The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

by Joan Aiken

  “Surely,” says he, “there’s a doctor in the village—Wootten-under-Edge, five miles along. Dr. Hastie—he’s a real good un, he’ll come fast enough.”

  “Where is this place?” says Uncle Fred. “Where should we tell him to come?”

  “He’ll know where it is,” says the old man. “Tell him Darkwoods Farm.”

  Off they went, and the old man came back to where Aunt Sarah was trying to make poor Tessie comfortable. The child was tossing and fretting, whimpering and crying that she felt so ill, her head felt so bad!

  “She’ll take a cup of my tansy tea. That’ll soothe her,” said the old man, and he went to his kitchen and brewed up some green drink in an old blue-and-white jug.

  “Here, Missus,” said he, coming back. “Try her with a little of this.”

  A sip or two did seem to soothe poor Tessie, brung her to herself a bit, and for the first time she opened her eyes and took a look at the old man.

  “Where is this place?” she asked. She was so weak, her voice was no more than a thread.

  “Why, you’re in my house,” said the old man. “And very welcome you are, my dear!”

  “And who are you?” she asked next.

  “Why, lovey, I’m old Tom Moon the shepherd—old Grandfather Moon. I lay you never expected you’d be sleeping in the moon’s house tonight!”

  But at that, Tessie gave one screech, and fainted dead away.

  Well, poor Aunt Sarah was that upset, with trying to bring Tessie round, but she tried to explain to Mr. Moon about Tessie’s trouble, and all her fears, and the cause of her sickness.

  He listened, quiet and thinking, taking it all in.

  Then he went and sat down by Tessie’s bed, gripping hold of her hand.

  She was just coming round by then, she looked at him with big eyes full of fright, as Aunt Sarah kneeled down by her other side.

  “Now, my dearie,” said Mr. Moon. “You know I’m a shepherd, I never hurt a sheep or a lamb in my life. My job is to look after ’em, see? And I’m certainly not a-going to hurt you. So don’t you be frit now—there’s nothing to be frightened of. Not from old Grandfather Moon.”

  But he could see that she was trembling all over.

  “You’ve been scared all your life, haven’t you, child?” said he gently, and she nodded, Yes.

  He studied her then, very close, looked into her eyes, felt her head, and held her hands.

  And he said, “Now, my dearie, I’m not going to tell ye no lies. I’ve never told a lie yet—you can’t be lying to sheep or lambs. Do ye believe that I’m your friend and wish you well?”

  Again she gave a nod, even weaker.

  He said, “Then, Tessie my dear, I have to tell you that you’re a-going to die. And that’s what’s been scaring you all along. But you were wrong to be in such a fret over it, lovey, for there’s naught to be scared of. There’ll be no hurt, there’ll be no pain, it be just like stepping through a door. And I should know,” he said, “for I’ve seen a many, many sheep and lambs be taken off by weakness or the cold. It’s no more than going to sleep in one life and waking up in another. Now do ye believe me, Tessie?”

  Yes, she nodded, with just a hint of a smile, and she turned her eyes to Aunt Sarah, on the other side of the bed.

  And with that, she took and died.

  Some Music for the Wicked Countess

  Mr. Bond was a young man who had just arrived in a small village to take up the post of schoolmaster there. The village was called Castle Kerrig but the curious thing about it was that there was no castle and never had been one. There was a large wood around three-quarters of its circumference which came almost to the door of the schoolmaster’s little house, and beyond that the wild hills and bog stretched for miles.

  There were only ten children needing to be taught; it hardly seemed worth having a school there at all, but without it they would have had to travel forty miles by bus every day, and a schoolmaster was far cheaper than all that gasoline, so Mr. Bond was given the job. It suited him very well, as he did not have to waste too much time in teaching and had plenty left for his collections of birds’ eggs, moths, butterflies, fossils, stones, bones, lizards and flowers, and his piano-playing.

  There was a tinny old piano in the school, and when he and the children were bored by lessons he would play tunes and songs to them for hours at a time while they listened in a dream.

  One day the eldest of the children, Norah, said:

  “Faith, ’tis the way Your Honor should be playing to the Countess up at the Castle for the wonder and beauty of your melodies does be out of this world entirely.”

  “The Castle?” said Mr. Bond curiously. “What castle is that? There’s no castle near here, is there?”

  “Ah, sure, ’tis the Castle in the forest I mean. The Wicked Countess would weep the eyes out of her head to hear the tunes you do be playing.”

  “Castle in the forest?” The schoolmaster was more and more puzzled. “But there’s no castle in the forest—at least it’s not marked on the two and a half-inch map of the district.”

  “Begorrah, and doesn’t Your Honor know that the whole forest is stiff with enchantment, and a leprechaun peeking out of every bush of it, the way you’d be thinking it was nesting time and them after the eggs?”

  “What nonsense, my dear Norah. You really must learn not to come to me with these tales.”

  But all the children gathered around him exclaiming and persuading.

  “Faith, and isn’t it the strangest thing that Your Worship should not be believing in these enchantments, and you playing such beautiful music that the very ravens from the Castle, and the maidens out of the forest are all climbing and fluttering over each other outside the windows to get an earful of it?”

