Mr Drake and My Lady Silver

by Charlotte E. English

  What was England? A mere faded, insignificant place, where trickles and dabs of magic might but briefly gain a hold, and only in sparse, scattered pockets, like Tilby. No, the place for a maggot like Oleander Whiteboots was somewhere deep in the Hollows.

  Tyllanthine, abandoning Aylfenhame, sought him there. She found no trace of him at Thieves’ Hollow, nor in Summer, Winter, Autumn or Spring. But whispers reached her ears: a glimpse here or there, a rumour, an echo. Traces of his passage there were, and Tyllanthine clung to the scent like the finest foxhound.

  In a distant, dusty Hollow, reached by a winding path out of the heart of Winter, Tyllanthine at last caught strong scent of her quarry. There was a tavern there, and an odd place for a tavern it was, to be sure. A grey sky hung glowering over a low, rickety building made from hammered planks of some contorted wood; water surrounded it, a shallow, greenish-tinged pond that smelled oddly of mint and pondweed and fresh grass. The place had too many chimneys, every one of which poured white smoke into the air, and there were too many doors in the walls.

  Tyllanthine had walked, very carefully, over the crude little bridge and gone through the nearest of the doors: bright green, though its paint was peeling.

  The interior of the tavern was much as one would expect of such a place: well supplied with tables and chairs and drinkers, and smelling strongly of wood-smoke and mead. A suffocatingly hot taproom she had been prepared for, considering the chimneys; but there turned out to be only one fireplace.

  Every single person in the tavern looked up as she came in. They were a varied crowd: Tyllanthine’s glance took in several brownies, hobs and goblins, hobgoblins, pixies, one or two Ayliri, a lone human (elderly) and even a troll slumped in a far corner.

  She had taken immediate advantage of the sudden silence to outline her request.

  ‘He is a Redcap,’ she went on, when still nobody spoke. ‘A known trader at the markets at Thieves’ Hollow. A notorious counterfeiter, a thief and a scoundrel to boot. Give him to me and I shall reward you splendidly.’

  ‘Oh?’ said a rotund gnome in a feathered cap. ‘What reward?’

  Tyllanthine displayed a pouch full of gold, and fended off one immediate attempt to relieve her of it the quick way. ‘You know not who you are dealing with,’ she said pleasantly to the culprit, a boggart who slunk, scowling, back into the shadows.

  To her disappointment, even her handsome reward did not appear to be productive of much. People were turning away, returning to their beverages, dismissing her from their notice. Nobody spoke up.

  But as she hobbled slowly to the door, defeated and angry, she felt a slight tug upon the loose sleeve of her tattered robe.

  A gnome stood there, unusually short even for one of her diminutive race, and oddly dressed in a haphazard patchwork of fabrics. She had positioned herself in a nook beside the door, where she could not be seen by the occupants of the tavern.

  Tyllanthine hastily stooped, as though to adjust her shoe. ‘What have you to say?’ she whispered.

  ‘He’s here, madam,’ said the gnome.

  ‘Here?’

  The gnome nodded. ‘Them as drinks here, they are all his friends. Bad as he is, every last one, and they protect each other.’

  ‘Why, then, are you different?’ Tyllanthine had learned to take a suspicious view of everything — learned it the very hard, very painful way. She never forgot it, not now.

  ‘He is cruel,’ whispered the gnome. ‘And he cheats us. They do not know it.’

  Largely, Tyllanthine accepted this. Resentment over double dealing often led to betrayal in turn. ‘I do not see him,’ she pointed out.

  But the gnome shook her head. ‘You came in by the wrong door. Go out, and come back in again by the red, but you must first knock thrice and say, “Shadow’s End,” or it won’t open.’ With which words she melted away, and was gone.

  Tyllanthine straightened her aching back, sparing a resentful thought of her own for the aged and aching muscles she was cursed with, and made her painful way back out of the door again. She went slowly around the rickety building until she came to a red-painted door, this one kept in better repair than the others: the paint was shining and new.

  She knocked three times, stifling a sigh at the dreary mundanity of the ritual, and said: ‘Shadow’s End.’

  She did this warily, and from a little distance, in case the gnome’s instructions had been some manner of trap. But nothing happened. The tavern did not swallow her, and nobody appeared. So she grasped the big brass knocker in the middle of the door and turned it.

