House of Many Ways

  Charmain could see he was working himself into a rage. She said quickly, “That’s true. He’s not here. He’s ill. The elves have taken him away to cure him, and I’m looking after his house while he’s away.”

  The kobold hunched his eyes over his great blue nose and glowered at her. “Are you telling the truth?”

  I seem to have spent all day being told I’m lying! Charmain thought angrily.

  “It is the exact truth,” Aunt Sempronia said. “William Norland is not here at present. So will you be so kind as to take yourself off, my good kobold. You are frightening poor Mrs. Baker.”

  The kobold glowered at her and then at Mrs. Baker. “Then,” he said to Charmain, “I don’t see any chance of this dispute being settled, ever!” And he was gone as suddenly as he had come.

  “Oh, my goodness!” Mrs. Baker gasped, holding her chest. “So little! So blue! How did it get in? Don’t let it run up your skirt, Charmain!”

  “It was only a kobold,” Aunt Sempronia said. “Pull yourself together, Berenice. Kobolds as a rule do not get on with humans, so I have no idea what it was doing here. But I suppose Great-Uncle William must have had some sort of dealings with the creatures. There’s no accounting for wizards.”

  “And I’ve spilled coffee—” Mrs. Baker wailed, mopping at her skirt.

  Charmain took the little cup and soothingly filled it with coffee again. “Have another cake, Mother,” she said, holding the plate out. “Great-Uncle William has a kobold to do the gardening, and that one was angry too when I met him—”

  “What was the gardener doing in the living room?” Mrs. Baker demanded.

  As often happened, Charmain began to despair of getting her mother to understand. She’s not stupid, she just never lets her mind out, she thought. “That was a different kobold,” she began.

  The kitchen door opened and Waif trotted in. She was the right size again. That meant that she was, if anything, smaller than the kobold and very pleased with herself for shrinking. She trotted jauntily across to Charmain and raised her nose wistfully toward the cake plate.

  “Honestly, Waif!” Charmain said. “When I think how much you ate for breakfast!”

  “Is that the guard dog?” Mrs. Baker quavered.

  “If it is,” Aunt Sempronia opined, “it would come off second best against a mouse. How much did you say it ate for breakfast?”

  “About fifty dog dishes full,” Charmain said without thinking.

  “Fifty!” said her mother.

  “I was exaggerating,” Charmain said.

  Waif, seeing them all looking at her, sat up into begging position with her paws under her chin. She contrived to look enchanting. It was the way she managed to make one ragged ear flop that did it, Charmain decided.

  “Oh, what a sweet little doggie!” Mrs. Baker cried out. “Is ooh hungwy, then?” She gave Waif the rest of the cake she was eating. Waif took it politely, ate it in one gulp, and continued to beg. Mrs. Baker gave her a whole cake from the plate. This caused Waif to beg more soulfully than ever.

  “I’m disgusted,” Charmain told Waif.

  Aunt Sempronia graciously handed a cake over to Waif too. “I must say,” she said to Charmain, “with this great hound to guard you, no one need fear for your safety, although you might go rather hungry yourself.”

  “She’s good at barking,” Charmain said. And there’s no need to be sarcastic, Aunt Sempronia. I know she isn’t a guard dog. But Charmain had no sooner thought this than she realized that Waif was guarding her. She had taken Mother’s attention completely away from kobolds, or the kitchen, or any dangers to Charmain herself, and she had contrived to reduce herself to the right size to do it. Charmain found herself so grateful that she gave Waif a cake as well. Waif thanked her very charmingly, by nosing her hand, and then turned her expectant attention to Mrs. Baker again.

  “Oh, she is so sweet!” Mrs. Baker sighed, and rewarded Waif with a fifth cake.

  She’ll burst, Charmain thought. Nevertheless, thanks to Waif, the rest of the visit went off most peacefully, until right at the end, when the ladies got up to go. Mrs. Baker said, “Oh, I nearly forgot!” and felt in her pocket. “This letter came for you, darling.” She held out to Charmain a long, stiff envelope with a red wax seal on the back of it. It was addressed to “Mistress Charmain Baker” in elegant quavery writing.

