by E. G. Foley
“Is dinner ready yet?”
“Er, almost, sir,” Jake replied on cue.
“Tell Cook to hurry. I have a meeting with the new shipmaster at the docks within the hour.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll go tell her right away.” Ha. Having been given the perfect excuse to enter the kitchen and try to wheedle the cook into giving him a bite to eat, Jake flashed a mischievous smile at Nixie, then headed past her to go relay the message.
“You can’t—Jake! Wait up!”
As Nixie hurried after him, he continued marching toward the kitchen. Passing through the hallway, he glanced at a small painting on the wall and stopped short, startled to find that, in fact, it was not a painting, but a picture-frame window, like the one they had seen in the foxhunt landscape.
This one looked out into a bedchamber in Merlin Hall, and to Jake’s amazement, he saw Constanzio, King of the Tenors, practicing scales.
“La, la, la, la, la, la!” the deep, perfectly modulated voice boomed. “La, la, la, la, LA, la, laaaa!”
The portly, affable ghost was the only person present.
Jake rushed over to the picture-frame window and began banging on it. “Constanzio! Hullo? Signore! In here! Help! Can you hear me?”
Nixie tried to shush Jake as he banged louder on the glass. “What are you doing? There’s nobody there!”
“Yes, there is—a ghost. Hey, Constanzio! Signore!”
“La, la—oh!” Constanzio stopped abruptly, noticing them there at last. At once, a broad smile of surprise broke out across his expressive face. “Why, if it isn’t my young friend, Lord Griffon! Buongiorno, ragazzo! I say, what are you doing in that painting?”
“We’re stuck,” Jake said, then in an aside to Nixie, “Why does he call me ragazzo?”
“It means boy in Italian.”
“Does it? Say, how’d you get so smart?” She just shrugged. Jake returned his attention to Constanzio. “Sir, you have to help us. I need you to go and tell my cousin, Archie Bradford…” Jake’s words faded in mid-sentence as he realized the obvious fault in his logic.
His cousin couldn’t see ghosts. None of his friends could.
“Have the ghost tell Dame Oriel we’re in here,” Nixie suggested, but Jake shook his head.
“I’m already in enough trouble with the Elders as it is.”
“Ha, ha! I knew you were a rascal when I met you.” Constanzio braced his hands on his waist and let out a laugh at this confession. “What did you do, ragazzo?”
“Actually, I didn’t. They accused me of stealing the Queen’s flag off the roof of the palace last night.”
“What?” Nixie exclaimed.
“You didn’t happen to see who took it, did you?” he asked the ghost.
“Last night? Heavens, no! I had a huge performance singing for all the earthbound spirits in St. Petersburg! Another triumph, if I say so myself.”
“Congratulations.”
Constanzio bowed in thanks with a courtly flourish.
“Maybe you could ask some of the other castle ghosts if they saw who took the flag and let me know?” Jake requested, but before Constanzio could answer, a big-framed servant woman carrying an armload of folded towels suddenly stepped around the corner into the hallway and let out a scream when she saw Nixie and Jake.
“Who are you? What are you doing in my master’s house?” she demanded.
Apparently, the old Dutch masters had not set much store in making everyone they painted look beautiful. This one had a face like a shovel.
“Er, we work here,” he said quickly, since the master himself had mistaken him for the kitchen boy or something.
“No, you don’t!” she retorted, then glanced at Nixie. “And neither do you! What are you, intruders?”
“Nothing like that!” they assured her as they began backing away.
“Got to go!” Jake told the ghost.
Constanzio laughed again. “Ciao, ragazzo! Don’t worry, I have every confidence in your ability to get yourself out of any scrape.”
“Grazie,” Jake muttered under his breath, which was about all the Italian he knew.
Since the glaring, wide-shouldered maid was blocking the way to the front door and their route to freedom, they had no choice but to keep backing up toward the kitchen.
“Ma’am, we can explain,” Nixie started.
“Save your breath! Malou, I found these two lurking in the hallway!” the maid hollered to the cook, who was still bustling about the kitchen at the back of the merchant’s house.
