Rose 4: Rose and the Silver Ghost (20 page)

No one else had agreed, and the half-retired admiral who was their liaison with the military forces had looked as though he wanted to slap her.

‘Now.’ The velvet-jacket man nodded, and everyone drew the symbols for the spell in the air, and then caught hands, to link the spell into a giant net.

Rose had never felt so much magic in one place before. She had never realised, but everyone’s spells smelled different. Miss Fell’s smelled of lavender, and Bella’s of milk bonbons. Mr Fountain’s reminded her of the pomade he applied to his moustache, and the man in the velvet jacket emitted a strong aroma of tobacco.

Her mother’s smelled of dark sugar, from being imprisoned for so long in a cell made of black timbers from the hold of a ship. Rose closed her eyes, wrapped in lavender sugar, thinking of lavender glacé icing, and Mrs Jones’s kitchen, and how her own unlikely story tied her to these two determined, impossible women.

The strength of the three of them was pulling the others out, over the odd calm of the sea.

It was as though she were being carried along on the waves of the spell, as they all streamed towards the invading ships. She could feel Bella beside her, clasping her hand tightly, and she knew that they were sitting on stools in the drawing room, but at the same time they were swooping and rushing through the air. Her hair was streaming behind her, and she laughed for joy at the feel of the wind in her face, a hundred times better than leaning over the side of a ship.

Then they drew close to the Talish barges, and the wonderful wind-rushing feeling died away, as she watched the men, ant-size in their dark-blue uniforms. How could she do this to them? She was quite sure that if King Albert had had half a chance he would have invaded Talis. These men were only doing what they were told. It simply wasn’t fair. How could she have let them persuade her into this?

‘We haven’t a choice, Rose,’ she felt her mother whisper in her ear.

‘But it isn’t fair. It’s cruel. A hundred thousand men, they think!’

‘It will end the possibility of the Talish invading.’

‘We could do that just by destroying the ships,’ Rose argued again. ‘Those men would never let their commanders make them do it another time, would they?’ Rose swallowed. ‘If we do this, everyone will hate us. And they will be right.’

Her mother stared at her for a moment, and then Rose jumped as something patted her shoulder. Miss Fell had let go of Bella’s other hand for long enough to tap Rose with the black lace fan looped around her wrist. ‘Miranda, she’s right. This is too much.’ The old lady smiled, hawk-like. ‘I have a solution. Remember all those times I made you unravel your crochet?’

Miranda wrinkled her nose. ‘Can we unravel an invasion fleet?’

‘My dear, you could unravel anything, you’ve had quite enough practice. If the three of us change the spell, the others will have to follow. Then those poor soldiers will at least have a fighting chance. Ah!’

The spell bubble began to envelop the Talish barges, and Rose could hear the cries of surprise and horror as the soldiers saw the sky change colour to an eerie cast of silvery grey. Perhaps they thought it was some strange uncanny storm.

Once the spell surrounded the ships, they should have swept them under the water, but there was a moment of stillness, as no one could bear to start such devastation. And in that moment, Miranda, Miss Fell and Rose swept in like a whirlwind, splitting the boards of the ships apart, ripping the ropes, and scattering the infantry into the freezing sea. Rose couldn’t help murmuring, ‘Sorry,’ as her magic swirled past, but of course, she didn’t know it in Talish. A sparkling white flurry of fur shot past her, as Gus gleefully joined in.

It took a horribly short time.

Rose blinked, and shivered, and opened her eyes. The fire was burning brightly, and somewhere in the depths of the house she could smell muffins toasting. Two hundred miles away, men were fighting and scrambling to get aboard the scraps of wood that were all that was left of their ships, but at Fell Hall, it was time for tea.

She shivered again, and felt her mother’s rose-pink silk frock brush past her. It was ten years out of date, but still beautiful after all its years in a cedar-lined dressing room. Miranda kneeled in front of her and caught her hands. ‘Don’t. Think instead what might have happened if they had landed on the beaches, Rose. The Talish emperor is not merciful, and we have been at war, secretly or not, for the last fifty years. It would have been a massacre.’

‘Can we go back to London now? Can we go back home?’ Rose asked stiffly. She wasn’t sure if it was her home any more.

Her mother smiled. ‘Mr Fountain was most put out when he realised that my return might disrupt your apprenticeship. He forced me to promise that I would not take you away from his house. So much so that he invited me to live there too, and assist in teaching you all.’

Rose smiled back, and then laughed out loud as she caught Freddie’s face, an expression of complete horror.

Gus leaped into Rose’s lap, and stared up at her mother, his eyes jewel-like slits. ‘Shall we bring the peacocks with us back to London?’

Rose stroked him, and rubbed behind his ears. ‘Would you rather have a peacock, or a whole fricasséed lobster?’ she whispered.

Her mother nodded. ‘You’re a war hero, now, you know. You could probably claim a lifetime of lobster from the king.’

‘There’s not the same enjoyment in stalking a lobster,’ Gus muttered regretfully. ‘They’re terribly slow. But delicious.’

