［名著］《哈尔的移动城堡》Diana Wynne Jones 著 (英国)
1. In which Sophie talks to hats.In the land ofIngary, where such things
as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a
misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who
will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.
Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the child of
a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success. Her
parents were well to do and kept a ladies’ hat shop in the prosperous town of Market Chipping. True,
her own mother died when Sophie was just two years old and her sister Lettie
was one year old, and their father married his youngest shop assistant, a
pretty blonde girl called Fanny. Fanny shortly gave birth to the third sister,
Martha. This ought to have made Sophie and Lettie into Ugly Sisters, but in
fact all three girls grew up very pretty indeed, though Lettie was the one
everyone said was most beautiful. Fanny treated all three girls with the same
kindness and did not favor Martha in the least.
Mr. Hatter was proud of his three daughters and sent them all to the best
school in town. Sophie was the most studious. She read a great deal, and very
soon realized how little chance she had of an interesting future. It was a
disappointment to her, but she was still happy enough, looking after her
sisters and grooming Martha to seek her fortune when the time came. Since Fanny
was always busy in the shop, Sophie was the one who looked after the younger
two. There was a certain amount of screaming and hair-pulling between those
younger two. Lettie was by no means resigned to being the one who, next to
Sophie, was bound to be the least successful.
“It’s not fair!” Lettie would shout. “Why should Martha have the best of it
just because she was born the youngest? I shall marry a prince, so there!”
To which Martha always retorted that she would end up disgustingly
rich without having to marry anybody.
Then Sophie would have to drag them apart and mend their clothes. She was
very deft with her needle. As time went on, she made clothes for her sisters
too. There was one deep rose outfit she made for Lettie, the May Day before
this story really starts, which Fanny said looked as if it had come from the
most expensive shop in Kingsbury.
About this time everyone began talking of the Witch of the Waste again. It
was said that the Witch had threatened the life of the King’s daughter and that
the King had commanded his personal magician, Wizard Suliman, to go into the
Waste and deal with the Witch. And it seemed that Wizard Suliman had not only
failed to deal with the Witch: he had got himself killed by her.
So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on
the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four
tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of
the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to
fifty years ago. People got very scared indeed. Nobody went out alone, particularly,
at night. What made it all the scarier was that the castle did not stay in the
same place. Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest,
sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right
downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north. You
could see it actually moving sometimes, with smoke pouring out from the turrets
in dirty gray gusts. For a while everyone was certain that the castle would
come right down into the valley before long, and the Mayor talked of sending to
the King for help.
But the castle stayed roving about the hills, and it was learned that it did
not belong to the Witch but to Wizard Howl. Wizard Howl was bad enough. Though
he did not seem to want to leave the hills, he was known to amuse himself by
collecting young girls and sucking the souls from them. Or some people said he
ate their hearts. He was an utterly cold-blooded and heartless wizard and no
young girl was safe from him if he caught her on her own. Sophie, Lettie, and
Martha, along with all the other girls in Market Chipping, were warned never to
go out alone, which was a great annoyance to them. They wondered what use
Wizard Howl found for all the souls he collected.
They had other things on their minds before long, however, for Mr. Hatter
had died suddenly just as Sophie was old enough to leave school for good. It
then appeared that Mr. Hatter had been altogether too proud of his daughters.
The school fees he had been paying had left the shop with quite heavy debts.
When the funeral was over, Fanny sat down in the parlor in the house next door
to the shop and explained the situation.
“You’ll all have to leave that school, I’m afraid,” she said. “I’ve been
doing sums back and front and sideways, and the only way I can see to keep the
business going and take care of the three of you is to see you all
settled in a promising apprenticeship somewhere. It isn’t practical to have you
all in the shop. I can’t afford it. So this is what I’ve decided. Lettie
first-“
Lettie looked up, glowing with health and beauty which even sorrow and black
clothes could not hide. “I want to go on learning,” she said.
“So you shall, love,” said Fanny. “I’ve arranged for you to be apprenticed
to Cesari’s, the pastry cook in Market
Square. They’ve a name for treating their learners
like kings and queens, and you should be very happy there, as well as learning
a useful trade. Mrs.Cesari’s a good customer and a good friend, and she’s
agreed to squeeze you in as a favor.”
Lettie laughed in a way that showed she was not at all pleased. “Well, thank
you,” she said. “Isn’t it lucky that I like cooking?”
Fanny looked relieved. Lettie could be awkwardly strong-minded at times.
“Now Martha,” she said. “I know you’re full young to go out and work, so I’ve
thought around for something that would give you a long, quiet apprenticeship
and go on being useful to you whatever you decide to do after that. You know my
old school friend Annabel Fairfax?”
Martha, who was slender and fair, fixed her big gray eyes on Fanny almost as
strong-mindedly as Lettie. “You mean the one who talks such a lot,” she said.
“Isn’t she a witch?”
“Yes, with a lovely house and clients all over the Folding Valley,”
Fanny said eagerly. “She’s a good woman, Martha. She’ll introduce you to grand
people she knows in Kingsbury. You’ll be all set up in life when she’s done
with you.”
“She’s a nice lady,” Martha conceded. “All right.”
Sophie, listening, felt that Fanny had worked everything out just as it
should be. Lettie, as the second daughter, was never likely to come to much, so
Fanny had put her where she might meet a handsome young apprentice and live
happily ever after. Martha, who was bound to strike out and make her fortune,
would have witchcraft and rich friends to help her. As for Sophie herself,
Sophie had no doubt what was coming. It did not surprise her when Fanny said,
“Now, Sophie dear, it seems only right and just that you should inherit the hat
shop when I retire, being the eldest as you are. So I’ve decided to take you on
as an apprentice myself, to give you a chance to learn the trade. How do you
feel about that?”
Sophie could hardly say that she simple felt resigned to the hat trade. She
thanked Fanny gratefully.
“So that’s settled then!” Fanny said.
The next day Sophie helped Martha pack her clothes in a box, and the morning
after that they all saw her off on the carrier’s cart, looking small and
upright and nervous. For the way to Upper Folding, where Mrs. Fairfax lived,
lay over the hills past Wizard Howl’s moving castle. Martha was understandably
scared.
“ She’ll be all right,” said Lettie. Lettie refused all help with the
packing. When the carrier’s cart was out of sight, Lettie crammed all her
possessions into a pillow case and paid the neighbor’s bootboy sixpence to
wheel it in a wheelbarrow to Cesari’s in Market Square. Lettie marched behind the
wheelbarrow looking much more cheerful than Sophie expected. Indeed. She had
the air of shaking the dust of the hat shop off her feet.
The bootboy brought back a scribbled note from Lettie, saying she had put
her things in the girls’ dormitory and Cesari’s seemed great fun. A week later
the carrier brought a letter from Martha to say that Martha had arrived safely
and that Mrs. Fairfax was “a great dear and used honey with everything. She
keeps bees.” That was all Sophie heard of her sisters for quite a while because
she started her own apprenticeship the day Martha and Lettie left.
Sophie of course knew the hat trade quite well already. Since she was a tiny
child she had run in and out of the big workshed across the yard where the hats
were damped and molded on blocks, and flowers and fruit and other trimmings
were made from wax and silk. She knew the people who worked there. Most of them
had been there when her father was a boy. She knew Bessie, the only remaining
shop assistant. She knew the customers who bought the hats and the man who
drove the cart which fetched raw straw hats in from the country to be shaped on
the blocks in the shed. She knew the other suppliers and how you made felt for
winter hats. There was not really much that Fanny could teach her, except
perhaps the best way to get a customer to buy a hat.
“You lead up to the right hat, love,” Fanny said. “Show them the ones that
won’t quite do first, so they know the difference as soon as they put the right
one on.”
In fact, Sophie did not sell hats very much. After a day or so observing in
the workshed, and another day going round the clothier and the silk merchant’s
with Fanny, Fanny set her to trimming hats. Sophie sat in a small alcove at the
back of the shop, sewing roses to bonnets and veiling to velours, lining all of
them with silk and arranging wax fruit and ribbons stylishly on the outsides.
She was good at it. She quite liked doing it. But she felt so isolated and a
little dull. The workshop people were too old to be much fun and, besides, they
treated her as someone apart who was going to inherit the business someday.
Bessie treated her the same way. Bessie’s only talk anyway was about the farmer
she was going to marry the week after May Day. Sophie rather envied Fanny, who
could bustle off to bargain with the silk merchant whenever she wanted.
The most interesting thing was the talk from the customers. Nobody can buy a
hat without gossiping. Sophie sat in her alcove and stitched and heard that the
Mayor never would eat green vegetables, and that Wizard Howl’s castle had moved
round to the cliffs again, really that man, whisper, whisper, whisper…. The
voices always dropped low when they talked of Wizard Howl, but Sophie gathered
that he had caught a girl down the valley last month. “Bluebeard!” said the
whispers, and then became voices again to say that Jane Farrier was a perfect
disgrace the way she did her hair. That was one who would never attract
even Wizard Howl, let alone a respectable man. Then there would be a fleeting,
fearful whisper about the Witch of the Waste. Sophie began to feel that Wizard
Howl and the Witch of the Waste should get together.
“They seem to be made for one another. Someone ought to arrange a match,”
she remarked to the hat she was trimming at that moment.
But by the end of the month the gossip in the shop was suddenly all about
Lettie. Cesari’s, it seemed, was packed with gentlemen from morning to night,
each one buying quantities of cakes and demanding to be served by Lettie. She
had ten proposals of marriage, ranging in quality from the Mayor’s son to the
lad who swept the streets, and she had refused them all, saying she was too
young to make up her mind yet.
“I call that sensible of her,” Sophie said to the bonnet she was pleating
silk into.
Fanny was pleased with this news. “I knew she’d be all right!” she said
happily. It occurred to Sophie that Fanny was glad Lettie was no longer around.
“Lettie’s bad for custom,” she told the bonnet, pleating away at the
mushroom-colored silk. “She would make even you look glamorous, you dowdy old
thing. Other ladies look at Lettie and despair.”
Sophie talked to hats more and more as weeks went by. There was no one else
much to talk to. Fanny was out bargaining, or trying to whip up custom, much of
the day, and Bessie was busy serving and telling everyone her wedding plans.
Sophie got into the habit of putting each hat on the stand as she finished it,
where it sat almost looking like a head without a body, and pausing while she
told the hat what the body under it ought to be like. She flattered the hats a
bit, because you should flatter customers.
“You have mysterious allure,” she told one that was all veiling with hidden
twinkles. To a wide, creamy hat with roses under the brim, she said, “You are
going to have to marry money!” and to a caterpillar-green straw with a curly
green feather she said, “You are young as a spring leaf.” She told pink bonnets
they had dimpled charm and smart hats trimmed with velvet that they were witty.
She told the mushroom-pleated bonnet, “You have a heart of gold and someone in
a high position will see it and fall in love with you.” This was because she
was sorry for that particular bonnet. It looked so fussy and plain.
Jane Farrier came into the shop next day and bought it. Her hair did look a
little strange, Sophie thought, peeping out of her alcove, as if Jane had wound
it round a row of pokers. It seemed a pity she had chosen that bonnet. But
everyone seemed to be buying hats and bonnets around then. Maybe it was Fanny’s
sales talk or maybe it was spring coming on, but the hat trade was definitely
picking up. Fanny began to say, a little guiltily, “I think I shouldn’t have
been in such a hurry to get Martha and Lettie placed out. At this rate we might
have managed.”
There was so much custom as April drew on towards May Day that Sophie had to
put on a demure gray dress and help in the shop too. But such was the demand
that she was hard at trimming hats in between customers, and every evening she
took them next door to the house, where she worked by lamplight far into the
night in order to have hats to sell the next day. Caterpillar-green hats like
the one the Mayor’s wife had were much called for, and so were pink bonnets.
