House of Many Ways

That may not be a lie! Charmain thought, in some surprise. Though it beats me why they even like me.

“Drive on!” Aunt Sempronia said sternly, and the groom did. When the pony was sedately ambling through the streets, she said, “Now, Charmain, I know your parents have given you the best of everything and you’ve never had to do a thing for yourself in your life. Are you prepared to look after yourself for a change?”

“Oh, yes,” Charmain said devoutly.

“And the house and the poor old man?” Aunt Sempronia persisted.

“I’ll do my best,” Charmain said. She was afraid Aunt Sempronia would turn round and drive her straight back home if she didn’t say this.

“You’ve had a good education, haven’t you?” Aunt Sempronia said.

“Even music,” Charmain admitted, rather sulkily. She added hastily, “But I wasn’t any good at it. So don’t expect me to play soothing tunes to Great Uncle William.”

“I don’t,” Aunt Sempronia retorted. “As he’s a wizard, he can probably make his own soothing tunes. I was simply trying to find out whether you’ve had a proper grounding in magic. You have, haven’t you?”

Charmain’s insides seemed to drop away downwards somewhere and she felt as if they were taking the blood from her face with them. She did not dare confess that she knew not the first thing about magic. Her parents – particularly Mrs Baker – did not think magic was nice. And theirs was such a respectable part of town that Charmain’s school never taught anyone magic. If anyone wanted to learn anything so vulgar, they had to go to a private tutor instead. And Charmain knew her parents would never have paid for any such lessons. “Er…” she began.

Luckily, Aunt Sempronia simply continued. “Living in a house full of magic is no joke, you know.”

“Oh, I won’t ever think of it as a joke,” Charmain said earnestly.

“Good,” said Aunt Sempronia, and sat back.

The pony clopped on and on. They clopped through Royal Square, past the Royal Mansion looming at one end of it with its golden roof flashing in the sun, and on through Market Square, where Charmain was seldom allowed to go. She looked wistfully at the stalls and at all the people buying things and chattering, and stared backwards at the place as they came into the older part of town. Here the houses were so tall and colourful and so different from one another – each one seemed to have steeper gables and more oddly placed windows than the one before it – that Charmain began to have hopes that living in Great Uncle William’s house might prove to be very interesting after all. But the pony clopped onward, through the dingier, poorer parts, and then past mere cottages, and then out among fields and hedges, where a great cliff leaned over the road and only the occasional small house stood backed into the hedgerows, and the mountains towered closer and closer above.

Charmain began to think they were going out of High Norland and into another country altogether. What would it be? Strangia? Montalbino? She wished she had paid more attention to geography lessons.

Just as she was wishing this, the groom drew up at a small mouse-coloured house crouching at the back of a long front garden. Charmain looked at it across its small iron gate and felt utterly disappointed. It was the most boring house she had ever seen. It had a window on either side of its brown front door and the mouse-coloured roof came down above them like a scowl. There did not seem to be an upstairs at all.

“Here we are,” Aunt Sempronia said cheerfully. She got down, clattered open the little iron gate, and led the way up the path to the front door. Charmain prowled gloomily after her while the groom followed them with Charmain’s two bags. The garden on either side of the path appeared to consist entirely of hydrangea bushes, blue, green-blue and mauve.

“I don’t suppose you’ll have to look after the garden,” Aunt Sempronia said airily. I should hope not! Charmain thought. “I’m fairly sure William employs a gardener,” Aunt Sempronia said.

“I hope he does,” Charmain said. The most she knew about gardens was the Bakers’ own back yard, which contained one large mulberry tree and a rosebush, plus the window boxes where her mother grew runner beans. She knew there was earth under the plants and that the earth contained worms. She shuddered.

Aunt Sempronia clattered briskly at the knocker on the brown front door and then pushed her way into the house, calling out, “Coo-ee! I’ve brought Charmain for you!”

“Thank you kindly,” said Great Uncle William.

The front door led straight into a musty living room, where Great Uncle William was sitting in a musty, mouse-coloured armchair. There was a large leather suitcase beside him, as if he were all ready to depart. “Pleased to meet you, my dear,” he said to Charmain.

“How do you do, sir,” Charmain replied politely.

Before either of them could say anything else, Aunt Sempronia said, “Well, then, I’ll love you and leave you. Put her bags down there,” she said to her groom. The groom obediently dumped the bags down just inside the front door and went away again. Aunt Sempronia followed him in a sizzle of expensive silks, calling, “Goodbye, both of you!” as she went.

The front door banged shut, leaving Charmain and Great Uncle William staring at each other. Great Uncle William was a small man and mostly bald except for some locks of fine, silvery hair streaked across his rather domed head. He sat in a stiff, bent, crumpled way that showed Charmain he was in quite a lot of pain. She was surprised to find that she felt sorry for him, but she did wish he wouldn’t stare at her so steadily. It made her feel guilty. And his lower eyelids drooped from his tired blue eyes, showing the insides all red, like blood. Charmain disliked blood almost as much as she disliked earthworms.

“Well, you seem a very tall, competent-looking young lady,” Great Uncle William said. His voice was tired and gentle. “The red hair is a good sign, to my mind. Very good. Do you think you can manage here while I’m gone? The place is a little disordered, I’m afraid.”

“I expect so,” Charmain said. The musty room seemed quite tidy to her. “Can you tell me some of the things I ought to do?” Though I hope I shan’t be here long, she thought. Once the King replies to my letter…

“As to that,” said Great Uncle William, “the usual household things, of course, but magical. Naturally, most of it’s magical. As I wasn’t sure what grade of magic you’ll have reached, I took some steps—”

Horrors! Charmain thought. He thinks I know magic!

