“He found it,” Charmain said. “You can tell by these arrows that say ‘Unexplored’ that he doesn’t know what’s out there yet.”
“You may be right,” Peter said judiciously. “He really only uses the middle bits, doesn’t he? We can do him a favor by exploring more of it.”
“You can if you like,” Charmain said. “I’m going to read my book.” She folded up the paper with the swirly lines on it and stowed it in her pocket. This could save her a journey in the morning.
In the morning, Charmain’s good clothes were still damp. She had to leave them draped depressingly around her room and get into her next-nicest, while she wondered if she could manage to leave Waif behind with Peter today. Perhaps not. Suppose Peter tried another spell and contrived to turn Waif inside out or something.
Waif of course came trotting eagerly after Charmain into the kitchen. Charmain tapped the fireplace for dog food and then, a little doubtfully, for her own breakfast. It could be that she and Peter had thrown the spell out by demanding breakfast yesterday evening.
But no. Today she got a full tray, with a choice of tea or coffee, and toast, and a plate piled high with something made with fish and rice, and a peach to follow. I think the spell’s apologizing, she thought. She didn’t like the fish stuff much, so she gave most of it to Waif, who liked it the way she always liked food and smelled quite fishy as she trotted after Charmain when Charmain unfolded her swirly paper, ready to go to the Royal Mansion.
Looking at the swirls confused Charmain. She found she had been even more confused by the chart in the suitcase. Bending the paper backward and forward to try and reproduce what was in the suitcase did not help at all. After several turns left and right, she found herself walking into a place that was large and well lighted by big windows overlooking the river. There was a fine view of the town across the river, where, most frustratingly, she could see the golden roof of the Royal Mansion gleaming in the sunlight.
“But I’m trying to get there, not here!” she said, looking around.
There were long wooden tables under the windows, loaded with strange implements and more implements stacked in the middle of the room. The other walls were full of shelves piled with jars, tins, and odd-shaped glassware. Charmain sniffed the smell of new wood here, which was overlaid by the same thunderstorm-and-spice smell she had noticed in Great-Uncle William’s study. The smell of magic having been done, she thought. This must be his workroom. To judge by the way Waif was trotting cheerily about, Waif knew this place well.
“Come on, Waif,” Charmain said, pausing to look at a piece of paper on top of the strange implements in the middle of the room. It said, “Please do not touch.” “Let’s go back to the kitchen and start again.”
It did not work out that way. A left turn from the workroom door brought them into a warm, warm place open to the sky, where a small blue pool rippled amid white stone surrounds. The place was fenced off by white stone trellises with roses growing up them, and there were white reclining chairs beside the roses, piled with large fluffy towels. Ready for when you’d finished swimming, Charmain supposed. But poor Waif was terrified of this place. She crouched against the gateway, whining and trembling.
Charmain picked her up. “Did someone try to drown you, Waif? Were you a puppy someone didn’t want? It’s all right. I’m not going near this water either. I’ve no idea how to swim.” As she turned left through the gateway, it occurred to her that swimming was only one of a very large number of things she had no idea how to do. Peter had been right to object to her ignorance. “It’s not that I’m lazy,” she explained to Waif as they arrived in what seemed to be the stables, “or stupid. I’ve just not bothered to look round the edges of Mother’s way of doing things, you see.”
The stables were rather smelly. Charmain was relieved to see that the horses that must belong there were up in a meadow beyond a fence. Horses were another thing she had no idea about. At least Waif did not seem to be frightened here.
Charmain sighed, put Waif down, scrabbled up her glasses, and looked at the confusing swirly chart again. “Stables” were here, up in the mountains somewhere. She needed two right turns from there to the kitchen again. She turned right twice, with Waif pattering behind, and found herself in near dark outside what seemed to be a large cave full of hurrying blue kobolds. Each one of them turned and glowered at Charmain. Charmain hurriedly turned right again. And this time she was in a store for cups, plates, and teapots. Waif whined. Charmain stared at several hundred teapots, in rows on shelves, of every possible color and size, and began to panic. It was getting late. Worse than that, when she put her glasses on again and consulted the plan, she found she was somewhere near the bottom left-hand part of the swirls, where the arrow pointing off to the edge had a note that said “A group of lubbockins live down this way. Care necessary.”