Then, the week before May Day, someone came in and asked for one with mushroom
pleats like the one Jane Farrier had been wearing when she ran off with the
Count of Catterack.
That night, as she sewed, Sophie admitted to herself that her life was
rather dull. Instead of talking to the hats, she tried each one on as she
finished it and looked in the mirror. This was a mistake. The staid gray dress
did not suit Sophie, particularly when her eyes were red-rimmed with sewing,
and, since her hair was a reddish straw color, neither did caterpillar-green
nor pink. The one with the mushroom pleats simply made her look dreary. “Like
an old maid!” said Sophie. Not that she wanted to race off with counts, like
Jane Farrier, or even fancied half the town offering her marriage, like Lettie.
But she wanted to do something-she was not sure what— that had a bit more
interest to it than simply trimming hats. She thought she would find time next
day to go and talk to Lettie.
But she did not go. Either she could not find the time, or she could not
find the energy, or it seemed a great distance to Market Square, or she
remembered that on her own she was in danger from Wizard Howl— anyway, every
day it seemed more difficult to go and see her sister. It was very odd. Sophie
had always thought she was nearly as strong-minded as Lettie. Now she was
finding that there were some things she could only do when there were no
excuses left. “This is absurd!” Sophie said. “Market Square is only two streets away.
If I run-“ And she swore to herself she would go round to Cesari’s when the hat
shop was closed for May Day. Meanwhile a new piece of gossip came into the shop. The King had quarreled
with his own brother, Prince Justin, it was said, and the Prince had gone into
exile. Nobody quite knew the reason for the quarrel, but the Prince had
actually come through Market Chipping in disguise a couple of months back, and
nobody had known. The Count of Catterack had been sent by the King to look for
the Prince, when he happened to meet Jane Farrier instead. Sophie listened and
felt sad. Interesting things did seem to happen, but always to somebody else.
Still, it would be nice to see Lettie.
May Day came. Merrymaking filled the streets from dawn onward. Fanny went
out early, but Sophie had a couple of hats to finish first. Sophie sang as she
worked. After all, Lettie was working too. Cesari’s was open till midnight on
holidays. “I shall buy one of their cream cakes,” Sophie decided. “I haven’t
had one for ages.” She watched people crowding past the window in all kinds of
bright clothes, people selling souvenirs, people walking on stilts, and felt
really excited.
But when she at last put a gray shawl over her gray dress and went out into
the street, Sophie did not feel excited. She felt overwhelmed. There were too
many people rushing past, laughing and shouting, far too much noise and
jostling. Sophie felt as if the past months of sitting and sewing had turned
her into an old woman or a semi-invalid. She gathered her shawl around her and
crept along close to the houses, trying to avoid being trodden on my people’s
best shoes or being jabbed by elbows in trailing silk sleeves. When there came
a sudden volley of bangs from overhead somewhere, Sophie thought she was going
to faint. She looked up and saw Wizard Howl’s castle right down on the hillside
above the town, so near it seemed to be sitting on the chimneys. Blue flames
were shooting out of all four of the castle’s turrets, bringing balls of blue
fire with them that exploded high in the sky, quite horrendously. Wizard Howl
seemed to be offended by May Day. Or maybe he was trying to join in, in his own
fashion. Sophie was too terrified to care. She would have gone home, except
that she was halfway to Cesari’s by then. So she ran.
“What made me think I wanted life to be interesting?” she asked as she ran.
“I’d be far too scared. It comes of being the eldest of three.”
When she reached Market Square,
it was worse, if possible. most of the inns were in the Square. Crowds of young
men swaggered beerily to and fro, trailing cloaks and long sleeves and stamping
buckled boots they would never have dreamed of wearing on a working day,
calling loud remarks and accosting girls. The girls strolled in fine pairs,
ready to be accosted. It was perfectly normal for May Day, but Sophie was
scared of that too. And when a young man in a fantastical blue-and-silver
costume spotted Sophie and decided to accost her as well, Sophie shrank into a
shop doorway and tried to hide.
The young man looked at her in surprise. “It’s all right, you little gray
mouse,” he said, laughing rather pityingly. “I only want to buy you a drink.
Don’t look so scared.”
The pitying look made Sophie utterly ashamed. He was such a dashing specimen
too, with a bony, sophisticated face-really quite old, well into his twenties—
and elaborate blonde hair. His sleeves trailed longer than any in the Square,
all scalloped edges and silver insets. “Oh, no thank you, if you please, sir,”
Sophie stammered. “I— I’m on my way to see my sister.”
“Then by all means do so,” laughed this advanced young man. “Who am I to
keep a pretty lady from her sister? Would you like me to go with you, since you
seem so scared?”
He meant it kindly, which made Sophie more ashamed than ever. “No. No thank
you, sir!” she gasped and fled away past him. He wore perfume too. The smell of
hyacinths followed her as she ran. What a courtly person! Sophie thought, as
she pushed her way between the little tables outside Cesari’s.
The tables were packed. Inside was packed and as noisy as the Square. Sophie
located Lettie among the line of assistants at the counter because of the group
of evident farmer’ sons leaning their elbows on it to shout remarks to her.
Lettie, prettier than ever and perhaps a little thinner, was putting cakes into
bags as fast as she could go, giving each bag a deft little twist and looking
back under her own elbow with a smile and an answer for each bag she twisted.
There was a great deal of laughter. Sophie had to fight her way through to the
counter.
Lettie saw her. She looked shaken for a moment. Then her eyes and her smile
widened and she shouted, “Sophie!”
“Can I talk to you?” Sophie yelled. “Somewhere,” she shouted, a little
helplessly, as a large well-dressed elbow jostled her back from the counter.
“Just a moment!” Lettie screamed back. She turned to the girl next to her
and whispered. The girl nodded, grinned, and came to take Lettie’s place.
“You’ll have to have me instead,” she said to the crowd. “Who’s next?”
“But I want to talk to you, Lettie!” one of the farmers’ sons yelled.
“Talk to Carrie,” Lettie said. “I want to talk to my sister.” Nobody really
seemed to mind. They jostled Sophie along to the end of the counter where
Lettie held up a flap and beckoned, and told her not to keep Lettie all day.
When Sophie had edged through the flap, Lettie seized her wrist and dragged her
into the back of the shop, to a room surrounded by rack upon wooden rack, each
one filled with rows of cakes. Lettie pulled forward two stools. “Sit down,”
she said. She looked in the nearest rack, in an absent-minded way, and handed
Sophie a cream cake out of it. “You may need this,” she said.
Sophie sank onto the stool, breathing the rich smell of cake and feeling a
little tearful. “Oh, Lettie!” she said. “I am so glad to see you!”
“Yes, and I’m glad you’re sitting down,” said Lettie. “You see, I’m not
Lettie, I’m Martha.” 2. In which Sophie is compelled to seek her fortune.“What?” Sophie stared at the girl on the stool opposite her. She looked just
like Lettie. She was wearing Lettie’s second-best blue dress, a wonderful blue
that suited her perfectly. She had Lettie’s dark hair and blue eyes.
“I am Martha,” said her sister. “Who did you catch cutting up Lettie’s silk
drawers? I never told Lettie that. Did you?”
“No,” said Sophie, quite stunned. She could see it was Martha now. There was
Martha’s tilt to Lettie’s head, and Martha’s way of clasping her hands round
her knees with her thumbs twiddling. “Why?”
“I’ve been dreading you coming to see me,” Martha said, “because I knew I’d
have to tell you. It’s a relief now I have. Promise you won’t tell anyone. I
know you won’t tell if you promise. You’re so honorable.”
“I promise,” Sophie said. “But why? How?”
“Lettie and I arranged it,” Martha said, twiddling her thumbs, “because Lettie
wanted to learn witchcraft and I didn’t. Lettie’s got brains, and she wants a
future where she can use them-only try telling that to Mother! Mother’s too
jealous of Lettie even to admit she has brains!”
Sophie could not believe Fanny was like that, but she let it pass. “But what
about you?”
“Eat your cake,” said Martha. “It’s good. Oh, yes, I can be clever too. It
only took me two weeks at Mrs. Fairfax’s to find the spell we’re using. I got
up at night and read her books secretly, and it was easy really. Then I asked
if I could visit my family and Mrs. Fairfax said yes. She’s a dear. She thought
I was homesick. So I took the spell and came here, and Lettie went back to Mrs.
Fairfax pretending to be me. The difficult part was the first week, when I didn’t
know all the things I was supposed to know. It was awful. But I discovered that
people like me-they do, you know, if you like them —and then it
was all right. And Mrs. Fairfax hasn’t kicked Lettie out, so I suppose she
managed too.”
Sophie chomped at cake she was not really tasting. “But what made you want
to do this?”
Martha rocked on her stool, grinning all over Lettie’s face, twirling her
thumbs in a happy pink whirl. “I want to get married and have ten children.”
“You’re not quite old enough!” said Sophie.
“Not quite,” Martha agreed. “But you can see I’ve got to start quite soon in
order to fit ten children in. And this way gives me time to wait and see if the
person I want likes me for being me . The spell’s going to wear off
gradually, and I shall get more and more like myself, you see.”
Sophie was so astonished that she finished her cake without noticing what
kind it had been. “Why ten children?”
“Because that’s how many I want,” Said Martha.
“I never knew!”
“Well, it wasn’t much good going on about it when you were so busy backing
Mother up about me making my fortune,” Martha said. “You thought Mother meant
it. I did too, until Father died and I saw she was just trying to get rid of
us— putting Lettie where she was bound to meet a lot of men and get married
off, and sending me as far away as she could! I was so angry I thought, Why
not? And I spoke to Lettie and she was just as angry and we fixed it up. We’re
fine now. But we both feel bad about you. You’re far too clever and nice to be
stuck in that shop for the rest of your life. We talked about it, but we
couldn’t see what to do.”
“I’m all right,” Sophie protested. “Just a bit dull.”
“All right?” Martha exclaimed. “Yes, you prove you’re all right by not
coming near here for months, and then turning up in a frightful gray dress and
shawl, looking as if even I scare you! What’s Mother been doing
to you?”
“Nothing,” Sophie said uncomfortably. “We’ve been rather busy. You shouldn’t
talk about Fanny that way, Martha. She is your mother.”
“Yes, and I’m enough like her to understand her,” Martha retorted. “That’s
why she sent me so far away, or tried to. Mother knows you don’t have to be
unkind to someone in order to exploit them. She knows how dutiful you are. She
knows you have this thing about being a failure because you’re only the eldest.
She’s managed you perfectly and got you slaving away for her. I bet she doesn’t
pay you.”
“I’m still an apprentice,” Sophie protested.
“So am I, but I get a wage. The Cesaris know I’m worth it,” said Martha.
“That hat shop is making a mint these days, and all because of you! You
made that green hat that makes the Mayor’s wife look like a stunning
schoolgirl, didn’t you?”
“Caterpillar green. I trimmed it,” said Sophie.
“And the bonnet Jane Farrier was wearing when she met that nobleman,” Martha
swept on. “You’re a genius with hats and clothes, and Mother knows it! You
sealed your fate when you made Lettie that outfit last May Day. Now you earn
the money while she goes off gadding-“
“She’s out doing the buying,” Sophie said.
“Buying!” Martha cried. Her thumbs whirled. “That takes her half a morning.
I’ve seen her, Sophie, and heard the talk. She’s off in a hired carriage and
new clothes on your earnings, visiting all the mansions down the valley!
They’re saying she’s going to buy that big place down at Vale End and set up in
style. And where are you?”
“Well, Fanny’s entitled to some pleasure after all her hard work bringing us
up,” Sophie said. “I suppose I’ll inherit the shop.”
