by Heide Goody
Ella bashed the radio with the palm of her hand until it stopped. The silence gave her a chance to compile a verbal list of her priorities.
“One. Tell dad something — the truth, something a bit like the truth — and stop the wedding.”
She turned left onto an actual road, a narrow lane of genuine if poorly maintained tarmac. She pushed the tiny engine to its top speed, which seemed to be something around fifty miles an hour, but felt like so much more with the bone-jarring ride.
“Two,” she said. “Find mum. Find her, revive her, rescue her. Whatever.”
The road was edged with an endless car-high vista of green hedgerows but she passed signposts for villages with names like Little Burnley and Much Darkling. They meant nothing to her. Trekking across country with the wolf had been a disorientating experience, and she suspected that the normal spatial arrangement of the countryside had also been tampered with.
“Three,” she said. “Find that fairy godmother of mine and kick her in the tinkerbells.”
She slowed to approach a junction and thought she might be in luck. There were street lights and a tree-shaded sign. She leaned forward to read the sign, but was immediately distracted by a large shape rising up from behind the hedge. She had time to register that it was a bed sheet, and she had time to recognise the two birds carrying it. She even had time to decipher their misspelled message as the banner wrapped around her windscreen.
Yur grans a mad ol wich
Unfortunately, she had no time at all to apply the car’s feeble brakes before it tilted blindly into a ditch and flipped onto its roof. An informative warning light brightened the dashboard as the car slid slowly to a stop. “Цар је наопачке.”
Ella squeezed out of the window into the scratchy claws of the hedge. It took her a few more minutes to extract herself and stumble onto the road. She looked around for those birds, but all she could hear was a distant tweeting that sounded suspiciously like laughter.
“Bastards,” she muttered. She took a long look at Granny’s car. It was going nowhere. It seemed to be in one piece, but that piece was wedged firmly into the hedge at an irretrievable angle.
Ella’s options were limited. Her first point of interest was the road sign on the main road. Cirencester, Stow-on-the-Wold.
The Cotswolds then, she thought. Not local, but not the ends of the earth either. Now without transport, she looked up and down the road. There was no sign of any other vehicles, although she was wary that if anyone stopped it would undoubtedly turn out to be a busload of elves or a troll driving a taxi.
She stepped back to the hedge and climbed on top of the car, balancing on the side of the window to get a good look over the top of the hedge.
For a dizzying moment, she had the impression that she was much higher up, looking down on a house of doll-like proportions. She wobbled with the sudden sense of vertigo, but swiftly reappraised what she was looking at when she realised the house was indeed a miniature, no more than two feet high. There were more of them, tiny houses stretching out towards the hedge borders of a well-manicured formal garden.
“A model village.”
Oddly, there was something wonderfully mundane about a model village. Model villages were the kind of Sunday afternoon tourist attraction that drew bored families, retired couples and the holidaying middle classes. A model village meant there’d be a car park full of practical estate cars and a café/gift shop where one could buy overpriced scones and bafflingly pointless fridge magnets. A model village meant middle England at its most tedious and glorious best.
“Almost home,” she said and climbed carefully down from the hedge.
She looked at the first house, the one that had initially caught her eye. It was a knee-high cottage with a real thatched roof. Ella couldn’t resist reaching out to run her fingers over it, wondering which thatcher (she knew several) had received this strange commission. It was familiar in a distant way, and Ella wondered if she’d seen a picture.
She moved on, following a path that ran between a diminutive pub and a farm, and continued from that miniature rural idyll to a more fanciful landscape with low-lying hummocks that might have been designed for hobbits or teletubbies. A turreted castle with a moat soared above a valley that housed cosy-looking caves. The path crossed over the valley on a small footbridge, and Ella couldn’t help peering over the side to check whether ogres or dragons could be seen in the caves.
“Hello dearie.”
