The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle Read online

  “These, my dear, are indeed magical scissors.” She leaned toward Kat as she spoke and lowered her voice.

  As Kat watched her great-aunt’s bright eyes, she knew better than to laugh. If she said they were magic, then, by golly, Kat had better pretend they were. She had to suck on the inside of her cheek to keep the smile down.

  “They will cut anything,” Great-Aunt Margaret said. “That’s the important thing, Katherine. These scissors will cut . . . anything.” Her face went still and grave. “‘We are the two halves of a pair of scissors, when apart, Pecksniff; but together we are something.’ Mr. Dickens, my dear, as you well know,” she added, eyebrows raised. “Although you may find something more suitable to say when the need arises,” she added cryptically. “Something of your own to say. You understand?”

  Kat nodded. But by then she was thoroughly befuddled.

  Great-Aunt Margaret replaced the scissors and lifted the third item, also hooked to its slender chain. “Ah.” She sighed. “The thimble. You know what that means.”

  Finally, Kat allowed herself a smile. “A kiss,” she answered. Aunt Margaret had read Peter Pan to them so often that the cover was coming apart from the binding; Robbie played at being one of the Lost Boys, especially since taking up fencing. Kat teased him about losing his marbles.

  “Well, yes,” Great-Aunt Margaret said, seeming disconcerted. “That, of course. Thimbles also have often been given as wedding gifts and love tokens. But this thimble has a magical aspect. This thimble can catch souls.”

  Kat had to bite her cheek hard. Honestly. “Aunt Margaret,” she began. “How can anything catch a soul?”

  Her aunt reared back, her eyebrows arching. “Katherine, you really must become less pragmatic. In times like these we require other equally important qualities. Like imagination. And faith. And hope. Remember, dear, hope springs eternal in the human breast.”

  Magic. Imagination. Hope. Great-Aunt Margaret was quite out of her mind.

  Now, the only thing Kat hoped was for this war to end so they could all go home. She dropped the chatelaine among her sweaters and shut the drawer.

  “Look,” Amelie said. “Come and look.”

  Ame stood at the window, staring out into the garden. Kat moved to her side.

  The view was toward the back of the castle. The fog had lifted into a gray autumn sky. The garden was barren and cold, the annuals gone and the shrubbery bare twigs. Some patches of early snow showed in the hollows, but the ground was otherwise bare and brown. An allée of trees stretched in a narrow band toward a woodland; beyond the farthest edge of woods Kat thought she saw a thin sliver of silvery water. That way was southeast, toward the North Sea and the continent.

  Toward the war.

  Toward Father, who was there, somewhere across the water, in danger but doing what he must.

  The woods, the rough coast, the moors beyond were treacherous and would be an easy place in which to be lost, especially in fog. There was no need of a castle moat, no need for shuttered gates. They were all here until the bitter end, and Kat swallowed the lump in her throat. She touched the cold glass with her fingers before she turned away.

  But Amelie tugged at her sleeve. “No. Look.” Ame pointed down into the near garden. Kat leaned against the glass to see.

  Straight below them a small girl with blonde hair sat on the stone edging of an empty round fishpond. How Kat hadn’t seen her right off was a mystery. A hound dog circled the girl and nosed the grass at her feet. As Kat watched, the girl reached into the rocks and lifted something out, and for an instant there was a flash of silver in the child’s hand. Kat blinked and rubbed her eyes.

  The girl held nothing.

  “She’s wearing a summer frock,” Kat murmured.

  “She’s catching fishes,” said Amelie.

  “Ame, that pond is dry, silly.” But the girl dipped her hand into the dry rocks again and again, and each time, something fishlike shimmered in her hand and then winked away. Kat shuddered.

  “I feel so sad for her,” said Amelie, leaning against the window, fingers splayed on the glass. “She’s lost something. Can you see it, Kat? She’s looking for something in the pond.”

  Kat took her sister’s hand. It felt so cold, Kat had to rub Ame’s fingers between her palms. “You have a kind heart, Ame.” But a vague uneasiness stirred inside Kat.

