Sophie’s sympathy shrank quite sharply. It occurred to her that if Howl could cover himself with green slime so easily, then he could just as easily turn his hair the proper color. “Then why don’t you feed the girl a love potion and get it over with?” she said.
“Oh, no,” said Howl. “That’s not playing the game. That would spoil all the fun.”
Sophie’s sympathy shrank again. A game, was it? “Don’t you ever give a thought for the poor girl?” she snapped.
Howl finished the milk and gazed into the mug with a sentimental smile. “I think of her all the time,” he said. “Lovely, lovely Lettie Hatter.”
Sophie’s sympathy went for good, with a sharp bang. A good deal of anxiety took its place. Oh, Martha! she thought. You have been busy! So it wasn’t anyone in Cesari’s you were talking about!
Chapter 7
In which a scarecrow prevents Sophie from leaving the castle.
Only a particularly bad attack of aches and pains prevented Sophie from setting out for Market Chipping that evening. But the drizzle in Porthaven had got into her bones. She lay in her cubbyhole and ached and worried about Martha. It might not be so bad, she thought. She only had to tell Martha that the suitor she was not sure about was none other than Wizard Howl. That would scare Martha off. And she would tell Martha that the way to scare Howl off was to announce that she was in love with him, and then perhaps to threaten him with aunts.
Sophie was still creaking when she got up next morning. “Curse the Witch of the Waste!” she muttered to her stick as she got it out, ready to leave. She could hear Howl singing in the bathroom as if he had never had a tantrum in his life. She tiptoed to the door as fast as she could hobble.
Howl of course came out of the bathroom before she reached it. Sophie looked at him sourly. He was all spruce and dashing, scented gently with apple blossom. The sunlight from the window dazzled off his gray-and-scarlet suit and made a faintly pink halo of his hair.
“I think my hair looks rather good this color,” he said.
“Do you indeed?” grumped Sophie.
“It goes with this suit,” said Howl. “You have quite a touch with your needle, don’t you? You’ve given the suit more style somehow.”
“Huh!” said Sophie.
Howl stopped with his hand on the knob above the door. “Aches and pains troubling you?” he said. “Or has something annoyed you?”
“Annoyed?” said Sophie. “Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, and deafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?”
Howl laughed. “I apologize,” he said, turning the knob to red-down. “The King wants to see me today. I shall probably be kicking my heels in the Palace until evening, but I can do something for your rheumatism when I get back. Don’t forget to tell Michael I left that spell for him on the bench.” He smiled sunnily at Sophie and stepped out among the spires of Kingsbury.
“And you think that makes it all right!” Sophie growled as the door shut. But the smile had mollified her. “If that smile works on me, then it’s no wonder poor Martha doesn’t know her own mind!” she muttered.
“I need another log before you go,” Calcifer reminded her.
Sophie hobbled to drop another log into the grate. Then she set off to the door again. But here Michael came running downstairs and snatched the remains of a loaf off the bench as he ran to the door. “You don’t mind, do you?” he said in an agitated way. “I’ll bring a fresh loaf when I come back. I’ve got something very urgent to see to today, but I’ll be back by evening. If the sea captain calls for his wind spell, it’s on the end of the bench, clearly labeled.” He turned the doorknob green-downward and jumped out onto the windy hillside, loaf clutched to his stomach. “See you!” he shouted as the castle trundled away past him and the door slammed.
“Botheration!” said Sophie. “Calcifer, how does a person open the door when there’s no one inside the castle?”
“I’ll open it for you, or Michael. Howl does it himself,” said Calcifer.
So no one would be locked out when Sophie left. She was not at all sure she would be coming back, but she did not intend to tell Calcifer. She gave Michael time to get well on the way to wherever he was going and set off for the door again. This time Calcifer stopped her.
“If you’re going to be away long,” he said, “you might leave some logs where I can reach them.”
“Can you pick up logs?” Sophie asked, intrigued in spite of her impatience.
For answer, Calcifer stretched out a blue arm-shaped flame divided into green fingerlike flames at the end. It was not very long, nor did it look strong. “See? I can almost reach the hearth,” he said proudly.
Sophie stacked a pile of logs in front of the grate so that Calcifer could at least reach the top one. “You’re not to burn them until you’ve got them in the grate,” she warned him, and she set off for the door yet again.
This time somebody knocked on it before she got there.
It was one of those days, Sophie thought. It must be the sea captain. She put up her hand to turn the knob blue-down.
“No, it’s the castle door,” Calcifer said. “But I’m not sure—”
Then it was Michael back for some reason. Sophie thought as she opened the door.
A turnip face leered at her. She smelled mildew. Against the wide blue sky, a ragged arm ending in the stump of a stick wheeled round and tried to paw at her. It was a scarecrow. It was only made of sticks and rags, but it was alive, and it was trying to come in.
“Calcifer!” Sophie screamed. “Make the castle go faster!”