  Mr. Bond shooed them all off rather crossly, saying that school was over for the day and he had no patience with such silliness.

  Next day was the last day of term, and Norah was leaving. Mr. Bond asked her what she was going to do.

  “Going into service up at the Castle. They’re in need of a girl in the kitchen, I’m told, and Mother says ’twill be good experience for me.”

  “But there isn’t any castle,” said Mr. Bond furiously. Was the girl half-witted? She had always seemed bright enough in school.

  “Ah, Your Honor will have your bit of fun. And what else could I do, will you be telling me that?”

  Mr. Bond was forced to agree that there were no other jobs to be had. That afternoon he started out into the forest, determined to search for this mysterious castle and see if there really was some big house tucked away in the trees, but though he walked for miles and miles, and came home thirsty and exhausted long after dusk, not a thing did he see, neither castle, house nor hut, let alone leprechauns peeking out of every bush.

  He ate some bread and cheese in a bad temper and sat down to play it off at his own piano. He played some dances from Purcell’s Fairy Queen, and soon soothed himself into forgetfulness of the children’s provoking behavior. Little did he know that three white faces, framed in long golden hair, were gazing through the window behind his back. When he had finished playing for the night the maidens from the forest turned and went regretfully back to the Castle.

  “Well,” asked the Wicked Countess, “and does he play as well as the village talk has it?”

  “He plays till the ears come down off your head and go waltzing off along the road. Sure there’s none is his equal in the whole wide world at all.”

  “I expect you are exaggerating,” said the Countess sadly. “Still he would be a useful replacement for Bran the Harpist, ever since the fool went and had his head chopped off at the Debatable Ford.”

  She looked crossly over to a corner where a headless harpist was learning to knit, since being unable to read music he c
ould no longer play.

  “We must entice this schoolmaster up to the Castle,” said the Wicked Countess. “’Twill cheer up our dull and lonely life to have a bit of music once again. Ah, that will be the grand day when they have the television broadcast throughout the length and breadth of the country for the entertainment and instruction of us poor sorcerers. I’ve heard they do be having lessons in ballet and basket-making and all sorts of wonderments.”

  “How will you entice him up?” asked one of the maidens.

  “The usual way. I’ll toss out my keys and let it be know that my hand and heart are in waiting for the lucky fellow who is after finding them. Then we’ll give him a draught of fairy wine to lull him to sleep for seven years, and after that he’s ours forever.”

  So the Countess arranged for the message about the keys to be relayed through the village and the keys were left lying in a conspicuous place in the middle of the schoolmaster’s garden path, visible to him but invisible to everyone else. Quite a number of people became very excited at the thought of winning the Wicked Countess’s heart and hand, and the forest was almost as crowded as Epping Forest at Bank Holiday, but the schoolmaster was very preoccupied just at that time with his search for the Scarlet Striped Orchis, which blooms only during the first week in May, and he hardly noticed the commotion.

  He did observe the keys lying on his path, but he knew they did not belong to him, and they came into none of the categories of things that he collected, so he merely kicked them out of the way, and forgot them in the excitement of noticing a rare orange fritillary by his garden gate.

  “The man’s possessed,” exclaimed the Countess in vexation. It was mortifying to have her message so completely ignored, but she did not give up.

  “We’ll try the snake trick—that’ll be after fetching him in, and he interested in all manner of bugs and reptiles, the way it’d be a terrible life for his wife, poor woman.”

  The snake trick was a very old ruse for enticing mortals. One of the maidens of the forest changed herself into a beautiful many-colored snake with ruby eyes and lay in the path of the intended victim, who would be unable to resist picking it up and taking it home. Once inside his house, it would change back into the forest maiden’s form, and the luckless man would be obliged to marry her. She would become more and more exacting, asking for a coat made from rose petals, or cherries in midwinter, until her husband had to go up to the Castle and ask them to supply one of these difficult requirements. Then of course he was in their power.

  “Indeed, why didn’t we try the snake trick before,” said the Countess. “’Twould have fetched him better than any old bit of a bunch of keys.”

  Accordingly, when next Mr. Bond went into the forest, looking for green-glass snails and the salmon-spotted hellebore, he found this beautiful colored snake lying temptingly displayed in a wriggle of black, scarlet, white, and lemon-yellow across his path.

  “Bless my soul,” said Mr. Bond. “That is something unusual. Can it be T. vulgaris peristalsis? I must certainly take it home.”

  He picked up the snake, which dangled unresistingly in his hands, and rushed home with it. All the forest maidens and the ravens leaned out of the high branches, and the leprechauns pried between the stems of the branches to watch him go by. He ran up the garden path, shoved open the front door with his shoulder, and dropped the snake into a jar of brine which was standing ready for specimens on the kitchen table. He was unable to find a picture or description of the snake in any work of reference, and to his annoyance and disappointment the beautiful colors faded after a couple of hours. The Wicked Countess was also very annoyed. One of her forest maidens had been demolished, and she had been foiled again, which was galling to her pride.

  “Maybe we could give him a potion?” suggested one of the maidens.

