Chapter Two: In which Anne is compelled to seek her fortune
Title: Alfred's Moving Castle
Genre: Fantasy/ Crossover
Pairings: USxfem!UK; and again mentions of Spainxfem!Romano.
Rating/Warnings: G, human names are used exclusively, genderbending
Summary: Based off the book version of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. Everything belongs to their respective owners. There are some odd familial relationships in here, but please just go with them :)
Notes: Now the story gets moving, though no sign of Alfred in this chapter (unfortunately, because I love him, I really do). Though we are introducing in person fem!Russia and a mysterious character! (ooh, the suspense!) For the fem!Human names, see Chapter 1! :)
“What?” Anne stared at the girl on the stool opposite her. She looked just like Elizaveta. She was wearing Elizaveta’s second-best green dress, a wonderful green that suited her perfectly. She had Elizaveta’s dark hair and green eyes.
“I am Mei,” said her sister. “Who did you catch cutting up Elizaveta’s silk drawers? I never told Elizaveta that. Did you?”
“No,” said Anne, quite stunned. She could see it was Mei now. There was Mei’s tilt to Elizaveta’s head, and Mei’s way of clasping her hands round her knees with her thumbs twiddling. “Why?”
“I’ve been dreading you coming to see me,” Mei said, “because I knew I’d have to tell you. It’s a relief now I have. Promise you won’t tell anyone. I know you won’t tell if you promise. You’re so honorable.”
“I promise,” Anne said. “But why? How?”
“Elizaveta and I arranged it,” Mei said, twiddling her thumbs, “because Elizaveta wanted to learn witchcraft and I didn’t. Elizaveta’s got brains, and she wants a future where she can use them - only try telling that to Mother! Mother’s too jealous of Elizaveta even to admit she has brains!”
Anne could not believe Yan was like that, but she let it pass. “But what about you?”
“Eat your cake,” said Mei. “It’s good. Oh, yes, I can be clever too. It only took me two weeks at Mrs. Braginskaya’s to find the spell we’re using. I got up at night and read her books secretly, and it was easy really. Then I asked if I could visit my family and Mrs. Braginskaya said yes. She’s a dear. She thought I was homesick. So I took the spell and came here, and Elizaveta went back to Mrs. Braginskaya pretending to be me. The difficult part was the first week, when I didn’t know all the things I was supposed to know. It was awful. But I discovered that people like me - they do, you know, if you like them - and then it was all right. And Mrs. Braginskaya hasn’t kicked Elizaveta out, so I suppose she managed too.”
Anne chomped at cake she was not really tasting. “But what made you want to do this?”
Mei rocked on her stool, grinning all over Elizaveta’s face, twirling her thumbs in a happy pink whirl. “I want to get married and have ten children.”
“You’re not old enough!” said Anne.
“Not quite,” Mei agreed. “But you can see I’ve got to start quite soon in order to fit ten children in. And this gives me time to wait and see if the person I want likes me for being me. The spell’s going to wear off gradually, and I shall get more and more like myself, you see.”
Anne was so astonished that she finished her cake without noticing what kind it had been. “Why ten children?”
“Because that’s how many I want,” said Mei.
“I never knew!”
“Well, it wasn’t much good going on about it when you were so busy backing Mother up about me making my fortune,” Mei said. “You thought Mother meant it. I did too, until Father died and I saw she was just trying to get rid of us - putting Elizaveta where she was bound to meet a lot of men and get married off, and sending me as far away as she could! I was so angry I thought, Why not? And I spoke to Elizaveta and she was just as angry and we fixed it up. We’re fine now. But we both feel bad about you. You’re far too clever and nice to be stuck in that shop for the rest of your life. We talked about it, but we couldn’t see what to do.”
“I’m all right,” Anne protested. “Just a bit dull.”
“All right?” Mei exclaimed. “Yes, you prove you’re all right by not coming near here for months, and then turning up in a frightful gray dress and shawl, looking as if even I scare you! What’s Mother been doing to you?”
“Nothing,” Anne said uncomfortably. “We’ve been rather busy. You should talk that about Yan that way, Mei. She is your mother.”
“Yes, and I’m enough like her to understand her,” Mei retorted. “That’s why she sent me so far away, or tried to. Mother knows you don’t have to be unkind to someone in order to exploit them. She knows how dutiful you are. She knows you have this thing about being a failure because you’re only the eldest. She’s managed you perfectly and got you slaving away for her. I bet she doesn’t pay you.”
“I’m still an apprentice,” Anne protested.
“So am I, but I get a wage. The Cesaris know I’m worth it,” said Mei. “That hat shop is making a mint these days, and all because of you! You made that green hat that makes the Mayor’s wife look like a stunning schoolgirl, didn’t you?”
“Caterpillar green. I trimmed it,” said Anne.
“And the bonnet Lovina Vargas was wearing when she met that nobleman,” Mei swept on. “You’re a genius with hats and clothes, and Mother knows it! You sealed your fate when you made Elizaveta that outfit last May Day. Now you earn the money while she goes off gadding - “
“She’s out doing the buying,” Anne said.
“Buying!” Mei cried. Her thumbs whirled. “That takes her half a morning. I’ve seen her, Anne, and heard the talk. She’s off in a hired carriage and new clothes on your earning, visiting all the mansions down the valley! They’re saying she’s going to buy that big places down at Vale End and set up in style. And where are you?”
