Hawthorn Read online

  “We have to tell them—” I began.

  Before I could finish Mr. Bellows leapt onto the dock and raced toward one of the rats. He kicked it into the water while another snapped at his heels. A woman passenger screamed and a couple of sailors came running to beat the rats away. They drove them back into the water—or at least most of them. I saw one slink into the crowd behind the coach that Miss Corey and Miss Sharp were taking to the train station. Mr. Bellows ran to the window of the coach and spoke to Miss Sharp. She nodded and squeezed Mr. Bellows’s hand, then waved to us, her face set in a determined expression as Mr. Bellows spoke to the driver. The driver snapped the horses’ reins and the coach took off in a rush. I couldn’t see any rats following, but the pier was so crowded it was hard to tell.

  Mr. Bellows came back up the gangplank, wiping his face with his handkerchief. “Blasted creatures!” he swore. “I don’t envy them if Vi gets a hold of them, though. She and Lil will be all right, and that’s less to follow us when we debark.”

  We stood on the deck watching the pier to be certain no one—or no thing—boarded the ship until it was time to embark again. Agnes and Sam went below to pack and Daisy went with Mr. Bellows to “strategize” while Helen remained with me on the deck watching the coast of Wales slip by.

  “Poor Mr. Appleby,” Helen remarked. “I’m afraid Daisy might be changing her mind about him.”

  “What do you mean? Why would she change her mind about Mr. Appleby—oh, you don’t mean . . . Mr. Bellows! But he’s our teacher . . . and he’s old.”

  Helen laughed at how flustered I’d become. “Not so old. He’s not even thirty. My mother was trotting out prospective husbands for me that were twice his age. And he’s not our teacher anymore. We’ve graduated—or at least Daisy has. You and I are apparently dropouts—”

  “I know Daisy has always had a crush on him but I can’t believe Mr. Bellows would think of her that way,” I cut in.

  “Then you haven’t been paying attention,” Helen remarked. “You’ve been too busy flying every night with Raven.”

  I was about to point out that she’d been busy herself with Marlin, but I found I didn’t really want to enter into a discussion of what exactly she had been doing every night. I felt suddenly as though everything was slipping away from me—as quickly and inexorably as the coast of Wales as we steamed steadily north. My friends seemed to be moving on without me, leaving me behind. As if to confirm my feeling, Helen left me to go pack. I stayed alone on deck, watching the green hills of Wales slip in and out of the fog. From one headland I thought I saw smoke coming from a rocky tor and wondered if it was another of the old watchtowers that Raven had told me about.

  The fog grew thicker as we steamed into the mouth of the Mersey toward Liverpool. I could barely make out the coast at all. It was unnerving, as if the land we’d been traveling to had vanished. The ship and harbor were hushed, the only sound the mournful wail of foghorns and the clatter of buoy bells, which grew louder and more frantic as we steamed into port, as if they were warning us of some obstacle ahead. My skin turned icy in the clammy fog. I was sure that we were steaming into some danger. The bells were so loud—

  Because they were inside my head. They were my bells, my warning system for danger. We were going to run into the rocks. I had to warn the captain—

  But before I could shout an alarm the ship shuddered under my feet and lurched violently to starboard and I was thrown to the deck. We’d struck something—or something had struck us. As I tried to get to my feet there was a second jolt. I smelled smoke and, looking up, saw flames licking the great smokestacks. The ship was listing so far to starboard that I couldn’t get to my feet. I could hear screams and sailors shouting orders.

  “Lower the lifeboats!”

  “Abandon ship!”

  “We’ve been torpedoed!”

  Torpedoed? Off the coast of England in peacetime?

  I crawled over the deck on my hands and knees, trying to find something I could brace myself against—and then I felt a hand on my arm pulling me up.

  It was Helen, staring at me, her blue eyes wide with alarm.

  “Helen, thank the Bells! We have to get to the lifeboats. We’ve been torpedoed. Where’s Daisy?”

  “I’m right here,” Daisy said, laying her hand on my arm. She was wearing a candy-striped dress and a hat with a cerise feather. “What are you talking about, Ava? The ship’s perfectly fine. We’ve docked in Liverpool. Our trunks are already being brought ashore. It’s time to go.”

