Geraldine thanked her.
But in her melancholy state, she left the chocolate behind.
Geraldine Thomas exited Theodora’s Tea Shop, the grief charm gently warping the city around her. The pain was manageable. The spell helped her to cry. It helped her to remember. She decided to treat herself to a nice, cathartic stroll along Wren Court under the dense greenery of the jacaranda trees. She would find her way up Folène Street, then to Sterns Road, then to the main street. Then she would take a tram home to the Mourners’ District.
But Geraldine Thomas did not make it to Mourners’.
For at the end of the street, two women stepped out from behind an old jacaranda, and that was simply that. A paring knife came quickly, stuck her in the neck. Oh, Geraldine felt the sharpness of it, the wetness of her blood all over her green blouse, recently bought from Hemmington’s. They spirited her away to the Alliaster Zoological Gardens – she recognised the gate. She had loved this park when she was small. Maud had, too. The elephants. The kangaroos.
They tied her to the roof of the admission building.
Not in the sun,thought Geraldine,I’ll burn.
‘Three down,’ came the rasping voice of the woman who’d held the knife. The other one walked circles around Geraldine, muttering, winding her threads, performing some dark sorcerie. Geraldine could not move. She could not scream. Cicadas shrieked in the trees around them.
A horrible wind kicked up, surrounding them in the scents of woodsmoke, incense, gunpowder, elderberry and hemlock. The woman with the threads muttered louder. Geraldine caught the sound of wind chimes, children’s chanting. The grief charm persisted. It softened her terror. How quickly she accepted it; how much she would miss her trips to the tea shop.
The elder of the two women reached down, took the knife to her skin.
‘Sorry about this,’ she said in that haunting voice joined by the tinkering of jars on her hip. ‘Nothing to do with you, of course.’
And she drove the paring knife across Geraldine Thomas’s throat.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
The summer heat abated at last and still Archie Walcott had not replied to Dot’s telegram. When had he been due to leave for the Southern Archipelago? Could her brother or parents have somehow intercepted the telegram? Dot stood behind the bar in the Raven’s Attic, sorting packet spells, riddling it all. Still, she could not bring herself to speak with her family; still, she could not cast a spell.
Theodora had tried almost everything to unblock her magic: chanting, chalk, meditation. The witch had even snuck up on Dot several times and tried to scare the magic out of her. All of it was to no avail.
When Dot had been in university, she used to tell herself that it was quite alright that she was not especially beautiful nor charming nor anything a young woman was supposed to be, because, instead, she was clever. She had no friends, of course, but she was good at mathematics. She could not converse with young men, but she could memorise long textbooks on the history of Alliaster; she could not be liked, but she could do puzzles; she could not be loved, but she could fix the radio.
But magic, it seemed, did not heed this logic and so Dot, heartbroken, muttered bitterly to herself as she sorted the spells. This was when Phillip, the barman of the Raven’s Attic, cleared his throat.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Phillip!’ she said, flinching. ‘Hello. Can I help with something?’
‘Well,’ said Phillip. He had sand-coloured hair and was only a few years older than her. ‘Minister De León is late on our wages.’
‘How terrible,’ said Dot, almost tipping over the box of spells. ‘I’ll ask her about it right away.’
‘Of course,’ said Phillip, trying to catch her eye. She deftly darted away, so he called, ‘Thank you ever so much, Miss.’
Dot hurried out, box in hand. Her life in Alliaster was beginning to exhaust her. She had recently started working two nights per week in the Raven’s Attic in addition to her days in the tea shop and all of her studying; she drank her tonic three times per day, and on most weekends hardly had the energy to leave her bed.
At the club, she wore patent heels that she had ordered from a magazine. She imitated with make-up the vampish look Theodora had given her the day she’d met the King. Each evening, Dot wet a mascara block, stippled brown powder over her lids, smeared lipstick onto her mouth, and felt she was painting right onto her face the mask of exquisite femininity.
In the club, dowdy Dot from the seaside had never lived nor breathed. There, she was Dot the mysterious, short-haired assistant to Minister De León. No one spilled champagne on her. No one giggled at her with pity, and she relished it – until, of course, she climbed up the stairs from the Raven’s Attic, through the imperceptible portal and out onto the ground-storey landing of the tea shop, where she was simply her awkward, magic-less self. Where she had tried to sit with Lio at breakfast and finally, for the first time, have a true conversation with him, only for it to go so terribly wrong. Dot grimaced at the memory.
What had begun as a gentle attraction to Lio was now blooming into a humiliating infatuation. She shouldn’t like him: he was taciturn and irritable and Theodora really seemed to hate him.Yet, there was something to him that struck a strange chord in her. He was kind to the old ladies of the tea shop who flirted shamelessly with him. He was fascinatingly thorough in how he washed the dishes and made tea for the customers and stacked the orders. He moved beautifully, with a kind of elegance that was so rare in the men she had previously known, most of them factory workers or fishermen or her family.
Yet, she had made a promise to herself not to truly likehim until she’d had at least one good conversation with him, and how had that turned out?
Dot groaned, the recollection so embarrassing it took a physical toll. She placed the box of packet spells upon the landing and rested for a moment on the tea shop floor.
‘Might you appreciate some assistance, Miss Dorothy?’
Belchamber was beside her. She made to take the box herself, but the little spirit scooped it up with his arms. Dot sighed. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and after a moment, they trotted slowly down the stairs to the basement workshop where she found Theodora and, unfortunately, Rupert.