  The door burst open behind them. “Kat!” Robbie fell into the room, Peter on his heels, Robbie’s eyes like saucers. “Kat! You won’t believe it. We found a secret hiding place. A hidden room. With something—or someone—locked inside that makes terrible shrieky noises.”

  Kat looked at Peter, who nodded, then back at Rob.

  He was white as the cliffs of Dover. “Sure as sure,” Rob said in a low voice, “sure as sure, it’s a ghost.”

  8

  The First Charm: The Fish

  IT IS 1746.

  Leonore leans against the door frame, listening. Her maids gossip about someone who lives at the edge of the village and who can use magic.

  A conjurer, a magician, newly arrived . . . or maybe not. Who appeared from the mists of the moors, or the hollows of the hills . . . no one knows.

  When questioned, her maids tell Leonore that he can help her, yes, surely, for he is the magister. She finds her own way to the ramshackle hut.

  The magister listens while he stirs his fire. When Leonore falls silent, this is what he tells her. He can make her wishes come true. The chatelaine that hangs from her belt holds, he says, an ancient magic, and he can release it. Then she can use this magic for a child, not her own, exactly, but a child nonetheless.

  “There is a price,” he says, and stirs his fire. There is always a price.

  “I’ll pay,” she says, and pay she does.

  The magister takes in trade a part from her. No: he takes a part of her.

  By flesh and bone, by rock and stone; I’ll charm a child to call my own.

  “The child must see the charm he will wear,” the magister says. “He cannot be asleep or with senses dulled.” When he whispers the incantation she’s to recite, the fire dims.

  Leonore shivers. She hears the cruel words. But she wants a child so badly . . .

  The magister watches as Leonore retreats into the mist. He has begun to work his own magic, and she does not know how he will use her, how he will twist her dream into a nightmare. She does not know that the chatelaine was his gift to her. She does not know the terrible things the magister will do.

  Leonore of Rookskill Castle will make magic to please her lord. But when she returns to tell him, her changed left hand hidden by a glove, she finds that he has been thrown by his stallion and lies in a deathlike stupor. She must find a willing child quickly now, quickly.

  “I bring you good news,” she says to her unconscious lord as she stands by his bed surrounded by weeping servants. “Of a child to come.”

  For which she has sacrificed to the magister a finger. Payment made of flesh and bone.

  Leonore makes a gift of the fish charm to the child Rose in the very presence of the child’s mother.

  The fishmonger’s wife, making deliveries, has been complaining, say Leonore’s maids. “All these children! All girls, worse luck. I can’t bear it! To keep them fed and clothed . . .” Leonore sees the opportunity she needs, and pays a visit to the hut by the shore.

  Rose, the youngest girl, is beautiful and sweet and—Leonore hopes—an easy mark. She prays that a child so much desired, even if only a girl, will spur her lord’s recovery and secure her future, as he wakes to see she is able to give him an heir. With the magister’s enchantment Leonore can confound her lord, make him believe the child is theirs by blood and bone.

  “Aye, then, go and live in the castle, Rose,” Rose’s mother says. “You’ll have a fit life, you will. You have my blessing.” And she mumbles, “And I�
�ve one less mouth to feed, thank the heavens.”

  Leonore holds a silk handkerchief to her nose with her gloved hand.

  The fishmonger’s wife is glad to see such emotion in her Rose’s new protector. She herself wipes away a tear or two before chasing down Rose’s older sisters.

  Leonore feels emotion, for certain: she can scarce stand the fishy rotting stench in the dark and crowded cottage. She’s grateful when Rose moves outside to examine the charm by the light of day.

  A moment later, as Rose hangs the charm around her neck and Leonore repeats the whispered words from the magister, the child cries out, then slips into a vacant-eyed silence. Leonore bites her lip. Was that a cry of pain? Has she done something wrong?

