Bogwoppit

by Ursula Williams

  It was not surprising that Mr Price had made a mistake in his choice of leaves, for the different plants grew in such variety and such profusion and were so tangled up with one another, that it needed broad daylight to see where one began and the other ended.

  ‘I think it’s over on this side,’ Samantha said, wading among the plants, each of which gave out a different scent as it brushed against her legs. ‘Ah-h-hh!’ she breathed suddenly, in relief, ‘I thought so! They’re here!’

  Jeff shone the torch on a clump of aruncus wopitus crouching under the wall, and Samantha picked and filled the toolbag.

  ‘We must dig up some plants!’ she said. ‘Have you got a knife, Jeff?’

  He had not, and the roots of the plants were long, strong and stubborn. Tugging and jerking they only succeeded in breaking off the plants above the roots.

  ‘Wait,’ Samantha said, breathless, ‘I’ll fetch the breadknife from the kitchen!’ She disappeared, leaving Jeff sitting like a small frightened rabbit among the aruncus wopitus leaves.

  But she was not long away. Almost at once she was back at his side, and even in the shadow of the house he could tell that she was trembling all over with apprehension.

  ‘I heard her door open!’ she hissed at him. ‘Get down in the leaves, and lie quite flat! Don’t make a sound! I think she heard us!’

  ‘Shut the door!’ urged Jeff, but it was too late now. Across the small courtyard garden they could distinctly hear the creak and tread of feet descending the stairs.

  Samantha and Jeff flung themselves flat among the herbs, their faces pressed to the sweet-smelling leaves of thyme and marjoram, which for ever afterwards they would associate with the terror of being hunted and probably discovered, by Lady Clandorris.

  Lying as still as stones they heard footsteps crossing the hall and approaching as far as the very threshold of the garden. Jeff was lying most uncomfortably across the torch, but he could not for the life of him remember whether he had switched it off or not. And if he had not, surely a faint and treacherous beam like the glow on the tail of a glow-worm, would penetrate the leaves and betray him? At the same time Samantha was asking herself where they had left the toolbag, and could it be seen from the door? Also what Aunt Daisy would be likely to say if she caught them, and whether she would send for the police.

  The footsteps stopped, and the silence that followed lasted almost longer than they could bear.

  Then, suddenly, they heard the door closed, and the key turned in the lock. Muffled now, the footsteps died away across the hall.

  After a few minutes Samantha looked up.

  ‘That’s done it!’ she said. ‘We’re locked in!’

  There was no other entrance to the herb garden, which was just a little courtyard built out beyond the house. The walls around it were too high to scale, and the roses too frail for climbing.

  ‘If we wait here till daylight she’ll see us!’ said Jeff, ready for tears.

  ‘P’raps not,’ said Samantha, ‘not if we lie quite flat till she goes out.’

  ‘How long?’ said Jeff hopefully.

  That was the question. As far as Samantha remembered, Lady Clandorris sometimes opened the door into the herb garden, and sometimes she didn’t. It all depended upon whether she wanted some herbs for her dinner or not.

  ‘We could shout!’ said Jeff lamely. Neither of them liked the idea of deliberately betraying themselves at one o’clock in the morning in a place where they had been expressly forbidden to go.

  ‘If she thought there was anybody here she would have come and looked,’ said Samantha, thinking aloud. ‘Supposing she just thought she had left the door open and the wind was blowing it – supposing she doesn’t think there is anyone about!’

  ‘Then we could be here for days!’ whispered Jeff in what was almost a wail.

  They waited, Samantha baffled, Jeff hoping that she would suddenly announce some wonderful solution to their problem. The minutes passed by.

  ‘I have got just one idea!’ Samantha said presently. ‘We could break the panel in the door and run for it while she is coming down the stairs! We could get away long before she caught us.’

  ‘She would be able to see who we were, from the stairs,’ Jeff pointed out. ‘And if you break a window the police get you and your dad has to pay. My dad said we were never to get into trouble with the police.’

  ‘Well, would you rather stop here all night, and perhaps all tomorrow too, then?’ Samantha said crossly.

