Be a Helper (part eight)

Be A Helper

(part eight)

“Whimbrel made it a muffin recipe.”

“And why, Finch, have we not had muffins?”

“Because, ma’am,” Whimbrel answered. “I don’t know what a currant is. Magic made the recipe.”

“For all intents and purposes, a currant is a raisin,” said Melchior. “But Bede ought to find currants at the market…next time, knowing they’re wanted.”

Then, as every nice person in the Fairy Realm enjoys a bit of doggerel, he supplied:

There is a reason only Magic knows

Why this must be, while that will never go

Langham had his coat off, and was elbow deep in the lining. His hand came out gripping a sheet of parchment. He was keeping himself at the ready, Bede realized, to argue his case point by point, should authority find his watch-work under par.

“Wipe your fingers off, so you don’t mar the ink.”

Using Langham’s scarf, Bede complied. He scanned the order, not at all caring for it, no more than his neighbor.

“Strangers? Odd people? What is to make them odd?”

Jorinda took her turn at reading. “They never mean to put us at fault if someone crosses! And did you see…they’ll have us hold prisoners!”

“Your house could do for a jail.”

“That it never will, Langham,” Bede murmured. “But the minister says, this is an alert. An alert is not yet a warning. Do I remember right?”

“Bah!” said Jorinda, with a flash of hands.

It might have been midnight. Bede’s mind had carried him over what he felt was the indecency of the proposal. The Queen was not evil. She was a dodderer, her daughter grown long in years at her side, although elves did not really age…

They accumulated, merely, hosts of cranks, pets, finickings, particular preferences, uncompromisable insistences, added to an encroaching deafness and shortsightedness that came of exercising the ears and eyes less often. Langham was a sweet-natured font of reason compared to any venerable elf.

Bede’s unsleeping brain digressed. That drowsing time when thoughts lose themselves was far tonight, and likely would not come. The Queen was not his enemy. Her ministers, their handpicked friends, and the interests of those friends, and the tight, ignorant circle they all maintained, feeding one another with these notions of…

9

 a Helper

Be a Helper (part nine)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)