“What a fate!” Martha exclaimed. “Listen-“
But at that moment two empty cake racks were pulled away at the other end of
the room, and an apprentice stuck his head through from the back somewhere
“Thought I heard your voice, Lettie,” he said, grinning in the most friendly
and flirtatious way. “The new baking’s just up. Tell them.” His head, curly and
somewhat floury, disappeared again. Sophie thought he looked a nice lad. She
longed to ask if he was the one Martha really liked, but she did not get a
chance. Martha sprang up in a hurry, still talking.
“I must get the girls to carry all these through to the shop.” She said.
“Help me with the end of this one.” She dragged out the nearest rack and Sophie
helped her hump it past the door into the roaring, busy shop. “You must do
something about yourself, Sophie,” Martha panted as they went. “Lettie kept
saying she didn’t know what would happen to you when we weren’t around to give
you some self-respect. She was right to be worried.”
In the shop Mrs. Cesari seized the rack from them in both massive arms,
yelling instructions, and a line of people rushed away past Martha to fetch
more. Sophie yelled goodbye and slipped away in the bustle. It did not seem
right to take up more of Martha’s time. Besides, she wanted to be alone to
think. She ran home. There were fireworks now, going up from the field by the
river where the Fair was, competing with the blue bangs from Howl’s castle.
Sophie felt more like an invalid than ever.
She thought and thought, and most of the following week, and all that
happened was that she became confused and discontented. Things just did not
seem to be the way she thought they were. She was amazed at Lettie and Martha.
She had misunderstood them for years. But she could not believe Fanny was the
kind of woman Martha said.
There was a lot of time for thinking, because Bessie duly left to be married
and Sophie was mostly alone in the shop. Fanny did seem to be out a lot,
gadding or not, and trade was slack after May Day. After three days Sophie
plucked up enough courage to ask Fanny, “Shouldn’t I be earning a wage?”
“Of course, my love, with all you do!” Fanny answered warmly, fixing on a
rose-trimmed hat in front of the shop mirror. “We’ll see about it as soon as
I’ve done the accounts this evening.” Then she went out and did not come back
until Sophie had shut the shop and taken that day’s hats through to the house
to trim.
Sophie at first felt mean to have listened to Martha, but when Fanny did not
mention a wage, either that evening or any time later that week, Sophie began
to think that Martha had been right.
“Maybe I am being exploited,” she told a hat she was trimming with
red silk and a bunch of wax cherries, “but someone has to do this or there will
be no hats at all to sell.” She finished that hat and started on a stark
black-and-white one, very modish, and a quite new thought came to her. “Does it
matter if there are no hats to sell?” she asked it. She looked round at the
assembled hats, on stands or waiting in a heap to be trimmed. “What good are
you all?” she asked them. “You certainly aren’t doing me a scrap of good.”
And she was within an ace of leaving the house and settling out to seek her
fortune, until she remembered she was the eldest and there was no point. She
took up the hat again, sighing.
She was still discontented, alone in the shop next morning, when a very
plain young woman customer stormed in, whirling a pleated mushroom bonnet by
its ribbons. “Look at this!” the young lady shrieked. “You told me this was the
same as the bonnet Jane Farrier was wearing when she met the Count. And you
lied. Nothing has happened to me at all!”
“I’m not surprised,” Sophie said, before she had caught up with herself. “If
you’re fool enough to wear that bonnet with a face like that, you wouldn’t have
the wit to spot the King himself if he came a begging— if he hadn’t turned to
stone first just at the sight of you.”
The customer glared. Then she threw the bonnet at Sophie and stormed out of
the shop. Sophie carefully crammed the bonnet into the wastebasket, panting
rather. The rule was : Lose your temper, lose a customer. She had just proven
that rule. It troubled her to realize how very enjoyable it had been.
Sophie had no time to recover. There was the sound of wheels and horse hoofs
and a carriage darkened the window. The shop bell clanged and the grandest
customer she had ever seen sailed in, with a sable wrap drooping from her
elbows and diamonds winking all over her dense black dress. Sophie’s eyes went
to the lady’s wide hat first— real ostrich plume dyed to reflect the pinks and
greens and blues winking in the diamonds and yet still look black. This was a
wealthy hat. The lady’s face was carefully beautiful. The chestnut brown hair
made her seem young, but…Sophie’s eyes took in the young man who followed the
lady in, a slightly formless-faced person with reddish hair, quite well
dressed, but pale and obviously upset. He stared at Sophie with a kind of
beseeching horror. He was clearly younger than the lady. Sophie was puzzled.
“Miss Hatter?” the lady asked in a musical but commanding voice.
“Yes,” said Sophie. The man looked more upset than ever. Perhaps the lady
was his mother.
“I hear you sell the most heavenly hats,” said the lady. “Show me.”
Sophie did not trust herself to answer in her present mood. She went and got
out hats. None of them were in this lady’s class, but she could feel the man’s
eyes following her and that made her uncomfortable. The sooner that lady
discovered the hats were all wrong for her, the sooner this odd pair would go.
She followed Fanny’s advice and got out the wrongest first.
The lady began rejecting hats instantly. “Dimples,” she said to the pink
bonnet, and “Youth” to the caterpillar-green one. To the one of twinkles and
veils she said, “Mysterious allure. How very obvious. What else have you?”
Sophie got out the modish black-and-white, which was the only hat even
remotely likely to interest this lady.
The lady looked at it with contempt. “This one doesn’t do anything for
anybody. You’re wasting my time, Miss Hatter.”
“Only because you came in and asked for hats” Sophie said. “This is only a
small shop in a small town, Madam. Why did you-“ Behind the lady, the man
gasped and seemed to be trying to signal warningly. “— bother to come in?”
Sophie finished, wondering what was going on.
“I always bother when someone tries to set themselves up against the Witch
of the Waste,” said the lady. “I’ve heard of you, Miss Hatter, and I don’t care
for your competition or your attitude. I came to put a stop to you. There.” She
spread out her hand in a flinging motion towards Sophie’s face.
“You mean you’re the Witch of the Waste?” Sophie quavered. Her voice seemed
to have gone strange with fear and astonishment.
“I am,” said the lady. “And let that teach you to meddle with things that
belong to me.”
“I don’t think I did. There must be some mistake,” Sophie croaked. The man
was now staring at her in utter horror, though she could not see why.
“No mistake, Miss Hatter,” said the Witch. “Come, Gaston.” She turned and
swept to the shop door. While the man was humbly opening it for her, she turned
back to Sophie. “By the way, you won’t be able to tell anyone you’re under a
spell,” she said. The shop door tolled like a funeral bell as she left.
Sophie put her hands to her face, wondering what the man had stared at. She
felt soft, leathery wrinkles. She looked at her hands. They were wrinkled too,
and skinny, with large veins in the back and knuckles like knobs. She pulled
her gray skirt against her legs and looked down at skinny, decrepit ankles and
feet which had made her shoes all knobbly. They were the legs of someone about
ninety and they seemed to be real.
Sophie got herself to the mirror, and found she had to hobble. The face in
the mirror was quite calm, because it was what she expected to see. It was the
face of a gaunt old woman, withered and brownish, surrounded by wispy white
hair. Her own eyes, yellow and watery, stared out at her, looking rather
tragic.
“Don’t worry, old thing,” Sophie said to the face. “You look quite healthy.
Besides, this is much more like you really are.”
She thought about her situation, quite calmly. Everything seemed to have
gone calm and remote. She was not even particularly angry with the Witch of the
Waste.
“Well, of course I shall have to do for her when I get the chance,” she told
herself, “but meanwhile, if Lettie and Martha can stand being one another, I
can stand being like this. But I can’t stay here. Fanny would have a fit. Let’s
see. This gray dress is quite suitable, but I shall need my shawl and some
food.” She hobbled over to the shop door and carefully put up the CLOSED notice.
Her joints creaked as she moved. She had to walk bowed and slow. But she was
relieved to discover that she was quite a hale old woman. She did not feel weak
or ill, just stiff. She hobbled to collect her shawl, and wrapped it over her
head and shoulders, as old women did. Then she shuffled through into the house,
where she collected her purse with a few coins in it and a parcel or bread and
cheese. She let herself out of the house, carefully hiding the key in the usual
place, and hobbled away down the street, surprised at how calm she still felt.
She did wonder if she should say goodbye to Martha. But she did not like the
idea of Martha not knowing her. It was best just to go. Sophie decided she
would write to both her sisters when she got wherever she was going, and
shuffled on, though the field where the Fair had been, over the bridge, and on
into the country lanes beyond. It was a warm spring day. Sophie discovered that
being a crone did not stop her from enjoying the sight and smell of may in the
hedgerows, though her sight was a little blurred. Her back began to ache. She
hobbled sturdily enough, but she needed a stick. She searched the hedges as she
went for a loose stake of some kind.
Evidently, her eyes were not as good as they had been. She thought she saw a
stick, a mile or so on, but when she hauled on it, it proved to be the bottom
end of an old scarecrow someone had thrown into the hedge. Sophie heaved the
thing upright. It had a withered turnip for a face. Sophie found she had some
fellow feeling for it. Instead of pulling it to pieces and taking the stick,
she stuck it between two branches of the hedge, so that it stood looming
rakishly above the may, with the tattered sleeves on its stick arms fluttering
over the hedge.
“There,” she said, and her crackled old voice surprised her into giving a
cracked old cackle of laughter. “Neither of us are up to much, are we, my
friend? Maybe you’ll get back to your field if I leave you where people can see
you.” She set off up the lane again, but a thought struck her and she turned
back. “Now if I wasn’t doomed to failure because of my position in the family,”
she told the scarecrow, “you could come to life and offer me help in making my
fortune. But I wish you luck anyway.”
She cackled again as she walked on. Perhaps she was a little mad, but old
women often were.
She found a stick an hour or so later when she sat down on the bank to rest
and eat her bread and cheese. There were noises in the hedge behind her: little
strangled squeakings, followed by heavings that shook may petals off the hedge.
Sophie crawled on her bony knees to peer past leaves and flowers and thorns
into the inside of the hedge, and discovered a thin gray dog in there. It was
hopelessly trapped by a stout stick which had somehow got twisted into a rope
that was tied around its neck. The stick had wedged itself between two branches
on the hedge so that the dog could barely move. It rolled its eyes wildly at
Sophie’s peering face.
As a girl, Sophie was scared of all dogs. Even as an old woman, she was
quite alarmed by the two rows of white fangs in the creature’s open jaws. But
she said to herself, “The way I am now, it’s scarcely worth worrying about,”
and felt in her sewing pocket for her scissors. She reached into the hedge with
the scissors and sawed away at the rope around the dog’s neck.
The dog was very wild. It flinched away from her and growled. But Sophie
sawed bravely on. “You’ll starve or throttle to death, my friend,” she told the
dog in her cracked old voice, “unless you let me cut you loose. In fact, I
think someone has tried to throttle you already. Maybe that accounts for your
wildness.” The rope had been tied quite tightly around the dog’s neck and the
stick had been twisted viciously into it. It took a lot of sawing before the
rope parted and the dog was able to drag itself out from under the stick.
“Would you like some bread and cheese?” Sophie asked it then. But the dog
growled at her, forced its way out through the opposite side of the hedge, and
slunk away. “There’s gratitude for you!” Sophie said, rubbing her prickled
arms. “But you left me a gift in spite of yourself.” She pulled the stick that
had trapped the dog out of the hedge and found it was a proper walking stick,
well trimmed and tipped with iron. Sophie finished her bread and cheese and set
off walking again. The lane became steeper and steeper and she found the stick
a great help. It was also something to talk to. Sophie thumped along with a
will, chatting to her stick. After all, old people often talk to themselves.
