‘I’m not coming back, dear child, not this time. But I’m sure we will meet again. The last thing you have to remember . . .’ said Griffin, finally, again dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘The answer,’ he said, after a long pause, ‘is heat.’
When Effie woke up on Monday morning she had the feeling something terrible had happened. Her father had contacted the hospital late the night before and had then gone there in his car. Effie had begged to go with him, but he had told her to stay at home and wait for news there. No news had come. And to make a bad day even worse, Effie’s step-mother Cait had got up at five o’clock in the morning and, before doing her exercise video, had thrown every edible piece of food in the house into the outside bin. Not even in the kitchen bin – ‘We might be tempted,’ Cait had said darkly, to Luna, the baby, who was not old enough to say anything back – but the actual outside bin.
Everything was gone. All the bread, oats and cereals. All the jam. The sausages. The eggs. All the cheese. The last of the marmalade that Miss Dora Wright (Effie’s old teacher whom Effie had even been allowed to call Dora out of school, and who, before she disappeared, had lived in the apartment beneath Griffin’s in the Old Rectory) had made for them at Christmas. There were no crisps or chocolate – not that you would eat crisps or chocolate for breakfast unless you were really desperate, of course. Nothing.
Cait Ransom-Bookend (she had kept some of her old name when she’d married Effie’s father) read a lot of diet books. She read these books because she wanted to be as thin and beautiful as people on television, even though her actual job was researching a medieval manuscript that no one had ever heard of. The latest diet book was called The Time Is NOW! and told you how you could live on special milkshakes that had no milk in them. These were called ‘Shake Your Stuff’ and came through the post in huge fluorescent tubs. Each tub came with a free book sellotaped to it, usually a romance novel with a picture on the front of a woman tied to a tree or a chair or a railway line. Cait read a lot of these books lately too.
It seemed that something in The Time Is NOW! (which had a chapter called ‘Don’t Let Fat Kids Ruin Your New Look’) had made Cait choose today of all days to throw out all the nice food – food that might make you feel better if you were feeling a bit sad and worried – and present Effie, who usually made her own breakfast anyway, with a glass of greeny, browny gooey liquid that looked like mud with bits of grass stirred in it. Or, worse, something that might come out of you if you had gastric flu. This, apparently, was the ‘Morning Shake’. It was vile. Not that Effie was that hungry anyway. She was too worried to be hungry.
Baby Luna had her own shake that was bright pink. She didn’t look that enthusiastic about it either. A pink streak on the wall opposite her high chair suggested that she had already thrown it across the room at least once.
‘Looks awesome, right?’ said Cait.
‘Uh . . .’ began Effie. ‘Thanks. Any news from Dad?’
Cait made a sad face that wasn’t really sad. ‘He’s still at the hospital.’
‘Can I go?’
Cait shook her head. ‘The school rang. You missed two whole days last week, apparently. Your father and I talked about this yesterday. You’re not going to help your grandfather by . . .’
‘Has something happened?’
Cait paused just long enough that Effie knew that something had happened.
‘Your father . . .’ she began. ‘He’ll talk to you after school.’
‘Please, Cait, can you drive me to the hospital now?’
‘Sorry, Effie, I can’t . . . Your father . . . Effie? Where are you going?’
But Effie had already left the kitchen. She walked along the thin, dusty hallway to the bedroom she shared with Luna.
‘Effie?’ Cait called after her, but Effie didn’t respond. ‘Effie? Come back and finish your shake!’ But Effie did not go back and finish her shake. She put on her green and grey school uniform as quickly as possible, buttoned up her bottle-green felt cape, and left the house without even saying goodbye. She could go to school after she’d seen her grandfather.
Effie took the same bus as usual to the Writers’ Monument and walked up the hill to the Old Town, just as if she were going to school, through the cobbled streets, past the Funtime Arcade, the Writers’ Museum, Leonard Levar’s Antiquarian Bookshop and Madame Valentin’s Exotic Pet Emporium until, after cutting though the university gardens, she turned right instead of left and walked down the long road towards the hospital, hoping that no one would notice her uniform and ask where she thought she was going.
Effie had looked up the word ‘codicil’ in her dictionary the night before. It meant ‘a supplement to a will’. She’d had to use her dictionary several more times to work out what this might mean – there was of course no internet to help any more. A lot of people still had out-of-date dictionaries on their old phones, but Effie had a proper dictionary that Griffin had given her for her last birthday. All dictionaries – except for the very new ones – had a lot of old-fashioned words in them, like ‘blog’ and ‘wi-fi’. Things that only existed before the worldquake.
Eventually Effie had found that a codicil was something you could add to a will to change it in some way, and that a will was a legal document that said who got what after someone died. Then she remembered the play they’d read with Mrs Beathag Hide a few weeks before, where an old king kept changing his will on the basis of who he thought loved him most.
But why would Griffin be changing his will now? Was he going to die? Effie couldn’t stop thinking back to him lying there weak and alone in his hospital bed, his long beard looking so fragile and wrong resting on the crisp white sheets. Effie saw him trying desperately to write the codicil, dipping his fountain pen in the bottle of blue ink that made Nurse Underwood tut every time she saw it. On the hospital table was a pile of Griffin’s special stationery that Effie had got from his desk: cream paper and envelopes that looked expensive, but ordinary, until you held them up to the light. If you did this, you would see a delicate watermark in the shape of a large house with a locked gate in front of it. This watermark was on all Griffin Truelove’s stationery.
Effie had never been into her grandfather’s rooms on her own before last week. She hadn’t liked it at all. Everything sounded wrong, smelled wrong – and she kept jumping every time she heard an unfamiliar noise. The heating was switched off and so the place was deathly cold. Effie kept picturing her grandfather in that alleyway, wondering what had made him go there in the middle of the night. People at the hospital said he must have been beaten up by thugs, or just randomly attacked by ‘kids’. But Effie was a kid and she didn’t know anyone who would be likely to attack someone like her grandfather.
And what about his magic?
Because surely that’s when you would use magic? However difficult or boring you pretended it was, and however many lectures you gave on using magic responsibly, or trying all other methods of achieving something first, surely, surely, if someone was attacking you, almost killing you, that’s when you would . . .
What? Turn them into a frog? Shrink them? Make yourself invisible?
Effie realised miserably that after all this time studying with her grandfather, she didn’t even know what magic did. All she knew were lots of things it didn’t do. ‘Don’t expect magic to make you rich or famous,’ for example. Or, ‘Magic is not how you will get your true power, especially not in your case.’ But whatever it could do, her grandfather had not done it when he was attacked. It didn’t make any sense to her.
Of course, the obvious explanation was that magic didn’t really exist. After all, that was what most people in the world seemed to think, despite all the Laurel Wilde books they seemed to read. Orwell Bookend had always said that magic didn’t exist. But then last Wednesday he’d said it was dangerous, and implied that he almost believed