“Oh,” Charmain exclaimed. “This is ridiculous! Come on, Waif.” She opened the door they had just come through and turned right yet again.
This time they were in complete darkness. Charmain could feel Waif nosing anxiously up against her ankles. Both of them sniffed and Charmain said, “Ah!” This place had a damp stone smell that she remembered from the day she had arrived in the house. “Great-Uncle William,” she asked, “how do I get from here to the kitchen again?”
Much to her relief, the kindly voice answered. It sounded very faint and far away now. “If you are there, my dear, you are rather lost, so listen carefully. Make one turn clockwise…”
Charmain had no need to listen anymore. Instead of making a complete turn, she turned carefully halfway and then peered forward. Sure enough, there was a dimly lighted stone corridor ahead, crossing the one she seemed to be standing in. She strode thankfully toward it, with Waif trotting behind her, and turned into that corridor. She knew she was now in the Royal Mansion. It was the same corridor where she had seen Sim pushing a trolley on her first day in Great-Uncle William’s house. Not only did it smell right—with faint foody smells on top of the damp stone smell—but the walls had the typical Royal Mansion look, with lighter squares and oblongs where pictures had been taken away. The only trouble was that she had no idea whereabouts in the Mansion this was. Waif was no help. She simply plastered herself against Charmain’s ankles and shivered.
Charmain picked Waif up and walked down the corridor, hoping to find somewhere she knew. She turned two corners without being any the wiser and then almost ran into the colorless gentleman who had passed the crumpets round yesterday. He jumped backward, thoroughly startled.
“Dear me,” he said, peering at Charmain in the gloom. “I had no idea you had arrived yet, Miss…er…Charming, is it? Are you lost? Can I assist?”
“Yes, please,” Charmain said resourcefully. “I went to the…to the…er…um…you know, the one for ladies—and I must have turned the wrong way afterward. Can you tell me the way back to the library?”
“I can do better than that,” said the colorless gentleman. “I’ll show you. Just follow me.”
He turned round and led the way back where he had been coming from, along another dim corridor and across a large, cold lobby, where a flight of stone stairs led upward. Waif’s tail began to twitch slightly, as if she found this part familiar. But her tail stopped moving as they crossed in front of the stairs. Morgan’s voice came booming down from the top of the flight.
“Don’t want to! Don’t want! Don’t WANT!”
Twinkle’s shriller voice joined in. “I can’t wear thethe! I want my thtwipey oneth!”
Sophie Pendragon’s voice echoed down too. “Be quiet, both of you! Or I’ll do something dreadful, I warn you! I’ve no patience left!”
The colorless gentleman winced. He said to Charmain, “Small children bring so much life to a place, don’t they?”
Charmain looked up at him, meaning to nod and grin. But something made her shudder instead. She was not sure why. She managed to give a little nod and that was all, before she followed the gentleman throu
gh an archway, where the booming of Morgan and the screaming of Twinkle died away into the distance.
Round another corner, the colorless gentleman opened a door that Charmain recognized as the door to the library. “Miss Charming seems to have arrived, Sire,” he said, bowing.
“Oh, good,” said the King, looking up from a pile of thin leather books. “Come in and sit down, my dear. I found an absolute heap of papers for you last night. I’d no idea we had so many.”
Charmain felt as if she had never been away. Waif settled down, rolled tummy upward in the heat from the brazier. Charmain settled down also, in front of a toppling heap of different-sized papers, found pen and paper, and started in. It was very companionable.
After a while, the King said, “This ancestor of mine, who wrote these diaries, fancied himself as a poet. What do you think of this one? To his lady love, of course.
‘You dance with the grace of a goat, my love,
And you sing soft like a cow on the mountains.’
