House Perilous, page 5
Perrault knew none of this, and did not sense Queenie’s tension. He launched into a pompous lecture about the traditions of philtre-brewing and other pharmaceutical wonders. Queenie nodded politely, and managed not to correct his information more than three or four times.
Dash, bored with all this philtre talk, spotted a room dedicated to Marvels of Miraculous Machinery, and scampered in that general direction. Flavia followed him, to discover an array of marvellous machines. A wild circus of automata performed for them on high glass plinths: not only acrobats and clowns, but lions, monkeys and one rather fat baby elephant, all constructed from silver, brass, copper and bronze.
No iron or steel, of course, because of the Winter Exhibition’s rules, which meant that Flavia could stand close enough to see the workings of the machines without feeling any physical discomfort. They reminded her powerfully of the work of the Extraordinary and Miraculous Device Brothers. Why, that monkey on the plinth was entirely constructed from silver teaspoons!
These creations were solid and permanent, nothing like the more ramshackle, fall-apart variety of devices that the young men had constructed in the village of Shuttlesworthing. Still, they felt awfully familiar.
While Dash whooped and danced back and forth in front of the performing monkeys, Flavia turned a corner of the gallery and lost her breath altogether.
A walnut tree grew out of the tiles, warm in sculpted bronze. It was bolted to the floor, and it was evident if you stepped close enough that every graceful branch and perfect leaf was made from metal. And yet…
It felt real. One of the miraculous engines was obviously at work at the heart of it, because a long sweep of fragile fronds moved slowly back and forth, catching imaginary breezes.
Silver nuts hung high in the branches, and one golden pear that looked good enough to bite into, just out of reach. “I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear, but a silver nutmeg and a golden pear,” Flavia whispered to herself.
This was ridiculous. She was a fairy, despite never having lived among her own people. There was no possible circumstance under which a man-made construction of a tree could affect her in this way. And yet she felt entirely seduced by the stirring of its branches, the rustle of its leaves. She might be standing on the edge of a river in her mother’s country, inches away from dipping her foot into the cold water…
With a whirring sound, a cavity opened in the tree and a bright silver owl popped out, its beak flaring to hoot the hour. Music began to play, a silly music hall tune. Flavia pressed her hands to her mouth, laughing helplessly.
“Miss Wednesday?” called the distant voice of the Honourable Perrault Gloucester, somewhere in the outer hall. “I say, Miss Wednesday?”
Flavia winced. The thought of Perrault peering at this treasure through his lorgnette and pronouncing it a clever piece of rustic art or something equally banal made her want to scream.
Her eye fell upon the placard beside the extraordinary exhibit. It came as no particular surprise to read the names of ORLANDO AND RINALDO DEVICE, ROYAL ENGINEERS.
This fine example of artificial botany was created for Princess Ygraine on her sixteenth birthday, by commission of her Imperial Majesty, Queen Isolda. Legend has it that our Queen commissioned a small jewellery tree for her daughter’s dressing table. The young royal engineers declared that, given the sheer amount of jewellery owned by the royal family, there was little point to working in miniature.
Flavia laughed again. That sounded like the gentlemen she knew.
The tree’s mechanical boughs danced and weaved gently as the music wound to a close. Flavia reached up to touch a single leaf. Not quite knowing why, she slid the long, pale brown glove from her right arm — the arm made entirely of flowers and grasses and magic, the arm she wove for herself — and pressed her palm against the rough bronze bark of the tree.
For a moment, she felt entirely at peace.
The bronze warmed beneath her hand. The tree shivered. And a single word whispered up out of the leaves, a word that made Flavia’s breath catch and her heart stutter.
“Flaxenseed.”
Not here. Not her.
Quicksilver.
Smooth twigs pricked at Flavia’s wrists. Before she could move away, a branch wrapped itself entirely around her flowered forearm. She felt herself tugged in, and fell bodily against the uneven surface of the trunk. It smelled real. The stickiness of sap and freshness of the leaves filled her lungs. Ridiculous. It was bronze. “Let me go,” she insisted.
