Because they had actually seen a bogwoppit all the children became enthusiastic about beetle hunting, but in spite of their enthusiasm and massed searching there were only a hundred and seventy-five black beetles brought to Samantha in the school playground the next morning. And a note she had found stuck in the bars of the grid had produced the words: CAN’T YOU HURRY UP. I WANT TO GET OUT. It sounded testy.
Samantha realized that timing was going to play an important part in the rescue. If they handed over the ransom too quickly (and this did not seem in the least probable at present), Aunt Daisy might not be grateful enough, and things would quickly slide back to the way they had been before. If they took too long about it Lady Clandorris might accuse them of doing it on purpose, and keeping her a prisoner for their own ends. In that case she was not at all likely to ask Samantha to come back and live at the Park. The ideal would be to collect the right amount of black beetles within the next few days and then to present their own conditions before handing them over. After all, Lady Clandorris had much more to gain from her freedom than they had.
Samantha wrote another note: VERY DIFFICULT TO COLLECT RANSOM. DOING OUR BEST.
Back came the answer in a matter of minutes.
THE HOUSE IS FULL OF THEM, YOU STUPID CHILD.
Samantha sighed in exasperation. She knew there were vast colonies of black beetles in the Park, but catching them was quite another matter. While she cornered one the rest made off and disappeared at a surprising rate. The same thing happened in every cupboard she opened. She complained bitterly to the Prices, who had not given any help at all, being glued to a television serial that meant a great deal to them at the moment.
‘I think we ought to tell my dad!’ said Timothy when she reproached them.
‘Not yet!’ said Samantha hastily, ‘I’ve got a better idea first. We’ll have a beetle drive!’
‘Where?’
‘At the Park!’
‘When?’
‘After school tomorrow!’
When she put the suggestion before them the class was not so enthusiastic as they had been the first time Samantha had invited them to her home. It was partly, perhaps, because she had mentioned that this time there would be no tea, and partly because Lady Clandorris’s sudden appearance and the subsequent disgracing of Samantha had left rather an unpleasant memory. But she assured them that this time Lady Clandorris had gone right away, and that she now went in and out as she pleased.
But since they had explored it for themselves the Park was no longer the place of glamour and mystery they had imagined it to be. They remembered, not so much the lofty rooms, the halls, the staircase and even the pianola, but also the dust, the dereliction and the squalor, as well as the wrath and indignation of Lady Clandorris in the face of all her uninvited visitors.
‘Come on! It will be fun!’ Samantha coaxed them. ‘Besides, when we’ve collected the black beetles we can get the bogwoppits to come to the surface any time we want them. We can tame them!’
But the class remembered the rather violent appearance of the One-and-Only-Bogwoppit, and did not seem eager to have tame bogwoppits climbing all over them. Their mothers, they decided, would detest it. Miss Mellor had mentioned something about building a hide and watching the bogwoppits through slits in the walls. This, the class decided, was a much more sensible way of carrying out the Project.
‘All right,’ Samantha said suddenly. ‘There will be food after all.’
The class gave in. They agreed to go up to the Park the next day, after school, carrying polythene bags in which to capture the black beetles.
Samantha was triumphant. Once more she warned the Prices to keep the subject of Lady Clandorris’s kidnapping a secret. She told the whole class to arrive at the Park by four o’clock the next day. The twins’ class was included at the last minute, for fear that Tim would tell his father, out of revenge. The mere thought of another feast and of playing the pianola was enough to win everybody’s approval and acceptance.
It was left to Samantha to think out the question of food and drink. She had no idea where this was to come from. Kind Mrs Price might supply a few cakes or biscuits, but not supplies for a party of nearly sixty children.
Fortunately, on her return to the Prices’ home she met Mr Beaumont, Lady Clandorris’s lawyer, on the doorstep. He had been handing Mrs Price the monthly cheque for Samantha’s keep.
‘Ah, young lady!’ he said on seeing Samantha. ‘We had just been talking over the question of your pocket money! How is your auntie?’
Samantha immediately sensed that Mr Beaumont did not want to go up to the Park and find out for himself.
‘My auntie is all right,’ said Samantha. ‘What about my pocket money?’
Mrs Price tactfully withdrew. Mr Beaumont and Samantha walked in the garden.
‘Do you find it enough?’ asked Mr Beaumont. ‘Your auntie told me to give you what the other children have, and any more that may be necessary.’
‘Necessary for what?’ asked Samantha cautiously.
‘Well, perhaps you want to go for a bus ride now and then?’ Mr Beaumont suggested. ‘Or get some clothes? Or go to the pictures?’
‘Yes I do!’ said Samantha. ‘I want to get a new dress and to take all the Prices to the pictures.’
‘Well that’s rather a tall order!’ said Mr Beaumont, looking alarmed.
‘All right, I can do without the dress!’ said Samantha. ‘But I’d like to take them all out to tea after the pictures.’
‘All of them? Mum, Dad and the children?’ said Mr Beaumont.
‘All of them,’ said Samantha subbornly.
