House of Many Ways (Howl's Moving Castle 3)

Everyone moved away. Twinkle went “I am not a naughty—” and then stopped as if a hand had been clapped across his mouth. In next to no time, Charmain found herself walking down the rest of the stairs with the King, on the way to the library, with Waif ecstatically trying to lick her chin.

“It takes me right back,” the King remarked. “I got out on the roof several times when I was a boy. Never failed to cause a silly panic. Firemen nearly hosed me off once by mistake. Boys will be boys, my dear. Are you ready to get down to work, or will you want to sit and recover a bit?”

“No, I’m fine,” Charmain assured him.

She felt completely at home today as she settled into her seat in the library, surrounded by the smell of old books, with Waif toasting her tummy at the brazier and the King sitting opposite investigating a ragged pile of old diaries. So peaceful was it that Charmain all but forgot about Twinkle’s spell. She became immersed in peeling apart a damp pile of old letters. They were all from a long-ago prince who was breeding horses and wanted his mother to coax more money out of the King. The prince was just feelingly describing the beauties of the new foal his best mare had given birth to, when Charmain looked up to see the fire demon flickering slowly this way and that around the library.

The King looked up too. “Good morning, Calcifer,” he said courteously. “Is there something you need?”

“Just exploring,” Calcifer answered in his small crackling voice. “I understand now why you might not want to sell these books.”

“Indeed,” said the King. “Tell me, do fire demons read much?”

“Not generally,” Calcifer replied. “Sophie reads to me quite often. I like the kind of story with puzzles in, where you have to guess who did the murder. Have you any of those in here?”

“Probably not,” said the King. “But my daughter is partial to murder mysteries too. Perhaps you should ask her.”

“Thank you. I will,” Calcifer said, and vanished.

The King shook his head and went back to his diaries. And, as if Calcifer had given Twinkle’s spell a jog, Charmain instantly noticed that the diary the King was flipping through was glowing a faint, pale green. So was the next thing in her own pile, which was a rather squashed scroll, done up with tarnished golden tape.

Charmain took a large breath and asked, “Anything interesting in that diary, Sire?”

“Well,” said the King, “it’s rather nasty, really. This is the diary of one of my great-grandmother’s ladies-in-waiting. Full of gossip. Just now, she’s dreadfully shocked because the King’s sister died giving birth to a son, and the midwife seems to have killed the baby. Said it was purple and it frightened her. They’re going to put the poor silly soul on trial for murder.”

Charmain’s mind flew to herself and Peter looking up “lubbock” in Great-Uncle William’s encyclopedia. She said, “I suppose

she thought the baby was a lubbockin.”

“Yes, very superstitious and ignorant,” the King said. “No one believes in lubbockins these days.” He went back to reading.

Charmain wondered whether to say that that long-ago midwife may have been quite right. Lubbocks existed. Why not lubbockins too? But she was sure the King would not believe her, and she scribbled a note about it instead. Then she picked up the squashed scroll. But before she unrolled it, it occurred to her to look along the row of boxes where she had put the papers she had already read, in case any of them glowed too. Only one did, quite faintly. When Charmain pulled it out, she found it was the bill from Wizard Melicot for making the roof look like gold. This was puzzling, but Charmain made a note about that too, before she finally undid the tarnished gold tape and spread the scroll out.

It was a family tree of the kings of High Norland, rather scribbly and hasty, as if it was only a plan for a much more careful copy. Charmain had trouble reading it. It was full of crossings out and little arrows leading to scribbled additions and lopsided circles with notes inside them. “Sire,” she said, “can you explain this to me?”

“Let’s see.” The King took the scroll and spread it out on the table. “Ah,” he said. “We’ve got the fair copy of this hanging in the throne room. I haven’t properly looked at it for years, but I know it’s much plainer than this family tree—just names of rulers and who they married and so on. This one seems to have notes on it, written by several different people by the looks of it. See. Here’s my ancestor, Adolphus I. The note beside him is in really old writing. It says…hmm…‘Raised walls to the towne by virtue of the Elfgift.’ Not much sign of those walls nowadays, is there? But they say that Embankment Street down beside the river is part of the old walls—”

“Excuse me, Sire,” Charmain interrupted, “but what is the Elfgift?”

