The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  Rain loved to have things to tell Tip. He puzzled over them as if he were a military strategist, but Rain took this to be largely boredom. It seemed almost everyone was more interested in the progress of the war than she was.

  “Does your grandfather write you letters?” Rain once asked of Miss Plumbago.

  “Grandfather Cherrystone? No,” snapped Miss Plumbago. “You’d think he might. After all, he taught me to read. But he’s apparently too busy to write letters or send me little bank cheques.”

  He’s besieged at Haugaard’s Keep still, thought Rain, and ventured her conclusion to Tip, who thanked her for trying but seemed to know this already.

  No, it couldn’t last forever. In a couple of weeks, Madame Streetflye told them, it would be time for Rain’s class to take up Butter and Eggs. Most of the girls giggled and blushed. Rain didn’t have a clue until Scarly filled her in. Butter and Eggs was the Pertha Hills softsoap way of talking about Human Sexual Techniques: Practical Clarifications. Rain guessed that once she sat through that class, she could no longer allow herself to share a room with a boy. Neither, probably, would she want to, if she read accurately Scarly’s repertoire of expressions. Primarily scowl and disgust. What would Tip do then?

  The matter resolved itself with painful swiftness. On the very day she was bringing back to Tip the latest gossip she’d heard—that men were going to be conscripted from Shiz—Proctor Gadfry Clapp was called up to war.

  The way it happened was this. Lord Manning, the Senior Overseer, had stopped to pay an unexpected call, which was his right and privilege. All might have gone horribly wrong, since Tip was just passing through the stables when Miss Ironish rushed in unexpectedly to give some instructions to Lord Manning’s coachman. Tip was caught between Miss Ironish entering the annex from the schoolyard side and the coachman arriving from the service entrance. Luckily, Miss Ironish took Tip for the coachman’s boy. She handed over some papers folded inside a clasped sleeve of leather, school accounts or an inventory of students or something. “Store these in Lord Manning’s pouch, young man.” Tip brought them to the horseman, who in return told Tip to ask the Cook for a few extra apples. The horses had been ridden hard on such urgent business.

  Suddenly, on this risky morning, Tip became a fixture in the backstairs without anyone quite having twigged to his lack of specific sponsorship.

  “Bring your man this carroty cream crumble, you,” said Cook, who by and large liked men, her several husbands ample proof of that.

  “Tell your Cook this may be the best cream crumble in Shiz,” said the coachman back.

  “Tell your fellow to tell me something I don’t know.”

  Lord Manning had had enough of hysterics. Having delivered his sorry news to Gadfry Clapp, he was in no mood to stay for a cold school luncheon. The proctor sat in marmoreal paralysis in his study, but Miss Ironish followed Lord Manning right into the ablutorium and out again, hissing at him. (The teachers kept their doors open a crack to catch the drama.)

  “I am not the Emperor of Oz, Miss Ironish,” snapped Lord Manning. “I do not order a thousand men to march to war. I scarcely order starch for my collars. I am merely implementing the diktat come directly from the Emerald City. Now will you spare me your tongue?”

  “Would you leave us without a man in the establishment? Lord Manning! I could not hold my head up with the parents of our girls, if they learned we had left them unprotected!”

  “I am confident in your professional skills, Miss Ironish. You are perfectly capable of fending off any attempt at assault or rapine.”

  “I shall close the school.”

  “You have no authority to close the school. Please do not give my headache a headache, Miss Ironish.”

  “Without a male in residence, I will not answer to the consequences.”

  By now Lord Manning had reached the kitchen, and he barreled through the yard as if he owned the place, heading for the stables. He caught sight of Tip munching a bacon butty courtesy of Cook, and he said, “This boy, he’s old enough to be some help, I’ll warrant.”

  “You would take the seventeenth proctor of St. Prowd’s and send him to battle, and leave a strapping stable boy in charge of the protection of schoolgirls? Lord Manning, have you abdicated your senses?”

  For an instant Lord Manning appeared to reconsider. But then he swiveled upon his boot heel and he poked a finger almost up one of Miss Ironish’s flared nostrils. “Our charge is the protection of children, Miss Ironish. Don’t you dare forget it. This boy isn’t old enough to be a soldier, but he is old enough and strong enough for lifting down the trunks from the box room and for chasing away beggars from the kitchen yard. He will be your factotum, and that’s the end of it. Boy, what is your name?”

