Castle Hangnail

by Ursula Vernon

  And when you looked at the letter from the Board of Magic, there was a faint red line through the word secure.

  “It’s not all the way there yet,” Molly said when she showed it to him. She wiped her forehead with her gardening gloves. “But we haven’t gotten the east flower bed under control yet, either. I think it’s working!”

  Perhaps it was simply because he had a dour disposition, or because he was used to serving dark and dreary Masters, but when things went this well, a minion like Majordomo could not help but expect something to go terribly, terribly wrong.

  Chapter 14

  Molly woke up three days later to find her room icy cold.

  She had been having a nightmare where the real Eudaimonia swept into the castle and everyone found out that she was just plain old Molly. In her dream, Majordomo had been staring at her, and his expression was so cold that when she woke up chilled, it just seemed like part of the dream.

  Then she exhaled, and her breath fogged over the blankets.

  “What . . . ?”

  It was normally a bit chilly in the evenings, but the ancient boiler kicked on at night and by morning the castle was warm. This morning, however, there was frost on both sides of the windowpanes. Molly felt a small, hot lump on her neck.

  “Bugbane?”

  “It’s cold,” he said, shivering. “I had to come off the bedpost. My wing-tips were going numb.”

  “Don’t bats hibernate when it’s cold?”

  “Not in summer.”

  Molly swathed herself in blankets and put her feet on the floor. The thick carpeting muted the cold somewhat. Her breath made a steamy plume in front of her.

  “Something’s wrong,” she said. “I better go find out what.”

  She eyed the bathroom door. The tiles gleamed like ice.

  “First, though,” she said, “I’m putting on ALL my socks.”

  “It’s the boiler,” said Majordomo, when Molly finally came down to breakfast. Everyone in the castle was wearing everything they owned. Cook had on a parka that had to have taken at least an acre of material. Pins had brought his goldfish down before her bowl froze and set her near the stove.

  They huddled around the table.

  “The boiler’s broken?” asked Molly. She wrapped her hands around her hot chocolate to warm them.

  Majordomo shook his head. “Not exactly. The plumbing’s broken, so there’s no water. The boiler can’t make steam to send through the radiators to heat things up. And all this stone keeps the castle so cold . . .” He leaned back and thumped one of the gray stones affectionately.

  “I suppose we’ll have to have someone in to fix it, then,” said Molly. “Is there a plumber in town?”

  There was a brief, embarrassed silence.

  “There is,” said Majordomo slowly, “and I’ll go fetch him after breakfast. But plumbing can be expensive, and I don’t know . . .”

  “Oh,” said Molly, who understood grown-up talk well enough to know that meant that there was a chance they couldn’t afford to have it repaired.

  She stared into her hot chocolate. It felt as if a hole had opened in her stomach and her heart had sunk down into it.

  She was the Master of Castle Hangnail. It was her plumbing. She ought to pay for it.

  The sum total of Molly’s possessions, including the money from Old Man Harrow, was eleven dollars and seventeen cents. Plus a very small donkey.

  “Do you know any spells to fix plumbing?” asked Pins, without much hope. Plumbing wasn’t very Witchy.

  Molly shook her head, and felt her heart sink even lower.

  • • •

  There was one person in the castle even more upset than Molly, and that was Serenissima.

  Serenissima didn’t need heat the way everyone else did. She carried her own heat with her. She could have stood in the middle of a blizzard, steaming gently.

  But she was a creature of water and she felt an affinity with pipes and plumbing and most especially with the great steaming boiler. With the pipes not working and the castle rapidly emptying of water, she felt abandoned in a way that none of the other minions could really understand.

  “You don’t understand!” she cried. “All your water is on the inside!”

  She retreated into her teakettle on the stove and sobbed bitterly. The kettle whistled sharply with every sob, which Cook was patient with for the first hour, and then finally Serenissima found herself lifted up and plopped down in the pantry. This made her sob even harder, until (as always happens) she eventually cried herself out and could only curl up in the kettle and sniffle.

