Kat, Incorrigible (8 page)

Mr. Gregson turned back, blinking. “No? I have told you, Katherine, I was Olivia’s tutor. I shall be your tutor as well, you know, now that you have found us.”

“Shall you, indeed?” I said, as icily as Lady Fotherington herself might have done.

But he looked too distracted to notice. “Yes, yes. I train all our new members, you know. I am the historian of our Order. But I don’t have time to explain matters fully to you tonight. I have an appointment early in the morning, and there is much to consider beforehand. I must go to our library now, before I lose any more of the night hours. Yes.” He nodded. “You may go home now, my dear. Come back tomorrow night with the books, and we shall have our first proper lesson. I’ll explain it all then, I assure you.”

If he had known Angeline, he would have known how
dangerous it was to trust an innocent smile. I smiled as innocently as I could. “Very well,” I said.

“Oh, Aloysius, you fool,” said Lady Fotherington. She shook her head. The smile that spread across her own face was insufferably smug. “If we don’t have time for explanations, you’ll need far more security than her word.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Gregson asked. For the first time since I’d mentioned Mama’s magic books, he seemed to emerge from his abstraction. Worse, he looked decidedly uneasy. “What are you intending, Lydia?”

“Security,” said Lady Fotherington, and started toward me.

I jumped back. “Stay away from me!”

“I think not.” Lady Fotherington gazed at me with green, catlike eyes. “I think if we let you go now we may never see you again. I believe you might even be intending to hide your mother’s magic books from us, for your own nefarious purposes.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. I shot a glance around me at the vast, empty hall. No doors. No signs of any escape route, and I hadn’t had the wits to memorize a single one of Mama’s spells. Mr. Gregson was only watching us, his eyes unreadable. “I wouldn’t do that,” I told them both. “Believe me!”

“Believe you?” Lady Fotherington tilted her head to one side, considering me as she paced across the golden floor, her silk skirts swishing around her legs. Her smile deepened. “You forget, my dear. I am prepared for you. After all, I knew your mother—which is more than you yourself
can claim. And I can tell you, she was quite a devilish little trickster.”

That did it. I lunged straight for her smug, smiling face.

I caught her off guard. She threw up her hands, but I barreled straight into her and knocked her backward. We fell together onto the smooth golden floor. I landed on top.

“I told you,” I panted. “Do not insult my mother!”

I slammed my fist into her nose just as Charles had taught me in his boxing lessons. It made a horrible crunching noise, and it hurt my hand.

She screamed. Her hands flew up to her face. Mr. Gregson was making distressed noises as he hovered to one side.

I kept my fist up and ready, even though it hurt like the devil.

“Let me go,” I said to both of them. “Now!”

“My dear girl—,” Mr. Gregson began.

Lady Fotherington’s eyes narrowed. She stopped screaming. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut in concentration.

Pressure built in the air around me until it felt thick and heavy, prickling at my skin. It tingled against my wrists, like a warm, thick cloud of smoke. Then it wrapped around my hands, creeping upward. I tried to bat it away. It came higher.

“Lydia …,” Mr. Gregson said.

She shook her head. Blood was flowing down from her nose to her lips, but she was smiling, her eyes still tightly shut. I hadn’t seen her recite any spell, but I suddenly understood what was happening.

Magic was one thing I couldn’t fight with my fists.

I lurched off her and onto my feet. My hands felt numb, and the numbness was traveling higher, up my arms.

I had to get away. But there weren’t any doors.

What had Mr. Gregson told me before?
Anyone who could not find their way safely back out would never have found their way inside in the first place.

I didn’t trust a word that either of them had spoken, but I had no choice. I had to try.

Even if the doors back to the outside world weren’t visible, they had to exist. And if I couldn’t see them with my eyes, I’d have to find them some other way.

I shut my eyes and ran straight across the Golden Hall. The pressure followed me, growing stronger all the time, until it felt like I was trying to run through thick jelly. My upper arms tingled. The numbness was moving to my shoulders. What would happen to me when it reached my head?

I whispered as I ran, stupid, hopeless pleas that couldn’t help me, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “Please, Mama, please, Mama, please …”

My shoulders went numb. The tingling sensation crept up to my neck.

“Mama, please!”

All I wanted was my home, and my sisters, and my mother’s cabinet of forbidden memories, and my brother who’d taught me how to fight even if he was useless in every other way, and my sweet, helpless father, and even—

The tingling reached my chin.

I opened my eyes. I was barreling straight toward the golden wall, much, much closer than I’d realized. I was going to hit it if I didn’t turn back. But if I turned back, Lady Fotherington would have me.

The tingling rose up my jaw. Chills raced across my scalp. My mind was slowing down, my thoughts scattering.

I closed my eyes and fixed the image of home in my mind with all my strength. I flung myself forward, bracing myself for the collision that would come if I was wrong—

And I fell, in a flash of golden light, tumbling hard onto the carpet of the sewing room, just in front of a pair of slippered feet.