  But no—Leonore assures herself that Rose’s mother is right. Rose will have a fit life in Rookskill Castle as the daughter of a lord, even if the enchantment has changed the child in some way Leonore does not yet understand.

  It is only as she makes her way back to the castle that Leonore feels something else. The charmed child Rose walks behind her, silent as a shadow, frail as a wisp. But Leonore is stronger than she was before she cast the spell, less the young bride and more the rightful lady. She smiles for the first time in years. Instead of feeling lighter for the loss of the little fish charm, Leonore’s chatelaine feels a wee bit heavier.

  She brings the charmed Rose to her lordship’s bedside. “See what I have made for us?”

  But he does not stir. His staring eyes are fixed upon a point in the space above his head.

  The chatelaine tugs on Leonore’s belt. A newfound strength snakes through her blood. A thin strand of white weaves through her black hair. The rooks, her only friends, wait at Leonore’s window.

  9

  The Secret Room

  “SIT DOWN AND catch your breath,” Kat said to Robbie. But it was to Peter she looked. His eyes were almost as round as Rob’s.

  “He’s right about the secret room,” Peter said. “We found it because of the noises.”

  “Grindings,” said Rob. “And screeches.”

  Peter lifted his hands in a shrug, nodding, and goose bumps rose on Kat’s arms.

  “It’s got to be a ghost,” Rob whispered. His eyes widened. “Say. Maybe it’s that Lady Leonore.”

  “Like the fishing girl,” said Ame. “Except she didn’t screech.”

  “Amelie,” Kat said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice, “that girl couldn’t be a ghost. Likely she’s one of the other students.”

  “No, she’s a ghost, because she’s disappeared,” said Ame.

  Kat turned to the window. Sure enough, there was no sign of the girl, who’d been there only moments earlier; the dog wandered the lawn alone. A rook perched on the pond coping, its head cocked, looking down at the stony bottom.

  Kat twisted the watch on her wrist. Carry on. She faced the boys. “I’d like to see for myself.”

  Peter squared his shoulders. “Okay.”

  “Robbie, you stay here with Ame, okay?”

  “No problem,” he said with a shudder. “I wouldn’t go back there for anything.”

  Kat plastered on a brave smile before closing the door on Robbie’s white face and Amelie’s round eyes.

  She and Peter crept down the hallway past closed doors, turning corners and finding their way in the gray light.

  “This place is so confusing,” Kat whispered. “It’s nothing inside like it appears on the outside.”

  “It’s like a puzzle box,” Peter whispered back.

  “Right.” Kat glanced at him. He was clever and friendly. An unexpected shyness grew in her. “Did you see anyone else?”

  “No,” Peter replied. “Rob rattled a couple of doorknobs before I stopped him, but nobody came out.”

  The castle did creak and groan in the way of old places, but nothing shrieked or clanked yet. A dank, musty odor permeated everything, and the carpet was worn and tattered. Kat tried not to think that the grim portraits of long-nosed ancestors with dark eyes watched them as they tiptoed down the hall. She didn’t want Peter to know she was frightened, but she was glad to have him there, even if she couldn’t tell him so.

  After twists and turns they reached the stairwell. They crept down the stairs, the window on their right.

  At the next landing Peter stopped. He pointed to the wall at the turn of the stair.

  Kat stepped forward, and a sound, a low murmur, seeped from the very wall itself. She leaned in, cocking her head, when a short high screech made her jump, and then she heard a staticky hiss, and she backed up the stairs and right into Peter, so that she jumped again.

  He shook his head and pointed past her, at the wall, and she moved back down the stairs, and there it was, the thin outline of a door fitted so tightly in the wall that it was well hidden from all but the most discerning eye.

  Now she leaned her right ear flat up against the thin crack. And heard a sharp screech, and a click-click, and worst of all, silence.

  Until a thud and something moved, unmistakably coming right toward her.