  Everyone tried to cheer her up, but to little avail.

  “Come out, Serenissima,” said Pins. “They’ll fix it, you’ll see.”

  “Is no good crying,” said Cook. “Is better working!”

  “C’mon, Serenissima, it’ll be okay,” said Molly.

  “Really, this is most unseemly,” said Majordomo. “As minions, it is our duty to accept whatever life has thrown at us!”

  “Stiff upper lip, my girl!” advised Lord Edward. “Always darkest before the dawn, what?”

  To all of these entreaties and more, Serenissima only wailed “You don’t understand!” The puddle under the teakettle (mostly condensation, but some tears too) grew wider and wider.

  Steam spirits are generally very lively, but when they get depressed, they are very soggy indeed.

  Eventually they gave up and left her in the pantry.

  The repairman came out the next day. His name was Harry Rumplethorn, and he was very tall and very wide and his pants tended to ride down in the back, so that when he knelt to work on the boiler, you saw rather more of Harry than you wanted.

  But for all that, he was a decent man and everybody in the village knew that he was fair. He had come out several times to fix the pipes over the years, and Majordomo trusted him. When Harry stood up this time and hitched his pants back into place, there was a regretful look in his eyes.

  “It’s bad,” he said. “If it was just a blocked pipe or something leaking or backed up, I could rig something to make it work, but it’s rusted through and the pump’s burned out trying to compensate and . . .” (And here he said a great many more things that he understood and no one else really did.)

  Majordomo gritted his teeth. Molly, who had been hovering near the boiler room, leaned around the edge of the doorframe.

  “Is that bad?” she asked.

  Harry sighed. He wasn’t quite sure how to talk to Molly—she was young enough to be one of nieces, but she was also most definitely a Wicked Witch, and everyone in town knew about the incident with the donkey by now. So he decided to be blunt.

  “It’s pretty bad,” he said.

  He tried to explain how the plumbing worked, but rapidly veered into technical terms that made Molly’s head ache. It was a different kind of magic from hers. The bit she took away was that there was a broken piece in there somewhere, and it had broken a couple of other things along with it. He could fix it, but it was going to cost a lot.

  “How much is a lot in this context?” asked Majordomo.

  “Eighteen hundred dollars,” said Harry. (Molly sucked in her breath.) “Nine hundred for the parts, and nine hundred for labor.”

  “We’ll have to think about it,” said Majordomo. “Thank you for coming out. What do we owe you?”

  “Nothing,” said Harry, who knew that “we’ll have to think about it” is grown-up code for “we don’t have the money, but we don’t want to admit it.” He wiped his hands on a towel. “I’m sorry I don’t have better news. You call me when you’re ready to set something up.”

  “We will,” said Majordomo, even though both of them knew that it wasn’t going to happen.

  The door closed behind Harry. Molly and Majordomo looked at each other, then at the walls.


  “Time was,” said Majordomo grimly, “time was that we had such a treasury that we gave charity, we didn’t ask for it. Ungo the Mad had a whole vault of gold and diamonds and antique china he got from selling his inventions. When the library in town burned down, he paid to have it replaced.”

  “That was nice of him,” said Molly.

  “Well . . .” Majordomo shifted his feet. “It burned down because he’d been experimenting with fire-breathing bats.”

  “Oh! Like Great-Uncle Humphrey!” said Molly.

  “What?”

  “Err—nothing.”

  He gave her a funny look, but Molly felt a sudden tug of hope. He’d given her an idea. The bats had helped her before—could they help her again?

  Chapter 15

  Treasure?” asked the Eldest. It was only an hour or two after noon, and the old bat was yawning. “We have no treasure. What would a bat do with treasure?”

  “We couldn’t lift it.”

  “Treasure is heavy.”

  “It doesn’t taste good.”

  “Not like bugs.”

