Sophie sighed. Michael said, “This is Lettie Hatter’s great-aunt. I brought her here to see Lettie.”
“Oh, I thought the face looked familiar!” Mrs. Fairfax exclaimed. “There’s quite a family likeness. Do come in. Lettie’s a little bit busy just now, but have some scones and honey while you wait.”
She opened her front door wider. Instantly a large collie dog squeezed past Mrs. Fairfax’s skirts, barged between Sophie and Michael, and ran across the nearest flower bed, snapping off flowers right and left.
“Oh, stop him!” Mrs. Fairfax gasped, flying off in pursuit. “I don’t want him out just now!”
There was a minute or so of helter-skelter chase, in which the dog ran hither and thither, whining in a disturbed way, and Mrs. Fairfax and Sophie ran after the dog, jumping flower beds and getting in one another’s way, and Michael ran after Sophie crying, “Stop! You’ll make yourself ill!” Then the dog set off loping round one corner of the house. Michael realized that the way to stop Sophie was to stop the dog. He made a crosswise dash through the flower beds, plunged round the house after the dog, and seized it by two handfuls of its thick coat just as it reached the orchard at the back.
Sophie hobbled up to find Michael pulling the dog away backward and making such strange faces at her that she thought at first he was ill. But he jerked his head so often toward the orchard that she realized he was only trying to tell her something. She stuck her face round the corner of the house, expecting to see a swarm of bees.
Howl was there with Lettie. They were in a grove of mossy apple trees in full bloom, with a row of beehives in the distance. Lettie sat in a white garden seat. Howl was kneeling on one knee in the grass at her feet, holding one of her hands and looking noble and ardent. Lettie was smiling lovingly at him. But the worst of it, as far as Sophie was concerned, was that Lettie did not look like Martha at all. She was her own extremely beautiful self. She was wearing a dress of the same kind of pinks and white as the crowded apple blossom overhead. Her dark hair trailed in glossy curls over one shoulder and her eyes shone with devotion for Howl.
Sophie brought her head back round the corner and looked with dismay at Michael holding the whining collie dog. “He must have had a speed spell with him,” Michael whispered, equally dismayed.
Mrs. Fairfax caught them up, panting and trying to pin back a loose coil of her buttery hair. “Bad dog!” she said in a fierce whisper to the collie. “I’ll put a spell on you if you do that once more!” The dog blinked and crouched down. Mrs. Fairfax pointed a stern finger. “Into the house! Stay in the house!” The collie shook himself free of Michael’s hands and slunk away round the house again. “Thank you so much,” Mrs. Fairfax said to Michael as they all followed it. “He will keep trying to bite Lettie’s visitor. Inside!” she shouted sternly in the front garden, as the collie seemed to be thinking of going round the house and getting to the orchard the other way. The dog gave her a woeful look over its shoulder and crawled dismally indoors through the porch.
“That dog may have the right idea,” Sophie said. “Mrs. Fairfax, do you know who Lettie’s visitor is?”
Mrs. Fairfax chuckled. “The Wizard Pendragon, or Howl, or whatever he calls himself,” she said. “But Lettie and I don’t let on we know. It amused me when he first turned up, calling himself Sylvester Oak, because I could see he’d forgotten me, though I hadn’t forgotten him, even though his hair used to be black in his student days.” Mrs. Fairfax by now had her hands folded in front of her and was standing bolt upright, prepared to talk all day, as Sophie had often seen her do before. “He was my old tutor’s very last pupil, you know, before she retired. When Mr. Fairfax was alive, he used to like me to transport us both to Kingsbury to see a show from time to time. I can manage two very nicely if I take it slowly. And I always used to drop in on old Mrs. Pentstemmon while I was there. She likes her old pupils to keep in touch. And one time she introduced this young Howl to us. Oh, she was proud of him. She taught Wizard Suliman too, you know, and she said Howl was twice as good—”
“But don’t you know the reputation Howl has?” Michael interrupted.
Getting into Mrs. Fairfax’s conversation was rather like getting into a turning skipping rope. You had to choose the exact moment, but once you were in, you were in. Mrs. Fairfax turned herself slightly to face Michael.
“Most of it’s just talk, to my mind,” she said. Michael opened his mouth to say that it was not, but he was in the skipping rope then and it went on turning. “And I said to Lettie, ‘Here’s your big chance, my love.’ I knew Howl could teach her twenty times more than I could—for I don’t mind telling you, Lettie’s brains go way beyond mine, and she could end up in the same league as the Witch of the Waste, only in a good way. Lettie’s a good girl and I’m fond of her. If Mrs. Pentstemmon was still teaching, I’d have Lettie to her tomorrow. But she isn’t. So I said, ‘Lettie, here’s Wizard Howl courting you and you could do worse than fall in love with him yourself and let him be your teacher. The pair of you will go far.’ I don’t think Lettie was too keen on the idea at first, but she’s been softening lately, and today it seems to be going beautifully.”
Here Mrs. Fairfax paused to beam benevolently at Michael, and Sophie dashed into the skipping rope for her turn. “But someone told me Lettie was fond of someone else,” she said.
