The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (24 page)

They were not the only ones—the girl with round cheeks and earrings screamed along with them, clinging to the side of a mirror to keep from collapsing on the floor.

“That's the work bell,” said Bayleaf, who looked a little glad to see the newcomers suffering as the rest had done. “You have to go. It'll only get worse if you shirk.” He pulled up his trouser-leg to show them—one of his feet was solid gold from the knee on. “Some of us do try to say no. Run off.”

Penny Farthing hooked an arm under each of Tom's and Tam's elbows and pulled them up. Tom thought his arm would come off in her hand—his bones burned.

“The Office! The Office!” wept the littlest children.

“Come on,” Penny said. “I'll go with you. The Fairies can't really tell us apart. They call off the gold as soon as someone shows up. Ginnie?” The girl with round cheeks nodded gratefully and dragged herself over to Penny. They held hands, and Penny's red hair turned into Ginnie's brown curls like ice melting. “We swap a lot. When one of us is just too tired. Or when it's a Laundry Sabbat. You rest, Gin. Sleep. I left some cocoa in the sink.”

Tom Thorn could hardly see. His foot felt so awfully, horribly heavy. “The Spinster,” he gasped. “You said…” But he could not finish.

“What do you want with that dried-up old tragedy?” Sadie Spleenwort, lately of the swamps, scoffed. “You'd best look to your own business or you'll find yourself with a golden head. She's with the Redcaps. Holed up fast in their rum cellar and they'll never let her out, so you just keep your head down and learn how to say
yes, sir,
like it was your first word.”

 

CHAPTER XV

T
HE
L
AUNDRY
M
OOSE

In Which Tom and Tam Go to the Office, Meet a Humble Public Servant, Fight Several Albino Moose, and Do a Spot of Laundry

The Office had come to collect them.

The Office towered over their heads, blotting out the sunlight and puffing little white cards into the air like smoke. It was a man taller than a tannery, wearing a sweeping dark robe stitched with all the symbols on a keyboard that sit lonely, used but rarely, ampersands and percentages and brackets and
at
signs and carrots and asterisks. It glowered at them with scalding red eyes.

“IN YOU GET,” it bellowed, and opened its robe to reveal its chest: a barrel-shaped card catalogue. Brass handles were bolted into its long drawers below little cream-colored cards with addresses printed neatly on them.

17 Love-Lies-Bleeding Lane
rolled smoothly toward them, as spacious as a coffin.

“Hullo, Rupert,” sighed Penny Farthing with a weak smile. “Doing well?”

“FINE,” thundered the Office. “MISS MYGNOME. WAS A CUSHY GIG, THAT. I GET A SORE THROAT SOMETIMES BUT WHAT CAN YOU DO.”

“Comes with the job, I imagine,” she agreed. Tom and Tam tried vainly to stand on their own. They left gold footprints where they'd come running. “All that hollering takes a toll.”

“I'VE A KNACK FOR IT,” Rupert roared. “GOTTA TAKE WORK WHILE WORK'S TAKING, YEAH?”

“Yeah,” Tam offered weakly. This seemed to snap the Office back to the task at hand.

“COME ON THEN, NO MOANING, I HAVEN'T GOT ALL DAY.”

Their little wretched band climbed up the card catalogue as best they could. Rupert boosted Scratch up into the drawer first, then popped Blunderbuss, squealing woolly protest, after. Penny got Tom and Tam halfway up to 17 Love-Lies-Bleeding Lane before Rupert hoisted them up the rest of the way with a surprisingly gentle hand.

Tom and Tam teetered on the edge of the dark drawer. Nothing lay at the bottom of it. Nothing at all, except darkness. But Penny gave them a shove and they toppled ungracefully into the depths of the Office, dripping gold all the way down.