  I stared at her and Helen and then looked around us. The deck had righted itself and passengers were calmly taking their leave of the ship, walking down the gangplank to the crowded pier. There were still tatters of fog wreathing the smokestacks—but no smoke.

  “S-something hit the boat! It was g-going down!” I cried.

  “You must have imagined it,” Helen whispered, gripping my arm and steering me away from the crowds. Some of the debarking passengers were staring at me. “The ship is fine. Mr. Bellows is waiting for us on the pier. Agnes and Sam went to get a taxi to take us to the train station. Come on, Ava. It’s time to go.”

  I nodded mutely and allowed myself to be led down the gangplank, Helen and Ava on either side of me, their arms linked firmly through mine as if I were an escaped mental patient they were afraid might make a run for it. I was trembling, the plank unsteady beneath my feet. I was glad when I stepped onto the pier, although my legs still wobbled like jelly.

  “There’s Rupert with the porter,” Daisy said, unhooking her arm from mine. “I’ll tell him to bring the coach around.”

  “Rupert?” I said to Helen.

  “I told you,” she replied, and then, in a gentler tone, “Are you feeling better now?”

  I nodded. “I think I had a vision of something that’s going to happen in the future.”

  “Let’s hope it’s the future we change,” Helen said, looking up at the ship we had just left fondly. “I’d hate to see anything happen to her. It was lovely voyage, wasn’t it?”

  I looked up at the great ocean liner, recalling its beautiful gilt rooms and stained-glass domes and the moonlit nights I’d spent flying over her with Raven. “Yes,” I said, thinking we might not pass so peaceful a week ever again, “it was.” But as we turned to join Mr. Bellows—Rupert—and Daisy I felt quite sure that I’d never set foot aboard the Lusitania again.

  13

  I LET DAISY and Helen shepherd me through the crowds on the pier, into a coach where Mr. Bellows, Sam, and Agnes waited, and then out again through the crowds at the train station. I still felt unsteady on my feet (“Takes a bit to get your land legs!” Mr. Bellows said, slapping me on the back) and blurry, as if the fog in my vision had gotten inside my head. My ears were stopped up, too, as if I’d been swimming and had gotten water in them. As if I’d drowned like the passengers on the Lusitania.

  I shook my head to clear the voice out of my head.

  “Stop doing that!” Helen hissed. “People are staring at you.”

  I looked around the enormous station to see if Helen was right, but the faces of the people rushing past us to catch their trains were a blur. Helen kept a grip on my arm as we were swept into the crowds. I spotted Agnes’s bright yellow feather in the crowd ahead of us. She waved at us and shouted that she’d go ahead and save us seats. When we boarded the train we found Daisy in a compartment arguing with a portly gentleman who wanted to take our seats.

  “I simply must sit with my sister and her companion,” Daisy explained, looking into the man’s small, fat-creased eyes. “We’re taking her to the asylum and she’s most unpredictable.”

  The stout man lurched away, mumbling something in a thick accent, his eyes clouded over.

  “Daisy, did you mesmerize that man?” Helen asked.

  “Did you just tell him I was crazy?” I demanded.

 
“He was being so difficult!” Daisy cried, stamping her foot. “Here, Rupert will want to face forward—he gets motion sickness otherwise—and by the window. Agnes and Sam will sit in the middle. Ava, do you want the other window seat? You’re looking rather green. Perhaps the air will do you good.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, sinking into the seat nearest the door to the corridor and next to Sam, who was reading a Liverpool newspaper. I glanced at the front page and saw an illustration of a scary-looking man with bat-like wings leaping from the roof of a building onto a terrified-looking girl.

  “What is that?” I asked, shuddering at the image.

  “There’s been a sighting of Spring-heeled Jack in Liverpool,” Sam said with the gleeful smile of a boy. “I used to read about him in the penny dreadfuls.”

  “Me too!” Agnes said, leaning across the compartment to peer at the story. “He used to give me nightmares. He had claws of steel and red glowing eyes, and spit blue and white flames into his victims’ eyes. He snatched girls from their beds. Of course he’s just a legend.”

