The Palace of Laughter

by Jon Berkeley

  “Little, is there a tiger at the Circus Oscuro?”

  “I’ve never seen one,” said Little. “Why?”

  “I dreamed about one last night. At least I think it was a dream, but it seemed almost more real than real life. I was sitting in my barrel and a tiger came and sat near me. He looked like an ordinary tiger, but he spoke to me. He told me that he could smell the circus in me, but I’ve never been to a circus until tonight.”

  “If a tiger said it, it must be true.”

  “But it was only a dream,” said Miles.

  “Tigers don’t lie,” said Little. “Not even in dreams.”

  They came to a high stone wall, ivy bearded and crumbling with neglect. Miles made his way along the wall to a place where it had collapsed, leaving a gap like a missing tooth, and clambered across the tumbled stones.

  Once inside the wall, he let Little down gently. They stood waist-deep in a swaying sea of weeds, among old trees of various shapes, some twisted and wild, others tall and dark like pillars holding up the night sky. The hulk of a derelict mansion stood with its back to them, empty windows staring blackly across the overgrown garden.

  In the center of the garden stood an enormous beech tree. It was a strange tree, with two trunks growing from the mighty roots, joined together by a web of branches that clasped each other like the arms of wrestling giants. Perched among these branches was the dark jumbled shape of a tree house. It was made from an assortment of old furniture, floorboards, and tea chests, as though it had been washed up into the tree by a freak tidal wave. Little saw a cat stalk along one of the branches, and as her eyes became accustomed to the dark mass of the tree, she saw there were others—three, five, twenty and more cats, staring down at them, or washing their paws and pretending not to notice them.

  Miles grabbed the lowest rung of the rope ladder that dangled from a hole in the tree house floor, and called up the tree. “Lady Partridge! It’s me. I’ve brought a friend.”

  “So they tell me,” called a voice from above. “Bring her up, my boy.”

  He lifted Little to the ladder and she hopped up it on one foot. Miles followed behind.

  The inside of the tree house was unlike anything you’ve ever seen, unless you live in a curiosity shop with branches growing up through the floor. A large Persian rug covered the uneven floorboards, and a fire glowed in an ornate iron fireplace that was set into the crooked walls. The walls themselves consisted largely of a jumble of bookcases, kitchen dressers, and chests of drawers, stuffed to overflowing with books, fat candle stubs, prickly cacti, and jars filled with herbs, polished stones, old coins, dried fruit, broken jewelry, boiled sweets, nuts and bolts, dried petals, hairpins, seashells, and a thousand other strange things whose use could only be guessed at. There were so many books that they flowed from the lower shelves and piled themselves around the edges of the floor, among the umbrella stands, snake baskets, ships in bottles, milking stools, chopped logs, hookah pipes, china elephants, brass divers’ helmets, ornate vases, butter churns, whalebones, sewing machines and parrot cages, not to mention a large stuffed crocodile that stared with a glassy eye from a dark corner by the potbellied stove.

  A broad hammock was strung between the two trunks, where they passed through the tree house on their way to the sky. A large woman sat in the hammock, peering at Little over her crooked spectacles. In her lap sat a heavy book. She wore a black silk Chinese dressing gown decorated with red dragons, and her gray hair was piled up on her head with the help of several tortoiseshell combs that seemed on the verge of falling out.

  “Well well,” she said. “And who do we have here?”

  “I’m Little,” said Little.

  “And I’m a great deal Larger than I ought to be,” said Lady Partridge, and she burst into a great guffaw of laughter. Little glanced at Miles, who grimaced back.

  “Well sit down, my dears,” said Lady Partridge, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “If you can find a space.”

  Finding a space on the floor was not as easy as it sounds. The room was almost completely carpeted with cats. Tabbies, tortoiseshells, Siamese and Persians, cats as black as coal at night and as white as sugar in a china bowl. They swarmed over the tumbling piles of books, perched on every shelf and draped themselves across Lady Partridge’s hammock. A small orange cat sat squarely in the middle of her book, smoothing his ears with licked paws. The whole tree house purred.

