The Whisper Witch Read online

  “Why, what do they do?” Godric asked, even as he searched for an escape.

  “The Grey Lady will steal your thoughts, and the Red Lady … Well, you don’t want to know what she steals.”

  The gargoyles swarmed. Chimney pots were clipped by stray wings and talons. They dodged the missiles, covering their heads. “How do we banish her?” Gretchen asked, rubbing her ear where a chunk of brick had bounced of the wall and scraped it. The White Lady turned her head sharply, spearing her with a glare. There was a red heart-shaped patch at the corner of her left eye.

  A white bird screeched and dove for Gretchen. Godric yanked her out of the way at the last moment. Moira fumbled in one of the pouches hanging at her belt, withdrawing a shard from a broken mirror. “What’s that for?” Gretchen asked as Moira held it up.

  “What do they teach you at that school?” she asked, turning the mirror so that it shone the White Lady’s reflection back at her. She bared her teeth, a glimpse of a snarl under the delicate fluttering veil. Moira kept the shard steady, even though it had nicked her thumb and blood ran down to her wrist.

  “Mirrors can block magic,” she explained. “Sometimes.”

  “This time?”

  “We’re about to find out.”

  The birds continued to attack and be attacked in turn. Feathers filled the air. Blood smeared the gargoyle’s stone teeth. The sound of so many wings was faintly sickening as it shivered through the tiny courtyard. Gretchen scrabbled on the ground for stones, bits of broken pottery, and glass from a shattered window. She pitched them all at the birds as the White Lady continued to advance.

  The sunlight bounced off the mirror and pierced through her veil. Moira craned her neck to make sure the White Lady’s reflection was properly centered in the broken mirror. Then she dropped it facedown on the ground and smashed it with the heel of her boot.

  The White Lady screeched once, sounding more like a gull than a woman. She shattered into glittering dust and was gone. Her birds faded away.

  “Why is she even allowed in the markets, exactly?” Godric inquired, brushing mud off his sleeve. “She’s a right nasty piece of work.”

  Moira shrugged. “Some folk will pay handsomely to be rid of a few memories.”

  The gargoyles remained, circling overhead. More detritus smashed on the ground. Someone gave a shout of alarm from the street. Before too long they would attract the kind of attention that also attracted the Order. Moira wasn’t the only one who wanted to avoid them. Gretchen could do without another lecture. She’d lost whichever Keeper was trailing her this morning, but she wasn’t keen on explaining why she’d ditched him.

  “How do we turn them off?” Gretchen asked, titling her head back to watch the gargoyles.

  “We don’t. There’s too much magic about.” Moira shrugged, sounding distracted. Her gargoyle tried to perch on the brim of her hat. “They’re not bothering anyone and I have things to do.”

  “We can’t just leave them,” Godric insisted, touching her arm. She bared her teeth at him. His fingers dropped away. “The Order will come. If what you say is true, won’t they suspect Madcaps are behind this?”

  Moira swore ripely. Godric waited patiently, too accustomed to Gretchen’s outbursts. “What do you suggest, Greybeard?” she finally asked.

  “There’s a gargoyle trap on the roof of the Ironstone Academy, isn’t there? It’s in Mayfair by—”

  “I know where it is,” she cut him off mildly. She pulled a chicken bone from some long-ago supper from her pocket. It was wound around with red thread at one end and designs were painted on the other. She snapped it in half. The gargoyles turned their heavy heads in her direction. Whistling a strange tune, she leaped to the next building.

  The gargoyles swooped down toward her. She clearly wasn’t afraid of them, but they could inflict considerable damage accidentally. A playful swipe with a stone claw could break her shoulder or send her tumbling to the cobblestones. She ran as fast as an alley cat.

  Gretchen and Godric followed, less sure of their footing. Gretchen launched herself over decorative iron scroll-work several stories above the city. Godric looked like he wanted to throw up. When he wasn’t looking smitten by Moira.

  When they finally reached the roof of the academy, they leaned wearily against the chimney pots to catch their breaths. Even Moira was gasping, her tangled hair damp with sweat. The gargoyles circled them lazily, finally settling on the huge symbol marked out on the roof in bird bones and salt. An open barrel filled with whiskey and milk sat in the center.

