that she had crying need of a bathroom. This tended to happen to her when she had been absorbed in reading. She sprang up, squeezing her knees together, and then realized that a bathroom was a place she had still not found.
“Oh, how do I find the bathroom from here?” she cried out.
Reassuringly, Great-Uncle William’s kind, frail voice spoke out of the air at once. “Turn left in the passage, my dear, and the bathroom is the first door on the right.”
“Thank you!” Charmain gasped, and ran.
Chapter Three
I N WHICH C HARMAIN WORKS SEVERAL SPELLS AT ONCE
The bathroom was as reassuring as Great-Uncle William’s kindly voice. It had a worn greenstone floor and a little window, at which fluttered a green net curtain. And it had all the fitments Charmain knew from home. And home has nothing but the best, she thought. Better still, it had taps and the toilet flushed. True, the bath and the taps were strange, slightly bulbous shapes, as if the person who installed them had not been quite sure what he or she was aiming at; but the taps, when Charmain experimentally turned them on, ran cold and hotwater, just as they were supposed to, and there were warm towels on a rail under the mirror.
Perhaps I can put one of those laundry bags in the bath, Charmain mused. How would I squeeze it dry?
Across the corridor from the bathroom was a row of doors, stretching away into dim distance. Charmain went to the nearest one and pushed it open, expecting it to lead to the living room. But there was a small bedroom beyond it instead, obviously Great-Uncle William’s, to judge by the mess. The white covers trailed off the unmade bed, almost on top of several stripey nightshirts scattered over the floor. Shirts dangled out of drawers, along with socks and what looked like long underclothes, and the open cupboard held a musty-smelling uniform of some kind. Under the window were two more sacks stuffed full of laundry.
Charmain groaned aloud. “I suppose he’s been ill for quite a time,” she said, trying to be charitable. “But, mother-of-pearl, why do I have to deal with it all?”
The bed started twitching.
Charmain jumped round to face it. The twitching was Waif, curled up comfortably in the mound of bedclothes, scratching for a flea. When he saw Charmain looking at him, he wagged his flimsy tail and groveled, lowered his frayed ears, and whispered a pleading whine at her.
“You’re not supposed to be there, are you?” she said to him. “All right. I can see you’re comfortable—and I’m blowed if I’m sleeping in that bed anyway.”
She marched out of the room and opened the next door along. To her relief, there was another bedroom there almost identical with Great-Uncle William’s, except that this one was tidy. The bed was clean and neatly made, the cupboard was shut, and when she looked, she found the drawers were empty. Charmain nodded approval at the room and opened the next door along the corridor. There was another neat bedroom there, and beyond that another, each one exactly the same.
I’d better throw my things around the one that’smine, or I’ll never find it again, she thought.
She turned back into the corridor to find that Waif had come off the bed and was now scratching at the bathroom door with both front paws. “You won’t want to go in there,” Charmain told him. “None of it’s any use to you.”
But the door came open somehow before Charmain got to it. Beyond it was the kitchen. Waif trotted jauntily in there and Charmain groaned again. The mess had not gone away. There were the dirty crockery and the laundry bags, with the addition now of a teapot lying in a pool of tea, Charmain’s clothes in a heap near the table, and a large green bar of soap in the fireplace.
“I’d forgotten all this,” Charmain said.
Waif put both tiny front paws on the bottom rung of the chair and raised himself to his full small length, pleadingly.
“You’re hungry again,” Charmain diagnosed. “So