  She turned around fast and caught Peter’s wide eyes, and they both ran up the stairs, top speed, taking the steps two at a time until they reached their floor, and they made it around the corner into the hallway the same instant they heard the door open on the landing below. Kat pressed her back against the wall, her chest tight, knees trembling, eyes closed, and ears wide open. She heard the door below them close, and then a dreadful pause, as if someone on the landing was checking the air, sniffing us out, she thought, until whoever it was headed down the stairs, away from them.

  She and Peter waited until all sounds faded.

  And waited and waited. The castle grew still and silent, but for the wind, which moaned now at the windows.

  Peter stood with his back against one wall, Kat facing him with her back pressed against the other. She thought her lungs would burst, until she had to let the air out, gasping.

  He whispered, “Well, unless ghosts walk down stairs, it’s not a ghost.”

  Kat shook her head, both relieved and worried. “No. But it might be worse.”

  Peter tapped on the wall and Kat listened, poised to run, but finally they were satisfied that the secret room was empty. They examined the door, up, down, and around, but couldn’t see the way to open it. They tapped, and pushed, and tried to pry—Kat broke a fingernail on that attempt—but it wouldn’t budge.

  “How do you know?” Peter asked when they’d given up and were making their way back to their rooms, Kat chewing on her damaged index finger. “How did you know what it was?”

  Kat said, “Because I’ve heard a short-wave radio before.” In fact, she’d seen one up close.

  When Father brought a short-wave wireless home a couple of weeks before leaving, he’d shown it only to Kat. “Here, Kitty, have a look. I knew you’d be interested. Just keep it under your hat.”

  It was about the size of her valise and was rigged up to be carried like a backpack. He’d dialed up a colleague and let her listen in on the test. It had screeched so she had to stop her ears with her fingers. Father had said, “Noisy all right. But it might save someone’s life.” She’d touched the case with gentle fingers.

  It might save his life, that wireless.

  “Why’s it worse to have a short-wave radio here than a ghost?” Peter asked. “A ghost would be far more trouble. Moving through walls. Moaning and howling and keeping us up at night, and maybe up to evil tricks. At the very least, scaring the devil out of me.”

  A ghost would scare the devil out of Kat, too, but she wasn’t going to admit that to Peter. Really, he was so honest. Blunt. She wasn’t sure what to think, since the boys she knew at school were all aloof. Peter’s straight brown hair now fell across his forehead. In the time since they’d left London—which already felt like a million years ago but was only yeste
rday—his bangs had come unglued. Kat rather liked them that way, but she wasn’t about to admit that, either.

  She stirred herself to be logical. “Think about it. A short-wave here would serve what purpose?” Kat asked. “We’re supposed to be on the lookout for spies in our midst. Mr. Churchill said so.”

  Peter’s expression moved from amusement to surprise, and he stopped in his tracks so they were facing each other at a turn in the passage. “You think there’s a spy here?”

  Kat set her lips. She knew something about spying. “It’s possible.”

  “Well, it couldn’t be the Lady,” he said.

  She lifted her eyebrows. “And why ever not?”

  “Maybe she has a wireless out of sheer practicality.” He paused. “She’s living up here nearly alone, and with her husband ill and all.”

  Kat wasn’t keen on the Lady, what with the small girl left out in the cold garden, the Lady’s chilly personality, and now Peter obviously thinking the Lady very fine indeed. Kat folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not at all sure about her.”

  “I like her well enough,” Peter said in a tone that suggested he liked her quite a lot.

  “Why would she have a wireless behind a hidden door if it’s just practical?”

  Peter shrugged. “You’re too suspicious.”

  Kat chewed her lip. “Maybe she’s in league with someone else.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe she doesn’t know the wireless is in there. Maybe someone discovered this hidden room and is using it for his or her purpose.”

  “I guess that’s possible,” Kat said grudgingly.

  “At least it’s not a ghost.”

  “Right,” Kat said. No such thing—was there? As if in answer, a grumbling groan drifted up from below. Kat glanced down the dusky hallway, suppressing the urge to run. The furnace, or maybe the wind around the outer walls. Right?

  Peter’s voice startled Kat. “What do you want to tell Rob and Ame?”