by E. Archer
“I’ll take that way, and you take that way!” Daphne said, pointing in random directions.
“Sure, whatever. You coming?” Cecil asked Ralph.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ralph said, eyeing the chaise next to Beatrice.
“You should go with them,” Beatrice said. “This is the only adventure you’re going to get all summer.”
“Don’t you think,” Ralph said, “that if a firearm has been set off, it’s not wise for us to wander off into the countryside?”
“Ralph,” Beatrice said, “what are you so uncomfortable about? We’re in the country — there’s always a grouse to be shot somewhere around here. If there was anyone dangerous around, those guards would have stopped them. Don’t be so wimpy.”
And so he went. Soon enough, he was enjoying his search of the twilit grounds. When he returned to Beatrice twenty minutes later, he found Cecil and Daphne already back and lazing about the patio. None of them had turned up anything, not a single clue.
“A hunter’s bullet,” Beatrice concluded. “Death of the usual variety, nothing to worry about.”
Indeed, Ralph wouldn’t turn up a single clue about that night, about the gunshot or the Battersby parents’ reluctance to discuss it or the guards or even the funeral, for a little over a week. In the meantime he spent a large part of his days on the phone with British Telecom, or waiting for their servicemen, or holding wires in either hand in hopes that their currents would stop interfering. During his non-working hours he read with Beatrice on the roof, played squash (poorly) with Cecil, and taught Daphne how to shoot videos on her phone. One day he and Beatrice went into town to see a movie (an American blockbuster, which brought on an unexpected rush of pride related to frame rates and number of effects shots), after which Ralph hung out with Cecil in the stockroom at the clothing store and bought Daphne a clearance headband with two monstrous felt eyes wired to dangle over her bangs. It would be a great prop for the short films that Daphne the telephone filmmaker had taken to composing.
Every night Ralph double-checked the locks, morbidly certain that he was bound to have an intruder — it wasn’t difficult to imagine someone breaking into his shadowy, isolated gatehouse. To keep his mind off the possibility until he fell asleep, he had taken to sitting up in bed, typing game ideas into his laptop, or composing the long apology email he would send to his parents once he got the internet working. Glancing about the spare stone walls lit only by the feeble glow of his laptop screen, listening to the scratches of his pen against heavy paper and seeing the reflected shadows of the giant tree’s leaves pace the windows, he often wondered what he would do if someone knocked on his door. There was no peephole or door chain, no back escape and no one to hear if he shouted for help. His only defense would be to not answer the door at all, and that sounded feeble as far as defenses go.
His invader wound up not giving Ralph the option, materializing as she did at the foot of his bed, seated so her royal posterior rested in the space between his legs. Until her appearance, Ralph had been in a deep sleep, and it took him a few moments to click the light on and realize that there was, indeed, a famous duchess in the room.
Ralph’s first impression of Chessie was a flurry of details: massive strawberry curls piled on a narrow head and held in place by strips of velvet, low-cut black evening gown interrupted by swatches of mesh and linen lattice, lips as wet and red as fresh-cut ruby grapefruit. Slowly the details formed together into what could only be his aunt Chessie.
“I was not expecting you to be here,” she intoned, locking a cigarette into her curved mouth.
Ralph sat up, pulled his sheets about his bare waist, and stared at Chessie’s lips.
“In fact,” she continued, “I don’t believe that was an error on my part. I do believe — correct me if I’m wrong — that even your parents probably don’t expect you to be here.”
“What are you doing in my room?”
“The way you say that makes me think you’ve already realized who I am. Otherwise, that would be the next logical question, no?” She pulled her cigarette away from her lips and examined it idly.
Ralph nodded. Just a few days before he had seen her ad in a newspaper flyer, mugging as she sipped a protein shake.
“I assume that the kids must have told you all about me. So now you inform me, if you will be so kind, how it is that you come to be alive.”
And so Ralph stammered for a moment about how, to the best of his knowledge, he had never died, and could therefore only conclude that he was still, at least as of that moment, alive.