“Well, Yan’s entitled to some pleasure after all her hard work bringing us up,” Anne said. “I suppose I’ll inherit the shop.”
“What a fate!” Mei exclaimed. “Listen - “
But at that moment two empty cake racks were pulled away at the other end of the room, and an apprentice stuck his head through from the back somewhere. “Though I heard your voice, Elizaveta,” he said, grinning in the most friendly and flirtatious way. “The new baking’s just up. Tell them.” His head, curly and somewhat floury, disappeared again. Anne though he looked a nice lad. She longed to ask if he was the one Mei really like, but she did not get a chance. Mei sprang up in a hurry, still talking.
“I must get the girls to carry all these through to the shop,” she said. “Help me with the end of this one.” She dragged out the nearest rack and Anne helped her hump it past the door into the roaring, busy shop. “You must do something about yourself, Anne,” Mei panted as they went. “Elizaveta kept saying she didn’t know what would happen to you when we weren’t around to give you some self-respect. She was right to be worried.”
In the shop Mrs. Cesari seized the rack from them in both massive arms, yelling instructions, and a line of people rushed away past Mei to fetch more. Anne yelled goodbye and slipped away in the bustle. It did not seem right to take up more of Mei’s time. She ran home. There were fireworks now, going up from the field by the river where the Fair was, competing with the blue bangs from Jones’s castle. Anne felt more like an invalid than ever.
She thought and thought, most of the following week, and all that happened was that she became confused and discontented. Things just did not seem to be the way she thought they were. She was amazed at Elizaveta and Mei. She had misunderstood them for years. But she could not believe Yan was the kind of woman Mei said.
There was a lot of time for thinking, because Bridgette duly left the shop to be married and Anne was mostly alone in the shop. Yan did seem to be out a lot, gadding or not, and trade was slack after May Day. After three days Anne plucked up courage to ask Yan, “Shouldn’t I be earning a wage?”
“Of course, with all you do!” Yan answered warmly, fixing on a rose-trimmed hat in front of the shop mirror. “We’ll see about it as soon as I’ve done the accounts this evening.” Then she went out and did not come back until Anne had shut the shop and taken that day’s hats through to the house to trim.
Anne at first felt mean to have listened to Mei, but when Yan did not mention a wage, either that evening or any time later that week, Anne began to think that Mei had been right.
“Maybe I am being exploited,” she told a hat she was trimming with red silk and a bunch of wax cherries, “but someone has to do this or there will be no hats at all to sell.” She finished that hat and started on a stark black-and-white one, very modish, and a quite new though came to her. “Does it matter if there are no hats to sell?” she asked it. She looked round the assembled hats, on stands or waiting in a heap to be trimmed. “What good are you all?” she asked them. “You certainly aren’t doing me a scrap of good.”
And she was within an ace of leaving the house and setting out to seek her fortune, until she remembered she was the eldest and there was no point. She took up the hat again, sighing.
She was still discontented, alone in the shop next morning, when a very plain young woman customer stormed in, whirling a pleated mushroom bonnet by its ribbons. “Look at this!” the young lady shrieked. “You told me this was the same as the bonnet Lovina Vargas was wearing when she met the Count. And you lied. Nothing has happened to me at all!”
“I’m not surprised,” Anne said, before she had caught up with herself. “If you’re fool enough to wear that bonnet with a face like that, you wouldn’t have the wit to spot the King himself if he came begging - if he hadn’t turned to stone first just at the sight of you.”
The customer glared. Then she threw the bonnet at Anne and stormed out of the shop. Anne carefully crammed the bonnet into the wastebasket, panting rather. The rule was: Lose your temper, lose a customer. She had just proven that rule. It troubled her to realize how very enjoyable it had been.
Anne had no time to recover. There was the sound of wheels and horse hoofs and a carriage darkened the window. The shop bell clanged and the grandest customer she had ever seen sailed in, with a sable wrap drooping from her elbows and diamonds winking all over her dense black dress. Anne’s eyes went to the lady’s wide hat first - real ostrich plume dyed to reflect the pinks and greens and blues winking in the diamonds and yet still look black. This was a wealthy hat. She was tall, and although no one could call her fat, she certainly wasn’t thin either. The lady’s face was carefully beautiful. The blonde hair made her seem young, but… Anne’s eyes took in the young man who followed the lady in, a slightly formless-faced person with both angular and completely flat features at the same time, and a hair that wasn’t a color, more a washed out lack of color than anything else, quite well dressed, but pale and obviously upset. He stared at Anne with a kind of beseeching horror. He was clearly younger than the lady. Anne was puzzled.
“Miss Kirkland?” the lady asked in a musical but commanding voice.
“Yes,” said Anne. The man looked more upset than ever. Perhaps the lady was his mother.
“I hear you sell the most heavenly hats,” said the lady. “Show me.”
Anne did not trust herself to answer in her present mood. She went and got out hats. None of them were in this lady’s class, but she could feel the man’s eyes following her and that made her uncomfortable. The sooner the lady discovered the hats were wrong for her, the sooner this odd pair would go. She followed Yan’s advice and got out the wrongest first.
The lady began rejecting hats instantly. “Dimples,” she said to the pink bonnet, and “Youth” to the caterpillar green one. To the one of twinkles and veils she said, “Mysterious allure. How very obvious. What else have you?”