  “He’s a teetotaler, the creature,” said the Wicked Countess in disgust. “Will you be after telling me how you can administer a potion to a man that will touch neither drop nor dram?”

  “Well, but doesn’t he take in each day the grandest bottle of milk you ever laid eyes on that would make any cow in Kerry sigh with envy at the cream there is on it?”

  “Very well, you can try putting the potion in the milk but ’tis a poor way of instilling a magic draught into a man, I’m thinking, and little good will it do him.”

  Two enthusiastic maidens went to Mr. Bond’s house at cockcrow the following morning and lay in wait for the milkman. As soon as he had left the bottle, they removed the cardboard bottle-top, tipped in the potion (which was a powder in a little envelope), put back the cap, and then hurried back to the Castle to report.

  Unfortunately it was the schoolmaster’s turn to be unwilling host to the village blue tits that morning. Shortly after the maidens had left, forty blue tits descended upon his doorstep, neatly removed the cap once more, and drank every drop of the milk. Mr. Bond was resigned to this happening every eleventh day, and swallowed his morning tea milkless, before setting off to open up the school, as the holiday was now over.

  Up at the Castle the maidens had a difficult time explaining to the Wicked Countess the sudden appearance of forty blue tits who flew in through the window and absolutely refused to be turned out.

  “How are we to get this miserable man up here, will you tell me that?” demanded the Countess. “I’ve lost patience with him entirely.”

  “You could write him a civil note of invitation, the way he’d be in no case to refuse without displaying terrible bad manners?”

  “I never thought of that,” admitted the Countess, and she sat down and penned a little note in her crabbed, runic handwriting, asking the schoolmaster for the pleasure of his company at a musical evening. She entrusted the note to Norah, who was now a kitchen-maid at the Castle, and asked her to give it into Mr. Bond’s own hands. Norah skipped off, much pleased with the commission, and presented the note to Mr. Bond as he sat in morning school.

  “Now isn’t it herself has done you the great honor of requesting your worshipful presence at such a musical junketing and a singing and dancing you’d think it was King Solomon himself entertaining the Queen of Sheba.”

  Mr. Bond scrutinized the letter carefully.

  “Now this is very interesting; the back of this document appears to be part of a version of the Cuchulainn legend written in a very early form of Gaelic. Dear me I must write to the Royal Society about this.”

  He became absorbed in the legend on the back, and clean forgot to read what was on the other side.

  The Countess was very affronted at this, and scolded Norah severely.

  “I’ve no patience with the lot of you at all. I can see I’ll have to be after fetching him myself, the way otherwise we’ll be having no music this side of winter.”

  It was now the middle of May, which is a very dangerous month of enchantment, the worst in the year apart from October.

  The Wicked Countess set out her spies to inform her when Mr. Bond next took an evening walk in the forest. A few days later it was reported that he had set out with a tin of golden syrup and a paintbrush and was busy painting the trunks of the trees. The Countess hastily arrayed herself with all her enchantments and made her way to where he was working. The whole forest hummed with interest and excitement and the leprechauns were jumping up and down in their bushes to such an extent that showers of hawthorn blossoms kept falling down. Mr. Bond noticed nothing at all of this, but he was just able to discern the Wicked Countess with her streaming hair and her beauty. He thought she must be the District Nurse.

  “The top of the evening to you,” she greeted him, “and isn’t it a grand and strange thing you do be doing there, anointing the bark of the trees with syrup as if they were horses and they with the knees broken on them? But perhaps ’tis a compliment you do be after paying me, and it meaning to say that the very trees in my forest are so s
weet they deserve to be iced like cakes.”

  “Good evening,” said Mr. Bond with reserve. “I’m after moths.”

  “And isn’t it a wonderful thing to be pursuing those pitiful brown things when you could be stepping up to the Castle like a civilized creature and passing a musical evening with me and my maidens, the way our hearts and voices would be singing together like a flock of starlings?”

  “Are you the Countess by any chance? I seem to have heard some vague tales about you, but I never thought that you were a real person. I hope you will forgive me if I have been guilty of any impoliteness.”

  “Sure our hearts are warmer than that in this part of the world, and what’s a trifle of an insult between friends. Do you be after strolling up with me this minute for a drop of something to drink and a few notes of music, for they say music be a great healer when there’s hurt feelings in the case, and it smoothing away the sore hearts and wounded spirits.”

  Mr. Bond gathered that he had in some way offended this talkative lady, and his mind went back guiltily to the note Norah had given him, which he had sent off to the Royal Society and forgotten to read.

  He turned and walked with her, and was surprised to notice a gray and vine-wreathed tower standing in a part of the forest where, he would have been ready to swear, there had been nothing before.

  “Walk in this way,” said the Countess holding open a little private gate. “We won’t stand on ceremony between friends.”

  They had to climb half a hundred steps of spiral staircase, but finally emerged in the Wicked Countess’s bower, a dim, rush-strewn room full of maidens, leprechauns, and woodsmoke.

  “Pray be taking a seat,” said the Countess, “the while you do be getting your breath. Fetch a drink for the poor gentleman, one of you,” she commanded the maidens, “he has no more breath in him than a washed sheet, and it clinging together on the line.”