The cook turned, kitchen knife in hand, as Jake and Nixie unwillingly retreated into her domain. At once, she looked outraged at their intrusion. “What’s this? Who are you? Burglars?”
“No, ma’am!”
“We’re simply lost, you see,” Nixie attempted, but Jake could not help glancing at the food on the table.
The cook saw him look at it, and her eyes narrowed to angry slashes. She pointed at him with the knife. “Don’t even think about it, you!”
“We’ll be happy to go—but could you spare some food for two poor children?” he suggested.
“Oh, beggars, are you? Humph. You want charity, try the church. Now, shoo, off with you, before I call the constabulary! Pesky little brats!” She hurled a turnip at him, as much to drive him off as to feed him.
As if any beggar kid would be grateful for a raw, stinking turnip.
“Thanks a lot.” Jake smirked as Nixie tugged him out the back door.
The brawny maid tromped after them to glare from the doorway. “And don’t come back!”
Nixie pulled him by his arm through the little, enclosed yard off the back of the merchant’s house. “Let’s go find the next paintbrush before you get us arrested, shall we?”
They pushed through a wooden gate and found themselves in the mews behind the row of houses. Horses munching hay looked out from their stalls as Jake and Nixie hurried down the private alleyway.
Anyone in his right mind hated turnips, but Jake took a tentative bite of this, the only food they had, only to discover that it was made of plaster.
He spit it out in disgust, spewing chalky bits off his tongue. “Ugh! Painted food made for painted people.”
Nixie shook her head, limping fast to keep up with him on her sprained ankle. “Would you quit fooling around?”
“Fooling around?” He wiped off his plaster-powdered mouth with a grimace. “Did it ever occur to you we could starve to death in here? At the very least, we’re going to need water. Archie says people die in three days if they don’t have anything to drink. What are we supposed to drink inside a blasted painting, Nixie? Linseed oil? Turpentine?”
“Now, now. Maybe we’ll end up in a watercolor painting.” She sent him a sly grin.
He was taken aback to see the little witch actually smiling, but he gave her a sardonic look in answer.
At the end of the alley, they reached an ordinary side street. There was no sign of any paintbrush, so they followed the cobbled street down to a bustling thoroughfare that ran alongside the busy canal full of boat traffic.
Nixie gasped, pointing to the nearest bridge. “There!”
Jake saw it at once: a huge paintbrush disguised as one of the beams supporting the bridge over the canal. “I guess we go over that bridge.”
They crossed the street and walked across the bridge, but nothing happened. They were still in seventeenth-century Flanders.
Jake threw up his hands. “What now?”
“Maybe we go under it.”
He snapped his fingers. “Right! Come on, let’s grab a boat.”
They hurried down the quayside steps to the water’s edge, where Nixie was lucky to be in the company of a skilled ex-thief. Jake knew just how to make his theft look casual as he ordered her into one of the rowboats tied up there, then stepped in, sat down, and picked up the oars.
“Hey! You there! Stop!” Some fellow in a neck ruff standing on the street above spotted them and came running. “That’s
my boat!”
But he was too late. Jake was already rowing at top speed for the bridge. It wasn’t far.
“Sorry!” Nixie called back.
“What are you apologizing for? These people aren’t real. Like the turnip.”
“I still don’t want them to catch us!”
“Don’t worry, they won’t,” Jake said grimly, putting more muscle into every stroke.
The yelling man had got the attention of a boat full of rugged fishermen at work out on the water, and they rushed to help apprehend the boat-thieves.
But as soon as Nixie and he glided under the rattling bridge, horses clip-clopping and carriages rumbling overhead, the whole scene disappeared.
As they came out on the other side, Nixie looked back in shock, but noisy, crowded Amsterdam had vanished behind them. Instead of a canal, they were now drifting peacefully down a babbling brook that wound through a sun-dappled forest.
Heart pounding, Jake took a slight break to catch his breath, and then rowed on.
At length, it occurred to him that the woods seemed a little too perfect.
Even Nixie noticed. “It’s so beautiful here.”
