I had hoped to talk to Judith about Sybil and the Merlin. Judith seemed to be the calm, sensible one in this family, and I was sure she could give me proper advice. But it was hopeless even to try during tea. The Izzys kept everyone’s thoughts and ears on them the whole time.
“They’re very excited at seeing you, you see,” Judith explained, in her anxious, apologizing way. “They’ve heard so much about you and their uncle Daniel and the Progress.”
The moment everyone had finished tea, the Izzys jumped down and rushed shrieking to the back door. They were stopped there by an even louder shriek from Heppy. “Wait! Take Ambrose and the dog with you and play in the garden. We have to show Arianrhod the Regalia.”
“Oh, why? I want to see it, too,” shouted Ilsabil.
“Stupid stuff!” Isadora proclaimed, with a toss of hair and chin. “I wouldn’t go and look at it if you paid me.”
Then of course they did it the other way around, except that Ilsabil added, “Regalia—such boredom!” with a deep, world-weary sigh.
As for Grundo, he positively scowled at being told to play with the Izzys. I think the only thing that reconciled him to it was the dog. Grundo has always wanted a dog, even more than I have, but the Waymaster’s office forbids pets on the Progress. He went out into the gar
den with one hand on the dog’s curly back, while Heppy and Judith took me past the looms and into their front room.
Good! I thought. Maybe we can talk now.
It was one of those hushed rooms with a lot of upright antique furniture and books in glass cases. It looked as if it were very rarely used, but now I come to think of it, they must have used it every day. Somehow, they must have managed to make the Izzys take care in there.
“Phew!” Heppy said as the quiet of it closed in around us. “I can hear myself think again! Roll on the day when we have to turn one of those girls out!”
Judith looked anguished. “There always have to be three Dimbers,” she explained to me, “one from each generation and no more. In seven years’ time, there is going to be the most agonizing choice. We’ve no idea whether we’ll keep Isadora or Ilsabil on as our third. How do you choose between identical twins?”
“Time enough to choose,” Heppy said. “Don’t buy trouble, Jude. And as I always tell her, Arianrhod, it was just as agonizing in my day, when we had to choose between Judith and Dora.” She chuckled. “And I’d complicated things by going and having your father before either of the girls. That’s just as unheard of as twins in our family, I can tell you.”
“What would have happened to my father,” I asked, “if Grandad hadn’t taken him to London?”
“Oh, he’d have been packed off over the hill where we usually send the boys,” Heppy said. “There’s a family of male witches with a farm there. It’s where the husbands come from usually. I was unusual, falling for Maxwell. And while we’re on this, I’ll tell you straight, Arianrhod, this is quite a problem, you bringing the boy with you. You yourself are welcome for as long as you care to stay, but seven days is all I can house a male stranger. What would you like us to do for you?”
“Well,” I said, “you’ve been awfully kind, and I don’t want to cause a problem. If you know how to find where the King is, Grundo and I will rejoin the Progress as soon as we can.”
Heppy looked up at her tall daughter, and Judith, as usual, looked anxious. “Huh!” Heppy said. “You can’t find them either, can you? Thought so. Those wizards are keeping the King secret again, aren’t they?”
“I was told one of the ports,” I said.
Heppy swept that aside. “They could be anywhere. No, your best bet is to go to your grandfather in London. Maxwell can do the finding for you. He’s good at it. Judith, when you’ve a moment, will you get Maxwell on the far-speaker? If I speak to him, we’ll only end up shouting at one another.”
Judith smiled at me. “Of course. But first …”
“Yes, yes, she has to be shown the Dimber Regalia. It’s her right as a female of the family.” Heppy, upright and barrel-shaped, bustled across the room. One wall was dark oak paneling. I watched as she laid one chubby, much-beringed hand on a particular place in the wooden squares. “Now you’ll see,” she said over her shoulder. Then she worked magic. It was nothing like any of the magic I had in my head. It was reverent magic, very old and very practiced, and it sent a shiver up my spine. I felt another shiver as two doors that had not been there in the wall before came creaking open like a cupboard. Inside, something blazed. There was a sweet smell, of old wood and new flowers.
Judith put an arm round my shoulders and pushed me gently toward the open space. “Our vessels of virtue,” she said softly. “Full of beauty and power.”
I found myself gasping. Inside the wooden space, laid out on red velvet, were cups, bowls, plates, and jugs of gold and silver. All were most exquisitely made and wonderfully, elegantly shaped. Some had patterns raised in the metal—patterns that I knew meant something, except that the meanings were just out of reach somehow—and some had small clusters of sapphires and pearls set into them. One of the most beautiful was a great cut glass goblet with a base of gold filigree that grew around the glass like part of a flower. The centerpiece was a majestic flat chalice with golden handles that had tiny running patterns on every part of it. Around it were old, old cups, worn lopsided with use. I could see everything was immensely old and full of power. And it all felt alive. The life in the things seemed to pour out of the cupboard and scintillate on all the elegant, shiny surfaces. While I was trying to decide which vessel was the most splendid—the crystal goblet, the chalice, or maybe the small, strange one like a vase, irregularly dotted with bulging pearls and sapphires—their sheer aliveness seemed to cause two little gleams of light to go dancing over them. They looked almost like eyes.
“Aren’t they something?” Heppy said warmly.
At her parrot voice, the eyes vanished, but the sense of warmth and strength stayed. The things felt so safe and so strong that I had no doubt that they would help me when I tried to explain about Sybil and the Merlin.
“They’re the repositories of our strength,” Judith said raptly, clasping her hands gawkily to her chest. The shine from the vessels was gold and silver on her face. It made her look quite beautiful for a moment.
“And,” Heppy said, “believe it or not, we use them every day.”
“Yes, every day, for whatever needs working on in our provenance,” Judith said. “We’re working at slaking this drought just now. And there seems to be a little imbalance in the magics here at the moment that we’re trying to put right.”
“And you use everything in here?” I asked.
“Not all at once, of course,” Heppy said. “But according to which day it is and where the moon is. We give them all a drop of blood every time we use them. This is why we can’t have men around. Can’t you feel how secret and how female they are?”