  “Are we quite sure of that?” Mr. Bellows asked, taking the paper from Sam. “Many of the legendary figures that spring up in crowded cities turn out to be creatures from Faerie.”

  “That doesn’t look like a creature from Faerie,” Daisy, who’d taken the window seat across from Mr. Bellows, objected.

  “No, it looks like a shadow-ridden man,” Agnes said. “But I agree with Rupert. These city myths—urban legends, I suppose you could call them—deserve a deeper study. Take the Hammersmith Ghost . . .”

  As they argued back and forth over the provenance of creatures like Spring-heeled Jack, the Hammersmith Ghost, and something called the Hedley Kow, I closed my eyes. Helen put a traveling rug over my lap. Soon the rocking of the train lulled me into a fitful slumber plagued by dreams of sinking ships, fat oozing rats, and bat-winged men with red eyes and metal claws. When I opened my eyes I saw snatches of the sodden countryside flashing by the rain-streaked windows. I turned away from the windows to look toward the compartment door. Those windows were covered with frosted glass so that the figures that passed in the corridor were indistinct and shadowy—

  Shadow creatures, I thought with a start, tenebrae. Had we been followed? Were we leading van Drood to Hawthorn Hall? Or was he already waiting for us there with Nathan?

  I thought I should ask Mr. Bellows or Agnes to go out into the corridor to check—but before I could I was lulled once again into an uneasy slumber. When I woke next the compartment was dark. Daisy was asleep with her head on Agnes’s shoulder. Mr. Bellows was leaning against the darkened windowpane, his head nodding on his chest, a boyish lock of hair falling over his forehead. Helen was right, I thought, he was really very young. Too young to lead soldiers into battle—too young to die in war.

  I looked from him to Sam, who had fallen asleep with the newspaper over his face. The flickering lights from the corridor flashed over the garish illustration of Spring-heeled Jack, making it look as if he were moving with the jerky motions of the moving pictures I’d watched in the nickelodeon. That’s where I had seen Spring-heeled Jack before. He was one of the mustachioed villains of the penny melodramas I had watched back before I knew there were worse terrors in the world. But surely he was only what Agnes had called him—an urban legend.

  I closed my eyes and started to fall asleep again but a scratching sound startled me awake. I opened my eyes. The sound was coming from outside the window. A branch must have brushed across it, only I didn’t see any trees outside . . .

  There it was again, a dreadful scritch scritch scritch like fingernails dragging across a chalkboard. And were those scratches I saw on the glass? I stood up, stepping over Sam’s and Agnes’s feet, and leaned across the sleeping Daisy to look more closely. No, it couldn’t have been a tree that made the sound. We were traveling across a desolate moor lit fitfully by a cloud-cloaked moon. But there was a scratch on the pane above Daisy— a long jagged line extending from the upper right-hand corner down to the lower left.

  A dark shape fell over the glass—a shape like a bat hanging upside down—

  With burning red eyes.

  I started back, screaming, and fell over Agnes’s feet. The malevolent red-eyed creature grinned at me. Then it held up a metal claw and scratched a long gash into the windowpane, drawing an X across the first scratch. The glass shattered, spraying shards over Daisy. Mr. Bellows started awake, as did Sam and Agnes and Daisy, who stared up at the creature in horror. Daisy opened her mouth to scream, but before she could the creature reached in, grabbed her, and pulled her out of the compartment.

  I screamed Daisy’s name and lunged for her. I caught one of her feet—Mr. Bellows caught the other—but she had loosened the laces of her boots for the trip and they slipped off her stocking feet. I fell back holding a boot, but Mr. Bellows was quicker. He stuck his head out the window, turned around, and vanished upward. I heard Helen scream.

  “They’re on the roof!” Sam cried. “Come on—there are ladders at the end of each car. Agnes, go to the front of this car, I’ll go to the back. We’ll surround the devil.”

  “I’ll go with Agnes!” I cried.

  “And I’ll go with Sam,” Helen said, following me out into the corridor.

  I turned to her. “If you’re knocked off the roof you’ll be killed, but I can fly. You should stay here.”

