House of Many Ways (8 page)

“So you see it
is
useful to sit and read a lot!” she announced to the air. By this time, however, she knew she was trying to justify herself to the world—if not to Peter—because she had been rather too impressed with herself for getting a letter from the King. “Oh, well,” she said. “Come on, Waif.”

Waif followed Charmain into the house but backed away from the kitchen door, trembling. Charmain saw why when she came into the kitchen and Peter looked up from his steaming saucepan. He had found an apron from somewhere and stacked all the crockery in neat heaps along the floor. He gave Charmain a look of righteous pain. “Very ladylike,” he said. “I ask you to help me wash up and you pick flowers!”

“No, really,” Charmain said. “Those beastly kobolds have cut off all the pink ones.”

“They have?” Peter said. “That’s too bad! Your uncle’s going to be upset when he comes home, isn’t
he? You could put your flowers in that dish where the eggs are.”

Charmain looked at the pie dish full of eggs crammed in beside the big bag of soapflakes among the teapots on the table. “Then where do we put the eggs? Just a moment.” She went away to the bathroom and put the hydrangeas in the washbasin. It was rather ominously moist and trickly in there, but Charmain preferred not to think about that. She went back to the kitchen and said, “Now I’m going to nurture the hydrangea bushes by emptying these teapots on them.”

“Nice try,” Peter said. “That’ll take you several hours. Do you think this water is hot yet?”

“Only steaming,” Charmain said. “I think it ought to bubble. And it won’t take me hours. Watch.” She sorted out two largish saucepans and began emptying teapots into them. She was saying, “There are some advantages to being lazy, you know,” when she realized that, as soon as she had emptied a teapot and put it back on the table, the teapot disappeared.

“Leave us one,” Peter said anxiously. “I’d like a hot drink.”

Charmain thought about this and carefully put the last teapot down on the chair. It disappeared too.

“Oh, well,” Peter said.

Since he was obviously trying not to be so unfriendly, Charmain said, “We can get afternoon tea in the living room after I’ve emptied these. And my mother brought another bag of food when she came.”

Peter cheered up remarkably. “Then we can have a decent meal when we’ve done the washing up,” he said. “We’re doing that first, whatever you say.”

And he held Charmain to it, in spite of her protests. As soon as she came in from the garden, Peter came and took the book out of her hands and presented her with a cloth to tie round her waist instead. Then he led her to the kitchen, where the mysterious and horrible process began. Peter thrust another cloth into her hands. “You wipe and I’ll wash,” he said, lifting the steaming saucepan off the
fire and pouring half the hot water on the soapflakes sprinkled in the sink. He heaved up a bucket of cold water from the pump and poured half of that in the sink too.

“Why are you doing that?” Charmain asked.

“So as not to get scalded,” Peter replied, plunging knives and forks into his mixture and following those with a stack of plates. “Don’t you know
anything
?”

“No,” Charmain said. She thought irritably that not one of the many books she had read had so much as mentioned washing dishes, let alone explained how you did it. She watched as Peter briskly used a dishcloth to wipe old, old dinner off a patterned plate. The plate came out of the suds bright and clean. Charmain rather liked the pattern now and was almost inclined to believe that this was magic. She watched Peter dip the plate in another bucket to rinse it. Then he handed it to her. “What do I do with this?” she asked.

“Wipe it dry, of course,” he said. “Then stack it on the table.”

Charmain tried. The whole horrible business took ages. The wiping cloth hardly seemed to soak up water at all and the plate kept nearly slithering out of her hands. She was so much slower at wiping than Peter was at washing, that Peter soon had a heap of plates draining beside the sink and began to get impatient. Naturally, at that point, the prettiest patterned plate slid out of Charmain’s hands completely and fell on the floor. Unlike the strange teapots, it broke.

“Oh,” Charmain said, staring down at the pieces. “How do you put them together?”