  “Thank you,” Godric said, smiling at Moira. “You’re very brave to have helped us. I’ll make sure the Order knows to whom it is indebted.”

  She stared at Gretchen. “Is he daft?”

  “No,” Gretchen replied fondly. “Just kind.”

  “Tobias kissed you?” Penelope squeaked an hour later. “Tobias?”

  “It was only to break the spell,” Gretchen insisted as Emma squeezed past her. Gretchen knew Penelope would pounce on it. And if Gretchen blushed she was sure to make a remark. “Never mind that; I just chased off the White Lady and a swarm of gargoyles.”

  Penelope waved that away. “I want to hear about the kiss.”

  “It was nothing. What were we supposed to do? Let you all sleep for the next hundred years? Now, are you going to let me in, or what?”

  The front hall and main parlor of the Chadwick family townhouse was a hothouse of roses, tulips, and hyacinths. Pink and yellow petals drifted over the marble floor, and pollen clung to the tabletops. They’d run out of vases and had resorted to painted teacups, set out on the windowsills and beside each of the chairs.

  “It smells like an old lady in here,” Gretchen said. Emma bad already arrived and was handing her shawl to the butler, Battersea. A moth flew out of her hair.

  “It smells like a garden,” Penelope corrected.

  “Same thing.” Gretchen shrugged, following her into the drawing room. “Who sent you all those tulips?”

  “Lord Beauregard,” she replied, looking softly at enough tulips to fill Carlton House. “Isn’t Lucius just a lovely name? He sent over a pair of pink silk gloves as well to replace the ones he spilled wine on.” Penelope held her arm straight out to stop Gretchen when she moved toward the parlor. “Don’t even consider it. I want details. Did anyone see you? Your mother will have you married by morning if she finds out about it. I danced with Mr. Abbotsford twice at the Pickford ball and she lectured me for an hour that I was too free with my favors, and in her day I’d have as good as declared my engagement with such behavior.”

  Gretchen shuddered. “I know. She’d say my reputation was at stake or some such rot and force us to marry.” She had no intention of being coerced into marrying Tobias. Even if he was such a surprisingly good kisser. “It’s not like people don’t kiss all the time. I saw Oliver Blake and Ada Grey vanish into the shrubbery just last week at a dinner party. That was perfectly acceptable as long as no one saw them. It’s daft.”

  “Bah. As if I care a fig for them. I want to know about your kiss. Was it divine?”

  Emma’s smile was sly. “It must have been, to break the spell so quickly.”

  Gretchen became suddenly very interested in the tulips. “It was magic.”

  “Oh ho!” Penelope hooted. “I’ll bet it was!”

  Gretchen rolled her eyes. “I meant actual magic, you goose.” She refused to consider the fact that she’d relived the kiss a hundred times in her head already. She’d been so engrossed in the memory, she’d nearly tripped down the stairs this morning on her way to breakfast. Breaking spells was tiring work, was all. She’d stop hearing wolves howling every time she shut her eyes as soon as she recovered.

  “Did he send flowers at least?”

  “Of course not. It wasn’t romantic, Pen. As if it could be.” She half smiled. “Anyway, I kissed him actually. His pathetically polite kiss on the back of my hand didn’t do a thing to stop the spell.”

 
“You kissed him?” Penelope beamed at her.

  “It was nothing. I’m sure he’s forgotten about it already.” Even if she couldn’t.

  Emma’s smile was too knowing, too sympathetic. “I thought Cormac was indifferent at first too.”

  “That was different.”

  “How?”

  “It just was,” she said crossly.

  “Perhaps I ought to kiss Lucius,” Penelope suggested with a wicked smile. “He’s taking entirely too long.”

  Gretchen raised an eyebrow in her direction. “Or Cedric?”

  “Why would I do that?” She sounded almost panicked. “He’d laugh at me.”

  “He would not.”

  “You’re just trying to change the subject,” Penelope muttered, suddenly deciding that she preferred to be in the parlor after all.

