by ‘So, how do we do this?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you want to do it now?’ Ophelia seemed surprised.
‘I don’t see why not. It’ll give me a little time to get used to everything before we go.’
She nodded, and without another word she advanced on me with, apparently, serious intent.
I experienced a flicker of nerves and an odd impulse to back away. She was giving me what I’d asked for, so what was I worried about? I suppose I’d expected more argument, more discussion, more delay. But no, here she came, it was about to happen, what if I really wasn’t ready—
‘Oh,’ I said, stupidly, because she’d bent slightly to press her lips to my forehead, and that really hadn’t been what I was expecting. At all.
And that seemed to be it, for she withdrew, leaving me to process a burgeoning feeling of — disorder.
‘I didn’t, um. I didn’t know it would make me feel sick,’ I croaked.
Ophelia had withdrawn as far as the other side of the room. Now she came back, and put into my hands a handsome copper basin.
‘I believe you will find this useful,’ said she.
And, promptly, I did.
***
I went to bed early. The sickness took a few hours to fade, and though, in the wake of it, I felt more restored to my usual self — if a bit swollen, like an overfull sponge — well, I still felt shaky. Vomiting a lot does that to a person.
Besides, I had a big day coming up, after all. A big week, maybe even two. Going to bed early and getting plenty of sleep would be the responsible thing to do, wouldn’t it? The sort of thing an adult, capable, sensible Ves would do. So I did that. Feeling, may I tell you, rather smug about it.
I woke up abruptly, groggy and heavy-eyed, not because my alarm was singing to me but because my phone was. Loudly.
Someone was calling.
Also, someone else was looming over me in the nearly pitch dark and urgently shaking my shoulder.
‘Sorry,’ muttered Jay, stepping back. ‘Ves. Stop screaming. It’s me.’
‘Jay, what—’
I didn’t finish the sentence because he was shoving my phone into my hands. I looked at the lock screen.
An antique silver chocolate pot was there displayed, steam curling from its spout.
Milady calling.
A different kind of panic clutched at my heart. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong. You’re just late.’
Having uttered these words of doom, Jay retreated.
Late? For what?
‘Hello, Milady,’ I said into the phone, speaking very calmly despite the pounding of my heart. I was late. Late for something Milady wanted. Shit.
‘I apologise for the lateness of the hour,’ said she, crisply.
‘It isn’t… morning?’ I said, fuzzily.
‘It is ten minutes after midnight and you are needed downstairs.’
Typical. The one time I act like a grown-up and go to bed early, then I’m called for a secret meeting at midnight.
‘I’ll be right down,’ I promised.
‘We’re waiting in the parlour.’ She hung up, before I could ask where “the parlour” was.
I knew though, really. There’s only one parlour at Home where Milady might hold a top-secret meeting at the Witching Hour.
House’s Favourite Room.
I threw back the duvet and launched myself out of bed.
***
I made it downstairs in record time, so it was a particularly unfortunate time to get lost in the labyrinthine corridors of House.
In the end, they sent Jay out to find me.
‘Sorry,’ I said, feeling flustered. Jay had been obliged to come and find me twice in fifteen minutes, and the first time I’d screamed in his face. I now stood in the midst of a crossroads, with three passages branching off from it, and I genuinely couldn’t remember ever having seen such a place before in my life.
Maybe I hadn’t. House has its mysterious ways.
‘To be fair,’ said Jay, gently taking my arm, and towing me down the left-hand fork, ‘I ought to have waited.’
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, trotting gamely beside Jay as he whisked us both past innumerable doors, all closed. ‘What’s the meeting about?’
‘Sh,’ Jay breathed. ‘You’ll find out in a minute.’
My, it really was a top-secret meeting. I obediently shut my mouth, and didn’t open it again until Jay thrust open a door and led me into House’s favourite room. It’s a snug little chamber, dating from somewhere in the sixteen-hundreds, and unchanged since. It has the type of grandfather clock that’s determined to be heard over any amount of noise, and I could clearly hear the resonant tick-tick of the clock over the low murmur of conversation.
Gathered around the little white tea table, deep in mugs of hot chocolate, were: Indira, Zareen and Emellana Rogan. Em had seated herself beneath a gilt-framed portrait of a troll lady in seventeenth-century court dress; the same kind I’d recently worn myself, at Mandridore. I couldn’t remember ever seeing that painting before, and I wanted to ask about it, but this meeting was both secret and urgent and that’d have to wait for another time. Focus, Ves.