Someone was waiting for me.

After all I’d been through, it should have been a relief
to see only Elissa waiting for me. But I had never seen my oldest sister so angry.

“How could you, Kat?” She kept her voice low, too quiet to wake anyone upstairs, but it vibrated with rage. “I never thought you could be so wickedly hurtful.
How could you?
”

Oh, Lord. It was the fit of prissiness I’d known would happen if Elissa ever found me or Angeline meddling with magic. I sighed and pulled myself up to my knees. The tingling had disappeared, but my head ached worse than ever, and my right hand hurt like blazes. As usual when he was being helpful, Charles had neglected to mention that there was a
flaw to what he was teaching me: Hitting people
hurt
.

“I didn’t do anything so terrible,” I said. “So you needn’t look at me like that. But I have to tell you—”

“Not so terrible?” she said. “It’s not only that you must have stolen Stepmama’s key, which is bad enough. It’s not even that you were clearly playing with magic, which is far worse than anything I could ever have believed you would do.”

I rolled my eyes. “Elissa—”

“What?” she said. “What are you going to say to try to fob me off this time? What mad scheme? What wild story to excuse yourself?” Her cheeks flushed as she pointed past my shoulder. “Is there anything that could possibly excuse
that
?”

I turned, following the direction of her pointing finger—and lost my breath.

A whirlwind had torn through Mama’s cabinet, flinging everything in its wake. Her picture frames had broken. Her single strand of pearls had exploded across the floor. And her teacups had shattered. They lay in lifeless, unmoving shards across the carpet before the open cabinet. The same teacups that had tried to brush up against my hands for petting …

Something welled up in my throat so hard I almost choked.

“I didn’t—this wasn’t—”

“It wasn’t you who did it?” Elissa asked. “Can you really
bring yourself to say such a deceitful thing when I’ve seen the evidence with my own eyes? Would you actually lie to me right now?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t look away from the blue and white shards that were all that remained of Mama’s teacups and teapot—the same teapot I’d heard about in Angeline’s stories. It must have been my passage back and forth between here and the mirror world that had done it. I couldn’t deny that to Elissa or myself, no matter how desperately I wanted to.

Instead I said, “I didn’t mean to.” My voice cracked as I spoke. “I didn’t know it would happen!”

Elissa shook her head. For the first time I could remember, I couldn’t see a single speck of love or forgiveness in my oldest sister’s face. “You’ve been careless before,” she said, “but never so cruelly.”

Her voice swelled on the last word, her face tightened, and I finally realized she was trying not to cry.

I leaned forward hastily to start picking up the scattered pieces and hide my face. But Elissa said,
“No,”
and took them out of my hand.

“I’ll take care of them,” she said. “I don’t want them hurt any further.”

I shuffled back, still on my knees. “Please,” I said. “It was an accident. What happened was—”

“Not now,” Elissa said. She didn’t even look at me as she spoke.

“But Elissa, I have to tell you—”

“Just go, Kat. Please. I can’t even talk to you right now. I’m too ashamed.”

Her hand curved around a shard of blue and white china as tenderly as if she were cradling a newborn baby. A sob broke from her throat. I saw her lips form a word she didn’t speak out loud:
Mama
.

I jumped to my feet and fled the room. But when I crawled through the trapdoor into my attic, I realized I hadn’t managed to escape after all.

Mama’s golden mirror lay on my pillow, waiting for me.

When I went down to breakfast the next morning, I could see in Angeline’s face that she knew what had happened. The cabinet was closed and locked again, and to an outside eye—to Stepmama and Papa and Charles and Mr. Carlyle—it must have looked as if nothing had happened.

But I knew better.

Elissa was as cool and reserved at the breakfast table as if I were one of Stepmama’s most unfortunate guests, who had to be tolerated even if they couldn’t be liked. Angeline was even worse. She didn’t glare at me or narrow her eyes or whisper threats in my ear, the way she had a hundred times in the past, the way that I’d expected. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at me.

Both my older sisters’ faces were puffy from crying. For me, Mama’s cabinet had been full of mysteries and secrets to be puzzled out, like an adventure. For them, it had been full of memories. And I had broken all of them.

I didn’t weep, but as soon as breakfast ended, I lunged straight out of the house before Stepmama could stop me. I didn’t come back until it was dark and well past dinnertime. It was almost a relief when Stepmama sentenced me to stay in my room for the last two days before our trip. At least that way I didn’t have to see my sisters.

But there was one thing I couldn’t escape, no matter how hard I tried.

When I ran into the fields, I found the golden mirror lying on the stone I chose to sit on. I took it home and buried it deep in one of the boxes in my attic, where I wouldn’t have to look at it and be reminded of what I’d done. When I woke up the next morning, though, I found it lying on the pillow beside my head. And on the morning of our trip to Grantham Abbey, I found it lying on top of my packed traveling case.