Peter rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “You don’t,” he said. “You just take care not to drop another.” He collected the pieces of plate and threw them into another bucket. “
I’ll
wipe now. You try your hand at washing, or we’ll be all day.” He let the now brownish water out of the sink, collected the knives, forks, and spoons out of it, and dropped them in the rinsing bucket. To Charmain’s surprise, they all seemed to be clean and shiny now.

As she watched Peter fill the sink again with
more soap and hot water, she decided, crossly but quite reasonably, that Peter had chosen the easy part of the work.

She found she was mistaken. She did not find it easy at all. It took her slow ages on each piece of crockery, and she got soaked down the front of her in the process. And Peter kept handing back to her plates and cups, saucers and mugs, and saying they were still dirty. Nor would he let her wash any of the many dog dishes until the human crockery was done. Charmain thought this was too bad of him. Waif had licked each one so clean that Charmain knew they would be easier to wash than anything else. Then, on top of this, she was horrified to find that her hands were coming out of the suds all red and covered with strange wrinkles.

“I must be ill!” she said. “I’ve got a horrible skin disease!”

She was annoyed and offended when Peter laughed at her.

But the dreadful business was done at last. Charmain, damp in front and wrinkly in the hands,
went sulkily off to the living room to read
The Twelve-Branched Wand
by the slanting light of the setting sun, leaving Peter to stack the clean things in the pantry. By this time, she was feeling she might go mad if she didn’t sit and read for a while. I’ve hardly read a word all day, she thought.

Peter interrupted her much too soon by coming in with a vase he had found and filled with the hydrangeas, which he dumped down on the table in front of her. “Where’s that food you said your mother brought?” he said.

“What?” Charmain said, peering at him through the foliage.

“I said
Food,”
Peter told her.

Waif seconded him by leaning against Charmain’s legs and groaning.

“Oh,” Charmain said. “Yes. Food. You can have some if you promise not to dirty a single dish eating it.”

“That’s all right,” Peter said. “I’m so hungry I could lick it off the carpet.”

So Charmain reluctantly stopped reading and
dragged the bag of food out from behind the armchair, and they all three ate large numbers of Mr. Baker’s beautiful pasties, followed by Afternoon Tea, twice, from the trolley. In the course of this huge meal, Charmain parked the vase of hydrangeas on the trolley to be out of the way. When she next looked, they had vanished.

“I wonder where they went,” Peter said.

“You can sit on the trolley and find out,” Charmain suggested.

But Peter did not feel like going that far, to Charmain’s disappointment. While she ate, she tried to think of ways of persuading Peter to go away, back to Montalbino. It was not that she utterly disliked him, exactly. It was just annoying to share the house with him. And she knew, as clearly as if Peter had told her, that the next thing he was going to make her do was to empty the things out of those laundry bags and wash them too. The idea of more washing made her shudder.

At least, she thought, I’m not going to be here tomorrow, so he can’t make me do it then.

All at once she was hideously nervous. She was going to see the King. She had been crazy to write to him, quite mad, and now she was going to have to go and
see
him. Her appetite went away. She looked up from her last creamy scone and found it was now dark outside. The magical lighting had come on indoors, filling the room with what seemed like golden sunshine, but the windows were black.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “I’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

“If that King of yours has any sense,” Peter said, “he’ll kick you straight out as soon as he sees you. Then you can come back here and do the laundry.”

Since both these things were exactly what Charmain was afraid of, she did not answer. She simply picked up
Memoirs of an Exorcist
for some light reading, marched to the door with it, and turned left to where the bedrooms were.

Charmain had rather a disturbed night. Some of this was certainly due to
Memoirs of an Exorcist,
whose author had clearly been very busy among a lot of haunts and weirdities, all of which he described in a matter-of-fact way that left Charmain in no doubt that ghosts were entirely real and mostly very unpleasant. She spent a lot of the night shivering and wishing she knew how to turn on the light.

Some of the disturbance was due to Waif, who was determined she had a right to sleep on Charmain’s pillow.