  Little picked her way around the edges of the room, keeping her weight on her good foot. She peered into every nook and cranny, lifting things from shelves to look at them more closely. She listened to the ocean’s call from the seashell, and held up a jar of amber nuggets to let the light pour through. On the shelf behind the jar was an old photograph with curling edges, in which a young man with a freshly scrubbed face stood by a large and fabulous contraption of wheels and pistons and jagged teeth. “Who is this?” asked Little, picking it up as she replaced the jar. She held out the photograph to Lady Partridge.

  “That,” said Lady Partridge, peering down through the spectacles balanced on the end of her nose, “is my late husband, Lord Partridge. He was a handsome chap, as you can see, with a head full of bright ideas. At least that’s what I believed.”

  “Is that one of his ideas behind him?” asked Little.

  “I’m afraid so. That was his all-in-one tree converter. If you fed it enough coal and ink it could chop down a forty-foot tree, chew it up and convert it into fourteen school desks, eight hundred triple-column accounting ledgers, and enough matches to keep fifty stevedores chain-smoking for a year and a half. By the time he had perfected the machine it could get through half an acre of trees in just over an hour. He called it Geraldine, although I was never quite sure why.”

  “It says ‘Geraldine XIV’ on the side,” said Miles, looking at the photograph over Little’s shoulder.

  “Yes, they were all called Geraldine. There was a fleet of twenty-four of them at one stage, and no timber merchant could hold up his head unless he had at least two. It all came to an end when they realized they had made a dozen school desks for every man, woman and child in the land, and that the ledgers they had produced would not be used up before the middle of the next millennium. But by that time Dartforth—that was my husband’s name—was very wealthy indeed. He had set up several other businesses and seemed to have completely forgotten about Geraldine.”

  “Did you live in the big house then?” asked Little.

  “We did, my dear, and we had a butler and two cooks and a team of gardeners. We had swans on the pond and peacocks on the lawn, and for many years I never bothered my head about Dartforth’s businesses and what they might be making. Not until he was killed by an exploding pudding in one of his factories did I think to look at them more closely, I’m afraid.”

  “An exploding pudding?” said Miles, looking at the photograph with renewed interest. There was nothing in the young Lord Partridge’s bearing or his cheerful face to suggest that he might be on course for such a sticky end.

  “An exploding pudding,” said Lady Partridge. “It was a prototype they were developing in secret for the army. It was cunningly disguised as an enemy ration tin, and was designed to be sneaked behind enemy lines by undercover cooks. They tried to keep the accident quiet of course, and offered me a pension that would have kept me in luxury for the rest of my days, but all I wanted was to find out the truth about how Dartforth had died. I hired an investigator, and little by little he discovered what kinds of businesses my husband had been involved in.”

  She sighed. “He was not a bad man, Dartforth. I believe he really thought that everything he did was for the best, but he was always in such a hurry to get on with the next brilliant idea that he had no time to see the consequences of the last one. He invented a cereal that was supposed to make children grow big and strong, but some rats broke into the storeroom and feasted on it for a week. Soon there were rats the size of sheep rampaging around the countryside and a team of pyth
on handlers had to be brought up from the south to hunt them all down. Then there was the Saltifier, for making lakes more like the sea so people didn’t have to travel far to the beach, and the Jumbo-sized Cocktail Sausages that made people’s fingers and toes swell up. Everything he turned his hand to seemed to produce poisonous gases, or terrible nocturnal noises, or two-headed chickens. After Dartforth died, there was only one thing to be done. I spent most of the money he had made over the years putting right the damage that he had done. I had some factories converted to making things that people really did need. Others, I’m afraid, simply had to be dynamited, in the hope that someday the grass will be able to grow over them.”

  “You must have been very sad,” said Little.

  “I was rather angry really,” said Lady Partridge, “but it had to be done.”

