Lily (11 page)

‘Could you tell us where the station is, please?’ Lily asked him, as politely as she could, but he only gaped at her.

‘The railway station?’ Georgie added helpfully, as the silence lengthened, and eventually he nodded, and pointed to the end of the street. ‘Down there, and turn left,’ he muttered.

‘Have you noticed,’ Georgie muttered worriedly as they followed his directions, ‘that every other girl we’ve seen has a hat on? And gloves? Perhaps that’s why he stared so.’

‘He still is,’ Lily reported, having turned round to check. ‘But I shouldn’t think much that’s exciting happens to such a boring boy.’

‘Don’t wave at him!’ Georgie told her, shocked. ‘I’m quite certain that’s unladylike.’

‘Well, he went pink and he’s pretending to sweep again now, so maybe,’ Lily agreed. ‘There’s a lot to learn, isn’t there? Do you think there’s anything we can do about the hats? You couldn’t whip up a couple out of dock leaves, or something?’

‘Here? Are you mad?’ Georgie hissed.

‘No, I suppose not. Well, we’ll just have to be strange then.’ But now Georgie had pointed it out, it did seem that everyone was eyeing them in surprise, and they started to walk faster. ‘I don’t think I’d mind as much if they were talking about us behind our backs because they suspected we were dangerous magicians. But it’s stupid that they’re fussing about hats.’

‘Just come on. Look, I can see the station.’ Georgie grabbed her hand and pulled her along, as Lily eavesdropped on two very smartly dressed ladies.

‘Are they Mrs Enderby’s granddaughters? I wouldn’t be surprised. Really, the woman has no idea of proper behaviour.’

‘I bet I’d like her,’ Lily muttered as Georgie hurried past her and into the little station building, which was red brick with curly white ironwork.

‘I suppose we just go and buy a ticket,’ Georgie muttered, looking uncertain. ‘I know I’ve read about tickets in the newspaper. There was a terrible scandal about how expensive they are.’

Henrietta trotted further into the station, and jerked her head at them meaningfully, clearly pointing out a window where a man in a peaked cap with a lot of silver braid, and a large handlebar moustache, was eyeing them rather distrustfully.

‘We’d like to go to London, please,’ Lily said firmly, marching up to the window, and searching in the pocket of her dress for the little bag of stolen gold.

‘Indeed.’ The man sniffed disbelievingly. ‘Ten shillings. For first class.’ He glared down at the girls, clearly expecting them to giggle and run away. He looked positively gobsmacked when Lily produced a gold sovereign from her pocket, and handed it to him.

‘When is the next train, please?’ Georgie beamed at him.

‘In about an hour,’ the man stammered, pulling on his moustache and staring at them as he handed Lily a pile of coins. ‘Platform one.’

Lily resisted the urge to run as they made their way to the platforms. She had a dreadful feeling that the man was going to run after them, shouting that they must have stolen the money – which of course they had.

They collapsed, giggling, on a bench on the platform, and Henrietta barked sharply at Lily, demanding to be picked up. Then she snuggled against Lily’s shoulder, so she could whisper unobtrusively in her ear.

‘How much money do we have?’

‘Twenty of those sovereigns,’ Lily told her. ‘It isn’t a lot, is it? I hadn’t thought much beyond getting away from the island. What shall we
do
in London? We’ll need more money before long.’

‘I think we should worry about getting there first.’ Georgie leaned close, so as to join their whispered conversation. ‘Let’s just get as far away from Mama and Merrythought as possible.’

Lily nodded. The mad excitement of their escape was fading, for both of them, and the station was growing busier. People were walking down the platforms, and the station staff all wore dark uniforms. Each time a porter appeared, Lily felt her heart shudder, convinced that Marten was after them in her gleaming black dress.

Georgie shot a nervous glance around the platform. ‘All Mama had to do was create another boat somehow, you know. Or just send Marten. Who knows what that creature can do? Perhaps she can walk on water? If she’s made of spells, she can do anything.’ Georgie shivered. ‘We shouldn’t have stayed on the beach last night. What if she’d come hunting for us over the water? We should have kept going!’