“Sorry for him, you mean,” said Mrs. Fairfax. She lowered her voice. “There’s a terrible disability there,” she whispered suggestively, “and it’s asking too much of any girl. I told him so. I’m sorry for him myself—”
Sophie managed a mystified “Oh?”
“—but it’s a fearsomely strong spell. It’s very sad,” Mrs. Fairfax wound on. “I had to tell him that there’s no way someone of my abilities can break anything that’s put on by the Witch of the Waste. Howl might, but of course he can’t ask Howl, can he?”
Here Michael, who kept looking nervously to the corner of the house in case Howl came round it and discovered them, managed to trample through the skipping rope and stop it by saying, “I think we’d better be going.”
“Are you sure you won’t come in for a taste of my honey?” asked Mrs. Fairfax. “I use it in nearly all my spells, you know.” And she was off again, this time about the magical properties of honey. Michael and Sophie walked purposefully down the path to the gate and Mrs. Fairfax drifted behind them, talking away and sorrowfully straightening plants that the dog had bent as she talked. Sophie meanwhile racked her brains for a way to find out how Mrs. Fairfax knew Lettie was Lettie, without upsetting Michael. Mrs. Fairfax paused to gasp a bit as she heaved a large lupine upright.
Sophie took the plunge. “Mrs. Fairfax, wasn’t it my niece Martha who was supposed to come to you?”
“Naughty girls!” Mrs. Fairfax said, smiling and shaking her head as she emerged from the lupine. “As if I wouldn’t recognize one of my own honey-based spells! But as I said to her at the time, ‘I’m not one to keep anyone against their will and I’d always rather teach someone who wants to learn. Only,’ I said to her, ‘I’ll have no pretense here. You stay as your own self or not at all.’ And it’s worked out very happily, as you see. Are you sure you won’t stay and ask her for yourself?”
“I think we’d better go,” Sophie said.
“We have to get back,” Michael added, with another nervous look toward the orchard. He collected the seven-league boots from the hedge and set one down outside the gate for Sophie. “And I’m going to hold on to you this time,” he said.
Mrs. Fairfax leaned over her gate while Sophie inserted her foot in the boot. “Seven-leaguers,” she said. “Would you believe, I’ve not seen any of those for years. Very useful things for someone your age, Mrs. Er—I wouldn’t mind a pair myself these days. So it’s you Lettie inherits her witchcraft from, is it? Not that it necessarily runs in families, but as often as not—”
Michael took hold of Sophie’s arm and pulled. Both boots came down and the rest of Mrs. Fairfax’s talk vanished in
the Zip! and rush of air. Next moment Michael had to brace his feet in order not to collide with the castle. The door was open. Inside, Calcifer was roaring, “Porthaven door! Someone’s been banging on it ever since you left.”
Chapter 9
In which Michael has trouble with a spell.
It was the sea captain at the door, come for his wind spell at last, and not at all pleased at having to wait. “If I miss my tide, boy,” he said to Michael, “I shall have a word with the Sorcerer about you. I don’t like lazy boys.”
Michael, in Sophie’s opinion, was far too polite to him, but she was feeling too dejected to interfere. When the captain had gone, Michael went to the bench to frown over his spell again and Sophie sat silently mending her stockings. She had only the one pair and her knobby feet had worn huge holes in them. Her gray dress by this time was frayed and dirty. She wondered whether she dared cut the least-stained bits out of Howl’s ruined blue-and-silver suit to make herself a new skirt with. But she did not quite dare.
“Sophie,” Michael said, looking up from his eleventh page of notes, “how many nieces have you?”
Sophie had been afraid Michael would start asking questions. “When you get to my age, my lad,” she said, “you lose count. They all look so alike. Those two Letties could be twins, to my mind.”
“Oh, no, not really,” Michael said, to her surprise. “The niece in Upper Folding isn’t as pretty as my Lettie.” He tore up the eleventh page and made a twelfth. “I’m glad Howl didn’t meet my Lettie,” he said. He began on his thirteenth page and tore that up too. “I wanted to laugh when that Mrs. Fairfax said she knew who Howl was, didn’t you?”
“No,” said Sophie. It had made no difference to Lettie’s feelings. She thought of Lettie’s bright, adoring face under the apple blossom. “I suppose there’s no chance,” she asked hopelessly, “that Howl could be properly in love this time?”
Calcifer snorted green sparks up the chimney.
“I was afraid you’d start thinking that,” Michael said. “But you’d be deceiving yourself, just like Mrs. Fairfax.”
“How do you know?” said Sophie.
Calcifer and Michael exchanged glances. “Did he forget to spend at least an hour in the bathroom this morning?” Michael asked.
“He was in there two hours,” said Calcifer, “putting spells on his face. Vain fool!”
“There you are, then,” said Michael. “The day Howl forgets to do that will be the day I believe he’s really in love, and not before.” Sophie thought of Howl on one knee in the orchard, posing to look as handsome as possible, and she knew they were right. She thought of going to the bathroom and tipping all Howl’s beauty spells down the toilet. But she did not quite dare. Instead, she hobbled up and fetched the blue-and-silver suit, which she spent the rest of the day cutting little blue triangles out of in order to make a patchwork sort of skirt.
