Moonlight and Ashes (27 page)

Written as Isabelle Merlin

Three Wishes

Pop Princess

Cupid's Arrow

Bright Angel

The Chronicles of El Jisal series

Snow, Fire, Sword

The Curse of Zohreh

The Tyrant's Nephew

The Maharajah's Ghost

Edited by Sophie Masson

The Road to Camelot

Isabelle Merlin

Careful what you wish for . . .

When Rose creates a blog for an English assignment, she doesn't realise it will change her life. An elegant stranger arrives to announce that Rose has an aristocratic French grandfather who would like to meet her.

Rose arrives in France to find that her grandfather lives in a magnificent castle. Utterly enchanted, she grows to love her new life – and Charlie, a charming boy who is equally besotted with Rose.

But as Rose begins to delve deeper into her family's past, her fairytale turns into a nightmare. Who is friend? Who is foe? Someone wants her dead. And she must find out who before their wish comes true!

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Read on for the first chapter

Careful what you wish for. That's always the message in those old stories where someone gets given three wishes. Careful – don't say the first thing that pops into your head . . .

In my mind, it all starts with the blog. I know in many ways that's not really true. It started a long time before that, years ago in fact, even before I was born. But in my mind, it doesn't feel like that. It feels like somehow, before the blog, my life was the same as it had been for the last eight years, since I first went to live with Aunt Jenny after my parents died in the crash. And it seems like, after the blog, things began to get weird . . .

The blog began as an English assignment. Our teacher, Ms Bryce, told us that she thought it would be interesting for us to use ‘cutting-edge new media' alongside ‘conven- tional essays and stories'. But she wanted it to be a proper blog, not just the add-on diary kind you have on MySpace or Bebo. It was supposed to have a theme and she was very excited about the project.

Not so most of the class. My best friends – Portia Warren, Alice Taylor and Maddy Fox – groaned and moaned about it. I pretended to moan too. But secretly

I didn't mind at all. I never mind writing, as long as it's creative stuff. I really want to be a writer. A really good, best-selling kind of writer. But I don't like ordinary English assignments much. You know the kind I mean – ones where you have to write about the meanings and messages in books. I can do it okay, but I just don't like it. It spoils good books and makes boring ones even more boring.

I didn't want to set my blog around a serious theme, like some of the ideas Ms Bryce had put up on the board:

‘Famous Writers', ‘Issues of History', ‘Great Journeys' and stuff like that. Or even the humdrum sorts of ideas, like

‘My Holidays', or ‘My Family History' (that was hardly something I could write about back then anyway, as I knew practically nothing about it). I wanted to do something fun and a bit out there. So I decided I'd do it around the theme of three wishes, you know, the kind given by fairies.

When I was a little kid, I totally believed in fairies. I was sure that by squinting my eyes a bit and looking really, really hard, I would actually see them. I read fairy books and I looked at fairy pictures and I thought and thought about what I would ask for if a fairy popped up beside me one day and declared she'd come to grant me three wishes. I wrote down wishes on little bits of paper and left them under my pillow or under trees or anywhere I thought a fairy might find them. One year, I actually got the wish I'd asked for: a beautiful fairy-princess doll all dressed up in this gorgeous sky-blue dress and bright silver shoes, with gauzy wings and a crown. I knew fairies existed then, because you couldn't find anything like her in the shops. She was special. She was unique. She was fairy magic come to me. Her name was Celestine and I loved her to bits.

But the next year, everything changed. I was at school one day when the principal came into my classroom. She looked very pale. She took me to her office and told me that Mum and Dad had been in a terrible head-on smash with a truck on the highway and that they had died – Dad instantly and Mum on the way to hospital. They'd had no chance, she said, no chance at all. I can still remember how she began to stutter as she spoke and her face looked all crumpled, and how she kept saying, ‘Oh, you poor little thing, Rosie! You poor little thing!' and trying to hug me. I remember a fly buzzing around that hot room, and alight- ing once on the principal's nose. But I don't remember how I really felt. They said afterwards I was in shock.

Aunt Jenny came very soon after and she took me home – to her home, that is. I knew her already quite well because she and my mum Annie, the younger of the two, were very close and always popping round to see each other. It wasn't far, anyway – Aunt Jenny lived in the next street. She looked after me, comforted me and tried hard over the next few years to be both father and mother to me, though it was hard for her. She missed my parents almost as much as I did and she didn't have much money.

My parents hadn't left any money, either. They had good jobs, but they had never been able to save. They loved to enjoy themselves and do fun, extravagant things, like hiring a Rolls Royce to drive to the beach, where we'd have a magnificent picnic, served by a waiter in a tuxedo. Or they might get a joy-flight over the mountains – Dad had his pilot's licence – or buy beautiful clothes or gorgeous toys for me. So they would max out their credit card and just do whatever they felt like, and I loved it. Anything, it seemed, could happen with them. Come to think of it, maybe that's why it was so easy for me to believe in fairies and things like that. My parents sprinkled fairy dust over everything. And it wasn't just to do with spending money, either. They loved each other, and me, really, really dearly, and they weren't afraid to show it and to tell me, over and over again.