‘In the dark? And I shouldn’t think there were trains in the night.’ Lily hugged her sister. Henrietta was right – Georgie was fragile. Too fragile for an adventure like this one. She could feel her shaking. ‘We would have been in just as much danger here.’

‘I suppose…’ Georgie pulled away from her quickly, glancing back at the station building. ‘Shhh!’

A tall, thin woman in a startlingly bright green travelling dress was marshalling a group of children, two servants, and an enormous mountain of baggage, onto the platform. At least three of the children seemed to be determined to throw themselves onto the railway line, preferably taking with them a large red parrot in an ornate golden cage.

Henrietta stiffened on Lily’s lap, bristling at the bird, which she seemed to regard as an insult. It took one look at her and agreed, letting off a series of ear-splitting shrieks, which ended with what sounded like, ‘Foul mongrel!’

The three little boys went into fits of laughter, one of them even rolling along the ground, temptingly close to Lily’s foot. She restrained herself, merely patting Henrietta, and murmuring, ‘Horrible mangy thing!’ just loud enough for the parrot to hear. It probably had no idea what it was saying, but still.

The woman in the bright-green dress, and the girl with her, stared down their remarkably long pale noses – they had to be mother and daughter – at Lily and Georgie, and then smirked at each other in a way that made Lily want to leap up and scream.

‘What are they looking like that for?’ she hissed to Georgie.

‘Probably the hats again,’ Georgie muttered. ‘I mean look, hers would make at least three hats.’ It was true that the mother’s hat was loaded with so much lace and flowers and feathers, plus a veil, that it must have made her neck ache.

‘Shh, I want to listen,’ Lily hushed her. The girl was whispering, but in the loud, hissy sort of whisper that was clearly meant to be heard.

‘I don’t think either of them are wearing corsets! And they’ve obviously never even heard of a dress-improver!’ she sniggered.

‘What’s a dress-improver?’ Lily nudged Georgie. ‘Is it whatever’s making her bottom stick out like a beetle?’

‘She’ll hear you! Oh, Lily, look! The train!’

Puffing grandly towards them was what looked like a large black and golden dragon, belching out steam, and even sparks, so that it seemed to be surrounded by clouds of fiery smoke.

‘But magic isn’t supposed to be allowed!’ Lily hissed to Georgie, her eyes wide with horror, almost expecting a detachment of Queen’s Men to arrest them all on the spot.

‘It isn’t magic. It’s all done with pistons – and – and things,’ Georgie muttered, although she was half hiding behind Lily, and she had her hair in her mouth again.

‘It
looks
magic,’ Lily whispered, her eyes shining. ‘I thought it was a dragon. Wouldn’t a dragon be wonderful?’

‘No,’ someone muttered very quietly by her shoulder, and Lily scratched Henrietta’s ears. She looked unnerved by the train too, her eyes bulging even more than usual.

‘London train! All aboard!’ It was the man from the ticket office, roaring and stomping up and down the platform with a flag. The smart family with the parrot were twittering around, trying to make sure they hadn’t left anything behind, and Lily snatched up her bag, and hurried to one of the black-and-cream-painted carriages. Then she went back for Georgie, who was still sitting open-mouthed on the bench, and hustled her in, shooing her into a little box-like room inside the carriage, so she could collapse onto a velvet-covered seat.

‘I never thought trains would be so big,’ Georgie muttered, clutching the edge of the window and looking panicked as the huge machine shuddered and throbbed, and drew away.

Lily stood in the corridor with Henrietta in her arms, watching as the little station seemed to slip away from them. Henrietta was wheezing with excitement, her little curl of a tail shaking. ‘So fast!’ she muttered. And then she darted her head forward sharply. ‘Look!’

Lily looked. Standing alone on the platform was a still black figure. The long black dress trailed the ground, covered in a black cloak. Now the black veil was swathed around a close-fitting black bonnet.

Marten.

They watched her as the train hurried away, the rhythm of the wheels stilling the racing of their hearts.

‘She didn’t catch the train,’ Henrietta pointed out. ‘We can be thankful for that.’