“Flaxenseed,” the tree moaned, Quicksilver’s voice reverberating along its branches.
Oh, that voice. She had fallen in love with that voice, before she even touched Quicksilver’s hand, or saw her face. She had heard it in her dreams, had followed it down the winding paths to the Isle of Faerie. Her love, her lady of the greenwood, mocking and merry. Everything Flavia wanted. Everything Flavia wanted to be.
“Please…”
Quicksilver had never said ‘please’ a day in her life before, except perhaps to Tanaquil Gloriana, the Queen who commanded her entire loyalty.
“I am not listening to this.” Flavia struggled against the branches and twigs that held her hard against the cool surface of the bronze tree. She flexed her magic flower hand, summoning what strength she had. “Leave me alone. I am not of her court anymore, I gave you up. Let me go.”
The branches wrapped around her waist, pulling her even more intimately against the tree trunk. Caressing her thighs, her hips, with knotted bronze. She could feel Quicksilver’s leafy breath against her cheek. Quicksilver was the loveliest of the queen’s court, and the sharpest. Her mother’s Hand and Voice.
How Flavia had longed for her to touch her like this, once upon a time. How she had thrilled at every caress of her hand.
Quicksilver hated her now. Flavia knew that from the night on the banks of the lake in the Forest of Arden. Flavia turned against the queen, and Quicksilver broke her arm. There was no love left between them, no softness, not even in the memory of the past.
How we danced.
Quicksilver was always better at pretending to be Flavia’s friend than the others. She had kept it up even after Tanaquil Gloriana no longer demanded it. As Flavia’s dreams about that other world shifted from the innocent play of childhood to something more wild and wanton, Quicksilver was at the centre of her desires.
Flavia’s first kiss was at a Midsummer dance, with a faery lady all masked in apple blossom. It was not Quicksilver’s usual true face of ivy leaves, but Flavia had recognised her hands and her merry eyes. Her kiss had heated Flavia all the way to her toes.
Quicksilver was not hers. Had never been hers. She served one woman with her heart and that was the Queen of Faerie, not her wayward, traitorous daughter.
“Flaxenseed,” Quicksilver whispered now through the tree trunk, teasing her hair with bronze twigs and branches, tugging at the tight braided bun. “It is not too late. You can still free us. Be our champion. Be our treasure.”
“I made my choice,” Flavia said flatly.
“You have driven your mother mad. She will kill us all, trapped here as we are. Help us. Free us from her wrath.”
With a flick of one bronze branch, and then another, Quicksilver stripped Flavia of her other glove. Several buttons rolled free on the floor as the tree dangled the sleeve of brown silk high above her head, then flung it out of reach.
Flavia called upon her own magic. She shoved her bare grass-and-clover arm hard against the bronze trunk and pushed a burst of summer sunshine directly into the metal so as to propel herself away, out of Quicksilver’s grasp. Her flesh arm blushed green, taking on its natural colour. “Leave me alone!” she gasped.
“Miss Wednesday!” she heard Perrault call again, closer than before. By instinct, Flavia shoved her magic back down inside her, returning pink and white to her skin so fast that it burned hot and angry.
The ends of her hair were still tangled in the branches, and she dared not come nearer to release herself. Quicksilver was silent. “In here, my lord!” Flavia cried out. Embarrassing, that she needed to be rescued.
Dash reached her first, his feet pattering across the floor. “What happened, Miss Wednesday?”
“Don’t touch the branches,” Flavia instructed him, not wanting Quicksilver to have access to the boy. “Pass me a glove, quick!”
Dash tossed her one of her brown gloves so that she could slide it over the botanical mess of stalks and flowers that formed her false arm. He asked no questions, which made her think that he remembered more than she had realised, about that night in the Forest of Arden.
“Heavens,” said Perrault, entering the hall a moment later at an unhurried saunter. “Are you quite all right, Miss Wednesday?”