  Jeff shook his head, too miserable to answer.

  Samantha began to make plans for breaking down the panel, which was made of painted wood and looked solid. Both she and Jeff were wearing canvas shoes, and unfortunately the toolbag had no tools in it. She took the rubber-handled torch and began to search for large stones, but it seemed very unlikely that they would be able to smash in the panel and escape before Lady Clandorris heard them and came rushing downstairs.

  And then, when the whole situation seemed hopeless and Jeff was really in tears at last, and they were making up their minds whether it was better to shout for help together or to curl up and sleep the rest of the night among the herbs, an extraordinary thing happened.

  The moonlight had shifted, and now an angle of light came fingering into the herb garden, and touched the door. Noticing this they watched it, and saw to their utter surprise and disbelief that very gently, very silently, the door was opening.

  While they watched with pounding heartbeats it opened from the width of a crack to a space wide enough for a face to peep through, and the face, pale in the moonlight, strangely small and scared and furtive, was the face of Jeff’s twin brother, Timothy.

  Tim had slept just a little longer than an hour when he awoke with a jerk to look and see whether Jeff had come home. He felt as if he had slept for hours, and on finding the bed still empty he was so dismayed that he came at once to the conclusion that something terrible must have happened.

  It seemed such a very long time ago that he had found Samantha standing beside his bed, shaking him by the arm and saying – what had she been saying? That he was to go with her to the Park to get aruncus wopitus leaves for the bogwoppit – and then it turned out that it was not Timothy she wanted, it was Jeff. Jeff, he knew, was more spunky and would do anything to please Samantha. So Jeff had gone with her and surely they should have been back by now?

  What could have happened? Perhaps the keeper had caught them! Perhaps the dogs had savaged them! Perhaps Lady Clandorris had caught them and shut them up and sent for the police? Something must have happened. Tim lay wondering if he ought to tell his father, but the consequences might be serious. Oddly enough he was more afraid of the possible consequences than of investigating for himself, and it was his twin brother that he was thinking of, not Samantha. For the second time that night he got out of bed, then dressed himself, and left the house as quietly as possible. Hearing him, the bogwoppit moaned and scratched inside the drain-pipe, but it was always doing that and nobody took any notice.

  Tim jogged up the Park drive in the footsteps of his brother and Samantha. The sight of the open window was almost a relief after the lonely emptiness of the moonlit night. At least it gave him a clue. They had been to the Park. They had been in the Park, and it looked as if they might still be in there now!

  It took real courage for Tim to haul himself on to the windowsill and then through the window into Lady Clandorris’s dining room. For no one but his twin brother would he ever have undertaken anything so brave and daring. There was a mite of assurance in the fact that only a couple of weeks ago he had explored this same house from top to bottom, and had walked round the huge old table just as he was doing now, but with far more confidence.

  He tiptoed into the hall and looked across it. Everything was perfectly still. He had half expected to find some sign of Jeff and Samantha the moment he entered the house, but to his disappointment there was nothing at all.

  Tim remembered the stairs, and the way into t
he kitchen, and the passage on the west side of the hall, leading to the pianola room. He walked across and looked inside. But the pianola stood deserted, music rolls lying about the floor just as they had left it after the party, and anyway, it was silly to think that anybody would be playing it in the middle of the night. Moonlight still flooded the lower rooms, though the moon was travelling on its way, and already half of the house was in shadow.

  They were going to fetch food for the bogwoppit, Samantha had said, and the bogwoppit ate leaves – aruncus wopitus leaves, and the leaves grew in Lady Clandorris’s herb garden. Yes! The herb garden! Samantha had showed them a herb garden on the day of the party, but where was the herb garden? Samantha had opened a door into a courtyard, and the leaves were in there in abundance, but which door had she opened? She had shown them so many places.

  Timothy stood alone in the hall, feeling terribly unprotected, as if every door he could see was about to spring open and something awful jump out of it and envelop him. He dared not try the handles. He crept round the walls counting the doors and timidly passing his hands across the panels. If the garden door had fitted better, and if the moon had not been shining across the top of the little courtyard he might never have dared to open any doors at all, but suddenly a chink of very pale light at the top of the panel caught his eye, and he was filled with hope. His fingers met the spiny resistance of a key, but now he had the confidence to turn it, and very slowly, very furtively, he pulled the door open.

