‘Double, double?’ Goose Bootmaker frowned. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Maybe it’s a code?’ Sam Lightfinger suggested.
‘Must be,’ Cordelia agreed. ‘Or a signal of some kind.’
It was the first good sunshine of spring. Daffodils gleamed in the grass of St James’s Park as Cordelia and her friends Goose and Sam tramped across Pall Mall and down the Avenue, a long sweep of towering oaks.
The Avenue was every fashionable Londoner’s favourite place to be seen. Many stylish (and some outlandish) outfits were on display today. There were ladies in hats adorned with Poetical Pears, wearing Ode-Ribboned Boots to complement them, and gentlemen in Frizzle Fern Cloaks offset with Fluttering Gloves to make their hands extra elegant.
But Cordelia, Goose and Sam hardly noticed these magical clothes. They were carrying a heavy bucket between them, which was almost overflowing with a glistering liquid that sparkled like diamonds. It bumped against their legs, splashing droplets on to the ground. Where they fell, tiny starlike flowers sprang up, bursting into rainbow blooms.
Hatmaker, Bootmaker and Lightfinger left a meandering trail of flowers down the Avenue. People picked the flowers, tucking them into buttonholes. They made everybody feel especially glad and springy. Somebody burst into song, while another danced a jig. The three friends were unaware of the frenzy of festivity left in their wake.
‘Who was in the rowing boat yesterday evening?’ Goose wondered.
‘I couldn’t see his face,’ Cordelia said regretfully. ‘He was wearing a cloak.’
At the end of the Avenue, they called cheery hellos to Master Ambrosius. The youthful sweetmaker often appeared in the park, selling delicious treats from his cart: gleaming toffee apples, strawberry nougat, iced coconut delights and clotted-cream cloudbuns so light they had to be kept in a box to stop them blowing away.
‘My favourite Makers!’ Master Ambrosius beamed as Cordelia, Sam and Goose passed by. ‘Good morning!’
‘We’ll be back in a little while,’ Cordelia told him, hauling the bucket along.
‘I’ll save you some Mint Cobwebs!’ Master Ambrosius called after them as they trudged across the Great Lawn towards the shrubbery. ‘They’re very popular today.’
‘Not – much – further!’ Goose panted, stopping to wipe his forehead. He got a smear of the liquid on his face, dazzling a passer-by with sudden angelic looks.
The three friends wove through a pink flurry of ornamental cherry trees into a quiet corner of the park where a slender sapling grew.
‘There’s a flower on it!’ Sam pointed. ‘That’s new!’
The sapling was all that was left of an orchard of magical golden apple trees that had been burned to the ground by an evil man named Lord Witloof. After Lord Witloof had been defeated, Cordelia had searched among the ashes of the ruined orchard and found a single golden apple that had survived the fire, lying in the blackened grass.
Cordelia, Goose and Sam had planted the apple, watering the spot frequently with buckets brimming with the Essence of Magic, the source of which they had discovered hidden in a secret well beneath the Makers’ Guildhall.
The golden apples were said to have mysterious magical powers, and Cordelia and her friends carefully tended the spot, bringing magic and hope in equal measure, which is the best way to grow things. Eventually, in February, a green-gold twigling emerged from the earth. It had grown a little each day, venturing tender leaves at the beginning of March in answer to the strengthening sun.
It was now just taller than Goose. Today it offered a pale yellow blossom, like a hopeful question, on the end of its single branch. It was nothing like the grand orchard that had been destroyed; it was just a young tree with a single flower. But that was how every great orchard began.
‘You’ll be sure to look after it, won’t you, Goose?’ Cordelia asked. ‘When we’re –’
She stopped, catching sight of the sudden glum expression on Goose’s face.
Goose’s heart was set on joining the crew of Little Bear. He had earned his place on board the ship, spending hours learning the ropes with Jack, and he got so good at tying sailors’ knots that it was impossible to tell the difference between the young bootmaker’s and the cabin boy’s. But now the subject of the voyage was a source of gloom whenever it was mentioned.
Several times, Goose had asked his mother’s permission to take part in the voyage. The first time he asked, his mother said, ‘No.’ The second time, she said, ‘No, no.’ The third time, she replied with: ‘No, no, NO!’ At this point, Goose decided it would be wise to stop asking. He suspected his mother had an infinite supply of no’s, which she spat like darts at his adventurous ambitions and deflated them.