Aye, not a leaf out of place. He stared in suspicion at a cuddly bunny rabbit that gazed at them from the side of the stream as they went gliding by. The breeze blew just so; the birds tweeted in harmony; and a golden sunbeam slanted in between the branches like a warm caress.
Whichever artist had created this picture was obviously obsessed with sweet, nearly cloying prettiness.
“Do you think we’ve arrived at the edge of the farm landscape? The one where it’s safe?”
“I don’t know,” he said uneasily, scanning the idyllic forest as he rowed. “Somehow I doubt it. Keep your eyes open.”
“And your ears,” she said suddenly. “Do you hear that?”
Jake stilled the oars and listened intently. Over the merry gurgle of the stream and the chirping of the birds, he heard music in the distance.
Laughter…
Giddy voices of men and women having a grand time, all set to an elegant sonata full of fast, dizzying trills on a harpsichord, paired with a lilting flute.
“Where the deuce are we?” he murmured, even as the boat glided out of the perfect woodland into the outer reaches of a vast formal garden with a palace in the distance.
An ornate fountain sat in the middle, a crown of water jets shooting out around a muscled bronze god driving a chariot pulled by porpoises.
“Oh, Lord,” Nixie said, her lip curling in disdain. “French Baroque. That explains a lot. What on earth are those courtiers doing over there?”
“Oh, I dunno. Just being French?” he jested.
Nixie sent him a sardonic glance. With her gloomy demeanor and somber black clothes, the little witch could not have looked more out of place than in this exquisite land of pretty-pretty-prettiness.
They both stared at the painted adults having their elegant country picnic, mystified by their giddy behavior—not to mention their antique clothes.
Ladies with huge belled pannier skirts, tall white wigs, and dark satin beauty marks glued to their powder-whitened faces pranced around the garden, giggling as they were pursued by amorous gents in jewel-toned frock coats and long, curly wigs, with rouged cheeks and lips.
They were the silliest lot Jake had ever seen.
“At least they don’t look dangerous,” Nixie said at last.
“No, but he does!” Jake pointed at the sky.
A chubby cupid, flapping his stubby wings to stay aloft, zigzagged out from behind a stand of trees, armed and dangerous with his bow and arrows. Fluttering above the heads of the silly courtiers, he laughed maniacally, firing his golden arrows at will.
And it seemed he never missed.
“Blimey, let’s get out of here! I’ll bet you he’s the one causing all the trouble.” Wasting no time, Jake rowed over to the opposite side of the brook, away from the gardens and the courtiers.
“Let’s just hope the paintbrush doorway is on this side,” he muttered, tossing the rowboat’s anchor overboard.
He used the oars to hold the boat steady while Nixie climbed ashore. Placing her weight gingerly on her sprained ankle, she hobbled up onto the grassy bank. Jake jumped out after her. At once, they started hurrying up the dainty path through the woods—but they were not fast enough to escape the roving eyes of the horrible Cupid.
Nixie gasped. “He’s coming!”
“Come on!” Jake cried as the diaper-clad menace swooped after them.
Nixie hung onto his arm for support, but quickly gave up. “Save yourself, I can’t go any faster!”
“Don’t be daft. We can take cover among the trees. Get off the path. This way!”
Cupid buzzed along the path just as they took shelter in the woods. “No one can hide from me forever, mes amis!” he taunted as he nocked another arrow.
They ducked behind a perfectly formed elm tree as the Cupid opened fire.
The first arrow missed, whizzing off among the leaves, but their winged pursuer was undaunted. He drew another out of his quiver and circled back, whistling a love song that sounded slightly sinister.
Jake peered out from behind the tree, his jaw clenched. “Stay behind me,” he said grimly. “I’ll use my telekinesis to knock the arrow aside.”
But Cupid did soon find them, and when Jake stepped out to zap the dart off course, he promptly learned that telekinesis did not have the slightest power to deflect a weapon of this magnitude.
“Ow!”
Nixie gasped; Cupid laughed in triumph and flew away; and Jake looked down in disbelief at the golden arrow sticking out of his thigh.