  Long before he saw them lurking among the leaves Jeff and Samantha had bounded out of their hiding places, so suddenly that he nearly cried aloud in terror. Samantha brushed past him and led the way helter-skelter across the hall, into the dining room and through the window, paying no heed this time to any noise they might make so anxious were they to escape from the Park.

  Jeff had the presence of mind to shut the garden door behind them. He passed up the bag to Samantha, who snatched it and dropped it outside, following with a jump and a sprawl that skinned both her knees on the gravel outside.

  It seemed an age before both the twins followed. First Tim climbed out gingerly on to the windowsill, and jumped to the ground. Then Jeff appeared, threw his leg over the sash, and came slithering down. Like Samantha, he landed badly, and stood for a moment rubbing his knees and groaning underneath his breath.

  As the three of them huddled underneath the dining-room window, clutching the toolbag and rubbing their grazes, poised for flight, the entire contents of a large bucket of disinfectant came hurtling from the window above on to the dark and shady patch where they were standing, drenching everyone of them from head to foot. By some unaccountable good fortune the toolbag, being strapped up, escaped most of the deluge, and Samantha washed the leaves very carefully in clean water in the morning before giving them to the bogwoppit.

  As they tore down the drive towards the Prices’ home their gasping breath was interrupted by bursts of hysterical laughter.

  ‘And all the time …’ Samantha panted, ‘she thought … she thought … she thought we were bogwoppits!’

  11. The Bogwoppit Goes Back to the Marsh

  The bogwoppit received the aruncus wopitus leaves greedily if not graciously. Samantha rationed them as best she could, for she was well aware that the toolbag held no more than a few days’ supply, and nothing would ever persuade her to undertake another midnight raid upon the Park, nor Jeff either. Tim had bad dreams for three nights afterwards, and shrieked in his sleep. Deborah would hardly speak to any of them, because they had left her out of the adventure.

  Samantha was doing her best to behave so beautifully that neither her Aunt Lily nor her Aunt Daisy would have known her. She was genuinely attached to the Price family, and took her manners from theirs, added to which she knew that the bogwoppit was behaving quite badly enough for both of them. In the drain pipe it moaned and wailed, if Samantha was within earshot, while if she let it out, unless she held it in her arms, holding it very tight and lovingly, it got into every kind of mischief, from swinging on Mrs Price’s washing to pulling the weights off the cuckoo clock. It even attacked the cuckoo when he came out to protest at such treatment. The bogwoppit then refused to be caught, and had to be bribed back into its hated cage with handfuls of aruncus wopitus and some mud, so that the supplies dwindled very quickly indeed.

  At school, Miss Mellor was busy with quite a different Project featuring glow-worms, but she had not forgotten about the bogwoppits, and asked Samantha if she had seen any signs of them lately.

  Samantha hesitated. She felt the time had not yet come to make a Project of the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World. Not, that is, until it could be returned to its natural surroundings. It was becoming such a problem that, fond of it as she was, she could not help hoping that the day was not far off.

  ‘I don’t think there have been any bogwoppits in the marsh lately,’ she said truthfully. ‘I haven’t seen them there myself.’

  ‘Well perhaps after half-term we can make a start!’ said Miss Mellor. ‘You can ask your auntie’s permission when she comes back from her visit.’

  Everyone seemed to think that Lady Clandorris had gone away for a short time, and that was why Samantha was living with the Prices instead of up at the Park. Even the children who had come to the party thought it was only a temporary arrangement. They would not have believed her aunt could be so cruel as to banish Samantha for ever from her home.

  Samantha realized that something would have to be done about the bogwoppit. Kind Mrs Price was becoming quite short-tempered, and when dirty footprints appeared all over Mr Price’s newly ironed pyjamas he became short-tempered, too. Also, the aruncus wopitus had run out.

