The wounds on her hands were much worse by evening. Her head and her arms felt hot, and she couldn’t sleep for all that she was oh! so tired; and she was hungry, but then when she tried to eat she suddenly wasn’t hungry and instead was fearful that she was going to be sick again. Cobweb was not a very good nurse, or even really any kind of nurse at all, and instead poked around the tower room and made little heaps of dust and brooded over the moss growing in the corners of the windowsill. Floralinda could hardly move her arms, which made it very difficult to get at the orange.
She humbly asked Cobweb if Cobweb wouldn’t mind peeling it for her; Cobweb obviously did mind, but nonetheless got very interested in the orange.
“This is witch-work,” it said. “And very powerful. You see here—the orange is really an orange—’tisn’t just gilt paper and sponge, done up to make you think it something else. (Fairy-magic can’t get over making things out of gilt paper and sponge. They should investigate the links between Fairyland and the men who make gilt paper and sponge.) Why, you could do anything with this—and you’ve been eating it?”
“Well, yes,” said poor Floralinda, “it’s good for your skin and hair.”
“Yes, yes; vitamins, and all that,” said Cobweb, “but also an unending supply of citric acid, which is a druggist’s dream. And you say that the milk flask always produces milk, and the water flask always produces water? Witches don’t know miracles when they create them. The opportunities! The implications! May I take them away, after you die?”
“I don’t see why you should,” said Floralinda, whom pain had made a little fretful. It seemed as though the light was very bright, and her hands felt very queer. The bite-marks had gone stiff and greenish; they bled, but also shed some nasty yellow-coloured stuff that Floralinda hated to see. She continued, “The witch gave them to me, and the flasks are bigger than you are, so you’ll have a time flying out of the tower with them. And I don’t care that they’re so wonderful; they can’t do much for me.”
“You are displaying a very small-minded attitude,” said the fairy, who seemed genuinely grieved by this. “Consider the orange-peel, which by itself has many very nice properties. Now, if you had a more educated brain (I cannot consider myself educated; I have only attempted to better my situation) you would have immediately said, ‘Why, if I had some liquor, or even very hot water, I could extract some oil from this orange-peel, which as everyone knows is antibacterial; that may well do my hands some good,’ and you wouldn’t be in such a stupid predicament.”
“Would it really do my hands good?” said Floralinda, doubtfully.
“Ye-e-s,” said Cobweb, appearing to regret the suggestion a bit, as it distanced the fairy farther than ever from securing the flasks for its own. “Well, it does depend, rather. Boiling the water would be necessary. Which is impossible, as you haven’t any source of heat—”
But Floralinda had pushed away the bedclothes, which was a relief as they were quite damp from her sweating, and although she felt rather dizzy she tried to not think about it, as thinking about things was often when the difficulties started. She wrapped her hands about with the silver gauze, although it made tears prick at her eyes, and unlocked the door. Floralinda felt the cool, still air on her skin from the stairway down to the thirty-ninth floor, and wrinkled her nose at a stink she was afraid was coming from the goblin that had broken its neck. It was such an awful smell that she was worried it would hurt her, and resolved to do something with the goblin later; but she was more interested in the brazier of coals, and the fire in them that never seemed to go out.
But how to take a coal? Of course she might light a taper—there were plenty of pages in Monarchic Positions that could be burned, chiefly the endnotes—but fires wanted more fuel, and even a princess could see that she only had so many books and sticks of furniture. The coal would be essential. Floralinda picked her way back up the stairs—Cobweb the fairy sat on the end of the bed looking more like a blossom than ever, but quite a judgmental blossom—and went to her own picturesque hearth with the false front, where there was an ornamental poker, and ornamental tongs. She removed the bowl of painted pine-cones from the grate. The tongs Floralinda took in her hands, and oh dear, didn’t it hurt to use them!—but they opened and closed just as they ought to have done, which displaced quite a bit of dust. Thusly armed, Floralinda crept back downstairs, and with all the care she could manage, she took a coal from that spitting, greasy brazier, and brought it upstairs.
She put it in the unused hearth, and some of the dust caught fire, but otherwise the coal sat there safely with its little flame always burning. It made her face hotter than it had been, and her hands had bled; but there was fire. The coal did not get any cooler, and the flame did not recede.
How Cobweb stared!
“This place,” it said, “is a dream of combustion.”
Floralinda had thought combustion was a sort of garment they put over one’s corset in the old days.
“Yes,” said Cobweb, when Floralinda ventured this, “but you are not very clever.”
Princess Floralinda supposed not.
But the fairy got quite excited, for all that. It directed Floralinda to get a few more coals to heap up in a proper little fire, and to bring over the copper basin that sat in the wash-stand, and all the while it took about seven oranges’ worth of orange-peel—for the peel, as it turned out, grew back just as readily as the flesh did—and pulled it all apart. It was quite fun to watch Cobweb work: shaking out an orange-peel as though it were a blanket, and ripping this into shreds, more finely than even the tiny grater Cook uses to make powdered nutmeg with in your kitchen. The whole room began to smell like walking through an orange grove, and Cobweb’s pale hands were stained yellow, especially the underneaths of the tiny fingernails, and it sat before a fairy-sized hummock of wet grated orange-peel. Floralinda filled the basin with water, and rigged it up over the coals. When it was on a rolling boil Cobweb tossed the orange-peel inside.
“Most of the good stuff has already evaporated,” it said. “This isn’t really efficacious. If I had good-quality oil, or rubbing alcohol, we might do better. The witch didn’t leave any of that, did she? No? Bad luck—take it off the fire—use those cloths to guard your hands—now, take off that gauze, and plunge your hands in the water when I say so; it will feel pretty dreadful.”
When Cobweb gave the direction, Floralinda plunged in her hands. It was indeed pretty dreadful. She was sick again. She was also forced to look at her hands, and the wounds looked a fright; her hands were so swollen that she felt sure all her gloves would have to be remade at the glover’s. Cobweb made her keep her hands in the water until she really couldn’t stand it, and then she was allowed to take them out; and they looked simply horrid.
“You must do that three times a day,” said the fairy, who had grown quite pompous from bossing her about.
Floralinda gasped, “And will I live?”
“If you die, it will be an education,” said Cobweb reasonably.
“But if I die, I’m sure I won’t learn a thing,” protested the princess; to which the fairy explained—