But most of the disturbance was nerves, pure and simple, and the fact that Charmain had no way of telling what the time was. She kept waking up, thinking, Suppose I oversleep! She woke in gray dawn, hearing birds twittering somewhere, and almost decided to get up then. But somehow she fell asleep again, and when she woke next it was in broad daylight.

“Help!” she cried out and flung back the covers, accidentally flinging Waif onto the floor too, and stumbled across the room to find the good clothes she had put out specially. As she dragged on her best green skirt, the sensible thing to do came to her at last. “Great-Uncle William,” she called out, “how do I tell what
time
it is?”

“Merely tap your left wrist,” the kindly voice replied, “and say ‘Time,’ my dear.” It struck Charmain that the voice was fainter and weaker than it had been. She hoped it was simply that the spell was wearing off, and not that Great-Uncle William was getting weaker himself, wherever he was.

“Time?” she said, tapping.

She expected a voice, or more probably a clock to appear. People in High Norland were great on clocks. Her own house had seventeen, including one in the bathroom. She had been vaguely surprised that Great-Uncle William did not seem to have even one cuckoo clock somewhere, but she realized the reason for this when what happened was that she simply
knew
the time. It was eight o’clock. “And it’ll take me at least an hour to walk there!” she gasped, ramming her arms into her best silk blouse as she ran for the bathroom.

She was more nervous than ever as she did her hair in there. Her reflection—with water trickling across it for some reason—looked terribly young with its hair in one rusty pigtail over its shoulder. He’ll
know
I’m only a schoolgirl, she thought. But there was no time to dwell on it. Charmain rushed out of the bathroom and back through the same door leftward and charged into the warm, tidy kitchen.

There were now five laundry bags leaning beside the sink, but Charmain had no time to bother about
that. Waif scuttled toward her, whining piteously, and scuttled back to the fireplace, where the fire was still cheerfully burning. Charmain was just about to tap the mantelpiece and ask for breakfast, when she saw Waif ’s problem. Waif was now too small to get her tail anywhere near the fireplace. So Charmain tapped and said, “Dog food, please,” before asking for breakfast for herself.

As she sat at the cleared table hurrying through her breakfast, while Waif briskly cleaned up the dog dish at her feet, Charmain could not help grudgingly thinking that it was much nicer having the kitchen clean and tidy. I suppose Peter has his uses, she thought, pouring herself a last cup of coffee. But then she felt she ought to tap her wrist again. And she
knew
it was now six minutes to nine and jumped up in a panic.

“How did I take so
long
?” she said out loud, and raced back to her bedroom for her smart jacket.

Perhaps because she was putting on the jacket as she ran, she somehow turned the wrong way through the door and found herself in a very
peculiar place. It was a long thin room with pipes running everywhere around it and, in the middle, a large, trickling tank, mystifyingly covered in blue fur.

“Oh,
bother
!” Charmain said, and backed out through the door.

She found herself back in the kitchen.

“At least I know the way from here,” she said, diving through into the living room and running for the front door. Outside, she nearly tripped over a crock of milk which must have been meant for Rollo. “And he doesn’t
deserve
it!” she said, as she shut the front door with a slam.

Down the front path she raced, between beheaded hydrangeas, and out through the gate, which shut with a
clash
behind her. Then she managed to slow down, because it was silly to try to run however many miles it was to the Royal Mansion, but she went down the road at a very brisk walk indeed, and she had just got to the first bend when the garden gate went
clash
again behind her. Charmain whirled round. Waif was running after her, pattering as fast
as her little legs would take her. Charmain sighed and marched back toward her. Seeing her coming, Waif gamboled delightedly and made tiny squeaks of pleasure.

“No, Waif,” Charmain said. “You can’t come. Go home.” She pointed sternly toward Great-Uncle William’s house.
“Home!”

Waif drooped both ears and sat up and begged.

“No!”
Charmain commanded, pointing again.
“Go home!”

