Chapter 4: In which Anne discovers several strange things
Title: Alfred's Moving Castle
Genre: Fantasy/ Crossover
Pairings: USxfem!UK
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: Our favorite hero appears again, and I love the idea of Alfred and Matthew laughing at Anne's expense.
When Anne woke up, daylight was streaming across her. Since Anne remembered no windows at all in the castle, her first notion was that she had fallen asleep trimming hats and dreamed of leaving home. The fire in front of her had sunk to rosy charcoal and white ash, which convinced her that she had certainly dreamed there was a fire demon. But her very first movements told her that there were some things she had not dreamed. There were sharp cracks from all over her body.
“Ow!” she exclaimed. “I ache all over!” The voice that exclaimed was a weak, cracked piping. She put her knobby hands to her face and felt wrinkles. At that, she discovered she had been in a state of shock all yesterday. She was very angry indeed with the Witch of the Waste for doing this to her, hugely, enormously angry. “Sailing into shops and turning people old!” she exclaimed. “Oh, what I won’t do to her!”
Her anger made her jump up into a salvo of cracks and creaks and hobble over to the unexpected window. It was above the workbench. To her utter astonishment, the view from it was a view of a dockside town. She could see a sloping, unpaved street, lined with small, rather poor-looking houses, and masts sticking up beyond the roofs. Beyond the masts she caught a sliver of the sea, something she had never seen in her life before.
“Wherever am I?” Anne asked the skull standing on the bench. “I don’t expect you to answer that, my friend,” she answered hastily, remembering this was a wizard’s castle, and she turned round to take a look at the room.
It was quite a small room, with heavy black beams in the ceiling. By daylight it was amazingly dirty. The stones of the floor were stained and greasy, ash was piled within the fender, and cobwebs hung in dusty droops from the beams. There was a layer of dust on the skull. Anne absently wiped it off as she went to peer into the sink beside the workbench. She shuddered at the pink-and-gray slime in it and the white slime dripping from the pump above it. Jones obviously did not care what squalor his servants lived in.
The rest of the castle had to be beyond one or another of the four low black doors around the room. Anne opened the nearest, in the end wall beyond the bench. There was a large bathroom beyond it. In some ways it was a bathroom you might normally find only in a palace, full of luxuries such as an indoor toilet, a shower stall, an immense bath with clawed feet, and mirrors on every wall. But it was even dirtier than the other room. Anne winced from the toilet, flinched at the color of the bath, recoiled from green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at her shriveled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless substances. The nameless substances themselves were crowded onto a very large shelf over the bath. They were in jars, boxes, tubes, and a hundreds of tattered brown packets and paper bags. The biggest jar had a name. It was called DRYING POWER in crooked letters. Anne was not sure whether there should be a D in that or not. She picked up a packet at random. It had SKIN scrawled on it, and she put it back hurriedly. Another jar said EYES in the same scrawl. A tube stated FOR DECAY.
“It seems to work too,” Anne murmured, looking into the washbasin with a shiver. Water ran into the basin when she turned a blue-green knob that might have been brass and washed some of the decay away. Anne rinsed her hands and face in the water without touching the basin, but she did not have the courage to use DRYING POWER. She dried the water with her skirt and then set off to the next black door.
That one opened onto a flight of rickety wooden stairs. Anne heard someone move up there and shut the door hurriedly. It seemed only to lead to a sort of loft anyway. She hobbled to the next door. By now she was moving quite easily. She was a hale old woman, as she had discovered yesterday.
The third door opened onto a poky backyard with high brick walls. It contained a big stack of logs, and higgledy-piggledy heaps of what seemed to be scrap iron, wheels, buckets, metal sheeting, wire, mounded almost to the tops of the walls. Anne shut that door too, rather puzzled, because it did not seem to match the castle at all. There was no castle to be seen above the brick walls. They ended at the sky. Anne could only think that this part was round the side where the invisible wall had stopped her the night before.
She opened the fourth door and it was just a broom cupboard, with two fine but dusty velvet cloaks hanging on the brooms. Anne shut it again, slowly. The only other door was in the wall with the window, and that was the door she had come in by last night. She hobbled over and cautiously opened that.
