“Eloped, has she?” said the patriarch.
“We think she’s been kidnapped,” said Chantel, curtseying to cover the rudeness of contradicting him.
The patriarch ignored her. “What did this mysterious stranger, so called, look like?”
Chantel did her best to translate Bowser’s odd description into something sensible. Bowser dutifully repeated Chantel’s description so that the patriarch could hear it. The effect of this was alarming. Sir Wolfgang’s eyebrows shot up, and then they dove down into a deep V shape. His jaw clenched and he leaned forward across his desk.
“Did he say who had sent him?”
“No,” said Bowser.
“Did he make any signs?”
“I . . . I don’t think so.”
“Did he leave any marks or ciphers on the house? On the doorjamb, on the step?”
“Um, I didn’t see any,” said Bowser.
“I’ll send searchers to look for signs,” said the patriarch. “There may be magic involved. Now run along. I have important things to do.”
“But what about the”—desperation made Chantel use the terrible word—“money?”
“What about the money?” Bowser repeated.
“Money is not for the likes of you,” said Sir Wolfgang. “You’ll be looked after. I’ll send someone. Now be off.”
“Are you going to send another sorceress to look after the school?”
“No,” said the patriarch. “The other sorceresses are busy. Now, go!”
So the three of them had no choice but to retreat.
“Put him in a wretched mood, have you?” asked the clerk.
“Yes, sir,” said Chantel. “Thank you for letting us in.”
“No no, thank you,” said the clerk, nodding them out. “Come back any time. My name is Less.”
They climbed back through the winding streets between the leaning buildings in the twilight. They took a detour through the gardenlands, where vegetables, vineyards and orchards grew in terraced green beds that scaled the south side of the mountain.
Then they climbed Fate’s Turning, and returned to the school, no better off than when they started.
In fact, they had only made things worse.
The patriarch did send someone. He sent a number of someones. First he sent quick-eyed men with magnifying glasses to search the steps and the bricks and the door for marks and ciphers. Then he sent swift-fingered men with crowbars and hammers, who searched the school thoroughly, tearing into the walls and ripping up the floorboards. Miss Flivvers gathered all of the girls into the upstairs classroom and set them all to reciting frantically. The more the school was pulled to pieces around them, the more loudly Miss Flivvers, rigid with terror, made them recite. They recited the 29 reasons to say excuse me, and the 19 best forms of apology, and the 174 reasons to be grateful for the way things are, and the 423 situations in which a magical maiden must never find herself.
“If I ran the school—” Anna muttered in between recitations.
The only people who didn’t have to recite were Frenetica and Bowser, who were doing their best to defend the kitchen as cauldrons were banged with hammers and drawers were split open to see if they had false bottoms.
Oh, the men were searching for something, all right.
Meanwhile the patriarch, instead of sending money, sent a manageress.
The manageress was named Mrs. Warthall, and the first thing she did was to go down to Mr. Whelk’s store and place new orders. Not very nice orders. Meals had never exactly been grand at Miss Ellicott’s School, but since Chantel didn’t know anything about grand meals she had been happy enough with them. Now they were largely composed of gruel and offal, or as Chantel called it in her head, Cruel and Awful.
Mrs. Warthall didn’t believe in schooling, not having had any herself, and so she put the girls and Miss Flivvers to work cleaning instead. In practice this actually meant using adhesion spells to stick the school back together, as best they could, after the searchers’ depredations.
But, Chantel kept wondering, what had they been searching for?
4
IN SEARCH OF SORCERESSES
Chantel was helping Bowser with his work. She very much wished she could help him scrub potatoes, as she had in the past. But there were no potatoes. Or rather, there was just one potato, every night, baked for Mrs. Warthall, and served with a pat of butter. The smell of it was very hard to bear when you were eating watery gruel or a scrambled mess of boiled animal organs.
Chantel was cleaning the kitchen fireplace. Mrs. Warthall said that it should never show a speck of soot, inside or out. This was rather a tall order for a fireplace. But Mrs. Warthall would run her handkerchief along the inside, and if it came away black, or even gray, Bowser would be beaten and miss dinner.
Mrs. Warthall had also told Bowser to scrub all the other fireplaces in the school, which meant he didn’t have time to scrub this one.
So Chantel scrubbed.
Meanwhile, she could hear Mrs. Warthall talking to her friend Mrs. Snickens out in the hall.
“It’s only until they find the spells, and the gentlemen figure out how to do them,” Mrs. Warthall was saying. “After that the school will be closed.”
Chantel froze and listened.
Mrs. Snickens said something. Chantel couldn’t make out the words.
“Oh, no, men can’t generally do magic,” said Mrs. Warthall. “But I figure that’s because they hain’t tried. After all, if women can be magicians, it stands to reason men can be better ones.”
Mrs. Snickens asked something.
“Because the children themselves might know something,” said Mrs. Warthall. “I don’t know what—they’re as silly a bunch of misses as you ever did see. But they may have overheard something.”
Mrs. Snickens said something else, a soft insinuating murmur.
“I think it’s just so those sorceresses don’t suspect anything,” said Mrs. Warthall. “This pack of brats can’t know much that the great patriarchs themselves don’t know, can they? But as long as the school stays here, no one will suspect—”
The other woman interrupted, said something, and chuckled.
“The children will be sold to the factories, of course,” said Mrs. Warthall. “Once the foremen beat some sense into them, they may be worth something.”
A query from Mrs. Snickens.
“Oh, I won’t have the selling of them,” said Mrs. Warthall. “Still—”
She stopped suddenly, as if she’d noticed the silence in the kitchen. Chantel began scrubbing frantically, just as Mrs. Warthall surged into the room, wielding a ladle. Chantel ducked into the fireplace as the ladle caught her a clanging blow.
“So you’re spying on me, are you?” Mrs. Warthall stood before the fireplace, hands on hips. “Heard what I said? So what if I do sell you? You’re going to be sold anyway. You belong in some respectable establishment where you can be given enough work to keep you out of trouble.”