  Helen looked like she was about to argue, but when I opened the door between cars and she saw the spindly ladder and the tracks flashing beneath the gap between cars, she turned white.

  “P’raps you’re right, but Ava”—she squeezed my arm—“get Daze back. I’ll never forgive myself if you don’t.”

  I wondered what Helen had to forgive herself for as I climbed the ladder, but that thought was driven out of my head when I got to the roof of the car. The bat-winged man with the fierce red eyes held Daisy in the center of the roof, his long razor-tipped claw poised at her throat. Mr. Bellows and Sam stood at the rear end of the car with daggers brandished. Agnes held her dagger in her hand. I withdrew my dagger and unfurled my wings in an angry snap.

  “Unhand her, you fiend!” Mr. Bellows roared.

  “If you come any closer I’ll slit her pretty little throat.” He spoke in a high, mincing falsetto that would have been funny if it weren’t so . . . horrible.

  “You’re surrounded, Jack,” Mr. Bellows said in a low growl I barely recognized.

  The red eyes swiveled around the roof of the speeding train car. “Two blokes what look like clerks and two Alices—by the time you make your first move the girl and me will be sitting down to tea with the queen at Buckingham Palace.”

  “What do you want with her?” Mr. Bellows demanded. “She’s just a girl.”

  Spring-heeled Jack regarded Daisy with mock surprise as if he’d picked up the wrong brand of biscuit at the grocer’s. “Say, you’re right, she is a girl. A pretty one at that.” He stroked her face with a pointed claw that drew blood. Mr. Bellows swore and lunged forward but Sam held him back. “Don’t worry, mate. That’s not what I want her for. There’s a bloke willing to pay good money for this girlie.”

  “Van Drood,” Agnes whispered.

  “Aye, that’s his name.”

  “We’ll give you twice what he offered,” Sam said.

  Jack laughed, an abrasive cackle that made me feel like a cheese grater was rubbing against my bare skin. “He’s not a bloke I’d like to cross, mate.” The red eyes seemed to burn hotter and I realized he was afraid. This monster was afraid of van Drood. And van Drood wanted Daisy, which meant Jack wasn’t going to make good on his threat to kill her.

  Before I could give myself time to think about it, I flexed my wings and flew at him, but he sprang off the car, carrying Daisy, and landed on the next car. I flew after him, sure that I could fly faster than he could jump, but it was as if his feet were made of I
ndia rubber. Each time he touched down on the train roof he sprang up again like a jack-in-the-box. And we were running out of train. If he sprang to the ground with Daisy she might get hurt. He was on the last car and not letting up. As he got to the edge of the last car he looked over his shoulder and cackled his grating laugh—and then pushed Daisy over the edge.

  I screamed and dove for her, but she was snatched up before I could catch her. Thinking it was another of van Drood’s henchmen I hurtled straight for the creature—and ran right into Marlin. We all tumbled to earth, rolling over and over the prickly ground. We came to a stop in a field of heather. A winged shape landed next to me and peered into my face.

  “Are you all right?” Raven demanded.

  “I’m fine,” I said, patting my skirt to pull it down over my knees. Daisy was struggling to her feet.

  “I’m going after him,” Raven said to Marlin. “You get the girls back to the train.”

  “I can get us back on the train myself,” I said, ruffling my wings to make sure I hadn’t broken any feathers in the fall. A few floated loose but otherwise my wings felt sound.

  “Good,” Raven said. “Then take Daisy. Marlin and I will give chase to that demon.”

  But Marlin insisted on seeing us back to the train, which was lucky since I had lost so many feathers I couldn’t fly properly at all. If the train hadn’t stopped at a station we might never have caught up to it. Sam and Agnes were standing on the platform. Mr. Bellows was pacing up and down. “Thank the Bells!” he swore when he saw us. “I was afraid you’d all been killed. Are you all right, Daisy? Did that monster hurt you?”

  Daisy, who’d put up a valiant front since we’d crash-landed in the heather, suddenly burst into tears and rushed into Mr. Bellows’s arms. Agnes hugged me while Sam grasped Marlin’s hand and leaned in to whisper something in his ear.