Anne got out the modish black-and-white, which was the only hat even remotely likely to interest this lady.
The lady looked at it with contempt. “This one doesn’t do anything for anybody. You’re wasting my time, Miss Kirkland.”
“Only because you came in and asked for hats,” Anne said. “This is only a small shop in a small town, Madam. Why did you - “ Behind the lady, the man gasped and seemed to be trying to signal warningly. “ - bother to come in?” Anne finished, wondering what was going on.
“I always bother when someone tries to set themselves up against the Witch of the Waste,” said the lady. “I’ve heard of you, Miss Kirkland, and I don’t care for your competition or your attitude. I came to put a stop to you. There.” She spread out her hand in a flinging motion toward Anne’s face.
“You mean you’re the Witch of the Waste?” Anne quavered. Her voice seemed to have gone strange with fear and astonishment.
“I am,” said the lady. “And let that teach you to meddle with things that belong to me.”
“I don’t think I did. There must be some mistake,” Anne croaked. The man was now staring at her in utter horror, though she could not see why.
“No mistake, Miss Kirkland,” said the Witch. “Come, Gaston.” She turned and swept to the shop door. While the man was humbly opening it for her, she turned back to Anne. “By the way, you won’t be able to tell anyone you’re under a spell,” she said. The shop door tolled like a funeral bell as she left.
Anne put her hands to her face, wondering what the man had stared at. She felt soft, leathery wrinkles. She looked at her hands. They were wrinkled too, and skinny, with large veins in the back and knuckles like knobs. She pulled her gray skirt against her legs and looked down at skinny, decrepit ankles and feet which had made her shoes all knobbly. There were the legs of someone about ninety and they seemed to be real.
Anne got herself to the mirror, and found she had to hobble. The face in the mirror was quite calm, because it was what she expected to see. It was the face of a gaunt old woman, withered and brownish, surround by wispy white hair. Her own eyes, yellow and watery, stared out at her, looking rather tragic.
“Don’t worry, old thing,” Anne said to the face. “You look quite healthy. Besides, this is much more like you really are.”
She thought about her situation, quite calmly. Everything seemed to have gone calm and remote. She was not even particularly angry with the Witch of the Waste.
“Well, of course I shall have to do for her when I get the chance,” she told herself, “but meanwhile, if Elizaveta and Mei can stand being one another, I can stand being like this. But I can’t stay here. Yan would have a fit. Let’s see. This gray dress is quite suitable, but I shall need my shawl and some food.”
She hobbled over to the shop door and carefully put up the CLOSED notice. Her joints creaked as she moved. She had to walk bowed and slow. But she was relieved to discover that she was quite a hale old woman. She did not feel weak or ill, just stiff. She hobbled to collect her shawl, and wrapped it over her head and shoulders, as old women did. Then she shuffled through into the house, where she collected her purse with a few coins in it and a parcel of bread and cheese. She let herself out of the house, carefully hiding the key in the usual place, and hobbled away down the street, surprised at how calm she still felt.
She did wonder if she should say goodbye to Mei. But she did not like the idea of Mei not knowing her. It was best just to go. Anne decided she would write to both her sisters when she got wherever she was going, and shuffled on, through the field where the Fair had been, over the bridge, and on into the country lanes beyond. It was a warm spring day. Anne discovered that being a crone did not stop her enjoying the sight and smell of may in the hedgerows, though the sight was a little blurred. Her back began to ache. She hobbled sturdily enough, but she needed a stick. She searched the hedges as she went for a loose stake of some kind.
Evidently her eyes were not as good as they had been. She thought she saw a stick, a mile or so on, but when she hauled on it, it proved to be the bottom end of an old scarecrow someone had thrown into the hedge. Anne heaved the thing upright. It had a withered turnip for a face. Anne found she had some fellow feeling for it. Instead of pulling it to pieces and taking the stick, she stuck it between two branches of the hedge, so that it stood looming rakishly above the may, with the tattered sleeves on its stick arms fluttering over the hedge.
“There,” she said, and her cracked old voice surprised her into giving a cracked old cackle of laughter. “Neither of us are up to much, are we, my friend? Maybe you’ll get back to your field if I leave you where people can see you.” She set off up the lane again, but a thought struck her and she turned back. “Now if I wasn’t doomed to failure because of my position in the family,” she told the scarecrow, “you could come to life and offer me help in making my fortune. But I wish you luck anyway.”
She cackled again as she walked on. Perhaps she was a little mad, but then old women often were.
She found a stick an hour or so later when she sat down on the bank to rest and eat her bread and cheese. There were noises in the hedge behind her: little strangled squeaking, followed by heavings that shook may petals off the hedge. Anne crawled on her bony knees to peer past leaves and flowers and thorns into the inside of the hedge, and discovered a then gray dog in there. It was hopelessly trapped by a stout stick which had somehow got twisted into a rope that was tied round its neck. The stick had wedged itself between two branches of the hedge so that the doge could barely move. It rolled its eyes wildly at Anne’s peering face.
As a girl, Anne was scared of all dogs. Even as an old woman, she was quite alarmed by the two rows of white fangs in the creature’s open jaw. But she said to herself, “The way I am now, it’s scarcely worth worrying about,” and she felt in her sewing pocket for her scissors. She reached into the hedge with the scissors and sawed away at the rope round the dog’s neck.