  Charmain stared at the letter and found her heart was banging away in her ears and her chest like a blacksmith at an anvil. Her eyes went fuzzy. Her hand shook as she took the letter. The King had replied to her. He had actually answered. She knew it was the King. The address was in the same quavery writing that she had found on the letter in Great-Uncle William’s study. “Oh. Thanks,” she said, trying to sound casual.

  “Open it, dear,” her mother said. “It looks very grand. What do you think it is?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Charmain said. “It’s only my Leavers’ Certificate.”

  This was a mistake. Her mother exclaimed, “What? But your father is expecting you to stay on at school and learn a little culture, darling!”

  “Yes, I know, but they always give everyone a certificate at the end of the tenth year,” Charmain invented. “In case some of us do want to leave, you know. My whole class will have got one too. Don’t worry.”

  In spite of this explanation, which Charmain considered quite brilliant, Mrs. Baker did worry. She might have made a very great fuss, had not Waif suddenly sprung up onto her hind legs and walked at Mrs. Baker, with her front paws most appealingly tucked under her chin again.

  “Oh, you sweetheart!” Mrs. Baker exclaimed. “Charmain, if your great-uncle lets you bring this darling little dog home with you when he’s better, I shan’t mind a bit. I really shan’t.”

  Charmain was able to stuff the King’s letter into her waistband and kiss her mother and then Aunt Sempronia good-bye without either of them mentioning it again. She waved them happily off down the path between the hydrangeas and shut the front door behind them with a gasp of relief. “Thank you, Waif!” she said. “You clever dog!” She leaned against the front door and started to open the King’s letter—though I know in advance he’s bound to say no, she told herself, shivering with excitement. I would say no, if it was me!

  Before she had the envelope more than half open, the other door was flung open by Peter. “Have they gone?” he said. “At last? I need your help. I’m being mobbed by angry kobolds in here.”

  Chapter Six

  WHICH CONCERNS THE COLOR BLUE

  Charmain sighed and stuffed the King’s letter into her pocket. She did not feel like sharing whatever it said with Peter. “Why?” she said. “Why are they angry?”

  “Come and see,” Peter said. “It all sounds ridiculous to me. I told them that you were in charge and they had to wait until you had finished being polite to those witches.”

  “Witches!” said Charmain. “One of them was my mother!”

  “Well, my mother’s a witch,” Peter said. “And you only had to look at the proud one in silk to see that she was a witch. Do come on.”

  He held the door open for Charmain and she went through, thinking that Peter was probably right about Aunt Sempronia. No one in the Bakers’ respectable house ever mentioned witchcraft, but Charmain had thought that Aunt Sempronia was a witch for years, without ever putting it to herself so baldly.

  She forgot about Aunt Sempronia as soon as she entered the kitchen. There were kobolds everywhere. Little blue men with different shapes of large blue noses were standing anywhere there was a space on the floor that was not full of dog dishes or spilled tea. They were on the table between teapots and in the sink balanced on dirty dishes. There were little blue women too, mostly perched on the laundry bags. The women were distinguished by their smaller, gentler noses and their rather stylish flounced blue skirts. I’d like a skirt like that, Charmain thought. Only larger, of course. There were so many kobolds that it took Charmain a moment to notice that the bubbles from the fireplace we
re nearly gone.

  All the kobolds raised a shrill shout as Charmain came in. “We seem to have got the whole tribe,” Peter said.

  Charmain thought he was probably right. “Very well,” she said above the yelling. “I’m here. What’s the problem?”

  The answer was such a storm of yelling that Charmain put her hands over her ears.

  “That’ll do!” she shouted. “How can I understand a word you say when you all scream at once?” She recognized the kobold who had appeared in the living room, standing on a chair with at least six others. His nose was a very memorable shape. “You tell me. What was your name again?”

  He gave her a curt little bow. “Timminz is my name. I understand you are Charming Baker and you speak for the wizard. Am I right?”

  “More or less,” Charmain said. There did not seem to be much point in arguing about her name. Besides, she rather liked being called Charming. “I told you the wizard’s ill. He’s gone away to get cured.”