Chessie took a long drag of her cigarette and offered it to Ralph. He declined. “Those wily Stevenses,” Chessie said. “They sent me a Christmas card a few years back saying you were quite dead.”
“I bet they had a good reason,” Ralph said quietly.
“Wishes, wishes, wishes,” Chessie said, jumping to her feet and pacing the gatehouse. “All this fuss over wishes.”
“What kinds of wishes?” Ralph asked, reaching for a discarded T-shirt and pulling it on.
Chessie pressed her hands against her cheeks, pulling her skin taut. “What do you see when you look at me?” she asked.
“Chessie of Cheshire. You’re famous.”
“For the wrong reasons. Do you know how it feels, Ralph, to be well-regarded, but not the way you want to be?”
Ralph nodded. He was seen as an adept geek, when he wanted to be fun, instead. He opened his mouth to tell Chessie so.
“I don’t want to have to be a corporate pitchwoman,” Chessie continued, barreling over his first syllable. “But unless I wanted to be a boring dignitary, a path that was never open to me for various reasons, I could find no other way to have a life that … means something. And all I want is a life that means something. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Ralph nodded, no longer even attempting speech.
“Tell me: I am the godmother to three immature children. Centuries ago, what would that have meant?”
“I’m very sorry, but I’m not sure.”
“I would have been a fairy godmother! I would have granted wishes!”
Surprisingly enough, he had already considered that conclusion, but was afraid it would sound ridiculous if spoken aloud.
“Come,” Chessie said, holding her hands out to Ralph, who stared at them. “Who says I can’t cast a spell or two? Who says being a duchess can’t come along with anything cool anymore? Look at my sister, Gert. Is she all you expect from aristocracy? Dry obligations and chilled heart? I’m of the old variety. I don’t want to be elegant and unobtrusive. I want to have an effect. I want everyone to be at least a trifle scared to meet me, like I’ve got a poison apple secreted away in my purse. You’re not scared of me, are you, dear heart?”
Ralph shook his head.
“Gert and Mary would have hated what I just said. They have an aversion to strongly worded statements, particularly those that don’t originate from them. ‘You know very well why we no longer partake in spells,’ Gert would say, ‘It’s so nouveau royale. Five hundred years ago, fine. But not now.’ We’re so polite now. And while my other sister, your mother, wouldn’t be as rude as Gert, she still doesn’t have the nobility of soul to understand what I’m trying to do.”
Ralph wasn’t sure how to take this last bit. He had often called his mother strict, or annoying, but “nobility of soul"! The concept was beyond him, and certainly nothing he would consider attaching to his parents.
“But you get me in a way she never will, don’t you?” Chessie continued. “Young Americans are always hankering for some fairy tale pizzazz.”
Ralph remembered another of Chessie’s ads, this one a photo of her hyping a treadmill while wearing a bathing suit of uncommon brevity. He didn’t think of her as a storybook godmother. But, as he always tried to give the right answer when an adult asked a question, he said, “I guess we always do attach some magic to royalty. We don’t have any of our own.”
“You’r
e a magician of your own sort, aren’t you, dear?”
“No, I don’t think so. Well. Depends on what you mean, I guess,” Ralph said, secretly hoping Chessie was about to unveil a prophecy that would tell him what to do with his life.
“You and your game designing. Your mythmaking.”
“How do you know about that? A few seconds ago you thought I was dead.”
“I’m a fairy godmother, Ralph. I thought we went over this.”
“Sorry. Please continue.”
“Well, there’s not much more to say. Just that we’re after the same thing. We’ve got that American grit. You’re a lot more like me than Gert’s children are. I can see that much right away. Even back in the States, though … no one’s ever really gotten you, have they?”
Ralph shook his head, suddenly chilled.
“We’re magicians. Or at least, we both want to be. But your path hasn’t been going too well, has it?”
“I don’t know about that,” Ralph said, hugging his knees to his chest.
