by The grounds of Ashdown Castle were beautiful, once.
Then we’d happened.
Actually, to be fair, Fenella Beaumont had happened. It was she who had enslaved several hapless Waymaster spirits and forced them to jaunt off with the castle. We’d obliged the castle’s inhabitants to come back without it, Fenella included — leaving the building itself camped on the shores of Whitmore Isle on the Fifth Britain. Zareen and George were out there somewhere, too.
We would be more unpopular with Ancestria Magicka than ever, should they recover their memories of these thrilling events.
When Jay, Alban and I arrived at Ashdown we found a mess of dark, ruined earth where the castle once stood. Only a few outbuildings lingered: the stable block, and assorted others, most of them in ruins. There was no sign of Fenella, or of any of the rest of her organisation. I wondered where, in their confusion, they might have chosen to decamp to.
More unfortunately for us, we found no sign of Millie Makepeace, either.
She’s hard to miss. Big, craggy and built from flint, she is a farmhouse somewhere north of two hundred years old. A bit shabby around the edges, perhaps; some of her stones are falling out, and her doors and window-frames are in need of a fresh coat of paint. She also has a habit of singing. Loudly.
But the burgeoning sunlight of early morning shone dewily down upon an empty, silent space, an occasional old oak swaying gently in the breeze.
‘Setback,’ I said, turning in a circle to survey the grounds in their entirety. Nothing.
‘Millie!’ Jay called. The word echoed hollowly over the ragged, grassy ground and no reply came.
The spirit of Mellicent Makepeace had brought the lot of us back — all of Fenella’s dinner guests squashed into a house that, though large as such buildings went, could barely accommodate so many. We’d beat a hasty retreat after that, and had not stayed to see what became of the house.
‘Where might a dispossessed farmhouse with homicidal tendencies go when she’s tired?’ I asked.
‘Wherever Ancestria Magicka told her to, probably,’ said Jay. ‘I tried to tell her she shouldn’t listen to that lot, but I don’t think she was hearing me.’
I felt a moment’s compunction on Millie’s account. We ought to have taken better care what happened to her. Only we’d been exhausted at the time, confused and disoriented ourselves, and urgently in need of returning Home and reporting to Milady. And Millie came off as a woman/house who could take care of herself.
‘Shh!’ said Jay suddenly, and froze.
I waited.
‘Do you hear that?’
I didn’t — and then I did. A distant, thin sound, like an eerie wail. Then another.
A few seconds later, she was hitting the high notes. I winced.
‘Come on.’ Jay set off in the general direction of the singing. Alban and I, without looking at each other, followed.
We found Millie parked on the very edge of the Ashdown property, as though she’d been making a bid for freedom and then lacked the energy to take the final step. Huddled in the midst of a circle of ancient elms, she sat swaying slightly from side to side, her stones rumbling, and singing some wordless song of woe.
Her front door was missing, and by the looks of it, someone had taken an axe to her porch-fence and windows. Shattered glass lay everywhere.
‘Millie!’ hollered Jay, for the third time. ‘Mellicent Makepeace!’
The house stopped wailing. Mr. Patel?
Jay, looking furious again, stomped in through the empty space where her front door had been. ‘What’s happened to you?’
She did! said Millie tragically. She did not know what she was doing here without her castle, but said that it must be my fault somehow.
She was presumably Fenella Beaumont. I winced, my guilt deepening. It had not occurred to me that, in the absence of an obvious culprit for the ruin of her plans (me, Jay and the Society in general) the woman might turn on Millie.
Jay sighed, and awkwardly patted her ruined door frame. ‘I’m sorry. We’ll get you a new door.’
‘And windows,’ I added, following Jay inside. ‘I’m sure such things can be arranged for on Whitmore.’
‘How about that, Millie?’ said Jay. ‘Do you want to get out of here?’
Yes! she hissed. And I am never, ever, ever coming back.’
There followed the sounds of muffled sobbing.
‘Fenella really needs to work on her staff satisfaction,’ I muttered. So the leader of Ancestria Magicka had a temper. Usefully possessed houses like this one were not in plentiful supply; she must have been absolutely incensed to treat Millie so cruelly. It was, to say the least, unwise.
I smiled, and leaned against her parlour wall in what I hoped was a comforting manner. ‘May we offer you alternative employment with the Society? Absolutely no axes, ever. All the doors and windows you’d like. And you’d be near Jay all the time.’
Jay shot me an appalled look.
Jay? said Millie. You mean Mr. Patel?
‘That’s right.’
A moment’s silence. Then: And who is this gentleman? said Millie, in a tone I could only describe as caressing.
Baron — Prince Alban — had kept his own counsel up until then, and taken up a station in a quiet corner, observing the proceedings in a silence I hoped was only thoughtful, not grim. He looked up at that, his eyes almost as wide as Jay’s. ‘Er,’ he said, with uncharacteristic hesitation. ‘My name’s Alban, Miss Makepeace.’
The temperature in the house, previously frigid, warmed a perceptible few degrees. And do you work for the Society also, Mr. Alban?
I shot his highness a warning look.
‘Er, yes,’ he said. ‘For the time being.’
Excellent, she crooned. Then I accept. What are to be my duties?
I looked at Jay to see how he’d taken the defection of his loyal sycophant. He was smiling.
I suppose the dog-like devotion of a lugubrious, murdering deadwoman would grow wearisome.
‘Conveyance,’ said Jay. ‘We’d like to go back to that nice island you took me to before. Do you think you’re feeling up to it?’
