The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle Read online

  No one, she thinks. Not even you.

  The adults around Eleanor each require different spells so that she can manage them, but they cannot stand between her and the gathering of souls. She spells her husband with illness, Marie with foolishness, Hugo with ignorance, and Cook with loss of memory. She fishes Mr. Storm out of the sea and turns his dreams to her own, casting a spell to shape him into a more useful form. She makes the school, the academy, a perfect pretense to bring the remaining children to her doorstep. She confuses Mr. Bateson and her teachers MacLarren and Gumble.

  The children will be charmed, but they are too innocent to be spelled like adults, so Eleanor must keep them from guessing her plan. Her clamor of rooks feeds her the news and secrets of war and the doings of all those within the castle.

  Magic bides its own time. And there is always a price to pay for its use.

  21

  No Place for Holidays

  THE RAIN CAME down with a vengeance now, and the wind battered the windows. Once Kat had been able to calm herself, she built a fire to warm the room and then sat on her bed cross-legged and fingered her great-aunt’s chatelaine.

  Pen, scissors, thimble.

  She held it up, the chains moving, and the watery light from the windows and ruby light from the fire reflected off the three objects and flashed around the room.

  Kat realized that it was possible Storm, too, had seen the portrait of her doppelgänger wearing her family chatelaine, and that was why he was so interested when she brought it up.

  And the Lady’s chatelaine—had Storm seen that?

  And did old things really gather magic like they collected dust?

  It couldn’t be real. If her great-aunt’s chatelaine could help her make magic, Kat would magic away this dreadful war. She’d bring her father home safe and sound from the dangerous mission he was on, and she and Robbie and Amelie would all return to London, to a peaceful, serene London, and to their mum and father and great-aunt. If Kat could make magic, she’d find the fishing girl and magic her a coat, and find the crippled boy and magic him whole, and find the cat-boy and magic him well. She’d even magic Peter back to America, if that’s what he wanted.

  There is always a price to pay for its use.

  A dark shadow crept over Kat. What price would she have to pay? And, honestly: a pen, scissors, and a thimble. What in the world could they do besides the obvious?

  She tossed the chatelaine back in her drawer and shut the drawer with a thump.

  Sundays in Rookskill Castle were quiet days of “rest and contemplation,” said the Lady at breakfast. Kat had little choice but to rest and contemplate, as the other children were not around. Rob was acting cranky and surly. Amelie was under the spell of her new friendship with Isabelle. Colin was busy with homework—stewing over it, in fact—and Jorry “has taken ill,” said the Lady. “Marie is bringing him porridge and tea, but please do not disturb him.”

  Had Jorry been so terrified by whatever had happened that he’d gotten sick? Kat fretted. She wasn’t sure whom to trust with what she’d seen, and Peter was still not speaking to her.

  Kat finished her homework and paced in her room. She’d started a fire, but it wasn’t enough to warm her mood. It was almost as if she could sense that something bad was about to happen.

  So when the knock came on the door, Kat’s skin crawled.

  It was Marie. “Telegram up from the station,” she said, handing it over before she walked off.

  Telegrams were usually bad news. Kat closed the door and tore open the envelope.

  FRANCE HAS PROVEN NO PLACE FOR HOLIDAYS STOP TAKE CARE OF ROB & AME REMAIN SCOTLAND STOP GREAT-AUNT M SAYS HANG ON TO HOPE & DON’T FALL TO PIECES STOP LOVE M

  Kat sank onto the bed. That first line was code from Mum, their code phrase for news about Father. This news was bad.

  Kat went to her window, staring out at the bleak mist, and winked back tears. Somewhere out there across the sea, somewhere in Belgium or France or maybe even in Germany itself, her father on his mission had gone missing. How was she supposed to hang on to hope here in Scotland?