“Dear, it’s okay. I can help.”
“How?”
“Really? Keep up! I grant wishes.”
“Are you offering me a wish?”
Chessie nodded.
“Okay,” Ralph said, spontaneously deciding to ignore years of his parents’ warnings. “I wish —”
“No, no, not yet. It all has to be in the right sequence. I can’t grant a wish to you before the Battersby children.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Ralph, mere minutes ago you were fibbing and telling me you were dead. Wishes take preparation. I can’t spring one out like a parlor trick.”
“Well, when do I get my wish?”
“You must work on this selfish streak.”
“Look! You can’t show up in my bedroom, offer a wish, and then take it back!”
Chessie looked at him appraisingly. “Well! Plenty of ambition, after all. Surprising. You’ll work hard for this, won’t you?”
“Tell me what you want, and I’ll make sure it happens.”
“What I want is easy,” Chessie said. “I need access to the Battersby children, even if only for a split second.”
“I’ll have to talk to Gert first.”
“You haven’t been following what I’ve really been saying, have you? No deal,” Chessie said, and vanished, leaving behind one extinguished cigarette, its filter rimmed in red lipstick.
CHAPTER X
When Chessie didn’t reappear even once over the following week, Ralph feared he would never see her again. His anxiety became all-consuming — he would glance at the foot of his bed between each paragraph of his late-night reading, sit on the patio for hours and scan for a fairy carriage coming down the walk. But there was never a single magic duchess. To occupy himself he became involved in the lives of his cousins. Before long he was as close to them as he had been to any of his friends in New Jersey (which is, to be honest, not terribly close). With Beatrice he discussed his parents’ wish ban. He told Cecil about his failure with girls, for which the suggested remedy was to ask out Cecil’s assistant manager, who was folding socks. (“You’re sweet” was her unpromising response.) And he had Daphne play simple games he had designed, for which she always managed to find the perfect sequence of keystrokes to crash the program. But Beatrice’s indifference, Cecil’s ill-conceived advice, and Daphne’s game wrecking, though each a minor failure, hid within them a sort of familial tolerance, an unthinking acceptance of the crazy American cousin. Ralph interpreted this as affection. He found that, despite their essential ambivalence about his existence, the Battersby family was very pleasant company for a summer.
Of course, the Battersby family also included its magical and potentially evil aunt, who is certainly not gone from our story.
Had he been more attentive, Ralph would have seen a clear sign of Chessie’s imminent reappearance: Sunday morning, the porcelain maid again took to sighing. But Ralph, distracted by the tantalizing possibility that he might have figured out how to make the wireless signal finally transmit into Beatrice’s wing, rushed by the melancholy creature without noticing.
After dinner he came upon a much more obvious clue: While strolling past the tree with Daphne on his shoulders, she vanished entirely, reappearing hundreds of feet away on the castle roof, shrieking and hopping in astonishment.
We all behave differently on the occasion of witnessing our first teleportation: Some proceed as if nothing has happened, some faint, some develop a rare form of lockjaw. Ralph was a starer. He glanced at his shoulder, where Daphne had so recently been, then at Daphne on the roof of the castle, shouting incomprehensibly, then back to his shoulder, then back to the roof, as if waiting to see a zip line appear connecting the two.
Eventually he started toward the castle, but when he took a step he ran directly into the lacy flannel of Chessie’s fairy godmother midriff. She had evidently been standing at his side for some time, watching in bemusement. She wrapped her gloved hands around Ralph’s cheeks, kissed him on the forehead, and said, “That’s magic, darling.”
“D-Daphne,” Ralph observed.
“Now do you see why I need your help? Gert doesn’t like the old ways, sure, but she sees no problem in placing a protection ward on her children.”
“Gert teleported Daphne away?”
“She probably isn’t even aware that her Parental Protection Ward fired; she put them in place years ago. She won’t let me see my own family, dear Ralph — and the teleporting wards are yet another way to block me.”