“No idea, my dear,” the King said. “I wish I knew. It was said to bring prosperity and protection to the kingdom, whatever it was, but it seems to have vanished long ago. Hmm. This is fascinating.” The King ran his large finger across to one note after another. “Here, beside my ancestor’s wife, it says, ‘Was Elf-woman, so called.’ They always told me that Queen Matilda was only half elf, but here is her son, Hans Nicholas, labeled as ‘Elf childe,’ so maybe that’s why he never got to be King. Nobody really trusts elves. Great mistake, in my opinion. They crowned Hans Nicholas’s son instead, a very boring person called Adolphus II, who never did anything much. He’s the one King on this scroll who doesn’t have a note beside him. Tells you something. But his son—here he is—Hans Peter Adolphus, he has a note that says, ‘Reaffirmed the safetie of the realm in partnership with the Elfgift,’ whatever that means. My dear, this is so interesting. Would you do me the favor of making a good readable copy of all these people’s names and the notes beside them? You can miss out cousins and things if they don’t have notes. Would you mind very much?”

“Not at all, Sire,” Charmain said. She had been wondering how she could write all this down secretly for Sophie and Twinkle, and this was how.

She spent the rest of that day making two copies of the scroll. One was a muddly first draft, where she was constantly having to ask the King about this note or that one, and the second copy was in her best writing for the King himself. She became as interested as the King was. Why did Hans Peter III’s nephew take to “banditry in the hills”? What made Queen Gertrude “a witche to be feared”? And why was her daughter Princess Isolla labeled “blueman lover”?

The King could not answer those questions, but he said he had a good idea why Prince Nicholas Adolphus was labeled “drunkarde.” Had Charmain looked at where it said the prince’s father, Peter Hans IV, was called “a dark tyrant and a wizarde besides”? “Some of my ancestors were not nice people,” he said. “I bet this one bullied poor Nicholas horribly. They tell me it can be like that when elf blood goes sour, but I think it’s just people, really.”

Quite late in the day, when Charmain was down near the bottom of the scroll, where nearly every ruler seemed to be called Adolphus, or Adolphus Nicholas, or Ludovic Adolphus, she was fascinated to come upon a Princess Moina who “married a great Lorde of Strangia, but died giving birth to a loathesome lubbockin.” Charmain was sure Moina was the one in the lady-in-waiting’s diary. It looked as if someone had believed the midwife’s story. She decided not to mention this to the King.

Three lines farther down she came upon the King himself, “much lost among his books,” and Princess Hilda, “refused marriage with a kinge, 3 lordes, and a wizard.” They were rather squeezed to one side to make room for the descendants of the King’s uncle, Nicholas Peter, who seemed to have had a great many children. The children’s children filled the whole bottom row. How on earth do they remember who is which? Charmain wondered. Half the girls were called Matilda and the other half Isolla, while the boys were mostly Hans or Hans Adolphus. You could only tell them apart by the tiny scribbled notes, calling one Hans “a great lout, drowned” and another “murdered by accident” and yet another “died abroad.” The girls were worse. One Matilda was “a tedious proude girl,” another “to be feared like Q. Gertrude,” and a third “of no good nature.” The Isollas were all either “poisoned” or “of evil ways.” The King’s heir, Ludovic Nicholas, stood out from what Charmain began to think was a truly dreadful family, by having no note beside him at all, like the dull Adolphus of long ago.

She wrote it all out, names, notes, and all. By the end of the afternoon, her right forefinger was quite numb and blue with ink.

“Thank you, my dear,” the King said as Charmain handed him her good copy. He started reading through it so eagerly that Charmain was easily able to gather up her scribbly copy and her other notes and cram them into her pockets, without the King seeing. As she stood up, the King looked up to say, “I hope you will forgive me, my dear. I shall not be needing you for the next two days. The Princess insists that I come out of the library and play host to young Prince Ludovic this weekend. She is not at her best with male visitors, you know. But I shall see you again on Monday, I hope.”

“Yes, of course,” Charmain said. She collected Waif, who came pottering toward her from the kitchen, and set off toward the front door, wondering what to do with her copy of the scroll. She was not sure she trusted Twinkle. Could you trust someone who looked like a little boy and obviously wasn’t, quite? And then there’s what Peter said Great-Uncle William said about fire demons. Can you trust someone that dangerous? she thought unhappily as she went.

She found herself face to face with Sophie. “How did it go? Did you find anything?” Sophie asked, smiling at her.