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“I’VE A KNACK FOR IT,” Rupert roared. “GOTTA TAKE
WORK WHILE WORK’S TAKING, YEAH?”
“Yeah,” Tam offered weakly. This seemed to snap the Office back to the task at hand.
“COME ON THEN, NO MOANING, I HAVEN’T GOT ALL DAY.”
Their little wretched band climbed up the card catalogue as best they could. Rupert boosted Scratch up into the drawer first, then popped Blunderbuss, squealing woolly protest, after. Penny got Tom and Tam halfway up to 17 Love-Lies-Bleeding Lane before Rupert hoisted them up the rest of the way with a surprisingly gentle hand.
Tom and Tam teetered on the edge of the dark drawer. Nothing lay at the bottom of it. Nothing at all, except darkness. But Penny gave them a shove and they toppled ungracefully into the depths of the Office, dripping gold all the way down.
Let us say a house is a world. Its hallways and landings are rivers and seas connecting the great continents of living room, parlor, kitchen, library. We sail down them, dropping anchor in the port of breakfast, the harbor of bookshelves! Great mountains of stairs lead up into the alpine country of bedrooms and washing rooms and sewing rooms and linen closets. Let us say this is true—for it is just exactly what Tom Thorn and Tamburlaine saw when they passed through the little door at 17 Love-Lies-Bleeding Lane, a handsome tweed brownstone sandwiched between two others just like it on a broad and pleasant street lined with poplin poplars.
Tom Thorn pushed open the door—an oval velvet elbow patch with a brown-button knob. The horrid pain in his bones and his skin and his teeth and his feet went up like steam and vanished back to wherever it had come from. He stepped into a wide green meadow studded with wildflowers. His friends crowded in behind him, all but Penny gawping at the sloping hills, the bright violets and dahlias and tangled bittersweet berries racing one another across the sweetgrass. Little groves of almond and tangerine and breadfruit trees sprouted up in the most perfect places, where the nooks of hillocks met or where one might most want shade if one were walking through the countryside. The sun gushed light like a burst grape; four happy trickling brooks full of smooth round stones darted through the rich black soil. The clouds blossomed in a very strange shade of eggplant, but it somehow looked lovely and right in this particular sky. They had stepped, not out of the oval velvet door, but out of a very neat groundskeeper’s hut, walls whitewashed and roof tiled in blue.
A lady came striding out of the nearest copse of tangerine trees. Penny stiffened; Tom Thorn and Tamburlaine gawped. She was the most perfectly beautiful person he had ever seen, so perfectly beautiful that she looked entirely wrong, precisely because there wasn’t the tiniest thing wrong with her. She looked like a drawing or a sort of architectural plan for a lady—except she wasn’t really a lady, but a Fairy. Her hair swept up into a wild mob of wine-grape-colored ringlets clasped with live black starlings clamping her curls in their beaks. Her wings folded decorously against her long, slim back, nearly black, so thick and dense were the colors of them. Her skin was pale and ageless, the color of copper gone slightly green with age. Yet she wore the most upsetting dress—a short tea gown made all of iron, from the shoulders to the fringe. It had been hammered together out of horseshoes and wheel hoops and hammer heads and ax blades and manacles. Where it touched her delicate skin it left red welts and tiny blisters like dewdrops, but the Fairy did not seem to mind them in the least; rather, she wore them like proud rubies.
“I thought Fairies were allergic to iron,” Tamburlaine whispered.
“Quite,” said the Fairy curtly. Her voice collided with them and burst into a shower of dark honey. “But that’s an absurd reason to be afraid of a thing, don’t you agree? I wear my day dress from nine in the morning to four thirty in the afternoon faithfully. I used to bleed the whole while. Oh, you never saw such a mess! But I am ever so much stronger now. I can put on my crinoline in the evenings and handle a hobnail without the smallest wince. It makes quite the party trick, I can tell you. But enough about my personal regimen!” She clapped her hands together. Her saffron eyes sparkled. “I may just have a fit, I am so thoroughly delighted to make your acquaintance! I asked for the two of you specially. I do so enjoy a spot of the unusual in my house. And folk have a charming habit of doing as I say. Very useful indeed. You may call me Madame Tanaquill. Your…animals may sleep in the stables with my own.” She gestured toward an outcropping of blue rock to the west. A willow tree was trying valiantly to grow out of it. “Go on, my little pups!”
“I’m no one’s pup, Miss Rustybritches, and I don’t sleep in a stable, thanks much!” snapped Blunderbuss. Scratch stubbornly refused to sing for this person calling him an animal. He stared down with the mouth of his bell. But Madame Tanaquill positively rippled with calm uncaring.
“I shouldn’t like to call my sheepdogs, but I shall,” she said in a singsong voice.
Scratch and Blunderbuss went, furiously, the gramophone’s crank winding up indignantly tight. Now he did want to sing—or spit—at her! But he could not seem to find a thing to say or sing, for no song has yet been written that goes: I love Tamburlaine and if you take me away from her I shall play John Philip Sousa at top volume till I explode or you do.
“Now, that’s all sorted! How nice. Let’s get you started on the laundry, shall we? And after supper I am having an Affair. You will be expected to dress appropriately and present yourselves at the Cranberry Bog at one quarter past nine. I do not abide tardiness, children! Ginnie knows the way to the Laundries. My regular boy is already at his post, so don’t make him labor alone longer than you must.”