‘Aha,’ I said, taking an empty chair across from Zareen. ‘Team Improbable assembles once again.’
I heard Jay snort as he took the chair next to me. ‘Speak for yourself. I prefer “Team Unstoppable”, thanks.’
‘So far, so good,’ said Zareen. ‘We remain unstopped.’
‘Which is the subject of this meeting,’ Milady put in. ‘Tangentially, at least.’
I wondered idly why we were all having this conversation in the dead of night, in a room whose existence is unknown to the majority of our esteemed colleagues.
Then I decided to be less idle about it.
‘This whole thing is developing a pleasing air of Mission Impossible,’ I observed. ‘High stakes. Dream team. The toppest of top secret.’
‘It has come to my attention that rumours of Orlando’s work have penetrated considerably further than I had anticipated,’ agreed Milady. ‘And since I can no longer guarantee that such rumours will not spread beyond the borders of the Society, I have felt obliged to take further steps to preserve the secrecy of your assignment.’
In other words: a previous mission had gone rather awry when somebody (who shall remain nameless) had passed information — and other things — to Ancestria Magicka, people who ought by rights to be our allies but whose methods and goals made them soundly unpopular with us.
And since Ancestria Magicka had made it their business to interfere with us at every opportunity, Milady wasn’t taking any chances with this one.
‘How about the Court?’ I asked, looking at Em.
‘As far as is generally known, I am away consulting on a routine matter of little import,’ she replied. ‘Unrelated, I might add, to the Society.’
‘So you arrived here in the dark of the night and snuck in?’ I asked. ‘That’s fantastic.’
Em awarded me one of her faint, wry smiles. ‘It was rather fun.’
‘How far will this misdirection work?’ Jay put in. ‘After all, everyone seems to know that the regulator’s ready. And then the Dream Team, as Ves put it, is immediately dispatched to parts unknown, taking Orlando’s assistant along? The connection’s obvious.’
‘Indira has put it about that you and she are going home for a family event,’ said Milady.
‘She has?’ Jay sounded startled, as well he might. His sister’s talents may be myriad, and uniformly impressive, but talking wasn’t one of them. Let alone telling glib and convincing lies to good effect.
Indira unwittingly bore out this portrait of her character by saying nothing. She only looked rather uncomfortable.
‘I, meanwhile, am feeling terrible,’ said Zareen. ‘It’s been a real struggle being back at work, so I am checking myself back in to rehab at the School of Weird. In fact, I left yesterday.’
‘What about me?’ I put in, in rather a small voice. I’d already gone through the list of believable excuses that might be spun to explain my absence from Home, and it was pretty short. If I wasn’t at Home, I was out on assignment for the Society. That was it.
‘You are presently engaged in a solo assignment in Leicester,’ Milady informed me. ‘Tracking down a rare book of possible interest to Valerie.’
‘Oh, that was a kind thought. Val will enjoy lying for me.’
‘In fact, you also left this evening.’
‘So my continued presence at Home is shrouded in such mystery even I didn’t know about it. Masterful.’
‘So we’re sneaking out in the morning,’ Jay concluded.
‘In fact,’ said Milady, ‘you’re sneaking out in thirty-five minutes.’
‘What?’ I sat up. ‘But we’re not ready.’
‘All necessary preparations have been made.’
‘I’m sorry to be the problem person, but I haven’t finished my preparations.’ I thought I’d have time in the morning to perform the chaotic ritual I like to call “packing”.
‘House has packed your things,’ Milady informed me.
After over a decade at the Society, I thought I was incapable of being surprised any more. It seems I was wrong.
‘My clothes have been packed by a country house,’ I said, just to make sure I’d got that right.
‘I trust you will find everything in order.’
‘I cannot say that the question of House’s gender has ever troubled me much, if it can be supposed to have one,’ I mused. ‘But if someone’s been going through my underwear drawer then I hope she’s a lady.’
Milady let that pass, with her usual superb grace. Or, possibly, indifference. ‘Indira has secured the regulator from Orlando,’ she continued.