  “And my daughter here would have me believe she isn’t a popular debutante,” Aunt Bethany said from her favorite Egyptian chair. It was painted black, with cats for armrests and intriguing hieroglyphs along the back. She was surrounded with so many flowers she looked like Titania in her dark green dress, embroidered all over with tiny leaves and white birds. She’d no doubt done the needlepoint herself; it was too extravagant and beautiful to be anyone else’s work.

  Gretchen grinned at her. “The lads all love Penelope; it’s the girls who get all lemon-faced.”

  Penelope wrinkled her nose. “Those boys only like me because I’m an heiress.”

  “And because you’re kind,” Emma put in.

  “The same two reasons the girls make lemon faces,” Gretchen added, stealing a slice of gingerbread from a silver platter. “And also because you’re unfairly beautiful.”

  “I’m fat.”

  “You’re stupid,” Gretchen retorted immediately, with an affectionate pat to the arm. “Not fat.”

  Penelope stuck out her tongue. “Clarissa called me fat.” “Clarissa is a canker-blossom.”

  Penelope grinned. “You’re cursing in Shakespearean. I’m so proud.”

  “I try. And since when do we care what a muttonhead like Clarissa says?”

  “We don’t,” Penelope admitted. “I just forget sometimes.”

  An osprey landed on the nearest windowsill. It pecked at the glass, its dark eye gleaming like the jet beads the Keepers used to break spells. Aunt Bethany set her embroidery hoop down. “That’s rather odd.”

  Another osprey landed next to the first. Moths flew out of the fireplace, in a cloud of dusty wings.

  “Blast.” Emma sighed. “Not again.” She rubbed her arms, chilled. “They were all the familiars of the three Sisters.”

  Aunt Bethany nodded thoughtfully. “A side effect from bottling them, no doubt. You’re not a Lacrimarium and yet you worked their magic. There are reasons they train for so long.” She drummed her fingers on her knee, watching the ospreys flap their wings frantically. “We need the Toad Mother,” she added finally. “She has spells for this sort of thing. A kind of magical purification.”

  “She sounds … odd,” Penelope said with a smile. “I can’t wait.”

  “I want you girls to be exceedingly careful,” Aunt Bethany said, the little frown lines between her eyes suddenly becoming deeper. “The Sisters are dangerous.”

  “But they’ve been bottled.”

  “All the same. My father, your grandfather, was a Keeper for the Order when the Sisters went on their last rampage. Decades later, he still had nightmares. And he kept the house spelled against them until the day he died.” She rubbed her arms, staring unseeing at the ospreys still pecking at the window. “They killed so many people at a winter ball once that he said the blood never washed off the floors. There’s a reason the magpie is their crest. They steal and hoard away magic, using whatever means they can.” She turned back to the girls. “Remember your rhymes. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.”

  “Isn’t that for how many magpies you can count?” Gretchen asked.

  “Yes, where do you think children’s rhyme and folklore come from?” her mother replied. “And there were Seven Sisters when they were at their most powerful. It took centuries to banish them all.”

  “We’ll be careful, Maman,” Penelope said soothingly. “Promise.”

  Aunt Bethany smiled crookedly. “I’m getting as bad as your grandfather,” she said. “Go on and take a turn about the garden in the meantime,” she suggested. “Before that bird breaks the glass.”

  The door leading to the garden was flanked with two massive sphinx statues. The Egyptian decorating craze had passed, but Aunt Bethany’s love of the artwork had remained. There was a statue of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, propped in the hallway, which the maidservants avoided. One of the footman swore the statue had blinked once, and then his mother had died of a fever the next day.

  The garden wasn’t any more traditional, even with the customary pebbled paths and hedges. Silver and glass charms dangled from tree branches, sending out sharp prisms of light. There were rowan saplings in pots lining each walkway and clustered at the gates. Snakes slid through the grass toward Emma, who strode grimly toward the painted shed.

  Until a few weeks ago, they’d always assumed it was merely the stillroom where Penelope’s mother made perfumes. It was easy to see now how much more was kept here. The dried flowers hanging from the hooks in the ceiling were wrapped in white thread. There were rowan berries everywhere, and jars filled with salt. It smelled like the last perfume or potion Aunt Bethany had concocted, heavy with lilac and amber.

