The mirror was very pretty, made of silver that had been polished so many times it was almost silky. It was oval, with a handle, and the silver frame had a pattern of roses moulded all around it, like a garland. Several of the roses were so worn away that they were more like shadows on the silver. Rose stroked the pattern, smiling. If she had been born the young lady that everyone now wanted her to be, she would have been given something like this. Perhaps with a brush that matched, specially chosen for a little Rose. But Miss Fell’s name was Hepzibah, so that didn’t quite fit.

‘Look into it!’ Gus hissed, peering over her arm. She had told him about the strange vision she’d had from the mirror before. ‘You might see her again.’

Rose swallowed nervously, and held the mirror out in front of her. She had a right to be anxious, she told herself firmly. She might be about to find out a vital clue to the mystery of her abandonment. Within the next few minutes, she might even have a family.

But then she bit her lip, and stared determinedly into the slightly dull glass. That wasn’t true. How could she ever have a family, whatever she found in the mirror? A proper family would never have left her in the first place. She might get relatives, but that was about it.

She had been expecting to see the same odd reflection, the older version of herself. Instead, her own face stared back at her, worried, and heavily shadowed by the flickering candles. Behind her in the mirror lurked a blue-eyed child, and a highly curious cat.

‘I can’t see anything strange,’ Bella complained.

‘It looks like any old glass,’ Gus agreed, pushing his nose around Rose’s elbow and gazing into the mirror. A well-groomed white face looked back at him, and he twitched his whiskers at himself admiringly. ‘What did you do the first time, to make it show you its secret?’

‘Nothing.’ Rose shook her head. ‘Really nothing. I saw myself at first, and I only caught a glimpse of her as I gave the mirror back. She just came sliding out of the frame towards me, somehow.’

‘So she’s in the back of the mirror,’ Gus muttered, sniffing at it. ‘I can’t smell a secret catch, but it may be very well hidden.’

‘What do you mean, she’s in the back of it?’ Rose’s hands shook without her meaning them to. She didn’t want the thing touching her if it had someone inside it.

‘A lock of hair is all I meant,’ Gus snapped. ‘Or a letter. In a secret compartment. Something that holds a memory of the girl, and it made you see her. Stop being so fussy and feeble, Rose.’

‘Oh!’ Rose nodded in relief. ‘Yes.’ She had seen the locket that Mrs Jones wore all the time, tucked neatly under her apron, and every so often when they had stopped work for a cup of tea, she would draw it out and polish it on the corner of the apron. She had shown Rose how it opened with a tiny spring, and inside there was a woven piece of sadly faded light-brown hair. Baby Maria Rose’s hair, the tiny daughter that Mrs Jones had lost to the cholera so many years ago. This mirror could well have something similar inside it. Perhaps that was why Miss Fell loved it so much? Because it held the memory of someone she had loved?

‘The lock of hair could even have belonged to one of her suitors,’ Bella suggested dreamily. ‘He died before they could marry – how tragic!’

Rose raised an eyebrow at her. She sometimes suspected that Bella had read quite a few of those books Miss Anstruther stashed in the ink cupboard.

Bella went pink. ‘Well, it might be true!’ she protested.

Gus was still sniffing at the mirror, and even licking at the rose garlands with the tip of his shocking pink tongue. ‘I’m sure there’s something inside,’ he muttered. ‘Lay the mirror on the bed, Rose.’