Although the Hatmaker and Bootmaker families had recently laid aside decades of enmity, Cordelia was still the tiniest bit nervous when Nigella Bootmaker smiled in her direction. She had not yet summoned the courage to knock on the tall door of Bootmaker Mansion to demand that Goose be allowed to go on Little Bear’s maiden voyage – much as she wanted to.
Thinking a change of subject might be helpful, Cordelia nodded to the watering can that they’d brought with them.
‘Go on, maybe it’ll grow a mind-changing apple?’ she suggested. ‘And we can put it as a decoration on your mother’s hat!’
‘That’d be good!’ Goose enthused, filling the watering can from the bucket and carefully pouring the sparkling liquid around the tree’s roots. ‘D’you think that would work?’
Cordelia paused for a moment. ‘Well, Aunt Ariadne did once tell me that trying to change someone’s mind is Meddling Magic,’ she admitted. ‘Which is illegal.’
Before they could ponder the ethics of Meddling Magic, they were distracted by a puff of golden pollen that burst from the pale yellow flower, and a bumblebee landed on the blossom in a gentle embrace.
Heading back towards Master Ambrosius across the Great Lawn, the three children at last noticed the people wearing magical Maker hats and boots, with matching cloaks and gloves and watches. It was something they were only just becoming accustomed to seeing.
For three decades, the Maker families of London – Hatmakers, Bootmakers, Cloakmakers, Glovemakers, Watchmakers – had refused to speak to each other, let alone work together to create harmonious outfits. This refusal to cooperate meant that a customer would never dare to wear a Hatmaker hat at the same time as a pair of Bootmaker boots, for example, for fear that the magical ingredients would react strangely together. A Hot-Headed Hat worn with a pair of Louche Boots might result in the wearer’s feet attempting to go in an entirely different direction from their head. A pair of Gladhand Gloves combined with a Doddle Watch would result in twitchy fingers.
At the end of last summer, Cordelia, Goose, Sam and the other Maker children had banded together to unite the Makers once more. Finally, after thirty years of exchanging nothing but scowls, the Makers had begun to exchange ideas again. Now Londoners were able to visit the Makers’ Guildhall and be fitted for an entire ensemble of clothes that worked together in perfect harmony.
‘Look!’ Goose pointed to a person dressed from head to toe in Mellifluent Silk, holding a slender cane carved from Buddleia wood, decorated with tiny jewelled flowers. At that very moment, a butterfly – the first the children had seen this spring – alighted on the cane.
‘A Canemaker cane spotted out in the wild!’ Cordelia whispered. ‘Delilah will be delighted!’
While five of the Maker families had refused to work together for thirty years, the sixth and final family – the Canemakers – had been forbidden from doing so. Magical canes had been banned because many of them, encrusted with Fury Jewels, had contained treacherous hidden swordsticks that led to hot-headedness, jealousy and sword fights in the streets. Those dangerous canes had been made by Solomon Canemaker, who had been found guilty of treason and expelled from the Makers’ Guildhall. His daughter, Delilah, at first swore revenge, but had a change of heart when she was locked up in prison, realizing that it is a far greater deed to mend things than to break them apart.
Still, Londoners were slow to trust a Canemaker again. Though Delilah Canemaker created wondrous canes, wrapped with rainbows or decorated with Merrybird feathers, Cordelia had not yet seen one being used out and about in town. Today’s was the first! And what a beauty it was.
As Cordelia, Sam and Goose reached Master Ambrosius (who was busy serving a crowd of ladies clamouring for sugared violets), they saw a procession of grey enter the bright spring green of the park.
Every fortnight, pupils from Miss Prim’s Academy for the Improvement of Small Minds arrived in St James’s Park to march up and down in solemn rows, led by the stately Miss Prim herself. These children, in their stiff, speckless clothes, displayed awe-inspiring politeness and serious deportment in a way that made Cordelia feel distinctly scruffy. Miss Prim was a paragon of perfect manners. She was neat and polished, and weaponized her smiles to let the recipient know she was judging them.