She stood for a moment looking out at a slowly moving view of the hills, watching heather slide past underneath the door, feeling the wind blow her wispy hair, and listening to the rumble and grind of the big black stones as the castle moved. Then she shut the door and went to the window. And there was the seaport town again. It was no picture. A woman had opened a door opposite and was sweeping dust into the street. Behind the house a grayish canvas sail was going up a mast in brisk jerks, disturbing a flock of seagulls into flying round and round against the glimmering sea.
“I don’t understand,” Anne told the human skull. Then, because the fire looked almost out, she went and put a couple of logs and raked away some of the ash.
White flames climbed between the logs, small and curly, and shot up into a long blue face with flaming white hair. “Good morning,” said the fire demon. “Don’t forget we have a bargain.”
So none of it was a dream. Anne was not much given to crying, but she sat in the chair for quite a while staring at a blurred and sliding fire demon, and did not pay much attention to the sounds of Matthew getting up, until she found him standing beside her, looking embarrassed and a little exasperated.
“You’re still here,” he said. “Is something the matter?”
Anne sniffed. “I’m old,” she began.
But it was just as the Witch had said and the fire demon had guessed. Matthew said cheerfully, “Well, it comes to us all in time. Would you like some breakfast?”
Anne discovered she was a very hale old woman indeed. After only bread and cheese at lunchtime yesterday she was ravenous. “Yes!” she said, and when Matthew went to the closet in the wall, she sprang up and peered over his shoulder to see what there was to eat.
“I’m afraid there’s only bread and cheese,” Matthew said rather stiffly.
“But there’s a whole basket of eggs in there!” Anne said. “And isn’t that bacon? What about a hot drink as well? Where’s you kettle?”
“There isn’t one,” Matthew said. “Alfred’s the only one that can cook.”
“I can cook,” said Anne. “Unhook that frying pan and I’ll show you.”
She reached for the large black pan hanging on the closet wall, in spite of Matthew trying to prevent her. “You don’t understand,” Matthew said. “It’s Gilbert, the fire demon. He won’t bend down his head to be cooked on for anyone but Alfred.”
Anne turned and looked at the fire demon. He flickered back at her wickedly. “I refuse to be exploited,” he said.
“You mean,” Anne said to Matthew, “that you have to do without even a hot drink unless Jones is here?” Matthew gave an embarrassed nod. “Then you’re the one that being exploited!” said Anne. “Give that here.” She wrenched the pan from Matthew’s resisting fingers, plonked the bacon into it, popped a handy wooden spoon into the egg basket, and marched with the lot to the fireplace. “Now, Gilbert, and by the by, not a very demonlike name,” she said, “let’s have no more nonsense. Bend down your head.”
“You can’t make me!” crackled the fire demon.
“Oh, yes I can!” Anne crackled back, with the ferocity that had often stopped both her sisters in mid-fight. “If you don’t, I shall pour water on you. Or I shall pick up the tongs and take away both your logs,” she added, as she get herself creakingly onto her knees by the hearth. There she whispered, “Or I can go back on our bargain, or tell Jones about it, can’t I?”
“Oh, curses!” Gilbert spat. “Why did you let her in here, Matthew?” Sulkily he bent his blue face forward until all that could be seen of him was a ring of curly white flames dancing on the logs.
“Thank you,” Anne said, and slapped the heavy pan onto the white ring to make sure Gilbert did not suddenly rise up again.
“I hope your bacon burns,” Gilbert said, muffled under the pan.
Anne slapped slices of bacon into the pan. It was good and hot. The bacon sizzled, and she had to wrap her skirt round her hand to hold the handle. The door opened, but she did not notice because she knew from her previous experiences that if she took one eye off, it would all be ruined. “Don’t be silly,” she told Gilbert. “And hold still because I want to break in the eggs.”
“Oh, hello, Alfred,” Matthew said helplessly.