“Would you call that romantic, my dear?”
Charmain laughed. “It’s dreadful. I hope she threw him over. Er…Your Majesty, who is the color…er…the gentleman who showed me in just now?”
“You mean my steward?” the King said. “Do you know, he’s been with us for years and years and years—and I can never remember the poor fellow’s name. You’ll have to ask the Princess, my dear. She remembers things like that.”
Oh, well, Charmain thought. I shall just have to think of him as the colorless gentleman, then.
The day passed peacefully. It made, Charmain felt, a pleasant change after such a hectic start. She sorted out, and made notes about, bills from two hundred years ago, bills from one hundred years ago, and bills from a mere forty years back. Oddly enough, the older bills were for much larger sums of money than the newer ones. It looked as if the Royal Mansion was spending less and less. Charmain also sorted out letters from four hundred years back and more recent reports from ambassadors, from Strangia, Ingary, and even Rajpuht. Some ambassadors sent poems. Charmain read the worst ones out to the King. Farther down the stack, she came upon receipts. Papers saying things like “In payment for portrait of a lady, reputed to be by a grand master, 200 guineas” began to turn up more and more frequently, all from the last sixty years. It looked to Charmain as if the Royal Mansion had been selling its pictures for most of the King’s reign. She decided not to ask the King about it.
Lunch arrived, more of Jamal’s delicious spicy things. When Sim brought them, Waif jumped up, wagging her tail, stopped, looked disappointed, and trotted away out of the library. Charmain had no idea if it was the cook’s dog or lunch that Waif wanted. Lunch, probably.
As Sim put the platter on the table, the King asked jovially, “How are things going out there now, Sim?”
“A little noisily, Sire,” Sim replied. “We have just received our sixth rocking horse. Master Morgan seems desirous of a live monkey, which, I am glad to report, Mrs. Pendragon has refused to allow him to have. A certain uproar resulted. In addition, Master Twinkle seems convinced that someone is denying him a pair of stripey trousers. He has been very loud on the subject all morning, Sire. And the fire demon has adopted the fire in the front parlor as his roosting place of choice. Will you be taking tea with us in the front parlor today, Sire?”
“I think not,” the King said. “I’ve nothing against the fire demon, but it gets a bit crowded in there with all those rocking horses. Be good enough to fetch us some crumpets here to the library, if you will, Sim.”
“Certainly, Sire,” Sim said, shakily backing from the room.
When the door was shut, the King said to Charmain, “It’s not the rocking horses, really. And I quite like the noise. But it all makes me think how much I’d have enjoyed being a grandfather. Pity, that.”
“Er…,” said Charmain, “people in town always say that Princess Hilda was disappointed in love. Is that why she never married?”
The King seemed surprised. “Not that I know of,” he said. “She had princes and dukes lining up to marry her for years when she was younger. But she’s not the marrying kind. Never fancied the idea, so she tells me. Prefers her life here, helping me. It’s a pity, though. Here’s my heir having to be Prince Ludovic, my fool of a cousin’s son. You’ll meet him soon, if we can only move a rocking horse or so—or maybe she’ll use the Grand Parlor instead. But the real pity is that there are no more youngsters around the Mansion nowadays. I miss that.”
The King did not seem too unhappy. He looked matter-of-fact rather than mournful, but Charmain was suddenly struck by what a sad place the Royal Mansion really was. Huge, empty, and sad. “I understand, Your Majesty,” she said.
The King grinned and bit into a Jamal tasty. “I know you do,” he said. “You’re a very intelligent young lady. You’ll do your Great-Uncle William great credit one day.”
Charmain blinked a bit at this description. But before she could get too uncomfortable at being praised, she realized what the King had left out. I may be clever, she thought, quite sadly, but I’m not in the least kind or sympathetic. I think I may even be hard-hearted. Look at the way I treat Peter.
She brooded on this for the rest of the afternoon. The result was that, when it was time to stop for the day and Sim reappeared with Waif wandering along after him, Charmain stood up and said, “Thank you for being so good to me, Your Majesty.”