Am I up to it! Millie’s incorporeal voice rang with enthusiasm. Just try to stop me!
‘Wait a moment, I—’ began Jay, but too late, for Millie’s timbers were already shivering (so to speak) and a wave of energy shot from floor to ceiling, setting my teeth on edge.
With a whoosh, we were gone.
Three minutes later, my bones still vibrating from the journey, I stepped out of Millie’s front porch, eager to catch another glimpse of lovely, exciting Whitmore.
What met my eye absolutely was not that.
‘Miss Makepeace?’ I ventured. ‘I think we’ve missed Whitmore.’
Jay and Alban joined me on the porch. We stared in silence at the view: an expanse of featureless land, largely desolate, with no trees, buildings or other prominent structures. The terrain was lumpy, dull and muddy, with a desultory smattering of rough, colourless grass. As flat as Lincolnshire, with a drab, stony beach tacked on at the edge, it gave way in the distance to a steel-grey sea. A thick mist hung in the air, obscuring what, if anything, lay beyond the water.
This is Whitmore, said Millie crossly. I am sure of it.
‘Different Whitmore,’ said Jay briefly.
‘Did this happen before?’ I asked.
‘No. But there are several Britains, and we didn’t specify which one we wanted.’
‘You said “the nice island we went to before.”‘
‘She’s tired,’ said Jay pacifically.
‘Tired?’ I said in a low voice. ‘Or untrustworthy?’
Jay raised his voice. ‘Millie, you weren’t told to bring us here, were you?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Subtle.’ If it was May on that particular Britain, there was no sign of it. The wind was chilly, the air damp, and my optimistically thin summer dress was not up to the demands of the weather. I began to shiver.
You were not supposed to guess that, said Millie in a small voice. They said you would never ask.
All right, I stood corrected. Subtlety wasn’t always superior.
‘They?’ prompted Jay. ‘You mean Fenella?’
Who’s that?
‘The bitch with the axe,’ I supplied.
Yes. With a subdued roar of loose stonework, the house began to tremble. She said they would demolish me if I did not do as they asked.
Alban said mildly, ‘You might like to stop being a building?’
THIS IS MY HOUSE. Millie’s voice thundered through my bones.
Alban swallowed. ‘All right.’
This turn of events bothered me, for it suggested that Fenella’s memories of the past day or so were only patchy, not altogether erased. She remembered the several Britains; well, naturally enough. She must have known about them for a long time. But she also remembered that we had been involved in the wreck of her plans, and apparently had vindictiveness enough to want to take revenge.
Tiresome woman.
‘Millie,’ Jay was saying. ‘You’re with us now, remember? You don’t need to keep us here.’
She will demolish me.
‘She will not. We won’t let her get anywhere near you.’
I tried to remember what Melmidoc had said. A couple of the nine known Britains were gone (and now was not a good time to think too hard about how that had come about). Actually, hadn’t he said three? So that left six. The Whitmore of our own Britain (the sixth) had sunk, so that wasn’t it either. And if we weren’t on the fifth, that left four possibilities: the two where magick had been outlawed, or the two where magick had died out altogether.
‘So we are either breaking the sacred law of the land,’ I said out loud, ‘or we’ve become the local equivalent of flying pigs and will probably be put in a museum.’
‘By whom?’ said Alban, and made a show of looking around at the general desolation.
Excellent point.
‘Millie,’ I said more loudly. ‘Did I mention that Mr. Alban is a prince?’
I received a filthy look from the erstwhile Baron, but I achieved my immediate object: Millie’s litany of complaints stopped abruptly. A real one?
‘One hundred percent authentic. And the prince is on an urgent royal mission, to the other Whitmore. The one where Melmidoc lives. You are in the service of a future king, Miss Makepeace.’
See, royalty has an odd way of impressing people. It’s true today, and I was gambling on the likelihood that it was still more true a couple of centuries ago. Back then, aristocrats and royals really did own the world.
Millie hesitated. But the bitch with the axe—
‘Is no match for a royal prince.’ I winked at Alban, who perceptibly winced.
But then he took another long look at the featureless landscape we were stranded in, and sighed. ‘How would you like to be an official royal residence, Miss Makepeace?’
The flint stones began to rumble again, but this time with excitement. Royal? Millie squeaked. Me?
‘The Court is in need of a more, ah, informal establishment. Not too informal, of course,’ he added, as Millie began to object. ‘I can see a few silk carpets in your future; some velvet drapes; maybe a chaise longue…’
‘And,’ I put in firmly, ‘no one will dare to demolish a royal residence, will they?’
Fenella was unlikely to be deterred by such trivialities, of course, but Millie need not know that. My real plan was to make sure (if at all possible) that Fenella never got anywhere near the farmhouse ever again.
She was ours, now.
There was something endearingly deranged about Miss Makepeace. Those lightning changes of mood, for one, from woebegone to effervescent. I am at your service, Your Highness! the house breathed.
I mentally apologised to Alban for lumbering him with Millie’s lonely heart. No part of me was motivated by irritation at his partial capture of mine, I swear. Desperate times. Needs must.
He’d missed his cue. The silence stretched, and I was obliged to nudge him with my toe. Or kick him. It might have been more of a kick.
‘Wonderful,’ sighed Alban. ‘Then, Miss Makepeace, pray take us to Melmidoc’s Whitmore on the fifth Britain.’
Right away, Your Highness!
‘Carefully—’ yelped Alban, to no avail. With a great, shuddering whoosh and an unpromising tearing sound, Millie hauled the lot of us off.