Anne turned round at that, rather hurriedly. She stared. The tall young fellow in a flamboyant blue-and-silver suit who had just come in stopped in the act of leaning a guitar in the corner. He brushed the fair hair from his rather curious pale blue eyes and stared back. His long, boyish face was perplexed.
“Who on earth are you?” said Jones. “Where have I seen you before?”
“I am a total stranger,” Anne lied firmly. After all, Jones had only met her long enough to call her a mouse before, so it was almost true. She ought to have been thanking her stars for the lucky escape she’d had then, she supposed, but in fact her main thought was, Good gracious! Wizard Jones is only a child in his twenties, for all his wickedness! It made such a difference to be old, she thought as she turned back to see her bacon slightly burnt. Drat it all! She thought as she flipped it. And she would have died rather than let this overdressed boy know she was the girl he had pitied on May Day. Hearts and souls did not enter into it. Jones was not going to know.
“She says her name’s Anne,” Matthew said. “She came last night.”
“How did she make Gilbert bend down?” said Jones.
“She bullied me!” Gilbert said in a piteous, muffled voice from under the sizzling pan.
“Not many people can do that,” Jones said thoughtfully. He propped his guitar in the corner and came over to the hearth. The smell of wheat and sunshine mixed with the smell of bacon as he shoved Anne firmly aside. “Gilbert doesn’t like anyone but me to cook on him,” he said, kneeling down and wrapping one trailing sleeve round his hand to hold the pan. “Pass me two more slices of bacon and six eggs and tell me why you’re here.”
Anne stared at the little tuft of upright hair on top of Jones’s head and passed him egg after egg. “Why I came, young man?” she said. It was obvious after what she had seen in the castle. “I came because I’m your new cleaning lady, of course.”
“Really?” Jones said, cracking the eggs one-handed and tossing the shells among the logs, where Gilbert seemed to be eating them with a lot of snarling and gobbling. “Who says so?”
“I do,” said Anne, and she added piously, “I can clean the dirt from this place even if I can’t clean you from your wickedness, young man.”
“Alfred’s not wicked,” Matthew said.
“Yes I am,” Jones contradicted him brightly. “You're forgetting just how wicked I’m being at the moment, Matthew.” He jerked his chin at Anne. “If you’re so anxious to be useful, madam, find some knives and forks and clear the bench.”
There were tall stools under the workbench. Matthew was pulling them out to sit on and pushing aside all the things on top of it to make room for some knives and forks he had taken from a drawer in the side of it. Anne went to help him. She had not expected Jones to welcome her, of course, but he had not even so far agreed to let her stay beyond breakfast. Since Matthew did not seem to need help, Anne shuffled over to her stick and put it slowly and showily in the broom cupboard. When that did not seem to attract Jones’s attention, she said, “You can take me on for a month’s trial, if you like.”
Wizard Jones said nothing but “Plates, please, Matthew,” and stood up holding the smoking pan. Gilbert sprang up with a roar of relief and blazed high in the chimney.
Anne made another attempt to pin the Wizard down. “If I’m going to be cleaning here for the next month,” she said, “I’d like to know where the rest of the castle is. I can only find this one room and the bathroom.”
To her surprise, both Matthew and the Wizard roared with laughter.
It was not until they had almost finished breakfast that Anne discovered what had made them laugh. Jones was not only hard to pin down. He seemed to dislike answering any questions at all. Anne gave up asking him and asked Matthew instead.
“Tell her,” said Jones. “It will stop her pestering.”
“There isn’t any more of the castle,” Matthew said, “except what you’ve seen and two bedrooms upstairs.”
“What?” Anne exclaimed.
Jones and Matthew laughed again. “Alfred and Gilbert invented the castle,” Matthew explained, “and Gilbert keeps it going. The inside of it is really just Alfred’s old house in Porthaven, which is the only real part.”
“But Porthaven’s miles down near the sea!” Anne said. “I call that too bad! What do you mean by having this great, ugly castle rushing about the hills and frightening everyone in Market Chipping to death?”
Jones shrugged, and shook his head wonderingly. “Wow, you’re quite the outspoken old lady! I’ve reached that stage in my career when I need to impress everyone with my power and wickedness. I can’t have the King thinking well of me. And last year I offended someone very powerful and I need to keep out of their way.”
