Mr Drake and My Lady Silver

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Hm,’ said the troll. ‘I suppose it were too much to hope that the password would be the same as it were ten year ago.’

  ‘Try some others,’ said Phineas. ‘Did you not say there was some manner of pattern emerging?’

  ‘Aye!’ And Balligumph rattled off a string of strange words, only a few of which Phineas recognised. “Tyllanthine,” he had heard that one before. And again, “Ilsevellian”, as the Grim, Mr. Tibs, had called the woman Phineas knew as Ilsevel.

  He wanted to enquire about this discrepancy with her name, but did not quite dare, for what business was it of his? And Balligumph was busy. “Edironal”, he said, and “Hidenory”, and “Grunewald”, and several other things that whisked by too fast for Phineas to catch.

  At length, he ran out of new words to try, and stopped. The atmosphere remained prosaically inert, and the troll’s face fell in disappointment. ‘Well, dash it,’ he muttered.

  Phineas thought.

  ‘Did Miss Phelps ever specify which gate she meant?’ he asked after a while.

  Balligumph just looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘There are two gates to the castle. This is the main gate, so I assumed it was this one that she meant. But thinking about it, if she lived on Drury Lane and she was out for a stroll, it is probably the rear gate she walked past that evening.’

  ‘What a treasure ye are.’ Balligumph’s face split wide in a grin, and he made an ushering motion. ‘Lead on, my fine guide! I’d be all at sea without yer help.’

  Phineas made haste, for the rain was soaking through his hat. Half-melted snow slushed unpleasantly underfoot as he splashed his way around the castle walls and at last reached its second, smaller gate, which was closed tight against the weather and the world. Perhaps it would not matter that it was.

  ‘Let’s try again,’ said Balligumph, and off he went, rattling through the same long list of words which, presumably, held some form of connection with the two passwords Wodebean had been known to use. But he began at the end first, and went backwards through, to Phineas’s confusion.

  ‘Anthelaena,’ said Phineas, when the troll was not more than halfway finished with his list.

  Then came the lights, and the sounds, and the swirl of energy all in one go. Wisp-lights like the ones Balligumph had summoned at Thieves’ Hollow danced at the edges of his vision; the mellow, haunting tones of distant bells sounded in his ears; and some force he could not name picked him up like a warm summer breeze and swept him off.

  He landed hard upon dry, solid ground. When he opened his eyes, all was golden sunlight, and his chilled, rain-drenched body insensibly relaxed a fraction in the sudden rush of warmth.

  ‘Well,’ he said reflectively. ‘This looks like Summer.’

  ‘Oh my!’ said a light voice from somewhere nearby. ‘Are you quite well, my lord? You should not lie in the road like that, you will be trampled! Do let me help you up.’

  Phineas twisted his head, blinking against the strong light. A short, slight creature bent over him: a pixie, or something of that kind? The features gracing that tiny face were neither feminine nor masculine; Phineas judged the pixie to be a she by virtue of the clothing she wore, a dress that looked woven from thistledown and hung about with flower petals. She wore a hat, too, perched atop her shock of dandelion-yellow hair, though a moment’s scrutiny revealed that it was not a hat so much as an attractively curled ash leaf. ‘Hello,’ Phineas croaked, his throat unaccountably dry. ‘I did not mean to lie down in the road, and will get up in a moment.’ His limbs felt weak and he hurt in a number of places. With a groan, he gritted his teeth and levered himself to a sitting position, and then upright.

  Standing, he towered over his solicitous new friend. This did not appear to trouble her in the slightest, for she smiled cheerily up at him and made a gesture of approval, her small hands weaving in the air. ‘And where do you come from, my lord?’ she enquired, examining his attire with interest.

  ‘I am no lord,’ said Phineas. ‘My name is Drake, and I am a baker. I come from England, but I think that is far away from here.’

  To his surprise, she clapped her hands at that, her face lighting up. ‘A new traveller! It is too long since we had any! And a baker, how perfect. Lantring left us some time ago, and since then I have not had any cake at all.’

