“No! No! That’s clearly the ablative case, you foolish girl!” Mrs. Thistleton smacked the chalkboard with the palm of her hand, making a cloud of whitish dust puff into the air. The words beneath her fingers got smudged, but Tess hardly cared. “Amico magno! Pay attention!”
Tess’s head ached. She stared at the copybook on the desk in front of her, wondering how on earth she was going to make sense of the mess of scribbles when—or if—she ever read these notes again. Her mind groaned beneath strange words like nominative, declension, and vocative, and it struggled particularly with one Mrs. Thistleton had used for her a few times already—obdurate. She’d been afraid to ask what it meant, but she had a feeling it was something extremely unpleasant.
“Can I please take a break?” asked Tess. “I need a drink of water.”
“You may take a break,” Mrs. Thistleton growled, turning back to the board, “at half past twelve and not a second before.” She picked up the duster and cleared some space amid the chalked nonsense. “We’ll begin again with the nouns of the second declension—and I hope you’re paying attention this time.”
“What’s the point of this?” Tess muttered, flipping to a fresh page in her copybook. “It’s not like anybody even speaks Latin anymore.” Mrs. Thistleton froze at these words.
“I’ll pretend,” she said, without turning around, “that I didn’t hear you say that.”
Tess stifled a sigh and picked up her pencil as Mrs. Thistleton began to drag her chalk across the board. It squeaked in protest and Tess felt a silent kinship with it. Under the neckline of her cardigan Violet stirred and Tess reached in a finger to stroke her, hoping Mrs. Thistleton wouldn’t notice. We wouldn’t want to cause a distraction now, would we? Tess thought with a small grin.
“Now, most of the second-declension nouns and adjectives are masculine—some are neuter, but we’ll deal with those in a moment,” Mrs. Thistleton began, busily writing. “Their endings are commonly -us and -er, but…”
Tess’s pencil stilled as she stopped listening. This was making even less sense the second time around, and she knew there was no point in taking any more notes. Keeping her eyes on Mrs. Thistleton, she slipped the Star-spinner out of her pocket and placed it in her lap, underneath the table and out of sight. Its warm weight felt comforting, like a purring cat.
As Mrs. Thistleton droned on, Tess let her thoughts wander. She ran her thumb along the Star-spinner’s edge, her mind focused on explosions in faraway worlds.
When something moved under her hand, she barely registered it for a second or two. Then she jerked upright in the chair, trying to look down at the device without being noticed. The Star-spinner had separated into an upper half and a lower one, and the top half of the object had begun to move counterclockwise, like someone screwing off a lid. Tess pushed and it clicked, the tarnished marker moving one place to the left.
Tess fought to keep calm. The Star-spinner, she thought. Of course it makes sense that it spins. Why didn’t I think of it before? She tried to memorize everything—exactly how the device had started to move, the fact that there was no light, nor any sign of the void, how much pressure it took to get it going, and anything else she could remember. It was all slipping out of her head already and she wondered if she’d ever be able to do this again.
I have to do this again, she told herself. And I have to tell Thomas!
Then Tess noticed the complete silence in the room. She looked up, panicked, expecting to be met with Mrs. Thistleton’s silent angry glare—but the sight that greeted her was even stranger than that.
Before her was a long table piled high with books. The high semicircular window was the same but the wheeled chalkboard and Mrs. Thistleton were gone. A strange haze hung over everything like a half-light or a veil.
And at the far end of the table, his head resting on an open book, there was a sleeping man.
He had a mustache and thick dark hair with a wide stretch of pale scalp at the parting, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles were sitting by his elbow. Tess had no idea who he was.
She ducked under the table, where she tried to breathe quietly and think even more quietly still. She dug her fingers into the carpet, her heart thumping hard at the discovery that her flesh met no resistance—her fingers passed right through the pile as though it weren’t there. Or, Tess realized, as though I’m not.
Just then the man gave a loud snore, which turned into a cough—which, to Tess’s horror, turned into him waking and sitting up. She could hear his groan as he leaned to stretch out his back and the scraping of his spectacles against the table as he picked them up.
“Nature calls,” the man muttered, apparently to nobody. He slipped his feet right out of his untied shoes and padded away in his stockings. Tess shrank, her heart beating so hard it shook her rib cage, but the man didn’t notice her as he left the room. She didn’t move until she heard the distant lavatory door closing behind him, and then she scrambled out from underneath the table. She blinked as she looked around; everything was out of focus.
But she could see enough to know that besides the fact that Mrs. Thistleton wasn’t in it and it was messier than she would have stood for, this room looked just like her office. The room was full of books, piled on the table and in heaps on the floor, as well as thickly stacked on shelves along two walls.
As quickly as she could, Tess walked to the end of the table the man had just been sitting at and glanced at the book he’d been reading. It was in a language she couldn’t understand and she frowned at it. A stack of thin notebooks stood beside the book, and their owner’s name was written on the top volume. Tess recognized the ornate handwriting immediately.
Helena Molyneaux de Sousa, Notes, 1938.
Tess felt faint. Helena Molyneaux! That’s Thomas’s mother! Her head began to cloud over, the thudding pain between her ears reaching an unbearable pitch. This didn’t make any sense, but before she could properly start to think about it, she heard the sound of the lavatory door unlocking.
