I find her on a bench in the courtyard, looking like she’s run out of tears. I sit down next to her. “Are you all right?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Daphne says, her eyes cast down.
I look more closely. She’s wearing a lovely floral garden-party dress. High-heeled jute sandals. Her cheeks are red and chafed.
“Did you . . .” I’m not sure how to say it. “Were we too late?”
She looks up at me. “Oh. No. Simon stopped him. No one took Smith’s spell today. But . . . Iwouldhave.” She starts crying again. “Oh, Basilton, I’ve been such a fool.”
I put my arm around her and fish a handkerchief out of my pocket. “There, there.”
“I believed in him.”
“I know.”
“And now . . . oh, and now . . .” She sniffs. “Basil, will you just take me home?”
Thank fucking Crowley.“Of course. As soon as I’ve spoken to Simon.”
Daphne nods, wiping her eyes.
A shadow falls over us. We both look up. It’s Penelope’s father, holding a stack of three empty glasses. “Hello, Daphne. Gin and tonic?”
She smiles up at him and nods her head, laughing tearfully. “Thank you, Martin.”
Professor Bunce takes a glass and taps it with his wand.“Dutch courage!”He casts it again on a glass for himself. (In my good opinion, anyone who can cast that spell twice in a row doesn’tneeda power upgrade.) He holds the last empty glass out to me. “Basil?”
“No, thank you, sir. I’m driving.”
“Could I trade places with you for a moment?”
“Yes, of course.” I stand, and Professor Bunce takes my place on the bench.
“Shepard has lemonade,” he says.
I nod and catch Daphne’s eye. “I won’t go far.”
Shepard does have lemonade. And Penelope has tea and biscuits. They’re moving through what’s left of the crowd, offering refreshments. (Shepard may be the first true Normal on Watford grounds—it’s aspectaculartransgression.) (How many history books is Penelope going to end up in? And for how many reasons?)
I take the biscuits from Bunce and do my part to help. Now that the danger has passed, people seem glad for the chance to gossip. And now that Smith-Richards has been disgraced, people are quick to say they only came today out of curiosity, and didn’t they get a show for their trouble. They’re already talking about the other prospective Chosen Ones . . .
My own Chosen One has been in the headmistress’s office for ages. We run out of tea and biscuits, and go to wait for him outside of the Weeping Tower.
I’m pacing the tiled pathway. Penelope is sitting cross-legged on a bench—never mind her short skirt—anxiously plucking leaves off a rosebush. Shepard is staring up at the Tower, probably wondering why it doesn’t fall over.
“She won’t hurt him,” Penny says, to herself, as much as to me.
“But she doesn’t like him,” I counter. “He says she’s never liked him.”
“Oh, she likes him fine—she just thinks he’s a bad influence on me.”
Shepard and I both laugh.
Bunce frowns at us.
“Maybe we should leave before your mom comes down,” Shepard says. “I don’t want to be here while she’s still putting people in towers.”
“I’d break you out,” Penny says dismissively.