The stone blocks round the doorway crunched and grated. The green-brown moorland was suddenly rushing past. The scarecrow’s stick arm thumped on the door, and then went scraping along the wall of the castle as the castle left it behind. It wheeled its other arm round and seemed to try to clutch at the stonework. It meant to get into the castle if it could.
Sophie slammed the door shut. This, she thought, just showed how stupid it was for an eldest child to try to seek her fortune! That was the scarecrow she had propped in the hedge on her way to the castle. She had made jokes to it. Now, as if her jokes had brought it to evil life, it had followed her all the way here and tried to paw at her face. She ran to the window to see if the thing was still trying to get into the castle.
Of course, all she could see was a sunny day in Porthaven, with a dozen sails going up a dozen masts beyond the roofs opposite, and a cloud of seagulls circling in the blue sky.
“That’s the difficulty of being in several places at once!” Sophie said to the human skull on the bench.
Then, all at once, she discovered the real drawback to being an old woman. Her heart gave a leap and a little stutter, and then seemed to be trying to bang its way out of her chest. It hurt. She shook all over and her knees trembled. She rather thought she might be dying. It was all she could do to get to the chair by the hearth. She sat their panting, clutching her chest.
“Is something the matter?” Calcifer asked.
“Yes. My heart. There was a scarecrow at the door!” Sophie gasped.
“What has a scarecrow to do with your heart?” Calcifer asked.
“It was trying to get in here. It gave me a terrible fright. And my heart—but you wouldn’t understand, you silly young demon!” Sophie panted. “You haven’t got a heart.”
“Yes I have,” Calcifer said, as proudly as he had revealed his arm. “Down in the glowing part under the logs. And don’t call me young. I’m a good million years older than you are! Can I reduce the speed of the castle now?”
“Only if the scarecrow’s gone,” said Sophie. “Has it?”
“I can’t tell,” said Calcifer. “It’s not flesh and blood, you see. I told you I couldn’t really see outside.”
Sophie got up and dragged herself to the door again, feeling ill. She opened it slowly and cautiously. Green steepnes
s, rocks, and purple slopes whirled past, making her feel dizzy, but she took a grip on the door frame and leaned out to look along the wall to the moorland they were leaving behind. The scarecrow was about fifty yards to the rear. It was hopping from clump to heather clump with a sinister sort of valiance, holding its fluttering stick arms at an angle to balance it on the hillside. As Sophie watched, the castle left it further behind. It was slow, but it was still following. She shut the door.
“It’s still there,” she said. “Hopping after us. Go faster.”
“But that upsets all my calculations,” Calcifer explained. “I was aiming to circle the hills and get back to where Michael left us in time to pick him up this evening.”
“Then go twice as fast and circle the hills twice. As long as you leave that horrible thing behind!” said Sophie.
“What a fuss!” Calcifer grumbled. But he increased the castle’s speed. Sophie could actually, for the first time, feel it rumbling around her as she sat huddled in her chair wondering if she was dying. She did not want to die yet, before she had talked to Martha.
As the day went on, everything in the castle began to jiggle with its speed. Bottles chinked. The skull clattered on the bench. Sophie could hear things falling off the shelf in the bathroom and splashing into the bath where Howl’s blue-and-silver suit was still soaking. She began to feel a little better. She dragged herself to the door again and looked out, with her hair flying in the wind. The ground was streaking past underneath. The hills seemed to be spinning slowly as the castle sped across them. The grinding and rumbling nearly deafened her, and smoke was puffing out behind in blasts. But the scarecrow was a tiny black dot on a distant slope by then. Next time she looked, it was out of sight entirely.
“Good. Then I shall stop for the night,” said Calcifer. “That was quite a strain.”
The rumbling died away. Things stopped jiggling. Calcifer went to sleep, in the way fires do, sinking among the logs until they were rosy cylinders plated with white ash, with only a hint of blue and green deep underneath.
Sophie felt quite spry again by then. She went and fished six packets and a bottle out of the slimy water in the bath. The packets were soaked. She did not dare leave them that way after yesterday, so she laid them on the floor and, very cautiously, sprinkled them with the stuff labeled DRYING POWER. They were dry almost instantly. This was encouraging. Sophie let the water out of the bath and tried the POWER on Howl’s suit. That dried too. It was still stained green and rather smaller than it had been, but it cheered Sophie up to find she could put at least something right.
She felt cheerful enough to busy herself getting supper. She bundled everything on the bench into a heap round the skull at one end and began chopping onions. “At least your eyes don’t water, my friend,” she told the skull. “Count your blessings.”
The door sprang open.
Sophie nearly cut herself in her fright, thinking it was the scarecrow again. But it was Michael. He burst jubilantly in. He dumped a loaf, a pie, and a pink-and-white-striped box on top of the onions. Then he seized Sophie round her skinny waist and danced her round the room.
“It’s all right! It’s all right!” he shouted joyfully.
Sophie hopped and stumbled to keep out of the way of Michael’s boots. “Steady, steady!” she gasped, giddily trying to hold the knife where it would not cut either of them. “What is all right?”