“A bit of a predicament, I’m afraid,” Flavia said, managing a small laugh. “Could you possibly…”
“Why yes, indeed.” She felt his hands touching her hair. “I’m afraid I might have to — oh, dear.” The bone pins she used to keep her coiffure tidy scattered to the ground, ringing on the floorboards.
“It’s fine,” Flavia said. She made herself breathe gently, becoming the calm governess once again. “Please, as quick as you can.” The tree hissed behind her. “Ow!”
“Your hair looks funny,” noted Dash, handing Flavia her other glove. Deftly, he poured the stray buttons into her cupped hand.
“Hush, you,” said Queenie, watching the whole business from a distance. When Flavia glanced up at her, the young lady’s eyes looked knowing.
Perrault freed Flavia’s hair. She moved away from the bronze branch with relief, catching Dash’s hand to pull him with her, to a safe distance beside Queenie. “Thank you, sir,” Flavia said, regaining her composure as best she could.
To her dismay, the young aristocrat was leaning into the bronze tree, his hands pressed carelessly against one of the branches as he examined the trunk. “Such a fine piece,” he muttered to himself. “Extraordinary. Ingenious. One might almost say… miraculous.”
“I do not think you should touch it, sir,” Flavia said, keeping her voice low and calm. She wanted to scream at him to get away, but one did not scream at a peer’s son if one wanted him to listen and follow advice.
She had learned a lot about gentlemen during her time in service.
“Ah, yes,” said Perrault. He stepped smartly back from the tree and pushed his spectacles further up his nose. “If we hurry, we should have time to peruse the clockwork engine exhibit, and the kinescopes, before we stop at the tea rooms.”
“I want a cake!” said Dash. This was his standard interjection, heard several times a day. Right now, it was entirely welcome.
“That sounds like an excellent plan,” said Flavia, tidying her hair as best she could without crawling on the floor to recover her lost pins. She did not want to get close to that tree again for any reason. She tucked the stray buttons into her reticule, and lifted her bosom high. Good posture covers a magnitude of ills, Miss Troughton used to say to the girls of the School of Good Wives and God’s Mercy.
If Quicksilver wanted to go around haunting bronze trees, she could jolly well haunt this one for as long as she liked. By evening, Flavia and the Gloucester children would be back safe in their home, surrounded by the iron-clad lamp posts and railings of London.
As Perrault led the children on through the Crystal Palace, Flavia’s thoughts turned to Rinaldo and Orlando Device. Was it a coincidence that it was their tree that Quicksilver had possessed so readily?
She resigned herself to an afternoon of busy thoughts and sore feet as they perambulated around the many wonders of the Exhibition.
Flavia had escaped Quicksilver, had survived her attack, and proved herself resilient to her old love’s blandishments. That was something to be proud of. Before the afternoon was over, there would be tea and cake.
Things were looking up.
1845 - Anna Russell, the Duchess of Bedford, is credited with the invention of a light meal of cakes and sandwiches alongside a cup of Darjeeling, to cure “a certain sinking feeling” one might suffer in the mid-afternoon.
Titania Raspbridge, A Timeline of High Tea in Britannia (2024)
Chapter 5
In Which a Nursery Tea is Not All That It Seems
The London house had no schoolroom, and so Flavia’s lessons were conducted in the Earl’s library, an elegant room of pomegranate-and-cress wallpaper and green leather chairs.
It was lucky that she had been given free use of this room during the day, as the shelves laden with prettily-matched volumes were more orderly than those at Gloucester Worth, and thefts might be readily apparent.
Indeed, the library was so surprised and pleased to have visitors that its shelves practically tipped useful volumes into Flavia’s arms as she and the children passed by. There were remarkably few works on magic in the collection, certainly nothing as advanced as one might expect from Lady Mortmain’s supposed magical prowess.
Clearly, the enchantress’ real library of practical texts was elsewhere in the house, which explained why this room was so neglected.
On the day after the excursion to the Winter Exhibition, Flavia returned to her usual curriculum, with mixed results. Trying to teach mathematics to Dash on a good day was like trying to teach table manners to a monkey. The first two hours of this particular morning had been exactly like that, as he refused to take any shape other than that of a small gibbon.