The grey procession turned neatly up the Avenue, leaving an awed silence in its wake. Even the herons, poised in the pond, looked sideways as Miss Prim and her pupils passed them by. Ladies paused, sugared violets forgotten in their mouths, to stare at the group. Everybody in the park felt a little more self-conscious, suddenly aware of having untidy hair or untied laces.
Before Cordelia had torn her eyes away from the impeccable headmistress and her gliding train of pupils, a strange bird call whooped through the trees – and Miss Prim twitched.
The headmistress turned to nod politely at the passing Lord Buncle, but suddenly jerked her head in a manner more befitting a sailor than a lady, and stuck out her tongue. Her neatly folded hands wrenched apart, splaying open in an extremely rude gesture that she waggled at the appalled lord.
There were gasps from the crowd of onlookers.
As Miss Prim’s own mouth fell open in shock, an enormous belch came out.
Lord Buncle dropped his toffee apple.
The headmistress halted in the middle of the Avenue, and her pupils staggered into a crush behind her. She turned sharply to admonish them, and a sound erupted from her that Goose would later describe as being ‘like the loudest trumpet in the orchestra’.
Someone snickered with laughter.
All of Miss Prim’s composure evaporated and she stamped and yelled, swearing as she performed violent scissor kicks. She turned cartwheels, flashing her petticoats, and bowled over a doddering group of old men. She kicked horse poo at Lady Clustertrunce, pulled off a marquis’s wig, and tore round in circles, barking like a dog.
Her pupils backed away fearfully as their headmistress began twisting on the spot, going faster and faster as though she was wearing a tornado instead of a cape.
‘We’d better help!’ Cordelia gasped, grabbing Goose and Sam. ‘It’s got to be the clothes – something’s gone wrong!’
They hurried towards the howling blur that was Miss Prim.
‘I’ll get the shoes!’ Goose declared gallantly.
‘You take the cape, Sam!’ Cordelia yelled. ‘I’ll get the hat!’
But it was the gloves that proved the first challenge for Cordelia; she had to fend off a two-pronged attempt from one of the lace-gloved hands to poke her in the eyes. Sam jerked Miss Prim to a stop, fumbling with her cape buttons, as Cordelia swerved and ducked, dodging a series of punches and upper cuts. She finally managed to tear the gloves off, and threw them to the ground, where they flipped over and began grabbing at nearby ankles.
‘Now for the bonnet!’ she panted.
Miss Prim wailed, pulling grotesque faces that were more like the gurning of a gargoyle than the serenely superior expression she usually presented to the world.
Goose emerged from beneath the headmistress’s dress, sporting a black eye and clutching one grey shoe. The other went flying over his head into the undergrowth.
Sam was still wrestling the cape, which appeared to be equally as difficult as wrangling a tornado. At last, she wrenched it loose and managed to throw herself to the ground, pinning the cape down.
Cordelia grabbed the straw bonnet and yanked it off.
At last, Miss Prim fell still. Her hair was a crazed haystack and her eyes were wild.
All around them, people stared in astonishment at the headmistress, who had just given the most spectacular display of bad behaviour ever seen in St James’s Park.
‘That was –’ Cordelia began, but a tiny bird burst out of Miss Prim’s pocket watch.
‘CUCKOO! CUCKOO!’
‘The watch too!’ Cordelia yelped.
She grabbed at it but missed as Miss Prim took several jerky steps backwards.
‘!ON’ Miss Prim cried. ‘!WON EM FFO TI EKAT’
‘WHAT?’ cried Cordelia.
‘!TARB DIPUTS UOY, EREHT DNATS TSUJ T’NOD’
Cordelia watched in horror as Miss Prim strode backwards across the grass, bawling, ‘!CIGAM ETAH I’
‘Look out!’ Cordelia shouted. ‘The pond!’
But it was too late. Miss Prim sploshed backwards into the muddy shallows, slipped and sat down firmly in a green patch of weed.
A heron looked down its long bill at her disdainfully.
‘We’ve got to tell them at the Guildhall!’ Cordelia gasped, snatching up the cape and gloves while gingerly holding the bonnet, as Goose heaved Sam to her feet, trying not to drop Miss Prim’s shoe. Together, they hurtled down the Avenue, leaving several of her pupils to pull Miss Prim out of the mud.