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