  Emma went straight to the small hooked rug under the worktable and kicked it aside to reveal the trap door. “I’m going,” she announced.

  Gretchen and Penelope exchanged a glance. “Shove over. You’re not going alone.”

  “You might get in trouble.”

  “Promise?” Gretchen grinned.

  “Almost definitely,” Emma grinned back.

  Penelope slipped between them and scurried down the ladder. “Are you two going to stand there all day grinning at each other like gooses?” She vanished into the dusty darkness. A curse followed almost immediately. It was mostly in archaic Tudor English and made no sense. Gretchen followed, Emma pulling the door shut over their heads.

  The darkness swallowed them. It was so palpable, they could have drowned in it. There was barely any room to move, only elbows pressing into one another, and toes being stepped on. The air was damp and dungeonlike.

  “I forgot how much I hate this,” Emma muttered. There was the scrape of antlers on the wall, and a peevish, “Ow!”

  Gretchen ran her hands along the walls until she found the doorknob. “Got it,” she announced just as Emma started to hyperventilate.

  Even though there was no door, turning the knob created an opening into the goblin markets. This time it didn’t deposit them in the alley next to the Three Goblins tavern; it dropped them in the middle of the bridge. Only the large emerald-green shake that startled passersby prevented them from being run over by an ox with silver horns pulling a cart full of swan wings.

  “Oi!” The coachman hollered at them, his black cat familiar hissing and spitting at his side. “Move it!”

  They scrambled out of the way, letting the bustle of the crowd carry them to one side. The wind carried the scents of salt and flowers, overpowering the stench of the Thames below. The pomegranate lamps swung overhead, pealed open to reveal glowing seeds, hanging on leaf-twined chain, punctuated with red-glass lanterns. There were witches everywhere, sorting through evil-eye beads, dried grass picked inside the circle of Stonehenge, silver apples filled with cloves, and a dizzying array of protective charms in the shape of miniature white horses and gargoyles. Hawkers shouted about amulets guaranteed to stop the Greymalkin Sisters.

  They stepped into a gap between a shop selling herbs and another selling gargoyles. The contorted stone faces watched them from behind diamond-paned glass. Moths clung to t
he shop sign like snow, and clouds of them drifted between the shops. “I don’t remember it being this crowded before,” Emma said, angling herself so she wouldn’t accidentally stab someone with her antlers.

  “That’s because it wasn’t,” Gretchen remarked when a woman trod on her foot. The woman looked terrified, spitting on the ground to avert the evil eye and then losing herself in the throngs of witches. Gretchen shook her head. “I suppose I should be glad she didn’t spit on me.”

  Strings of holed stones and rowan branches hung with bells promised to block warlock magic. It was the wind chimes made from silver knives and purporting to keep away the Sisters that gave Gretchen an instant headache. She stepped closer to the stall as Penelope wandered away to look at fruit.

  “These wind chimes are faulty,” Gretchen said, rubbing her temples.

  “Piss off,” the shopkeeper snapped.

  She narrowed her eyes. “I’m only saying that if you replaced the glass beads there with amber and rose thorns, they might actually be effective.”

  “As if I can afford amber.” He snorted. He leaned forward menacingly. “Now piss off, I said.” He yanked a cord, dropping a curtain down to screen his wares from the curious bystanders who were starting to eavesdrop. Gretchen didn’t like the undercurrent of suspicion and fear running through the markets.

  Emma touched her arm. “We’re drawing attention,” she murmured. Moths had already covered the curtain. Gretchen nodded and stepped back, but not before she pilfered a miniature chime from the edge of the table. Emma raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s homework,” Gretchen maintained. “I’m going to fix it so it works properly.”

  They ducked into the shadows. “We’d better find the Toad Mother,” Emma murmured, as dozens of ospreys lined the roof across the bridge. “Before someone notices my new friends.”

  Tobias frowned at a flock of white ospreys flying overhead, their shadows crossing the bridge. “That’s odd.”

  Cormac watched them circle with a shrug. “Goblin markets,” he said, as if it explained everything. “Are they connected to the fox-girl trail?”