Liesl & Po

Po was a shadow on the wall, unmoving.

The old lady with the cane finished searching all the passenger cars, then berated the policeman for letting the crazy girl with the wooden box get away.

Mo, drinking hot chocolate and reading the paper, sat contentedly on an express train to Cloverstown, where he intended to intercept train 128.

Lefty licked dribbles of chocolate from Mo’s beard with a small pink tongue.

The alchemist and the Lady Premiere arrived at the gates of 31 Highland Avenue, where they had determined the magic had been taken by mistake.

A black-haired thief on his way to Gainsville stole two silver pieces from the grave of a dead man.

Time ticked forward. Stars collided. Planets were born and died. Everywhere and in every fold and bend of the universe, strange and miraculous things happened.

And so it was, just then.





Chapter Sixteen





JUST THEN, TOO, AUGUSTA HORTENSE VARICE-Morbower, second wife of the late Henry Morbower, and stepmother to Liesl Morbower, was rounding the corner of Highland Avenue in her carriage.

Her daughter, Vera, sat across from her, pale and sickly-looking despite the powder on her face and rouge on her cheeks, which she never went anywhere without, looking a little bit like a wriggly tadpole clothed in fur and lace.

“For the last time, stop your squirming!” Augusta barked at her daughter.

“Sorry, Mama,” Vera mumbled. She couldn’t help it. She squirmed when she was uncomfortable, and her mother’s temper made her distinctly uncomfortable.

She had been trying all morning to be as quiet and helpful as possible—since her mother had wrenched her out of her bed before dawn with the chilling words, “The little snot is gone! Fled! Disappeared!”

But as they rattled through the city, watching the dawn bleed pale gray light through the streets without shedding any light whatsoever on where Liesl had run off to, her mother’s mood only got fouler and fouler. Augusta screamed, and ranted, and pulled her hair, and swore. Everything was ruined, and terrible, and disastrous. Even the warm potatoes that the cook had prepared, and carefully wrapped in wax paper, were inedible, and Augusta had hurled her breakfast out of the carriage window in a rage after taking only a single bite.

Augusta could not have been more different from Vera: She was broad, and flat, and enormous, with a wide, coarse face and hands as thick as paddles. She, too, was dressed in fur and lace, but she gave the impression of a full-grown toad. It did not help that when she was angry, the two warts on her forehead seemed to swell in size, as though expressing indignation on her behalf.

And oh, was Augusta angry! She was furious. She was enraged. The warts looked frighteningly large. Even Vera shrank away from the sight of them.

Augusta feared that everything she had built—every single last shred of happiness and security, which she had had to wrestle and wrangle and tweak and pull and suck from life with all her strength—was on the verge of collapse. The big, lofty house at 31 Highland Avenue with all the obedient, silent, scurrying servants; the parties and the dresses; the fat feasts and the tables groaning under the weight of roasts and pies and puddings, when half the world starved; all of it would vanish, be snatched right from under her very feet were the girl not found.

Her marriage to Liesl’s father had been a marriage of convenience. She had once been Liesl’s teacher. She had hated the ridiculous little drip even then, of course, although she had done her utmost to hide it, and Henry Morbower was hoping Augusta would prove to be a good and decent stepmother to his only daughter. Augusta had realized right away that he would never love her. His heart belonged fully and completely to his first wife (a woman, Augusta thought sneeringly, who must have been as silly as she was pretty, for in all her portraits she was laughing—as though there were anything in the world to laugh about!—and wearing the simplest cotton dresses, though of course she could have afforded the richest satin gowns).

Augusta also knew, when she married Mr. Morbower, that he would never remake the will in her favor. Upon his death, the house and all the vast Morbower fortune—accumulated by Henry Morbower’s grandfather, a titan of the early railroads—would descend entirely on little Liesl Morbower, pale and strange and undeserving though she was. (A stupid one, like her mother; as a small girl she had danced in the rain! Actually danced in it! Ruining a pair of beautiful silk slippers in the process! Stupid.)