‘But she knows where we’re going,’ Lily murmured, her cheek still pressed against the chill glass of the window. Then she straightened up, glancing back at Georgie in the compartment, who was sitting quite upright on the very edge of the seat, staring out of the other window, her teeth biting into her lip. ‘We don’t tell her!’ she hissed to Henrietta.

The dog eyed Georgie thoughtfully, and nodded. ‘No. Better not.’ She wriggled down from Lily’s arms, and trotted into the compartment, beckoning Lily to follow with a jerk of her head. Then she busily shoved the sliding door closed with her bottom, and turned back to the girls, her eyes sparkling. ‘I do trust neither of you suffer from motion sickness?’ she asked, as Lily lifted her onto the seat, and she sat staring around her regally.

‘It can’t be worse than the boat,’ Lily pointed out. ‘I do wish we’d brought sandwiches, actually. I should think London is quite a long way away, isn’t it?’

‘T
here’s just so much of it…’ Lily murmured, staring out of the carriage window as the landscape sped by. ‘I know Merrythought was only a very small island, but I hadn’t thought there’d be so much of everywhere else…’

Georgie nodded. ‘All those houses – all those people!’

They had just wheezed out of another station, in a middling sort of town.

‘London is a great deal bigger than that, you know,’ Henrietta pointed out helpfully. She seemed to find their amazement rather funny.

Lily nodded. ‘I suppose it must be.’ She sank back against the padded train seat, letting the view out of the window become a greenish blur. ‘What are we going to do when we get there?’ she asked, in a small voice. ‘I hadn’t thought much further than getting away from Mama.’

‘Well… We’ll have to find somewhere to stay. A boarding house, I suppose,’ Georgie said slowly. ‘And then try to find out where Father has been imprisoned. His letters have a London postmark, but the envelopes have a different handwriting. The Queen’s Men read them before they’re sent to Mama, I suppose, and that means they might have sent them on to London first, and the prison isn’t there at all. But it’s somewhere to start.’ She gave a rather hopeless sigh.

Lily nudged her. ‘Georgie, don’t be miserable! You can’t – we must be about a hundred miles away from home!’

Georgie stared at her. ‘I know! That’s
why
I’m miserable!’

‘But aren’t you excited?’ Lily asked her. ‘How can you miss home, when you think about what Mama was planning?’

‘I don’t know, but I do.’ Georgie sighed again. ‘I don’t like all this bigness.’

Henrietta sniffed, and eyed her thoughtfully. Lily saw her give Georgie the same slightly worried look nine hours later, when they stumbled out of the carriage – into the madness of Paddington Station, at five o’clock in the evening.

‘The whole of our house would fit in here,’ Lily whispered, staring around at the cavernous building. It was still light outside, but round glass gas lamps were suspended from the delicate iron trellises in the arched roof, burning like a hundred little moons. There were even pigeons flying about under the glass.

‘The newspaper said that all the trains into Wales and the West start from Paddington,’ Georgie murmured, her eyes so wide that the whites showed all round. ‘I suppose it would be big. But still…’

They stood huddled next to their train, ignored as the crowd boiled and hustled around them. Across the platform another train stood steaming, ready to set off, while passengers swirled around the doors, fussing at the stowing of their baggage, and porters raced up with trolleys piled with yet more bags.

‘Lily, there’s a pig in that crate,’ Georgie pointed out in amazement, staring at a slatted wooden crate that had been abandoned close to them.

‘Poor thing,’ Lily murmured, bending to peep through the cracks. The pig looked distinctly confused and annoyed, and squealed at her indignantly. Rather a lot of the passengers turned round to see what was happening and Lily tried hard to look as though it were nothing to do with her.

‘Come on,’ Georgie picked up both bags. ‘You had better carry Henrietta, someone might step on her in here.’

‘They might regret it,’ Lily giggled, and Henrietta licked her lovingly.

They hurried through the bustling station, dodging porters, and newspaper sellers, and people running after their trains, making for the grand arch out onto the street.

‘Gracious,’ Henrietta whispered. ‘What a lot of omnibuses. Ah! Look! That one is for Bloomsbury, it’s painted on the side. Lots of boarding houses there, or there always used to be. Hop onto it, quickly, before it goes!’