Immediately, he grasped the shaft to pull it out, but the whole thing crumbled in his hand, dissolving into his leg in a puff of sparkling, golden powder, sifting through his fingers like Gladwin’s fairy dust.
“Where’d it go?”
He stared down at his leg, then looked, aghast, at Nixie. “Uh-oh.”
“Jake?”
Her voice grew distant; her face went fuzzy for a minute. He felt a pleasant buzzing sensation in his head, a tingle down his arms and legs, and a weird warmth glowing in his chest.
Nixie grasped him by the shoulder and shook him. “Answer me! Are you all right? Jake, can you hear me?”
He blinked until her face came back into focus, then he gazed at her, awestruck by her unimaginable beauty. How on earth had he not seen it before?
“What?” she asked in alarm.
A dazed laugh escaped him. He gazed breathlessly at her, marveling, as though he had never seen a girl before.
Nixie furrowed her brow, looking all the more adorable. She had the loveliest dark eyes, like a starry night sky…
She punched him in the arm. “Jake! Can you walk? We have to go.”
“Ahh,” was all he said, mesmerized by her.
“What is wrong with you?” she demanded.
“Nothing. I’ve never been better. I feel…wonderful, Nixie. Nixie…Valentine. Valentine! Hearts and flowers…”
She began backing away, staring at him like he had sprouted two heads. “Come on, then. Let’s get going. We have to find the paintbrush.”
He leaned against the tree, unable to tear his eyes off her. “Maybe we should just stay here and talk. I hardly know anything about you. Do you realize that? We’ve never really talked.”
Nixie stared at him with a sudden grimace of revulsion. “Oh, God.” She rolled her eyes and then started limping away rather indignantly.
“Come back, my love!” Jake called, prancing after her. He could not stop smiling and felt like he was floating.
“Would you be serious, please? This is just repulsive.”
“Please! Tell me more about yourself! I must know everything!”
“Focus, idiot. We have to find the paintbrush door, remember?”
But he just laughed, charmed at how adorable she was when she was annoyed. “I don’t care if you call me an idiot.
I call you an angel.”
“Oh, if only my wand worked,” she muttered, keeping to the path.
“Why do you always wear black, little Valentine? You’d look even more beautiful if you wore some colors. But if you must wear black for your own mysterious reasons, then I shall wear it, too! Always.”
“Would you snap out of it, please? You’re not yourself!”
“I’m not, am I?” he agreed, considering his soaring emotions. “I’ve never felt so happy in all my life, actually. I’m not even hungry anymore! Maybe music really is the food of love. Hmm. Nixie!”
“What?” she retorted when he grasped her wrist.
“Look!” He pointed into the woods. “Let’s go pet those bunny rabbits together! Maybe they’ll let us hold them. They look so soft. Hullo, birdie.” He held out his finger and a bluebird hopped onto it and started tweeting.
Somehow he understood every word.
“Goodbye, little friend!” he called as the bluebird flitted off into the pretty-pretty woods.
Nixie stopped hobbling down the path and turned to him.
In truth, she looked like she wanted to punch him, but instead, she pressed her lips together for a moment, perhaps holding back an exasperated curse word. “Jake.”
He gazed rapturously at her. “Yes, my love?”
# # #
Nixie didn’t know whether to laugh or to scream. But she saw the glazed look in Jake’s blue eyes and the vacant smile on his lips, and knew perfectly well what had happened. It wasn’t his fault, of course, that he was suddenly in love—with love, not with her, though at the moment he couldn’t tell the difference.
Her first-ever suitor waited with bated breath for her to speak.
She almost started to reason with him but then gave up on that idea. There was no point in it, since she was dealing with a boy under a spell.
“If you love me,” she said calmly and slowly, as though she were speaking to either a very young child or a very thick dunce, “you will help me find the paintbrush door. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”
A crestfallen look came over his admittedly handsome face. He was cute, she’d give him that. But she still liked Archie better. “Well, yes,” he said, “but…why do you want to go so soon? I never want to leave this wonderful place.” She jolted when he took both of her hands and held them with an earnest look. “I want to stay here forever, my darling! With you.”
