much longer are you going to glorm about in bed, madam? The sun’s up, in case you hadn’t noticed, and witching agencies don’t run themselves. You’re not a pampered princess anymore, you’re one of the downtrodden working class, that’s what you are. So it’s time to rise and shine and think of how we’re going to keep the office door open when we haven’t had a single nibble of a client in over three weeks!”
Of course, nothing was ever perfect…
Melissande sat up, looking for Boris, but he’d let himself out through the open window already. At first she’d worried about him, wandering about in a brand new city, but it seemed Boris was a cat blessed with a multitude of lives. He always came home no matter how creatively Reg insulted him.
“Your hair’s a rat’s-nest, by the way,” the bird added helpfully. “You should sleep with it in a nightcap. I always did.”
“And good morning to you too, Reg,” she muttered, and fell back against her lumpy pillow. “Now go away.”
Reg sniffed. “So much for the royal work ethic. Come along, madam, you’ve got to rally to the cause, you’ve got to spit the world in the eye, you’ve got to hunt us up some clients before I starve to death! You can’t just lie there dreaming about that Markham boy. He’s probably blown himself to smithereens by now anyway.”
Monk, and his unsanctioned, brilliant, mysterious experiments. Heart thumping, Melissande leapt out of bed. “I know you think you’re being funny, Reg, but you might actually be right for once. God alone knows what he’s getting up to in that stupid attic of his. You’ve got to fly over there, quick, and-”
“I’m way ahead of you, ducky,” said Reg, sounding smug. “Great-uncle Throgmorton’s legacy is still standing and that Markham boy is in one piece… but he won’t be for much longer if those old fogies in the Department find out what he’s been up to.”
Chilly in bare feet and a sensible nightdress, Melissande snatched her green flannel dressing gown from the battered bedpost and hauled it on. “What do you mean? What’s he working on?”
Once, Reg would have used the question as an excuse to make pointed remarks about the manifest inadequacies of Madam Rinky Tinky and her correspondence witching course. Since the humiliations of Madam Olliphant’s exclusive Academie of Witchcraft, however, the bird had been mercifully-not to mention uncharacteristically-restrained.
Oddly, the restraint hurt worse than the pointed remarks.
“Well,” said Reg, scratching the back of her head. “It’s a bit hard to say, really. But I’ll tell you this much, ducky: you wouldn’t catch me getting cosy with thaumic generators, etheretic quantifiers and multi-dimensional wavelength gauges. Not all together under the same roof, at any rate.”
Feeling faint, Melissande dropped to the edge of her bed and pulled the dressing gown more tightly round her ribs. “Yes, but you’re not Monk. He’s a thaumaturgical genius.”
“He’s a thaumaturgical genius today,” said Reg, looking down her beak. “By this time tomorrow he could be a nasty stain on the carpet.”
“Oh, Reg.” If there’d been a slipper handy she would’ve thrown it. “Do stop being so melodramatic.”
“Only if you get dressed,” said Reg. “You’ll catch your death sitting about the place half-naked and if you think I’m going to be mopping your fevered brow you’ve sadly misread the situation.”
“Oh, all right,” she groaned, and hunted up some clean tweed trews and a not-too-wrinkled white shirt, her everyday attire of choice. Even in modern Ottosland such a masculine outfit raised eyebrows, but she was loath to abandon it for skirts and dresses. Baggy trousers were comfortable. During her hard-fought campaign to avoid a royal marriage of convenience she’d first grown accustomed to having the shape of her legs more-or-less on show, and then positively attached to the habit of walking fast without tripping over flounces.
And the ruder Reg got about princesses who couldn’t tell if they were Martha or Arthur the more determined she became never to dress like a girl again.
Ignoring the wretched bird’s eloquent stare and heavy sighs, she swapped nightwear for daywear, wrestled her rat’s-nest hair into submission with a brush and tidied it into a long plait. Then she made her way down the four flights of rickety stairs to the outside convenience in the building’s rear courtyard, checked for spiders, twice, washed her hands afterwards under the recalcitrant water pump-Saint Snodgrass, how she missed the palace’s plumbing-and trudged all the way back upstairs to face a breakfast of two cold hard-boiled eggs left over from last night’s supper. Without salt or pepper, because she’d used up the dregs yesterday.