“There’s two encounters,” she said, “and not a scrap of magical gratitude
from either. Still, you’re a good stick. I’ m not grumbling. But I’m surely due
to have a third encounter, magical or not. In fact, I insist on one. I wonder
what it will be.”
The third encounter came towards the end of the afternoon when Sophie had
worked her way quite high into the hills. A countryman came whistling down the
lane toward her. A shepherd, Sophie thought, going home after seeing to his
sheep. He was a well-set-up young fellow of forty or so. “Gracious!” Sophie
said to herself. “This morning I’d have seen him as an old man. How one’s point
of view does alter!”
When the shepherd saw Sophie mumbling to herself, he moved rather carefully
over to the other side of the lane and called out with great heartiness, “Good
evening to you, Mother! Where are you off to?”
“Mother?” said Sophie. “I’m not your mother, young man!”
“A manner of speaking,” the shepherd said, edging along against the opposite
hedge. “I was only meaning a polite inquiry, seeing you walk into the hills at
the end of the day. You won’t get down into Upper Folding before nightfall,
will you?”
Sophie had not considered this. She stood in the road and thought about it.
“It doesn’t matter really,” she said, half to herself. “You can’t be fussy when
you’re off to seek your fortune.”
“Can’t you indeed, Mother?” said the shepherd. He had now edged himself
downhill of Sophie and seemed to feel better for it. “Then I wish you good luck,
Mother, provided your fortune don’t have nothing to do with charming folks’
cattle.” And he took off down the road in great strides, almost running, but
not quite.
Sophie stared after him indignantly. “He thought I was a witch!” she said to
her stick. She had half a mind to scare the shepherd by shouting nasty things
after him, but that seemed a little unkind. She plugged on uphill, mumbling.
Shortly, the hedges gave way to bare banks and the land beyond became heathery
upland, with a lot of steepness beyond that covered with yellow, rattling
grass. Sophie kept grimly on. By now her knobby old feet ached, and her back,
and her knees. She became too tired to mumble and simply plugged on, panting,
until the sun was quite low. And all at once it became quite clear to Sophie
that she could not walk a step further.
She collapsed onto a stone by the wayside, wondering what she would do now.
“The only fortune I can think of is a comfortable chair!” she gasped.
The stone proved to be on a sort of headland, which gave Sophie a
magnificent view of the way she had come. There was most of the valley spread
out beneath her in the setting sun, all fields and walls and hedges, the
winding of the river, and the fine mansions of rich people glowing our from
clumps of trees, right down to blue mountains in the far distance. Just below
her was Market Chipping. Sophie could look down into its well-known streets.
There was Market Square
and Cesari’s. She could have tossed a stone down the chimney pots of the house
next to the hat shop.
“How near it still is!” Sophie told her stick in dismay. “All that walking
just to get above my own rooftop!”
It got cold on the stone as the sun went down. An unpleasant wind blew
whichever way Sophie turned to avoid it. Now it no longer seemed so unimportant
that she would be out on the hills during the night. She found herself thinking
more and more of a comfortable chair and a fireside, and also of darkness and
wild animals. But if she went back to Market Chipping, it would be the middle
of the night before she got there. She might just as well go on. She sighed and
stood up, creaking. It was awful. She ached all over.
“I never realized before what old people had to put up with!” she panted as
she labored uphill. “Still, I don’t think wolves will eat me. I must be far too
dry and tough. That’s one comfort.”
Night was coming down fast now and the heathery uplands were blue-gray. The
wind was also sharper. Sophie’s panting and the creaking of her limbs were so
loud in her ears that it took her a while to notice that some of the grinding
and puffing was not coming from herself at all. She looked up blurrily.
Wizard Howl’s castle was rumbling and bumping toward her across the
moorland. Black smoke was blowing up in clouds from behind its black battlements.
It looked tall and thin and heavy and ugly and very sinister indeed. Sophie
leaned on her stick and watched it. She was not particularly frightened. She
wondered how it moved. But the main thing in her mind was that all that smoke
must mean a large fireside somewhere inside those tall black walls.
“Well, why not?” she said to her stick. “Wizard Howl is not likely to want my
soul for his collection. He only takes young girls.”
She raised her stick and waved it imperiously at the castle.
“Stop!” she shrieked.
The castle obediently came to a rumbling, grinding halt about fifty feet
uphill from her. Sophie felt rather gratified as she hobbled toward it. 3. In which
Sophie enters into a castle and a bargain.
There was a large black door in the black wall facing Sophie and she made
for that, hobbling briskly. The castle was uglier that ever close to. It was
far too tall for its height and not a very regular shape. As far as Sophie
could see in the growing darkness, it as built of huge black blocks, like coal,
and, like coal, these blocks were all different shapes and sizes. Chill
breathed off these blocks as she got closer, but that failed to frighten Sophie
at all. She just thought of chairs and firesides and stretched her hand out
eagerly to the door.
Her hand could not come near it. Some invisible wall stopped her hand about
a foot from the door. Sophie prodded at it with an irritable finger. When that
made no difference, she prodded with her stick. The wall seemed to be all over
the door from as high as her stick could reach, and right down to the heather
sticking out from under the doorstep.
“Open up!” Sophie cackled at it.
That made no difference to the wall.
“Very well,” Sophie said. “I’ll find your back door.” She hobbled off the
lefthand corner of the castle, that being both the nearest and slightly
downhill. But she could not get around the corner. The invisible wall stopped
her again as soon as she was level with the irregular black cornerstones. At
this, Sophie said a word she had learned from Martha, that neither old ladies
nor young girls are supposed to know, and stumped uphill and anti-clockwise to
the castle’s righthand corner. There was no barrier there. She turned that
corner and came hobbling eagerly towards the second big black door in the middle
of that side of the castle.
There was a barrier over that door too.
Sophie glowered at it. “I call that very unwelcoming!” she said.
Black smoke blew down form the battlements in clouds. Sophie coughed. Now
she was angry. She was old, frail, chilly, and aching all over. Night was
coming on and the castle just sat and blew smoke at her. “I’ll speak to Howl
about this!” she said, and set off fiercely to the next corner. There was not
barrier there-evidently you had to go around the castle clockwise-but there,
bit sideways in the next wall, was a third door. This one was much smaller and
shabbier.
“The back door at last!” Sophie said.
The castle started to move again as Sophie got near the back door. The
ground shook. The wall shuddered and creaked, and the door started to travel
sideways from her.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Sophie shouted. She ran after the door and hit it
violently with her stick. “Open up!” she yelled.
The door sprang open inward, still moving sideways. Sophie, by hobbling
furiously, managed to get one foot up on its doorstep. Then she hopped and
scrambled and hopped again, while the great black blocks round the door jolted
and crunched as the castle gathered speed over the uneven hillside. Sophie did
not wonder the castle had a lopsided look. The marvel was that it did not fall
apart on the spot.
“What a stupid way to treat a building!” she panted as she threw herself
inside it. She had to drop her stick and hang on to the open door in order not
to be jolted straight out again.
When she began to get her breath, she realized there was a person standing
in front of her, holding the door too. He was a head taller than Sophie, but
she could see he was the merest child, only a little older than Martha. And he
seemed to be trying to shut the door on her and push her out of the warm,
lamplit, low-beamed room beyond him, into the night again.
“Don’t you have the impudence to shut the door on me, my boy!” she said.
“I wasn’t going to, but you’re keeping the door open,” he protested. “What
do you want?”
Sophie looked round at what she could see beyond the boy. There were a
number of probably wizardly things hanging from the beams— strings of onions,
bunches of herbs, and bundles of strange roots. There were also definitely
wizardly things, like leather books, crooked bottles, and an old, brown,
grinning human skull. On the other side of the boy was a fireplace with a small
fire burning in the grate. It was a much smaller fire than all the smoke
outside suggested, but then this was obviously only a back room in the castle.
Much more important to Sophie, this fire had reached the glowing rosy stage,
with little blue flames dancing on the logs, and placed beside it in the
warmest position was a low chair with a cushion on it.
Sophie pushed the boy aside and dived for that chair. “Ah! My fortune!” she
said, settling herself comfortably into it. It was bliss. The fire warmed her
aches and the chair supported her back and she knew that if anyone wanted to
turn her out now, they were going to have to use extreme and violent magic to
do it.
The boy shut the door. Then he picked up Sophie’s stick and politely leaned
it against the chair for her. Sophie realized that there was now no sign at all
that the castle was moving across the hillside: not even the ghost of a rumble
or the tiniest shaking. How odd! “Tell Wizard Howl,” she said to the boy, “that
this castle’s going to come apart round his ears if it travels much further.”
“The castle’s bespelled to hold together,” the boy said. “But I’m afraid
Howl’s not here just at the moment.”
This was good news to Sophie. “When will he be back?” she asked a little
nervously.
“Probably not till tomorrow now,” the boy said. “What do you want? Can I
help you instead? I’m Howl’s apprentice, Michael.”
This was better news than ever. “I’m afraid only the Wizard can possibly
help me,” Sophie said quickly and firmly. It was probably true too. “I’ll wait,
if you don’t mind.” It was clear Michael did mind. He hovered over her a
little helplessly. To make it plain to him that she had no intention of being
turned out by a mere boy apprentice, Sophie closed her eyes and pretended to go
to sleep. “Tell him the name’s Sophie,” she murmured. “Old Sophie,” she
added, to be on the safe side.
“That will probably mean waiting all night,” Michael said. Since this was
exactly what Sophie wanted, she pretended not to hear. In fact, she almost
certainly fell into a swift doze. She was so tired from all that walking. After
a moment Michael gave her up and went back to the work he was doing at the
workbench where the lamp stood.
So she would have a whole night’s shelter, even if it was on slightly false
pretenses, Sophie thought drowsily. Since Howl was such a wicked man, it
probably served him right to be imposed upon. But she intended to be well away
from here by the time Howl came back and raised objections. She looked sleepily
and slyly across at the apprentice. It rather surprised her to find him such a
nice, polite boy. After all, she had forced her way in quite rudely and Michael
had not complained at all. Perhaps Howl kept him in abject servility. But
Michael did not look servile. He was a tall, dark boy with a pleasant, open
sort of face, and he was most respectably dressed. In fact, if Sophie had not
seen him at that moment carefully pouring green fluid out of a crooked flask
onto black powder in a bent glass jar, she would have taken him for the son of
a prosperous farmer. How odd!
Still, things were bound to be odd where wizards were concerned, Sophie
thought. And this kitchen, or workshop, was beautifully cozy and very peaceful.
Sophie went properly to sleep and snored. She did not wake up when there came a
flash and a muted bang form the workbench, followed by a hurriedly bitten-off
swear word from Michael. She did not wake when Michael, sucking his burned
fingers, put the spell aside for the night and fetched bread and cheese out of
the closet. She did not stir when Michael knocked her stick down with a
clatter, reaching over her for a log to put on the fire, or when Michael,
looking down into Sophie’s open mouth, remarked to the fireplace, “She’s got
all her teeth. She’s not the Witch of the Waste, is she?”
“I wouldn’t have let her come in if she was,” the fireplace retorted.
Michael shrugged and picked Sophie’s stick politely up again.
Then he put a log on the fire with equal politeness and went away to bed
somewhere overhead.
In the middle of the night Sophie was woken by someone snoring. She jumped
upright, rather irritated to discover that she was the one who had been
snoring. It seemed to her that she had only dropped off for a second or so, but
Michael seemed to have vanished in those seconds, taking the light with him. No
doubt a wizard’s apprentice learned to do that kind of thing in his first week.
And he had left the fire very low. It was giving out irritating hissings and
poppings. A cold draft blew on Sophie’s back. Sophie recalled that she was in a
wizard’s castle, and also, with unpleasant distinctness, that there was a human
skull on a workbench somewhere behind her.