  “So you say,” Timminz answered. “Are you sure he hasn’t run away?”

  This produced such yells and jeers from all over the kitchen that Charmain had to shout again to get heard. “Be quiet! Of course he hasn’t run away. I was here when he went. He was very unwell and the elves had to carry him. He would have died if the elves hadn’t taken him.”

  In the near-silence that followed this, Timminz said sulkily, “If you say so, we believe you, of course. Our quarrel is with the wizard, but maybe you can settle it. And I tell you we don’t like it. It’s indecent.”

  “What is?” Charmain asked.

  Timminz squeezed his eyes up and glowered over his nose. “You are not to laugh. The wizard laughed when I complained to him.”

  “I promise not to laugh,” Charmain said. “So what is it?”

  “We were very angry,” Timminz said. “Our ladies refused to wash his dishes for him and we took away his taps so that he couldn’t wash them himself, but all he did was smile, and say he hadn’t the strength to argue—”

  “Well, he was ill,” Charmain said. “You know that now. So what is it about?”

  “This garden of his,” Timminz said. “The complaint came first from Rollo, but I came and took a look and Rollo was quite right. The wizard was growing bushes with blue flowers, which is the correct and reasonable color for flowers to be, but by his magic he had made half the same bushes pink, and some of them were even green or white, which is disgusting and incorrect.”

  Here Peter was unable to contain himself. “But hydrangeas are like that!” he burst out. “I’ve explained it to you! Any gardener could tell you. If you don’t put the bluing powder under the whole bush, some of the flowers are going to be pink. Rollo’s a gardener. He must have known.”

  Charmain looked around the crowded kitchen but could not see Rollo anywhere among the swarms of blue people. “He probably only told you,” she said, “because he likes to chop things down. I bet he kept asking the wizard if he could chop the bushes down and the wizard said no. He asked me last night—”

  At this, Rollo popped up from beside a dog dish, almost at Charmain’s feet. She recognized him mostly by his grating little voice when he shouted, “And so I did ask her! And she sits there in the path, having just floated down from the sky, cool as you please, and tells me I only wants to enjoy myself. As bad as the wizard, she is!”

  Charmain glared down at him. “You’re just a destructive little beast,” she said. “What you’re doing is making trouble because you can’t get your own way!”

  Rollo flung out an arm. “Hear her? Hear that? Who’s wrong here, her or me?”

  A dreadful shrill clamor arose from all over the kitchen. Timminz shouted for silence, and when the clamor had died into muttering, he said to Charmain, “So will you now give permission for these disgraceful bushes to be lopped down?”

  “No, I will not,” Charmain told him. “They’re Great-Uncle William’s bushes and I’m supposed to look after all his things for him. And Rollo is just making trouble.”

  Timminz said, squeezing his glower at her, “Is that your last word?”

  “Yes,” said Charmain. “It is.”

  “Then,” Timminz said, “you’re on your own. No kobold is going to do a hand’s turn for you from now on.”

  And they were all gone. Just like that, the blue crowd vanished from among teapots and dog dishes and dirty crockery, leaving a little wind stirring the last few bubbles about and the fire now burning brightly in the grate.

  “That was stupid of you,” Peter said.

  “What do you mean?” Charmain asked indignantly. “You’re the one who said those bushes were supposed to be like that. And you could see Rollo had got them all stirred up on purpose. I couldn’t let Great-Uncle William come home to find his garden all chopped down, could I?”

  “Yes, but you could have been more tactful,” Peter insisted. “I was expecting you to say we’d put down a bluing spell to make all the flowers blue, or something.”

  “Yes, but Rollo would still have wanted to cut them all down,” Charmain said. “He told me I was a spoilsport last night for not letting him.”

  “You could have made them see what he was like,” Peter said, “instead of making them all even angrier.”

  “At least I didn’t laugh at them like Great-Uncle William did,” Charmain retorted. “He made them angry, not me!”

  “And look where that got him!” Peter said. “They took away his taps and left all his dishes dirty. So now we’ve got to wash them all without even any hot water in the bathroom.”