  ‘I do not mean to stay,’ Phineas said, as gently as he could, for he felt obscurely guilty at the prospect of disappointing so cheerful a soul. ‘I am here to look for…’ He could not finish the sentence, for two things struck him at once. One, that he did not precisely know what he was here to look for, only that he and Balligumph had resolved upon investigating the truth of Miss Phelps’s story. Was this, too, part of the endless hunt for the elusive Wodebean?

  The other thing was that Balligumph himself was nowhere in evidence. Phineas turned slowly in a full circle to make sure. He saw that he had been deposited in a fine, flourishing meadow of low grass dotted with poppies and cowslip and dandelions; that there was a long, dry dirt road running through it, quite wide, into the middle of which he had fallen; that there were some tall cedar trees on the horizon in one direction, and the glitter of water somewhere upon the other; and that there was no one in sight at all save for himself and the pixie.

  He did not much welcome the prospect of being stranded in this place without Balligumph, especially considering that time appeared so much disordered out here. Would he emerge after a few hours, or a few days, to find a decade gone in England? Or a century? That prospect prompted a strong shudder, and for a moment he could not breathe.

  He could not imagine why Balligumph would be unable to follow him here, nor why the affable troll might choose not to, but that problem being the least pressing of those that now faced him, he put it out of his mind.

  ‘Oh, but no one leaves!’ the pixie was saying cheerily. ‘Leastwise, not many. Will you please make me a cake?’

  ‘You said Lantring left you,’ Phineas reminded her.

  ‘Oh yes, but I meant that he died.’

  Oh. Phineas frowned, disheartened. ‘But there was another who left in more ordinary fashion, for I have met her. Her name is Eleanor Phelps. I think you must know her?’

  The pixie shook her head.

  ‘A human, like me? Not very old, her hair like—’

  ‘We have not had any humans in a long time,’ said the pixie, and seemed to dismiss the subject, for she rattled on. ‘My name is Bix! You must have a name, and you will tell me what it is, won’t you? And then I will take you to Lantring’s old house. It still has the stove and the tables and the rolling-pins and everything! You will be very comfortable there and make us lots of cakes.’

  ‘I have told you my name,’ Phineas reminded her. ‘It is Phineas Drake.’

  ‘You shall be Mister Drake,’ decided Bix. ‘That is the way humans do it, is it not? And it sounds well! Come, Mister! I really want a cake.’

  ‘Bix,’ said Phineas, slightly desperate. ‘If you can help me with something, I will bake you twelve cakes.’

  ‘My favourite ones?’ said Bix instantly, her eyes narrowing.

  Phineas blinked. ‘Er, yes. What are your favourite ones?’

  ‘Sun cakes, with a honey core, and plumberries.’

  ‘I do not know that recipe.’

  ‘Lantring has it. Come on.’ Bix grabbed him by the arm and hauled.

  Phineas trailed helplessly after her. ‘Do not you want to know what you are to help me with?’

  ‘I am sure whatever it is will be easy!’ she said gaily, and set off at a trot.

  ‘I need to find a chest!’ Phineas persevered. ‘One large enough for a human like me to get into.’

  Bix fell to laughing. ‘I told you it would be easy!’ she crowed. ‘Why, there are chests like that everywhere!’

  There was one in Lantring’s house, Phineas soon discovered, and as Bix had promised it was plenty large enough for him to get into if he wanted. It was a heavy pine wood contraption, as long as he was tall
, and about four feet high. He hauled up the lid at once and stepped in, discreetly crossing his fingers.

  Nothing happened.

  With a sigh, he replaced the lid. Would he have to search every house for the one Miss Phelps had vanished into? Would it help, if he did? For she had not been unaided; perhaps it had been some action of Wodebean’s that had made a simple chest into a means of escape, and he could dance in and out of wooden boxes all day long if he chose, without securing anything like the same result.

  He had relied too much on Balligumph, he now saw. Assuming that the troll would go wherever he went, and that he would be carrying some solution to every conceivable problem in one or another of his deep pockets, Phineas had not carefully enough considered the trouble he might be in were he to succeed in following in Miss Phelps’ footsteps. Now he was in trouble indeed, for if time swirled about oddly in this endless summer, he could discern nothing that would indicate the fact, or serve to warn him how much of it was passing elsewhere. The place — Summer’s Hollow, Bix called it — had an air of sleepy timelessness about it, as though it were too lazy to move through time the way everything else did and simply lay comfortably inert.