  She thought back to the day Father had left them, not long after her embarrassing babyish behavior. They’d all said their good-byes, and Father had gathered his luggage—including the short-wave wireless—in the front hall, but he’d forgotten something in his workroom, and Kat had followed him out into the evening. He was closing the door when she burst out.

  “Don’t go!” And she threw her arms around him, burying her face in his chest. “Please! Please don’t go!” And Kat began to sob.

  “Kitty, what’s this?” He held her and petted her hair.

  “Please stay.” His jacket was wet with her tears. “I have a terrible feeling about it if you go.”

  “Now, Kit. I’d expect this kind of talk from Amelie, but you’re my big girl. My logical girl. You have to be strong. Carry on.”

  “I can’t.” Her voice was muffled and she shook her head no.

  He pushed her away gently and held her at arms’ length. “You must. I’m doing this for you. For all of you. It’s important.”

  “But . . .” She rubbed at her nose, the tears still running down her cheeks.

  “You have to promise me you’ll take care of them. Your mother, you know, she has her hands full. She can’t manage without you. And I expect things from you.”

  He’d held her eyes with his. Kat wanted to protest, tell him she couldn’t; but she would not let him down. She could not let Father down.

  “All right then,” he said. “Promise?” Kat nodded. She swallowed her tears. “Keep calm, Kitty. Carry on. And remember, no matter what happens, keep faith.”

  That was the last time she saw him, and the memory of being so weak shamed her.

  After he’d left, she’d gone back out to his shop. The broken watch waited on the workbench. She’d strapped it onto her wrist and it hadn’t been out of her sight since.

  Now she gripped the watch face and then folded the telegram into little squares. Carry on, that’s what she had to do. Take care of Rob and Ame. Do her best for her family’s sake. For her father’s sake. For her promise to him.

  She looked at the clock on the mantle, still ticking away. She picked up her makeshift tools and knocked on Peter’s door.

  Peter wasn’t friendly at first, but when he learned why she was there he gave her the clock, and then watched with curiosity as she opened the back.

  “Can I help?” he asked, sounding shy.

  She was glad to have him back as her one and only friend. She pointed out what needed to be done, and for the rest of the afternoon they worked side by side, first on his clock, and then on the one in Isabelle’s room, and finally on one in an empty room down the hall.

  “Funny that so many clocks aren’t working,” Peter said.

  “They’ve been neglected. Maybe the Lord and Lady don’t have time since he’s taken ill.”

  “You’re good at it,” he said, pointing to the clock as she dusted her hands.

  “Thanks,” Kat said. “It’s because my father taught me.” And worry crept back in.

  Maybe he was in some safe house, hiding; the resistance in France had a good reputation, and the members of the resistance there were growing in number. Maybe someone had taken him in.

  Maybe there were no children there looking to catch a spy.

  She decided not to say anything to Rob and Ame about their father going missing for the moment. She didn’t want to worry them; though maybe it wouldn’t be fair to them not to tell. She’d have to think on that.

  “I have to tell you,” she said to Peter as she set the clock back on the mantle, “something happened with Jorry.” And she described what she’d seen.

  “You don’t suppose it has anything to do with this illness of his?” Peter asked.

  “He looked
so odd. Like he was in the midst of something really painful.” She hugged herself. “Like he was being stabbed or torn to pieces.”

  “He’s a stuck-up jerk, but that doesn’t make any difference,” said Peter. “What can we do?”

  Kat twisted her watch. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

  It took her a long time that night to fall asleep, long after Amelie’s breathing slowed and softened, long after the fire burned to glowing coals and the room grew cold and dark and still.

  22

  Knives

  SOMETHING SLIDES THROUGH the dark until it stands over the bed Kat shares with Amelie. It hovers, a dreadful monster made of metal and wheels and gears, like clockworks, a monster that buzzes and clicks and reflects the moonlight that streams in through the unshuttered window. Instead of proper arms and legs it has limbs that are thin and shiny like knives.

