Cold Days at Castle Drax (Paperback)

In a land far from anywhere you know, in a town by an emerald sea, atop a cliff overlooking prismatic green waves, there’s a castle looming. A dark and stormy castle, thoroughly forbidding, which is unfortunate: for among the crumbling parapets and grime-ridden spires, a hand-lettered sign reads: FOR SALE (Enquiries: Percy and Bell, Estate Agents).

‘You have set it far too high up,’ said Miss Luna Vexx to her father, the Count. ‘No one will see it. Ask Fane to bring it down.’

‘Nonsense,’ answered Count Vexx, waving this off. ‘Fane has enough to do.’ This was true, the old manservant being a prominent part of a much-reduced household staff, in these straitened times.

‘Then I shall fetch it down myself,’ decided the damsel, and rose from her threadbare seat before the pleasingly blazing hearth. The flames were as cold as the sea, and at least as green, which rather compromised its comforts; but the effect, Lulu considered, was delightful. The light flickered off the black marble floor most attractively.

‘It is fine where it is,’ the Count drawled, slumped and idle in the familiar embrace of a chair he’d favoured for a century at least (and it showed). ‘It’s jaunty. Like a flag.’

Lulu frowned down at her feet. They were bare; she’d forgotten shoes, again. It only now occurred to her to notice the penetrating cold. ‘You do want to sell Castle Drax, I suppose?’

‘Of course!’

‘Well! You never will, if nobody knows it is for sale.’

Count Vexx waved this off, too. ‘They know.’

* * *

It is possible no one intended for the place to be so lugubrious. The town above which it loomed, Andirac, offered several advantages to its residents: bracing sea air, sulphuric hot springs, and a deep quarry of black lava stone, now much depleted. A long-ago Count Vexx, finding the local stone economical, had plundered it liberally; Castle Drax was the striking result.

Furnishing every inch of the interior in marble as black as the depths of Hell, though, there could be no excuse for that.

Lulu acquired for herself a sock (not black), and then another to match it (near enough). She trotted up the three winding flights of stairs to what had once been Aunt Maud’s painting-tower, and stretched her long, strong arms out of the window (three of its diamond-shaped panes absent, and letting in the wind). Retrieving the FOR SALE sign was the work of a moment, and she soon had it installed by the front door. The Count rarely left the house; it’d take him at least a week to notice.

It took everyone else a week to notice, too, or rather more. Lulu soon forgot about the prospective sale of the castle, busily occupied (as always) with her favourite springtime pursuits. She’d be down in the kitchens with Magwell, the cook, baking up batches of gooseberry pies (which her father declined to eat). She’d be out in the walled garden pruning the peach trees, neatly espaliered, or gathering fat peonies to put in glass vases (the Count tended to throw them away again, if he chanced to notice them at all). She’d even be up in Aunt Maud’s painting tower, with a canvas before her, and a box of watercolours; the Count threw her paintings away, too, whenever she was so bold as to display them, though in this, at least, he had the right of it. Lulu had neither talent nor taste, though was never so poor-spirited as to let it stop her.

Her days proceeded so much as usual, that when a tinny ringing sound shattered the sepulchral silence at Castle Drax she could not immediately identify what it was.

The morning had barely started. Lulu was down in the cloakroom, removing the curl clamps from her bobbed blonde hair. The mirror warped her reflection somewhat, age-spotted as it was, but every other mirror in the house being long since shattered, it sufficed. The ringing began when she was only halfway finished; she froze with her arms raised over her head, staring at her own wide green eyes in the mirror.

Fane’s heavy footsteps added to the tumult. He was crossing the hall, towards the—

‘Gracious! The telephone!’

Lulu abandoned her hair, ran out into the hall with half her head bristling with metal, like a semi-styled porcupine. ‘I’ll get it, Fane!’ she called, and trotted past him.

‘Very good, Miss,’ said the slow-moving Fane, placid as always, and paced away again.

Lulu caught up the heavy black receiver and clamped it to her ear. ‘Hello!’

A voice buzzed and rattled in answer. ‘Hello, is that Castle Drax?’

‘Ha! See! It still works!’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Lulu performed a little dance of victory. ‘I am sorry. Only I’m so delighted to receive a telephone call! I had begun to think that the device was irreparably broken.’

‘To whom am I speaking?’ Her interlocuter was male, and sounded severe. Well, she could hardly expect him to understand her point of view; he probably lived in a house where everything worked.

‘Sorry,’ Lulu said again. ‘This is Luna Vexx.’

‘Miss Vexx. This is Percival Percy, of Percy and Bell’s. We have received a request to view your delightful home—’ he could not suppress a slight, embarrassed cough after the word “delightful” —’And I would like to conduct this interested person around this afternoon.’

Lulu suppressed an impulse to say “sorry” again, she had said it twice already—what came out instead was scarcely any better—’What?’ she blurted.

‘Oh dear, is there something wrong with the connection? Can you hear me? Operator—’

‘I hear you,’ Lulu hastened to interrupt. ‘At least, I believe I do. You said somebody wants to buy the castle.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Mr. Percy at once. ‘Somebody wants to see the castle.’

‘Aha.’

‘If they are sufficiently pleased with the place, then, I imagine, an offer of purchase will naturally follow.’

‘Aha.’

‘Yes.’

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