  All he had to help him was Bix, a flighty pixie who was fixated upon cake and who forgot half of the things he said the moment the words left his lips.

  So be it, then.

  ‘Bix,’ he said, as they explored Lantring’s house. ‘Let’s play a game.’ The house could have been situated anywhere in England, for it was a timber-framed building with whitewashed walls, low ceilings, crooked doorways, uneven floors and every other feature of a cottage a few hundred years old. It was equipped as a bakery, with every convenience Phineas might require to produce a fine batch of cakes — save that the stove was, perhaps, a few decades out of date. No matter. It would serve. ‘I will make you one cake for every chest you find and explore for me,’ he offered. ‘I am looking for one that will serve as a way out of Summer’s Hollow.’

  ‘But they are all ways out of the Hollow,’ said she plaintively.

  Phineas, bent over the stove in the neat, cool kitchen, straightened to look at her. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘We put flowers in them,’ she explained. ‘And they go away somewhere.’

  ‘Flowers?’ His thoughts rushed at once to the inexplicably fresh rose that Wodebean had dropped. He had wondered as to its source. Where was it? He had left it in the pocket of his coat, which (being too warm in this climate) now hung on a peg by the door. He hurried to retrieve it, and showed it to Bix. ‘Like this one?’

  The pixie examined it doubtfully. ‘It looks like one of ours, though it did not look like that when it was sent away.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Phineas, tucking it into the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘It has been a bit altered.’ He thought. ‘Does nothing else go away, when you put it in the chest?’

  ‘The cakes did.’ Bix pointed a finger at Lantring’s pine chest. ‘He piled them all into there — or not all, because some were for us! — and they went. And other times things appear, like food. Not cake, though I wish it would. And clothes, though not this dress because I made it.’ She plucked at the wispy skirt of her little gown. ‘I put others like it in the chests and they go, too, but when I put in a stone I found near the lake it just sat there.’

  Phineas thought fast. The chests, then, were obviously enchanted to take or deliver, but only specific things. ‘Where do the flowers go to?’ he tried.

  Bix shrugged. ‘Nobody knows.’

  To wherever Wodebean was, perhaps? The notion did not seem so very far-fetched. And according to the testimony of Miss Phelps, Wodebean could occasionally be counted on to assist a person wrongly stranded in the Hollows. Did not he, Phineas, count as such? He had not been brought there by design.

  Then of course, there was the theory he had been developing with Balligumph: that Wodebean, unlikely as it may seem, was a staunch supporter of the deposed royals of Aylfenhame. Phineas could not count himself among their number, being largely unacquainted with the whole affair; but he was a staunch ally to Ilsevel, or Ilsevellian, or My Lady Silver, or whatever she was pleased to call herself. His mind shied away from connecting her too closely with the concept of royalty; what had she been doing wasting her time on him, if she were a woman of such dizzyingly high status? But none of that mattered. If he considered himself her friend, and he did, then he and Wodebean might just have something in common.

  He must get Wodebean’s attention.

  ‘Those cakes of yours, Bix,’ he said. ‘Your favourites. What were they again?’

  ‘Jellied cakes!’ she answered promptly, her eyes shining. ‘Chocolate pond cakes! And the ones with the sugared bells!’

  ‘Sun cakes, was it not?’ prompted Phineas.

  ‘Oh yes, I like those too.’

  ‘With honey cores, and… berries?’

  Bix’s whole face suffused with ecstasy. ‘Plumberries,’ she said in tones of hushed reverence.

  ‘Is that not what Lantring used to make?’

  ‘His Speciality.’ Bix nodded solemnly.

  ‘Good.’ Phineas found a plain cotton apron hanging on a hook near the stove, and put it on. ‘Find me the recipe, Bix,’ he instructed. ‘And some plumberries, and you shall have your cakes.’

  ‘How many?’ Her small face had gone business-like again, all traces of rapture gone from her suddenly steely voice.

  Phineas eyed her. ‘How many do you want?’

  ‘As many as I can eat.’

  ‘Oh? In how many minutes?’