  “I mean when he died,” said Little.

  The question took Lady Partridge by surprise. She was quiet for a moment, gazing at something beyond the tree house and many years ago. Then she took off her glasses and dropped them into a pocket in her dressing gown. “Well, we don’t talk about that,” she said briskly, tipping the orange cat from her book and placing it on top of a teetering pile that conveniently reached her left elbow.

  “Who doesn’t?” asked Little.

  “Well…people in general, I suppose.”

  “Then how do people make each other feel better?”

  Lady Partridge seemed completely stumped. Little put the photograph back in its place and walked over to where she sat on the edge of her hammock. She climbed the precarious stack of books, put her arms around Lady Partridge’s neck and gave her a big kiss on the cheek. Lady Partridge hugged her back, then lifted her down gently.

  “Well, here I am wittering on, and I’m sure you’re both hungry,” she said, dabbing her eyes quickly with a silk sleeve. “Sit down…um…somewhere, and I’ll make you some soup.”

  Miles shifted a plump cat or two, to make space for Little and himself. His damp jacket steamed in the warmth of the fire. Little hopped gingerly over to where he sat.

  “You’re limping, my dear,” said Lady Partridge.

  “She twisted her ankle,” said Miles.

  “Well why didn’t you tell me?” said Lady Partridge. “We must get you bandaged up at once.” She stepped down from the hammock into a pair of worn purple slippers and produced a rolled bandage from a wooden box on the shelf behind her. She knelt down on the Persian carpet with a great deal of huffing and sighing, and began to bandage Little’s ankle with a practiced hand.

  “Why did you leave your house to live in a tree?” asked Little, wincing a little.

  “Oh, I built this tree house over the years, with the help of my gardeners, from old furniture we no longer used in the house. Dartforth was forever ordering newer and grander furniture for the manor, but I hated to part with the old stuff. In the days before those dreadful Pinchbuckets took over the orphanage I used to have all the children around for picnics on Saturday afternoons. It was nice and cool in the tree house, and they could play up here when the sun became too high. The Pinchbuckets stopped all that many years ago. I don’t think they ever let the poor things out nowadays, except for their annual trip to the cement quarry. After Dartforth died I began to spend more and more time up here myself. It was a good place to sit and think. All the staff had long gone, and I had sold almost everything in the house. It became too big and lonely, and I simply couldn’t bear to be there anymore, so I moved my last few things out here where it was small and cozy. The grocer’s boy comes once a week and the coal man delivers too, so I hardly need to venture out at all. Anyhow, it’s rather appropriate that I should live in a tree with two trunks. That makes me a Partridge in a pair tree!”

  Lady Partridge bellowed with laughter at her own joke, causing a fat tabby to wake with a start and fall off the shelf where he had been perched.

  “And now, my dears,” said Lady Partridge when she had calmed down, “I had better stop rambling on and see about that soup I promised you. A good tale never fares well on an empty stomach, and I can see that you both have a story to tell.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FALLING THROUGH THUNDER

  Lady Partridge, book-bound, dragon-gowned, and mistress of a hundred cats, rummaged among the tins and jars on the dresser by the stove. As she did so she muttered to herself, or perhaps to her cats. She filled the belly of the stove with a shovelful of glowing coals from the fireplace, and placed a pot of soup on top.

  While the soup bubbled in the pot, Miles told her a story that you and I have heard already. He told her of the strange circus and the mysterious tiger, of how he had seen Little fall, and later rescued her from her locked trailer under the nose of the Great Cortado. Over bowls of steaming soup he spoke of the nameless beast that had pursued him through the night, and how it had reduced to splinters the barrel that had kept him warm and dry for three winters under the pine tree on the side of the hill. Lady Partridge listened, and her cats listened too.

  “Well well,” said Lady Partridge at length, when his story had taken them up the ladder and into her tree house. “You must both stay here for the night, and in the morning we’ll see what’s to be done.” She peered thoughtfully at Little. “Would you mind, my dear, if we took a look at those wings of yours?”

