“Well, this is new!” exclaimed Aunt Margaret. And it was, for a young girl called Tamburlaine had painted it alive only a little while ago. “This whole forest used to be the very edge of the Tattersall Tundra. I always come out here. How alarming for my poor puppies! They’re used to eating nothing but mice and moss. I’ll bet they’ve gotten fat.” She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled.
The small and amiable dog felt personally insulted by this remark, and yelped indignantly. Now, it is far past time for me to tell you the dog’s name, so I shall do it now and the poor beastie will not have to spend any more pages feeling desperately unimportant. Fenris is a very ferocious name for a pug with a curly tail. But September had given it to him out of her book of mythology when he was a pup and he was very proud of it. There—we’ll have no more sad eyes from you, Fenris!
“Oh, Fenny,” said Susan Jane, and picked him up, which he liked much better than sitting down in the mud where he could get stepped on. Owen scratched the pug behind his ears. Both September’s parents tried not to look too agog at the Painted Forest. They had been to New York City. Owen had seen London and Paris. They were not country rubes. They could handle a tree full of thin Italian daggers. They could handle two moons in the sky. And of course, every girl wants to look just as cosmopolitan as her older sister, even when she is thirty-nine years old and her older sister is forty-three. Susan pocketed a few of the daggers off the tree, for she was a practical woman who liked, better than almost anything, to be prepared.
They could even handle Margaret’s puppies—almost.
A team of six hippopotami pulling a grand sled behind them crashed through the brightly colored woods. Yet not a one of them could be called a proper hippo—one was made all of lavender leather with gold stitching, one all of twisted glass and wire, one of hundreds of brass buttons with flowers and anchors stamped on them, one of tarnished silver with a hinge along her back like a scruff of fur, one of deep red cake with white icing, and one that was all over pictures of bones and muscles and diagrams of knee and elbow joints. They bounded toward Margaret and tackled her in a heap, licking her face and making happy, contented hippopotamus noises. The sleigh managed to keep itself out of the mud, but only barely.
“Maggie,” September’s father cried out. “Are they hurting you?”
September’s mother laughed. “Mags always made friends with monsters. Once she found a scorpion hiding in the mailbox and named it Oscar.”
Margaret snuggled all the hippos and kissed their noses. “I do miss Oscar sometimes,” she said, laughing. “But these aren’t monsters. I made them.” Margaret could not help feeling proud that her family could see at last that she was not the barmy old scatterbrain they took her for—though Susan had never really thought that at all. “An old thaumaturge named Thimbleneed taught me how. Thaumaturges change things into other things, by and large. But you can’t make something out of nothing. There aren’t so many laws here, but that’s one. And all I had were the things in my school satchel when the Golden Wind brought me over on his jaguar. I named them all after the most mysterious and forbidden things I knew at the time—the bottles in Papa’s liquor cabinet.” She giggled as though, somehow, she still thought it was a bit naughty. She patted the hippopotamus made of lavender leather. “Vermouth here I made out of my old diary. She’s got a lock on one side, see? I cut all the brass buttons off the wool coat Grandmother sewed for me to make Beefeater, who is such a worrywart! I always come back, love, and I always will. Blackstrap is my glasses—Mama was so angry when she thought I’d lost them! But I could hardly say I’d turned them into a hippo. Old Kentucky is quite the fiercest one of the lot—I conjured her up out of a slice of your seventh birthday cake wrapped up in wax paper. I’d saved it to eat after school. Do you remember my old silver locket? I kept a little painting I’d done of you and me and Mama inside. Well, that’s Schnapps here, with the hinge on her back. And I suppose it’s time to admit I stole Papa’s anatomy book. I was fascinated by it. All the pictures! They looked like black magic to me. And in the end I turned it into my darling Pálinka.”
The hippos seemed enormously pleased to hear their names and even more pleased to see their Margaret. They rumbled and cooed and whined at her, and she rumbled and cooed and whined back, for Margaret was entirely fluent in hippopotamus. They sniffed Susan Jane’s and Owen’s hands and Fenris barked a great deal and in a moment or two they were all packed into her sleigh and ready to be off.
My daughter has been here, Susan Jane thought. My daughter has been here and survived because she is brave and smart. I shall be, too.
“Where are we going?” asked September’s father.
Margaret smiled. “There’s a Derby on. We’re going to Mummery.” She snapped her fingers. “Abracadabra!”
Vermouth, Beefeater, Blackstrap, Old Kentucky, Schnapps, and Pálinka sprang up and dashed out of the forest faster than clouds across the sky.
CHAPTER X