  “Don’t you have any ideas?” asked Molly. “We need to make some money, fast! Otherwise Serenissima’s going to flood the whole castle crying. And it’s all salt water, so we can’t even use it. Cook says that there’s an inch of water in the pantry and she had to move the cheeses, and Angus is hauling in buckets from the well so we can all have baths.”

  “We have nothing.” The Eldest yawned again and folded a wing over her face. “Treasure is a thing of earth. Plumbing is a thing of water. Bats are of the air. Ask someone else . . .”

  Molly opened her mouth to protest that surely they must have some ideas, but Bugbane tugged on her hair with one claw. She looked at him and he shook his head warningly. Apparently it did not do to keep the Eldest from her sleep.

  Molly sighed and tried to squelch her disappointment. She bowed to the bats and said, “Thank you for your time, Eldest,” as politely as she could.

  The bats were already snoring when she left the tower.

  • • •

  She found Majordomo, Pins, and Cook pooling their money in the kitchen. Between the three of them, they had three hundred and twelve dollars and eighty-eight cents. Molly pushed her own eleven dollars and seventeen cents into the pile.

  A few days ago, this would have seemed like a vast sum of money to her. Now it was dwarfed by a much bigger number—eighteen hundred dollars.

  “Will be getting egg money next week,” said Cook. “Probably . . . thirty dollars. And Angus is being helping Berkeley with the calves, is bringing home maybe a hundred dollars, if many calves.”

  “I have a shiny rock,” said Pins’s goldfish. She stroked a fin over a small pebble. “Perhaps we could sell it.”

  Nobody said anything. The goldfish sighed. “Air-breathers don’t appreciate shiny rocks nearly enough.”

  “Mrs. Emmett wants her grandmother’s wedding dress let out to fit her daughter,” offered Pins. “That might be worth something.”

  “Unless it’s worth fifteen hundred dollars, I don’t think it’s going to help,” said Majordomo. “And if we can’t fix it, we’ll have to leave—you can’t stay in a castle like this in winter without heat—and then the Board will get involved. It won’t even matter if Molly has completed all the Tasks.”

  “Why would the Board get involved over a boiler?” asked Molly.

  “They don’t let magic places stand empty. The magic gets all . . . funny,” Pins explained. He poked a pin into a crack in the table and began trying to pry a splinter loose with it.

  “If a magic castle can’t be inhabited, it’s decommissioned,” said Majordomo.

  “Oh,” said Molly. After a minute she said, “How do they decommission a castle, anyway?”

  “Druids,” said Majordomo gloomily. “A whole team of them, wearing goggles and rubber gloves. They pull the magic right out. Anyway, by the time they’re done, it’s just an ordinary old castle, and they usually wind up selling it to a developer to turn into apartment buildings.”

  This thought was so depressing that Molly wanted to hide under the table.

  “Check the letter,” said Majordomo quietly.

  Molly reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the letter from the Board of Magic. She spread it flat on the table.

  The thin red line that had appeared across “Secure and defend the castle” had vanished. Now there was a black underline under the phrase. It pulsed when Molly looked at it.

  “Oh, come on!” said Molly. “I pulled every weed in the herb garden! I got slivers and thorns and Miss Handlebram got a rash! That doesn’t count?”

  Majordomo shook his head. “Not now. Not if the castle will be uninhabitable.”

  Molly put her hands over her head.

  Pins worked the splinter loose from the table and stuck it into his head next to the other pins and needles.

  “We’ve got some time, don’t we?” asked Molly. “I mean, the plumbing’s not going to get any more broken.”

  “That’s true,” said Pins. “We’re not using it.” (Flushing the toilets was becoming increasingly difficult, since you had to carry water from the well and dump it into the toilet tank, where it promptly froze because the castle was so cold. Using the bathroom was starting to require a lot of strategic planning.)

  “As long as it’s fixed by fall . . .” said the goldfish.

  Unspoken between them was the thought that they probably couldn’t raise fifteen hundred dollars by fall. Even some of the money they had needed to be spent on groceries and chicken feed.

