by Emily Rodda
‘Yah,’ jeered Freda, but at a look from Conker she shrugged and walked on.
Soon they reached a large yard fenced with chicken wire. In the centre of the yard was a neat wooden shed that seemed to be in far better condition than Wizard Bing’s house. Through the open door of the shed Leo could see cosy-looking nesting boxes and perches fastened to the wall.
Egbert was waiting for them at the yard gate. As they approached, he pulled the gate open and inclined his head slightly, inviting them to enter. Bertha, Conker, Leo and Mimi filed in obediently. Freda followed, muttering under her breath and dragging her feet.
‘Please take a perch,’ Egbert said grandly, waving a wing towards a low wooden rail that stretched along one side of the yard.
‘Outdoor seating!’ Bertha exclaimed in admiration. ‘How very convenient!’
‘Ah yes,’ said Egbert, preening himself. ‘It was one of my better ideas, I think, to commission Simon to make us some garden furniture. Naturally we have indoor perches as well.’
‘Oh, naturally,’ Freda muttered.
Bertha leaned gracefully against the rail. Conker, Leo and Mimi perched on it uncomfortably. As Freda joined them, looking disdainful, the yard gate swung open again and six hens wandered in, eyeing the visitors self-consciously.
‘Ah, the ladies have joined us,’ Egbert said expansively. He raised his voice. ‘Hurry along, my dears! All is well. I have everything under control.’
When the hens had gathered around him, he puffed up his chest and made a rather long-winded speech in which he explained the guests’ quest, promised the full cooperation of the Flock of Bing, and tactfully made no mention of the unfortunate incident on the path. He then made formal introductions, consistently (and deliberately, Leo was sure) referring to Freda as ‘Ferdie’.
The hens were all very different from one another. The first to be introduced was Cluck, a small, neat and rather bossy-looking red hen. After her was Teeny, who was golden-brown, even smaller than Cluck, and so thin, talkative and excitable-looking that Leo was sure she was the one who had given the alarm and caused the stampede. Next was the elegant, beautifully speckled Chickadee, who kept tossing her gleaming red comb out of her eyes in a rather affected manner. Then there was Scramble, a white hen who smiled vacantly and instantly forgot everyone’s name, and Broody, a handsome, silent, intense-looking black hen who seemed rather depressed.
‘And last, but by no means least,’ Egbert announced, with the air of having saved the best till the end, ‘may I present … Moult!’
The flock parted to reveal a worried-looking mouse-brown hen standing by herself at the back. The brown hen jumped nervously. ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ she mumbled, ducking her head.
The elegant Chickadee sneered and whispered something to Scramble behind her wing. Scramble giggled uncertainly. Moult looked hunted.
Cluck began bustling around the yard, kicking up a lot of dust and issuing orders to the others. Moult scuttled to help her, but no one else took any notice.
‘Cluck!’ called Egbert. ‘Don’t exhaust yourself, my dear! Come and sit down.’
‘How can I sit down, Egbert?’ snapped Cluck. ‘We have guests, and someone has to make the refreshments! You would think that everyone would pull together on an occasion like this, but oh, no. As usual everything is left to me.’ She shouted some more instructions to Moult, and in a few moments the two of them had dragged a large tin platter into the centre of the group surrounding Egbert.
‘There!’ Cluck said, collapsing and fanning herself fretfully with her wing. ‘Please help yourselves.’
As the refreshments on the platter were a bowl of water with a feather floating in it, a small heap of grain, some very brown apple cores and a few dusty fish paste sandwiches, the friends politely said thank you but they weren’t hungry. Cluck gave a martyred sigh and ate an apple core herself.
‘In a day or two all the grain will be gone,’ Broody said in a low, throbbing voice. ‘The apples too, I daresay. Then …’ She sighed deeply.
‘Oh, my beak!’ quavered Teeny. ‘Do you mean … we’re going to starve?’ Her feathers began to fluff up ominously. Clearly she was preparing for another bout of hysterics.
‘Beak up, Teeny,’ Egbert said bracingly, shooting a reproving glance at Broody. He leaned a little closer towards Bertha. ‘Teeny is a delightful hen, but a trifle … highly strung,’ he muttered out of the side of his beak.
‘We noticed,’ Freda smirked.
Egbert gave her a cold look and turned back to Teeny. ‘Remember what I told you, my dear,’ he said soothingly. ‘Our guests are here to save Wizard Bing and bring Simon home. Soon all our problems will be over.’