  Tip, according to Scarly who told Rain all about this later, was so startled that he leaped to his feet and answered without hesitation. “Pit.”

  “Was your family too poor to give you a last name?” snarled Lord Manning.

  “Well, yes, sir,” he answered, “I mean, in a manner of speaking, as I’m an orphan. All they left me was my name.”

  Lord Manning blew out air between his teeth and buttoned his overcoat. As he beetled toward the kitchen door, he called over his shoulder, “You will be Miss Ironish’s right hand when she needs you, Pit. We’ll settle details of a salary allowance later, but for now housing and meals, the usual, and so on. Is that clear.”

  The Senior Overseer didn’t wait for an answer. He ignored the uninterrupted flow of Miss Ironish’s protests. His carriage left with purpose.

  The room slowly quietened down. Miss Ironish dried her face in a tea towel and said to Cook, “A cup of lemon tea to strengthen Proctor Gadfry, if you please, Cook.” And to Tip, she added, “Your employer left you behind in a school of young ladies. He must be mad. Straighten your shoulders and look at me when I talk to you. We’ll discuss your obligations this afternoon. For now…” But she couldn’t take the measure of her new situation yet, and fled the kitchen.

  Scarly came to Rain’s room that night to fill her in on the details, but Rain had heard a good deal already through the gossip. Proctor Gadfry had taken to his bed; Scarly had spent much of the day attending him with hot compresses and yeasty correctives. Tip was installed in a kitchen nook behind the wall stove, a corner that had been previously used for storing the butter churn and the lesser china. He had his own bed. The room was windowless but decent warm, said Scarly with more pride than envy.

  Come evening, he couldn’t sneak out to Rain’s room the way Scarly could. Cook, who missed her sons, marshaled Tip’s company for her own maternal needs. Besides, she was a guardian of the students’ virtue, so she took to sleeping on a cot in the kitchen. She put it across the door to his cubby so he would have to climb over her to get out at night. In the case of loo emergencies she supplied him with a basin for night waste and a plate to cover it from flies. From Rain, therefore, he was pinned good and proper, but not entirely from Scarly, who during the day had reason enough to pass through the kitchen. At night she brought news of Pit to Rain in the Annex.

  “Pit ?” asked Rain, incredulous.

  “It was the first thing he could think of. He didn’t want to say his real name, for his own reasons. The easiest thing was to turn his name backward, he said. Tip. Pit. Do you get it?” Scarly was very proud of getting it herself. Now that the stranger boy had been safely pegged into the class system of the household, which she could understand, the maid was eager to get back to studying the secret lessons that Rain had offered to resume.

  Rain had her own scholastic travails to deal with. Despite the upheaval to the management of St. Prowd’s Academy, the session called Butter and Eggs proceeded on schedule. Miss Ironish, who customarily spoke to girls at great length about Feminine Virtue, this year marched to the doorway of the classroom and without bothering to enter said shortly, “Girls, the most important thing to know about Feminine Virtue is that you’re going to need a hell of a lot of it. Carry
on, Madame Streetflye.”

  Rain thought the mechanics of sex less compelling than, say, the way a bird learns to fly from a nest, or a snake contorts to shed its skin. She couldn’t imagine herself ever wanting to descend to what Madame Streetflye called the Happy Hello or to shiver with the Special Sneeze that sometimes followed. Despite all the rude information, she couldn’t picture how the experience was actually managed. But there was so much she didn’t know, and she would learn in time. People changed, sometimes more than you expect, she told herself.

  For instance, she’d never imagined herself getting along with a bunch of children her own age. The one thing that hadn’t happened in all her peripatetic youth, she saw now, was having access to other kids. Adults had been such a mystery that she’d paid them no mind, but children might have provided something of a support circle. You don’t have to collect kids; they just clump of their own accord. Like rice otters or phantomescent spiders.

  Now she had Tip, a best friend; and Scarly, who was a little miffed at being demoted to second position; and even Miss Igilvy wasn’t quite as damp as the others. Miss Plumbago was a rotter, though.

