Julie Berry - Crime and Carpetbags

If theres one thing I should know better than most, its to be careful what you wish for. I once commanded an all-powerful djinni, and he turned out to be nothing but trouble. Did I get all my wishes granted? Hardly! Did I nearly die a gruesome death, a dozen times over? Yes, indeed.

(Perhaps not quite a dozen, but after enough near misses, one loses count.)

You would think the experience wouldve cured me of wishing. You would think, after being, for example, thrown in the cellar at my old girls school, caught by police, hounded by a ruthless businessman, burgled by a hired criminal, nearly eatenor worseby demon beasts, and almost cursed to within an inch of an icy grave by an undead sorcerer, that I would settle down to a quiet life of crocheting lace and planting ferns in flowerpots.

If you thought such things about me, Maeve Merritt, youd be very much mistaken.

Once word gets about that theres an all-powerful djinni in town, some people will go to any lengths to snatch him from you. The past winter, Id done battle with enough greedy villains trying to steal my djinni that I couldve made a small fortune just by selling them tickets to wait in line for their turn to rob me.

In the end, I parted ways with Mermeros, my ill-tempered, rude, arrogant djinni. Far from curing me of my desire for wishes, this only whetted my appetite for them to a razor-sharp point. Even if it meant I had to earn my wishes myself, without any magical help.

I wished to form a cricket league for girls. I wished to travel the world someday. I wished for a small fortune, as thats what my wishes would cost. Id need to earn that fortune, now that I had no djinni, so I wished to gain a real education, the kind boys were given, without the silly nonsense of dancing and deportment taught to girls. I didnt just wish it. I needed it.

When all the hubbub was over, I no longer had Mermeros. My old school sacked me for my general rottenness. Then, by a pure miracle, I was invited to move into the Bromleys home and be privately educated along with their granddaughter, Alice. I jumped at the chance. Of course, thats also because I adore Alice. Shed been my roommate at my old girls school. She was the only good thing about that wretched place. Miss Salamancas School for Upright Young Ladies. One could hardly say its name without feeling queasy.

With Alices help, I persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Bromley not to hire us a governess but a real classics tutor, a gentleman out of Oxford who could teach us Greek and Latin. History, too, and literature, geography (my favorite), proper mathematics, and all the subjects one might need to become truly successful.

Id gotten my wish. I wanted Greek and Latin; now I was saddled with Greek and Latin . And with Mr. Abernathy, our very energetic tutor. I rather enjoyed the stories from Homer and Virgilthose naughty, naughty gods!and the geography bits, but the languages! Conjugations and declensions and definitions until my eyes swam. Symbols that arent even letters, but pure gibberish. It was a nightmare.

Alice loved it, though, so there was no turning back. Id created a monster.

Be careful what you wish for.

Scholarly matters aside, 1897 was an extraordinary year. It was Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee, celebrating sixty years of her reign. There would be no end of fuss over it, all year long. Much pomp and circumstance.

For me, it was the year I set out to grant wishes for others, so to speak. To weave a web to catch a wish for someone I dearly loved. All the while, someone else was spinning a web to catch Mermeros, the djinni, by any means necessary, and they didnt care if they caught the people I loved best along the way.

Wishes are a dangerous business.

***

Right at this moment, I was wishing hard for my sister Evangelines wedding to end.

It was late afternoon on an April Saturday, and the setting sun pouring through wavy glass windows lit up my familys little Luton parish church, filled up with our relatives and neighbors. Men sat in stiff cravats and women in their finest feathered hats. The scent of too many mingled perfumes tickled my nose.

Alice sat beside me in the pew of the brides family, near the front of the church. She seemed to be enjoying herself, listening to the readings, watching the organist play, even smiling in a sappy sort of way at my sister, who stood next to my soon-to-be brother-in-law, Rudolph, stammering out their vows in turn. As if they were, somehow, a tender picture of sweet romance. Disgusting.

Rudolph looked like a butler, or perhaps, a penguin. My sister looked like someone had taken a thousand lace handkerchiefs and pinned them to a wicker mannequin, with a few orange blossoms thrown in. How, in fact, could Rudolph be sure that was Evangeline under there? One of the better stories from the Bible is about that very problem, when a fellow thought he was marrying one sister, and it turned out he got the other one. I laughed out loud when they read it to us in Sunday school, and got a stern reprimand for it.

To the other side of Evangeline stood my two other sisters, Deborah and Polydora, as bridesmaids, dressed in yellow ruffles and clutching bouquets. Deborah, age eighteen, kept darting coy glances at some young man among the guests, while Polydora, the eldest at twenty-three, made a point of not letting her gaze drift to Constable Matthew Hopewood, her not-exactly, not-quite-yet-but-almost-certainly-probably beau. She couldnt, in fact, see him, as Evangeline had put her foot down and insisted that Polydora couldnt, under any circumstances, wear her spectacles during the wedding.

Thats Evangeline for you.

There had been talk of me donning the costume and standing there beside them, sneezing into my own bouquet of flowers. One camp in the family said that I must, that it simply wouldnt do for one sister to be absent from the wedding party. The other camp contended that since the sister in question was me , I might find six different ways to cause a scene and ruin the blessed occasion.