“Tanaquill,” said Tamburlaine slowly. “The Faerie Queene.”
Tom Thorn nodded and squeezed her hand. “Yes! Spenser! I knew it sounded familiar! You’re the Queen of the Fairies!”
An impossibly pretty blush rose up in her high cheeks. “Certainly not, child. You embarrass me. Goodness! That was so long ago! Who can remember? Having spent some centuries as a preposterous four-armed statue in a field will do dreadful things to one’s mind. No, Miss Toothpick, I am not the Queen of anything. Once, in my youth, perhaps, I carried the thistle and the fennel. Perhaps I wore the Hungry Crown. Who can say? I may have commanded bullfrog battalions and rode in a silver walnut shell drawn by eleven mad peacocks. But it becomes no one to dwell upon the past! I serve but humbly, at the leisure of the King, without ambition or thought of myself.” She tilted her chin down demurely. “A throne is nothing but an ostentatious bit of chair that matches nothing and ruins the room. I am but a mild and hardworking soul, a simple Prime Minister. A humble public servant, devoted to service and sacrifice. Charles Crunchcrab”—she could not quite conceal an exquisite grimace of distaste at the name—“is my sovereign, and he is…well. He is a charming man. If you are lucky, perhaps one day you will meet him.” She smirked. “Unless King Goldmouth comes back!”
Did she know? Tom had never been good at guessing when folk meant the opposite of what they said. He always said exactly what he meant—why would anyone say otherwise?
“Come now, the laundry won’t wait! Let us see how my backward, upside-down Changelings handle a little honest work.”
And Madame Tanaquill swept away, her iron dress clunking and clinking and clanging behind her. She disappeared back into the tangerine trees as the starlings sang in her hair.
Penny rolled her eyes. “That’s about enough of that, I think. It’s worse than scrubbing floors, having to listen to her! She’s really the worst of them, just an insufferable bag of donkey hooves. And such lies!” She began to walk down toward a fold in the meadow where the four brooks met and tumbled into one another. Hibiscus and orchids rouged the mouth of the gully. Tom and Tam jogged after her. “I should have known she’d want you. Don’t swallow a teaspoon of her bunk; she just wants to keep an eye on you, make sure you’re not going to make anything happen. The Fairies are very concerned with nothing happening. Have this as your first bite of Fairy logic.” Penny made her voice high and sweet and teasing and fancified, a fair impression of Madame Tanaquill’s. “‘Things used to happen, and that was fine as ferns until they started happening to us. Oh, wasn’t that just beastly, Mr. Butternut? Undoubtedly, Mrs. Henbane! Why, I was a dung shovel for five whole minutes! Can you imagine? That’s nothing, Mr. Butternut, I was a priceless idiot, so I spent my holidays as hat! I shall never recover! Oh, Mrs. Henbane, never you fear, we’ll make good and sure nothing goes mucking about with happening at all anymore, won’t that be nice?’ That’s what they call it! Our Holiday! A hundred years as garbage and they’re worse than ever. They always say that ugly little mess about King Goldmouth, too. He was the big man when they were strong as gravity. Some whip of a girl with a needle for a sword stomped him flat and good riddance. Now they all hate King Chuck and it’s till Goldmouth returns this and if King Goldmouth could hear you he’d smack the sass off your wings!”
Down in the gully, a herd of white moose splashed angrily in the cold water, hoot-roaring in rage, vicious blue eyes rolling, their hooves churning the water white. Their tails snaked up behind them, barbed with brilliant red thorns. A boy dressed rather like Robin Hood brandished a black oar in each hand, whacking their flanks whenever he could.
“Laundry day,” Penny Farthing chuckled. “Aren’t you glad you came all this way to be a washboard?”
“Stop jawing and help me!” hollered Robin Hood as he smacked another albino moose with his paddle.
They scrambled down through the orchids to an icy pool that was quickly becoming moose soup.
“Get the crossbow!” he panted. Tom looked about and saw one laying on the grass. Its arrows stunk of lye, but though his eyes stung, he managed to string it, remembering his Great Battles of Britain and hoping he’d done it right. Tamburlaine and Penny had got hold of several oak branches and were giving the front-most moose a good thrashing.
“In the eye!” urged Robin Hood, and Tom Thorn wrenched the crossbow up toward the frenzied blue eye of the biggest bull. He closed his eyes as he fired—he couldn’t help it—and it struck the beast in the forehead. But that appeared to be close enough, as the arrow burst into streamers of wet green light and the moose crumpled to his knees.
The other moose realized their danger and lashed out with their red tails. Wherever the barbs sunk into the water they sizzled, dark red stains spreading through the streams. Tam and Penny and Tom dodged them—T
om felt quite sure they were poison, and one strike would be the last laundry he ever did. He ducked under one brutal, quick tail and rolled through the water, shoving the crossbow up into moose-belly and firing again. He looked over—Tam had somehow gotten on top of one and was beating it about the head frightfully with her branch, nearly crying in fear and confusion. The tail came up to stab her shoulders and he yelped to warn her—but Penny reached up with a knife and cut the tail off at the moose’s rump. It shrieked and fell with a tremendous splash, Tam and all. Robin Hood tossed him one of the black paddles; Tom whirled around and caught the last moose square in the skull, knocking it up onto the dry grass. All four of them stood in the moose wreckage, panting and shaking.