Ella looked up, startled to see a young woman beaming at her from a few feet away. How had this woman appeared so silently, especially since every movement that she made was accompanied by a rustling sound? She was dressed in a fifties ball gown made of yellow silk, supported by numerous layers of petticoats. Her waist was cinched in with a contrasting belt that made Ella wince just looking at it. Her hair was piled into an elegant chignon and her face was made up in the style that Lily and Petunia often called department store assistant. When they said it, they were normally mocking someone who was trying too hard, but Ella associated the look with someone who took a great deal of care with their appearance. The woman affected a look of casual insouciance, but then tilted her foot to admire the glossy red shoes she was wearing and made small swivelling movements of her skirts (purely, it seemed, for the satisfaction of hearing them swish).
“Welcome to our fantasy kingdom,” she said.
Ella sighed. Could this woman possibly be a normal human passer-by who just happened to be dressed like a Disney princess? Maybe she was a model village employee? Or maybe an unabashed fashion dress aficionado?
“Lovely dress,” said Ella.
“Nineteen fifty-three,” said the woman.
“Got yourself a bargain there,” said Ella approvingly. “Did you get it on eBay or second hand shop?”
“Second of June, nineteen fifty-three,” replied the woman with smiling lips of perfect cherry red.
“Pardon?”
“It was the pinnacle of style. I get all my best things from there. Fashion flattered women in the best way possible. Surely you must agree?”
“Oh. Right.”
Ella could see the odds of this being an ordinary person diminishing rapidly. She was still holding out for the possibility that the woman was a delusional Lucille Ball cosplayer.
The young woman made a very obvious appraisal of Ella’s tattered garments and raised her eyebrows in a pointed manner.
“I think something like this would suit you very well, dearie.”
Dearie?
Ella realised she had heard the woman’s voice before, on a Betamax video tape.
“You’re Carabosse,” she said coldly.
“Oh well done, dear.”
Ella turned round to look for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing behind her but a small-scale windmill. With a passionate strength, she wrenched the roof off, sails and all, and swung it round intending to clout the fairy in the face. But, Carabosse’s hand was already raised and the impromptu weapon smashed harmlessly apart in mid-air as though the fairy stood behind bulletproof glass.
Carabosse gave Ella a look of gentle rebuke.
“Ella, dear. The sooner you embrace your destiny, the sooner we can make sure that you get that happy ending that we all want for you.”
Ella threw a punch. It stopped a hand’s breadth from Carabosse’s nose. It didn’t hit anything. It didn’t hurt. It just stopped.
“What have you done with my mum, you cow?”
“Me? Nothing. Why? Have you been listening to the ramblings of mad old ladies?” She clapped her hands together, beaming. “Now, dear. Let’s get our priorities sorted out. If you’ll just let me fix your clothes and hair, we can sit down and have a delightful girly chat about your Prince Charming.”
“I don’t have a Prince Charming!”
There was instantly a hand of playing cards in Carabosse’s hand.
“No, we have a choice of several, don’t we?” She grinned. “Oh, it’s like th
at on-line dating thing, isn’t it, except you’ve got your very own fairy godmother to help you make the correct choice.” She suddenly frowned, plucked out a card and threw it away. It vanished in a shower of golden sparkles. “Lovely lad but not quite right.” She fanned out the cards. “Shall we pick one? One, two, three, four, five guaranteed tickets to your very own happily ever after.”
“I don’t want a happily ever after!”
“Who doesn’t want to be happy? Your dear grandmother has been so deluded about that point. I blame her for your mother’s troubles, I really do.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Ella, stung by the casually cruel references to her family. “If you hadn’t stuck your nose in, I’d have my family with me now, instead of them hiding out in limbo.”
“And there you go,” smiled Carabosse. “That’s your grandmother talking. Mistaking my offer of wisdom, support and guidance for interfering control. No one gets anywhere without a little help these days. It’s not about what you know; it’s about who you know. And you, my lucky dear, know a fairy godmother who is happy to help.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“No, you don’t,” Carabosse agreed. “Without your grandmother’s malign influence and your poor confused mother to cloud the waters for you, I can see that you’ve grown into a strong and confident young woman. And that’s lovely. You don’t need my help but you’d benefit from it. Top athletes need a coach. The greatest actors need a director. Think what I can do for you!”