*   *   *

Let us say a house is a world. Its hallways and landings are rivers and seas connecting the great continents of living room, parlor, kitchen, library. We sail down them, dropping anchor in the port of breakfast, the harbor of bookshelves! Great mountains of stairs lead up into the alpine country of bedrooms and washing rooms and sewing rooms and linen closets. Let us say this is true—for it is just exactly what Tom Thorn and Tamburlaine saw when they passed through the little door at 17 Love-Lies-Bleeding Lane, a handsome tweed brownstone sandwiched between two others just like it on a broad and pleasant street lined with poplin poplars.

Tom Thorn pushed open the door—an oval velvet elbow patch with a brown-button knob. The horrid pain in his bones and his skin and his teeth and his feet went up like steam and vanished back to wherever it had come from. He stepped into a wide green meadow studded with wildflowers. His friends crowded in behind him, all but Penny gawping at the sloping hills, the bright violets and dahlias and tangled bittersweet berries racing one another across the sweetgrass. Little groves of almond and tangerine and breadfruit trees sprouted up in the most perfect places, where the nooks of hillocks met or where one might most want shade if one were walking through the countryside. The sun gushed light like a burst grape; four happy trickling brooks full of smooth round stones darted through the rich black soil. The clouds blossomed in a very strange shade of eggplant, but it somehow looked lovely and
right
in this particular sky. They had stepped, not out of the oval velvet door, but out of a very neat groundskeeper's hut, walls whitewashed and roof tiled in blue.

A lady came striding out of the nearest copse of tangerine trees. Penny stiffened; Tom Thorn and Tamburlaine gawped. She was the most perfectly beautiful person he had ever seen, so perfectly beautiful that she looked entirely wrong, precisely because there wasn't the tiniest thing wrong with her. She looked like a drawing or a sort of architectural plan for a lady—except she wasn't really a lady, but a Fairy. Her hair swept up into a wild mob of wine-grape-colored ringlets clasped with live black starlings clamping her curls in their beaks. Her wings folded decorously against her long, slim back, nearly black, so thick and dense were the colors of them. Her skin was pale and ageless, the color of copper gone slightly green with age. Yet she wore the most upsetting dress—a short tea gown made all of iron, from the shoulders to the fringe. It had been hammered together out of horseshoes and wheel hoops and hammer heads and ax blades and manacles. Where it touched her delicate skin it left red welts and tiny blisters like dewdrops, but the Fairy did not seem to mind them in the least; rather, she wore them like proud rubies.

“I thought Fairies were allergic to iron,” Tamburlaine whispered.

“Quite,” said the Fairy curtly. Her voice collided with them and burst into a shower of dark honey. “But that's an absurd reason to be afraid of a thing, don't you agree? I wear my day dress from nine in the morning to four thirty in the afternoon faithfully. I used to bleed the whole while. Oh, you never saw such a mess! But I am ever so much stronger now. I can put on my crinoline in the evenings and handle a hobnail without the smallest wince. It makes
quite
the party trick, I can tell you. But enough about my personal regimen!” She clapped her hands together. Her saffron eyes sparkled. “I may just have a
fit,
I am so thoroughly delighted to make your acquaintance! I asked for the two of you specially. I do so enjoy a spot of the unusual in my house. And folk have a charming habit of doing as I say. Very useful indeed. You may call me Madame Tanaquill. Your … animals may sleep in the stables with my own.” She gestured toward an outcropping of blue rock to the west. A willow tree was trying valiantly to grow out of it. “Go on, my little pups!”

“I'm no one's pup, Miss Rustybritches, and I don't sleep in a stable, thanks much!” snapped Blunderbuss. Scratch stubbornly refused to sing for this person calling him an animal. He stared down with the mouth of his bell. But Madame Tanaquill positively rippled with calm uncaring.

“I shouldn't like to call my sheepdogs, but I shall,” she said in a singsong voice.

Scratch and Blunderbuss went, furiously, the gramophone's crank winding up indignantly tight. Now he did want to sing—or spit—at her! But he could not seem to find a thing to say or sing, for no song has yet been written that goes:
I love Tamburlaine and if you take me away from her I shall play John Philip Sousa at top volume till I explode or you do
.