  “She doesn’t have them on now,” said Miles. “They’re back at the circus.”

  But Little had slipped off the heavy overcoat. The thin straps of her glittery costume left her shoulders almost bare, and as she turned her back to Lady Partridge Miles saw to his astonishment a pattern of gracefully curving lines traced faintly across her shoulder blades. As he looked closer he could see in the pattern the outline of a pair of neatly folded wings. Little gave her shoulders a shake, and the wings opened out. They were a little longer, from the bend to the tips of the primaries, than her upper arm from shoulder to elbow. They looked even more magnificent in the cluttered tree house than when he had seen them in the circus. The firelight gave a pearly glow to their fine, closely fitting feathers.

  It took Miles a moment to find his voice. “They’re real?” he croaked. “Where…where did they come from?”

  “I think the real question,” said Lady Partridge, “is where did Little come from?” She smiled at Little, who had folded her wings so neatly against her back that they seemed almost to melt back into her skin. “We should very much like to hear your story, my dear,” she said. “I’m sure it would make the time fly!” She was overcome by a fit of laughter. Little and Miles smiled politely as she dabbed her eye with the corner of her dressing gown.

  “I’m not really supposed to tell,” said Little hesitantly.

  “You can trust us, dear,” said Lady Partridge. “We won’t breathe a word to anyone.”

  Little chewed her lip thoughtfully for a moment. “Well…,” she began slowly, “I suppose the trouble started when I followed Silverpoint down through a cloud tunnel.”

  “Silverpoint?” echoed Lady Partridge.

  “Silverpoint is a Storm Angel,” said Little. “He’s older than me, perhaps a thousand winters old. I used to watch him and the other longfeathers rolling thunderballs across the cloud fields and dodging one another’s lightning. It was fun to watch, and a bit scary too. They were as quick as thought when they played, and the sound of their thunder made my head shake. Sometimes my hair would all stand up on end and you could hear it crackle, when they got too close.”

  “Did you say a thousand years old?” interrupted Lady Partridge.

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “Good gracious! Then how old are you, my child, if that’s not a rude question?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Little. “Silverpoint once said I had lived more than four hundred years, but the seasons come and go, and I’ve never had much time for counting.”

  “Well,” said Lady Partridge, pushing her spectacles up on her nose. “I certainly hope I’m as sprightly as you when I’m four hundred years
old,” and she chuckled to herself while Little continued her story.

  “Silverpoint is the quickest of them all, and his lightning is strong and blue and always finds its mark. He would get angry if he saw me watching, because I wasn’t supposed to be there. He told me that someday I would get fried, and my song would never be heard, but I still used to watch whenever I could find a hiding place.

  “One day I saw Silverpoint and Rumblejack heading for the cloud fields, so I followed them at a distance. They gathered up some thunderballs, and I hid myself to watch, but they didn’t play in the usual way. Rumblejack began rolling the thunderballs in a circle. Round and round he rolled them, faster and faster, and a sort of whirlpool began to form in the clouds underneath. The noise was like a thousand giants roaring. The center of the cloud sank lower and lower, like a tunnel heading downward. All at once Rumblejack shouted something to Silverpoint, and flew off back the way he had come. I saw Silverpoint look around to see if anyone was watching, so I sank down lower. He didn’t see me. Then all of a sudden, he took a long run and dived into the hole. Just like that.

  “Without thinking for a moment I got up and ran after him. It was a silly thing to do, but I just wanted to see where he had gone, to see that he was all right. But as I got near to the tunnel the wind began to pull me. I tried to stop then, but the pull was too strong, and the tunnel swallowed me like a huge mouth.”

  The coals shifted in the fireplace, sending a shower of sparks up the dark chimney. The ginger cat had returned to Lady Partridge’s ample lap, and sat licking its paws among the red dragons on her dressing gown.