“I don’t want whatever it is you can do for me. I want my family back.”
“Ah, so you do want a happy ending,” said Carabosse, bent right into Ella’s face with a smirk. “You’ll have your own family soon. Strong sons, beautiful daughters. That’s the family you need to focus on now, my dear. You’re not getting any younger, you know.”
Ella roared with frustration, forcibly uprooted a model church and brought it crashing down over Carabosse’s perfectly coiffed bonce. It crumbled like Legos and cascaded to the floor, not a single piece actually touching the smug fairy.
Looking down at the rubble of the church’s steeple, Carabosse nudged the painted clock face with the toe of her glossy red pump. “Ah sweetie, none of us like to be reminded of that biological clock do we?” she smiled, patting her hair. “But — tick-tock — I have something I need you to see.”
She pulled Ella’s arm into a tight lock with her own. Ella, reeling from the uselessness of her attack, could only comply.
Carabosse held her close and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Allow yourself to think of it for a moment, Ella. A future that’s guaranteed to hold happiness for you. Love and fulfilment without ever having to worry about it.”
“But I want to worry about it!”
“You want to worry?”
“Nobody’s life should be that easy. The journey’s there to be savoured, with its ups and its downs. The most important thing is that it should be mine, not someone else’s idea of what my journey ought to be.”
“I don’t believe you mean that,” said Carabosse stiffly.
“I do.”
“Oh, I believe you believe you mean that. But you don’t. Not really.” Carabosse ran her fingertips along the crenelated top of a castle wall as they passed. “You want ups and downs but you mean the ups and downs of ‘will there be cake for tea?’ or ‘will it rain on the bank holiday weekend?’ You don’t actually want any major upsets.”
“I want life. As it comes,” said Ella.
Carabosse put a hand to Ella’s belly. Ella tried to wriggle away but the fairy had her tight.
“What if I were to say you have tumours?” said the fairy. “Festering. Growing.”
Ella blinked.
“I have cancer?”
“I said ‘if’. I’m a fairy, not an oncologist. What if I were to tell you that your firstborn will one day find a medicine bottle and, thinking they are sweets, eat every last pill? What if I were to tell you that someone you care for dearly frequently thinks about just ‘ending it all’?”
“Is this true?” said Ella. “Any of it?”
Carabosse patted Ella’s arm.
“What do you care? You just want life as it comes. Now, where’s the thing I need to show you. It’s just round… ah.”
The path curved around a grassy hummock to reveal a model tower, shaped like a lighthouse. It was built of stone, with a charming gothic window at the top.
“In there, Ella,” said Carabosse.
“In there?”
Carabosse pointed at the tiny window. “I think you’ll find it very interesting, dear.”
Ella stooped to peer into the window, but the bright sunlight made it impossible to see what was inside.
“A little closer,” said Carabosse.
Ella cupped her hands to keep the light away, and put her face right up to the window. “I can’t see any—”
Just for an instant she thought she saw a tiny figure: a woman with a confused expression and bits of hedge sticking out of her hair. The woman looked up at Ella and shouted. Ella stepped away in fright. She was about to yell at Carabosse, then somehow she stepped backwards across a rough wooden floor. The window was still in front of her only now she was looking out rather than looking in.
A huge face appeared at the window. It had a cherry red smile. Ella could see every pore on the nose and thready little veins in the eyeballs.
“You bitch, let me out of here!” yelled Ella.
“Tsk,” said her fairy godmother in a voice as loud as worlds. “Do you really think I’m going to give in to your tantrums, my dear? I’ve waited a long time to see this through, and if you think I’m about to let you ruin it with your naive ideas about your journey then you need to pull yourself together. You’ll remain here for the time being while I organise things properly for you.”
“Organise? Organise what?”
