‘Like I said,’ said Jay with a sigh. ‘Blithe recklessness.’
I looked at Mabyn. ‘Would you like to be on better terms with your family again?’
‘What,’ said Mabyn suspiciously, ‘did you have in mind?’
‘If, say, you heard about this Goldnose matter and came here out of concern for the school, that might win back a little favour.’
‘They would only think I was here to make trouble for them.’
‘Which,’ Jay put in, ‘we very possibly are.’
‘Let’s just see how it goes, shall we? Anyone who’s with me, come along.’ I left without waiting for a reply. I knew Jay would follow, and it wasn’t especially important whether Mabyn did or not.
I thought for a moment that she would not, but then I heard her uneven footsteps following along behind Jay’s — the intermittent clip of her one remaining heeled shoe on the stone floor. ‘You’ll never even find the school without me,’ she called.
‘Is it that well-hidden?’
‘It’s more that it’s spread all over Dapplehaven by now, and beyond. It had thirteen different buildings last I knew, and that was some time ago. What you’ll want is the kennels, which used to be on the north-eastern edge of the town.’
‘Lead on,’ said Jay with a courtly half-bow.
Mabyn led us all the way back down the stairs again. Her cousin Doryty lingered still in the hall. ‘And where are you going?’ snapped she when she saw Mabyn.
‘To the school.’ Mabyn spoke firmly. ‘We have come on a matter of some urgency, and I think the school will want to hear of it. Please ask whoever is currently serving as its headmistress to meet us at the kennels.’ She did not await a response, but swept out of the front door with her chin held high.
Doryty scowled, but made no move to stop either Jay or I as we went past.
‘Headmistress?’ Jay wondered. ‘It couldn’t be a headmaster?’
Mabyn did not appear to hear, and marched on up the street oblivious of Jay’s question.
So I hauled out our lovely book. ‘Mauf. Is the Redclover School at Dapplehaven always led by a headmistress?’
‘Typically,’ said Mauf. ‘Spriggan society tends strongly towards the matriarchal.’
‘I knew I liked them,’ I said.
The kennels, happily, had not been moved in the last forty years, though judging from Mabyn’s reaction they had been altered. She led us down myriad curly streets, past a great many houses and little shops (I wanted to investigate some of the latter, but Jay would not let me). The streets were mostly empty, but we passed a few citizens of Dapplehaven here and there — spriggans, mostly, dressed in such a riot of different clothing styles that I could detect no clear pattern. A society with no prevailing fashions? Unusual. We attracted some attention ourselves; I could well believe that they did not often see a couple of humans wandering down their wonky boulevards.
Just where Dapplehaven’s houses thinned and gave way to rocky heathland, there was a cluster of low-roofed buildings arranged around a central courtyard. The sounds of yapping and baying announced the kennels’ presence rather before they came into view; they were obviously still in use.
But Mabyn looked around with a frown, apparently nonplussed.
‘Something the matter?’ said Jay.
‘There used to be a lot… more,’ said Mabyn. ‘Of everything.’
The school had downsized its kennels in recent years, hm? Perhaps things were not going so well for them.
The kennels also appeared oddly deserted, in spite of the noise. We wandered about for a while, peeping into each of the white-walled buildings in turn. There were plenty of beasts there, including a litter of gorhounds just like the one my pup presently resembled, but there were no people.
The pup swiftly proved a handful. Her face had popped up out of the bag the moment the first forlorn yap had reached our ears, and she had ridden like that, ears pricked up and on high alert, until we got within sight of the kennels. After that, nothing would restrain her. I managed to catch her as she swarmed out of the bag, but she writhed like a wild thing in my arms and it was like trying to hold on to a thrashing eel. She bested me with embarrassing ease and hit the floor with a bounce.
Off she went at a run.
She did not seem disposed to go far, so I was not unduly worried. She came back into view from time to time, tearing past with her tail flying behind her, jaws wreathed in a huge puppy grin as she went from kennel to kennel, greeting every single other creature there.