“Lettie loves me!” Michael shouted, dancing her almost into the bathroom and then almost into the hearth. “She’s never even seen Howl! It was all a mistake!” He spun them both round in the middle of the room.
“Will you let me go before this knife cuts one of us!” Sophie squawked. “And perhaps explain a little.”
“Wee-oop!” Michael shouted. He whirled Sophie to the chair and dumped her into it, where she sat gasping. “Last night I wished you’d dyed his hair blue!” he said. “I don’t mind now. When Howl said ‘Lettie Hatter’ I even thought of dying him blue myself. You can see the way he talks. I knew he was going to drop this girl, just like all the others, as soon as he’d got her to love him. And when I thought it was my Lettie, I—Anyway, you know he said there was another fellow, and I thought that was me! So I tore down to Market Chipping today. And it was all right! Howl must be after some other girl with the same name. Lettie’s never even seen him.”
“Let’s get this straight,” Sophie said dizzily. “We are talking about the Lettie Hatter who works in Cesari’s pastry shop, are we?”
“Of course we are!” Michael said jubilantly. “I’ve loved her ever since she started work there, and I almost couldn’t believe it when she said she loved me. She has hundreds of admirers. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Howl was one of them. I’m so relieved! I got you a cake from Cesari’s to celebrate. Where did I put it? Oh, here it is.”
He thrust the pink-and-white box at Sophie. Onion fell off it into her lap.
“How old are you, my child?” Sophie asked.
“Fifteen last May Day,” said Michael. “Calcifer sent fireworks up from the castle. Didn’t you, Calcifer? Oh, he’s asleep. You’re probably thinking I’m too young to be engaged—I’ve still got three years of my apprenticeship to run, and Lettie’s got even longer—but we promised one another, and we don’t mind waiting.”
Then Michael was about the right age for Martha, Sophie thought. And she knew by now he was a nice, steady lad with a career as a wizard ahead of him. Bless Martha’s heart! When she thought back to that bewildering May Day, she realized that Michael had been one of that shouting group leaning on the counter in front of Martha. But Howl had been outside in
Market Square
.
“Are you sure your Lettie was telling the truth about Howl?” she asked anxiously.
“Positive,” said Michael. “I know when she’s lying. She stops twiddling her thumbs.”
“She does too!” said Sophie, chuckling.
“How do you know?” Michael asked in surprise.
“Because she’s my sis-ter—er—sister’s granddaughter,” said Sophie, “and as a small girl she was not always terribly truthful. But she’s quite young and—er… Well, suppose she changes as she grows. She—er—may not look quite the same in a year or so.”
“Neither will I,” said Michael. “People our age change all the time. It won’t worry us. She’ll still be Lettie.”
In a manner of speaking, Sophie thought. “But suppose she was telling the truth,” she went on anxiously, “and she just knew Howl under a false name?”
“Don’t worry, I thought of that!” said Michael. “I described Howl—you must admit he’s pretty recognizable—and she really hadn’t seen him or his wretched guitar. I didn’t even have to tell her he doesn’t know how to play the thing. She never set eyes on him, and she twiddled her thumbs all the time she said she hadn’t.”
“That’s a relief!” Sophie said, lying stiffly back in her chair. And it certainly was a relief about Martha. But it was not much of a relief, because Sophie was positive that the only other Lettie Hatter in the district was the real one. If there had been another, someone would have come into the hat shop and gossiped about it. It sounded like strong-minded Lettie, not giving in to Howl. What worried Sophie was that Lettie had told Howl her real name. She might not be sure about him, but she liked him enough to trust him with an important secret like that.
“Don’t look so anxious!” Michael laughed, leaning on the back of the chair. “Have a look at the cake I brought you.”
As Sophie started opening the box, it dawned on her that Michael had gone from seeing her as a natural disaster to actually liking her. She was so pleased and grateful that she decided to tell Michael the whole truth about Lettie and Martha and herself too. It was only fair to let him know the sort of family he meant to marry into. The box came open. It was Cesari’s most luscious cake, covered in cream and cherries and little curls of chocolate. “Oh!” said Sophie.
The square knob over the door clic
ked round to red-blob-down of its own accord and Howl came in. “What a marvelous cake! My favorite kind,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“I—er—I called in at Cesari’s,” Michael said in a sheepish, self-conscious way. Sophie looked up at Howl. Something was always going to interrupt her when she decided to say she was under a spell. Even a wizard, it seemed.
“It looks worth the walk,” Howl said, inspecting the cake. “I’ve heard Cesari’s is better than any of the cake shops in Kingsbury. Stupid of me never to have been in the place. And is that a pie I see on the bench?” He went over to look. “Pie in a bed of raw onions. Human skull looking put-upon.” He picked up the skull and knocked an onion ring out of its eyesocket. “I see Sophie has been busy again. Couldn’t you have restrained her, my friend?”