‘Oh!’ gulped Teeny, her feathers settling a little. ‘And so in the end we’ll all live happily ever after?’
‘As sure as eggs are eggs!’ Egbert assured her. ‘Absolutely!’ Conker said heartily.
All the hens began chattering excitedly – all but Moult, who stood a little apart, looking troubled.
‘Conker, we can’t promise –’ Mimi whispered indignantly, but broke off as Conker glared at her.
‘Now,’ said Egbert, turning to Bertha. ‘It is my duty, since I clearly have the most highly developed brain in this gathering, to take the lead in our discussion. As I would prefer to speak to you and your party in private, I suggest we adjourn to the hen house.’
‘I’m not going in there,’ Freda said flatly. ‘Nesting boxes give me the creeps.’
‘There’s no need for any of us to move from this spot!’ Conker barked. ‘We’re the expert investigators here, so we’ll decide what’s going to be discussed and what’s not.’
‘Conker –’ Bertha murmured warningly, but Conker took no notice. ‘We need to interview all the witnesses,’ he said to Egbert. ‘Your theories can wait.’
‘Well, really!’ Egbert snapped. He turned his back on Conker and stalked away to the other side of the yard, his tail feathers stiff with outrage.
The hens looked after him, murmuring uncertainly.
‘There’s no need for concern, ladies,’ Conker said, baring his teeth in a terrible smile. ‘All you have to do is answer some simple questions.’
‘Questions?’ Scramble quavered. ‘Oh, I hope they won’t be too difficult. I never can answer difficult questions. Or even easy ones, sometimes.’
‘When Simon didn’t answer the policeman’s questions, he got taken to gaol!’ cried Teeny, blinking rapidly and hopping from foot to foot. ‘Maybe you’ll have to go to gaol too, Scramble! And if the questions are really difficult maybe I will too. Maybe all of us will!’
‘And then the Flock of Bing will be no more,’ said Broody with melancholy satisfaction.
‘We’re doomed!’ wailed Teeny, fluffing up until she was twice her normal size.
‘Lawks-a-daisy,’ sighed Bertha. ‘Here we go again!’
‘Teeny!’ Mimi snapped, putting her hands on her hips. ‘Do you want to help Simon or not?’
Teeny’s beak fell open in shock. She swallowed. ‘Yes,’ she gulped.
‘Well, pull yourself together and help, then,’ said Mimi crisply. ‘Stop working yourself up for nothing and wasting everyone’s time.’
Teeny blinked, shut her beak with a little click, and began to shrink like a slowly leaking balloon. In moments she had returned to her normal size.
‘Oh, good work, Mimi!’ Bertha murmured.
‘She’s very hard-boiled, isn’t she?’ Leo heard Chickadee whisper to Cluck, looking down her beak at Mimi. ‘It’s not very feminine.’
Cluck tossed her head. ‘It’s a relief to hear someone talking sense, if you ask me,’ she whispered back. ‘All this coddling of Teeny is a mistake – I’ve said that since she first came here. She was spoiled as a chick, that’s her trouble. All that addle-brained nonsense about hysterics running in her family …’
‘But it does!’ clucked Chickadee. ‘My dear, they say her grandfather caused a general riot in his youth. The family
tried to hush it up, naturally, but these things always leak out.’
‘Have the questions started yet?’ Scramble asked Broody. Broody shook her head sombrely.
‘Right!’ said Conker, running his fingers through his hair. ‘Well, then. First question … ah …’
‘We’d like you to tell us about any visitors Wizard Bing had just before he disappeared,’ Mimi said quickly. ‘Was there a stranger, fairly tall – with a little beard maybe, and blue-tinted glasses?’
The hens all shook their heads. ‘There have been no visitors,’ Cluck said. ‘Wizard Bing does not encourage them. He is a very busy man, and he values his privacy.’
‘There must have been one visitor at least,’ Mimi insisted. ‘We found a list –’
‘They can’t see the house from here,’ Freda muttered, as the hens shook their heads again. ‘Bing could have had a whole team of visitors without them knowing about it – especially at night. You can’t hear much with your head under your wing.’
‘No,’ Cluck declared, overhearing. ‘If there had been visitors, Simon would have told us. He kept us fully informed of events in the House of Bing.’
‘Dear Simon,’ moaned Broody. ‘Gone but not forgotten.’
