The Autumn Palace Read Free

they were about to work for the Duke, and the Duke would probably prefer Hamish to remain a ferret as much as possible.
    â€˜This is going tae be so exciting I cannae wait tae make a start,’ Hamish said. ‘And Col, at first I didnae like yer interfering, but now I can see ye’ll help Ondi get a job and then we’ll be working together and having adventures, so we will.’
    Ondine loved hearing him talk. There was something magical and a little bit naughty in the way he spoke. Just thinking about how they could stay together and work together made her glow. It really felt like everything would turn out wonderfully.
    The afternoon tea trolley arrived. Col ordered a potof Darjeeling for herself and some nibbles for Ondine and Hamish. 12 The waiter made a few deft moves and extracted side tables from within the armrests.
    â€˜This is tha good stuff, eh, lass?’ Hamish gave Ondine another of his lopsided smiles. The ones that made her go all silly in the head. The next moment he cut a small piece off his marinated artichoke and offered it to her.
    There was something so tender and touching about the action, Ondine felt overcome. She accepted the morsel and chewed it as delicately as she could. ‘It’s heavenly.’ She shut her eyes to savour the moment. When she opened them, she found Hamish gazing at her with adoration. They were lost in a bubble of love as she returned the favour, feeding him a tidbit from her plate.
    â€˜Easy on tha salad, hen.’
    â€˜Oh, sorry, I forgot you’re still not used to it.’ Ondine picked the leafy greens off her fork and replaced them with chunks of chicken and ham.
    â€˜It’s taking a while tae adjust, like,’ he said.
    It sure was. As a ferret he ate nothing but protein and fat. Not through choice but necessity, because carbohydrates could put him in a coma. And they didn’t like salad. But now he was human, surely he could vary his diet?
    As if reading her mind, he added, ‘Old habits die hard.’
    â€˜They certainly do,’ Old Col said, interrupting them. At which point Col tipped the remains of her tea into the saucer and then studied the tea leaves. ‘Oh, look, we’re going on a journey.’
    Ondine rolled her eyes – probably a safer option than going
Pfffft
, because she had another mouthful of scrumptious food. Since when did her great aunt look for signs in a teacup? Col had scorned her old friend Mrs Howser for doing just that at Thomas and Margi’s engagement party.
    â€˜No, really, look.’ Old Col held out the teacup for Ondine to see.
    To Ondine’s surprise, she saw the clear outline of a locomotive in the wet leaves. ‘That’s a . . . it reallylooks like a train. Mercury’s wings, I never thought you’d be into reading tea leaves. It’s even got a carriage and everything.’
    â€˜Really?’ Old Col knitted her brows and had another look in the cup. She turned the cup this way and that, then shook her head. ‘That’s not a carriage, dear, it’s a coffin. What a shame, that means somebody’s going to die.’
    Â 
    10    ‘Barry’ means ‘very nice’, ‘great’ even. Nice meal, great place, fabulous view, etc. Outside Edinburgh, ‘to Barry’ means to be sick. It’s really important not to confuse the two, otherwise you might end up insulting someone
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    11    Usually backstory does not belong at the front of the book. Ondine is aware of this and she has kept her episode of reminiscing brief
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    12    Darjeeling is expensive fancy-pants tea. It was introduced to Brugel when Marco Polo opened up the spice trade to Asia
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Chapter Three

    A s much as Ondine didn’t want to believe in the power of tea leaves, she couldn’t shake the image of that small coffin outlined in Darjeeling in Aunt Col’s cup.
    On their train chugged, through the valleys of Novorsk Kallun 13