Emily Feather and the Secret Mirror (4 page)

“She'd better not do it again,” Rachel snarled. “And if she says you smell, there's a simple answer, isn't there?” She put her arm round Emily's shoulders. “We can just tell Katie to put a bag over her head. That'll be an improvement for everybody.”

Emily yawned and blinked as Rachel nudged her. She'd almost been asleep.

“We're nearly there. Wake up, Emily, Mrs Daunt's doing her how-we-expect-you-to-behave-not-like-when-you-went-to-the-farm-last-year talk. She definitely doesn't expect people sleeping while she's moaning.”

“Wasn't asleep,” Emily murmured, but the coach was pulling into a car park, and wasn't on the motorway any more. She blinked stickiness out of her eyes and tried to concentrate. This trip to the city gallery was to do with their literacy topic, writing in response to stimulus – which just meant seeing something and writing a story about it. They were supposed to choose pictures that they liked and write a story inspired by them. Emily suspected that she wasn't going to enjoy it. And she had a feeling that whichever painting she chose, strange details were going to creep into her story. Some things she'd seen over the last fortnight were engraved deeply in her memory – Lark and Lory unfurling their glorious, bird-like wings. Her mother's huge, glowing eyes. Robin's flaming hair and translucent skin. The strange otherness of her father's face, once he'd let her see his real self.

How could she make anything up when all that was filling her head? She could write down what was really happening to her right now, and Mrs Daunt would probably tell her not to let her imagination run away with her.

Thankfully, the gallery was beautifully cool. Emily let out a sigh of pleasure as they stepped through the glass doors and into the light, open rooms.

“This place is huge,” Rachel murmured, sounding awed, and a bit worried. “How are we supposed to choose just one painting? There must be thousands.”

“At least,” Emily agreed, looking at the little map that had been handed out, and then peering ahead through the gallery and seeing the rooms opening out in front of them like a maze. “But Mrs Daunt said we had to stick to just this floor. So that cuts it down to maybe only a few hundred to look at?” She smiled, the delicious open whiteness of the gallery, studded with jewel-like paintings, had already lifted her out of her gloom.

Emily had been to galleries before – her mother went all the time, and she would have liked to take them all with her, but Lark and Lory and Robin always moaned. Eva had told Emily that she loved bringing her to see new exhibitions. It was their special time together. Often they'd go home afterwards and sit in Eva's studio, drinking hot chocolate and drawing. Eva would scribble designs for beautiful new clothes in page after page of a sketch pad, and Emily would lie on the floor underneath her mother's cutting table, covering huge pieces of paper with coloured pencils or sweeps of pastel chalk.

Eva said she loved it that at least one of her children shared her passion for art. Emily blinked slowly. She could hear her mother saying it now, after Robin had told her he'd rather eat worms than go to another art gallery.
At least one of my children
… It had never sounded forced. Emily shivered a little, with a sort of relieved happiness. She did belong in some ways. Of course, she hadn't really inherited her love of drawing from Eva, but she'd spent hours and hours borrowing pencils and bits of paper while her mother worked. She remembered being tiny and trying to copy the colours of the fabrics that Eva was cutting and twisting. It had grown into her. Surely that counted too?

Emily nodded to herself. If Eva were here, she'd say to ignore Mrs Daunt's questions and walk round the paintings until Emily found one that spoke to her. Emily thought she was right, but she didn't want to get into trouble for not doing the quiz. If she and Rachel did it together quickly, then they could go for a proper explore. She tapped her pencil against the clipboard and looked at the first question. “We're in the wrong room, I think.”

The quiz took them all round the gallery, and by the time they'd finished it – counting numbers of children in strange family groups, and naming horses, and spotting snails in still lives – even Emily was almost sick of paintings.

“Done!” Rachel said gleefully, scribbling in the final answer, and they collapsed on to one of the low wooden benches. “It has to be time for lunch?” she added hopefully.

“No.” Emily checked her watch and sighed. “No, we've got at least another hour before we have to meet up for lunch. We're having it late, remember, just before we get back on the coach. Do you want to go and look for a painting for your story?”

“No. But I suppose we ought to.” Rachel heaved herself up from the bench reluctantly. “Did you see anything you want to write about?”

Emily shook her head slowly, but she wasn't listening. Something had caught her – she was hooked, it felt like. As though something was calling to the tiny fraction of magic that had buried itself inside her. It pulled her in. She glanced around eagerly, trying to see what it was.

A streak of colour was shining at her from the next room – no, not even the next one, but the one beyond that. It was a fragment of shining blue, a colour that made Emily think of butterflies' wings.

She smiled. Now she could see them, fluttering around the skylight above her head, circling and darting, and then tempting her on through the doorway to the rooms ahead.

Emily grabbed Rachel's wrist and pulled her. “This way,” she murmured, forgetting that she was tired and hungry and sick of paintings. She wanted desperately to find that patch of blue, and feast on it.

The painting was of a girl, standing in the shadows of a stone building – a broken tower, or perhaps just a garden summerhouse. She was looking sideways, and Emily couldn't tell if she was meant to be hiding – there was a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth, as if she thought she had found the perfect place – or if she was waiting for someone to meet her. Emily just wished that the girl would look up. She wanted to gaze into her eyes. She was almost sure that there would be a message in them for her.

It was the girl's dress that was the calling blue, and as Emily stood gazing in front of the painting, still gripping Rachel's wrist, the butterflies shimmered and settled back into the silken folds, making the skirt ripple, as though a light wind had blown through the garden.

“It's so
real
,” Rachel whispered.