  Bolts flew smoothly back, and the door swung open.

  On the other side of this door was a quite different room. It was spacious, with a large fireplace at either end — both lit, and roaring with cheerful flames — and a handsome canopied bed in the centre hung with tapestries. Soft couches and chairs occupied other parts of the room, and there was a large dining-table, too, flanked by ten or twelve chairs. It was a castle in miniature, a chamber fit for a lord’s residence. And it glittered and twinkled and shone, for the furniture and the floor were heaped with treasure.

  It was the dull, predictable kind, for the most part: an abundance of gold (coins, goblets, necklaces and crowns); precious jewels (rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires — all the usual sort); silks and velvets (doublets and soft caps, gowns, tapestries, table-cloths, headdresses, and so on). Tyllanthine’s nose also informed her that the occupant possessed considerable riches of other kinds: spices from afar, fragrances, fruits and confectionery.

  ‘Not a bad lot,’ she said, for however uninteresting it might be it was certainly a valuable hoard.

  ‘Not bad at all,’ said the lord of all these riches. He was sitting in a chair that more nearly resembled a throne, a stupendous construction positioned in the centre of the room. He did not make an especially convincing vision of a great lord, for though his cloak was brightly coloured it was of no especially fine make, and only of plain woollen cloth; the dark cap he wore might be good velvet, but it bore signs of having been haphazardly dyed, according to the ways of the Redcaps; and he wore not a single jewel anywhere about his person. His boots were ancient, dusty and cracked. He looked a drab little sparrow amid the splendour of his treasure-hoard, but his eyes glittered in a way Tyllanthine did not at all like, and she would not make the mistake of underestimating him.

  ‘Oleander Whiteboots,’ she purred, shutting the door behind herself. ‘I have been looking for you.’

  ‘I had heard.’ He said nothing else, nor did he move; he only watched, more like a cat than a sparrow, and a vicious creature at that.

  Tyllanthine being too tired and far too old to waste time on such games, she ignored this predatory look and got briskly to the point. ‘I am here to arrange a trade with you. You will give me all of her late Majesty’s possessions, and I will give you any price you care to name.’

  Oleander Whiteboots sat up a little at that. ‘Any price? That is a dangerous offer to make, my good lady.’

  ‘I know it.’

  The Redcap looked her over, taking in the ragged robes she wore, none too clean; the boils upon her creased, prematurely ancient face; the frizzled mess of her grey-white hair, sticking out from beneath her hood. ‘And what could a mere hag do for me?’

  ‘You have lived too long to be much taken in by appearance,’ said Tyllanthine with disapproval.

  A glance down at Oleander’s filthy boots served to remind him of his own unprepossessing appearance, and he inclined his head in acknowledgement of the point. ‘Still,’ he said, watching her closely. ‘What can you offer?’

  ‘I am a witch of great power. There is no Glamour beyond my skill to weave.’

  ‘That could come in useful,’ conceded the Redcap.

  ‘And I will give you some treasures in trade,’ she continued. ‘Items from the Court. Jewels and silks that once belonged to the princesses Ilsevellian and Tyllanthine and Lihyaen.’

  Oleander’s eyebrows rose, and
his eyes glittered with avarice. ‘How came you by such articles as that?’ he breathed.

  Tyllanthine merely returned him a look. It said, are you such a fool as to expect an answer?

  His mouth quirked into a bitter smile, and he inclined his head. ‘I would be tempted by such a bargain, had I any power to fulfil it.’

  This took Tyllanthine aback. She had been prepared to meet with some manner of ploy — an attempt to pass off counterfeit objects as the true treasures, in the most likely case. She was ready to counter such an attack as that. But plain honesty disconcerted her. ‘Why cannot you?’ she said, after a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘I have already sold them,’ said Oleander Whiteboots with a silky smile. ‘For a better price than yours, and to one who will never release them. You will never get the Queen’s Hoard, my good hag.’