The King seemed surprised and told her to think nothing of it. But I do, Charmain thought. He’s been so kind that it should be a lesson to me. As she followed Sim’s slow totter, with Waif, who seemed very sleepy and fat, toiling along behind both of them, Charmain made a resolution to be kind to Peter when she got back to Great-Uncle William’s house.
Sim had almost reached the front door, when Twinkle came rushing past from somewhere, energetically bowling a large hoop. He was followed at speed by Morgan, holding both arms out and bellowing, “Oop, oop, OOP!” Sim was sent reeling. Charmain tried to flatten herself against the wall as Twinkle shot past. There was an instant when she thought that Twinkle gave her a strange, searching look as he whipped by, but a yelp from Waif sent her speeding to the rescue and she thought no more about it. Waif had been knocked upside down and was very upset about it. Charmain scooped her up and nearly ran into Sophie Pendragon, chasing after Morgan.
“Which way?” Sophie panted.
Charmain pointed. Sophie hauled her skirts high and raced off, muttering something about guts and garters as she ran.
Princess Hilda appeared in the distance and stopped to drag Sim to his feet. “I really do apologize, Miss Charming,” she said as Charmain reached her. “That child is like an eel—well, they both are, actually. I shall have to take steps, or poor Sophie will have no attention left for our problems. Are you steady now, Sim?”
“Perfectly, ma’am,” said Sim. He bowed to Charmain and let her out through the front door into bright afternoon sunlight, as if nothing had happened.
If I ever marry, Charmain thought, striding across Royal Square with Waif in her arms, I shall never have children. They would make me cruel and hard-hearted after a week. Perhaps I shall be like Princess Hilda and never marry. That way, I might stand a chance of learning to be kind. Anyway, I shall practice on Peter, because he’s truly hard work.
She was full of sternly kind resolve when she reached Great-Uncle William’s house. It helped, as she marched up the path between the ranks of blue hydrangeas, that there was no sign of Rollo. Being kind to Rollo was something Charmain was sure she could never do.
“Not humanly possible,” she remarked to herself as she put Waif down on the living room carpet. The room struck her as being unusually clean and tidy. Everything was orderly, from the suitcase neatly put back beside one of the armchairs to the vase of variously colored hydrangeas on the coffee table. Charmain frowned at this vase. It was surely the one that had disappeared when it was put on the trolley. Maybe Peter ordered Morning Coffee and it came back then, she though
t—rather vaguely, because she suddenly remembered that she had left damp clothing all over her bedroom and bedclothes trailing over the floor. Bother! I have to tidy up.
She stopped short in the doorway of her bedroom. Someone had made her bed. Her clothes, dry now, were neatly folded on top of the chest of drawers. It was an outrage. Feeling anything but kind, Charmain stormed into the kitchen.
Peter was sitting at the kitchen table, looking so virtuous that Charmain knew he had been up to something. Behind him, on the fire, a large black pot was bubbling out strange, weak, savory smells.
“What do you mean by tidying up my room?” Charmain demanded.
Peter looked injured, even though Charmain could tell he was full of secret, exciting thoughts. “I thought you’d be pleased,” he said.
“Well, I’m not!” Charmain said. She was surprised to find herself almost in tears. “I was just beginning to learn that if I drop something on the floor it stays dropped unless I pick it up, and if I make a mess I have to clear it away because it doesn’t go by itself, and then you go and clear it up for me! You’re as bad as my mother!”
“I’ve got to do something while I’m alone here all day,” Peter protested. “Or do you expect me to just sit here?”
“You can do anything you like,” Charmain yelled. “Dance. Stand on your head. Make faces at Rollo. But don’t spoil my learning process!”
“Feel free to learn,” Peter retorted. “You’ve got a long way to go. I won’t touch your room again. Are you interested in some of the things I’ve learned today? Or are you thoroughly self-centered?”
Charmain gulped. “I was meaning to be kind to you this evening, but you make it very difficult.”
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