  ‘We’ll have to take it back to the marsh!’ Deborah said. ‘Honestly, I think our dad will wring its neck if we don’t do it soon.’

  ‘The aruncus stuff must be growing in the marsh pools again by now,’ said Samantha. ‘What we had better do is this: Tim and Deb can go round the outside of the Park as far as the keeper’s cottage. If he is there and the dogs are shut up they can wave a hanky from the top of the back gates. We can see it if we climb on the fence this side of the Park. And if he’s out and about they needn’t wave at all. Then we’ll know not to do it just then. It’s quite safe. There’s no law against waving handkerchiefs on a Saturday afternoon, not from anybody’s back gate. He can’t get them for that!’

  ‘What about Lady Clandorris?’ asked Deborah. ‘She might catch you at the marsh pools.’

  ‘Never!’ said Samantha. ‘I’ve never seen her go near the marsh pools at all. I believe what she said about taking the bogwoppits down there fifty times a day was just twaddle. Nobody has ever seen her there or they would have said so.’

  They took one further precaution.

  ‘Dad,’ Jeff said, ‘Samantha and me are going to take the bogwoppit back to the marsh pools.’

  ‘That’s a good job!’ said Mr Price.

  ‘But Dad,’ said Jeff, ‘can we stick something down the drain to prevent Lady Clandorris putting more disinfectant into the pools and killing it?’

  ‘Disinfectant hadn’t ought to be able to get into the pools at all,’ said Mr Price, thinking aloud. ‘The drain what she puts the disinfectant into goes into the main drain – joins it somewhere this side of the Park. There must be a leak to get it coming up in the pools, like. Now the secondary drain, what branches off the rest, that’s as high and dry as a badger’s nest. Nothing can’t get in there, short of a flood. It hasn’t been used for years. It’s a regular beauty, as big as a palace, more like a cellar than a drain. Why, a man can stand upright in it! A little damp, but not dusty. Your bogwoppit wouldn’t hurt in there.’

  ‘Well, couldn’t you block off the other part?’ the children asked hopefully.

  ‘What? Go up to the Park again? Not likely! When her Ladyship paid me for the grid she created something shocking, and said more or less that I was rooking her. I’m doing no more work for her!’ said Mr Price. ‘Not even if
she asks me I won’t, and catch me chasing her for a job!’

  ‘The bogwoppit may die!’ said Samantha. ‘And it’s the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World.’

  ‘And the world’s a better place for that!’ said Mr Price with feeling. ‘Even if you are right about it, my dear! I haven’t seen the TV cameras rushing to take its picture yet!’

  The children carried out their plan. Deborah and Tim circled the Park and saw through the windows of his cottage the gamekeeper and his wife watching Saturday sport on television. The dogs were shut up in pens, sleeping in the sun.

  Climbing the Park gates at the back entrance, they waved handkerchiefs in the direction of the housing estate, where Samantha and Jeff, on the look-out, saw the small, white distant signals, and climbed over the railings of the Park, carrying the bogwoppit in the toolbag.

  Samantha’s heart ached at parting with it, though Jeff had promised to give her a piebald guinea pig to take its place. Secretly she felt certain that the bogwoppit would not leave her. Somehow or other she believed it would find her again, and she refused to face the question of what was to be done with it if it did.

  To their relief, all over the borders of the marsh pools small clumps of aruncus wopitus were springing into life, apparently as prolific and as vigorous as before. Samantha picked some leaves and pulled up a couple of plants, just in case. They came more easily out of the bog than from the untended clay of Lady Clandorris’s herb garden.

  After a final hug she put the bogwoppit on the ground.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she whispered, ‘I’m terribly sorry! I wanted you to live with me, but …’

  She expected the bogwoppit to cling to her knees, to sob and cry, to fly back into her arms. She fully believed it would refuse to go into the marsh pool without her. She thought she would have to push it away and run.

  But the ungrateful little creature did not give her so much as a final glance. Spreading its ridiculous whirring wings it rose spinning into the air and dropped with a plop! into the middle of the marsh pool, spattering Samantha from head to foot with mud.