It seemed a funny way to avoid someone, but Anne supposed wizards had different standards from ordinary people. And she shortly discovered that the castle had other peculiarities. They had finished eating and Matthew was piling the plates in the slimy sink beside the bench when there came a loud, hollow knocking at the door.
Gilbert blazed up. “Kingsbury door!”
Jones, who was on his way to the bathroom, went to the door instead. There was a square wooden knob above the door, set into the lintel, with a dab of paint on each of its four sides. At that moment there was a green blob on the side that was at the bottom, but Jones turned the knob round so that it had a red blob downward before he opened the door.
Outside stood a personage wearing a stiff white wig and a wide hat on top of that. He was clothed in scarlet and purple and gold, and he held up a little staff decorated with ribbons like an infant maypole. He bowed. Scents of cloves and orange blossoms blew into the room.
“His Majesty the King presents his compliments and send payment for two thousand pair of seven-league boots,” this person said.
Behind him Anne had glimpses of a coach waiting in a street full of sumptuous houses covered with painted carvings, and towers and spires and domes beyond that, of a splendor she had barely before imagined. She was sorry it took so little time for the person at the door to hand over a long, silken, chinking purse, and for Jones to take the purse, bow back, and shut the door. Jones turned the square knob back so that the green blob was downward again and stowed the long purse in his pocket. Anne saw Matthew’s eyes follow the purse in an urgent, worried way.
Jones went straight to the bathroom then, calling out, “I need hot water in here, Gilbert!” and was gone for a long, long time.
Anne could not restrain her curiosity. “Whoever was that at the door?” she asked Matthew. “Or do I mean wherever?”
“That door gives on Kingsbury,” Matthew said, “where the King lives. I think that man was the Chancellor’s clerk. And,” he added worriedly to Gilbert, “I do wish he hadn’t given Alfred all that money.”
“Is Jones going to let me stay here?” Anne asked.
“If he is, you’ll never pin him down,” Matthew answered. “He hates being pinned down to anything.”
Genre: Fantasy/ Crossover
Pairings: USxfem!UK
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: Our favorite hero appears again, and I love the idea of Alfred and Matthew laughing at Anne's expense.
When Anne woke up, daylight was streaming across her. Since Anne remembered no windows at all in the castle, her first notion was that she had fallen asleep trimming hats and dreamed of leaving home. The fire in front of her had sunk to rosy charcoal and white ash, which convinced her that she had certainly dreamed there was a fire demon. But her very first movements told her that there were some things she had not dreamed. There were sharp cracks from all over her body.
“Ow!” she exclaimed. “I ache all over!” The voice that exclaimed was a weak, cracked piping. She put her knobby hands to her face and felt wrinkles. At that, she discovered she had been in a state of shock all yesterday. She was very angry indeed with the Witch of the Waste for doing this to her, hugely, enormously angry. “Sailing into shops and turning people old!” she exclaimed. “Oh, what I won’t do to her!”
Her anger made her jump up into a salvo of cracks and creaks and hobble over to the unexpected window. It was above the workbench. To her utter astonishment, the view from it was a view of a dockside town. She could see a sloping, unpaved street, lined with small, rather poor-looking houses, and masts sticking up beyond the roofs. Beyond the masts she caught a sliver of the sea, something she had never seen in her life before.
“Wherever am I?” Anne asked the skull standing on the bench. “I don’t expect you to answer that, my friend,” she answered hastily, remembering this was a wizard’s castle, and she turned round to take a look at the room.
It was quite a small room, with heavy black beams in the ceiling. By daylight it was amazingly dirty. The stones of the floor were stained and greasy, ash was piled within the fender, and cobwebs hung in dusty droops from the beams. There was a layer of dust on the skull. Anne absently wiped it off as she went to peer into the sink beside the workbench. She shuddered at the pink-and-gray slime in it and the white slime dripping from the pump above it. Jones obviously did not care what squalor his servants lived in.
