House of Many Ways (9 page)

“Let me make my daughter known to you,” said the King. “Princess Hilda.”

Princess Hilda was old too. If Charmain had not known she was the King’s daughter, she might have thought the Princess and the King were the same age. The main difference between them was that the Princess looked twice as royal as the King. She was a big lady like her father, with very neat iron-gray hair and a tweed suit so plain and tweed-colored that Charmain knew it was a highly aristocratic suit. Her only ornament was a big ring on one veiny old hand.

“That is a very sweet little dog,” she said, in a firm and forthright voice. “What is her name?”

“Waif, Your Highness,” Charmain faltered.

“And have you had her long?” the Princess asked.

Charmain could tell that the Princess was making conversation in order to set her at her ease, and that made her more nervous than ever. “No…er…that is,” she said. “The fact
is
she was a stray. Or…er…Great-Uncle William said she was. And he can’t have had her long because he didn’t know she was…er…a bi…er…I mean a girl. William Norland, you know. The wizard.”

The King and the Princess both said, “Oh!” at this and the King said, “Are you related to Wizard Norland, then, my dear?”

“Our great friend,” added the Princess.

“I—er—He’s my aunt Sempronia’s great-uncle really,” Charmain confessed.

Somehow the atmosphere became much more friendly. The King said, rather longingly, “I suppose you have had no news of how Wizard Norland is yet?”

Charmain shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Your
Majesty, but he did look awfully ill when the elves took him away.”

“Not to be wondered at,” stated Princess Hilda. “Poor William. Now, Miss Baker—”

“Oh—oh—please call me Charmain,” Charmain stammered.

“Very well,” the Princess agreed. “But we must get down to business now, child, because I shall have to leave you soon to attend to my first guest.”

“My daughter is sparing you an hour or so,” the King said, “to explain to you what we do here in the library and how you may best assist us. This is because we gathered from your handwriting that you were not very old—which we see is the case—and so probably inexperienced.” He gave Charmain the most enchanting smile. “We really are most grateful to you for your offer of help, my dear. No one has ever considered that we might need assistance before.”

Charmain felt her face filling with heat. She knew she was blushing horribly. “My pleasure, Your—,” she managed to mutter.

“Pull your chair over to the table,” Princess Hilda interrupted, “and we’ll get down to work.”

As Charmain got up and dragged the heavy chair over, the King said courteously, “We hope you may not be too hot in here with the brazier beside you. It may be summer now, but we old people feel the cold these days.”

Charmain was still frozen with nerves. “Not at all, Sire,” she said.

“And Waif at least is happy,” the King said, pointing a gnarly finger. Waif had rolled over onto her back with all four paws in the air and was basking in the heat from the brazier. She seemed far happier than Charmain was.

“To work, Father,” the Princess said severely. She fetched up the glasses hanging from a chain round her neck and planted them on her aristocratic nose. The King fetched up a pair of pince-nez. Charmain fetched up her own glasses. If she had not been so nervous, she would have wanted to giggle at the way they all had to do this. “Now,” said the Princess, “we have in this library books, papers, and
parchment scrolls. After a lifetime of labor, Father and I have managed to list roughly half the books—by name and author’s name—and assigned each a number, together with a brief account of what is in each book. Father will continue doing this, while you make yourself responsible for my main task, which is to catalog papers and scrolls. I have barely made a start there, I’m afraid. Here is my list.” She opened a large folder full of sheets of paper covered in elegant spidery writing, and spread a row of them in front of Charmain. “As you see, I have several main headings: Family Letters, Household Accounts, Historic Writings, and so on. Your task is to go through each pile of paper and decide exactly what every sheet contains. You then write a description of it under the appropriate heading, after which you put the paper carefully in one of these labeled boxes here. Is this clear so far?”

Charmain, leaning forward to look at the beautifully written lists, was afraid that she seemed awfully stupid. “What do I do,” she asked, “if I find a paper that doesn’t fit any of your headings, ma’am?”

“A very good question,” Princess Hilda said. “We are hoping that you will find a great many things that do not fit. When you do find one, consult my father at once, in case the paper is important. If it isn’t, put it in the box marked Miscellaneous. Now here is your first packet of papers. I’ll watch as you go through them to see how you go on. There is paper for your lists. Pen and ink are here. Please start.” She pushed a frayed brown packet of letters, tied together with pink tape, in front of Charmain and sat back to watch.