  She crossed her arms huffily. ‘In an hour.’

  ‘I do not have an hour. Five minutes.’

  ‘Five! An outrage, Mister Drake! Half of an hour.’

  Phineas began ostentatiously measuring flour into a bowl, out of the stoneware bins he found lined up beneath the main table. ‘Seven minutes,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Fifteen!’

  ‘Eight.’

  Bix stamped her foot. ‘I do not like you at all, and I will not help you!’

  ‘Then you will not get any cake.’

  She whimpered, a sound of pure agony, and wilted like a flower. ‘Nine?’ she said hopefully.

  Phineas smiled down at her. ‘Nine it shall be. Are you a very fast eater?’

  ‘Extremely,’ she said stoutly, and the look of determination on her pale features convinced Phineas that she meant it.

  He doubled the quantity of flour.

  Never had he baked so peculiar a recipe, Phineas thought an hour or so later, when the cakes were almost ready to remove from the stove. When Bix had spoken of “sun cakes”, he had thought she was using a figure of speech, or that perhaps it was a whimsical name she had come up with all by herself. He expected bright, sunny-looking cakes, turned yellow by some clever ingredient, or an excess of butter. Instead, he had mixed honey into the batter by the ladleful, and then — to his astonishment — she had instructed him to set the bowls of batter in the window, directly in the strongest shafts of sunlight.

  And they had soaked up the sunshine, like a dry cloth absorbing water. Under Phineas’s amazed eyes, the cake mix had turned steadily brighter and more golden, until the batter itself began to emit a faint, sunny glow.

  ‘Done!’ Bix had then announced, reigning over the departed Lantring’s recipe book like a tiny tyrant, and Phineas had then to dollop the cake-dough into his predecessor’s tins as quickly as he could, adding a generous spoonful of honey to the centre of each. The plumberries proved to be aptly named: they looked like miniature plums, though when Phineas ate a few he found them to be somehow sweeter and also tarter than any plum he had ever eaten.

  When he, hands wrapped thickly in cotton, extracted the cakes from the heat and laid the trays on the table, Bix actually climbed the table-leg in her haste to get at them, and had to be bodily held back. ‘They are very hot!’ Phineas warned her.

  ‘I do not care!’ panted Bix, and did her best to swarm out of his grip.

  ‘You
will when your mouth is burned,’ said Phineas, not in the least bit discomposed by the wildly writhing pixie he barely managed to restrain.

  ‘My nine minutes hasn’t started yet, has it?’ Bix looked up at him with huge, anxious eyes.

  He shook his head. ‘It begins when you eat your first mouthful.’

  Bix sat down heavily, and laid her head against Phineas’s leg. ‘Shall I have to wait long?’

  ‘No. Only a few minutes. How long has Lantring been gone, Bix?’

  ‘Oh, ages and ages!’ she said, surprising Phineas not at all considering her extreme fervour for the cakes.

  If Eleanor Phelps had spent a month here and returned to find more than ten years had passed in England, how long might “ages and ages” seem like to the outside world? Even making allowances for the natural exaggeration (and imperfect grasp of details) of a being like Bix, Lantring must have been gone for rather more than a month of Hollows-time. He hoped, then, that the sudden appearance of anything at all in Lantring’s long-abandoned chest would attract the notice of Wodebean; the more so if it were Lantring’s own speciality.

  He curbed his impatience for a little while longer, for he would not see Bix harmed, however great his need for escape. When he judged the cakes cool enough to touch, he carefully extracted a few.

  Bix’s eyes lit up.

  ‘These are not for you,’ he said mildly, and carried them over to the chest. He dropped one in, half expecting that it would hit the solid wooden panel at the bottom with an unlovely splat, and disintegrate.

  Instead, to his delight, it vanished almost as soon as it left his fingers.

  He dropped three more, and stepped back. If that would not get Wodebean’s attention, no amount of cake ever would.

  ‘Right,’ he said, turning back to Bix. ‘Are you ready?’

  She bared sharp teeth at him in a feral grin. ‘I am ready,’ she growled.

  Phineas began to transfer cakes from the trays to the large plate he had already set before Bix. ‘Then I charge you to… begin!’