The rest of the castle had to be beyond one or another of the four low black doors around the room. Anne opened the nearest, in the end wall beyond the bench. There was a large bathroom beyond it. In some ways it was a bathroom you might normally find only in a palace, full of luxuries such as an indoor toilet, a shower stall, an immense bath with clawed feet, and mirrors on every wall. But it was even dirtier than the other room. Anne winced from the toilet, flinched at the color of the bath, recoiled from green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at her shriveled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless substances. The nameless substances themselves were crowded onto a very large shelf over the bath. They were in jars, boxes, tubes, and a hundreds of tattered brown packets and paper bags. The biggest jar had a name. It was called DRYING POWER in crooked letters. Anne was not sure whether there should be a D in that or not. She picked up a packet at random. It had SKIN scrawled on it, and she put it back hurriedly. Another jar said EYES in the same scrawl. A tube stated FOR DECAY.
“It seems to work too,” Anne murmured, looking into the washbasin with a shiver. Water ran into the basin when she turned a blue-green knob that might have been brass and washed some of the decay away. Anne rinsed her hands and face in the water without touching the basin, but she did not have the courage to use DRYING POWER. She dried the water with her skirt and then set off to the next black door.
That one opened onto a flight of rickety wooden stairs. Anne heard someone move up there and shut the door hurriedly. It seemed only to lead to a sort of loft anyway. She hobbled to the next door. By now she was moving quite easily. She was a hale old woman, as she had discovered yesterday.
The third door opened onto a poky backyard with high brick walls. It contained a big stack of logs, and higgledy-piggledy heaps of what seemed to be scrap iron, wheels, buckets, metal sheeting, wire, mounded almost to the tops of the walls. Anne shut that door too, rather puzzled, because it did not seem to match the castle at all. There was no castle to be seen above the brick walls. They ended at the sky. Anne could only think that this part was round the side where the invisible wall had stopped her the night before.
She opened the fourth door and it was just a broom cupboard, with two fine but dusty velvet cloaks hanging on the brooms. Anne shut it again, slowly. The only other door was in the wall with the window, and that was the door she had come in by last night. She hobbled over and cautiously opened that.
She stood for a moment looking out at a slowly moving view of the hills, watching heather slide past underneath the door, feeling the wind blow her wispy hair, and listening to the rumble and grind of the big black stones as the castle moved. Then she shut the door and went to the window. And there was the seaport town again. It was no picture. A woman had opened a door opposite and was sweeping dust into the street. Behind the house a grayish canvas sail was going up a mast in brisk jerks, disturbing a flock of seagulls into flying round and round against the glimmering sea.
“I don’t understand,” Anne told the human skull. Then, because the fire looked almost out, she went and put a couple of logs and raked away some of the ash.
White flames climbed between the logs, small and curly, and shot up into a long blue face with flaming white hair. “Good morning,” said the fire demon. “Don’t forget we have a bargain.”
So none of it was a dream. Anne was not much given to crying, but she sat in the chair for quite a while staring at a blurred and sliding fire demon, and did not pay much attention to the sounds of Matthew getting up, until she found him standing beside her, looking embarrassed and a little exasperated.
“You’re still here,” he said. “Is something the matter?”
Anne sniffed. “I’m old,” she began.
But it was just as the Witch had said and the fire demon had guessed. Matthew said cheerfully, “Well, it comes to us all in time. Would you like some breakfast?”
Anne discovered she was a very hale old woman indeed. After only bread and cheese at lunchtime yesterday she was ravenous. “Yes!” she said, and when Matthew went to the closet in the wall, she sprang up and peered over his shoulder to see what there was to eat.
“I’m afraid there’s only bread and cheese,” Matthew said rather stiffly.
“But there’s a whole basket of eggs in there!” Anne said. “And isn’t that bacon? What about a hot drink as well? Where’s you kettle?”
“There isn’t one,” Matthew said. “Alfred’s the only one that can cook.”
“I can cook,” said Anne. “Unhook that frying pan and I’ll show you.”
She reached for the large black pan hanging on the closet wall, in spite of Matthew trying to prevent her. “You don’t understand,” Matthew said. “It’s Gilbert, the fire demon. He won’t bend down his head to be cooked on for anyone but Alfred.”
