Howl's Moving Castle: Chapters 1–3

She was very deft with her needle.

So when, a few months after that, a tall black castle suddenly appeared on the hills above Market Chipping, blowing clouds of black smoke from its four tall, thin turrets, everybody was fairly sure that the Witch had moved out of the Waste again and was about to terrorize the country the way she used to fifty years ago.

Sometimes it was a tall black smudge on the moors to the northwest, sometimes it reared above the rocks to the east, and sometimes it came right downhill to sit in the heather only just beyond the last farm to the north.

But the castle stayed roving about the hills, and it was learned that it did not belong to the Witch but to Wizard Howl.

“She’s a nice lady,” Martha conceded.

Sophie sat in a small alcove at the back of the shop, sewing roses to bonnets and veiling to velours, lining all of them with silk and arranging wax fruit and ribbons stylishly on the outsides.

Then there would be a fleeting, fearful whisper about the Witch of the Waste.

“She would make even you look glamorous, you dowdy old thing. Other ladies look at Lettie and despair.”

There was so much custom as April drew on toward May Day that Sophie had to put on a demure gray dress and help in the shop too.

The staid gray dress did not suit Sophie, particularly when her eyes were red-rimmed with sewing, and, since her hair was a reddish straw color, neither did caterpillar green nor pink.

When there came a sudden volley of bangs from overhead somewhere, Sophie thought she was going to faint.

Crowds of young men swaggered beerily to and fro, trailing cloaks and long sleeves and stamping buckled boots they would never have dreamed of wearing on a working day, calling loud remarks and accosting girls.

His sleeves trailed longer than any in the Square, all scalloped edges and silver insets.

He meant it kindly, which made Sophie more ashamed than ever. “No. No thank you, sir!” she gasped and fled away past him. He wore perfume too. The smell of hyacinths followed her as she ran. What a courtly person!

“That’s why she sent me so far away, or tried to. Mother knows you don’t have to be unkind to someone in order to exploit them. She knows how dutiful you are. She knows you have this thing about being a failure because you’re only the eldest. She’s managed you perfectly and got you slaving away for her. I bet she doesn’t pay you.”

There was a lot of time for thinking, because Bessie duly left to be married and Sophie was mostly alone in the shop.

She finished that hat and started on a stark black-and-white one, very modish, and a quite new thought came to her.

The shop bell clanged and the grandest customer she had ever seen sailed in, with a sable wrap drooping from her elbows and diamonds winking all over her dense black dress.

He stared at Sophie with a kind of beseeching horror.

The lady looked at it with contempt. “This one doesn’t do anything for anybody. You’re wasting my time, Miss Hatter.”

“You mean you’re the Witch of the Waste?” Sophie quavered. Her voice seemed to have gone strange with fear and astonishment.

She pulled her gray skirt against her legs and looked down at skinny, decrepit ankles and feet which had made her shoes all knobbly.

It was the face of a gaunt old woman, withered and brownish, surrounded by wispy white hair.

But she was relieved to discover that she was quite a hale old woman. She did not feel weak or ill, just stiff.

Then she shuffled through into the house, where she collected her purse with a few coins in it and a parcel of bread and cheese.

Sophie discovered that being a crone did not stop her enjoying the sight and smell of may in the hedgerows, though the sight was a little blurred.

Instead of pulling it to pieces and taking the stick, she stuck it between two branches of the hedge, so that it stood looming rakishly above the may, with the tattered sleeves on its stick arms fluttering over the hedge.

“You’ll starve or throttle to death, my friend,” she told the dog in her cracked old voice, “unless you let me cut you loose. In fact, I think someone has tried to throttle you already. Maybe that accounts for your wildness.”

Sophie stared after him indignantly. “He thought I was a witch!” she said to her stick.

“How near it still is!” Sophie told her stick in dismay. “All that walking just to get above my own rooftop!”

Wizard Howl’s castle was rumbling and bumping toward her across the moorland. Black smoke was blowing up in clouds from behind its black battlements.

She raised her stick and waved it imperiously at the castle.

Sophie prodded at it with an irritable finger. When that made no difference, she prodded with her stick.

Sophie glowered at it. “I call that very unwelcoming!” she said.

Perhaps Howl kept him in abject servility.

But Michael did not look servile. He was a tall, dark boy with a pleasant, open sort of face, and he was most respectably dressed.

There was a poppling, blazing silence while the orange eyes in the demon’s wavering blue face traveled up and down Sophie.

You can find out what it is if you watch and listen carefully. I implore you to try.

It was in earnest, leaping about on its logs in an agitated way.

Sophie fell into a deep sleep, with a slight suspicion that she was being bewitched now, as well as beguiled, but it did not bother her particularly.