She shivered and cranked her stiff old neck around, but there was only
darkness behind her. “Let’s have a bit more light, shall we?” she said. Her
cracked voice seemed to make no more noise than the crackling of the fire.
Sophie was surprised. She had expected it to echo through the vaults of the
castle. Still, there was a basket of logs beside her. She stretched out a
creaking arm and heaved a log on the fire, which sent a spray of green and blue
sparks flying through the chimney. She heaved on a second log and sat back, not
without a nervous look or so behind her, where the blue-purple light form the
fire was dancing over the polished brown bone of the skull. The room was quite
small. There was no one in it but Sophie and the skull.
“He’s got both feet in the grave and I’ve only got one,” she consoled
herself. She turned back to the fire, which was now flaring up into blue and
green flames. “Must be salt in that wood,” Sophie murmured. She settled herself
more comfortably, putting her knobby feet on the fender and her head into a corner
of the chair, where she could stare into the colored flames, and began dreamily
considering what she ought to do in the morning. But she was sidetracked a
little by imagining a face in the flames. “It would be a thin blue face,” she
murmured, “very long and thin, with a thin blue nose. But those curly green
flames on top are most definitely your hair. Suppose I didn’t go until Howl
gets back? Wizards can lift spells, I suppose. And those purple flames near the
bottom make the mouth— you have savage teeth, my friend. You have two green
tufts of flame for eyebrows…” Curiously enough, the only orange flames in the
fire were under the green eyebrow flames, just like eyes, and they each had a
little purple glint in the middle that Sophie could almost imagine was looking
at her, like the pupil of an eye. “On the other hand,” Sophie continued,
looking into the orange flames, “if the spell was off, I’d have my heart eaten
before I could turn around.”
“Don’t you want your heart eaten?” asked the fire.
It was definitely the fire that spoke. Sophie saw its purple mouth move as
the words came. Its voice was nearly as cracked as her own, full of the
spitting and whining of burning wood. “Naturally I don’t,” Sophie answered.
“What are you?”
“A fire demon,” answered the purple mouth. There was more whine than spit to
its voice as it said, “I’m bound to this hearth by contract. I can’t move from
this spot.” Then its voice became brisk and crackling. “And what are you
?” it asked. “I can see you’re under a spell.”
This roused Sophie from her dreamlike state. “You see!” she exclaimed. “Can
you take the spell off?”
There was a poppling, blazing silence while the orange eyes in the demon’s
wavering blue face traveled up and down Sophie. “it’s a strong spell,” it said
at length. “It feels like one of the Witch of the Waste’s to me.”
“It is,” said Sophie.
“But it seems more than that,” crackled the demon. “I detect two layers. And
of course you won’t be able to tell anyone about it unless they know already.”
It gazed at Sophie a moment longer. “I shall have to study it,” it said.
“How long will that take?” Sophie asked.
“It may take a while,” said the demon. And it added in a soft persuasive
flicker, “How about making a bargain with me? I’ll break your spell if you
agree to break this contract I’m under.”
Sophie looked warily at the demon’s thin blue face. It had a distinctly
cunning look as it made this proposal. Everything she had read showed the
extreme danger of making a bargain with a demon. And there was no doubt that
this one did look extraordinarily evil. Those long purple teeth. “Are you sure
you’re being quite honest?” she said.
“Not completely,” admitted the demon. “But do you want to stay like that
till you die? That spell had shortened your life by about sixty years, if I am
any judge of such things.”
This was a nasty thought, and one which Sophie had tried not to think about
up to now. It made quite a difference. “This contract you’re under,” she said.
“It’s with Wizard Howl, is it?”
“Of course,” said the demon. Its voice took on a bit of a whine again. “I’m
fastened to this hearth and I can’t stir so much as a foot away. I’m forced to
do most of the magic around here. I have to maintain the castle and keep it
moving and do all the special effects that scare people off, as well as
anything else Howl wants. Howl’s quite heartless, you know.”
Sophie did not need telling that Howl was heartless. On the other hand, the
demon was probably quite as wicked. “Don’t you get anything out of this
contract at all?” she said.
“I wouldn’t have entered into it if I didn’t,” said the demon, flickering
sadly. “But I wouldn’t have done if I’d known what it would be like. I’m being
exploited.”
In spite of her caution, Sophie felt a good deal of sympathy for the demon.
She thought of herself making hats for Fanny while Fanny went gadding. “All
right,” she said. “What are the terms of the contract? How do I break it?”
An eager purple grin spread across the demon’s blue face. “You agree to a
bargain?”
“If you agree to break the spell on me,” Sophie said, with a brave sense of
saying something fatal.
“Done!” cried the demon, his long face leaping gleefully up the chimney.
“I’ll break your spell the very instant you break my contract!”
“Then tell me how I break your contract,” Sophie said.
The orange eyes glinted at her and looked away. “I can’t. Part of the
contract is that neither the Wizard nor I can say what the main clause is.”
Sophie saw that she had been tricked. She opened her mouth to tell the demon
that it could sit in the fireplace until Doomsday in that case.
The demon realized she was going to. “Don’t be hasty!” it crackled. “You can
find out what it is if you watch and listen carefully. I implore you to try.
The contract isn’t doing either of us any good in the long run. And I do keep
my word. The fact that I’m stuck here shows that I keep it!”
It was in earnest, leaping about on its logs in an agitated way. Sophie
again felt a great deal of sympathy. “But if I’m to watch and listen, that
means I have to stay here in Howl’s castle,” she objected.
“Only about a month. Remember, I have to study your spell too,” the demon
pleaded.
“But what possible excuse can I give for doing that?” Sophie asked.
“We’ll think of one. Howl’s pretty useless at most things. In fact,” the
demon said, venomously hissing, “he’s too wrapped up in himself to see beyond
his nose half the time. We can deceive him— as long as you’ll agree to stay.”
“Very well,” Sophie said. “I’ll stay. Now find an excuse.”
She settled herself comfortably in the chair while the demon thought. It
thought aloud, in a little crackling, flickering murmur, which reminded Sophie
rather of the way she had talked to her stick when she walked here. And it
blazed while it thought with such a glad powerful roaring that she dozed again.
She thought the demon did make a few suggestions. She remembered shaking her
head to the notion that she should pretend to be Howl’s long— lost great— aunt,
and to two other ones even more far— fetched, but she did not remember very
clearly. The demon at length fell to singing a gentle, flickering little song.
It was not in any language Sophie knew— or she thought not, until she
distinctly heard the word “saucepan” in it several times— and it was very
sleepy— sounding. Sophie fell into a deep sleep, with a slight suspicion that
she was being bewitched now, as well as beguiled, but it did not bother her
particularly. She would be free of the spell soon….. 4. In which
Sophie discovers several strange things.
When Sophie woke up, daylight was streaming across her. Since Sophie
remembered no windows a t all in the castle, her first notion was that she had
fallen asleep trimming hats and dreamed of leaving home. The fire in front of
her had sunk to rosy charcoal and white ash, which convinced her that she had
certainly dreamed there was a fire demon. But her very first movements told her
that there were some things she had not dreamed. There were sharp cracks from
all over her body.
“Ow!” she exclaimed. “I ache all over!” The voice that exclaimed was a weak,
cracked piping. She put her knobby hands to her face and felt wrinkles. At
that, she discovered she had been in a state of shock all yesterday. She was
very angry indeed with the Witch of the Waste for doing this to her, hugely,
enormously angry. “Sailing into shops and turning people old!” she exclaimed.
“Oh, what I won’t do to her!”
Her anger made her jump up in a salvo of cracks and creaks and hobble over
to the unexpected window. It was above the workbench. To her utter
astonishment, the view from it was a view of a dockside town. She could see a
sloping, unpaved street, lined with small, rather poor-looking houses, and
masts sticking up beyond the roofs. Beyond the masts she caught a glimmer of
the sea, which was something she had never seen in her life before.
“Wherever am I?” Sophie asked the skull standing on the bench. “I don’t
expect you to answer that, my friend,” she added hastily, remembering this was
a wizard’s castle, and she turned round to take a look at the room.
It was quite a small room, with heavy black beams in the ceiling. By
daylight it was amazingly dirty. The stones of the floor were stained and
greasy, ash was piled within the fender, and cobwebs hung in dusty droops from
the beams. There was a layer of dust on the skull. Sophie absently wiped it off
as she went to peer into the sink beside the workbench. She shuddered at the
pink-and-gray slime in it and the white slime dripping from the pump above it.
Howl obviously did not care what squalor his servants lived in.
The rest of the castle seemed to be beyond one or the other of the four low
black doors around the room. Sophie opened the nearest, in the end wall beyond
the bench. There was a large bathroom beyond it. In some ways it was a bathroom
you might find normally only in a palace, full of luxuries such as an indoor
toilet, a shower stall, an immense bath with clawed feet, and mirrors on every
wall. But it was even dirtier than the other room. Sophie winced form the
toilet, flinched at the color of the bath, recoiled form the green weed growing
in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at her shriveled shape in the
mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless
substances. The nameless substances themselves were crowded onto a very large
shelf over the bath. They were in jars, boxes, tubes, and hundreds of tattered
brown packets and paper bags. The biggest jar had a name. It was called DRYING
POWER in crooked letters. Sophie was not sure whether there should be a D in
that or not. She picked up a packet at random. It had SKIN scrawled on it, and
she put it back hurriedly. Another jar said EYES in the same scrawl. A tube
stated FOR DECAY.
“It seems to work too,” Sophie murmured, looking into the washbasin with a
shiver. Water ran into the basin when she turned a blue-green knob that might
have been brass and washed some of the decay away. Sophie rinsed her hands and
face in the water without touching the basin, but she did not have the courage
to use DRYING POWER. She dried the water with her skirt and then set off to the
next black door.
That one opened onto a flight of rickety wooden stairs, Sophie heard someone
move up there and shut the door hurriedly. It seemed only to lead to a sort of
loft anyway. She hobbled to the next door. By now she was moving quite easily.
She was a hale old woman, as she discovered yesterday.
The third door opened onto a poky backyard with high brick walls. It
contained a big stack of logs, and higgledy-piggledy heaps of what seemed to be
scrap iron, wheels, buckets, metal sheeting, wire, mounded almost to the tops
of the walls. Sophie shut that door too, rather puzzled, because it did not
seem to match the castle at all. There was no castle to be seen above the brick
walls. They ended at the sky. Sophie could only think that this part was the
round side where the invisible wall had stopped her the night before.
She opened the fourth door and it was just a broom cupboard, with two fine
but dusty velvet cloaks hanging on the brooms. Sophie shut it again, slowly.
The only other door was in the wall with the window, and that was the door she
had come in by last night. She hobbled over and cautiously opened that.
She stood for a moment looking out at a slowly moving view of the hills,
watching heather slide past underneath the door, feeling the wind blow her
wispy hair, and listening to the rumble and grind of the big black stones as
the castle moved. Then she shut the door and went to the window. And there was
the seaport town again. It was no picture. A woman had opened a door opposite
and was sweeping dust into the street. Behind that house a grayish canvas sail
was going up a mast in brisk jerks, disturbing a flock of seagulls into flying
round and round against the glimmering sea.
“I don’t understand,” Sophie told the human skull. Then, because the fire
looked almost out, she went and put on a couple of logs and raked away some of
the ash.
Green flames climbed between the logs, small and curly, and shot up into a
long blue face with flaming green hair. “Good morning,” said the fire demon.
“Don’t forget we have a bargain.”
So none of it was dream. Sophie was not much given to crying, but she said
in the chair for quite a while staring at a blurred and sliding fire demon, and
did not pay much attention to the sounds of Michael getting up, until she found
him standing beside her, looking embarrassed and a little exasperated.