  Tyllanthine drew herself up, knowing that her face darkened with a foreboding anger like a storm-cloud obscuring the sun. She gave herself an illusory aura, a mantle of dark power. Her eyes — her own eyes, the only part of herself the curse did not alter — bore into Oleander’s, dark with a terrible purpose. ‘Let me be understood,’ she said softly. ‘I will find these articles, no matter whom I must destroy in the attempt — even if that prove to include myself. You will tell me to whom you sold Her Majesty’s possessions, Oleander Whiteboots. You will tell me where to find your buyer. You will tell me anything else I require as well, or you will never leave this room again.’

  Oleander Whiteboots merely smiled. ‘I find that I like it in here,’ was all that he said.

  A perfect answer. Frustration and anger, fear and foreboding, sadness and pain and rage and despair — all these roiled within Tyllanthine’s mind and heart and oh, how she longed for somebody upon whom she might fairly give vent to her fury! And this miserable specimen, with his self-satisfied air and his risible failure to understand whom he had offended — oh, he would do nicely.

  With a small, vicious smile, Tyllanthine went to work.

  The old roads, Ilsevel soon found, spanned a very great distance indeed.

  If she had entertained any fond imaginings that she might, with a single step, go from Autumn’s Hollow into the lair of Gilligold, she was soon obliged to abandon such fancies.

  Phineas’s recovery was speedier than she had at first hoped, and the two were soon venturing forth from Eleri’s comfortable cottage and finding their way back to the road again. Perhaps it was because some part of the road had been lost, or perhaps it was some other trouble; but when Ilsevel, with Phineas’s arm clasped through hers, issued her orders to the road: ‘On to the place where Gilligold hides, and quickly!’ — they were indeed swept away into somewhere else, but it was nowhere of any use at all.

  They emerged in a different Hollow, and an odd place it was, for it appeared to consist of a wide meadow ringed in hedgerows, and with a single house planted in the centre of it. The house was of a bygone fashion, though it nonetheless appeared quite new. A grand place, built from great blocks of pristine, pale-yellow limestone, it had casement windows, a columned portico and a handsome pediment to its roof. An Ayliri woman was in the process of descending the steps that led up to the double front doors: a noblewoman, clearly, for her bearing and attire equally proclaimed it so. Ilsevel regarded the stiff, embroidered silks of her gown, the voluminous skirts, the tall, elaborately curled style of her hair, and wondered whence this woman could possibly hail.

  Undaunted, Ilsevel strode up to the foot of the stairs, aware that Phineas was trailing some way behind her. A great coach with oversized wheels and far too much gilding stood waiting nearby, with four hobgoblin footmen perfectly matched in height poised to assist their mistress on her travels. Considering the confines of the Hollow, Ilsevel wondered where the lady could possibly be going to.

  ‘I bid you good morning!’ she greeted as she drew near the lady. ‘My companion and I seek the one known as Gilligold. He does not, by chance, live here?’

  The lady tilted her head at Ilsevel — carefully, so as not to dislodge the lace-and-pearl headdress perched atop her heaped curls. ‘He does not,’ she said.

  ‘But you know of him? Do you know where I may find him?’

  The lady had not yet paused in her slow descent, but she did so now, two steps from the bottom, and regarded Ilsevel. She took in Phineas, too, with a flickering glance which soon found him unworthy of scrutiny. ‘Who asks for him?’

  ‘My Lady Silver,’ said Ilsevel.

  But the lady frowned. ‘Impossible. The Lady Ilsevellian is but a child.’

  That silenced Ilsevel. Before she could decipher the meaning behind so unexpected a speech, Phineas had drawn near. ‘We are gone back some years, I think,’ he whispered. ‘No one has seen Gilligold for a hundred years, remember.’

  Of course. The garments, and the house — Gilligold’s name had faded from use because he had hidden himself away in some Torpored Hollow, where time had ceased to hold any sway. In effect, he had ceased to exist — except in the past. Thus, that was precisely where the roads had taken her.

  Ilsevel let the question of her identity pass unanswered. ‘It is a matter of the gravest urgency,’ she said. ‘I must find him.’

  The lady made her stately way down the remaining steps and stood considering Ilsevel. She took in the majesty of her gown, and, perhaps, the glitter of enchantment upon it; the brooch upon her shoulder and the jewels in her hair; the peculiarity of her silver eyes, and the depth of power and authority that lay there. ‘The coach goes into Deepmantle shortly. You may travel with me, and hail another coach from there.’