I’ve never known anything so off-putting! Charmain thought. She tremulously unpicked the pink knot and tried spreading the letters out a little.

“Pick each one up by its opposite corners,” Princess Hilda said. “Don’t push them.”

Oh, dear! Charmain thought. She glanced sideways at the King, who had taken up a wilted-looking soft leather book and was leafing carefully through it. I’d hoped to be doing that, she thought. She sighed and carefully opened the first crumbly brown letter.

“My dearest, gorgeous, wonderful darling,” she read. “I miss you so hideously…”

“Um,” she said to Princess Hilda, “is there a special box for love letters?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the Princess. “This one. Record the date and the name of the person who wrote it—Who was it, by the way?”

Charmain looked on to the end of the letter. “Um. It says ‘Big Dolphie.’”

Both the King and the Princess said,
“Well!”
and laughed, the King most heartily. “Then they are from my father to my mother,” Princess Hilda said. “My mother died many years ago now. But never mind that. Write it on your list.”

Charmain looked at the crumbly brown state of the paper and thought it must have been
many
years ago. She was surprised that the King did not seem to mind her reading it, but neither he nor the Princess seemed in the least worried. Perhaps royal people are different, she thought, looking at the next letter. It began “Dearest chuffy puffy one.” Oh, well. She got on with her task.

After a while, the Princess stood up and pushed her chair neatly up to the table. “This seems quite satisfactory,” she stated. “I must go. My guest will be arriving soon. I still wish I had been able to ask that husband of hers too, Father.”

“Out of the question, my dear,” the King said, without looking up from the notes he was making. “Poaching. He’s someone else’s Royal Wizard.”

“Oh, I know,” Princess Hilda said. “But I am also aware that Ingary has
two
Royal Wizards. And our poor William is ill and may be dying.”

“Life is never fair, my dear,” the King said, still scratching away with his quill pen. “Besides, William had no more success than we have had.”

“I’m aware of that too, Father,” Princess Hilda said as she left the library. The door shut with a heavy thud behind her.

Charmain bent over her next pile of papers, trying to look as if she had not been listening. It seemed private. This pile of paper had been tied into a bundle for so long that each sheet had stuck to the next one, all dry and brownish, like a wasps’
nest Charmain had once found in the attic at home. She became very busy trying to separate the layers.

“Er-hem,” said the King. Charmain looked up to see that he was smiling at her, with his quill in the air and a sideways twinkle at her from above his glasses. “I see you are a very discreet young lady,” he said. “And you must have gathered from our talk just now that we—and your great-uncle with us—are searching for some very important things. My daughter’s headings will give you some clue what to look out for. Your key words will be ‘treasury,’ ‘revenues,’ ‘gold,’ and ‘elfgift.’ If you find a mention of any of these, my dear, please tell me at once.”

The idea of looking for such important things made Charmain’s fingers on the frail paper go all cold and clumsy. “Yes. Yes of course, Your Majesty,” she said.

Rather to her relief, that packet of papers was nothing but lists of goods and their prices—all of which seemed surprisingly low. “To ten pounds of wax candles at two pennies a pound, twenty pence,”
she read. Well, it did seem to date from two hundred years ago. “To six ounces of finest saffron, thirty pence. To nine logs of fragrant applewood for the scenting of the chief chambers, one farthing.” And so on. The next page was full of things like “To forty ells of linen drapes, forty-four shillings.” Charmain made careful notes, put those pages in the box labeled Household Accounts, and peeled up the next sheet.

“Oh!” she said. The next sheet said, “To Wizard Melicot, for the enchanting of one hundred square feet of tinne tilings to give the appearance of a golden roofe, 200 guineas.”

“What is it, my dear?” the King asked, putting his finger on his place in his book.

Charmain read the ancient bill out to him. He chuckled and shook his head a little. “So it was definitely done by magic, was it?” he said. “I must confess I had always hoped it would turn out to be real gold, hadn’t you?”

“Yes, but it
looks
like gold anyway,” Charmain said consolingly.

