The Magician's Land (The Magicians, #3)(76)

It was at one of Aunt Maude’s parties that it happened for the first time. She often entertained in those days, in a lavish style that some people thought was not entirely in line with the sacrifices that we all, as loyal subjects of the King, were expected to make on behalf of the war effort.

I suppose hers was a glamorous life, but it never seemed so to us. We all know what it is to be a child, to be innocent, to understand nothing. We understood nothing, the five of us. Not anything. But we watched everything.

We watched the hired musicians fuss with their instruments, rosin their bows and empty their spit valves into wineglasses. We watched the ladies wince at their uncomfortable shoes and the men tug at their uncomfortable collars. We saw the faces of the servants assume a practiced blankness the moment before they entered a crowded room. We stole canapés off the trays, and loose change from the coats of the guests.

But talk of the war bored us, and flirtatious chatter bored us just as much, and none of the guests cared about anything else. The scene may or may not have been glittering, as such parties are always described, but either way it was wasted on us. The only ones who paid any attention to us were the interchangeable young men who passed through the house in an endless parade, and they did so only to try to gain favor with Aunt Maude.

Their efforts were misguided—an interest in children was not a quality Aunt Maude prized. In her eyes it only made them weak and sentimental.

An hour or so after the first guests arrived the dancing would begin, and Aunt would drape her long limbs and eventually her entire upper body across the back of the piano, to either the consternation or the delight of the pianist, depending on who was playing. Our various bedtimes would come and go, but nobody put us to bed. Eventually we Chatwin children would retreat, yawning and fractious, to the back halls and upper stories of Dockery House, as it was known, though Aunt Maude didn’t like the name—she thought it sounded fussy and Victorian. Which it did, which is precisely why we children liked it.

It was on one such occasion that Martin began playing with an old grandfather clock that he found standing by itself in a back hallway. He was mechanically minded and could never resist a chance to tinker with something complicated and valuable.

As the other boy in the family I suppose I might have been expected to share his enthusiasm, but I did not. I wasn’t one of those keen children with well-defined, clearly articulated interests—I had very few enthusiasms at all apart from books. I was no good at games, or music, or drawing, or figures. I don’t wonder that Martin, as I later found out, thought I was weak, like those young men who were always wooing Aunt Maude. But it was in the nature of the calamity that followed that it took the strong and spared the weak.

I remember Fiona telling Martin to stop, he would break it, and Helen defending him—Helen never tired of scolding the rest of her siblings, but she worshipped Martin, and he could do no wrong in her eyes. I didn’t think it mattered either way, as Maude rarely visited this part of the house. If the clock stopped running it would be years before she discovered it, at which point she would decide that it had been that way all along. She was a careless woman.

Jane said nothing. She rarely spoke unless someone questioned her directly, and sometimes not even then.

Once he had the cabinet open Martin began repeating “bloody hell” under his breath. Even Helen shushed him when he swore, which he had been doing a great deal ever since our father went to France—the year was 1915, if I haven’t mentioned it, and father was a lieutenant in the Artists Rifles, a regiment that, its whimsical designation notwithstanding, was about to embark on a tour of the most brutal battlefields the Great War had to offer. I had wandered a little way down the hall to examine an interesting spiderweb in an angle of the ceiling, but upon hearing Martin I came back. I believe I was hoping that he and Helen might have a row.

The clock was a monster, its flat brass dial so richly studded with circles and hands and curious symbols that it looked like a cross scowly face. Martin dragged over a stool, the better to study it eye to eye, as it were. Cool, damp air breathed from inside its cabinet as it would from the mouth of a cave. As we watched the clock whirred to life and chimed the hour: nine o’clock at night.

Little Jane yawned. Martin stared at the clock furiously, meeting its crooked gaze, mussing his own hair without noticing it, as he did when something vexed him.

He hopped down.

“Bloody hell,” he said. “Rupes, take a look inside. What do you see?”

I obediently bent my head to look into the cabinet, and Martin pinned my arms and attempted to shove me inside. It was his idea of a joke. He was always shouldering me into closets and down stairs. There was nothing sinister in it, we were just bored to sobs.

“Leave off, Martin,” Fiona said, but without much conviction.

We tussled; the clock wobbled dangerously; he was stronger, but leverage was on my side, and eventually I got my shoulders jammed in the opening in such a way as to make further progress impossible. I sometimes wonder if things would have been different had he succeeded. But as it was he saw there was no more fun to be had, and he let me up. I was red-faced and breathing hard, my collar popped up on one side. He swaggered away in a circle to show that he hadn’t really meant it.

“Really, have a look,” he said. “There’s no works inside. No pendulum. What makes it go?”

No one was much intrigued by this mystery. Jane picked at a bit of peeling wallpaper. Fiona leaned against a wall and rolled her eyes at boys.