“Of course,” I said. “So this is what you should do. You mustn’t really leave, you must just leave the Regalia for a day or so, until the Dimbers realize that you exist. I’ll help. I’ll tell them that you’re really people that they didn’t know they’d enslaved. Then, when they start talking to you, tell the Dimbers that you’re quite willing to go on working for them so long as they ask you politely first. Tell them that slavery is wrong. Do you think that will do it?”
This
was exactly what they had hoped I would say. They told me so in chorus, singing and twittering and chanting and thanking me over and over again. I settled back to sleep, smiling a little smugly, because it seemed to me that I’d done everyone a favor. I’d scotched Grundo, helped these strange invisible folks, shown Heppy and Judith that there had been a dreadful mistake all these years, and possibly even forced the Izzys to be polite to something for once.
It didn’t work out like that at all.
FOUR
There must have been an early-morning ritual. I was woken by Heppy screaming. She screamed like a parrot, on and on and on. I sprang up in my nightclothes and rushed downstairs to the stiff living room. Grundo came tumbling and yawning down after me, wearing nothing but his trousers.
The cupboard in the paneling was open. I saw at a glance that the Regalia inside was lifeless. It was still beautiful, but it was lackluster, simply cups and plates and vases, with nothing special about them, except fine workmanship. It could have been merely the Crown Jewels.
Heppy was in front of the cupboard, dressed up to the nines in a blue satin two-piece, jumping up and down in her high heels and screaming. Judith was wringing her hands under a lovely lace shawl, and the Izzys were there, too, sitting in two corners, looking scared and almost subdued. They were wearing frilly yellow dresses with yellow bows in their hair, and I had no idea which was which, even less than yesterday.
Mainly I thought, Oh, dear! I think this was an important ceremony!
“Look!” Heppy shrieked, pointing a dramatic arm at the cupboard. “The virtue’s gone! Somebody’s stolen all our power!”
“No, no, they haven’t, Heppy, honestly,” I said. I took a quick look around. The big creature was sitting on one of the open cupboard doors, looking sorrowful and anxious. His frilly parts were almost trailing in Heppy’s face, but I hadn’t seen him straightaway because these strange beings were truly extremely hard to see by daylight. The rest were perched around the room, roosting beside vases on the mantelpiece, on the long-case clock and on top of the glass-fronted bookcases. “They’re all here,” I said. Heppy just went on screaming, so I shouted, loudly and slowly, “Heppy! They’re all here! All the folks that inhabit the Regalia are sitting here in this room!”
“What do you mean?” Heppy bawled at me.
“The power in the Regalia!” I said. “It’s because long-ago Dimbers put spells on these invisible people and forced them to live in the treasure and—and empower it for you. They don’t look like us, but they’re alive. They’re people, too, just like we are. Honestly, Heppy. Judith, can’t you see them? They’re perched all over the room. They’ve been enslaved to the Regalia for centuries....”
Heppy was looking so thunderous by then that I began to falter a bit, but I tried to keep going.
“They came to see me in the night,” I said, “because they’d realized that they’d never been asked to do what they do. But they’re ever so loyal and they didn’t want to leave. They were just upset that you treated them like things instead of people. So I suggested—”
Heppy screamed. Her screaming up to then had been nothing to the way she screamed now. She screamed. And she screamed. Then she cursed. Then she yelled, “Are you telling me, little madam from Court, how to deal with my own Regalia? The—the cheek of it!”
“All they want is for you to ask them nicely,” I said desperately, but I don’t think she listened.
“The cool, barefaced cheek of it!” Heppy screamed. And she went on screaming “The cheek of it!” with occasional shrieks of “Judith, have you ever heard the like? In all my days, I’ve never seen such ingratitude! My own flesh and blood, too!”
She was an almost continuous background to Judith, who was anxiously trying to ask me to explain a bit more. I did my best, but it was not easy, because I wanted to keep Grundo out of it, and I very much didn’t want to tell the Izzys’ mother that it was the Izzys the Regalia folks were afraid of. Judith just could not seem to understand. And Heppy was not giving herself a chance to understand anyway.
“But why did you tell the treasure it was enslaved, dear?” Judith asked me patiently. She just couldn’t seem to think of it as people living in the Regalia, whatever I said. “What made you suddenly do this?”
Grundo suddenly spoke up, in his calmest, deepest voice. “She didn’t. It was me. I talked to the Regalia first. I told them they were enslaved. And they are.”
That set Heppy off again, worse than ever. She was so angry that she practically danced. “Get out of my sight!” she screamed at Grundo. “Go and get dressed. Pack your things.” She glared at Grundo, pop-eyed with rage, until Grundo turned white and fled. “I’m not having that boy in my house one moment longer!” she screamed. “He’s going! Going this very morning! And you!” she shrieked, turning on me. “You sneaky little traitress! You’re going, too!”
“I am not a traitress or a sneak,” I said. I was almost as angry as she was. “I was simply trying to deal in an honorable way with people who came to me for advice. You’re just not listening to me!”
“You chilly little sneak!” she screamed. “I take you in, and you go behind my back!”
“I had to!” I shouted. “You can’t see them, and I can!”
“And you’re a liar!” she shouted back. “Judith, put them both in the car and drive them to Mrs. Candace. She can sort them out. I’ve had enough of them.”
And this was more or less what happened, except that Judith anxiously insisted we were to have breakfast first because it was a long drive. She insisted on the Izzys’ coming, too. “You’re too upset, Mother,” she said. “They’ll only bother you.”
While Heppy was arguing that her own dear twins never bothered her in the slightest, it was only some people!—glaring at me—I tried to apologize to all the transparent creatures sitting sadly about in the room. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I don’t seem to have done any—”
That was all I managed to say before Heppy rushed at me and shoved me out into the hallway. “I’ll talk to them! It’s my right!” she yelled.
At least she was beginning to admit that the creatures existed, I thought while I was chewing toast I didn’t want. The Izzys were grinning secretly at one another and only pretending to be scared by then. I hoped very much that they might begin to believe in the creatures, too, but I simply couldn’t tell. They seemed to take Heppy’s word for most things, so if Heppy believed … No, all I could hope was that they would not be too rowdy in the car, and that was probably too much to hope for anyway.