  It stands over the bed, eyes bright in a half-eaten skull, and strokes Amelie’s cheek with a thin metal finger that sticks out from its hand like a crooked claw.

  The finger runs down Amelie’s cheek, down to her throat, and then to Amelie’s heart. Kat tries to scream, but it’s as if she’s under water, as the claw digs into Amelie’s chest and pulls out her heart and holds it up in the moonlight.

  Kat keeps trying to scream, trying to fight her way up from sleep, keeps fighting to stop this monster, wanting to save little Ame, but she is helpless, helpless and rigid in the grip of some dark magic, until the nightmare fades.

  After that she sleeps like the very dead.

  23

  Lost Souls

  OH, THE TERROR!

  The villagers speak of it in hushed whispers. Of the sounds of chains and wheels and machines in need of oil that come in darkness; the cries and the calls and the soft tuneless songs. The lost.

  “It were the bogeys,” say mams to their wide-eyed bairns. “You dinna go out at night, loveys, or your souls’ll be snatched.”

  “Like them others,” mutter the das. Among themselves, the das mutter their own thoughts about the castle and the things that go on there, but only among themselves.

  No one knows for certain, and no one in the village is brave enough to ask.

  The giant Hugo, who drives for the beautiful Lady newly wed to Lord Craig, he sees. He sees the magister through the smoky glass window and has the vague memory that the magister does wonderful and terrible things. As he sits alone with his mug in the corner of the Rook, the giant is heard to say, “Those poor bairns. Whatever’ll become . . .” He wishes he could help them, but something muddles his mind.

  The wee ones, sleeping, hear it in their dreams—the mechanical whir, the clang and scrape, the soft cries—and they stir, restless and fearful.

  Oh, the terror!

  The charmed child Rose, who wears the small silver fish, has feelings, yes, but they’re locked deep inside. And she has memories, too, of a small cottage with a mum who held her, and of the many sisters who scrabbled around fighting and bossing and laughing, but her memories are ghosts, wispy things.

  Rose tries to catch her memories. The little pond in the garden is where she goes with a net she’s fashioned from a tangle of wires and strings and strands of her long yellow hair. She sits at the edge of the pond and waits for a fish. A memory fish.

  She is very patient, that Rose.

  When she catches a fish and brings it up, she lays it on the stone edging and watches and waits. Will the fish give her back her past? What, little fish? You are opening and closing your mouth, but Rose can’t hear you. She turns her head but hears nothing. Speak up, little fish!

  When the fish’s eyes are gone blank and staring, Rose carries the fish with her, carries it until it falls away in her pocket, falls to rotting pieces, until she’s forgotten its purpose as she’s forgotten so many things.

  Tim, the hunchback boy, wearing the hunchback charm, knows how to polish, yes. He can’t recall his name or the old priest or the chapel or the offering or the fair. But he remembers the polishing. It makes him feel special, though now he can’t remember why. So that’s what he does. He polishes.

  Oh, but he remembers the saint, yes. The beautiful saint who gave him the polishing cloth he is holding now and the charm he wears, the saint who was followed into the woods by dark wings beating overhead, so she must be a saint. Yes, he felt a momentary pain in her presence, but wasn’t that the pain of love?

  Tim is in his private place, the place he’s found at the bottom of the bottom, the place where he lies neither dead nor alive next to the furnace on a bed of straw. On occasion, when he leaves his place, he polishes things in the castle, things like mirrors and faucets and handles, as he was when caught in a bathroom by those children, who frightened him so that he ran back to his dark hideaway and shook with fear.

  Arrayed around him now are the lovely, shiny baubles he has collected over centuries in this drafty castle, candlesticks and bowls, platters and forks. He breathes a sigh and takes his polishing rag and goes to work.

  The twin girls, Alice and Brigit, with their wordless tunes, find their way to the top of the high tower, the keep, from which they can see the wide gray ocean, and they sing to the water, Alice still clutching her one old boot and Brigit still clasping her locked treasure chest, and the things that mimic their relics are charms that hang round their necks on thin silver chains.

