Everything else in the room had been scrupulously cleaned. The drawers in the nightstand had been emptied. Even the floor under the bed had been swept and polished, and all of the pictures seemed to have been exchanged for new ones. I could see where the old ones had hung, the faded squares on the wallpaper much larger than the nondescript landscapes hanging there now. I dug about under the mattress, hoping for some further hint as to who Greta had been. All I found were several novels and a list tucked between the headboard and the wall.
Read Cavendish’s Compendium of Spirits, chapter nine
Find pearl earring
Tell John about suspicions
“Well?” said a voice, and I almost leaped out of my skin. I whirled, expecting to see someone in the room. But there was no one.
“Hello?” I said, turning a full circle. The pictures, the closet standing open, a marble bust of a rather irritable-looking gentleman in a tricorn hat—
“I said, ‘Well?’ Not hello,” the voice snapped, and I whirled again, still utterly confused. The voice had a very clipped, no-nonsense tone to it, and it also sounded chilly and echo-y, as if the speaker were standing at the end of a long glass tube.
My eyes alighted once more on the marble bust. I crept toward it slowly. And then its stone eyebrows raised, and its mouth quirked, and it glared at me.
“As in, ‘Well, what are you going to do about your family, which is currently cursed to eternal petrification down in the dining room?’”
I flinched. Then I circled the bust, examining it for strings or wires. “Who are you?” I asked, eyeing its tricorn hat and mustache.
“I am a marble bust. But I used to be a Telurian prince. My spirit was bound to this effigy one hundred and fourteen years ago, when I angered one of the twelve kings of the underworld. I was forced to flee, and now I am doomed to cling to it for all eternity, or at least until I feel very confident the king is not going to find me and devour my soul, which I don’t think will be any time soon. Anyway, I asked you a question.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, coming back around to face the marble prince. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Well, I can tell you one thing: languishing about on a fur rug and staring at the ceiling is not the path to enlightenment.”
“I know that,” I said. “But I only just got here, and I know hardly anything about being a witch—”
“Excuses,” he said. “How d’you suppose you’ll learn? By pretending! By pretending so convincingly that you trick yourself and everyone else into believing it. Because in the end, we’re all only pretending to be the things people think we are, or pretending to be something else, or looking like a marble bust, when really we’re not a marble bust at all.”
I stared at the prince, waiting for him to get to the point.
“You must break the curse,” he said finally. “You must bring your family back to life and catch their murderer. I see no other solution.”
“Do you know who killed them?” I asked hopefully. “Mrs. Cantanker said it was a ghost—”
“I’m a marble head confined to my pedestal. I don’t know anything.”
“Then how do you know they’re dead in the first place?”
“Because sometimes people whisper things in my general vicinity. And just the other day, oh, did I hear some exciting whispers . . . I did indeed! About a spell called ephinadym mulsion. About how the last Blackbird was going to be put in this very room for safekeeping.”
“You mean for sleeping.”
“I mean for safekeeping. That’s you, I suppose. The last Blackbird . . . hmm. Not much like your mother, are you?”
I squinted at the prince. “Did you know her?”
“Alas, I did not. I did not even have the honor of seeing her. My eyes are marble. They gather no light. But I heard her from time to time. . . .” The prince’s tone became dreamy. “Her voice was always so beautiful, like the song of a nightingale, or the wind in a rosebush. Your voice is not beautiful at all.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes, it sounds like a dog chewing a stick. Now, as I was saying. Talk to the servants. They are an intriguing lot. Make friends with them. And ask them if they know anything about a certain something called the League of the Blue Spider, and a certain witch named Magdeboor. See what they say.”
I thought about that. “And what about the curse? Do you know how I can break it?”
“I haven’t the foggiest,” said the marble prince. “Now go! Shoo! Be gone!”
“This is my room—” I started to say, but the marble prince dismissed me with a shake of his head. “I was here long before you, young lady,” he said, and began to reminisce about distant times as if I weren’t there at all, about how he had once played cards with the Tentacle King of Dreng and not exactly won, but at least lost very heroically. In the end I put one of Greta’s petticoats over his head and turned him to face the wall. Then I set off in search of answers.
I found Bram in a dusty corridor, balancing on a chair and attempting to stuff a crack in the cornice with straw.
“Mice?” I asked, stopping next to him.
Bram shook his head. “Triggles,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Little wretches. I patch up one of their passageways, and they dig a dozen more.”
I wanted to ask him what triggles were, but I also didn’t want to seem stupid, so I did the logical thing and assumed they were pests at least tangentially related to mice. “Have you tried tea leaves from the bottom of the pot?” I suggested. “At Mrs. Boliver’s, where I used to work, I’d scrape them up and plop them all over the shelves in the pantry to keep the crawlies out. Worked like a charm.”
Bram gave me a confused glance and began stuffing another of the little doorways. I turned red.
“Look, I’ll help you,” I said quickly, dragging over a second chair. Hitching up my skirts, I climbed onto it. Bram looked at me as if I were mad, but I didn’t stop. I began snatching handfuls of straw from the bucket in the crook of his arm, stuffing them into the popped-out eye socket of a plaster cherub. The straw smelled stingingly of lavender oil, as if it had been drenched in the stuff.
“Bram?” I said, after a while. “Have you ever heard of something called the League of the Blue Spider?”
Bram wobbled on his chair. “What do you know of that?”
“Nothing,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking.”
I was pleased to note that while he had been shocked by my question, he did not look entirely unhappy. If anything, the little rain cloud under which he seemed to be operating lifted slightly. But in the end he only returned to his bucket, saying quietly, “I can’t speak of them. It isn’t allowed.”
“Why not?”
“Because. Terrible things will happen.”
“You know, terrible things mostly happen when people don’t speak of things. It’s almost always better in the long run to say things rather than to not say things.”
I didn’t know if this was true, but the Mother Superior had always told us that when she wanted us to confess to something, and I very much wanted to know whatever Bram knew of the League of the Blue Spider. I thought I’d try my luck.