Emily shook herself, and took a sharp breath in. She hadn't breathed since her first glimpse of that amazing blue, she realized. “I know. It's wonderful…” The butterflies had gone, and the dress was only paint again. Emily longed to stroke it, to see if she could feel the silk, or the dusty softness of wings, but she knew the magic wasn't there. It wasn't the painted girl who had been calling, Emily felt sure. She could feel the magic still pulling at her from another corner of the room. Something else had stolen the blue from the girl's skirt and sent the butterflies out to call Emily. It was close, though. The air was quivering with power, a feeling that Emily remembered from her dreams. Something needed her.

“Emily, are you going to choose this one for your story?” Rachel asked her hopefully.

Emily stared at her, forgetting for a moment what they were supposed to be doing. “Oh! No. No, I think I'll look for something else,” she murmured. Her fingertips itched with the need to find where the magic was coming from.

“Oh, good, because if you really don't want it, then I'll have it!” Rachel said gratefully, sitting down on the floor in front of the painting and staring at it lovingly.

Perhaps there
was
still some magic in it? Emily wondered, looking at her in surprise. The painting seemed to have enchanted Rachel. The hiding girl smiled sweetly at the crushed petals by her feet, and Emily shuddered. She must make sure to pull her friend away from that painting when she went for lunch. Rachel looked as though she could stare at it for years, her eyes darting busily between the girl and the story she was already scribbling. There was a wisp of power buried somehow in those swirls of silk, and it had wrapped itself round Rachel.

Emily began to walk slowly around the room, glancing back occasionally to check that Rachel was all right. After her father's warnings, Emily was more worried about magic outside the house, when she was nowhere near any of her family. She wasn't sure who she could trust. But the girl hadn't moved again – perhaps it was just the beauty of the painting that was holding Rachel so close.

The colours in this room seemed especially bright, and Emily stared at them hungrily. The paintings were like jewels; some of them even had golden frames painted round them, like necklaces. But they reminded Emily of those enchanted fruits too, the ones that Lark and Lory had stopped her eating. Perhaps the paintings were bespelled somehow? Her father had said there were other doors… Emily wondered if he had ever visited this gallery.

Emily dug her fingernails into her palms, telling herself to be wary. If there was a door here, she mustn't be tempted in – she had promised Ash and Eva she would not go on her own.

At last she stopped in front of a painting that was lurking in the corner of the gallery. There were several other people in the room, but they had all passed it by with a vague glance – it seemed busy and muddy-coloured. But Emily was sure that there was something more – she could feel the power in the dull canvas. She stepped closer, her hand creeping up to cover her mouth in amazement.

It was moving. Hundreds of tiny figures fought and talked and shopped and wrangled in a landscape of tree-sized daisies and chestnuts that looked like boulders. Emily glanced behind her, suddenly worried that this was desperately secret, and that she mustn't let anyone else see what was happening. Then she noticed the label on the wall beside the painting – a label just like those on all the other paintings around the gallery. This painting had been here for years, and for years people had walked past it without seeing what it was. Emily reached out one finger and cautiously stroked the frame, trying to feel the magic.

As she touched the gilded wood of the frame, the painting suddenly sprang into full colour, as though only a washed-out, greyish version lived in the gallery from day to day. The faint flickers and shifts of movement that Emily had seen before turned to dancing life, and the noise swelled out of the frame. A shrieking gang of fairy children chased each other in and out of daisies and twining columbine, and a plump young girl with ragged butterfly wings stared out at Emily in amazement, nudging her friend and pointing. Then the pair of them dissolved into giggles, as though Emily was the funniest thing they had ever seen, and fluttered away into the tall grass stems that framed the main scene, peeping back every so often and sniggering behind their hands.

Emily sighed. She had hoped to ask one of the fairies from the painting how it was that she could see them, and whether the painting was another door into their world from hers. But there was clearly no point asking those two anything. They reminded her of Lara and Ellie-Mae.

Still – here was a chance to answer some of those questions that she kept forgetting to write down. At one point during last week's history lesson, Emily had looked thoughtfully at a picture of a Roman general on a horse, and wondered if centaurs were real. And now a dark centaur archer was glaring at her out of the painting.

Emily practically pressed her nose up against the canvas, trying to see all the detail that she could. She wondered what the art gallery looked like to the fairy people on the other side – was it just a little window? A hole in the sky? And did she look her own size, or smaller? It was impossible to tell.

“Please…”

It was the merest whisper, so soft that Emily hardly heard it. She stepped back from the painting, frowning and trying to see which of the hundreds of tiny creatures had spoken – she was almost sure that whoever it was had been speaking to her; had recognized the magic inside her and called her from across the gallery.

“Help me…”

Emily scanned the painting desperately, her stomach twisting. There was such fear in that tiny voice. No one inside the painting seemed to have heard – but a tiny creature at the far side of the canvas was peering out at her now, looking over the edge of a rocky crag and beckoning to her. “Help me!” she whispered again, her pale little face twisting with fright.

“I can't come in,” Emily whispered. “I don't know how – I can only see. And I'm not allowed… They said it was dangerous…”

It seemed a very feeble set of excuses, and the girl's shoulders drooped. She looked behind her anxiously, and then she sprang up, scrambling her way on to the top of the jutting cliff and darting in and out of the other creatures, always looking behind her, as though she expected to see something dreadful come clambering over the cliff edge after her. Each time the girl glanced back, her hair swung wildly around her head. It swirled like weeds in a fast-flowing river and waved around her pale face. The long fingers that had stretched out and caught desperately at the handholds in the rock as she climbed, were webbed, and Emily let out a little gasp of recognition.