  Alice and Brigit sing to the sea, sing for the loss of their parents and home, and their voices carry down the allée of trees to the ocean’s edge, carry over the water and back, some trick of the land and seascape that brings their voices back like a bird returning to roost.

  The villagers, hearing the sad melodies as if they come from the ocean itself, believe in selkies, selkies with the voices of angels.

  Cat-boy John, with his charm of cats, with the cats that come and go and follow and mew, was the fifth to be taken.

  He will not be the last.

  24

  Lessons

  THE FIRST THING Kat did when she opened her eyes in the early light was reach for her sister, taking her by the shoulder. Amelie grumped, “Quit it. Trying to sleep.”

  Kat lay back and took long shuddering breaths.

  While getting dressed, as she fished in her drawer for her uniform sweater, her fingers landed on the chatelaine, and she lifted it out. Dreadful monsters? Dark magic? If Great-Aunt Margaret hadn’t planted this fantasy in Kat’s head, would she even think such things?

  Kat grew angry, with her aunt, with herself, with her fears, and with the ridiculous chatelaine, and she dropped it on top of the sweaters and slammed the drawer shut.

  After that she was grateful for the distraction of school. Classes fell into their regular rhythm, with English at the start of the day, followed by maths and then history. The only thing missing was Jorry.

  “Yes, he’s quite ill after all,” said the Lady, when they asked at lunch. “I’ve sent for the doctor. I think it might be a chill, and I’m hoping it’s not influenza. Please do not disturb him; I can assure you he’s being well tended, and I don’t need his contagion spreading throughout the house.”

  Contagion, Kat thought.

  English lessons were rigorous. Colin was not a model student: he fretted and worried, and Miss Gumble, though not mean, was not easy on him. Even Peter chewed his pencil and knitted his brows over her questions. Kat had to work hard to get all the readings done and the questions answered, and she wasn’t looking forward to the long essay assignment that was due the following week.

  In history Storm continued to query them on coastal geography, interspersing those “lessons” with recent history of the British Isles. Sometimes he would pause in the middle of some ramble as if he’d forgotten where he was. There were times when Kat wondered what he was playing at. He only mentioned the artifacts once in passing, and Kat swore Storm stared long and hard at her
before he moved on to the geology of the Great Glen Fault.

  Maths, of course, was Kat’s favorite, and she quickly discovered that MacLarren was impressed she was so skilled.

  “Perhaps I should be giving you harder assignments, eh, lass?” And he tossed out a long list of problems for her to do that night. When she finished them by the next class, he raised his brows.

  “Showing off a wee bit, are we? Maybe they’re not done right, eh?”

  But they were. He doubled her assignments for the rest of the week.

  It bothered Peter more than it did Kat.

  “Why does he pick on you?” Peter asked after supper midweek.

  “Probably because it’s easy for me,” she said. “Maybe he thinks I need a challenge.”

  “Well, it’s not fair.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t mind.” There were too many other things that weren’t fair for her to worry over one mathematics teacher.

  There was Jorry, for one thing. The Lady informed them that the doctor had visited and proclaimed him ill “but not in danger. But indeed contagious with influenza, and no one is to disturb him.” He was confined alone to his room for the duration.

  Kat still hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell Rob and Ame that Father was missing. She kept hoping he’d turn up and she wouldn’t have to say a thing.

  By the following Saturday, however, there still had been no news about Father. Kat chewed her lip as she stared out the window into the highland hills. Today she could see the sea, a flat gray sliver at the far edge of the grounds. The gray clouds hovered like a blanket over the land.

  And then, as she stared aimlessly out . . . there was someone striding across the grounds toward the allée of trees and the sea.

  Whoever it was, he was draped in a long oilcloth coat as he made his way toward the water. Kat pressed her hands to the glass of her window as the figure grew smaller and finally disappeared into the woods.