“Now, that's all sorted! How nice. Let's get you started on the laundry, shall we? And after supper I am having an Affair. You will be expected to dress appropriately and present yourselves at the Cranberry Bog at one quarter past nine. I do not abide tardiness, children! Ginnie knows the way to the Laundries. My regular boy is already at his post, so don't make him labor alone longer than you must.”

“Tanaquill,” said Tamburlaine slowly.
“The Faerie Queene.”

Tom Thorn nodded and squeezed her hand. “Yes! Spenser! I knew it sounded familiar! You're the Queen of the Fairies!”

An impossibly pretty blush rose up in her high cheeks. “Certainly not, child. You embarrass me. Goodness! That was so long ago! Who can remember? Having spent some centuries as a preposterous four-armed statue in a field will do dreadful things to one's mind. No, Miss Toothpick, I am not the Queen of anything. Once, in my youth, perhaps, I carried the thistle and the fennel. Perhaps I wore the Hungry Crown. Who can say? I may have commanded bullfrog battalions and rode in a silver walnut shell drawn by eleven mad peacocks. But it becomes no one to dwell upon the past! I serve but humbly, at the leisure of the King, without ambition or thought of myself.” She tilted her chin down demurely. “A throne is nothing but an ostentatious bit of chair that matches nothing and ruins the room. I am but a mild and hardworking soul, a simple Prime Minister. A humble public servant, devoted to service and sacrifice. Charles Crunchcrab”—she could not quite conceal an exquisite grimace of distaste at the name—“is my sovereign, and he is … well. He is a
charming
man. If you are lucky, perhaps one day you will meet him.” She smirked. “Unless King Goldmouth comes back!”

Did she know?
Tom had never been good at guessing when folk meant the opposite of what they said. He always said exactly what he meant—why would anyone say otherwise?

“Come now, the laundry won't wait! Let us see how my backward, upside-down Changelings handle a little honest work.”

And Madame Tanaquill swept away, her iron dress clunking and clinking and clanging behind her. She disappeared back into the tangerine trees as the starlings sang in her hair.

Penny rolled her eyes. “That's about enough of that, I think. It's worse than scrubbing floors, having to listen to her! She's really the worst of them, just an insufferable bag of donkey hooves. And
such
lies!” She began to walk down toward a fold in the meadow where the four brooks met and tumbled into one another. Hibiscus and orchids rouged the mouth of the gully. Tom and Tam jogged after her. “I should have known she'd want you. Don't swallow a teaspoon of her bunk; she just wants to keep an eye on you, make sure you're not going to make anything
happen
. The Fairies are very concerned with nothing
happening
. Have this as your first bite of Fairy logic.” Penny made her voice high and sweet and teasing and fancified, a fair impression of Madame Tanaquill's. “‘Things used to happen, and that was fine as ferns until they started happening to
us
. Oh, wasn't that just
beastly,
Mr. Butternut? Undoubtedly, Mrs. Henbane! Why, I was a dung shovel for five whole minutes! Can you imagine? That's nothing, Mr. Butternut, I was a
priceless
idiot, so I spent my holidays as hat! I shall never recover! Oh, Mrs. Henbane, never you fear, we'll make good and sure nothing goes mucking about with
happening
at all anymore, won't that be nice?' That's what they call it! Our Holiday! A hundred years as garbage and they're worse than ever. They always say that ugly little mess about King Goldmouth, too. He was the big man when they were strong as gravity. Some whip of a girl with a needle for a sword stomped him flat and good riddance. Now they all hate King Chuck and it's
till Goldmouth returns
this and
if King Goldmouth could hear you he'd smack the sass off your wings!
”

Down in the gully, a herd of white moose splashed angrily in the cold water, hoot-roaring in rage, vicious blue eyes rolling, their hooves churning the water white. Their tails snaked up behind them, barbed with brilliant red thorns. A boy dressed rather like Robin Hood brandished a black oar in each hand, whacking their flanks whenever he could.

“Laundry day,” Penny Farthing chuckled. “Aren't you glad you came all this way to be a washboard?”