  Ilsevel curtseyed her thanks, though the lady’s manner was in no way conciliating. She did not receive the compliment of a curtsey in return; the lady merely nodded coldly and got into the coach, her footmen clustering around her.

  Ilsevel stepped in after, drawing Phineas with her. The poor boy was more impressed by the fine lady’s repelling manner than he ought to be. Truly, he thought too lowly of himself.

  The moment the coach doors closed behind Phineas, the equipage began to move. It occurred to Ilsevel that she had seen no horses, nor any sign of some other, load-bearing animal; the coach, it seemed, moved under its own power. It travelled along the winding road almost to the edge of the meadow, and then, in a blur of grass and hedgerow, it made the leap from Hollow to Hollow and they were in Deepmantle.

  It proved to be a glade, overhung with the heavy boughs of velvety-green trees. The coach brought them into what appeared to be a regular coach-station, for there were oaken signposts driven into the earthen floor at regular intervals. Their coach drew up before one that read: “Downdew” — the name, presumably, of the Hollow from which they had just come. The lady descended from the coach without so much as glancing at Ilsevel, let alone Phineas. Her footmen ushered her in the direction of a sign saying “Mossdale.”

  Ilsevel surveyed the others. Shadowridge and Moonblight; Sagewood and The Seaward Peak; Wisewinds and The Wildbarrow; Willowhaven, The Rains, Threewoods and Fivewoods and Sevenwoods — on and on went the signs, and none of the names engraved upon them were in the least bit familiar to Ilsevel.

  Ilsevel tried the road. ‘Onward to Gilligold, if you please,’ she whispered, but nothing happened. She was not surprised. Gilligold lay farther back, beyond the power of My Lady Silver.

  ‘Phineas,’ said she. ‘I fear we are undone. I have not the smallest idea where to go.’

  Phineas, practical soul that he was, began to wander, approaching some few of the various travellers who were bustling from coach to coach. Ilsevel heard the word ‘Gilligold’ repeatedly pass his lips, only to be greeted with shakes of the head, and, on occasion, a positive recoil. She took up the endeavour herself and went from stranger to stranger — and what an array they made! Some were dressed like the lady of Downdew, but many more sported garments of the most outlandish, recognisable, in some cases, as fashions from ages long past; in others, reminiscent of nothing Ilsevel knew.

  Bu
t the former gave her an idea. She began to approach those whose clothing betrayed their origins as of an earlier age; those with embroidered, wide-skirted coats and long, curling wigs; with doublets and velvet caps, with great ruffs around their necks and stockings upon their legs. And, at last, she began to meet with some success; for instead of blank looks she perceived glimmers of recognition. The eyes of these more knowledgeable souls, however, slid away from hers, unwilling to meet her gaze. Their lips tightened, they looked at the floor, they shook their heads and slid away from her.

  Gilligold, she judged, was somewhat feared.

  At length, Ilsevel lost her patience. She took up a station in the centre of the chaos, and spun upon the spot until she began to rise. When she had gone up some ten or twelve feet and hovered nicely above the heads of all those below (or most of them; there was an occasional troll or giant to be glimpsed among the mass of travellers); she clapped her hands thrice. The sound emerged much amplified, and split the air of Deepmantle sharply, cutting through the hubbub of chattering voices. ‘Which coach,’ called she, when she had their attention, ‘goes farther back?’

  It was a giant who answered her, his face not far off level with her own. He smiled amiably, touched the brim of his shabby straw hat, and said: ‘That’d be Derrydock, lady, or Crowsfoot.’

  Ilsevel thanked him prettily, and descended.

  Phineas stood gazing at her in awe.

  ‘Come, now, you have seen me do that before,’ said she, with a roguish smile.

  Phineas, surprisingly, grinned. ‘So I ought rightly to be used to the sight of a princess of Aylfenhame hovering over my head like a butterfly?’

  ‘There are greater marvels, you know.’

  ‘Doubtless, but how many of those do you think Phineas the Baker’s Boy has seen?’

  ‘True,’ she murmured. ‘I begin to forget where you come from, my Phineas.’

  That prompted a flush, whether of pleasure or of mortification she could not tell, for his smile faded and he dipped his head.