House of Many Ways

Yours, in Sincere Hope, Adolphus Rex High Norland

So the King sent those elves! “Well, well,” Charmain murmured, leafing through the final stack of letters. Every single one of these was written in different sorts of someone’s best handwriting. They all seemed to say the same thing in different ways: “Please, Wizard Norland, I would like to become your apprentice. Will you take me on?” Some of them went on to offer Great Uncle William money. One of them said he could give Great Uncle William a magical diamond ring, and another, who seemed to be a girl, said rather pathetically, “I am not very pretty myself, but my sister is, and she says she will marry you if you agree to teach me.”

Charmain winced and only flipped hastily through the rest of the stack. They reminded her so very much of her own letter to the King. And quite as useless, she thought. It was obvious to her that these were the kind of letters that a famous wizard would instantly write and say “No” to. She bundled them all back under DasZauberbuch and looked at the other books on the desk. There was a whole row of tall, fat books at the back of the desk, all labelled Res Magica, which she thought she would look at later. She picked up two more books at random. One was called Mrs Pentstemmon’s Path: Signposts to the Truth and it struck her as a trifle moralising. The other, when she had thumbed open its metal clasp and spread it out at its first page, was called The Boke of Palimpsest. When Charmain turned over the next pages, she found that each page contained a new spell – a clear spell too, with a title saying what it did and, below that, a list of ingredients, followed by numbered stages telling you what you had to do.

“This is more like it!” Charmain said, and settled down to read.

A long time later, while she was trying to decide which was more useful, “A Spell to tell Friend from Foe” or “A Spell to Enlarge the Mind,” or perhaps even “A Spell for Flying,” Charmain suddenly knew that she had crying need of a bathroom. This tended to happen to her when she had been absorbed in reading. She sprang up, squeezing her knees together, and then realised that a bathroom was a place she had still not found.

“Oh, how do I find the bathroom from here?” she cried out.

Reassuringly, Great Uncle William’s kind, frail voice spoke out of the air at once. “Turn left in the passage, my dear, and the bathroom is the first door on the right.”

“Thank you!” Charmain gasped, and ran.

CHAPTER THREE

In which Charmain works several spells at once

The bathroom was as reassuring as Great Uncle William’s kindly voice. It had a worn greenstone floor and a little window, at which fluttered a green net curtain. And it had all the fitments Charmain knew from home. And home has nothing but the best, she thought. Better still, it had taps and the toilet flushed. True, the bath and the taps were strange, slightly bulbous shapes, as if the person who installed them had not been quite sure what he or she was aiming at; but the taps, when Charmain experimentally turned them on, ran cold and hot water, just as they were supposed to, and there were warm towels on a rail under the mirror.

Perhaps I can put one of those laundry bags in the bath, Charmain mused. How would I squeeze it dry?

Across the corridor from the bathroom was a row of doors, stretching away into dim distance. Charmain went to the nearest one and pushed it open, expecting it to lead to the living room. But there was a small bedroom beyond it instead, obviously Great Uncle William’s, to judge by the mess. The white covers trailed off the unmade bed, almost on top of several stripey nightshirts scattered over the floor. Shirts dangled out of drawers, along with socks and what looked like long underclothes, and the open cupboard held a musty-smelling uniform of some kind. Under the window were two more sacks stuffed full of laundry.

Charmain groaned aloud. “I suppose he’s been ill for quite a time,” she said, trying to be charitable. “But, mother-of-pearl, why do I have to deal with it all?”

The bed started twitching.

Charmain jumped round to face it. The twitching was Waif, curled up comfortably in the mound of bedclothes, scratching for a flea. When he saw Charmain looking at him, he wagged his flimsy tail and grovelled, lowered his frayed ears and whispered a pleading whine at her.

“You’re not supposed to be there, are you?” she said to him. “All right. I can see you’re comfortable – and I’m blowed if I’m sleeping in that bed anyway.”

She marched out of the room and opened the next door along. To her relief, there was another bedroom there almost identical to Great Uncle William’s, except that this one was tidy. The bed was clean and neatly made, the cupboard was shut, and when she looked, she found the drawers were empty. Charmain nodded approval at the room and opened the next door along the corridor. There was another neat bedroom there, and beyond that another, each one exactly the same.

