Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded Read online

  Frenetica the cook stuck her large head around the doorway. “If you’re through solving the world’s problems,” she said, “you can go round to the shop and get me some cinnamon, and two dozen eggs. And place an order for another hundred pounds of potatoes.”

  She meant Bowser, of course. Magical maidens didn’t run errands. But on this strange, unsettled day, it didn’t seem to matter. Chantel, Anna and Bowser slipped out the skullery door, down the alley, and around the corner to Mr. Whelk’s grocery on Fate’s Turning.

  Where there were only three eggs, and no cinnamon.

  “Can I have the eggs, then, please,” said Bowser, setting his basket on the counter.

  “I suppose so.” Mr. Whelk spoke in tones Chantel imagined a mournful walrus might use. “Somebody has to.”

  He reached for the box behind him and drew out the credit slip for Miss Ellicott’s School. He wrote on it, and pushed it across for Bowser to sign.

  “What?” said Bowser. “Fifteen dollars? For three eggs?”

  “Is that a lot?” said Anna. Magical maidens didn’t handle money.

  “It’s highway robbery!” said Bowser.

  Japheth gave a wriggle on Chantel’s neck, perhaps in surprise at this lack of deportment. But Bowser, after all, was not a magical maiden.

  “That,” said Mr. Whelk, in heavy, hollow tones, “is a matter of opinion. Prices”—he pushed the card forward again—“have risen.”

  “Fine.” Bowser signed. It wasn’t his money, after all. “And we want to order a hundred pounds of potatoes.”

  “Please,” Anna added.

  Mr. Whelk blinked sorrowfully. “I doubt, young people, that there are a hundred pounds of potatoes in the entire city at this moment.”

  “Why?” said Chantel.

  “Some sort of trouble.” Mr. Whelk took the card back, and picked his teeth with the corner of it.

  A woman came into the shop, balancing a baby on her hip.

  “An ounce of butter, please,” she said. “And two eggs.”

  Mr. Whelk took the card out of his mouth and regarded her sadly. “There is no butter,” he intoned. “There are no eggs.”

  Without saying anything, Bowser took one of the eggs out of his basket and handed it to the woman. And without demur, she thanked him for it and left.

  Because that was Lightning Pass, Chantel thought with a surge of pride. People relied on each other. They were usually kind and they expected kindness.

  From each other, that is. Not from anyone outside the walls. But people outside the walls hardly counted. You never saw them.

  They went back to the school, with two eggs and no hope of future potatoes.

  “Do we have any potatoes now?” said Chantel.

  “Nope,” said Bowser.

  This was dismal news. It was bad enough to have strange things suddenly happening to your safe and comfortable world. But to have them happening without potatoes was worse. It was Chantel’s opinion that baked potatoes were one of the best things in the world. When you held a hot baked potato in your hands, grown in the Green Terraces under the sorceresses’ cultivation spells, you knew you were safe and you knew you were home.

  And if there was butter, so much the better.

  There wasn’t any butter now.

  “Also, there’s no milk, and no cheese,” Bowser said, as they climbed the stairs of Fate’s Turning. “And no leeks, and—”

  “I don’t like leeks,” said Chantel.

  “And I don’t like cheese,” said Anna.

  “I bet you’d rather eat them than nothing,” said Bowser. “We have enough food through lunchtime tomorrow, and that’s it.”

  “Can’t you go somewhere else besides Mr. Whelk’s?” said Chantel.

  “Not without money,” said Bowser. “And Frenetica asked Miss Flivvers for money, and Miss Flivvers burst into tears.”

  Chantel didn’t know what to say. It was a horribly insecure feeling when grown ups burst into tears, because it more or less left you in charge.

  “Where does the money come from?” said Chantel.

  Anna knew this. “From the patriarchs.”

  Chantel had seen the patriarchs. On important occasions they paraded in velvet robes. The king paraded too, but the patriarchs had nicer robes and people cheered more loudly for them.

  Anna said that the patriarch in charge of the money for the school was named Sir Wolfgang. And Bowser said that they might try looking for him in the Hall of Patriarchs at the bottom of the city hill.

