After that night when she had been fourteen, it had taken months before Dot could look at herself in the mirror again – longer, still, before she could speak. Of course, she had not been rendered permanently mute; after the incident, she simply felt with a desolate certainty that she had nothing to say, and no assurance that anyone would want to hear it if she did. Then, Willard had caught her in the bathroom, weeks after her fifteenth birthday, scissors in hand. ‘You’re no magazine girl,’ he’d scoffed. ‘Don’t bother.’
And so, Dot had dropped the scissors.
The curls were too thick, too heavy, constantly knotted and irritating. No women wore their hair short in Seafarthing. The only club in the next town over still had a corset room, for goodness’ sake.
In the humid bedroom on the corner of Wren Court and Ethel Avenue, Dot let go of her hair. Outside, the rain pattered harder. A motor car chugged past. What would Willard say if she cut her hair now? Dot glanced at her bandaged hand and supposed there would be bigger things to hide from Willard whenever she saw him next. He wanted what was best for her, she was sure. He loved her, she was sure. She should not cut her hair.
But then Dot recalled the way he had looked at her the night she had left. Not with goodness, or familial compassion, but with absolute contempt. Was a person who loved you meant to look at you like that?
Dot took up the scissors from the desk beside her bed. She opened them. The blades reflected the lamplight and, for the first time, she wondered:What do I want?
She pictured Theodora fighting off Acanthi like a one-person battalion.To be a witch,thought Dot. To be a bright young thing of the city. To have a grand magical discovery of hers published in a journal and to have her name distributed in print across the continent. To discover the source of her affliction. To heal it.
And then she recalled another woman she had met in the tea shop, who had requested a spell for the growth of geraniums. Dot had set down a mug of herbal tea beside her and spotted the woman’s hands, the fingers joined almost entirely together. She wore a bright red dress and striking lipstick, and her hair was cropped to the chin, and she picked up her tea as if it didn’t bother her one stitch that her hands were different. The customer had smiled at Dot, and then she had taken a sip, and it awed her – yet, how else was the woman supposed to live? In fear? In shame? Dot wanted to be like her, too. To be bold.
Dot took the scissors to her hair. She opened the blades around one long curl.Snip.It fell to the floor, and she let out a nervous giggle.
The roof creaked again, dust fell, and it was as if the house itself could see her.Oh, she thought, let the tea shop watch.
Dot realised that, if she were to do this properly, she would need the use of both hands. She placed the scissors gently down and held up her bandaged hand in the lamplight. Then, she closed her eyes.
With tremoring fingers, Dot pulled the cloth away from her hand, feeling first the sticky humidity against her afflicted palm and fingers. The open air felt colder to that hand than it did to the rest of her skin, in the way that one feels colder having risen from the ocean.
Dot opened her eyes.
She finally looked on her new hand for a second time: scaly, delicate, long and plated with strange spikes from her middle finger. She did not feel disgust or anger now as she tapped her talons against the glass of the mirror. She discovered that she liked the sound of the click.
Dot drew her unafflicted fingers along the scales. She felt both the sensation of touching and being touched. Then, she stretched both hands before her and peered at them side by side. She tooka deep breath. She named the things she could see and smell and hear and taste and feel. And, once she finally felt calm, she took a clump of hair with her left hand and her scissors with her right, and began to cut.
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
The next morning, Dot knocked upon Theodora’s attic door. The witch opened it, dressed in her usual lavish blouse, as if she were yet to sleep at all. She raised her eyebrows in question.
‘I need to learn more about my affliction,’ said Dot. ‘I’m going to the telegram office with Belchamber today but, afterwards, I was hoping you might sneak me into the Royal Institute library? Surely I am not the only one to have these scales.’
‘Why to the telegram office?’ asked Theodora, yawning.
‘I need to contact my grandad. You said this magic has been in me for a long time. Perhaps he remembers something I don’t. I need to know how he foundthe ambergris and why it helps me.’
‘Finally.We’ll leave in forty minutes.’ Theodora slammed the attic door shut. Dot stared at the wood for a moment, a touch surprised, and then climbed down the stairs. As her feet met the floorboards, the door was yanked open again and the witch cried, ‘Dorothy, did you cut your hair? Oh, look at you. How stunning!’
They met in the living room. Dot was dressed in one of her new blouses and a brown tweed skirt. On her feet were a pair of wingtips that were truthfully not as comfortable as the brogues she’d borrowed from Theodora, but were so beautifully polished she did not mind. What had happened to her old shoes, with the newspaper stuffedinto the soles, abandoned in the foyer of Saint Penelope’s Cathedral? She felt a pang of guilt for them.
‘Ready?’ asked Theodora.
‘We should wait for Belchamber,’ said Dot.
‘He’s in the workshop,’ said Theodora. ‘Said to tell you, “Have fun, Miss Dorothy”.’
‘Why should he stay behind?’
‘To keep the house company.’
Dot peered out the window.
‘Acanthi won’t come for us, will they?’
The witch shook her head.