“You’re still here,” he said. “Is something the matter?”
Sophie sniffed. “I’m old,” she began.
But it was just as the Witch had said and the fire demon had guessed.
Michael said cheerfully, “Well, it comes to us all in time. Would you like some
breakfast?”
Sophie discovered she was a very hale old woman indeed. After only bread and
cheese at lunchtime yesterday, she was ravenous. “Yes!” she said, and when
Michael went to the closet in the wall, she sprang up and peered over his
shoulder to see what there was to eat.
“I’m afraid there’s only bread and cheese,” Michael said rather stiffly.
“But there’s a whole basket of eggs in there!” Sophie said. “And isn’t that
bacon? What about a hot drink as well? Where’s your kettle?”
“There isn’t one,” Michael said. “Howl’s the only one who can cook.”
“I can cook,” said Sophie. “Unhook that frying pan and I’ll show you.”
She reached for the large black pan hanging on the closet wall, in spite of
Michael trying to prevent her. “You don’t understand,” Michael said. “It’s
Calcifer, the fire demon. He won’t bend down his head to be cooked on for
anyone but Howl.”
Sophie turned and looked at the fire demon. He flickered back at her
wickedly. “I refuse to be exploited,” he said.
“You mean,” Sophie said to Michael, “that you have to do without even a hot
drink unless Howl’s here?” Michael gave an embarrassed nod. “Then you’re
the one that’s being exploited!” said Sophie. “Give that here.” She wrenched the
pan from Michael’s resisting fingers, plonked the bacon into it, popped a handy
wooden spoon into the egg basket, and marched with the lot to the fireplace.
“Now, Calcifer,” she said, “let’s have no more nonsense. Bend down your head.”
“You can’t make me!” crackled the fire demon.
“Oh, yes I can!” Sophie crackled back, with the ferocity that had often
stopped both her sisters in mid-fight. “If you don’t, I shall pour water on
you. Or I shall pick up the tongs and take away both your logs,” she added, as
she got herself creaking onto her knees by the hearth. There she whispered, “Or
I can go back on our bargain, or tell Howl about it, can’t I?”
“Oh, curses!” Calcifer spat. “Why did you let her in here, Michael?” Sulkily
he bent his blue face forward until all that could be seen of him was a ring of
curly green flames dancing on the logs.
“Thank you,” Sophie said, and slapped the heavy pan onto the green ring to
make sure Calcifer did not suddenly rise up again.
“I hope your bacon burns,” Calcifer said, muffled under the pan.
Sophie slapped slices of bacon into the pan. It was good and hot. The bacon
sizzled, and she had to wrap her skirt round her hand to hold the handle. The
door opened, but she did not notice because of the sizzling. “Don’t be silly,”
she told Calcifer. “And hold still because I want to break in the eggs.”
“Oh, hello, Howl,” Michael said helplessly.
Sophie turned round at that, rather hurriedly. She stared. The tall young
fellow in a flamboyant blue-and-silver suit who had just come in stopped in the
act of leaning a guitar in the corner. He brushed the fair hair from his rather
curious glass-green eyes and stared back. His long, angular face was perplexed.
“Who on earth are you?” said Howl. “Where have I seen you before?”
“I am a total stranger,” Sophie lied firmly. After all, Howl had only met
her long enough to call her a mouse before, so it was almost true. She ought to
have been thanking her stars for the lucky escape she’d had then, she supposed,
but in fact her main thought was, Good gracious! Wizard Howl is only a child in
his twenties, for all his wickedness! It made such a difference to be old, she
thought as she turned the bacon over in the pan. And she would have died rather
than let this overdressed boy know she was the girl he had pitied on May Day.
Hearts and souls did not enter into it. Howl was not going to know.
“She says her name’s Sophie,” Michael said. “She came last night.”
“How did she make Calcifer bend down?” said Howl.
“She bullied me!” Calcifer said in a piteous, muffled voice from under the
sizzling pan.
“Not many people can do that,” Howl said thoughtfully. He popped his guitar
in the corner and came over to the hearth. The smell of hyacinths mixed with
the smell of bacon as he shoved Sophie firmly aside. “Calcifer doesn’t like
anyone but me to cook on him,” he said, kneeling down and wrapping one trailing
sleeve round his hand to hold the pan. “Pass me two more slices of bacon and
six eggs please, and tell me why you’ve come here.”
Sophie stared at the blue jewel hanging from Howl’s ear and passed him egg
after egg. “Why I came, young man?” she said. It was obvious after what she had
seen of the castle. “I came because I’m your new cleaning lady, of course.”
“Are you indeed?” Howl said, cracking the eggs one-handed and tossing the
shells among the logs, where Calcifer seemed to be eating them with a lot of
snarling and gobbling. “Who says you are?”
“I do,” said Sophie, and she added piously, “I can clean the dirt from this
place even if I can’t clean you from your wickedness, young man.”
“Howl’s not wicked,” Michael said.
“Yes I am,” Howl contradicted him. “You forget just how wicked I’m being at
the moment, Michael.” He jerked his chin at Sophie. “It you‘re so anxious to be
of use, my good woman, find some knives and forks and clear the bench.”
There were tall stools under the workbench. Michael was pulling them out to
sit on and pushing aside all the things on top of it to make room for some
knives and forks he had taken from the drawer in the side of it. Sophie went to
help him. She had not expected Howl to welcome her, of course, but he had not
even so far agreed to let her stay beyond breakfast. Since Michael did not seem
to need help, Sophie shuffled over to her stick and put it slowly and showily
in the broom cupboard. When that did not seem to attract Howl’s attention, she
said, “You can take me on for a month’s trial, if you like.”
Wizard Howl said nothing but “Plates, please, Michael,” and stood up holding
the smoking pan. Calcifer sprang up with a roar of relief and blazed high in
the chimney.
Sophie made another attempt to pin the Wizard down. “If I’m going to be
cleaning here for the next month,” she said, “I’d like to know where the rest
of the castle is. I can only find this one room and the bathroom.”
To her surprise, both Michael and the Wizard roared with laughter.
It was not until they had almost finished breakfast that Sophie discovered
what made them laugh. Howl was not only hard to pin down. He seemed to dislike
answering any questions at all. Sophie gave up asking him and asked Michael
instead.
“Tell her,” said Howl. ‘It will stop her pestering.”
“There isn’t any more of the castle,” Michael said, “except what you’ve seen
and two bedrooms upstairs.”
“What?” Sophie exclaimed.
Howl and Michael laughed again. “Howl and Calcifer invented the castle,”
Michael explained, “and Calcifer keeps it going. The inside of it is really
just Howl’s old house in Porthaven, which is the only real part.”
“But Porthaven’s miles down near the sea!” Sophie said. “I call that too
bad! What do you mean by having this great, ugly castle rushing about the hills
and frightening everyone in Market Chipping to death?”
Howl shrugged. “What an outspoken old woman you are! I’ve reached that stage
in my career when I need to impress everyone with my power and wickedness. I
can’t have the King thinking well of me. And last year I offended someone very
powerful and I need to keep out of their way.”
It seemed a funny way to avoid someone, but Sophie supposed wizards had
different standards from ordinary people. And she shortly discovered that the
castle had other peculiarities. They had finished eating and Michael was piling
the plates on the slimy sink beside the bench when there came a loud, hollow
knocking at the door.
Calcifer blazed up. “Kingsbury door!”
Howl, who was on his way to the bathroom, went to the door instead. There
was a square wooden knob above the door, set into the lintel, with a dab of
paint on each of its four sides. At that moment, there was a green blob on the
side that was the bottom, but Howl turned the knob around so that it had a red
blob downward before he opened the door.
Outside stood a personage wearing a stiff white wig and a wide hat on top of
that. He was clothed in scarlet and purple and gold, and he held up a little
staff decorated with ribbons like an infant maypole. He bowed. Scents of cloves
and orange blossom blew into the room.
“His Majesty the King presents his compliments and sends payment for two
thousand pair of seven-league boots,” this person said.
Behind him Sophie had glimpses of a coach waiting in a street full of
sumptuous houses covered with painted carvings, and towers and spires and domes
beyond that, of a splendor she had barely before imagined. She was sorry it
took so little time for the person at the door to hand over a long, silken,
chinking purse, and for Howl to take the purse, bow back, and shut the door.
Howl turned the square knob back so that the green blob was downward again and
stowed the long purse in his pocket. Sophie saw Michael’s eyes follow the purse
in an urgent, worried way.
Howl went straight to the bathroom then, calling out, “I need hot water in
here, Calcifer!” and was gone for a long, long time.
Sophie could not restrain her curiosity. “Whoever was that at the door?” she
asked Michael. “Or do I mean wherever ?”
“That door gives on Kingsbury,” Michael said, “where the King lives. I think
that man was the Chancellor’s clerk. And,” he added worriedly to Calcifer, “I
do wish he hadn’t given Howl all that money.”
“Is Howl going to let me stay here?” Sophie asked.
“If he is, you’ll never pin him down,” Michael answered. “He hates being
pinned down to anything.” 5. Which is
far too full of washing.
The only thing to do, Sophie decided, was to show Howl that she was an
excellent cleaning lady, a real treasure. She tied an old rag round her wispy
white hair, she rolled the sleeves up her skinny old arms and wrapped an old
tablecloth from the broom cupboard round her as an apron. It was rather a
relief to think there were only four rooms to clean instead of a whole castle.
She grabbed up a bucket and besom and got to work.
“What are you doing?” cried Michael and Calcifer in a horrified chorus.
“Cleaning up,” Sophie replied firmly. “The place is a disgrace.”
Calcifer said, “It doesn’t need it,” and Michael muttered, “Howl will kick
you out!” but Sophie ignored them both. Dust flew in clouds.
In the midst of it there came another set of thumps at the door. Calcifer
blazed up, calling, “Porthaven door!” and gave a great, sizzling sneeze which
shot purple sparks through the dust clouds.
Michael left the workbench and went to the door. Sophie peered through the
dust she was raising and saw that this time Michael turned the square knob over
the door so that the side with a blue blob of paint on it was downward. Then he
opened the door on the street you saw out of the window.
A small girl stood there. “Please, Mr. Fisher,” she said, “I’ve come for
that spell for me mum.”
“Safety spell for your dad’s boat, wasn’t it?” Michael said. “Won’t be a
moment.” He went back to the bench and measured powder from a jar from the
shelves into a square of paper. While he was doing it, the little girl peered
in at Sophie as curiously as Sophie peered out at her. Michael twisted the
paper round the powder and came back saying, ‘Tell her to sprinkle it right
along the boat. It’ll last out and back, even if there’s a storm.”
The girl took the paper and passed over a coin. “Has the Sorcerer got a
witch working for him too?” she asked.
“No,” said Michael.
“Meaning me?” Sophie called. “Oh, yes, my child. I’m the best and cleanest
witch in Ingary.”
Michael shut the door, looking exasperated. “That will be all around
Porthaven now. Howl may not like that.” He turned the door green-down again.
Sophie cackled to herself a little, quite unrepentant. Probably she had let
the besom she was using put ideas into her head. But it might persuade Howl to
let her stay if everyone thought she was working for him. As a girl, Sophie
would have shriveled with embarrassment at the way she was behaving. As an old
woman, she did not mind what she did or said. She found that a great relief.
She went nosily over as Michael lifted up a stone in the hearth and hid the
little girl’s coin underneath it. “What are you doing?”
“Calcifer and I try to keep a store of money,” Michael said rather guiltily.
“Howl spends every penny we’ve got if we don’t.”
“Feckless spendthrift!” Calcifer crackled. “He’ll spend the King’s money
faster than I burn a log. No sense.”