I’d better throw my things around the one that’s mine or I’ll never find it again, she thought.

She turned back into the corridor to find that Waif had come off the bed and was now scratching at the bathroom door with both front paws. “You won’t want to go in there,” Charmain told him. “None of it’s any use to you.”

But the door came open somehow before Charmain got to it. Beyond it was the kitchen. Waif trotted jauntily in there and Charmain groaned again. The mess had not gone away. There were the dirty crockery and the laundry bags, with the addition now of a teapot lying in a pool of tea, Charmain’s clothes in a heap near the table and a large green bar of soap in the fireplace.

“I’d forgotten all this,” Charmain said.

Waif put both tiny front paws on the bottom rung of the chair and raised himself to his full small length, pleadingly.

“You’re hungry again,” Charmain diagnosed. “So am I.”

She sat in the chair and Waif sat on her left foot, and they shared another pasty. Then they shared a fruit tart, two doughnuts, six chocolate biscuits and a custard flan. After this Waif plodded rather heavily away to the inner door, which opened for him as soon as he scratched at it. Charmain gathered up her pile of clothes and followed him, meaning to put her things in the first empty bedroom.

But here things went a trifle wrong. Charmain pushed the door open with one elbow and, fairly naturally, turned right to go into the corridor with the bedrooms in it. She found herself in complete darkness. Almost at once she walked into another door, where she hit her elbow on its doorknob with a clang.

“Ouch!” she said, fumbled for the doorknob and opened this door.

It swung inward majestically. Charmain walked into a large room lit by arched windows all around it and found herself breathing a damp, stuffy, leathery, neglected smell. The smell seemed to come from the elderly leather seats of carved chairs arranged around the big carved table that took up most of the room. Each seat had a leather mat on the table in front of it, and an old, withered sheet of blotting paper on the mat, except for the large seat at the other end that had the arms of High Norland carved into the back of it. This one had a fat little stick on the table instead of a mat. All of it, chairs, table, and mats, was covered in dust and there were cobwebs in the corners of the many windows.

Charmain stared. “Is this the dining room or what?” she said. “How do I get to the bedrooms from here?”

Great Uncle William’s voice spoke, sounding quite faint and far off. “You have reached the Conference Room,” it said. “If you are there, you are rather lost, my dear, so listen carefully. Turn round once, clockwise. Then, still turning clockwise, open the door with your left hand only. Go through and let the door shut behind you. Then take two long steps sideways to your left. This will bring you back beside the bathroom.”

And let’s hope it does! Charmain thought, doing her best to follow these directions.

All went well, except for the moment of darkness after the door had swung shut behind her, when Charmain found herself staring into a totally strange stone corridor. An old, bent man was pushing a trolley along it, loaded with steaming silver teapot, jugs and chafing dishes and what looked like a pile of crumpets. She blinked a little, decided that she would not do any good, either to herself or the old man, by calling out to him, and took two long steps to the left instead. And then, to her relief, she was standing beside the bathroom, from where she could see Waif turning round and round on Great Uncle William’s bed in order to get comfortable.

“Phew!” Charmain said, and went and dumped the pile of clothes on top of the chest of drawers in the next bedroom along.

After that she went along the corridor to the open window at the end, where she spent some minutes staring out at that sloping sunlit meadow and breathing the fresh, chilly air that blew in from it. A person could easily climb out of this, she thought. Or in. But she was not really seeing the meadow, or thinking of fresh air. Her real thoughts were with that enticing book of spells that she had left open on Great Uncle William’s desk. She had never in her life been let loose among magic like this. It was hard to resist. I shall just open it at random and do the first spell I see, she thought. Just one spell.

In the study, The Boke of Palimpsest was, for some reason, now open at “A Spell to Find Yourself a Handsome Prince”. Charmain shook her head and closed the book. “Who needs a prince?” she said. She opened the book again, carefully at a different place. This page was headed “A Spell for Flying”.

“Oh yes!” Charmain said. “That’s much more like it!” She put her glasses on and studied the list of ingredients.

“A sheet of paper, a quill pen (easy, there’s both on this desk), one egg (kitchen?), two flower petals – one pink and the other blue – six drops of water (bathroom), one red hair, one white hair and two pearl buttons.”

