In bed, Glory was screaming too, her body thrashing into wakefulness in the moonlit room.
A tall shape blundered through the door. Light flooded in after him.
‘It’s over,’ her father said, coming to the bed, wrapping her in his arms. ‘Hush now. You’re safe; it was just a dream.’ He pushed a sweaty strand of hair off her face as she shuddered and gasped.
‘Was it the Burning Court again?’
Glory nodded. She was eight years old and had been having the same nightmare for as long as she could remember. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. Thumps and grumbles could be heard through the walls as the building’s other residents resettled themselves.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for, baby-girl. Nothing to be frightened of either. I’ll chase the bad dream away.’
But in the end it always came back. As Glory got older, she learned to control her waking outbursts and no longer disturbed the house with her cries. The terror didn’t diminish though. The dream was so vivid; immediately afterwards, she could swear the scent of smoke clung to her hair.
Her father believed she’d grown out of it. In the early years, he tried to get her to describe it properly, and talk about what might bring it on. But even as a little girl, she was embarrassed by her weakness, refusing to revisit the panic of the night. And the Burning Court dream was bound up with two secrets that her father mustn’t know.
The first was the image in the glass panel. In the dream, Glory was the witch at the stake, yet the face she saw reflected was her mother’s. She recognised her from photographs, not memory, for Glory’s mother, Edie, had disappeared when she was three.
Edie Starling’s farewell to her husband and child had been a single line on a postcard, dropped on the doormat the morning she walked out of their lives – and perhaps her own – for ever. I love you, but it’s better if I go. Forgive me. That was the last they or anyone else heard of her. ‘She’ll have run off with some fancy-man,’ the neighbours speculated. ‘Done herself an injury,’ said others. ‘Too flaky for family life,’ declared the rest. Any of this could be true, but whatever else Glory’s mother was, she was also a witch. The illegal kind: unregistered, unlicensed and hunted by the Inquisition.
For this was Glory’s second secret fear: that the dream of her mother’s burning felt so real because her mother had been caught by the Inquisition, because it was true.
Yet despite this, once the nightmare was over, after she’d been soothed and petted and her tears had dried, she’d wait until the house was quiet again. Then she would climb out of bed and go to her attic window. She would look over London’s jumbled rooftops, the ghostly glow of the street lights, the darkness above. And Gloriana Starling Wilde would lift her chin, take a deep, defiant breath, and say the same prayer she had said ever since she could remember.
Please, God . . . when I’m grown-up, make me a witch.