The Enchanted Castle

The Enchanted Castle
by E. Nesbit

To Margaret Ostler with love from E. Nesbit
Peggy, you came from the heath and moor,
And you brought their airs through my open door;
You brought the blossom of youth to blow
In the Latin Quarter of Soho.
For the sake of that magic I send you here
A tale of enchantments, Peggy dear,
A bit of my work, and a bit of my heart...
The bit that you left when we had to part.
Royalty Chambers, Soho, W. 25 September 1907

There were three of them Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathleen. Of course,
Jerry's name was Gerald, and not Jeremiah, whatever you may think;
and Jimmy's name was James; and Kathleen was never called by her
name at all, but Cathy, or Catty, or Puss Cat, when her brothers were
pleased with her, and Scratch Cat when they were not pleased. And
they were at school in a little town in the West of England the boys at
one school, of course, and the girl at another, because the sensible habit

of having boys and girls at the same school is not yet as common as I
hope it will be some day. They used to see each other on Saturdays and
Sundays at the house of a kind maiden lady; but it was one of those
houses where it is impossible to play. You know the kind of house,
don't you? There is a sort of a something about that kind of house that
makes you hardly able even to talk to each other when you are left
alone, and playing seems unnatural and affected. So they looked
forward to the holidays, when they should all go home and be together
all day long, in a house where playing was natural and conversation
possible, and where the Hampshire forests and fields were full of
interesting things to do and see. Their Cousin Betty was to be there too,
and there were plans. Betty's school broke up before theirs, and so she
got to the Hampshire home first, and the moment she got there she
began to have measles, so that my three couldn't go home at all. You
may imagine their feelings. The thought of seven weeks at Miss
Hervey's was not to be borne, and all three wrote home and said so.
This astonished their parents very much, because they had always
thought it was so nice for the children to have dear Miss Hervey's to go
to. However, they were "jolly decent about it , as Jerry said, and after a
lot of letters and telegrams, it was arranged that the boys should go and
stay at Kathleen's school, where there were now no girls left and no
mistresses except the French one.
"It'll be better than being at Miss Hervey's," said Kathleen, when the
boys came round to ask Mademoiselle when it would be convenient for
them to come; "and, besides, our school's not half so ugly as yours. We
do have tablecloths on the tables and curtains at the windows, and
yours is all deal boards, and desks, and inkiness."
When they had gone to pack their boxes Kathleen made all the rooms
as pretty as she could with flowers in jam jars marigolds chiefly,
because there was nothing much else in the back garden. There were
geraniums in the front garden, and calceolarias and lobelias; of course,
the children were not allowed to pick these.
"We ought to have some sort of play to keep us going through the
holidays," said Kathleen, when tea was over, and she had unpacked and

arranged the boys clothes in the painted chests of drawers, feeling very
grown-up and careful as she neatly laid the different sorts of clothes in
tidy little heaps in the drawers. "Suppose we write a book."
"You couldn't," said Jimmy.
"I didn't mean me, of course," said Kathleen, a little injured; "I meant
us."
"Too much fag," said Gerald briefly.
"If we wrote a book," Kathleen persisted, "about what the insides of
schools really are like, people would read it and say how clever we
were."
"More likely expel us," said Gerald. "No; we'll have an out-of-doors
game bandits, or something like that. It wouldn't be bad if we could get
a cave and keep stores in it, and have our meals there."
"There aren't any caves," said Jimmy, who was fond of contradicting
everyone. "And, besides, your precious Mamselle won't let us go out
alone, as likely as not."
"Oh, we'll see about that," said Gerald. "I'll go and talk to her like a
father."
"Like that?" Kathleen pointed the thumb of scorn at him, and he looked
in the glass.
"To brush his hair and his clothes and to wash his face and hands