It was the pup who finally found signs of sentient life, in a manner of speaking. I had not seen any sign of her for a few minutes, and Jay and Mabyn and I had gathered into a knot in the central courtyard, deprived of any particular objective for the moment and awaiting the arrival of the headmistress (supposing she chose to answer the summons). The pup suddenly erupted from a nearby kennel, vaulting over the door in a single leap, and dashed towards us, tongue lolling.
The door she had just jumped over slammed open in her wake, and a spriggan came dashing out after her. I could swear we had looked into that same building only a few minutes before, and seen no one, so how we could have missed him I do not know. He came barrelling in our direction, but not because he had the slightest interest in us; all his attention was fixed upon the pup.
He swiftly proved himself an adept handler of puppish creatures, for he stymied all her attempts at evasion, anticipating her movements with remarkable prescience, and intercepted her as she swung around behind Mabyn. He pounced, and scooped, and emerged victorious, with a wriggling and indignant pup captured in his arms.
I took brief note of his posture. Was he holding the pup in some special way? I couldn’t see how, but by one means or another, he was holding her fast where I had completely failed.
‘I am so sorry,’ I said to him, holding out my arms to receive her. ‘Lacking your aptitude with such creatures, I could not persuade her to stay with me. She’s a little over excited by all the company, I’m afraid.’
The spriggan looked up, as though noticing my presence for the first time. His gaze travelled from me to Jay and then to Mabyn, but he betrayed no sign of understanding what I had said.
Mabyn stepped in, to my relief. She spoke to him in a string of incomprehensible words, presumably repeating what I had said, for she gestured once or twice at me.
But the spriggan shook his head, so emphatically that the flat cap he wore almost fell off. He said something in response, with a vehemence I interpreted as excitement. He shook the pup slightly as though to say, look at this! And I noticed that he was shaking.
Mabyn winced, and turned to Jay and me. ‘He asks where you got a Goldnose pup from.’
‘He… he can tell she is not a gorhound?’
‘He says he would know a Goldnose anywhere, whatever disguise they wore.’
Oh dear. I hoped there were not too many people around who could so easily see through our deception. ‘Please tell him that we are here in hopes of discovering an answer to that very question. We do not know where she came from.’
Mabyn relayed this, which seemed to dumbfound the kennel worker. He stood in thought for a moment, a look of total befuddlement on his face. Then, to my mild indignation, he turned around and wandered off in the direction of the kennel he had emerged from.
‘Hey, wait a moment,’ I said. ‘That’s our pup.’
‘He is fetching her some milk,’ said Mabyn. ‘He said a moment ago that she’s too thin, and he thinks you have not taken good care of her.’
‘She’s only been with us a few days!’ I protested. ‘She was starving to death when we found her.’
‘That is hardly surprising,’ said a new, unpromisingly stern voice from somewhere behind me. ‘She needs a special milk, which I do not suppose she has been getting.’
I turned. Behind me stood a woman almost of my own height — a human woman, not a spriggan — and almost of my own age, too, if I judged correctly. She presented an unassuming
appearance, with dark hair drawn into a ponytail and discreet make-up. She wore a deep blue trouser suit with a black blouse. On the lapel of her jacket was a tiny silver pin in the shape of a pegasus.
‘You must be in charge,’ I guessed.
She inclined her head to me. ‘My name is Jenifry Redclover. I am the present headmistress of the school.’
Now that I looked more closely at her, I detected traces of something else in her face that might indicate a mixed ancestry. Slightly overlarge eyes, for one, and an unusually wide mouth. Still, it did not make much sense for her to share a surname with Mabyn, who could scarcely be more different.
‘It is something of an honorific,’ she explained, with a faint, unamused smile. ‘To become the manager of this school is to become a Redclover, if you were not one already.’ I supposed my puzzlement must have shown, which was clumsy of me.