So when they died, for me the fairies died too. I couldn't believe in magic wishes any more, because the only thing I wanted during that terrible time was for the accident never to have happened and Mum and Dad and I to live happily together back in our own home. And though I wished it ever so many times, it never came true, of course. Eventually, I settled down to life with Aunt Jenny, and though I missed my parents terribly, as the years passed the ache of their absence grew softer. That was partly time passing, and partly it was because of Aunt Jenny. She's much more anxious than my mum and dad were and sometimes she fussed and flapped, but she was also very kind and loving and I couldn't have asked for a better guardian. The only thing that was a real problem was money. Aunt Jenny worried about that constantly.

Aunt Jenny's a dressmaker, a really good one, but she's a hopeless businesswoman. She's too nice. A soft touch, some people say. She gives discounts to people who could really afford to pay full price. And she makes excuses for people who don't pay on time and who make out they're too skint to pay straightaway. And so money's always tight.

She worked from home, in the back room of our flat, which she'd set up as a workroom. It's a rather nice room, actually, big and full of light, with a couple of tall old- fashioned mirrors on stands, and two tailor's dummies, and beautiful black and white framed photographs of film stars on the walls. Aunt Jenny loves the glamorous actresses of the past, like Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. There are shelves for the materials, a filing cabinet for the patterns, a table for the sewing- machine and comfy chairs for the customers to sit on when they're ordering stuff. And there's a CD player for the music Aunt Jenny likes to play when she's sewing. It's nearly always from the same era as those film stars – jazz, mostly. I think she'd have liked to live in a world like that, a dreamworld of elegant ease and effortless sophistication. She'd like to have had a design studio catering to those glamorous beauties.

Aunt Jenny makes all kinds of clothes, but she specialises in evening dresses. She's really, really good at those. Slinky satin or full-skirted organza, the latest thing or vintage style, she'd make something gorgeous, with beadwork and sequins and lace and stuff sewn on by hand. She'd love to make mostly the kinds of clothes worn by those classic film stars, and sometimes she can persuade people that's what they should want. But not often. People mostly want things they see in gossip mags, the clothes they see celery-stick-thin modern celebrities wearing. Aunt Jenny gets disappointed – she thinks a lot of modern fashion simply doesn't suit most normal body shapes – but she has to do what the customer wants. And she always makes it beautifully, no matter what she thinks.

When I was little, Aunt Jenny would sometimes use the scraps from some splendid evening dress to make me fabulous costumes for school plays or fancy dress parties or Book Week parades, all those sorts of things. And, as I learned later, it was she, of course, who had made me my Celestine doll . . . Anyway – getting back to my blog, I'd decided I'd go back to my childhood obsession and write about three wishes. Don't ask me why I returned to something I thought I'd left behind. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I think it's kind of spooky.

The internet's such a weird place. Sometimes it feels to me like a fairytale kind of country. There are trolls and wizards and zombies and people hiding out under false names and others who transform themselves into what they're not. There are all kinds of nasties waiting to trap the unwary and then there are good fairies who make amazing things happen. You can have invisible friends – people you've never met in the flesh. All sorts of odd magic, good and bad, seems to hover there. It was back to the old wishes under a pillow kind of thing – except this time on the web. Maybe that's why calling my blog Three Wishes seemed like a good fit.

When I'd finished setting it up, I thought it looked pretty cool. Ms Bryce did too. She gave me full marks for it. But seeing it up there, in that smart and professional- looking format, made my heart beat faster. What if – you never knew – what if the blog attracted attention from people other than my friends? What about if a publisher saw it, and thought, Hey, this girl can write, maybe I'll ask her to do a book! I'd heard of that happening before, that bloggers were discovered by publishers, and their dream of writing a real book came true. I didn't think about it too much, because I knew it was unlikely. But it was at the back of my mind, some of the time at least.

Okay, you might be thinking, what about those three wishes then? What did you write? Well, you can go and have a look at my blog for the full deal – it's at
http://fairychild3wishes.blogspot.com.
But basically they were:

1. To win a lot of money in the lottery so Aunt Jenny doesn't have to scrimp and save (we occasionally get lottery tickets but have never won anything).

2. A pair of silver shoes like Celestine's, except in my size.

3. For something exciting to happen to me, because I want to be a really good and popular writer and how can you be that if you just live an ordinary, humdrum kind of life?

In my first post, I'd written, very solemnly, about how you had to be careful what you wished for.
(Don't forget that whenever I've included this rose, it means you can go and look at my blog,
http://fairychild3wishes.blogspot.com
, to see what I wrote.) I wrote about the people who made stupid wishes and what happened to them. I wrote about people who didn't think things through. I thought I was safe from that because I had really thought about those three wishes. I didn't want to ask for impossible things. No time-travel or supernatural powers or what have you, just things that might come true. Portia, Alice and Maddy wrote down their own wishes in the comments boxes and I thought their wishes were a good deal more unrealistic than mine. Alice even asked for a magic wand! (Mind you, I used to try out that one on the fairies when I was a little kid – I thought you could then trick them into giving you unlimited wishes.) I believed I'd taken my own advice really rather well, and heeded the warning message of those old stories. What I didn't realise back then was that ‘careful what you wish for' isn't really just advice or even a warning. It is a threat.