Moult, standing alone at the edge of the crowd, gave a strangled sob, and a few of the others glanced at her again in what Leo thought was definitely an accusing way.
‘It’s as if they blame Moult for what happened,’ he whispered to Mimi, forgetting for the moment that he was angry with her. ‘But how could it be her fault?’
‘They’re probably used to blaming her for everything,’ Mimi muttered back, glaring at the other hens. ‘They pick on her, you can see that.’ Her hands were clenched into fists, and as she saw Leo glancing at them curiously she shoved them into her jacket pockets.
‘Simon’s not dead,’ Bertha was saying to the hens soothingly. ‘He’s only a mushroom. And speaking of that, have you any idea how he became, um … mushroomised in the first place?’
‘No,’ clucked Cluck, who seemed to have appointed herself spokeshen for the flock. ‘It is all very distressing. We didn’t see him at all on the day of the tragedy. The last time we saw him – saw him looking like himself – was the day before. Thirstyday.’
‘Was it Thirstyday?’ Scramble asked vaguely. ‘Or was it Flyday?’ Her eyes crossed with the effort of trying to remember.
‘Chickens in Rondo have their own names for the days of the week,’ Bertha murmured to Leo and Mimi, seeing them glancing at each other in confusion. ‘It’s a very old tradition. Isn’t it the same in Langland?’
‘I don’t know,’ Leo said.
‘Probably,’ said Mimi at the same moment.
‘Of course it wasn’t Flyday, Scramble!’ said Chickadee, tossing back her comb impatiently. ‘Flyday was a very unusual day, don’t you remember? First, it was Teeny’s hatching-day but Simon didn’t come to the party. And then in the night the explosion happened. But Thirstyday was just an ordinary day.’
‘Just an ordinary day,’ Cluck agreed with a sharp little nod. ‘We were just thinking of going to the sleeping perches when Simon came to say goodnight. He was in fine spirits then.’
‘He brought us some bread rolls for supper,’ Teeny put in, ‘and we had a little sing-song, as usual. Then Wizard Bing called him to make dinner and he had to go.’
‘Ah, little did we know we would never see his dear face again,’ Broody sighed.
‘That’s right!’ exclaimed Scramble, thrilled to have remembered at last. ‘Thirstyday was the last time we saw Simon, and it was just an ordinary day, with an argument at the end of it.’
‘Argument?’ snapped Conker. ‘What argument?’
‘Just the usual thing,’ Cluck said dismissively. ‘Wizard Bing shouting at Simon, calling him a nincompoop, telling him he was sacked and so on.’
‘But Flyday wasn’t an ordinary day at all,’ Scramble babbled on. ‘As well as everything else, Flyday was the day Moult laid the golden egg!’
Chapter
26
The Deep, Dark Secret
There was a sudden, shocked silence in the chicken yard. Conker, Freda, Bertha, Leo and Mimi turned to gaze in astonishment at the cringing Moult. ‘Scramble, you featherbrain!’ scolded Cluck. ‘Scramble, you addle-head!’ squawked Teeny. Scramble’s eyes widened. She clapped her wing over her beak. ‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, I wasn’t supposed to tell, was I? The golden egg is a deep, dark secret, isn’t it? I forgot.’
‘Forgot?’ Broody repeated in disgust. ‘You forgot the last words our beloved wizard ever spoke to us?’
‘How could you, Scramble?’ cried Chickadee.
‘My heart, liver and lungs, this is – incredible!’ Conker gasped. ‘I’ve only ever heard of one other hen who could lay golden eggs, and that was before the Dark Time. Moult – are you related to Goldie Featherlocks? Was she your grandmother or something?’
‘I don’t know,’ Moult said in a small voice. ‘I’m an orphan. I never met my mother and father, and I don’t know anything about the rest of my family.’
‘Moult doesn’t even know her hatching-day,’ Teeny chipped in brightly. ‘We’re fairly sure it must have been a Thirstyday, because you couldn’t get a hen thinner and sadder than Moult is, but it’s not official so she never gets any hatching-day presents.’
Moult shook her head sadly.
‘Moult can’t be Goldie Featherlocks’ granddaughter,’ Freda said. ‘Goldie Featherlocks was stolen so often that she didn’t have time to have chicks.’
‘She couldn’t have had chicks anyway,’ Chickadee said, with a spiteful, sidelong glance at Moult. ‘There’s no room for a chick in a fancy-ansy solid gold egg.’
