The Shadow in the Glass by JJA Harwood (any book recommendations txt) 📕

in the square, a shivering monkey curled up in the collar of his jacket. With every turn of the barrel organ, a fresh wail arched over the street.

An elbow caught Eleanor in the ribs. A hand brushed against her hips, and she could not tell if it was feeling for her or her purse. An umbrella sliced through the gloom, and she ducked to avoid it scratching across her eye. She huddled into her shawl and kept walking, a sick, twisting fear slowly filling her up.

Eleanor forced herself to follow through with her plan. Lizzie’s death had not changed anything. She needed the money Lizzie had stolen from her. Surely Lizzie could not have spent twenty-five pounds in one go – that was almost three years’ wages. She must have been lying. And if she hadn’t been, Eleanor would take what Lizzie had bought and sell it on.

Of course, Eleanor thought as she climbed up the narrow servants’ staircase, she could always wish for her money back. But the words ‘I wish you’d just stop’ kept circling around her head, dragging her thoughts back to Lizzie’s pale and bloated face, and the black-eyed woman’s empty eye sockets loomed in Eleanor’s memory, vast and unknowable, and—

Eleanor shoved the thought away. It hadn’t been like that. Of course it hadn’t.

She eased the door to Lizzie’s room open with the toe of her boot.

Drawers were hanging open, the sheets had been cast aside, the straw mattress had been slit open and rummaged through. Whatever the policemen had been looking for, they’d made a mess searching for it. Eleanor went inside and started looking in the chest of drawers. She reached for the first pile of stockings and drew her hand back, imagining Lizzie’s work-roughened fingers carefully folding and putting her things away. Sweat trickling down her neck, she turned over Lizzie’s stockings and chemises, listening for footsteps on the stairs and trying not to feel sick.

At last, she found something. Her fingers met something hard and Eleanor lunged for it. She drew out a leather purse and tore it open, heart pounding. It was empty. Eleanor’s twenty-five pounds was long gone.

She turned to leave, and something caught her eye. It was a jug and basin made of patterned white porcelain, far too fine for the plain, sensible room of the head housemaid. Lizzie had been a senior servant, and had been entitled to a larger portion of tea in the mornings and the first helping of every meal, after the cook and housekeeper had served themselves. She had not been entitled to this.

Eleanor crept closer. The jug had been put under Lizzie’s bed. She bent down, pulled it out, and felt a slap of recognition.

This had been hers. This had been the jug and basin set that Eleanor had used for years, which Mrs Pembroke had chosen for her specially. She’d thought it had been sold off, but all this time, Lizzie had been hiding it.

A wave of anger crashed over her. Eleanor snatched up the jug and basin and took them into her own room, her hands shaking. There was nothing that Lizzie wouldn’t have taken from her. Well, now Eleanor was going to take it back, and there was nothing that Lizzie could do about it, because at long last she had stopped—

Eleanor almost dropped the jug. Her anger vanished, and a cold fear crept through her.

She had to know.

The rain had leaked through the roof at Granborough House, soaking into the maids’ attic rooms. Aoife and Daisy were sprinting upstairs with all the buckets they could find, and back down again to pile up their things in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Eleanor ignored them. She retreated into her own room, where there was a large damp patch on the ceiling, but nothing had actually leaked through. She closed the door behind her and sank onto the bed. Lizzie had died after she made the second wish. And, though it had been terrible, she had got what she had asked for. Lizzie’s death had stopped her torments.

Eleanor gripped the edges of her bed.

She didn’t understand. Wishes were supposed to be nice things. They were granted by smiling fairy godmothers and left everyone living happily ever after. They couldn’t leave her like this – lost in horror and disgust that was deep enough to drown in.

She remembered the woman’s black eyes. Pits. Coal shafts. Empty.

Eleanor cleared her throat. The black-eyed woman had said she would be with her always. If Eleanor called her, would she come?

‘We must talk. It’s important.’

‘What seems to be the problem, dear?’

Eleanor had been staring right at the place where she’d appeared. She’d seen nothing. One moment there was the dark shape of the dresser. Then she’d blinked, and the black-eyed woman was there, perching on the end of Eleanor’s bed as if she’d come to read her a story.

‘When I wished for Lizzie to stop tormenting me, she died.’

The black-eyed woman’s face was perfectly still.

‘Did you do that?’

The sound of the rain vanished. It still spattered against her window, but it was silent.

‘Did you think your wishes would be granted with no cost?’ the black-eyed woman asked, her voice silky. ‘Eleanor, darling, wishes are made every day but they are seldom granted. It takes a good deal of magic to grant a wish, and magic has its price. All things do.’

Eleanor couldn’t understand. The black-eyed woman had been sent to help her, hadn’t she? She was supposed to smile, and be kind, and tend Eleanor’s glorious future with a gentle hand. Instead, she had watered Eleanor’s hopes with blood, and now they had grown into twisted, monstrous things. How could she have done something like this?

‘But … but that doesn’t make sense,’ Eleanor insisted. ‘Nobody died to grant my first wish! You must be mistaken.’

‘Perhaps not a person, but there was a death. Even a little canary’s life is enough. I cannot make magic from nothing. Think of it as lighting a fire; there must be