Page 4 of The City of Stardust

It’s because of her desire to escape into a good book that she finds herself hidden inside the wardrobe, as Ambrose converses with a stranger in his midst. Then he says, “What do you want, Gabriel?”

Gabriel. Her other uncle is so rarely here, but whenever he visits, the rooms seem brighter, warmer, as though the house itself recognises the return of its wayward inhabitant. He never comes empty-handed, either, bringing gifts that are as magical as they are beautiful. Clockwork statues of princes and knights, fairies and queens, with intricate workings and gossamer wings stretched taut along thin wire. Or, once for her sixth birthday, a set of nesting dolls that neverrevealed the same object in its innermost hold. On his last visit, he gave her a dim light to read by, which never went out and yet never seemed to need batteries, either.

From eavesdropping on late-night phone calls, she gathers Gabriel does something vaguely illegal, but Ambrose is tight-lipped about the details. More than half of the travel books in the library belong to Gabriel. He must have been all over the world.

Adventure, Violet thinks, and a thrill ripples through her.

Then he mentions her mother, and she almost falls out of the wardrobe. Marianne Everly.

Her mother has long dissolved from her life, like so much salt in the sea. That is, she’s nowhere to be found, and yet she’s everywhere: her lingering perfume on moth-eaten coats; a slim gold watch abandoned on her vanity; the chair no one uses. Mostly, Violet imagines her in the blank spaces between paragraphs, or the invisible inhale before a sentence. Whereas her father is an entirely missing book—one that her mother holds the key to, if she holds anything at all. It’s a parent-shaped hole that Ambrose has tried to fill, in his own way.

After that, it’s impossible to concentrate on anything else. Besides, most of the conversation is frustratingly beyond her. A good half of it is muffled by the wardrobe, Ambrose’s footsteps on the creaky floorboards—and the sound of her own heart, pumping furiously in her ears as she tries to put it all together.

Only three days after her uncle’s mysterious visit, they receive another visitor. Instead of his usual rumpled jumper and jeans, Ambrose wears an ironed shirt and smart trousers to greet them, his shoes polished to a high shine. His hands twist around themselves nervously.

“Come, Violet,” he says. “There’s someone who wants to meet you.”

The woman is sitting in the living room, perched elegantly in Ambrose’s favourite armchair. Her hair is a pale flax gold hewn in a soft bob curling at her ears, and her hands are perfectly smooth, unadorned by rings or callouses. Her clothes are nondescript, but they have a tailor’s expert fit and the material looks silky andexpensive. The woman smiles pleasantly, offering her hand in greeting. The barest hint of vanilla drifts in the air.

Violet shivers and draws away.

“Hello, little dreamer,” the woman says, her voice as soft and unassuming as her appearance. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

She offers her slender hand again, but Violet stays where she is. Behind her, Ambrose puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

“She’s a bit shy. It’s been a long time since we’ve had any visitors,” he says with his usual mild warmth.

He gives her a small nudge, and she reluctantly crosses the living room to shake the woman’s hand. But instead of shaking, she clasps Violet’s hand in both of hers, her thumbs pressed into Violet’s palm. After a moment, she releases Violet and claps her hands, delighted.

“Well, you are your mother’s daughter,” she says, then turns to Ambrose. “She’s the spitting image of Marianne at that age. And just as talented, no doubt. What a fortuitous discovery. To think you have been holding out on me for so long. All those birthday cards I never got to send.”

Ambrose’s forehead knits, but before he can say anything, a small figure sidles past him to stand behind the woman. A boy, slightly older than Violet, with dark curly hair brushing the nape of his neck. His eyes are the colour of grey sea glass, almost translucent. He holds himself stiffly in old-fashioned clothes: a faded red woollen waistcoat, threads unravelling at the hem, over a shirt gone fuzzy at the collar with age.

“Ah, my assistant.” The woman gestures to the child behind her. “This is Aleksander.”

The boy watches Violet suspiciously, as thoughshe’sthe one standing inhisliving room. She glares back.

Ambrose diverts her attention. “Vi, why don’t you give Aleksander a tour of the house? Wouldn’t that be nice? Penelope and I have a lot to catch up on.”

The woman smiles at him with perfectly straight teeth. “We certainly do. Aleksander?”

As quietly as he came in, the boy detaches himself from Penelope, with the heavy air of an older child forced to babysit. It’s the absolute last thing Violet wants to do, not when she knows that she’s the topic at hand. Not when she could creep up to the second floor, remove the two loose floorboards Ambrose is forever threatening to fix, and drop into the tiny crevice above this ceiling, where the conversation would float up to her in perfect clarity.

Violet flashes a dark look at Ambrose.

He leans down and whispers, “Go on, Vi. Please.”

It looks like answers will have to wait. With a long-suffering sigh, Violet leads the boy out of the room, closing the door behind them.

Ambrose is not an old man—far from it. In fact, for years it seems as though he’s slipped into a kind of physical stasis, even as he drifted past his thirtieth birthday and is now slowly creeping towards his fortieth. But today he feels weary with responsibility, and underneath it all, a terrible panic at the mess he’s found himself in.

Such carefully laid plans, undone in an instant.

“It’s been a long time,” Penelope says, as Ambrose sits across from her in the living room. “I was beginning to think you were hiding from me.”

“This is the Everly house,” Ambrose says with a shrug that sits on the knife-edge between bravado and stupidity. “Where else would we be?”

No need to tell her that the house was an abandoned wreck twelve years ago, buried deep in English countryside. That none of them had wanted to stay in a childhood home when the childhood was so bitter. As the youngest, Ambrose had been the last to leave, and the first to vow that he’d never return—yet here he is, anyway. There’s something terribly ironic about returning to raise Violet, climbing back on to that wheel of destiny he’d been so desperate to escape.

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