  Still, Rain missed the few weeks of sharing a room with Tip, back in the paradise days before she’d heard of the Happy Hello. They’d never so much as touched hands after that one time their shoulders had brushed together on the ladder to the hatch. But they’d been closer without touching, without words, than all these girls who hugged and squealed and whispered and paraded about with their arms around one another’s waists.

  At least she imagined that she and Tip had been closer. There was no way to know.

  15.

  One afternoon, when Proctor Gadfry had been gone for a while and things were settling down into the new arrangement, the sky suddenly brightened with a sideways, vermouthy light. The air grew tinny. Ropes of clouds divided in parallel lengths, like carded wool. Since there’d been almost two weeks of cold rains, everyone went mad for a promenade.

  In the old days the teachers had been considered competent enough to escort young ladies on their excursions, but with Proctor Gadfry gone for a soldier (pity the poor army), Miss Ironish had become more skittish. Or perhaps Shiz was considered marginally less safe this year than last. Who knew? So Tip, the school’s jack of all trades, was enlisted to accompany Madame Chortlebush and eleven girls from Rain’s section on their brisk stroll through the streets of Shiz.

  Madame Chortlebush took a dim view of Miss Ironish’s precautions but she tried to toe the line. “You walk first, Pit, and check for anything that might threaten us. Fissures in the paving stones, wild beasts lurking behind lampposts, bands of crazy Munchkinlanders determined to kidnap us in broad daylight and take us hostage. We shall follow behind, marching in pairs and screaming for our lives.”

  Ten girls chose their partners so quickly that Rain had to team with Madame Chortlebush. This didn’t bother Rain as she still had little to say to her fellow students. And Madame Chortlebush did seem to enjoy Rain’s company so.

  Pit, Pit. Rain was trying to memorize his new name the way she had successfully learned to call herself Rainary. It was funny to see him kitted out in a somewhat ill-fitting school uniform found in the boys’ clothes press. Marching along in knickerbockers and thick stockings, and a stupid jaunty scarf knotted around his neck. Pit, Pit. “Miss Ironish’s aide-de-camp while her brother is occupied in military matters,” murmured Madame Chortlebush to some friend on the street while the girls had been required to stop and gawp at the famous pleated marble dome of St. Florix. “Not my type, our Pit, but he has pretty legs for a boy.”

  They had their lemon barleys at a café in Railway Square. Then they crowded onto a trestle bridge to watch the noon train for the Pertha Hills inch thrillingly beneath them, thickening the bright day with coal smoke and steam. When the air cleared and the girls were brushing smuts from their clothes and hair, Rain saw Scarly enter the plaza. She looked all around, frantically, until she spotted the school group descending the wrought-iron staircase at the other side of the tracks.

  “Madame Chortlebush,” she cried, and waved. The teacher halted the girls on the pavement before Blackhole’s, the place where university students bought and sold their old textbooks. Scarly caught up with them there.

  “Important news, Miss Ironish bade me find you at once,” Scarly said between gasped breaths. The news must be dreadful indeed, for what had been a bright sunny day an hour ago had gone glowery as they crossed the bridge, and the clouds that had pestered the region for two weeks were rushing back as if for a return engagement.

  Scarly handed an envelope embossed with the St. Prowd’s emblem.

  “I can’t imagine what is so important it couldn’t wait,” said Madame Chortlebush to Rain, while the other girls preened for the benefit of the young men from Three Queens or Ozma Towers brisking in and out of Blackhole’s. Madame Chortlebush ripped the envelope open with all the finesse of a hawk eviscerating a ferret.

  Then those massive ankles, clad in boots like iron socks, twisted and buckled. The considerable weight of Madame Chortlebush fell upon Rain, who could barely keep from collapsing. Tip ran to help, and he and Scarly and Rain lowered the teacher to the pavement. A clerk outside Blackhole’s, covering the books on a pushcart in front in the event of rain, hurried over, too.

  “She’s had news of some sort,” explained Scarly.

  The clerk didn’t have to abide by the niceties of St. Prowd’s. He glanced at the folded sheet and said, “Quite quite dreadful. Her brother on the mountain front has taken a bullet.”

  “Taken it where?” said Scarly, though Rain could guess, and by the look on his face, Tip could too.