  So they left the eggs in the kitchen, and went down the steep, uneven stairs of Fate’s Turning, and through the crooked, narrow alleys that wound back and forth, toward the sound of the sea. They climbed tortuous trails to bridges that spanned streets and squares, topped by tall towers upon which the dragon flag of Lightning Pass rippled in the wind. And they went down staircases, and up more staircases, and through arched alleys, and at last they reached the grand, imposing Hall of Patriarchs, in the shadow of the wall called Seven Buttons.

  The Hall of Patriarchs was part cemetery, part government building, with a tower stuck onto the side. When you first entered, you were in the dank and windowless Hall of the Dead, where footsteps echoed like books dropped in silent libraries.

  Chantel and her friends made their way among rows of sarcophogi. Some had carvings of dead patriarchs and kings, staring stonily at the vaulted ceiling.

  Chantel felt the breath of cold, musty air as they passed the dark hole of a stairway that led down to the catacombs.

  Beyond the Hall of the Dead was the sudden warmth of a sunlit office. A round-eyed clerk with a mustache waxed into two curlicues sat at a severely-sloped desk. He smiled—the kind of smile that welcomes any interruption to a dull day.

  “Yes?” He drew the word out slowly.

  “We want to see Sir Wolfgang, please,” said Bowser.

  “Indeed? And yet I highly doubt Sir Wolfgang wants to see you,” said the clerk, still smiling.

  “We could come back—” said Anna uncertainly.

  “No need for that,” said the clerk. “Why shouldn’t Sir Wolfgang do things he doesn’t want? Third doorway on the left.”

  He waved toward a high arched hallway. Chantel wasn’t at all sure they should go in. It was hardly good deportment to bother a patriarch who didn’t want to see you.

  On the other hand, Miss Ellicott was missing and there was nothing for dinner tomorrow.

  They walked down the passage, between fluted stone columns, past arches that led to chambers great and small. They found Sir Wolfgang sitting at a broad table, reading a scroll.

  Sir Wolfgang was dressed in a long black coat, red velvet pantaloons and a waistcoat embroidered with golden lions.

  The girls curtseyed perfectly, and Bowser bowed.

  “What are you doing here?” Sir Wolfgang barked. Apparently no one had made him learn deportment.

  “We’re from Miss Ellicott’s School,” said Chantel. “And I’m afraid it seems that . . .” She trailed off. Money was not a polite matter to discuss.

  “We can’t buy food past lunchtime tomorrow,” said Anna bluntly.

  The patriarch said nothing, but looked questioningly at Bowser.

  “We can’t buy dinner,” Bowser said.

  “Why should you need to?” said the patriarch. “Surely you are supplied with it on a quotidian basis.”

  “Miss Ellicott’s gone,” said Anna. “And there’s no—” Chantel watched her swallow the unmentionable word. “There’s no way to buy any food.”

  This elicited no response but a glare, which was directed not at Anna but at Bowser.

  “She’s gone,” Bowser echoed.

  “Who?” said Sir Wolfgang.

  The girls and Bowser looked at each other in consternation. Could the patriarch actually not hear girls?

  “Miss Ellicott,” said Bowser. “Miss Ellicott is gone from the school, and there’s no money for food.”

  “What do you mean, gone?” said the pa
triarch. “She has no business to be gone. The school is her station in life, and there she must remain.”

  Anna looked at Chantel, and Chantel looked at Bowser, and Bowser told the patriarch about the mysterious stranger.

  “Eloped, has she?” said the patriarch.

  “We think she’s been kidnapped,” said Chantel, curtseying to cover the rudeness of contradicting him.

  The patriarch ignored her. “What did this mysterious stranger, so called, look like?”

  Chantel did her best to translate Bowser’s odd description into something sensible. Bowser dutifully repeated Chantel’s description so that the patriarch could hear it. The effect of this was alarming. Sir Wolfgang’s eyebrows shot up, and then they dove down into a deep V shape. His jaw clenched and he leaned forward across his desk.

  “Did he say who had sent him?”

  “No,” said Bowser.

  “Did he make any signs?”