The dog was very wild. It flinched away from her and growled. But Anne sawed bravely on. “You’ll starve or throttle to death, my friend,” she told the dog in her cracked old voice, “unless you let me cut you loose. In fact, I think someone has tried to throttle you already. Maybe that accounts for your wildness.” The rope had been tied quite tightly round the go’s neck and the stick had been twisted viciously into it. It took a lot of sawing before the rope parted and the dog was able to drag itself out from under the stick.
“Would you like some bread and cheese?” Anne asked it then. But the dog just growled at her, forced its way out through the opposite side of the hedge, and slunk away. “That’s gratitude for you!” Anne said, rubbing her prickled arms. “But you left me a gift in spite of yourself.” She pulled the stick that had trapped the dog out of the hedge and found it was a proper walking stick, well trimmed and tipped with iron. Anne finished her bread and cheese and set off walking again. The lane became steeper and steeper and she found the stick a great help. It was also something to talk to. Anne thumped along with a will, chatting to her stick. After all, old people often talk to themselves.
“There’s two encounters,” she said, “and not a scrap of magical gratitude from either. Still, you’re a good stick. I’m not grumbling. But I’m surely due to have a third encounter, magical or not. In fact, I insist on one. I wonder what it will be.”
The third encounter came toward the end of the afternoon when Anne had worked her way quite high into the hills. A countryman came whistling down the lane toward her. A shepheard, Anne thought, going home after seeing to his sheep. He was a well-set-up young fellow of forty or so. “Gracious!” Anne said to herself. “This morning I’d have seen him as an old man. How on’e point of view does alter!”
When the shepherd saw Anne mumbling to herself, he moved rather carefully over to the other side of the lane and called out with great heartiness, “Good evening to you, Mother! Where are you off to?”
“Mother?” said Anne. “I’m not your mother, young man!”
"A manner of speaking,” the shepherd said, edging along against the opposite hedge. “I was only meaning a polite inquiry, seeing you walking into the hills at the end of the day. You won’t get down into Upper Folding before nightfall, will you?”
Anne had not considered this. She stood in the road and thought about it. “It doesn’t matter really,” she said, half to herself. “You can’t be fussy when you’re off to seek your fortune.”
“Can’t you indeed, Mother?” said the shepherd. He had now edged himself downhill of Anne and seemed to feel better for it. “Then I wish you good luck, Mother, provided your fortune don’t have nothing to do with charming folks’ cattle.” And he took off down the road in great strides, almost running, but not quite.
Anne started after him indignantly. “He thought I was a witch!” she said to the stick. She had half a mind to scare the shepherd by shouting nasty things after him, but that seemed a little unkind. She plugged on uphill, mumbling. Shortly, the hedges gave way to bare banks and the land beyond became heathery upland, with a lot of steepness beyond that covered with yellow, rattling grass. Anne kept grimly on. By now her knobby old feet ached, and her back, and her knees. She became too tired to mumble and simply plugged on, panting, until the sun was quite low. And lal at once it became quite clear to Anne that she could not walk a step further.
She collapsed onto a stone by the wayside, wondering what she would do now. “The only fortune I can think of is a comfortable chair!” she gasped.
The stone proved to be on a sort of headland, which gave Anne a magnificent view of the way she had come. There was most of the valley spread out beneath her in the setting sun, all fields and walls and hedges, the windings of the river, and the fine mansions of rich people glowing out from clumps of trees, right down to blue mountains in the far distance. Just below her was Market Chipping. Anne could look down into its well-known streets. There was Market Square and Cesari’s. She could have tossed a stone down the chimney pots of the house next to the hat shop.
“How near it still is!” Anne told her stick in dismay. “All that walking just to get above my own rooftop!”
It got cold on the stone as the sun went down. An unpleasant wind blew whichever way Anne turned to avoid it. Now it no longer seemed so unimportant that she would be out on the hills during the night. She found herself thinking more and more of a comfortable chair and a fireside, and also of darkness and wild animals. But if she went back to Market Chipping, it would be the middle of the night before she got there. She might just as well go on. She sighed and stood up creaking. It was awful. She ached all over.
“I never realized before what old people had to put up with! She panted as she labored uphill. “Still, I don’t think wolves will eat me. I must be far too dry and tough. That’s one comfort.”
Night was coming down fast now and the heathery uplands were blue-gray. The wind was sharper. Anne’s panting and the creaking of her limbs were so loud in her ears that it took her a while to notice that some of the grinding and puffing was not coming from herself at all. She looked up blurrily.
Wizard Jones’s castle was rumbling and bumping toward her across the moorland. Black smoke was blowing up in clouds from behind its black battlements. It looked tall and thin and heavy and ugly and very sinister indeed. Anne leaned on her stick and watched it. She was not particularly frightened. She wondered how it moved. But the main thing in her mind was that all that smoke must mean a large firestand somewhere inside those tall black walls.
“Well, why not?” she said to her stick. “Wizard Jones is not likely to want my soul for his collection. He only takes young girls.”
She raised her stick and waved it imperiously at the castle.
“Stop!” she shrieked.
The castle obediently came to a rumbling, grinding halt about fifty feet uphill from her. Anne felt rather gratified as she hobbled toward it.
A/N: And now Anne is just as old as she always felt she was. We also start to see some of the more typical Anne behavior, now that she is no longer under Yan's thumb! I already have the next few written so hopefully it will just be editing! Please review, I feel so inspired when you do!