Michael patted her shoulder kindly as he came to throw all seventeen pages of his notes onto Calcifer. “Everyone gets over things in the end, you know,” he said.
By this time it was clear Michael was having trouble with his spell. He gave up the notes and scraped some soot off the chimney. Calcifer craned round to watch him in a mystified way. Michael took a withered root from one of the bags hanging on the beams and put it in the soot. Then, after much thought, he turned the doorknob blue-down and vanished for twenty minutes into Porthaven. He came back with a large, whorled seashell and put that with the root and the soot. After that he tore up pages and pages of paper and put those in too. He put the lot in front of the human skull and stood blowing on it, so that soot and bits of paper whirled all over the bench.
“What’s he doing, do you think?” Calcifer asked Sophie.
Michael gave up blowing and started mashing everything, paper and all, with a pestle and mortar, looking at the skull expectantly from time to time. Nothing happened, so he tried different ingredients from bags and jars.
“I feel bad about spying on Howl,” he announced as he pounded a third set of ingredients to death in a bowl. “He may be fickle to females, but he’s been awfully good to me. He took me in when I was just an unwanted orphan sitting on his doorstep in Porthaven.”
“How did that come about?” asked Sophie as she snipped out another blue triangle.
“My mother died and my father got drowned in a storm,” Michael said. “And nobody wants you when that happens. I had to leave our house because I couldn’t pay rent, and I tried to live in the streets, but people kept turning me off doorsteps and out of boats until the only place I could think of to go was somewhere everyone was too scared of to interfere with. Howl had just started up in a small way as Sorcerer Jenkin then. But everyone said his house had devils in it, so I slept on his doorstep for a couple of nights until Howl opened the door one morning on his way to buy bread and I fell inside. So he said I could wait indoors while he got something to eat. I went in, and there was Calcifer, and I started talking to him because I’d never met a demon before.”
“What did you talk about?” said Sophie, wondering if Calcifer had asked Michael to break his contract too.
“He told me his troubles and dripped on me. Didn’t you?” said Calcifer. “It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might have troubles as well.”
“I don’t think you have. You just grumble a lot,” Michael said. “You were quite nice to me that morning, and I think Howl was impressed. But you know how he is. He didn’t tell me I could stay. He just didn’t tell me to go. So I started being useful wherever I could, like looking after money so that he didn’t spend it all as soon as he’d got it, and so on.”
The spell gave a sort of whuff then and exploded mildly. Michael brushed soot off the skull, sighing, and tried new ingredients. Sophie began making a patchwork of blue triangles round her feet on the floor.
“I did make lots of stupid mistakes when I first started,” Michael went on. “Howl was awfully nice about it. I thought I’d got over that now. And I think I do help with money. Howl buys such expensive clothes. He says no one’s going to employ a wizard who looks as if he can’t make money at the trade.”
“That’s just because he likes clothes,” said Calcifer. His orange eyes watched Sophie at work rather meaningly.
“This suit was spoiled,” Sophie said.
“It isn’t just clothes,” Michael said. “Remember last winter when we were down to your last log and Howl went off and bought the skull and that stupid guitar? I was really annoyed with him. He said they looked good.”
“What did you do about logs?” Sophie asked.
“Howl conjured some from someone who owed him money,” Michael said. “At least, he said they did, and I just hoped he was telling the truth. And we ate seaweed. Howl says it’s good for you.”
“Nice stuff,” murmured Calcifer. “Dry and crackly.”
“I hate it,” said Michael, staring abstractedly at his bowl of pounded stuff. “I don’t know—there should be seven ingredients, unless it’s seven processes, but let’s try it in a pentacle anyway.” He put the bowl on the floor and chalked a sort of five-pointed star round it.
The powder exploded with a force that blew Sophie’s triangles into the hearth. Michael swore and hurriedly rubbed out the chalk marks.
“Sophie,” he said, “I’m stuck in this spell. You don’t think you could possibly help me, do you?”
Just like someone bringing their homework to their granny, Sophie thought, collecting triangles and patiently laying them out again. “Let’s have a look,” she said cautiously. “I don’t know anything about magic, you know.”
Michael eagerly thrust a strange, slightly shiny paper into her hand. It looked unusual, even for a spell. It was printed in bold letters, but they were slightly gray and blurred, and there were gray blurs, like retreating stormclouds, round all the edges. “See what you think,” said Michael.
Sophie read:
“Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake r
oot,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot.
Teach me to hear the mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
Decide what this is about
Write a second verse yourself”
It puzzled Sophie exceedingly. It was not quite like any of the spells she had snooped at before. She plowed through it twice, not really helped by Michael eagerly explaining as she tried to read. “You know Howl told me that advanced spells have a puzzle in them? Well, I decided at first that every line was meant to be a puzzle. I used soot with sparks in it for the falling star, and a seashell for the mermaids singing. And I thought I might count as a child, so I got a mandrake root down, and I wrote out lists of past years from the almanacs, but I wasn’t sure about that—maybe that’s where I went wrong—and could the thing that stops stinging be dock leaf? I hadn’t thought of that before—anyway, none of it works!”