She dropped to her knees and scuttled under the table again, desperately looking for a better place to hide. Her gaze fell on the man’s empty shoes, and as she watched, a mouse hopped up onto the toe of the left one. It began nibbling contentedly at the shoelace and after a moment or two the mouse’s tiny black eyes found her. It remained completely calm, as though spotting a tousle-headed girl crouched awkwardly on the carpet with a tarantula on her neck was a completely normal thing in this household. Tess watched the mouse for a moment or two, feeling herself relax.
So that’s where I am, Tess thought, giving the mouse a small grin. I wonder if you can go and fetch Thomas? Her heart lifted a little and instinctively she reached for Violet—but then her breath caught in her throat as she realized the spider was gone.
Tess sat for three juddering heartbeats, trying to think. Her eyes raked the patterned carpet—could Violet have fallen? Gone exploring? Could the journey to this world have harmed her somehow? There was no sign of her anywhere and Tess’s panic began to build again. She shoved her hand into her cardigan, feeling around frantically, but Violet was nowhere to be found. It’s not like her to just wander off, especially not in a new place, Tess told herself. Even if it does look remarkably like the old place.
She fought to control her breathing. Logic, she told herself. Come on. She squeezed her eyes shut and began to flick through the things she knew for sure, one by one. There is more than one reality. I have the Star-spinner, which lets me see between worlds—and maybe do more than that. I used to be able to go from world to world as a kid, until I forgot about it. Her eyes popped open. And I forgot about it because of Violet.
Miss Ackerbee’s voice filled her memory and Tess remembered the day everything had changed. In her mind, she was once again in Miss Ackerbee’s parlor, listening to her explain how Violet had been the thing that had kept Tess tied to one world, had made her stop flitting between realities. So if that’s true, perhaps she can’t come through. If she’s my anchor to the world—to my world—perhaps she stays behind and I go. She chewed the inside of her mouth. And maybe she can bring me home.
Tess gazed at Thomas’s mouse. Its nose quivered and it cocked its head to one side in a gesture that looked so intelligent and friendly Tess felt a squeeze of loneliness. I miss you, she told Violet, inside her mind. A hot tear spilled down her cheek. Impatiently, she brushed it away, trying to focus.
Somewhere close by, she heard the man whistling and there was the sound of a kettle being filled with water. Let him stay away for a few minutes longer, Tess pleaded inside her mind, and squeezed her eyes shut.
She began to build Violet from memory. Her legs, her body, her cluster of shining eyes, the feel of her movement, until the image of the spider was so clear it felt that Tess could reach out her hand and Violet would come crawling into it. She could sense the gentle tickling tapping of her feet, just reaching Tess’s palm…
Then she opened her eyes again and set the Star-spinner moving, turning its upper half back until it clicked into place once more. The discolored marker settled back into its original position but nothing else happened. Queasy disbelief filled Tess’s mouth—but at the same time as she saw the man’s stockinged feet reentering the room, she felt the air around her refocusing and Violet, the real Violet, clinging to the sleeve of her cardigan. The man’s feet vanished and the wave of relief was so great that Tess scrambled upright, whacking her head into the underside of Mrs. Thistleton’s table.
“What on earth are you doing on the floor, Tess?” Mrs. Thistleton said.
“Sorry—s-sorry, Mrs. Thistleton, I dropped my spider—I mean, I dropped my pencil,” Tess babbled. She hauled herself back into her chair, amazed at the sense of rightness that settled over her once Violet was safely ensconced in her usual spot. It was so profound it even outweighed the throbbing of her wounded head. My anchor, she thought, wishing she could get away with giving Violet a kiss. Miss Ackerbee was right about that.
Mrs. Thistleton watched all this, the tip of her nose lifting as she showed her distaste, and after a moment she shook her head and began to gather her things. “Since it’s practically half past twelve,” she said, “perhaps we can call it a morning. I’ll leave you to get some lunch, Tess, and I’ll see you back here at one sharp.” She bored through Tess with her gimlet-eyed stare. “I trust you’ll be more receptive to my instruction once you’ve had a chance to refresh yourself,” she continued.
“Um,” Tess began. “Yes. Of course. I’m sure I will.”
Mrs. Thistleton heaved a sigh so deep it made the paperwork on her desk flutter. “I truly have a Sisyphean task on my hands with you, child,” she muttered, sweeping toward the door. “If you learn a single thing in this room, it will be a miracle.” Tess listened to the clacking of her heels as it slowly faded away, only allowing herself to slump in her chair once the sound had completely gone.
A small smile grew on Tess’s face as she thought about the things she’d already learned in that very room—none of which Mrs. Thistleton had anything to do with—and she got to her feet, settling Violet at her neck. Her excitement began to build at the thought of what Thomas would say when she told him what she’d done—but then she realized she had to stifle it. A long, boring afternoon lay ahead, and Mrs. Thistleton would surely suspect something if Tess spent it grinning at her.
She settled her face, stood up straight and made for the door. “Better go and get some grub, girl,” she whispered to Violet. “And before we know it, we’ll see Thomas again. Just you wait!”