She tried to interrupt Great Uncle William to explain, but at that moment they were both interrupted. The front door clattered open and a procession of tall, tall elves walked quietly in. They were all most medically dressed in white, and there was no expression on their beautiful faces at all. Charmain stared at them, utterly unnerved by their beauty, their height, their neutrality and, above all, by their complete silence. One of them moved her gently aside and she stood where she was put, feeling clumsy and disorderly, while the rest clustered around Great Uncle William with their dazzling fair heads bent over him. Charmain was not sure what they did, but in next to no time Great Uncle William was dressed in a white robe and they were lifting him out of his chair. There were what seemed to be three red apples stuck to his head. Charmain could see he was asleep.

“Er… haven’t you forgotten his suitcase?” she said, as they carried him away towards the door.

“No need for it,” one of the elves said, holding the door open for the others to ease Great Uncle William out through it.

After that, they were all going away down the garden path. Charmain dashed to the open front door and called after them, “How long is he going to be away?” It suddenly seemed urgent to know how long she was going to be left in charge here.

“As long as it takes,” another of the elves replied. Then they were all gone before they reached the garden gate.

CHAPTER TWO

In which Charmain explores the house

Charmain stared at the empty path for a while and then shut the front door with a bang. “Now what do I do?” she said to the deserted, musty room.

“You will have to tidy the kitchen, I’m afraid, my dear,” said Great Uncle William’s tired, kindly voice out of thin air. “I apologise for leaving so much laundry. Please open my suitcase for more complicated instructions.”

Charmain shot the suitcase a look. So Great Uncle William had meant to leave it, then. “In a minute,” she said to it. “I haven’t unpacked for myself yet.” She picked up her two bags and marched with them to the only other door. It was at the back of the room and, when Charmain had tried to open it with the hand that held the food bag, then with that hand and with both bags in the other hand, and finally with both hands and with both bags on the floor, she found it led to the kitchen.

She stared for a moment. Then she dragged her two bags round the door just as it was shutting and stared some more.

“What a mess!” she said.

It ought to have been a comfortable, spacious kitchen. It had a big window looking out on to the mountains, where sunlight came warmly pouring through. Unfortunately, the sunlight only served to highlight the enormous stacks of plates and cups piled into the sink and on the draining board and down on the floor beside the sink. The sunlight then went on – and Charmain’s dismayed eyes went with it – to cast a golden glow over the two big canvas laundry bags leaning beside the sink. They were stuffed so full with dirty washing that Great Uncle William had been using them as a shelf for a pile of dirty saucepans and a frying pan or so.

Charmain’s eyes travelled from there to the table in the middle of the room. Here was where Great Uncle William appeared to keep his supply of thirty or so teapots and the same number of milk jugs – not to speak of several that had once held gravy. It was all quite neat in its way, Charmain thought, just crowded and not clean.

“I suppose you have been ill,” Charmain said grudgingly to the thin air.

There was no reply this time. Cautiously, she went over to the sink, where, she had a feeling, something was missing. It took her a moment or so to realise that there were no taps. Probably this house was so far outside town that no water pipes had been laid. When she looked through the window, she could see a small yard outside and a pump in the middle of it.

“So I’m supposed to go and pump water and then bring it in, and then what?” Charmain demanded. She looked over at the dark, empty fireplace. It was summer, after all, so naturally there was no fire, nor anything to burn that she could see. “I heat the water?” she said. “In a dirty saucepan, I suppose, and— Come to think of it, how do I wash? Can’t I ever have a bath? Doesn’t he have any bedroom, or a bathroom at all?”

She rushed to the small door beyond the fireplace and dragged it open. All Great Uncle William’s doors seemed to need the strength of ten men to open, she thought angrily. She could almost feel the weight of magic holding them shut. She found herself looking into a small pantry. It had nothing on its shelves apart from a small crock of butter, a stale-looking loaf and a large bag mysteriously labelled CIBIS CANINICUS that seemed to be full of soapflakes. And piled into the back part of it were two more large laundry bags as full as the ones in the kitchen.

“I shall scream,” Charmain said. “How could Aunt Sempronia do this to me? How could Mother let her do it?”

In this moment of despair, Charmain could only think of doing what she always did in a crisis: bury herself in a book. She dragged her two bags over to the crowded table and sat herself down in one of the two chairs there. There she unbuckled the carpet bag, fetched her glasses up on to her nose and dug eagerly among the clothes for the books she had put out for Mother to pack for her.

Her hands met nothing but softness. The only hard thing proved to be the big bar of soap among her washing things. Charmain threw it across the room into the empty hearth and dug further. “I don’t believe this!” she said. “She must have put them in first, right at the bottom.” She turned the bag upside down and shook everything out on to the floor. Out fell wads of beautifully folded skirts, dresses, stockings, blouses, two knitted jackets, lace petticoats and enough other underclothes for a year. On top of those flopped her new slippers. After that, the bag was flat and empty. Charmain nevertheless felt all the way round the inside of the bag before she threw it aside, let her glasses drop to the end of their chain and wondered whether to cry. Mrs Baker had actually forgotten to pack the books.

“Well,” Charmain said, after an interval of blinking and swallowing, “I suppose I’ve never really been away from home before. Next time I go anywhere, I’ll pack the bag myself and fill it with books. I shall make the best of it for now.”