Genre: Fantasy/ Crossover
Pairings: USxfem!UK; and again mentions of Spainxfem!Romano.
Rating/Warnings: G, human names are used exclusively, genderbending
Summary: Based off the book version of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynn Jones. Everything belongs to their respective owners. There are some odd familial relationships in here, but please just go with them :)
Notes: Now the story gets moving, though no sign of Alfred in this chapter (unfortunately, because I love him, I really do). Though we are introducing in person fem!Russia and a mysterious character! (ooh, the suspense!) For the fem!Human names, see Chapter 1! :)
“What?” Anne stared at the girl on the stool opposite her. She looked just like Elizaveta. She was wearing Elizaveta’s second-best green dress, a wonderful green that suited her perfectly. She had Elizaveta’s dark hair and green eyes.
“I am Mei,” said her sister. “Who did you catch cutting up Elizaveta’s silk drawers? I never told Elizaveta that. Did you?”
“No,” said Anne, quite stunned. She could see it was Mei now. There was Mei’s tilt to Elizaveta’s head, and Mei’s way of clasping her hands round her knees with her thumbs twiddling. “Why?”
“I’ve been dreading you coming to see me,” Mei said, “because I knew I’d have to tell you. It’s a relief now I have. Promise you won’t tell anyone. I know you won’t tell if you promise. You’re so honorable.”
“I promise,” Anne said. “But why? How?”
“Elizaveta and I arranged it,” Mei said, twiddling her thumbs, “because Elizaveta wanted to learn witchcraft and I didn’t. Elizaveta’s got brains, and she wants a future where she can use them - only try telling that to Mother! Mother’s too jealous of Elizaveta even to admit she has brains!”
Anne could not believe Yan was like that, but she let it pass. “But what about you?”
“Eat your cake,” said Mei. “It’s good. Oh, yes, I can be clever too. It only took me two weeks at Mrs. Braginskaya’s to find the spell we’re using. I got up at night and read her books secretly, and it was easy really. Then I asked if I could visit my family and Mrs. Braginskaya said yes. She’s a dear. She thought I was homesick. So I took the spell and came here, and Elizaveta went back to Mrs. Braginskaya pretending to be me. The difficult part was the first week, when I didn’t know all the things I was supposed to know. It was awful. But I discovered that people like me - they do, you know, if you like them - and then it was all right. And Mrs. Braginskaya hasn’t kicked Elizaveta out, so I suppose she managed too.”
Anne chomped at cake she was not really tasting. “But what made you want to do this?”
Mei rocked on her stool, grinning all over Elizaveta’s face, twirling her thumbs in a happy pink whirl. “I want to get married and have ten children.”
“You’re not old enough!” said Anne.
“Not quite,” Mei agreed. “But you can see I’ve got to start quite soon in order to fit ten children in. And this gives me time to wait and see if the person I want likes me for being me. The spell’s going to wear off gradually, and I shall get more and more like myself, you see.”
Anne was so astonished that she finished her cake without noticing what kind it had been. “Why ten children?”
“Because that’s how many I want,” said Mei.
“I never knew!”
“Well, it wasn’t much good going on about it when you were so busy backing Mother up about me making my fortune,” Mei said. “You thought Mother meant it. I did too, until Father died and I saw she was just trying to get rid of us - putting Elizaveta where she was bound to meet a lot of men and get married off, and sending me as far away as she could! I was so angry I thought, Why not? And I spoke to Elizaveta and she was just as angry and we fixed it up. We’re fine now. But we both feel bad about you. You’re far too clever and nice to be stuck in that shop for the rest of your life. We talked about it, but we couldn’t see what to do.”
“I’m all right,” Anne protested. “Just a bit dull.”
“All right?” Mei exclaimed. “Yes, you prove you’re all right by not coming near here for months, and then turning up in a frightful gray dress and shawl, looking as if even I scare you! What’s Mother been doing to you?”
“Nothing,” Anne said uncomfortably. “We’ve been rather busy. You should talk that about Yan that way, Mei. She is your mother.”
“Yes, and I’m enough like her to understand her,” Mei retorted. “That’s why she sent me so far away, or tried to. Mother knows you don’t have to be unkind to someone in order to exploit them. She knows how dutiful you are. She knows you have this thing about being a failure because you’re only the eldest. She’s managed you perfectly and got you slaving away for her. I bet she doesn’t pay you.”
“I’m still an apprentice,” Anne protested.
“So am I, but I get a wage. The Cesaris know I’m worth it,” said Mei. “That hat shop is making a mint these days, and all because of you! You made that green hat that makes the Mayor’s wife look like a stunning schoolgirl, didn’t you?”
“Caterpillar green. I trimmed it,” said Anne.
“And the bonnet Lovina Vargas was wearing when she met that nobleman,” Mei swept on. “You’re a genius with hats and clothes, and Mother knows it! You sealed your fate when you made Elizaveta that outfit last May Day. Now you earn the money while she goes off gadding - “
“She’s out doing the buying,” Anne said.
“Buying!” Mei cried. Her thumbs whirled. “That takes her half a morning. I’ve seen her, Anne, and heard the talk. She’s off in a hired carriage and new clothes on your earning, visiting all the mansions down the valley! They’re saying she’s going to buy that big places down at Vale End and set up in style. And where are you?”
