hidden_variable

I didn’t sign up for the Worldbuilding Exchange, but I did spend some time looking through the requests, and I was intrigued enough to write a treat focusing on Mrs. Pentstemmon from the Howl series. Mrs. Pentstemmon is interesting to me because of the important role she must have played in the development of Howl’s magic—his respect for her is clear even in his “heartless” phase—and also because of the way she is at the heart of the backstory for so many of the other notable magic users we meet: Wizard Suliman, Mrs. Fairfax, and the Witch of Montalbino from House of Many Ways.

The idea that really got its claws into me was a recommendation letter as written by Mrs. Pentstemmon. The rec letter is a form I have plenty of practice with. I wrote about a dozen of them in January-February this year—‘tis the season. Writing as Mrs Pentstemmon recommending Howl immediately sounded fun: she canonically has a very high regard for his abilities, but she also strikes me as someone who wouldn’t pull any punches regarding his obvious flaws. So I would get to say fun things that I would never think of writing in a real recommendation.

It was a lot of fun trying to put the letter into a plausible voice. For all the enticing hints of huge backstory influence, Mrs P. really doesn’t have many lines in canon; the only time we ever see her “onstage” is in her meeting with the enspelled Sophie pretending to be Howl’s mother. So I had to extrapolate. Sometime after I had finished writing this story, I happened to be watching Mary Poppins with S, and it hit me that there’s a lot of Mary Poppins DNA in my Pentstemmon voice, although I didn’t consciously make the connection at the time. There’s also a good bit of Hilary Tamar in there, I think, and possibly a dash of the Dowager Duchess from Downton Abbey.

I looked very carefully through all three books in the Howl series to find Mrs. Pentstemmon’s first name, but no dice. (I even tried Googling. The obnoxious AI response that appeared at the top of the results page informed me that her first name is Madame Suliman. Thanks, Google AI! This is exactly the level of performance I’ve come to expect from you!) I did learn the interesting fact that Penstemon is the name of a genus of flowering plants, commonly known as beardtongue, so I had to work that in somewhere.

The Pentstemmon Papers (3424 words) by hidden_variable
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Mrs. Pentstemmon (Howl Series), Ben Sullivan | Wizard Suliman, Howl Pendragon, Charmain Baker
Additional Tags: Worldbuilding, Wales-Ingary Portal, Magic Lessons, magic in academia, Oblique references to canonical character death, In-Universe Meta
Summary:

In which Mrs. Pentstemmon drafts a letter of recommendation.

The natural context that occurred to me would be Mrs. Pentstemmon telling the king to select Howl as Royal Wizard. I came up with a scene of Howl barging in on a magic lesson with Ben Sullivan (later Wizard Suliman)--I liked the idea of doing a compare-and-contrast thing between the two of them. Then I got hung up on the issue of whether this was canon-compliant. Sophie asks Howl whether it’s true that he and Suliman came from the same world, and Howl says yes, “but I never met him.” If he’d said, “I’ve never met him,” I would take that to mean that they’d never met at all. But “I never met him” could mean that they specifically never met in Wales, allowing for the possibility that they had met in Ingary. Plus, of course, Howl may not be the most reliable narrator here.

I also started running into trouble trying to fit the timing of the letter into canon. I really wanted to get her take on the visit during which Sophie claims to be Howl’s mother. But canonically, the Witch of the Waste kills Mrs. Pentstemmon within an hour of that meeting. So, how would the recommendation letter be written and delivered in such a short time window? And would I really want to end the fic at a point where Mrs. Pentstemmon’s death is imminent–especially given that the person I wanted to treat specifically DNW’ed unhappy endings?

I solved the first problem by having the letter be a rough draft, with the part about Sophie being added much later. I really liked including the revisions as a way to illustrate both the passage of time and give some character notes. To try to create a happy ending, I thought about having Mrs. Pentstemmon turn out to have faked her own death, but I couldn’t think of a satisfying canon-compliant way in which that could make sense. Then I hit on the idea of framing the letter as a primary source for someone’s later research, to open things out into a more hopeful future. And when I thought about who in the Howl canon might go on to do that sort of research, there was an obvious candidate. Once I had set this up in the form of a PhD thesis, I couldn’t resist making the connection to snake fighting. This just opens up a whole possible world of snake fight crossovers…