Waif dropped to the ground and became a miserable white lump, with just the tip of her tail wagging.

“Oh,
honestly
!” Charmain said. And since Waif seemed determined not to budge from the middle of the road, Charmain was forced to pick her up and rush back to Great-Uncle William’s house with her. “I
can’t
take you with me,” she explained breathlessly as they went. “I’ve got to see the King, and people just don’t
take
dogs to see the King.” She opened Great-Uncle William’s front gate and dumped Waif on the garden path. “There. Now,
stay
!”

She shut the gate on Waif’s reproachful face and strode off down the road again. As she went, she tapped her wrist anxiously and said, “Time?” But she was outside Great-Uncle William’s grounds then and the spell did not work. All Charmain knew was that it was getting later. She broke into a trot.

Behind her the gate clashed again. Charmain looked back to see Waif once more racing after her.

Charmain groaned, whirled round, raced to meet Waif, scooped her up, and dumped her back inside the gate. “Now be a good dog and
stay
!” she panted, rushing off again.

The gate clashed behind her, and Waif once more came pelting after her. “I shall scream!” Charmain said. She turned back and dumped Waif inside the gate for the third time. “
Stay
there, you silly little dog!” This time she set off toward town at a run.

Behind her, the gate clashed yet again. Tiny footsteps pattered in the road.

Charmain whirled round and ran back toward Waif, crying out, “Oh,
blast
you, Waif! I shall be so
late
!” This time she picked Waif up and carried her toward the town, panting out, “All right. You win. I shall have to take you because I’ll be late if I don’t, but I don’t
want
you, Waif! Don’t you understand?”

Waif was delighted. She squirmed upward and licked Charmain’s chin.

“No, stop that,” Charmain said. “I’m not pleased. I hate you. You’re a real nuisance. Keep still or I’ll drop you.”

Waif settled into Charmain’s arms with a sigh of contentment.

“Grrr!” Charmain said as she hurried on.

As she rounded the huge bulge of cliff, Charmain had meant to check upward in case the lubbock came plunging down at her from the meadow above, but by then she was in such a hurry that she clean forgot about the lubbock and simply jogtrotted onward. And greatly to her surprise, the town was almost in front of her when she came round the bend. She had not remembered it was so near. There were the houses and towers, rosy and twinkling in the morning sun, only a stone’s throw away.
I think Aunt Sempronia’s pony made a meal of this journey, Charmain thought, as she strode in among the first houses.

The road dived in across the river and became a dirty town street. Charmain thought she remembered that this end of town was rather rough and unpleasant and marched on fast and nervously. But although most of the people she passed seemed quite poor, none of them seemed to notice Charmain particularly—or if they did, they only noticed Waif, peeping out enthusiastically from Charmain’s arms. “Pretty little dog,” remarked a woman carrying strings of onions to market as Charmain strode by.

“Pretty little
monster
,” Charmain said. The woman looked very surprised. Waif squirmed protestingly. “Yes, you are,” Charmain told her, as they began to come among wider streets and smarter houses. “You’re a bully and a blackmailer, and if you’ve made me late I shall never forgive you.”

As they reached the marketplace, the big clock
on the town hall struck ten o’clock. And Charmain went suddenly from needing to hurry to wondering how she was going to stretch ten minutes’ walk into half an hour. The Royal Mansion was practically just round the corner from here. At least she could slow down and get cool. By now the sun had burned through the mist from the mountains, and what with that and Waif’s warm body, Charmain was decidedly hot. She took a detour along the esplanade that ran high above the river, rushing swift and brown on its way to the great valley beyond the town, and dropped to a saunter. Three of her favorite bookshops were on this road. She pushed her way among other sauntering people and looked eagerly into windows. “Nice little dog,” several people said as she went.

“Huh!” Charmain said to Waif. “Fat lot
they
know!”