“Well, Yan’s entitled to some pleasure after all her hard work bringing us up,” Anne said. “I suppose I’ll inherit the shop.”
“What a fate!” Mei exclaimed. “Listen - “
But at that moment two empty cake racks were pulled away at the other end of the room, and an apprentice stuck his head through from the back somewhere. “Though I heard your voice, Elizaveta,” he said, grinning in the most friendly and flirtatious way. “The new baking’s just up. Tell them.” His head, curly and somewhat floury, disappeared again. Anne though he looked a nice lad. She longed to ask if he was the one Mei really like, but she did not get a chance. Mei sprang up in a hurry, still talking.
“I must get the girls to carry all these through to the shop,” she said. “Help me with the end of this one.” She dragged out the nearest rack and Anne helped her hump it past the door into the roaring, busy shop. “You must do something about yourself, Anne,” Mei panted as they went. “Elizaveta kept saying she didn’t know what would happen to you when we weren’t around to give you some self-respect. She was right to be worried.”
In the shop Mrs. Cesari seized the rack from them in both massive arms, yelling instructions, and a line of people rushed away past Mei to fetch more. Anne yelled goodbye and slipped away in the bustle. It did not seem right to take up more of Mei’s time. She ran home. There were fireworks now, going up from the field by the river where the Fair was, competing with the blue bangs from Jones’s castle. Anne felt more like an invalid than ever.
She thought and thought, most of the following week, and all that happened was that she became confused and discontented. Things just did not seem to be the way she thought they were. She was amazed at Elizaveta and Mei. She had misunderstood them for years. But she could not believe Yan was the kind of woman Mei said.
There was a lot of time for thinking, because Bridgette duly left the shop to be married and Anne was mostly alone in the shop. Yan did seem to be out a lot, gadding or not, and trade was slack after May Day. After three days Anne plucked up courage to ask Yan, “Shouldn’t I be earning a wage?”
“Of course, with all you do!” Yan answered warmly, fixing on a rose-trimmed hat in front of the shop mirror. “We’ll see about it as soon as I’ve done the accounts this evening.” Then she went out and did not come back until Anne had shut the shop and taken that day’s hats through to the house to trim.
Anne at first felt mean to have listened to Mei, but when Yan did not mention a wage, either that evening or any time later that week, Anne began to think that Mei had been right.
“Maybe I am being exploited,” she told a hat she was trimming with red silk and a bunch of wax cherries, “but someone has to do this or there will be no hats at all to sell.” She finished that hat and started on a stark black-and-white one, very modish, and a quite new though came to her. “Does it matter if there are no hats to sell?” she asked it. She looked round the assembled hats, on stands or waiting in a heap to be trimmed. “What good are you all?” she asked them. “You certainly aren’t doing me a scrap of good.”
And she was within an ace of leaving the house and setting out to seek her fortune, until she remembered she was the eldest and there was no point. She took up the hat again, sighing.
She was still discontented, alone in the shop next morning, when a very plain young woman customer stormed in, whirling a pleated mushroom bonnet by its ribbons. “Look at this!” the young lady shrieked. “You told me this was the same as the bonnet Lovina Vargas was wearing when she met the Count. And you lied. Nothing has happened to me at all!”
“I’m not surprised,” Anne said, before she had caught up with herself. “If you’re fool enough to wear that bonnet with a face like that, you wouldn’t have the wit to spot the King himself if he came begging - if he hadn’t turned to stone first just at the sight of you.”
The customer glared. Then she threw the bonnet at Anne and stormed out of the shop. Anne carefully crammed the bonnet into the wastebasket, panting rather. The rule was: Lose your temper, lose a customer. She had just proven that rule. It troubled her to realize how very enjoyable it had been.
Anne had no time to recover. There was the sound of wheels and horse hoofs and a carriage darkened the window. The shop bell clanged and the grandest customer she had ever seen sailed in, with a sable wrap drooping from her elbows and diamonds winking all over her dense black dress. Anne’s eyes went to the lady’s wide hat first - real ostrich plume dyed to reflect the pinks and greens and blues winking in the diamonds and yet still look black. This was a wealthy hat. She was tall, and although no one could call her fat, she certainly wasn’t thin either. The lady’s face was carefully beautiful. The blonde hair made her seem young, but… Anne’s eyes took in the young man who followed the lady in, a slightly formless-faced person with both angular and completely flat features at the same time, and a hair that wasn’t a color, more a washed out lack of color than anything else, quite well dressed, but pale and obviously upset. He stared at Anne with a kind of beseeching horror. He was clearly younger than the lady. Anne was puzzled.
“Miss Kirkland?” the lady asked in a musical but commanding voice.
“Yes,” said Anne. The man looked more upset than ever. Perhaps the lady was his mother.
“I hear you sell the most heavenly hats,” said the lady. “Show me.”
Anne did not trust herself to answer in her present mood. She went and got out hats. None of them were in this lady’s class, but she could feel the man’s eyes following her and that made her uncomfortable. The sooner the lady discovered the hats were wrong for her, the sooner this odd pair would go. She followed Yan’s advice and got out the wrongest first.
The lady began rejecting hats instantly. “Dimples,” she said to the pink bonnet, and “Youth” to the caterpillar green one. To the one of twinkles and veils she said, “Mysterious allure. How very obvious. What else have you?”
Anne got out the modish black-and-white, which was the only hat even remotely likely to interest this lady.