  Charmain flounced down into the chair and began, again, to open the King’s letter. “Why have we got to?” she said. “I haven’t the remotest idea how to wash dishes anyway.”

  Peter was scandalized. “You haven’t? Why ever not?”

  Charmain got the envelope open and pulled out a beautiful, large, stiff, folded paper. “My mother brought me up to be respectable,” she said. “She never let me near the scullery, or the kitchen either.”

  “I don’t believe this!” Peter said. “Why is it respectable not to know how to do things? Is it respectable to light a fire with a bar of soap?”

  “That,” Charmain said haughtily, “was an accident. Please be quiet and let me read my letter.” She pulled her glasses up on to her nose and unfolded the stiff paper.

  “Dear Mistress Baker,” she read.

  “Well, I’m going to get on and try,” Peter said. “I’m blowed if I’m going to be bullied by a crowd of little blue people. And I should think you had enough pride to help me do it.”

  “Shut up,” said Charmain and concentrated on her letter.

  Dear Mistress Baker,

  How kind of you to offer Us your services. In the normal way, We would find the assistance of Our Daughter, the Princess Hilda, sufficient for Our need; but it so happens that the Princess is about to receive Important Visitors and is obliged to forgo her Work in the Library for the duration of the Visit. We therefore gratefully accept your Kind Offer, on a temporary basis. If you would be so Good as to present yourself at the Royal Mansion this coming Wednesday Morning, at around ten-thirty, We shall be happy to receive you in Our Library and instruct you in Our Work.

  Your Obliged and Grateful

  Adolphus Rex Norlandi Alti

  Charmain’s heart banged and bumped as she read the letter, and it was not until she reached the end of it that she realized that the amazing, unlikely, unbelievable thing had happened: the King had agreed to let her help him in the Royal Library! Tears came into her eyes, she was not sure why, and she had to whisk her glasses off. Her heart hammered with joy. Then with alarm. Was today Wednesday? Had she missed her chance?

  She had been hearing, without attending, Peter crashing saucepans about and kicking dog dishes aside as he went to the inner door. Now she heard him come back again.

  “What day is it today?” she asked him.

  Peter set the large saucepan he was carrying down, hissing, on the fire. ?
??I’ll tell you if you tell me where he keeps his soap,” he said.

  “Bother you!” said Charmain. “It’s in the pantry in a bag labeled something like Caninitis. Now, what day is it?”

  “Cloths,” said Peter. “Tell me where cloths are first. Did you know there are two new bags of laundry in this pantry now?”

  “I don’t know where cloths are,” Charmain said. “What day is it?”

  “Cloths first,” said Peter. “He doesn’t answer me when I ask.”

  “He didn’t know you were coming,” Charmain said. “Is it Wednesday yet?”

  “I can’t think why he didn’t know,” Peter said. “He got my letter. Ask for cloths.”

  Charmain sighed. “Great-Uncle William,” she said, “this stupid boy wants to know where cloths are, please.”

  The kindly voice replied, “Do you know, my dear, I nearly forgot cloths. They’re in the table drawer.”

  “It’s Tuesday,” Peter said, pouncing on the drawer and dragging it open almost into Charmain’s stomach. He said as he fetched out wads of toweling and dishcloths, “I know it must be Tuesday, because I set off from home on Saturday and it took me three days to walk here. Satisfied?”

  “Thank you,” Charmain said. “Very kind of you. Then I’m afraid I’ll have to go into town tomorrow. I may be gone all day.”

  “Then isn’t it lucky that I’m here to look after the place for you?” Peter said. “Where are you skiving off to?”

  “The King,” Charmain said, with great dignity, “has asked me to go and help him. Read this, if you don’t believe me.”

  Peter picked up the letter and looked it over. “I see,” he said. “You’ve arranged to be in two places at once. Nice for you. So you can darned well help me wash these dishes now, when the water’s hot.”

  “Why? I didn’t get them dirty,” Charmain said. She pocketed her letter and stood up. “I’m going into the garden.”

  “I didn’t get them dirty either,” Peter said. “And it was your uncle who annoyed the kobolds.”