“And a very good spell too, to last two hundred years,” the King said, nodding. “Expensive as well. Two hundred guineas was a lot of money in those days. Ah, well. I never did hope to solve our financial problems that way. Besides, it would look shocking if we climbed up and stripped all the tiles off the roof. Keep looking, my dear.”

Charmain kept looking but all she found was someone charging two guineas to plant a rose garden and someone else getting paid ten guineas to refurbish the treasury—no,
not
someone else, the same Wizard Melicot who did the roof!

“Melicot was a specialist, I fancy,” the King said, when Charmain had read this out. “Looks to me like a fellow who went in for faking precious metals. The treasury was certainly empty by that date. I’ve known my crown was a fake for years. Must be this Melicot’s work. Are you getting peckish at all, my dear? A bit cold and stiff? We don’t bother with regular lunch—my daughter doesn’t hold with it—but I generally ask the butler to bring in a snack around this time. Why not get
up and stretch your legs while I ring the bell?”

Charmain stood up and walked about, causing Waif to roll to her feet and watch inquiringly, while the King limped over to the bell rope by the door. He was decidedly frail, Charmain thought, and very tall. It was as if his height was too much for him. While they waited for someone to answer the bell, Charmain seized the chance to look at the books in the shelves. They seemed to be books about
everything,
higgledy-piggledy, travel books next to books of algebra and poems rubbing shoulders with geography. Charmain had just opened one called
Secrets of the Universe Revealed,
when the library door opened and a man in a tall cook’s hat came in carrying a tray.

To Charmain’s surprise, the King nimbly skipped behind the table. “My dear, pick up your dog!” he called out urgently.

Another dog had come in, pressed close to the cook’s legs as if it felt unsafe, a bitter-looking brown dog with gnarly ears and a ratty tail. It was growling as it came. Charmain had no doubt that this was
the dog that slew other dogs, and she dived to pick Waif up.

But Waif somehow slipped through her hands and went trotting toward the cook’s dog. The other dog’s growls increased to a snarl. Bristles rose along its haggard brown back. It looked so menacing that Charmain did not dare go any nearer to it. Waif, however, seemed to feel no fear. She went right up to the snarling dog in her jauntiest way, raised herself on her tiny hind legs, and cheekily dabbed her nose on its nose. The other dog started back, so surprised that it stopped snarling. Then it pricked its lumpy ears and, very cautiously, nosed Waif in return. Waif gave an excited squeak and frisked. Next second, both dogs were gamboling delightedly all over the library.

“Well!” said the King. “I suppose that’s all right, then. What is the meaning of this, Jamal? Why are you here instead of Sim?”

Jamal—who had only one eye, Charmain noticed—came and apologetically put his tray down on the table. “Our princess has taken Sim away to
receive the guest, Sire,” he explained, “leaving no one but me to bring food. And my dog
would
come. I think,” he added, watching the two prancing dogs, “that my dog has never enjoyed life until now.” He bowed to Charmain. “Please bring your small white dog here again often, Miss Charming.”

He whistled to his dog. It pretended not to hear. He went to the door and whistled again. “Food,” he said. “Come for squid.” This time both dogs came. And to Charmain’s surprise and dismay, Waif went trotting out of the door beside the cook’s dog, and the door shut after them both.

“Not to worry,” the King said. “They seem to be friends. Jamal will bring her back. Very reliable fellow, Jamal. If it wasn’t for that dog of his, he’d be the perfect cook. Let’s see what he’s brought us, shall we?”

Jamal had brought a jug of lemonade and a platter piled with crisp brown things under a white cloth. The King said, “Ah!” as he eagerly lifted the cloth. “Have one while they’re hot, my dear.”

Charmain did so. One bite was enough to assure
her that Jamal was an even better cook than her father—and Mr. Baker was renowned for being the best cook in town. The brown things were crunchy, but soft at the same time, with a rather hot taste that Charmain had never met before. They made you need the lemonade. She and the King polished off the whole platterful between them and drank all the lemonade. Then they got back to work.

By this time they were on extremely friendly terms. Charmain now had no shyness about asking the King anything she wanted to know. “Why would they need two bushels of rose petals, Sire?” she asked him, and the King answered, “They liked them underfoot in the dining saloon in those days. Messy habit, to my mind. Listen to what this philosopher has to say about camels, my dear.” And he read out a page from his book that made them both laugh. The philosopher had clearly not got on with camels.