The lady looked at it with contempt. “This one doesn’t do anything for anybody. You’re wasting my time, Miss Kirkland.”
“Only because you came in and asked for hats,” Anne said. “This is only a small shop in a small town, Madam. Why did you - “ Behind the lady, the man gasped and seemed to be trying to signal warningly. “ - bother to come in?” Anne finished, wondering what was going on.
“I always bother when someone tries to set themselves up against the Witch of the Waste,” said the lady. “I’ve heard of you, Miss Kirkland, and I don’t care for your competition or your attitude. I came to put a stop to you. There.” She spread out her hand in a flinging motion toward Anne’s face.
“You mean you’re the Witch of the Waste?” Anne quavered. Her voice seemed to have gone strange with fear and astonishment.
“I am,” said the lady. “And let that teach you to meddle with things that belong to me.”
“I don’t think I did. There must be some mistake,” Anne croaked. The man was now staring at her in utter horror, though she could not see why.
“No mistake, Miss Kirkland,” said the Witch. “Come, Gaston.” She turned and swept to the shop door. While the man was humbly opening it for her, she turned back to Anne. “By the way, you won’t be able to tell anyone you’re under a spell,” she said. The shop door tolled like a funeral bell as she left.
Anne put her hands to her face, wondering what the man had stared at. She felt soft, leathery wrinkles. She looked at her hands. They were wrinkled too, and skinny, with large veins in the back and knuckles like knobs. She pulled her gray skirt against her legs and looked down at skinny, decrepit ankles and feet which had made her shoes all knobbly. There were the legs of someone about ninety and they seemed to be real.
Anne got herself to the mirror, and found she had to hobble. The face in the mirror was quite calm, because it was what she expected to see. It was the face of a gaunt old woman, withered and brownish, surround by wispy white hair. Her own eyes, yellow and watery, stared out at her, looking rather tragic.
“Don’t worry, old thing,” Anne said to the face. “You look quite healthy. Besides, this is much more like you really are.”
She thought about her situation, quite calmly. Everything seemed to have gone calm and remote. She was not even particularly angry with the Witch of the Waste.
“Well, of course I shall have to do for her when I get the chance,” she told herself, “but meanwhile, if Elizaveta and Mei can stand being one another, I can stand being like this. But I can’t stay here. Yan would have a fit. Let’s see. This gray dress is quite suitable, but I shall need my shawl and some food.”
She hobbled over to the shop door and carefully put up the CLOSED notice. Her joints creaked as she moved. She had to walk bowed and slow. But she was relieved to discover that she was quite a hale old woman. She did not feel weak or ill, just stiff. She hobbled to collect her shawl, and wrapped it over her head and shoulders, as old women did. Then she shuffled through into the house, where she collected her purse with a few coins in it and a parcel of bread and cheese. She let herself out of the house, carefully hiding the key in the usual place, and hobbled away down the street, surprised at how calm she still felt.
She did wonder if she should say goodbye to Mei. But she did not like the idea of Mei not knowing her. It was best just to go. Anne decided she would write to both her sisters when she got wherever she was going, and shuffled on, through the field where the Fair had been, over the bridge, and on into the country lanes beyond. It was a warm spring day. Anne discovered that being a crone did not stop her enjoying the sight and smell of may in the hedgerows, though the sight was a little blurred. Her back began to ache. She hobbled sturdily enough, but she needed a stick. She searched the hedges as she went for a loose stake of some kind.
Evidently her eyes were not as good as they had been. She thought she saw a stick, a mile or so on, but when she hauled on it, it proved to be the bottom end of an old scarecrow someone had thrown into the hedge. Anne heaved the thing upright. It had a withered turnip for a face. Anne found she had some fellow feeling for it. Instead of pulling it to pieces and taking the stick, she stuck it between two branches of the hedge, so that it stood looming rakishly above the may, with the tattered sleeves on its stick arms fluttering over the hedge.
“There,” she said, and her cracked old voice surprised her into giving a cracked old cackle of laughter. “Neither of us are up to much, are we, my friend? Maybe you’ll get back to your field if I leave you where people can see you.” She set off up the lane again, but a thought struck her and she turned back. “Now if I wasn’t doomed to failure because of my position in the family,” she told the scarecrow, “you could come to life and offer me help in making my fortune. But I wish you luck anyway.”
She cackled again as she walked on. Perhaps she was a little mad, but then old women often were.
She found a stick an hour or so later when she sat down on the bank to rest and eat her bread and cheese. There were noises in the hedge behind her: little strangled squeaking, followed by heavings that shook may petals off the hedge. Anne crawled on her bony knees to peer past leaves and flowers and thorns into the inside of the hedge, and discovered a then gray dog in there. It was hopelessly trapped by a stout stick which had somehow got twisted into a rope that was tied round its neck. The stick had wedged itself between two branches of the hedge so that the doge could barely move. It rolled its eyes wildly at Anne’s peering face.
As a girl, Anne was scared of all dogs. Even as an old woman, she was quite alarmed by the two rows of white fangs in the creature’s open jaw. But she said to herself, “The way I am now, it’s scarcely worth worrying about,” and she felt in her sewing pocket for her scissors. She reached into the hedge with the scissors and sawed away at the rope round the dog’s neck.