I had thought Indira looked unusually tense, even for her. She sat ramrod straight, with her hands clasped tightly together, and I suppose I’d attributed this to the startling news that she’d recently been obliged to lie through her teeth to her esteemed colleagues.
But, no. She had the regulator. She probably had it on her right now, for there was no way anybody was going to take that thing out of Orlando’s secure workroom and then leave it lying around somewhere.
I now perceived that she had the wild-eyed look of a woman sitting on an unexploded bomb, and everything made a lot more sense.
I tried to soothe her with an encouraging smile, with the usual lack of effect.
‘Can I see it?’ I blurted.
Indira shook her head. ‘It’s secured.’
That told me exactly nothing, but okay. I wouldn’t be seeing the device until we were ready to use it.
‘Your instructions are as follows,’ continued Milady. ‘Proceed to Silvessen with all possible caution and secrecy. Please conduct a thorough appraisal of the conditions there, to be submitted via report upon your return. If you judge it safe, then Indira will deploy the regulator. You will remain long enough to observe its effects and manage any unforeseen occurrences. Once you are certain that Silvessen is hale and secure, you will remove the regulator and return Home.’
We had questions.
‘Caution?’ said I. ‘Are we expecting some kind of threat?’
‘Unforeseen occurrences?’ asked Jay. ‘Like what?’
‘Remove the regulator?’ said Em. ‘Surely that would defeat the purpose.’
Milady waited until we had finished and coolly replied: ‘Caution is always wise, Ves, even if the concept is somewhat alien to you.’
Fair cop.
She added, after a moment, ‘And I cannot guarantee there will be no threats. The enforced secrecy of this mission is a consequence of that.’
Fair cop again. Lovely.
‘Jay, if occurrences are defined as “unforeseen” then they are, by definition, a mystery. I leave it in your capable hands to manage anything that should prove troublesome, and to maximise your chances of doing so successfully I have assigned you Zareen.’
Zareen grinned. ‘Don’t worry,’ she murmured to Jay. ‘I’ll look after you.’
Jay scowled. But it was a measure of his improved relationship with Zareen that he stopped there.
‘As for removing the regulator,’ Milady continued. ‘Yes, its removal will in all likelihood reverse whatever effects its installation might produce. And if those effects are desirable, then it will be a pity to do so. But this is only a prototype, and your assignment is only to test it, and deliver a full report of its workings to Orlando’s department.’
Emellana accepted this with a nod.
‘Are there any other questions?’ Milady waited, politely, while we all scrolled through myriad possible enquiries, and dismissed them as unworthy of her attention.
‘Very well, then,’ she concluded. ‘I wish you all possible success, and please do exercise caution.’
We filed out, rather like a class of dismissed schoolchildren.
Only once we had put some distance between ourselves and the parlour — and, hopefully, Milady’s capacity to overhear — did I own up.
‘I have something to tell you,’ I said, in a half-whisper.
Jay cast me a sideways look. ‘Is this something to do with your abrupt and dramatic disappearance into Ophelia’s cottage earlier?’
‘Yes, and thank you for not haring after me.’
‘I was tempted.’
‘But you accepted that Ves cannot be stopped, and abandoned all pursuit as futile.’
‘Exactly. So what dark deed did you commit?’
‘I’ve, um,’ I sunk my voice even further, ‘I’ve borrowed Merlin’s powers.’
Jay stopped dead, halfway down a chilly corridor, and stared at me. ‘Borrowed.’
‘Yes.’
‘Like an old coat.’
‘It fits pretty well,’ I said, defensively.
‘I have questions,’ said Jay.
‘Me too,’ put in Zareen. ‘Why did you do that, Ves? Do you know something we don’t? Expecting something we can’t handle?’
‘No, and no,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s as Milady said. We can’t know what to expect. And, anyway, I wanted an opportunity to try things out in the field.’
‘And Merlin let you.’ That was Jay, solidly disbelieving.
‘She did.’ I flexed my fingers, which were tingling a bit with suppressed energy. ‘If this is borrowing a coat, it’s a supercharged dreamcoat of dizzying potential and I may be experiencing some regrets.’
Jay smirked, the weasel.
‘I’m sure you will put it to good use,’ said Em, bless her. How loyal.
How naïve.
‘Oh no,’ I said, beaming. ‘I have every intention of using my powers for Evil.’