Queenie was supposed to be practicing her handwriting by copying a text out on to writing paper, with ink and quill. Flavia had hoped to please her by finding a treatise on the application of culinary science to love philtres (with reference to why such potions were more easily concealed in sugary rather than salty foods). The task held little interest for the young alchemist. Whenever she thought her governess was not looking, Queenie would switch books and read up on the various theories of practical invisibility instead.
Finally Flavia gave in and allowed Dash to draw pictures of his favourite feats of engineering from yesterday’s excursion, on condition that he retain the shape of a human boy for at least an hour.
This allowed her to get on with some study of her own. Back in the library at Gloucester Worth, Flavia had located a thick tome of legends from the Age of Chivalry, and packed it in her clothes trunk to bring along to the London House. Amongst its many tales of hapless knights and sinister enchantresses, there were plentiful references to the Forest of Arden. Nearly every story involved the drinking of a philtre from the wrong enchanted fountain, and the search for another fountain to undo the damage that the first had caused. Not to mention a great deal of non-consensual kissing, marrying and suchlike.
Flavia found herself making notes concerning the philtres natural to the Forest:
Fountain of Love (features in all the stories, is there more than one or is it just conveniently placed?)
Fountain of Love-me-not (antidote to the former)
Fountain of Hate (also surprisingly popular in the tales: enemies-to-lovers is such a popular trope)
Fountain of Truth (less common except when the writer of tales clearly wishes to resolve their story abruptly)
Fountain of Life (surprisingly scanty references, surely this one would be most convenient!)
Fountain of Wisdom (entirely absent from most of these romances)
Fountain of Know-not (not an antidote to Wisdom, though one story suggests that Wisdom can be used as an antidote to Know-not – check this in various sources)
Fountain of Oblivion (terrifying)
Fountain of Youth (not as appealing as one might think, but a solid motivation for villains)
Fountain of Transformation (always with “hilarious” results)
Fountain of Undoing (exceptionally useful! Why is this not in every enchanter’s back pocket?? Surely would be useful when the Love-Me-Not runs out if nothing else)
Fountain of the Water of Worlds (?????)
No wonder that the knights and enchantresses of those stories were all so confused! They were at various times combining up to four philtres simply to function in everyday life.
Flavia now understood why the Forest of Arden had been deemed so dangerous that it was closed off from humanity after the Faerie were exiled to their island.
What did Lady Mortmain want with the Forest’s bounty of magical philtres? Could she have the same motivation as Queenie: a desire to restore the family’s fortune by gaining access to the waters of the Fountain of Love-Me-Not? It seemed unlikely that the answer was that simple — not when there was power to be had from the other fountains as well.
Queenie was not going to forget the promise that Flavia had made on that terrible night, to escort the girl back into the Forest of Arden at the next solstice. The more Flavia read of the Forest’s disreputable history, the more she fretted about the dangers of that journey.
Today, she was so engrossed in her book that she did not notice Perrault entering the library. He leaned against the door frame with a casual indolence that did not match his usual demeanour.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Flavia, jumping slightly. “I did not see you there. Do you require the children, or the library?”
“Neither,” he said with a slow smile. “I want you, Miss Wednesday.” When she did not immediately answer, he crooked his finger.
Reluctantly, Flavia set down her book and informed Queenie and Dash that she would be back shortly. “How can I help you, sir?” she asked politely in the relative privacy of the empty corridor.
Perrault reached out and closed the library door firmly behind her, removing witnesses to their encounter.
His eyes were brighter than usual, and he spoke in a deliberate manner. “I have a message from my sister-in-law, Elspeth.” He was standing far too close. Flavia attempted to slide sideways, and found herself backing into the wall. “Tea.”
“Tea?” Flavia repeated stupidly. Had Perrault’s eyes always been that colour? There was a silver light to them that was strangely mesmerising. The last thing she needed was to be caught gazing into the eyes of the young master of the house like a love-struck parlour maid. She blinked, several times. “But Lady Mortmain pays calls in the mornings.”