Sophie sprinkled water from the sink to lay the dust, which made Calcifer
shrink back against the chimney. Then she swept the floor all over again. She
swept her way toward the door in order to have a look at the square knob above
it. The fourth side, which she had not seen used yet, had a blob of black paint
on it. Wondering where that led to, Sophie began briskly sweeping the cobwebs
off the beams. Michael moaned and Calcifer sneezed again.
Howl came out of the bathroom just then in a waft of steamy perfume. He
looked marvelously spruce. Even the silver inlets and embroidery on his suit
seemed to have become brighter. He took one look and backed into the bathroom
again with a blue-and-silver sleeve protecting his head.
“Stop it, woman!” he said. “Leave those poor spiders alone!”
“These cobwebs are a disgrace!” Sophie declared, fetching them down in
bundles.
“Then get them down and leave the spiders,” said Howl.
Probably he had a wicked affinity with spiders, Sophie thought. “They’ll
only make more webs,” she said.
“And kill flies, which is very useful,” said Howl. “Keep that broom still
while I cross my own room, please.”
Sophie leaned on the broom and watched Howl cross the room and pick up his
guitar. As he put his hand on door latch, she said, “If the red blob leads to
Kingsbury and the blue blob goes to Porthaven, where does the black blob take
you?”
“What a nosy old woman you are!” said Howl. “That leads to my private bolt
hole and you are not being told where it is.” He opened the door onto the wide,
moving moorland and the hills.
“When will you be back, Howl?” Michael asked a little despairingly.
Howl pretended not to hear. He said to Sophie, “You’re not to kill a single
spider while I’m away.” And the door slammed behind him. Michael looked
meaningly at Calcifer, and sighed. Calcifer crackled with malicious laughter.
Since nobody explained where Howl had gone, Sophie conceded he was off to
hunt young girls again and got down to work with more righteous vigor than
ever. She did not dare harm any spiders after what Howl had said. So she banged
at the beams with the broom, screaming, “Out, spiders! Out of my way!” Spiders
scrambled for their lives every which way, and webs fell in swathes. Then of
course she had to sweep the floor yet again. After that, she got down on her
knees and scrubbed it.
“I wish you’d stop!” Michael said, sitting on the stairs out of her way.
Calcifer, cowering at the back of the grate, muttered, “I wish I’d never
made that bargain with you now!”
Sophie scrubbed on vigorously. “You’ll be much happier when it’s all nice and
clean,” she said.
“But I’m miserable now !” Michael protested.
Howl did not come back again until late that night. By that time Sophie had
swept and scrubbed herself into a state when she could hardly move. She was
sitting hunched up in the chair, aching all over. Michael took hold of Howl by
a trailing sleeve and towed him over to the bathroom, where Sophie could hear
him pouring out complaints in a passionate mutter. Phrases like “terrible old
biddy” and “won’t listen to a word !” were quite easy to hear, even
though Calcifer was roaring, “Howl, stop her! She’s killing us both!”
But all Howl said, when Michael let go of him, was “Did you kill any
spiders?”
“Of course not!” Sophie snapped. He aches made her irritable. “They look at
me and run for their lives. What are they? All the girls whose hearts you ate?”
Howl laughed. “No. Just simple spiders,” he said and went dreamily away
upstairs.
Michael sighed. He went into the broom cupboard and hunted until he found an
old folding bed, a straw mattress, and some rugs, which he put into the arched
space under the stairs. “You’d better sleep here tonight,” he told Sophie.
“Does that mean Howl’s going to let me stay?” Sophie asked.
“I don’t know!” Michael said irritably. “Howl never commits himself to
anything. I was here six months before he seemed to notice I was living here
and made me his apprentice. I just thought I bed would be better than the
chair.”
“Then thank you very much,” Sophie said gratefully. The bed was indeed more
comfortable than a chair and when Calcifer complained he was hungry in the
night, it was an easy matter for Sophie to creak her way out and give him
another log.
In the days that followed, Sophie cleaned her way remorselessly through the
castle. She really enjoyed herself. Telling herself she was looking for clues,
she washed the window, she cleaned out the oozing sink, and she made Michael
clear everything off the workbench and the shelves so that she could scrub
them. She had everything out of the cupboards and down from the beams and cleaned
those too. The human skull, she fancied, began to look as long suffering as
Michael. It had been moved so often. Then she tacked an old sheet to the beams
nearest the fireplace and forced Calcifer to bend his head down while she swept
the chimney. Calcifer hated that. He crackled with mean laughter when Sophie
discovered that soot had got all over the room and she had to clean it all
again. That was Sophie’s trouble. She was remorseless, but she lacked method.
But there was a method to her remorselessness: she calculated that she could
not clean this thoroughly without sooner or later coming across Howl’s hidden
hoard of girls’ souls, or chewed up hearts-or else something that explained
Calcifer’s contract. Up the chimney, guarded by Calcifer, had struck her as a
good hiding place. But there was nothing there but quantities of soot, which
Sophie stored in bags in the yard. The yard was high on her list of hiding
places.
Every time Howl came in, Michael and Calcifer complained loudly about
Sophie. But Howl did not seem to attend. Not did he seem to notice the
cleanliness. And nor did he notice that the food closet became very well
stocked with cakes and jam and the occasional lettuce.
For, as Michael had prophesied, word had gone round Porthaven. People came
to the door to look at Sophie. They called her Mrs. Witch in Porthaven and
Madam Sorceress in Kingsbury. Though the people who came to the Kingsbury door
were better dressed than those in Porthaven, no one in either place liked to
call on someone so powerful without an excuse. So Sophie was always having to
pause in her work to nod and smile and take in a gift, or to get Michael to put
up a quick spell for someone. Some of the gifts were nice things-pictures,
strings of shells, and useful aprons. Sophie used the aprons daily and hung the
shells and pictures round her cubbyhole under the stairs, which soon began to
look very homelike indeed.
Sophie knew she would miss this when Howl turned her out. She became more
and more afraid that he would. She knew he could not go on ignoring her
forever.
She cleaned the bathroom next. That took her days, because Howl spent so
long in it every day before he went out. As soon as he went, leaving it full of
steam and scented spells, Sophie moved in. “Now we’ll see about that contract!”
she muttered at the bath, but her main target was of course the shelf of
packets, jars, and tubes. She took every one of them down, on the pretext of
scrubbing the shelf, and spent most of the day carefully going through them to
see if the ones labeled SKIN, EYES, and HAIR were in fact pieces of girl. As
far as she could tell, they were all just creams and powders and paint. If they
had once been girls, then Sophie thought Howl had used the tube FOR DECAY on
them and rotted them down the washbasin too thoroughly to recall. But she hoped
they were only cosmetics in the packets.
She put the things back on the shelf and scrubbed. That night, as she sat
aching in the chair, Calcifer grumbled that he had drained one hot spring dry
for her.
“Where are these hot springs?”
Sophie asked. She was curious about everything these days.
“Under the Porthaven Marshes mostly,” Calcifer said. “But if you go on like
this, I’ll have to fetch water from the Waste. When are you going to stop
cleaning and find out how to break my contract?”
“In good time,” said Sophie. “How can I get the terms out of Howl if he’s
never in? Is he always away this much?”
“Only when he’s after a lady,” Calcifer said.
When the bathroom was clean and gleaming, Sophie scrubbed the stairs and the
landing upstairs. Then she moved into Michael’s small front room. Michael, who
by this time seemed to be accepting Sophie gloomily as a sort of natural
disaster, gave a yell of dismay and pounded upstairs to rescue his most
treasured possessions. They were in an old box under his worm-eaten little bed.
As he hurried the box protectively away, Sophie glimpsed a blue ribbon and a
spun-sugar rose in it, on top of what seemed to be letters.
“So Michael has a sweet heart!” she said to herself as she flung the window
open-it opened into the street in Porthaven too-and heaved his bedding across
the sill to air. Considering how nosy she had lately become, Sophie was rather
surprised at herself for not asking Michael who his girl was and how he kept
her safe from Howl.
She swept such quantities of dust and rubbish from Michael’s room that she
nearly swamped Calcifer trying to burn it all.
“You’ll be the death of me! You’re as heartless as Howl!” Calcifer choked.
Only his green hair and a blue piece of his long forehead showed.
Michael put his precious box in the drawer of the workbench and locked the
drawer. “I wish Howl would listen to us!” he said. “Why is this girl taking him
so long?”
The next day Sophie tried to start on the backyard. But it was raining in
Porthaven that day, driving against the window and pattering in the chimney,
making Calcifer hiss with annoyance. The yard was part of the Porthaven house
too, so it was pouring out there when Sophie opened the door. She put her apron
over her head and rummaged a little, and before she got too wet, she found a
bucket of whitewash and a large paintbrush. She took these indoors and set to
work on the walls. She found an old stepladder in the broom cupboard and she
whitewashed the ceiling between the beams too. it rained for the next two days
in Porthaven, though when Howl opened the door with the knob green-blob-down
and stepped out onto the hill, the weather there was sunny, with big cloud
shadows racing over the heather faster than the castle could move. Sophie
whitewashed her cubbyhole, the stairs, the landing, and Michael’s room.
“What’s happened in here?” Howl asked when he came in on the third day. “It
seems much lighter.”
“Sophie,” said Michael in a voice of doom.
“I should have guessed,” Howl said as he disappeared into the bathroom.
“He noticed !” Michael whispered to Calcifer. “The girl must be
giving in at last!”
It was still drizzling in Porthaven the next day. Sophie tied on her
headcloth, rolled up her sleeves, and girdled on her apron. She collected her
besom, her bucket, and her soap, and as soon as Howl was out of the door, she
set off like an elderly avenging angel to clean Howl’s bedroom.
She had left that until last for fear of what she would find. She had not
even dared to peep into it. And that was silly, she thought as she hobbled up
the stairs. By now it was clear that Calcifer did all the strong magic in the
castle and Michael did all the hackwork, while Howl gadded off catching girls
and exploiting the other two just as Fanny had exploited her. Sophie had never
found Howl particularly frightening. Now she felt nothing but contempt.
She arrived on the landing and found Howl standing in the doorway of his
bedroom. He was leaning lazily on one hand, completely blocking her way.
“No you don’t,” he said quite pleasantly. “I want it dirty, thank you.”
Sophie gaped at him. “Where did you come from? I saw you go out.”
“I meant you to,” said Howl. “You’d done your worst with Calcifer and poor
Michael. It stood to reason you’d descend on me today. And whatever Calcifer
told you, I am a wizard, you know. Didn’t you think I could do magic?”
This undermined all Sophie’s assumptions. She would have died rather than
admit it. “Everyone knows you’re a wizard, young man,” she said severely. “But
that doesn’t alter the fact that your castle is the dirtiest place I’ve ever
been in.” she looked into the room past Howl’s dangling blue-and-silver sleeve.
The carpet on the floor was littered like a bird’s nest. She glimpsed peeling
walls and a shelf full of books, some of them very queer-looking. There was no
sign of a pile of gnawed hearts, but those were probably behind or under the
huge fourposter bed. Its hangings were gray-white with dust and they prevented
her from seeing what the window looked out onto.
Howl swung his sleeve in front of her face. “Uh-uh. Don’t be nosy.”
“I’m not being nosy!” Sophie protested. “That room-!”
“Yes, you are nosy,” said Howl. “You’re a dreadfully nosy, horribly
bossy, appallingly clean old woman. Control yourself. You’re victimizing us
all.”
“But it’s a pigsty,” said Sophie. “I can’t help what I am!”
“Yes you can,” said Howl. “And I like my room the way it is. You must admit
I have a right to live in a pigsty if I want. Now go downstairs and think of
something else to do. Please. I hate quarreling with people.”