“I’m sure she has a very good reason. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go, you know, rescue Daphne.”
“No, Gert really doesn’t have a good reason. She’s unfeeling. I’m certain the children still miss their silly aunt. Ask them to meet me. That’s all I ask.”
“If Gert’s got some magic wards set up, how could I possibly be any help? If I even wanted to help, of course, which I’m pretty sure I don’t.”
“Because the wards are against me, not you. You can remove them for me. All I ask is that you give my nieces and nephew the choice. They’ve got their own minds, like you. Lay everything out before them, so they can decide like reasonable adults. If they don’t want to see me, fine. But frankly I don’t think that’s likely.”
“And if I do, and they do, you’ll grant me a wish as well?”
“Once they all make wishes, you will be the fourth, yes.”
“Why are you so desperate to do all of this?”
Daphne’s cries on the roof intensified.
Chessie stepped back and held Ralph at arm’s length. She was wearing a mass of rainbow flannel ribbons; he could really see her for the first time, and saw that she was gorgeous and powerful and maybe (he was aware of his “maybe,” aware that he was fighting it into a “surely”) good-intentioned. What could be the harm, he thought, of offering the Battersby kids the option of seeing their aunt? If Cecil and Beatrice decided it was okay, then he would have reunited them with a family member. And afterward, he could wish for his dream job at MonoMyth after all.
“What would I have to do?” he asked.
“You’ve met the milkmaid. She can tell you how to remove the Parental Protection Wards. Part of the magic is that I’m not allowed to tell you personally. The rules are a real bore.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Ralph said grudgingly, pulling away.
“Thank you,” Chessie said, a single dramatic tear marring none of the magical foundation painted on her cheek. She batted her eyelashes expectantly (slowed as they were by heavy mascara, the batting of Chessie’s eyelashes was a surprisingly involved process). “That’s all I can ask.”
CHAPTER XI
As he approached the castle, Ralph saw Daphne disappear into the roof stairwell and figured that she had decided to find her own way down. He went straight to Beatrice, whom he found on the floor in her room, using a marker to ink black butterflies on her ankle. “Hey,” he said, “I need the whole truth on your Aunt Che
ssie. Everything you know. Now.”
Beatrice looked up at him and widened her eyes. “What kind of truth?”
“Um, let’s start with whether she’s good or evil.”
“I don’t know. I was a kid when I saw her last. Mom would definitely say that she’s evil. The tabloids definitely think she’s good. What a weird question.” Beatrice capped the marker and squinted at Ralph. “You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”
“No.”
She squinted further. “Where? What did she say to you?”
Ralph buckled. “On the grounds. She wants to see you guys again.”
“She’s here? My God!”
“I know!”
“Tell me everything she said, right now.”
“She wants to see you all. I told her that I’d have to ask your mom first, and Chessie didn’t like that, so she disappeared. She approached me again. I told her I’d bring it up to you and Cecil, but that I didn’t think you would be okay with it. Oh, and in the process Daphne got teleported away because of some Parental Protection Ward.”
Beatrice stood up. “Where is she right now?”
“I think she found her own way down from the roof”
“No, Chessie.”
“You’re not really going to see her, are you?”
“Did she say exactly why she wanted to see us?”
“Granting a wish, apparently. What’s that about?”
Beatrice scrambled out the door.
Ten minutes later Beatrice, Ralph, and Cecil were facing one another on a circular rug in the castle basement, a thick candle flickering between them.
“So what do you think?” Beatrice asked her brother.
“No way we’re going to see her. The world doesn’t need any more of this medieval self-indulgence.”
“I wonder,” she said, “if you could wish for an end of all wishing. Would that make it worth it?”
“Ugs, listen to me,” Cecil said, nervously scratching at a blistering pimple. “It’s not that I’m against the granting of wishes. I’m against the unreflective use of power. And this seems like such idle, mystical crap. Why should royal kids, who already have so much, be the ones to get wishes?”