‘Leave Moult alone!’ Mimi snapped unexpectedly. ‘Can’t you see she feels bad? Do you all have to be so mean?’
Chickadee tossed her head. Mimi, her face flushed, turned to Moult. ‘Did you really lay a golden egg?’ she asked gently.
Moult shuffled her claws and nodded, looking more dejected than ever.
‘Did it hurt?’ Freda asked with interest. Moult shook her head.
‘Lawks-a-daisy,’ Bertha breathed in awe. ‘The new Goldie Featherlocks! Imagine what Scribble would say if he knew about this! Imagine what – oh!’
She drew a sharp breath and swung round to face the rest of the quest team. ‘Violet Orpington-Dunk!’ she cried. ‘Now we know why she was on Wizard Bing’s list!
Farmer Macdonald must have been one of Wizard Bing’s targets, and Violet was coming here as Macdonald’s representative! Violet is Macdonald’s right-hand hen when it comes to matters of poultry. He’d know she’d recognise a fraud when she saw it.’
‘Fraud?’ squawked Egbert, overhearing the last few words. ‘Do you dare accuse us of fraud? This is too much!’ He bent rapidly to sharpen his beak on a stone and then began to stride across the yard, puffing himself up ominously.
‘Oh, no! I didn’t mean –’ Bertha began hastily, as Moult gave a tremulous cry and all the other hens began clucking excitedly to one another.
‘Swatters out,’ muttered Freda to Conker, trying to push her way in front of Leo and Bertha. ‘You go for his head. I’ll take the underbelly.’
‘No, Freda!’ Bertha whispered furiously, standing her ground. ‘Stay back! Leo and I will handle this.’
‘Leo, be careful,’ Mimi cried, as the hens scurried aside to let Egbert through.
‘Don’t worry,’ Leo said. ‘It’ll be all right.’
He certainly hoped it would. His voice sounded amazingly calm, considering that his knees had started to feel extremely weak and his hands were sweating. Egbert, swollen with fury and now far too close for comfort, was a truly terrifying sight.
‘There was no question of fraud!’ thundered Egbert, his eyes hard as small black pebbles.
‘We know that, Egbert,’ Leo assured him, eyeing the sharpened beak nervously. ‘Bertha was talking about someone else who might have made that mistake.’
‘That very foolish mistake,’ Bertha added quickly. ‘One we would never make ourselves, of course.’
‘Oh,’ said Egbert, the feathers on the back of his neck flattening a little. ‘I see.’
Leo breathed a silent sigh of relief and decided to press home his advantage. ‘Can you tell us what happened on, um, on Flyday morning, Egbert?’ he asked. ‘We need to know.’
‘Of course you do,’ said Egbert huffily. ‘And you would have done so, long ago, if you had agreed to my proposal to –’
‘That was a mistake,’ Leo said, glancing at Conker to warn him to keep quiet. ‘We should have listened to you, Egbert. We apologise. Most – most profoundly.’
‘We certainly do,’ Bertha agreed.
Conker made a strangled, choking sound, Mimi snorted and Freda made a vomiting noise, but Egbert was fortunately too busy clearing his throat and settling his ruffled feathers to hear them.
‘Very well,’ he said, with the air of one making a great concession. ‘On Flyday morning, Wizard Bing came to collect our eggs. Broody, Cluck and Teeny were tidying the yard while I – ahem – supervised. Chickadee, Scramble and Moult were still in their nesting boxes –’
‘Taking their time, lolling around on the nice warm straw while the rest of us did all the work!’ Cluck put in resentfully.
‘It takes time to lay a high-quality egg,’ Chickadee sniffed. ‘I can’t help it if I’m a perfectionist.’
‘I think I’d forgotten what I was supposed to be doing,’ Scramble murmured.
‘I’d laid my egg, but I wasn’t feeling very well,’ whispered Moult.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Freda said.
‘Wizard Bing went into the hen house with the basket,’ Egbert went on, raising his voice determinedly. ‘He asked us to go with him –’
‘He was in a very good mood,’ Teeny interrupted breathlessly. ‘He told Chickadee, Scramble and Moult not to get up, and he wasn’t even angry when he found that Chickadee and Scramble had empty nests. He just laughed and wagged his finger at them and said, “I hope you’ll do better tomorrow, my friends. Don’t forget – an egg a day keeps the hatchet away.”’