The dog was very wild. It flinched away from her and growled. But Anne sawed bravely on. “You’ll starve or throttle to death, my friend,” she told the dog in her cracked old voice, “unless you let me cut you loose. In fact, I think someone has tried to throttle you already. Maybe that accounts for your wildness.” The rope had been tied quite tightly round the go’s neck and the stick had been twisted viciously into it. It took a lot of sawing before the rope parted and the dog was able to drag itself out from under the stick.
“Would you like some bread and cheese?” Anne asked it then. But the dog just growled at her, forced its way out through the opposite side of the hedge, and slunk away. “That’s gratitude for you!” Anne said, rubbing her prickled arms. “But you left me a gift in spite of yourself.” She pulled the stick that had trapped the dog out of the hedge and found it was a proper walking stick, well trimmed and tipped with iron. Anne finished her bread and cheese and set off walking again. The lane became steeper and steeper and she found the stick a great help. It was also something to talk to. Anne thumped along with a will, chatting to her stick. After all, old people often talk to themselves.
“There’s two encounters,” she said, “and not a scrap of magical gratitude from either. Still, you’re a good stick. I’m not grumbling. But I’m surely due to have a third encounter, magical or not. In fact, I insist on one. I wonder what it will be.”
The third encounter came toward the end of the afternoon when Anne had worked her way quite high into the hills. A countryman came whistling down the lane toward her. A shepheard, Anne thought, going home after seeing to his sheep. He was a well-set-up young fellow of forty or so. “Gracious!” Anne said to herself. “This morning I’d have seen him as an old man. How on’e point of view does alter!”
When the shepherd saw Anne mumbling to herself, he moved rather carefully over to the other side of the lane and called out with great heartiness, “Good evening to you, Mother! Where are you off to?”
“Mother?” said Anne. “I’m not your mother, young man!”
"A manner of speaking,” the shepherd said, edging along against the opposite hedge. “I was only meaning a polite inquiry, seeing you walking into the hills at the end of the day. You won’t get down into Upper Folding before nightfall, will you?”
Anne had not considered this. She stood in the road and thought about it. “It doesn’t matter really,” she said, half to herself. “You can’t be fussy when you’re off to seek your fortune.”
“Can’t you indeed, Mother?” said the shepherd. He had now edged himself downhill of Anne and seemed to feel better for it. “Then I wish you good luck, Mother, provided your fortune don’t have nothing to do with charming folks’ cattle.” And he took off down the road in great strides, almost running, but not quite.
Anne started after him indignantly. “He thought I was a witch!” she said to the stick. She had half a mind to scare the shepherd by shouting nasty things after him, but that seemed a little unkind. She plugged on uphill, mumbling. Shortly, the hedges gave way to bare banks and the land beyond became heathery upland, with a lot of steepness beyond that covered with yellow, rattling grass. Anne kept grimly on. By now her knobby old feet ached, and her back, and her knees. She became too tired to mumble and simply plugged on, panting, until the sun was quite low. And lal at once it became quite clear to Anne that she could not walk a step further.
She collapsed onto a stone by the wayside, wondering what she would do now. “The only fortune I can think of is a comfortable chair!” she gasped.
The stone proved to be on a sort of headland, which gave Anne a magnificent view of the way she had come. There was most of the valley spread out beneath her in the setting sun, all fields and walls and hedges, the windings of the river, and the fine mansions of rich people glowing out from clumps of trees, right down to blue mountains in the far distance. Just below her was Market Chipping. Anne could look down into its well-known streets. There was Market Square and Cesari’s. She could have tossed a stone down the chimney pots of the house next to the hat shop.
“How near it still is!” Anne told her stick in dismay. “All that walking just to get above my own rooftop!”
It got cold on the stone as the sun went down. An unpleasant wind blew whichever way Anne turned to avoid it. Now it no longer seemed so unimportant that she would be out on the hills during the night. She found herself thinking more and more of a comfortable chair and a fireside, and also of darkness and wild animals. But if she went back to Market Chipping, it would be the middle of the night before she got there. She might just as well go on. She sighed and stood up creaking. It was awful. She ached all over.
“I never realized before what old people had to put up with! She panted as she labored uphill. “Still, I don’t think wolves will eat me. I must be far too dry and tough. That’s one comfort.”
Night was coming down fast now and the heathery uplands were blue-gray. The wind was sharper. Anne’s panting and the creaking of her limbs were so loud in her ears that it took her a while to notice that some of the grinding and puffing was not coming from herself at all. She looked up blurrily.
Wizard Jones’s castle was rumbling and bumping toward her across the moorland. Black smoke was blowing up in clouds from behind its black battlements. It looked tall and thin and heavy and ugly and very sinister indeed. Anne leaned on her stick and watched it. She was not particularly frightened. She wondered how it moved. But the main thing in her mind was that all that smoke must mean a large firestand somewhere inside those tall black walls.
“Well, why not?” she said to her stick. “Wizard Jones is not likely to want my soul for his collection. He only takes young girls.”
She raised her stick and waved it imperiously at the castle.
“Stop!” she shrieked.
The castle obediently came to a rumbling, grinding halt about fifty feet uphill from her. Anne felt rather gratified as she hobbled toward it.
A/N: And now Anne is just as old as she always felt she was. We also start to see some of the more typical Anne behavior, now that she is no longer under Yan's thumb! I already have the next few written so hopefully it will just be editing! Please review, I feel so inspired when you do!