Rose smiled at him, rubbing the back of her hand over the soft, silk fur beneath his ears. It felt quite normal, to be using magic to discuss expensive seafood with a cat. Far more normal than it did to be discussing
anything
with her mother. Rose still couldn’t quite believe she had one. But she was starting to feel that she might rather like it. Every so often she looked up to find her mother’s eyes fixed on her, and filled with a strange sort of delighted amazement. No one had ever looked at Rose that way before.

The drawing room door eased slowly open, and several maids entered with trays of tea. Bill followed them with a large platter of sandwiches, which he brought straight to Rose. He bowed briefly to Miranda and Miss Fell. ‘You did it then?’ he murmured to Rose, offering her a sandwich, and pretending not to see as a white paw reached over the side of the salver. ‘The potted shrimp sandwiches are on the other side, miss, should you wish for one,’ he added. The paw disappeared, and a sandwich disappeared from the other side.

Rose nodded. ‘It worked.’ She smiled at him, her eyes creasing at the corners, and a delicious feeling of excitement glowing inside her. ‘And now we’re going home.’

T
o look at, there was nothing very remarkable about Otto Spinoza. He was about average height for a boy of twelve. He had very clear blue eyes and floppy brown hair, which he was in the habit of tossing back from his forehead from time to time. His teacher at school thought he was rather quiet, but she concluded that he was merely thoughtful and left it at that.

However, there were at least two things about Otto that
were
very much out of the ordinary. The first was the fact that from as far back as he could remember, Otto had had the feeling that he was different from the other boys and girls in his school; for some reason, which he could not quite put his finger on, he simply did not belong. He didn’t talk about this feeling to anyone, because he didn’t want to seem rude or stuck-up. But it was always there.

The second unusual thing about Otto was the mystery of his father’s death: he had died of a rare tropical disease shortly after Otto was born. So rare was this disease, that no one else in England had ever contracted it, and by the time the hospital realised what was wrong, it was too late to do anything about it. The doctors had been extremely puzzled because even in the jungles of Borneo, where the disease originated, it had only reared its ugly head a few times in the last hundred years. The conclusion they had come to was that Mr Spinoza, who was a bookseller by trade, must have been bitten by an insect that had stowed away in a crate of books he had bought at an auction the week before.

Otto had often wondered why the insect had not bitten anyone else, such as the person who put the books in the crate in the first place, or the auctioneer, but no one seemed to know the answer to this.

Otto and his mother lived in the sleepy little town of Bridlington Chawley, in an apartment above the second-hand bookshop that his mother now ran. It was not the sort of home you see featured in magazines or on television programmes. The furniture was rickety, the carpets threadbare and the rooms all needed a coat of paint. But Otto did not mind all that. He liked living above a bookshop because he loved to read, and there were always plenty of books waiting for his attention.

Otto’s mother was a dreadful worrier. When it rained, she worried that the roof might leak, when it was cold she worried that the central heating might break, and when it was warm she worried that it would not last. She worried about her health, and about her weight, about whether or not she was going to be able to pay all the bills. But most of all she worried about Otto, and in particular about what would become of him if anything should happen to her.

‘They’ll come round sticking their noses in, asking all sorts of questions, that’s what they’ll do,’ she frequently complained. ‘Then they’ll take you away and put you in a home for orphans. There’ll be no one to care for you, no one to look after you. Oh, Otto, I can’t bear to think about it!’

At this point she always burst into tears and Otto was obliged to make her a cup of strong tea, and open a packet of biscuits.

Otto’s mother had a great fondness for biscuits. They were the only thing that really stopped her worrying for any length of time. It was because of this that Otto was not present when one of the most extraordinary things in the history of Bridlington Chawley took place. She had sent him to the corner shop for a couple of packets of chocolate digestives. So he only discovered what had happened when he returned.

It was the first day of the summer holidays, and all the way to the shop Otto was thinking about what he would do in the weeks to come. Other children in his class went on holiday to exotic places, but there was no chance of that for Otto. Even if they could afford to go away, his mother would be far too worried to contemplate such a trip. Perhaps if his father had been alive, Otto thought to himself, things might have been different.

He was still thinking about what might have been when he arrived back home to find the door of the bookshop wide open and no sign of his mother. Surprised, he stepped into the shop. Immediately the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and goosebumps sprang up all over his body. The air in the shop seemed to crackle with energy as though a thunderstorm might break out above the bookshelves at any moment. It made Otto quite dizzy. He took hold of a bookcase and steadied himself.

‘Mum?’ he called out. ‘Where are you?’

There was no answer. He walked across the shop and opened the door to the stock room. But it was empty, except for the hundreds and hundreds of characters who lived within the dusty covers of the books. He could almost hear them muttering unhappily to each other, as if they, too, sensed that something was wrong.

Otto looked in the back yard in case his mother was putting out the rubbish. Then he went upstairs and checked the apartment that they both shared. There was no sign of her. But in the kitchen, stuck to the front of the refrigerator door was a set of magnetic letters that had been there ever since he was a baby. He hadn’t played with them for many years. They had been rearranged into two words.

HELP ME.

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