Anne turned and looked at the fire demon. He flickered back at her wickedly. “I refuse to be exploited,” he said.
“You mean,” Anne said to Matthew, “that you have to do without even a hot drink unless Jones is here?” Matthew gave an embarrassed nod. “Then you’re the one that being exploited!” said Anne. “Give that here.” She wrenched the pan from Matthew’s resisting fingers, plonked the bacon into it, popped a handy wooden spoon into the egg basket, and marched with the lot to the fireplace. “Now, Gilbert, and by the by, not a very demonlike name,” she said, “let’s have no more nonsense. Bend down your head.”
“You can’t make me!” crackled the fire demon.
“Oh, yes I can!” Anne crackled back, with the ferocity that had often stopped both her sisters in mid-fight. “If you don’t, I shall pour water on you. Or I shall pick up the tongs and take away both your logs,” she added, as she get herself creakingly onto her knees by the hearth. There she whispered, “Or I can go back on our bargain, or tell Jones about it, can’t I?”
“Oh, curses!” Gilbert spat. “Why did you let her in here, Matthew?” Sulkily he bent his blue face forward until all that could be seen of him was a ring of curly white flames dancing on the logs.
“Thank you,” Anne said, and slapped the heavy pan onto the white ring to make sure Gilbert did not suddenly rise up again.
“I hope your bacon burns,” Gilbert said, muffled under the pan.
Anne slapped slices of bacon into the pan. It was good and hot. The bacon sizzled, and she had to wrap her skirt round her hand to hold the handle. The door opened, but she did not notice because she knew from her previous experiences that if she took one eye off, it would all be ruined. “Don’t be silly,” she told Gilbert. “And hold still because I want to break in the eggs.”
“Oh, hello, Alfred,” Matthew said helplessly.
Anne turned round at that, rather hurriedly. She stared. The tall young fellow in a flamboyant blue-and-silver suit who had just come in stopped in the act of leaning a guitar in the corner. He brushed the fair hair from his rather curious pale blue eyes and stared back. His long, boyish face was perplexed.
“Who on earth are you?” said Jones. “Where have I seen you before?”
“I am a total stranger,” Anne lied firmly. After all, Jones had only met her long enough to call her a mouse before, so it was almost true. She ought to have been thanking her stars for the lucky escape she’d had then, she supposed, but in fact her main thought was, Good gracious! Wizard Jones is only a child in his twenties, for all his wickedness! It made such a difference to be old, she thought as she turned back to see her bacon slightly burnt. Drat it all! She thought as she flipped it. And she would have died rather than let this overdressed boy know she was the girl he had pitied on May Day. Hearts and souls did not enter into it. Jones was not going to know.
“She says her name’s Anne,” Matthew said. “She came last night.”
“How did she make Gilbert bend down?” said Jones.
“She bullied me!” Gilbert said in a piteous, muffled voice from under the sizzling pan.
“Not many people can do that,” Jones said thoughtfully. He propped his guitar in the corner and came over to the hearth. The smell of wheat and sunshine mixed with the smell of bacon as he shoved Anne firmly aside. “Gilbert doesn’t like anyone but me to cook on him,” he said, kneeling down and wrapping one trailing sleeve round his hand to hold the pan. “Pass me two more slices of bacon and six eggs and tell me why you’re here.”
Anne stared at the little tuft of upright hair on top of Jones’s head and passed him egg after egg. “Why I came, young man?” she said. It was obvious after what she had seen in the castle. “I came because I’m your new cleaning lady, of course.”
“Really?” Jones said, cracking the eggs one-handed and tossing the shells among the logs, where Gilbert seemed to be eating them with a lot of snarling and gobbling. “Who says so?”
“I do,” said Anne, and she added piously, “I can clean the dirt from this place even if I can’t clean you from your wickedness, young man.”
“Alfred’s not wicked,” Matthew said.