  “I . . . I don’t think so.”

  “Did he leave any marks or ciphers on the house? On the doorjamb, on the step?”

  “Um, I didn’t see any,” said Bowser.

  “I’ll send searchers to look for signs,” said the patriarch. “There may be magic involved. Now run along. I have important things to do.”

  “But what about the”—desperation made Chantel use the terrible word—“money?”

  “What about the money?” Bowser repeated.

  “Money is not for the likes of you,” said Sir Wolfgang. “You’ll be looked after. I’ll send someone. Now be off.”

  “Are you going to send another sorceress to look after the school?”

  “No,” said the patriarch. “The other sorceresses are busy. Now, go!”

  So the three of them had no choice but to retreat.

  “Put him in a wretched mood, have you?” asked the clerk.

  “Yes, sir,” said Chantel. “Thank you for letting us in.”

  “No no, thank you,” said the clerk, nodding them out. “Come back any time. My name is Less.”

  They climbed back through the winding streets between the leaning buildings in the twilight. They took a detour through the gardenlands, where vegetables, vineyards and orchards grew in terraced green beds that scaled the south side of the mountain.

  Then they climbed Fate’s Turning, and returned to the school, no better off than when they started.

  In fact, they had only made things worse.

  The patriarch did send someone. He sent a number of someones. First he sent quick-eyed men with magnifying glasses to search the steps and the bricks and the door for marks and ciphers. Then he sent swift-fingered men with crowbars and hammers, who searched the school thoroughly, tearing into the walls and ripping up the floorboards. Miss Flivvers gathered all of the girls into the upstairs classroom and set them all to reciting frantically. The more the school was pulled to pieces around them, the more loudly Miss Flivvers, rigid with terror, made them recite. They recited the 29 reasons to say excuse me, and the 19 best forms of apology, and the 174 reasons to be grateful for the way things are, and the 423 situations in which a magical maiden must never find herself.

  “If I ran the school—” Anna muttered in between recitations.

  The only people who didn’t have to recite were Frenetica and Bowser, who were doing their best to defend the kitchen as cauldrons were banged with hammers and drawers were split open to see if they had false bottoms.

  Oh, the men were searching for something, all right.

  Meanwhile the patriarch, instead of sending money, sent a manageress.

  The manageress was named Mrs. Warthall, and the first thing she did was to go down to Mr. Whelk’s store and place new orders. Not very nice orders. Meals had never exactly been grand at Miss Ellicott’s School, but since Chantel didn’t know anything about grand meals she had been happy enough with them. Now they were largely composed of gruel and offal, or as Chantel called it in her head, Cruel and Awful.

  Mrs. Warthall didn’t believe in schooling, not having had any herself, and so she put the girls and Miss Flivvers to work cleaning instead. In practice this actually meant using adhesion spells to stick the school back together, as best they could, after the searchers’ depredations.

  But, Chantel kept wondering, what had they been searching for?

  4

  IN SEARCH OF SORCERESSES

  Chantel was helping Bowser with his work. She very much wished she could help him scrub potatoes, as she had in the past. But there were no potatoes. Or rather, there was just one potato, every night, baked for Mrs. Warthall, and served with a pat of butter. The smell of it was very hard to bear when you were eating watery gruel or a scrambled mess of boiled animal organs.

  Chantel was cleaning the kitchen fireplace. Mrs. Warthall said that it should never show a speck of soot, inside or out. This was rather a tall order for a fireplace. But Mrs. Warthall would run her handkerchief along the inside, and if it came away black, or even gray, Bowser would be beaten and miss dinner.

  Mrs. Warthall had also told Bowser to scrub all the other fireplaces in the school, which meant he didn’t have time to scrub this one.

  So Chantel scrubbed.

  Meanwhile, she could hear Mrs. Warthall talking to her friend Mrs. Snickens out in the hall.

  “It’s only until they find the spells, and the gentlemen figure out how to do them,” Mrs. Warthall was saying. “After that the school will be closed.”

  Chantel froze and listened.

  Mrs. Snickens said something. Chantel couldn’t make out the words.

