Well. These things happen.

She walked carefully round the puddle and carried on up the corridor. As well as having a missing girl to find and a Beast to avenge, she was by now hopelessly lost in a building that could be a castle, Toad Hall or pretty well anything that has long winding corridors with no doors in them and no lighting apart from the occasional flickering torch set in a sconce high up on the wall. You could have played Doom in there for hours, assuming you survived that long.

Arguably, the wicked queen muttered to herself, that’s precisely what I am doing. What fun.

She wandered around for another ten minutes or so, but all she found were more corridors. They were, she noticed, all carefully swept and dusted and free of cobwebs; and that set her thinking. Housework — castlework, even — doesn’t do itself. Therefore — No sooner had she formulated the thought than she heard in the distance the sound of somebody humming, off-key. She ducked behind a pillar and waited.

Not long afterwards, someone came. It was a cosy-looking middle-aged woman in an apron, wheeling one of those big housekeeping trolleys you see in hotels. Every fifteen yards or so she’d stop, unload a broom or a dustpan and brush or a long-handled feather duster, clean up, put new torches in the sconces, polish the noses of the gargoyles and move on. The tune she was humming was almost but not quite recognisable; it was probably a theme song or an advertising jingle, and she hummed the same bit over and over again.

‘Excuse me,’ said the queen, stepping out from behind her pillar.

‘Gaw!’ The woman started, then clicked her tongue. ‘Gave me a fright, you did, jumping out like that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the queen replied. ‘The fact is, I’m lost.’

The woman smiled sympathetically. ‘Confusing, isn’t it, till you’re used to it? Where was it you was wanting to go to?’

‘Actually,’ the queen said, selecting a silly-me sheepish grin from her repertoire of facial expressions, ‘I’m not even sure where this is. You see, I was in this secret passage—’

‘Oh, one of them,’ the nice woman said, with a knowing smile. ‘Ever such a lot of them, aren’t there? And you come up out of it and you haven’t a clue where you are, right?’

The wicked queen nodded. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘You see, I thought this was Beauty’s castle, but then it seemed as if it had turned into Toad Hall, and now — well, I’m completely foxed. I mean, it could be anywhere.’

The nice woman laughed. ‘Funny you should say that,’ she said. ‘Oh well, best of luck. Some of ‘em do get out eventually, so they say.’

The wicked queen’s happy smile faded abruptly. ‘Well, couldn’t you, um, point me in the right direction for the way out? If it’s no trouble, that is.’

‘Sorry, love.’ The nice woman looked genuinely sorry. ‘But I’m just the housekeeper. And that’s a job and a half, I can tell you. All of this to keep clean and tidy, and never a word of thanks. I reckon they think it all cleans itself, you know.’ She loaded her tackle back on to the trolley and prepared to move on. The wicked queen grabbed a trolley handle.

‘Please don’t do that,’ the housekeeper said.

‘Look, I really don’t want to cause trouble, but—’

‘Funny way you got of showing it,’ the housekeeper said, making the wicked queen feel rather wretched; after all, the poor woman was only doing her job, and it looked as if it was a fairly horrid job and in all probability she only got paid a pittance for it. ‘Now you take your hands off my trolley. You’ll get me in trouble, you will. I’m behind with my rounds as it is.’

The wicked queen shook her head. ‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ she said. ‘I really have got to find a way out of here, and you obviously know your way around. Couldn’t you just see your way to—?’

The housekeeper tried to move the trolley forward, but the wicked queen jammed her foot against one of the wheels, making it veer off into the wall. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t want any unpleasantness, but…’

She broke off, mainly because the eight-inch dagger the housekeeper was pressing against her jugular vein made talking somewhat uncomfortable. ‘Mind you hold still, dear,’ the housekeeper said, in a horribly matter-of-fact tone. ‘I’ve got enough to do without mopping up blood all over the place. It can be a real pain, getting blood off these tiles.’

‘Anything you say,’ the queen croaked. ‘The last thing I’d want to do is make extra work for you.’

‘Should’ve thought of that earlier, shouldn’t you?’ the housekeeper replied reproachfully. ‘Now where did I put those dratted handcuffs? There’s so much stuff on this trolley, you don’t know where to start looking. Ah, here we are. Now, you just hold your hands out where I can get at them, that’s the ticket.’

The ratchets of the handcuffs clicked into place around the queen’s left wrist; then the housekeeper passed the central links under the handle of the trolley and fastened the right cuff as well. ‘That ought to do it,’ the housekeeper said. ‘Now you’ll just have to wait there till I finish off my rounds, I’m afraid. I haven’t got too much more to do, just this wing and the east wing and the main hall and the old guard tower and the refectory and the dortoirs and the garderobe and the north dungeons and the inner keep and the solar and the bailey. Pity you can’t give me a hand,’ she added wistfully. ‘Could be through it all like a dose of salts with another pair of hands.’ She stopped, thought for a moment, looked at the large knife and the queen’s wrists, then shook her head. ‘In a manner of speaking,’ she added.

‘I don’t mind helping, really,’ the queen replied, with perhaps just a touch too much eagerness in her voice.

The housekeeper shook her head sadly. ‘Sorry, love, but you know how it is,’ she replied. ‘Not that I’m saying I don’t trust you or anything like that, you understand.’

The wicked queen muttered something uncouth under her breath as the housekeeper carried on with her dusting and her rather unbearable humming. After a while the housekeeper relented and let her push the trolley, but apart from that it looked very much as if negotiations had reached stalemate. If she tried to say anything, the housekeeper simply hummed a bit louder, or accidentally clouted her across the face with a feather duster. Tactically speaking, it was a mess.

But the queen did have one advantage. Sooner or later, she figured, they’d come to the place where the Beast had had his nasty experience, and that was going to take some clearing up. The housekeeper was going to need the mop and bucket, the broom, the dustpan and brush, the floor cloth and (assuming she was going to do a proper job, which, to do her credit, seemed likely) the tin of floor wax and the electric polisher. To make the electric polisher work, she’d need a power source; and although there hadn’t been any signs of electrical sockets in the walls when she’d been this way earlier, that was probably because she hadn’t been looking for them. The combination of electrical appliance, power source and puddle of nameless liquid suggested various avenues for exploration by a keen strategic mind, although it was pointless trying to formulate a detailed plan of action until she could get another look at the actual terrain.

‘Dah dah dee dah dah,’ the housekeeper warbled; then she broke off in the middle of a mangled bar and tutted loudly, her hands on her hips. ‘Oh for crying out loud,’ she complained, and the queen smiled. Ah, she said to herself. We’re here.

‘Some people,’ the housekeeper was saying, and her back was turned. Very carefully, so as to prevent the links of the handcuffs clinking against the trolley handle, the queen reached out for the polisher flex —‘And you leave that flex alone,’ the housekeeper said, without turning her head. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, ‘cos I do.’