  “Taken it to hell, I suspect. Look, we can’t have fainting ladies on the pavement in front of the shop. Business is poorly enough as it is. I’ll whistle for a carriage over to Railway Square, and you can get her back to St. Prowd’s, if that’s where she goes.”

  Someone came out with smelling salts. A passing student who studied magic tried to cast a charm of cheer, which made everyone’s noses dribble for a few moments but produced no other discernible effect. The clerk returned with the hired carriage. Wordless and shaken, Madame Chortlebush was helped aboard, and Scarly clambered in after her to see her home.

  “Mind the girls are safe, will you, Pit, there’s a good lad,” murmured Madame Chortlebush through her tears as the landau bounced off.

  It would have been easy enough for Tip to lead the girls back at a clip, since after months of pilfering and loitering he knew the streets of Shiz well. The skies, though, chose to open just then, with renewed vigor after the morning of sunny respite.

  “What’ll I do?” he asked Rain, as the troupe of twelve huddled under an awning, pushing the elderly and indigent out into the downpour where they belonged.

  “I saw a charabanc of some sort stationed at Railway Square,” she said. “If it’s still free, I bet we could all squeeze in.”

  Tip ran for it. The girls continued to squeal or feel faint or profess to be quite vexed indeed. The omnibus was less capacious than it had looked, and instead of four horses for which it had been designed, its shaft and harnesses were fitted to two world-weary donkeys.

  “I can take ten of you, no more,” said the driver, a thin mean man with toothbrush mustachios and a sorry case of pinkeye.

  “Surely you can manage eleven?” said Tip. “There are eleven girls, and this isn’t a downpour but a deluge.”

  “I’ll take ten, or none. It ought to be six, but as these young ladies are all asparagus stalks I’ll make an exception. I’ll make four exceptions. But I won’t kill my beasts for you lot. It’s always the last young miss who hobbles the enterprise. Call it superstition, them’s my terms.”

  Tip looked out of ideas. “It’s all right,” said Rain. “I’ll walk.”

  So off went the driver, promising to deliver the scholars to the front door of St. Prowd’s within half an hour. Rain and Tip stood a foot or two from each other, s
oaking but hardly chilled, looking and feeling clueless.

  Rain said, “It’s not going to let up for a while, by the looks of it. If we’re going to get in trouble anyway, let’s duck into that shop around the corner. SKURVY BASTARD’S.”

  They found it was closed and the storefront for lease. But the one past the newsagent’s, which said BROKEN THINGS OF NO USE TO ANYONE BUT YOU, looked open.

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter if I’m fired, as I never applied for the job in the first place,” agreed Tip at last, and they splashed through the gauze of rain and stamped through the puddles, and hurtled down the slick stone steps into the basement shop.

  It was empty of customers, but at the sound of the bell on the door the proprietor emerged through a curtain of strung grommets, washers, nuts, and crimped watch springs. It was a male Bear, thinner than a Bear ought to be. A Bear brought down by hunger and stooped, maybe arthritic too, with age. He wore a shaggy bathrobe and had a muffler wrapped around his throat.

  “Well, that’s a nice pair of water rats the gutter has splashed down my steps this time,” he said, not unkindly. “How may I be of service?”

  “We’re ducking the rain, actually,” said Tip.

  “Ducks like rain, but I take your point. Be my guest. If you find something of interest, sing out. In the meantime, don’t mind me; I’ll settle myself here and read the racing forms.”

  In time their eyes became accustomed to the gloom. “Of course, Loyal Oz wouldn’t dare race talking Animals now,” said the Bear. “These are antique forms. I just like to see if I can find any of my relatives. It makes me happy to see them referred to in print. I found one reference to my old auntie Groyleen, who I thought had perished in the skirmishes following the Mayonnaise Affair. She must be dead by now, of course, but in the form she was handicapped at seven to one, not bad for an old dame as she must have been even then. Don’t mind me, I’m mumbling.”

  They wandered about. The ceiling was low, and many of the items were tall, so the high bookcases or old apothecaire’s cabinets or postal boxes or discarded card catalogs, grouped back to back, built a series of chambers and secret vaults. It reminded Rain of something, but she couldn’t think what. “Look, a set of wizard’s globes,” said Tip. “They must have had their ether extinguished or they’d be valuable. Valuable and dangerous.”