“I wonder why the Mage has never dated anyone else.…”
“Who knows,” she says, shaking it off and looking back at her computer. “Maybe he has secret Normal girlfriends.”
“Or maybe he really loved Lucy,” I say, “and never got over her.”
“Maybe,” Professor Bunce says. She’s not paying attention. She types for a few seconds, then looks up at me. “You just reminded me of something I haven’t thought of in years. Wait here.” She walks out of the kitchen, and I figure she probably won’t be back. The Bunces do that sometimes.
But she does come back, holding out a photograph. “Martin took this.”
It’s three Watford students, two girls and a boy, sitting in the grass—by the football pitch, I think. The girls are wearing trousers. (Mum says nobody wore school skirts in the ’90s.) One of them is pretty obviously Penelope’s mum. With her hair down and wild, she looks a lot like Penny. Same wide forehead. Same smirk. (I wish Penny were down here, so I could tease her about that.) And the boy is obviously the Mage—different with his hair longer and loose, and with no silly moustache. (The Mage has the worst moustache.)
But the girl in the middle is a stranger.
She’s lovely.
Shoulder-length yellow-blond hair, curly and thick. With rosy cheeks, and eyes so big and blue, you can see the colour in the photo. She’s smiling warmly, holding Penelope’s mum’s hand, and leaning into the boy, who has his arm around her.
The Mage really was dead handsome. Better looking than either of the girls. And he looks softer here than I’ve ever seen him, smiling out one side of his mouth, with an almost sheepish look in his eyes.
“Lucy and I never really fought,” Professor Bunce says. “I’d fight, and Lucy would just try to change the subject. It was never a fight at the end, either. I think she stopped talking to me because she got tired of defending Davy to me. He was so intense by the time we left school—radicalized, ready to charge the palace and set up a guillotine.”
I realize that Professor Bunce is talking to herself now, and to the photo, more than she is to me.
“And he never shut up,” she says, setting the photo on the counter. “I still don’t know how she could stand him.”
She looks up at me and narrows her eyes. “Agatha, I know I’m being indiscreet—but nothing we say in this kitchen leaves the kitchen, understood?”
“Oh, of course,” I say. “And don’t worry about it—my mother complains about the Mage, too.”
“She does?”
“He never comes to her parties, and when he does, he’s wearing his uniform, and it’s usually caked with mud, and then he leaves early. It gives her a migraine.”
Professor Bunce laughs.
Her mobile rings. She takes it out of her pocket. “This is Mitali.” She looks back at her computer and clicks at the touchpad. “Let me check.” She picks up the laptop, balancing it against her stomach, propping the phone between her ear and shoulder, and walks out of the room.
She leaves the photo on the counter. After a moment, I pick it up.
I look at the three of them again. They look so happy—it’s hard to believe none of them are on speaking terms now.
I look at Lucy, at the colour in her cheeks and her blue-sky eyes, and slip the photo into my pocket.
58
LUCY
I wish you could have known him when he was young.
He was handsome, of course. He’s still handsome. Now he’s handsome in a way that everyone sees.…
Then it was just me.
I did feel sorry for him; I guess that’s how it started. He was always talking, and no one was ever listening.
I liked to listen. I liked his ideas—he was right about so many things. He still is.
“How goes the Revolution, Davy?”
“Don’t tease, Lucy. I don’t like teasing.”
“I know. But I do.”
He was sitting alone under the yew tree, so I sat down next to him. When we first started talking, I’d meet him here so that no one would see us together—so no one would see me with daft old Davy.
Now I liked to meet him under the yew tree because it was almost like being alone together.
“You’ve been quiet lately,” I said.
“There’s nothing more to say. Nobody’s listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“I brought my grievances before the Coven,” he said. “They laughed at me.”
“I’m sure they didn’t laugh, Davy—”
“You don’t have to laugh out loud to mock someone. They treated me like a child.”
“Well, you are a child. We both are.”
He looked directly into my eyes. There’s something about Davy’s eyes. They’re half magic. I could never look away.
“No, Lucy. We’re not.”
* * *
After that meeting with the Coven, Davy was always in the library, or bent over a book in the dining hall, dripping gravy over some four-hundred-year-old text.
Sometimes I’d sit with him, and sometimes he’d talk to me.
“Lucy, did you know that Watford used to have its own oracle? That’s the room at the top of the Chapel with the window that looks out over the school walls. The oracles worked there. They were as important as the headmasters.”
“When did that end?”
“Nineteen fourteen. It was an austerity measure. The idea was that oracles would donate their services as needed after that.”