“There’s a ball to attend. There’s the carriage. The horses. Your wicked stepmother will inevitably try to stop you…”
Ella rushed to the window but Carabosse was nowhere to be seen. She peered from side to side, but the view was restricted to the path that she’d walked up and the treeline on the other side. She looked down. It was a long way. When she’d been on the outside, it had been something like three feet; but from in here, it was a bone-shattering drop. She wondered, briefly what would happen if she jumped out. Would she revert to her proper size and find herself sitting on the ground, unharmed? Would she stay tiny, but find that a squadron of bluebirds swooped down and rescued her? Or would she simply plummet to an unhappy ending. Probably not worth the risk of finding out. Not yet.
Ella turned her attention to the inside of the tower. It was circular, with bare stone walls and a wooden floor. There was no sign of a handy staircase, or even a doorway that might lead to one, but that came as no surprise. She knew this story. The dwarfs would probably call this the Tower Gambit or the Hair Gambit.
There was no door. However, there was a deep and comfy-looking brass bed, a huge clawfoot bath and a surprisingly modern kitchenette. There was also a spinning wheel and an embroidery frame.
“Everything a medieval maiden could ask for,” she muttered.
It crossed Ella’s mind that she might benefit from a soak in a bath, while she was assessing her options. She turned on the taps and then, as she picked up a towel, she heard a distant cheeping.
“Oh no. We’re having none of that. If you blue-faced little seed-gobblers think you’re going to slide into helping with chores and holding up towels, you’ve left it too late. I’m sure I could use the help, but if I’m honest, I just don’t like you.”
She ran to the window and slammed it shut. The tweeting turned into a malevolent hiss as she did so. She returned to the bath, inspected the products lined up along the sides and rapidly dismissed them all. They had names like Irresistible Allure and Come Hither, My Prince. If she could find a simple bar of soap she’d be happy. If she could find a loofah in the shap
e of a blue bird to clean the sweaty bits between her toes, she’d be even happier.
Once she was cleaner, and marginally less frustrated, Ella investigated further. There was a wardrobe full of clothes, so she dug in eagerly, keen to change out of the outfit she’d been wearing for at least thirty-six hours. She flicked past some jewel coloured ball gowns with puff sleeves, totally impractical, but she found only more ball gowns, increasingly gaudy and outlandish. There were some slightly lighter-weight dresses, made from pale cottons, but they featured corset lacing and plunging necklines — just the sort of thing that might be called for in a pantomime production of Milkmaids Like it with Cream on Top. She searched the room for a pair of scissors with which to modify some of the clothing to suit her needs, but was unable to find anything sharp enough to cut fabric.
Ella stomped back to the bath and washed her own clothes in the tub, draped them over the side to dry and then went over to the bed, which looked incredibly comfortable. She tested the mattress and slipped between the sheets naked. She’d catch up on her sleep and sort out some clothes in the morning.
At The Bumbles, the sprawling Avenant family house, Roy Avenant snoozed in his leather armchair, in front of a muted television. The Cornbury Game Fair had taken it out of him. It had been a smashing day and it was a shame Ella hadn’t been able to attend. Nonetheless, he, ‘Prince’ Jasper and ‘Whirlybird’ Wilbur had made an absolute occasion of it. They had made a good showing in the clay pigeon competition, thrashed a Land Rover round the 4x4 off-road course, sampled the cultural delights of the beer tent and then done something absolutely hilarious and not at all dangerous in the falconry display area. (Roy’s fuzzled brain was vague on the details.) Then, Wilbur had gone off for a chat with some members of the local constabulary so Roy and Jasper had returned to the beer tent where, over a pint or four of something hoppy, Jasper had tried to explain how his uncle, the Duke of Westmoreland, and all his family had vanished the night before in what Jasper described as a ‘conga-related accident’. Befuddled by such nonsense, Roy had called it a day and somehow wound up back at home with every intention of rounding off the evening with a meat pie, a bottle of something apple-ish and a little sleep.