Pastel castle on a pink cloud on a calf

Captain Eben Rook said the old rule held. You do not steer toward a castle that has not hailed you. So they lay to, sails slatting, and watched the blue roofs turn gold as the sun went down behind them. The cloud did not drift. It waited, the way a cat waits at a mousehole, and by the second morning the whole crew was leaning on the rail like children at a shop window.

It was the cook, Hannah Dunmore, who lowered the jolly boat. She rowed across the calm with a tin of her good yellow ochre and a brush wrapped in oilcloth, because a woman who has fed a ship for nine years has learned that a door opens for a thing carried in the hand. At the base of the cloud a small arched gate stood open. A porter in a tall hat held out a pennant and asked, very politely, what colour the sea had been that morning.

She told him the truth: grey, with a green stripe where the river came out. The porter nodded as if she had passed an examination, and said the towers were always painted in whatever the last visitor remembered. Hannah rowed home with a flag the colour of her own apron strings, and when the Marigold finally made port, the castle was gone, but the mast had a pink pennant at the top that no one had hoisted.