She arrived in Royal Square as the big clock there began to chime the half hour. Charmain was pleased. But, as she crossed the square to the booming of the clock, she was somehow not pleased, and
not hot anymore either. She was cold and small and insignificant. She knew she had been stupid to come. She was a fool. They would take one look at her and send her away. The flashing of the golden tiles on the roof of the Royal Mansion daunted her completely. She was glad of Waif’s small warm tongue licking her chin again. By the time she was climbing the steps to the heavy front door of the Mansion, she was so nervous that she almost turned round and ran away.

But she told herself firmly that this was the one thing in the world she really wanted to do—even though I’m not sure I
do
want to now, she thought. And everyone
knows
that those tiles are only tin enchanted to
look
like gold! she added, and she lifted the great gold-painted knocker and bravely hammered on the door with it. Then her knees threatened to fold under her and she wondered if she
could
run away. She stood there quivering and clutching Waif hard.

The door was opened by an old, old serving man. Probably the butler, Charmain thought, wondering
where she had seen the old man before. I must have passed him in town on my way to school, she thought. “Er…,” she said. “I’m Charmain Baker. The King wrote me a letter—” She let go of Waif with one hand in order to fetch the letter out of her pocket, but before she could get at it, the old butler held the door wide open.

“Please to come in, Miss Charming,” he said in a quavery old voice. “His Majesty is expecting you.”

Charmain found herself entering the Royal Mansion on legs that wobbled almost as badly as the old butler’s did. He was so stooped with age that his face was on a level with Waif as Charmain wobbled in past him.

He stopped her with a shaky old hand. “Please to keep tight hold on the little dog, miss. It wouldn’t do to have it wandering about here.”

Charmain discovered herself to be babbling. “I
do
hope it’s all right to bring her, she
would
keep following me, you see, and in the end I had to pick her up and carry her or I’d have been—”

“Perfectly all right, miss,” the butler said,
heaving the great door shut. “His Majesty is very fond of dogs. Indeed he has been bitten several times trying to make friends with—Well, the fact of the matter is, miss, that our Rajpuhti cook owns a dog that is not at all a nice creature. It has been known to slay other dogs when they impinge upon its territory.”

“Oh, dear,” Charmain said weakly.

“Precisely,” said the old butler. “If you will follow me, miss.”

Waif squirmed in Charmain’s arms because Charmain was clutching her so tightly as she followed the butler along a broad stone corridor. It was cold inside the Mansion and rather dark. Charmain was surprised to find that there were no ornaments anywhere and almost no hint of royal grandeur, unless you counted one or two large brown pictures in dingy gold frames. There were big pale squares on the walls every so often, where pictures had been taken away, but Charmain was by now so nervous that she did not wonder about this. She just became colder and thinner and more and more unimportant,
until she felt she must be about the size of Waif.

The butler stopped and creakily pushed open a mighty square oak door. “Your Majesty, Miss Charming Baker,” he announced. “And dog.” Then he doddered away.

Charmain managed to dodder into the room. The shakiness
must
be catching! she thought, and did not dare curtsy in case her knees collapsed.

The room was a vast library. Dim brown shelves of books stretched away in both directions. The smell of old book, which Charmain normally loved, was almost overpowering. Straight in front of her was a great oak table, piled high with more books and stacks of old, yellow papers, and some newer, whiter paper at the near end. There were three big carved chairs at that end, arranged around a very small charcoal fire in an iron basket. The basket sat on a kind of iron tray, which in turn sat on an almost worn-out carpet. Two old people sat in two of the carved chairs. One was a big old man with a nicely trimmed white beard and—when Charmain dared to look at him—kindly, crinkled old blue
eyes. She knew he had to be the King.

“Come here, my dear,” he said to her, “and take a seat. Put the little dog down near the fire.”

Charmain managed to do as the King said. Waif, to her relief, seemed to realize that one must be on one’s best behavior here. She sat gravely down on the carpet and politely quivered her tail. Charmain sat on the edge of the carved chair and quivered all over.