“No problem at all,” Charmain said. She took her glasses off and bustled about assembling ingredients. She hurried to the kitchen – she got to that by opening the bathroom door and turning left and was almost too excited to find that she had got this right – and asked the air, “Where do I find eggs?”

Great Uncle William’s gentle voice replied, “Eggs are in a crock in the pantry, my dear. I think it’s behind the laundry bags. I do apologise for leaving you with such disorder.”

Charmain went into the pantry and leaned across the laundry bags, where sure enough she found an old pie dish with half a dozen brown eggs in it. She took one of them carefully back to the study. Since her glasses were dangling on their chain, she failed to notice that The Boke of Palimpsest was now open at “A Spell to Find Hidden Treasure”. She bustled over to the study window, where the flower petals were ready to hand on a hydrangea bush that was one half pink and the other blue. She laid those beside the egg and rushed to the bathroom, where she collected the six drops of water in a tooth mug. On the way back, she went across the passage to where Waif was now curled up like a meringue on Great Uncle William’s blankets. “Excuse me,” Charmain said to him, and raked her fingers along his ragged white back. She came away with quite a number of white hairs, one of which she put beside the flower petals and added to that a red hair from her own head. As for the pearl buttons, she simply ripped two of them off the front of her blouse.

“Right,” she said, and put her glasses eagerly on again to look at the instructions. The Boke of Palimpsest was now open at “A Spell for Personal Protection”, but Charmain was too excited to notice. She looked only at the instructions, which were in five stages. Stage One said, “Place all ingredients except quill and paper in a suitable bowl.”

Charmain, after taking her glasses off to stare searchingly around the room, and finding no bowl, suitable or not, was forced to go off to the kitchen again. While she was gone, lazily and slyly, The Boke of Palimpsest turned over another couple of pages. When Charmain came back with a slightly sugary bowl, having tipped all the sugar out on to a not-too-dirty plate, the Boke was open at “A Spell to Increase Magical Power”.

Charmain did not notice. She put the bowl down on the desk and piled into it the egg, the two petals, the two hairs and her two buttons, and dripped the water carefully in on top. Then she put her glasses on and leaned over the book to discover what she did next. By this time, The Boke of Palimpsest was displaying “A Spell to Become Invisible”, but Charmain only looked at the instructions and did not see this.

Stage Two told her to “Mash all ingredients together, using only the pen.”

It is not easy to mash up an egg with a feather, but Charmain managed it, stabbing with the sharpened end over and over until the shell fell to pieces, then stirring so hard that her hair fell down over her face in red strands, and finally, when nothing seemed to mix properly, whisking with the feather end. When she finally stood up, panting, and pushed her hair away with sticky fingers, the Boke had turned over yet another page. It now displayed “A Spell to Start a Fire”, but Charmain was too busy trying not to get egg on her glasses to see. She put them on and studied Stage Three.

Stage Three of this spell said, “Recite three times ‘Hegemony Gauda’.”

“Hegemony gauda,” Charmain intoned obediently over the bowl. She was not sure, but on the third repetition she thought the bits of eggshell seethed around the pearl buttons a little. I think it’s working! she thought. She pushed her glasses back on her nose and looked at Stage Four. By this time, she was looking at Stage Four in “A Spell to Bend Objects to the Will”.

“Take up the quill,” this said, “and, using the prepared mixture, write upon the paper the word Ylf surrounded by a five-sided figure. Care must be taken not to touch the paper while doing this.”

Charmain took up the drippy, sticky feather pen, adorned with bits of eggshell and a piece of pink petal, and did her best. The mixture was not easy to write with and there seemed no way to hold the paper steady. It slipped and it slid, while Charmain dipped and scratched, and the word that was supposed to be Ylf came out gluey and semi-visible and crooked, and looked more like Hoof because the red hair in the bowl came out on the pen halfway through and did strange loopy things across the word. As for the five-sided figure, the paper slipped sideways while Charmain was trying to draw it and the most that could be said for it was that it had five sides. It finished as a sinister egg-yolk yellow shape with a dog hair sticking off one corner.

Charmain heaved up a breath, plastered her hair back with a now extremely sticky hand and looked at the final stage, Stage Five. It was now Stage Five of “A Spell to Make a Wish Come True”, but she was far too flustered to notice. It said, “Placing the feather back in the bowl, clap hands three times and say ‘Tacs’.”