I hastily changed the subject. ‘A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Redclover. May I ask whether the pup came from these kennels?’
‘That is quite impossible. To so blatantly flout all Magickal Accords would result in the school’s permanent closure. It could never be worth the risk, however valuable the Goldnose may be.’
At this point, Mabyn decided to reassert herself. ‘I hope that is the truth,’ she said in a brisk tone. ‘It has come to the attention of the Hidden Ministry of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales that the breed has resurfaced against all prohibitions. No good can come to those responsible, and if the school is involved there is a great deal of trouble brewing.’
‘Hello, Mabyn,’ said Jenifry flatly. ‘How good of you to return.’
10
Mabyn and Jenifry Redclover, the spriggan and the human headmistress, eyed one another with bristling hostility. ‘Must you bring threats?’ said Jenifry. ‘The school has never offered you the smallest harm.’
‘I bring warning, not a threat,’ said Mabyn, though she looked nonplussed. ‘How do you know me? I do not think we have met.’
‘Your portrait still hangs in the heritage gallery.’
Mabyn looked pleased. ‘I thought they would have taken that down by now.’
Jay coughed. ‘You’ve an official portrait?’
‘She is a former headmistress,’ said Jenifry. ‘That makes her a part of our history, whatever her subsequent choices may have been.’
‘I made them for good reason,’ said Mabyn.
Jenifry looked unimpressed. ‘I am sure you did. At any rate, I must get to the bottom of this.’ She straightened her shoulders, and left in the direction of the kennel which had previously swallowed up the man in the flat cap — and our pup.
Mabyn gave a soft sigh. ‘I tried to tell Milady I was the wrong person to send.’
‘Milady knows what she is doing,’ said Jay. ‘I am sure she had her reasons.’
I smiled faintly, remembering the early days of my career at the Society, and the unshakeable faith I, too, had enjoyed in Milady. Not that I doubted her now, as such. But however remarkable she may appear, she was as human as the rest of us somewhere behind the disembodied voice. I hoped Jay was right, and that this time she knew what she was doing.
For myself, I pitied Mabyn. Her job required her to take a hard line against the pup, for the Ministry could no more support the widespread return of the Goldnoses to the world than any of its sister organisations did. But she clearly felt some residual loyalty to her former home, and if she was once the headmistress here… she must have been very dedicated.
‘I am sure we can contain this issue before it has chance to cause much trouble,’ I told her in my most reassuring tone, secretly crossing my fingers in hope that I was to be proved right. ‘Only one pup has been found.’
‘If it came from here, there are more,’ said Mabyn.
I was worried about that possibility, too, though perhaps not for the same reasons. No matter what the laws said, the Goldnoses were innocent of wrongdoing in themselves; it was only in the hands of the wrong person that they had any power to cause harm. Did they not have a right to exist? Was it not our duty to protect and preserve all magickal creatures, as we did with books and artefacts and treasures — even the dangerous ones? A series of laws that had effectively wiped out several entire species did not sit well with me.
This point of view had nothing whatsoever to do with the heartrending cuteness of the pup, I swear. I was totally detached and objective.
Anyway, I was concerned that more pups were out there somewhere, starving to death as our pup’s siblings had done. And they could be anywhere. Anywhere at all. We needed to find the source before any more of them died, and then Jay and I needed to find a way to protect them — with or without Milady’s concurrence. I was fairly sure I could successfully argue that case, but Milady sometimes came down hard on the side of the rules. You never could quite tell which way she would go.
Jenifry Redclover shortly returned, the becapped spriggan with her. I was relieved to see our pup trotting along at their heels, though a bit less pleased to see that the beast had lost her disguise, and was restored to all her gold-furred splendour.
She came straight up to me, and begged to be picked up. I, of course, was delighted to comply.
Mabyn, Jenifry and the kennel worker watched this display of affection in unreadable silence.
Jenifry spoke. ‘Jory is confident that the pup did not come from this school. He also says that it is not — it cannot be — a descendent of the last such beasts that were known to exist before the laws forbidding their procreation.’