Of course if she’d followed Bibbie’s example and taken a room at Mistress Mossop’s Boarding House for Refined Young Ladies, she’d be eating a hot breakfast in style right about now. Fresh eggs scrambled in butter, juicy fat sausages, toast and marmalade, sweet, creamy coffee…
But she couldn’t do it. Partly because of the money-she was determined not to be a drain on Rupert’s strained royal purse-and partly because she wasn’t certain she could face hordes of Refined Young Ladies, even if one of them was Emmerabiblia Markham… the first real friend of the female persuasion she’d ever made.
Reg didn’t count.
“So, what’s the plan for today, then?” the bird enquired, perched on the bedrail. “Seeing as how we’ve got no clients there’s an awful lot of time to fill between now and sunset.”
Melissande looked up from sweeping bits of eggshell into the bedsit’s tiny rubbish pail. “And you think I need reminding of that yet again because…”
“No point getting snippy with me, ducky,” said Reg, shrugging. “We’re floundering and that’s all there is to it.”
“We are not floundering,” she retorted. “We are experiencing a temporary dearth of clients. It’s not the same thing at all.”
“Well, if you’d just make more of the fact that you’re a princess and your brother’s a king, madam, we’d have so many clients we’d be beating them off with a stick!”
“How many times do I have to say it, Reg?” Melissande demanded, glaring. “I left New Ottosland so I could stop being a princess. I’m not going to-to flaunt myself in Ottish society just so we can-”
Reg rattled her tail feathers. “Flaunt? Flaunt? Who said anything about flaunt? I never said you should flaunt. But you could wear a regal dress and your mother’s tiara, couldn’t you, and let the local snobs draw their own conclusions? Drop them a hint, where’s the harm in that?”
“Oh, Reg!”
“Don’t you Oh, Reg me!” said Reg crossly. “Because you know that I know the piggy bank’s pretty much run out of oink!”
Yes, she knew it. She wished she didn’t. She wished-well, she wished a lot of things. But wishing wouldn’t change the facts. Reg was right, drat her. They were facing dire financial straits, and without some kind of miracle the agency’s doors wouldn’t stay open much longer than another week. Maybe two, if they were lucky.
I don’t understand. It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.
“ It’s one thing for that Markham boy’s sister not to use her family’s connections,” Reg continued, relentless. “She doesn’t turn twenty-one for two more years so they’ve still got some say over what she does. But what’s your excuse? Cutting off all our noses to spite your freckled face, that’s what you’re doing, madam, and I for one don’t approve!”
“Really?” she replied. “I had no idea, Reg. You’ll have to stop being so subtle.” She shoved her hands in her pockets. “Look, I know you think I’m being contrary. I know you’d give anything to get your old life back. You liked being royal, which is fine, but I’m not you. I’m me. And I want to find out who I am. The real me, not the me who’s spent her life being a-a- title. A function. Just one more portrait in a long line of portraits. Is that so unreasonable?”
“Weeeeell…” Reg let out a grudging sigh. “No, I suppose not, when you put it that way.”
“Besides, things will improve around here,” she said. “Every new venture takes a little time to find its feet. It’s not like we haven’t had any clients. We just haven’t had enough. But they’ll come. And in the meantime we’ll just have to economise.”
Reg looked around the tiny room, which had started life as a smaller second office. “Ducky, this place is worse than Gerald’s bedsit in the Wizard’s Club and that’s not something I ever thought I’d hear myself say. The only way you’re going to get more economical is by moving into the outdoors convenience.” She sniffed. “Or you could try tapping that Markham boy on the shoulder. He’s got plenty of empty rooms going spare in that new house of his, I’m sure.”
Melissande turned away so Reg wouldn’t see the tell-tale flush of colour in her cheeks. “Don’t be ridiculous,