  “Oh, no, men can’t generally do magic,” said Mrs. Warthall. “But I figure that’s because they hain’t tried. After all, if women can be magicians, it stands to reason men can be better ones.”

  Mrs. Snickens asked something.

  “Because the children themselves might know something,” said Mrs. Warthall. “I don’t know what—they’re as silly a bunch of misses as you ever did see. But they may have overheard something.”

  Mrs. Snickens said something else, a soft insinuating murmur.

  “I think it’s just so those sorceresses don’t suspect anything,” said Mrs. Warthall. “This pack of brats can’t know much that the great patriarchs themselves don’t know, can they? But as long as the school stays here, no one will suspect—”

  The other woman interrupted, said something, and chuckled.

  “The children will be sold to the factories, of course,” said Mrs. Warthall. “Once the foremen beat some sense into them, they may be worth something.”

  A query from Mrs. Snickens.

  “Oh, I won’t have the selling of them,” said Mrs. Warthall. “Still—”

  She stopped suddenly, as if she’d noticed the silence in the kitchen. Chantel began scrubbing frantically, just as Mrs. Warthall surged into the room, wielding a ladle. Chantel ducked into the fireplace as the ladle caught her a clanging blow.

  “So you’re spying on me, are you?” Mrs. Warthall stood before the fireplace, hands on hips. “Heard what I said? So what if I do sell you? You’re going to be sold anyway. You belong in some respectable establishment where you can be given enough work to keep you out of trouble.”

  Chantel’s neck hurt from crouching over, and her eyes stung from the soot. Japheth didn’t like the fireplace at all. Chantel felt his scales sliding over her neck. He wriggled over her shoulder, down her arm, and away.

  “You can be sure the patriarchs intend to get what they can for you. And I might help them out,” Mrs. Warthall went on. “I might just sell the little ones first, who’ll be easiest to train, and—”

  She broke off with a squawk as Japheth slid past, a golden streak of life on the cold brick floor. She raised her ladle to strike.

  “Don’t you dare!” cried Chantel, forgetting her deportment entirely. She burst out of the fireplace and gave Mrs. Warthall a shove in the stomach.

  Blows from the ladle rained down on her. Chantel ducked and tried to cover her head with her ar
ms. At least she was saving Japheth.

  She didn’t know where Japheth went during the times he disappeared. She only knew that he always came back.

  Chantel told Anna and Bowser what she’d heard.

  “She can’t sell us!” said Anna. “We don’t belong to her.”

  “So what do we do?” said Bowser.

  “Tell the patriarchs,” said Anna.

  “Then they’ll just sell us before she does,” said Chantel.

  “I don’t think so,” said Anna. “They let the school exist. They need sorceresses. To strengthen the wall, and make plants grow, and—”

  “Mrs. Warthall said she thought the patriarchs could do magic if they tried,” said Chantel.

  “They can’t,” said Bowser flatly. “Only girls can do magic.”

  They looked at him. He looked embarrassed. “Well, I’ve tried. And I can’t.”

  Chantel was struck with a flurry of memories: Bowser looking longingly at the jar of dried mandrake root. Bowser surreptitiously making signs over a particularly badly burnt cauldron, Bowser casting herbs into a bubbling pot of soup, Bowser trying to get the skulls at the back of the skullery to talk.

  She felt bad for never having noticed how much he wanted to do magic. She wanted to say that after all, no one had taught him. But he clearly didn’t want to discuss it.

  “I think we should ask one of the other sorceresses for help,” Chantel decided.

  So they went in search of sorceresses. They wended their way through twisting streets, and into arched alleys and up certain staircases that wound around watchtowers, and over various bridges.

  “A couple of them live in a house up on Turnkey Crescent,” said Bowser. He knew the city better than they did.

  Turnkey Crescent was a street that curved gradually around the hill on which the city was built. Beech trees grew thickly and joined overhead, their branches meshing. It was like walking through a green leafy tunnel, loud with birdsong. The sorceresses’ house was number 526, a thin, tall building with a narrow green door topped by a stained-glass transom, depicting a sorceress stirring a cauldron. They knocked.