“Yes I am,” Jones contradicted him brightly. “You're forgetting just how wicked I’m being at the moment, Matthew.” He jerked his chin at Anne. “If you’re so anxious to be useful, madam, find some knives and forks and clear the bench.”
There were tall stools under the workbench. Matthew was pulling them out to sit on and pushing aside all the things on top of it to make room for some knives and forks he had taken from a drawer in the side of it. Anne went to help him. She had not expected Jones to welcome her, of course, but he had not even so far agreed to let her stay beyond breakfast. Since Matthew did not seem to need help, Anne shuffled over to her stick and put it slowly and showily in the broom cupboard. When that did not seem to attract Jones’s attention, she said, “You can take me on for a month’s trial, if you like.”
Wizard Jones said nothing but “Plates, please, Matthew,” and stood up holding the smoking pan. Gilbert sprang up with a roar of relief and blazed high in the chimney.
Anne made another attempt to pin the Wizard down. “If I’m going to be cleaning here for the next month,” she said, “I’d like to know where the rest of the castle is. I can only find this one room and the bathroom.”
To her surprise, both Matthew and the Wizard roared with laughter.
It was not until they had almost finished breakfast that Anne discovered what had made them laugh. Jones was not only hard to pin down. He seemed to dislike answering any questions at all. Anne gave up asking him and asked Matthew instead.
“Tell her,” said Jones. “It will stop her pestering.”
“There isn’t any more of the castle,” Matthew said, “except what you’ve seen and two bedrooms upstairs.”
“What?” Anne exclaimed.
Jones and Matthew laughed again. “Alfred and Gilbert invented the castle,” Matthew explained, “and Gilbert keeps it going. The inside of it is really just Alfred’s old house in Porthaven, which is the only real part.”
“But Porthaven’s miles down near the sea!” Anne said. “I call that too bad! What do you mean by having this great, ugly castle rushing about the hills and frightening everyone in Market Chipping to death?”
Jones shrugged, and shook his head wonderingly. “Wow, you’re quite the outspoken old lady! I’ve reached that stage in my career when I need to impress everyone with my power and wickedness. I can’t have the King thinking well of me. And last year I offended someone very powerful and I need to keep out of their way.”
It seemed a funny way to avoid someone, but Anne supposed wizards had different standards from ordinary people. And she shortly discovered that the castle had other peculiarities. They had finished eating and Matthew was piling the plates in the slimy sink beside the bench when there came a loud, hollow knocking at the door.
Gilbert blazed up. “Kingsbury door!”
Jones, who was on his way to the bathroom, went to the door instead. There was a square wooden knob above the door, set into the lintel, with a dab of paint on each of its four sides. At that moment there was a green blob on the side that was at the bottom, but Jones turned the knob round so that it had a red blob downward before he opened the door.
Outside stood a personage wearing a stiff white wig and a wide hat on top of that. He was clothed in scarlet and purple and gold, and he held up a little staff decorated with ribbons like an infant maypole. He bowed. Scents of cloves and orange blossoms blew into the room.
“His Majesty the King presents his compliments and send payment for two thousand pair of seven-league boots,” this person said.
Behind him Anne had glimpses of a coach waiting in a street full of sumptuous houses covered with painted carvings, and towers and spires and domes beyond that, of a splendor she had barely before imagined. She was sorry it took so little time for the person at the door to hand over a long, silken, chinking purse, and for Jones to take the purse, bow back, and shut the door. Jones turned the square knob back so that the green blob was downward again and stowed the long purse in his pocket. Anne saw Matthew’s eyes follow the purse in an urgent, worried way.
Jones went straight to the bathroom then, calling out, “I need hot water in here, Gilbert!” and was gone for a long, long time.
Anne could not restrain her curiosity. “Whoever was that at the door?” she asked Matthew. “Or do I mean wherever?”
“That door gives on Kingsbury,” Matthew said, “where the King lives. I think that man was the Chancellor’s clerk. And,” he added worriedly to Gilbert, “I do wish he hadn’t given Alfred all that money.”
“Is Jones going to let me stay here?” Anne asked.
“If he is, you’ll never pin him down,” Matthew answered. “He hates being pinned down to anything.”