  “Six weeks,” said Majordomo.

  They looked up at him, startled.

  “It’s a Task now,” he said, tapping the letter. “Molly’s only got six weeks to do the Tasks. If it hadn’t broken until afterward, it wouldn’t matter, but . . .” He sighed. “Maybe I can file another extension.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” said Molly, feeling horrible. She was the Master of the castle. She was supposed to be able to fix things!

  A terrible little voice in the back of her head said: The real Eudaimonia would be able to fix it.

  Majordomo rose and went out without saying anything. That only made her feel worse.

  Cook took down a big jar and swept the money on the table into it. She wrote “PLUMBING IS BEING REPAIRED FUND” on the label and set it on the counter.

  Pins and Molly nodded. They had work to do.

  Chapter 16

  When Majordomo went to town the next day, Molly went with him. She had a letter of her own to mail.

  It wasn’t a bad walk. They didn’t say very much. The shadow of eighteen hundred dollars hung over them, and both Molly and Majordomo felt, on some level, that whatever their differences, they were in this together.

  (Molly was feeling especially quiet because when she had tried to use the bathroom that morning, the toilet was completely dry. She’d gone to three different bathrooms in the castle before she found one that had enough water to flush. This lent a certain urgency to the plumbing issue.)

  Majordomo held the door of the post office open. Before Molly could walk through, a man shouldered his way through the door and nearly ran into her.

  “Excuse me!” said Molly, in the tone that really means “You’re being very rude!”

  “Oh!” said the man. He looked down at Molly. “Didn’t see you there.” He was wearing a red checked jacket and a disagreeable expression.

  There is really nothing you can say to this, so Molly didn’t say anything.

  “You’re fine,” said the man. He patted her on the head, which caused Molly to hate him immediately, at once, and for eternity. “Good little girl.”

  And then he simply walked away.

  “What was that?” demanded Molly, shocked.

  Majordomo shook his head.
He had no idea.

  “Good little girl?!” she said. “Am not! I’ve half a mind to turn him into an earwig!”

  “Oh, would you?” asked the postmistress. “He’s an awful man. Some time as an earwing might improve him immensely.”

  Molly peered over the edge of the counter. “I’m Molly.” She slid a letter over the counter. (It was addressed to her parents, and it was asking for an advance on her allowance. She would have gladly given up her allowance for the rest of her life to save Castle Hangnail, but somehow, she didn’t think they’d send her eighteen hundred dollars. Still, it didn’t hurt to ask.)

  “You’ll be the new Wicked Witch, then,” said Postmistress Jane. “The one with the good twin. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She handed Majordomo a stack of mail. “That nasty fellow was Freddy Wisteria.”

  “Wisteria?” asked Majordomo. “Didn’t his grandfather own that lake in the middle of town?”

  “Indeed, and his father after him, and now Freddy owns it. But he’s taken a notion in his head to put a hundred houses on it.”

  Majordomo frowned. The stitches on his forehead pulled together in an impressive topography of concern. “But . . . there’s not enough land there. You could fit—I don’t know, three or four houses. Maybe five or six. You couldn’t put anything like a hundred houses on it.”

  “You can if they don’t have yards,” said Postmistress Jane. “Or proper gardens. And if you drain most of the lake and put in parking lots.” She slammed a drawer shut. “People won’t know it’s not supposed to look like that. They’ll just move in because we’re a quaint little village with charming atmosphere, and then want to know where the real grocery store is and why isn’t there a nail salon and pretty soon they’re putting up more stores and we’re just a faceless little town where the village used to be.” She scowled. “I’ve seen it happen. I used to live over in North Hickory, and . . . well. It was the nicest little town. Was.”

  Majordomo shuddered. Molly thought of the town where her parents lived. It had nail salons and three grocery stores and parts of it were nice, but parts of it were hard and grungy and dirty and there was broken glass on the sidewalk. There weren’t any places like that in the village. She ran a finger over the brass rail on the counter.