There was nothing Sophie could do but hobble away with her bucket clanking
by her side. She was a little shaken, and very surprised that Howl had not
thrown her out of the castle on the spot. But since he had not, she thought of
the next thing that needed doing at once. She opened the door beside the
stairs, found the drizzle had almost stopped, and sallied out into the yard,
where she began vigorously sorting through piles of dripping rubbish.
There was a metallic clash! and Howl appeared again, stumbling
slightly, in the middle of the large sheet of rusty iron that Sophie had been
going to move next.
“Not here either,” he said. “You are a terror, aren’t you? Leave this yard
alone. I know just where everything is in it, and I won’t be able to find the
things I need for my transport spells if you tidy them up.”
So there was probably a bundle of souls or a box of chewed up hearts
somewhere out here, Sophie thought. She felt really thwarted. “Tidying up is
what I’m here for!” she shouted at Howl.
“Then you must think of a new meaning for your life,” Howl said. For a
moment it seemed as it he was going to lose his temper too. His strange, pale
eyes all but glared at Sophie. But he controlled himself and said, “Now trot
along indoors, you overactive old thing, and find something else to play with
before I get angry. I hate getting angry.”
Sophie folded her skinny arms. She did not like being glared at by eyes like
glass marbles. “Of course you hate getting angry!” she retorted. “You don’t
like anything unpleasant, do you? You’re a slitherer-outer, that’s what you
are! You slither away from anything you don’t like!”
Howl gave a forced sort of smile. “Well now,” he said. “Now we both know
each other’s faults. Now go back into the house. Go on. Back.” He advanced on
Sophie, waving her toward the door. The sleeve on his waving hand caught the
edge of the rusty metal, jerked, and tore. “Damnation!” said Howl, holding up
the trailing blue-and-silver ends. “Look what you’ve made me do!”
“I can mend it,” Sophie said.
Howl gave her another glassy look. “There you go again,” he said. “How you
must love servitude!” He took his torn sleeve gently between the fingers of his
right hand and pulled it through them. As the blue-and-silver fabric left his
fingers, there was no tear in it at all. “There,” he said. “Understand?”
Sophie hobbled back indoors, rather chastened. Wizards clearly had no need
to work in the ordinary way. Howl had shown her he really was a wizard to be
reckoned with. “Why didn’t he turn me out?” she said, half to herself and half
to Michael.
“It beats me,” said Michael. “But I think he goes by Calcifer. Most people
who come in here either don’t notice Calcifer, or they’re scared stiff of him.” 6. In which
Howl expresses his feelings with green slime.
Howl did not go out that day, nor for the next few days. Sophie sat quietly
in the chair by the hearth, keeping out of his way and thinking. She saw that,
much as Howl deserved it, she had been taking out her feelings on the castle
when she was really angry with the Witch of the Waste. And she was a little
upset at the thought that she was here on false pretenses. Howl might think
Calcifer liked her, but Sophie knew Calcifer had simply seized on a chance to
make a bargain with her. Sophie rather thought she had let Calcifer down.
This state of mind did not last. Sophie discovered a pile of Michael’s
clothes that needed mending. She fetched out thimble, scissors, and thread from
her sewing pocket and set to work. By that evening she was cheerful enough to
join in Calcifer’s silly little song about saucepans.
“Happy in your work?” Howl said sarcastically.
“I need more to do,” Sophie said.
“My old suit needs mending, if you have to feel busy,” said Howl.
This seemed to mean that Howl was no longer annoyed. Sophie was relieved.
She had been almost frightened that morning.
It was clear Howl had not yet caught the girl he was after. Sophie listened
to Michael asking rather obvious questions about it, and Howl slithering neatly
out of answering any of them. “He is a slitherer-outer,” Sophie murmured to a
pair of Michael’s socks. “Can’t face his own wickedness.” She watched Howl
being restlessly busy in order to hide his discontent. That was something
Sophie understood rather well.
At the bench Howl worked a good deal harder and faster than Michael, putting
spells together in an expert but slapdash way. From the look on Michael’s face,
most of the spells were both unusual and hard to do. But Howl would leave a
spell midway and dash up to his bedroom to look after something hidden-and no
doubt sinister-going on up there, and then shortly race out into the yard to
tinker with a large spell out there. Sophie opened the door a crack and was
rather amazed to see the elegant wizard kneeling in the mud with his long
sleeves tied behind his neck to keep them out of the way while he carefully
heaved a tangle of greasy metal into a special framework of some kind.
That spell was for the King. Another overdressed and scented messenger
arrived with a letter and a long, long speech in which he wondered if Howl
could possibly spare time, no doubt invaluably employed in other ways, to bend
his powerful and ingenious mind to a small problem experienced by His Royal
Majesty-to whit, how an army might get its heavy wagons through a marsh and
rough ground. Howl was wonderfully polite and long-winded in reply. He said no.
But the messenger spoke for a further half-hour, at then end of which he and
Howl bowed to one another and Howl agreed to do the spell.
“This is a bit ominous,” Howl said to Michael when the messenger had gone.
“What did Suliman have to get himself lost in the Waste for? The King seems to
think I’ll do instead.”
“He wasn’t as inventive as you, by all accounts,” Michael said.
“I’m too patient and polite,” Howl said gloomily. “I should have overcharged
him even more.”
Howl was equally patient and polite with customers from Porthaven, but, as
Michael anxiously pointed out, the trouble was that Howl did not charge these
people enough. This was after Howl had listened for an hour to the reasons why
a seaman’s wife could not pay him a penny yet, and then promised a sea captain
a wind spell for almost nothing. Howl eluded Michael’s arguments by giving him
a magic lesson.
Sophie sewed buttons on Michael’s shirts and listened to Howl going through
a spell with Michael. “I know I’m slapdash,” he was saying, “but there’s
no need for you to copy me. Always read it right through, carefully, first. The
shape of it should tell you a lot, whether it’s self-fulfilling, or self-discovering,
or simple incantation, or mixed action and speech. When you’ve decided that, go
through again and decide which bits mean what they say and which bits are put
as a puzzle. You’re getting on to more powerful kinds now. You’ll find every
spell of power has at least one deliberate mistake or mystery in it to prevent
accidents. You have to spot those. Now take this spell…”
Listening to Michael’s halting replies to Howl’s questions, and watching
Howl scribble remarks on the paper with a strange, everlasting quill pen,
Sophie realized that she could learn a lot too. It dawned on her that if Martha
could discover the spell to swap herself and Lettie about at Mrs.Fairfax’s,
then she ought to be able to do the same here. With a bit of luck, there might be
no need to rely on Calcifer.
When Howl was satisfied that Michael had forgotten all about how much or how
little he charged people in Porthaven, he took him out into the yard to help
with the King’s spell. Sophie creaked to her feet and hobbled to the bench. The
spell was clear enough, but Howl’s scrawled remarks defeated her. “I’ve never seen
such writing!” she grumbled to the human skull. “Does he use a pen or a poker?”
She sorted eagerly through every scrap of paper on the bench and examined the
powders and liquids in the crooked jars. “Yes, let’s admit it,” she told the
skull. “I snoop. And I have my proper reward. I can find out how to cure fowl
pest and abate whooping cough, raise a wind and remove hairs from the face. If
Martha had found this lot, she’d still be at Mrs. Fairfax’s.”
Howl, it seemed to Sophie, went and examined all the things she had moved
when he came in from the yard. But that seemed to be only restlessness. He
seemed not to know what to do with himself after that. Sophie heard him roving
up and down during the night. He was only an hour in the bathroom the next
morning. He seemed not to be able to contain himself while Michael put on his
best plum velvet suit, ready to go to the Palace in Kingsbury, and the two of
them wrapped the bulky spell up in golden paper. The spell must have been
surprisingly light for its size. Michael could carry it on his own easily, with
both is arms wrapped round it. Howl turned the knob over the door red-down for
him and sent him out into the street among the painted houses.
“They’re expecting it,” Howl said. “You should only have to wait most of the
morning. Tell them a child could work it. Show them. And when you come back,
I’ll have a spell of power for you to get to work on. So long.”
He shut the door and roved around the room again. “My feet itch,” he said
suddenly. “I’m going for a walk on the hills. Tell Michael the spell I promised
him is on the bench. And here’s for you to keep busy with.”
Sophie found a gray-and-scarlet suit, as fancy as the blue-and-silver one,
dropped into her lap from nowhere. Howl meanwhile picked up his guitar from its
corner, turned the doorknob green-down, and stepped out among the scudding
heather above Market Chipping.
“His feet itch!” grumbled Calcifer. There was a fog down in Porthaven.,
Calcifer was low among his logs, moving uneasily this way and that to avoid
drips in the chimney. “How does he think I feel, stuck in a damp grate
like this?”
“Then you’ll have to give me hint at least about how to break you contract,”
Sophie said, shaking out he gray-and-scarlet suit. “Goodness, you’re a fine
suit, even if you a bit worn! Built to pull in the girls, aren’t you?”
“I have given you hint!” Calcifer fizzed.
“Then you’ll have to give it to me again. I didn’t catch it,” Sophie said as
she laid the suit down and hobbled to the door.
“If I give you a hint and tell you it’s a hint, it will be information, and
I’m not allowed to give that,” Calcifer said. “Where are you going?”
“To do something I didn’t dare do until they were both out,” Sophie said.
She twisted the square knob over the door until the black blob pointed
downward. Then she opened the door.
There was nothing outside. It was neither black, nor gray, nor white. It was
not think, or transparent. It did not move. It had no smell and no feel. When
Sophie put a very cautious finger out into it, it was neither hot nor cold. It
felt of nothing. It seemed utterly and completely nothing.
“What is this?” she asked Calcifer.
Calcifer was as interested as Sophie. His blue face was leaning right out of
the grate to see the door. He had forgotten the fog. “I don’t know,” he
whispered. “I only maintain it. All I know is that it’s on the side of the
castle that no one can walk around. It feels quite far away.”
“It feels beyond the moon!” said Sophie. She shut the door and turned the
knob green-downward. She hesitated a minute and then started to hobble to the
stairs.
“He’s locked it,” said Calcifer. “He told me to tell you if you tried to
snoop again.”
“Oh,” said Sophie. “What has he got up there?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Calcifer. “I don’t know anything about upstairs. If you
only knew how frustrating it is! I can’t even really see outside the castle.
Only enough to see what direction I’m going in.”
Sophie, feeling equally frustrated, sat down and began mending the
gray-and-scarlet suit. Michael came in quite soon after that.
“The King saw me at once,” he said. “He-” He looked round the room. His eyes
went to the empty corner where the guitar usually stood. “Oh, no!” he said.
“Not the lady friend again! I thought she’d fallen in love with him and it was
all over days ago. What’s keeping her?”
Calcifer fizzed wickedly. “You got the signs wrong. Heartless Howl is
finding this lady rather tough. He decided to leave her alone for a few days to
see if that would help. That’s all.”
“Bother!” said Michael. “That’s bound to mean trouble. And here I was hoping
Howl was almost sensible again!”
Sophie banged the suit down on her knees. “Really!” she said. “How can you
both talk like that about such utter wickedness! At least, I suppose I can’t
blame Calcifer, since he’s an evil demon. But you, Michael-!”
“I don’t think I’m evil,” Calcifer protested.
“But I’m not calm about it, if that’s what you think!” Michael said. “If you
knew the trouble we’ve had because Howl will keep falling in love like this!
We’ve had lawsuits, and suitors with swords, and mothers with rolling pins, and
fathers and uncles with cudgels. And aunts. Aunts are terrible. They go for you
with hatpins. But the worst is when the girl herself finds out where Howl lives
and turns up at the door, crying an