Except for Effie’s mother.
Maybe.
Had she been killed? Or had she simply run away for some reason? No one knew. After the worldquake, most mobile phones stopped working and the internet broke down. For a few weeks everything was complete chaos. If Aurelia Truelove had wanted to send a message to her husband or daughter she would not have been able to. Or perhaps she had tried and the message had been lost. Technologically, the world seemed to have gone back to something like 1992. A whole online world was gone. It was soon replaced with flickering Bulletin Board Systems (accessed via dial-up modems from the olden days) while people tried to work out what to do. They thought that eventually things would go back to normal.
They never did.
After the worldquake, everything was different for Effie in other ways too. Because Effie now had no mother, and because of her father’s latest promotion at the university – which meant he did even more work for even less money – there was no one to look after her, so she had started spending a lot of time with her grandfather Griffin Truelove.
Griffin Truelove was a very old man with a very long, white beard who lived in a jumble of rooms at the top of the Old Rectory in the most dark, grey and ancient part of the Old Town. Griffin had once been quite a cheerful soul who set fire to his beard so often he always kept a glass of water nearby to dip it in. But for the first few months she went there, he barely said anything to Effie. Well, that is, apart from ‘Please don’t touch anything,’ and ‘Be quiet, there’s a good child.’
After school Effie would spend the long hours in his rooms examining – without touching – the contents of his strange old cabinets and cupboards while he smoked his pipe and wrote in a large black hardback book and more or less ignored her. He wasn’t ever horrible to her. He just seemed very far away, and busy with his black book and the old manuscript he seemed to need to consult every few minutes, which was written in a language Effie had never seen before. Before the worldquake, Effie and Aurelia had occasionally come here together and Grandfather Griffin’s eyes had twinkled when he had spoken of his travels, or shown Aurelia some new object or book he had found. Now he rarely left his rooms at all. Effie thought her grandfather was probably very sad because of what had happened to his daughter. Effie was sad too.
Griffin Truelove’s cabinets were filled with strange objects made of silk, glass and precious metals. There were two silver candlesticks studded with jewels next to a pile of delicate embroidered cloths with images of flowers, fruits and people in flowing robes. There were ornate oil-lamps, and carved black wooden boxes with little brass locks on them but no visible keys. There were globes, large and small, depicting worlds known and unknown. There were animal skulls, delicate knives and several misshapen wooden bowls with small spoons alongside them. One cupboard contained folded maps, thin white candles, thick cream paper and bottles of blue ink. Another had bags of dried roses and other flowers. A corner cabinet held jar after jar of seed heads, charcoal, red earth, pressed leaves, sealing wax, pieces of sea-glass, gold leaf, dried black twigs, cinnamon sticks, small pieces of amber, owl feathers and homemade botanical oils.
‘Do you know how to do magic, Grandfather?’ Effie had asked one day, about a year after the worldquake. It seemed the only reasonable explanation for all the unusual things he kept around him. Effie knew all about magic because of Laurel Wilde’s books, which were about a group of children at a magical school. All children – and even some adults – secretly wanted to go to this school and be taught how to do spells and become invisible.
‘Everyone knows how to do magic,’ had come her grandfather’s mild reply.
Effie knew perfectly well (from reading her Laurel Wilde books) that only a few special people were born with the ability to do magic, so she suspected that her grandfather was making fun of her in some way. But on the other hand . . .
‘Will you do some?’ she had asked.
‘No.’
‘Will you teach me how to do it?’
‘No.’
‘Do you actually believe in magic?’
‘It doesn’t matter whether or not I believe in it.’
‘What do you mean, Grandfather?’
‘Do hush, child. I must get on with my manuscript.’
‘Can I go and look at your library?’
‘No.’
And so Effie had gone back to peering into a glass cabinet that contained many tiny stone bottles stoppered with black corks, and several pens made out of feathers. Sometimes she went up the narrow staircase to the attic library and tried the door handle, but it was always locked. Through the blue glass in the door she could see tall shelves of old-looking books. Why wouldn’t he let her go and look at them? Other adults were always going on about children needing to read, after all.
But adults only wanted children to read books they approved of. Effie’s father, Orwell Bookend (whose last name was different from Effie’s because Aurelia had insisted on remaining a Truelove and passing the name to her daughter), had banned Effie from reading Laurel Wilde books just before the sixth book in the series had come out. It was because he didn’t want her to have anything to do with magic, he had said, which had been odd, given that he didn’t believe in magic. And then one day, after he had drunk too much wine, Orwell had told Effie to keep away from magic because it was ‘dangerous’. How could something not exist, and yet be dangerous? Effie didn’t know. But however much she kept asking her grandfather about magic, he never gave in, and so Effie started asking him other things.
‘Grandfather?’ she said, one Wednesday afternoon just before she turned eleven. ‘What language is that you’re reading? I know you’re doing some kind of translation, but where did the manuscript come from?’
‘You know I’m doing a translation, do you?’ He nodded, and almost smiled. ‘Very good.’
‘But what language is it?’
‘Rosian.’
‘Who speaks Rosian?’
‘People a very, very long way away.’
‘In a place where they do magic?’
‘Oh, child. I keep telling you. Everyone does magic.’
‘But how?’
He sighed. ‘Have you ever woken up in the morning and sort of prayed, or hoped very hard, that it would not rain?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did it work?’
Effie thought about this. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, did it rain?’
‘No. At least, I don’t think so.’
‘Well, then you did magic. Bravo!’
This was certainly not how magic worked in Laurel Wilde books. In Laurel Wilde books you had to say a particular spell if you wanted to stop it raining. You had to buy this spell in a shop, and then get someone to teach it to you. And . . .
‘What if it wasn’t going to rain anyway?’
He sighed again. ‘Euphemia. I promised your father . . .’
‘Promised him what?’
Griffin took off his glasses. The thin antique silver frames sparkled as they caught the light. He rubbed his eyes and then gazed at Effie as if he had just drawn aside a curtain to reveal a sunny garden that he had never seen before.
‘I promised your father I wouldn’t teach you any magic. Particularly after what happened with your mother. And I also promised some other people that I would not do any magic for five years, and indeed I have not done any magic for five years. Although . . .’ He looked at