I blinked. ‘What? Why not?’
‘Because the horn she bears is out of keeping with that theory. The Goldnose was eventually arrived at through the cross-breeding of a few other species, one of which possessed a horn like the one you see adorning the forehead of your pup. But that feature gradually bred out, and was gone by the time the laws were introduced.’
‘So…’ I did not know what to say first, so many thoughts were churning in my mind.
‘Is she a Goldnose?’ said Jay.
Jory said something emphatic.
‘Yes,’ translated Jenifry. ‘Her capabilities are not in question. But she is a very early example of the breed.’
‘How is that possible?’ I gasped.
Jenifry shook her head. ‘I do not know. Either someone, somewhere, has been attempting to recreate the species by going back to its beginnings, and starting again from scratch, or… or something far stranger is happening. And I suspect the latter, for according to Jory, most of the creatures who were originally cross-bred to arrive at the Goldnose have been extinct for longer than the Goldnose itself.’
I retrieved the book. ‘Mauf,’ I said crisply. ‘Tell us what you know about the Dappledok pups, otherwise known as the Goldnose species. Everything, please, from the beginning.’
Mauf swelled with importance, almost doubling in size. ‘The species commonly known as the Goldnose was primarily the work of one person, a spriggan of the name of Melmidoc Redclover. The idea was conceived in the autumn of 1617, and work swiftly began. The goal was to successfully interbreed a variety of beasts whose collective talents included unusual senses for precious materials of one sort or another, heightened tracking abilities, tenacity, and biddableness. It is noted that the project was completed successfully in a surprisingly short space of time — too short, some said, though no particular theory as to how it was done has ever been presented. Within a few years, the earliest hybrids were being successfully trained to sniff out precious metals and jewels from some distance away.’
‘What did these look like?’ I said. ‘In detail?’
‘These earliest of the Goldnoses had pelts of varying colours, and the diminutive “unicorn” horn.’
‘But this feature faded over time? The horn?’
‘It was felt that the horn was unnecessary, for it served no particular purpose, and it was too distinctive a feature. Subsequent generations were bred selectively to eradicate the horn, though in the process the ran
ge of colours was lost, and they became predominantly goldish yellow.’
‘By when did that happen?’ put in Jay.
‘The last recorded instance of a horned Goldnose was noted in 1624.’
Seven years? Within a mere seven years of the project’s inception, they were already at the stage of making refinements to an otherwise perfect breed? ‘That is far too fast,’ I said, puzzled. ‘Even if the Goldnoses breed unnaturally quickly, surely that is too fast.’
‘Many said so,’ agreed Mauf. ‘In a letter to her sister in 1621 — subsequently published in a volume entitled, “Diverse Correspondence Between Two Sisters” — the Viscountess of Wroxby observed, “Do you Persist in wishing to bring a Goldnose Pup into your household? I am Persuaded you would never know another moment’s peace, being forever deprived of your Jewels &c. And you should consider, that though they may be Fashionable, there is some manner of Mystery surrounding their existence about which I cannot be Easy. I wish you would abandon the notion.” Which, by the by, she did.’
‘Good to know,’ murmured Jay.
Mabyn, who had been trying to find opportunity to speak for a few minutes, now cut in. ‘Yes, that is all very interesting, but what of Melmidoc Redclover? I am certain I have heard that name, but I cannot think how.’
‘Melmidoc Redclover was thrice invited to take up the headmastery of the school, but declined, for he preferred to devote all of his time to his various projects. His was the mind behind five of the eight breeds for which the school became famous.’
‘Perhaps that is how I have heard of him,’ said Mabyn, though she frowned, and her tone was doubtful.
‘He is primarily remembered for his disappearances, however,’ said Mauf blandly.
‘What?’ I said.
‘What?’ Mabyn and Jenifry said at the same time.
The Striding Spire Page 7