‘Of course, they have been very good to you!’ agreed Mr Beaumont thoughtfully. ‘Very good indeed.’ Privately he was sorry for Samantha. He thought she had been poorly treated by her aunt, and was not averse to spending some of Lady Clandorris’s money on her if necessary. ‘You can spend what you like to get the child looked after,’ Lady Clandorris had told him. ‘Just as long as I don’t set eyes on her again.’
Between them Mr Beaumont and Samantha worked out how much money it would take to buy cinema tickets for the five Prices and herself and to take them out to tea afterwards. Samantha reminded him that there would also be bus fares.
‘It is a lot of money!’ Mr Beaumont sighed at the end of their calculations.
‘Not for six people and tea as well as the cinema and the bus both ways,’ said Samantha. ‘I shan’t do it every week.’
‘I should think not!’ said Mr Beaumont, but he handed over the money without further argument.
‘You will have to wait a little longer for your new dress!’ he told her, adding with a fatherly smile: ‘We’ll let Auntie get over this one first!’
Samantha raced Mr Beaumont to the gate in her hurry to get down to the shops and lay out the money in cakes, biscuits, potato crisps and bottles of fizzy lemonade. She was too accustomed to running rings round Aunt Lily to worry about buying them under false pretences. She was glad to find that there was just enough money left over to take Mrs Price, by herself, to the pictures at a later date.
She hurried up to the Park, carrying trays, and closely followed by the Prices.
The beetle drive was a great success. Samantha announced that anyone catching ten beetles was eligible to play a whole roll of music on the pianola. Presently there was a whole queue of people awaiting their turn, and Samantha went into the kitchen to find a larger container for all the black beetles they had collected. The kitchen was pervaded by a familiar smell, and beyond the cellar door a familiar moaning and wailing filled her with apprehension.
Sure enough, when she opened the door, the thinnest, flattest bogwoppit she had ever seen sat whimpering in a puddle on the far side. It had evidently squeezed through the bars of the grid, and was holding a piece of paper in its beak.
Samantha snatched the paper and closed the cellar door on the bogwoppit, but it set up such a caterwauling that she was forced to open it again. As she did s
o Timothy entered the kitchen behind her, bent upon refreshments.
‘It squeezed through the grid,’ Samantha said, half in and half out of the cellar door. ‘I don’t know how … but it has!’
‘We ought to tell my dad!’ said Timothy.
‘Read this first!’ said Samantha, holding out the paper.
The words on it said:
I WANT MY HAT FOR EMERGING.
‘What does “emerging” mean?’ asked Timothy.
‘Getting out, you twit. Go upstairs and get the hat with feathers on it. It’s on her bed. I’ll look after the bogwoppit,’ said Samantha. ‘Don’t let anyone see you with the hat!’ she hissed after him as he made for the stairs.
Tim came back with the pheasant feather hat crushed under his blazer. Nobody had seen him come or go. Samantha took it from him and spruced it up with the hearth brush. It was a very old and dusty hat like everything else belonging to Lady Clandorris. Some of the pheasants’ feathers were coming out.
‘It will be ruined if the bogwoppit drags it through the bars!’ Samantha said. ‘I’d better go and unlock the grid for it.’
‘What about tea?’ said Timothy.
‘When I come back!’ said Samantha, keeping a fast hold on the hat, and following the bogwoppit through the cellar door. She kept the key of the grid high on the dresser, and was now carrying it in the left-hand pocket of her jeans.
Arriving at the grid the long, thin bogwoppit insisted on wriggling through the bars, just to show her how clever it was, but Samantha firmly refused to push the hat after it. She unlocked the gate in the grid and passed through it Lady Clandorris’s pheasant feather hat.
By the beam of her torch she saw the bogwoppit put the hat saucily on its head and prance away down the tunnel.
But it was hardly out of sight before she heard a banshee screech of rage, followed by one of terror. Yelp followed snarl, scuffling broke out and the drain reverberated to the sound of fighting. Triumphant cries mingled with vanquished sobbing, and then the noise died down.
Full of misgivings, Samantha was in half a mind to penetrate the drain a little farther beyond the grid, but she was afraid the bogwoppits might rush at her in the dark and take the key away, or, worse still, overpower her and make her a prisoner like Lady Clandorris. So she locked the gate very firmly and was turning away, when a scampering noise arrested her. Something came galloping up the drain in the darkness to hurl itself with full force against the bars of the grid.
Samantha’s torch shone full into the round blue eyes and beaky bill of the One-and-Only, not loving and affectionate now, but crumpled and indignant, as with bill and wing and angry claw it thrust the unfortunate remains of Lady Clandorris’s pheasant feather hat through the bars in several dozen pieces.
‘Oh how naughty you are!’ Samantha scolded, but the One-and-Only did not wait to be reproved. It flounced away into the darkness in a series of scornful leaps and bounces, leaving Samantha to pick up such fragments as she could find by the feeble light of her torch, and to find her way back to the kitchen, where her guests were beginning to assemble and clamour for their tea.
The result of the beetle drive was just under two thousand black beetles of every shape and size. Some of them were alive and some were dead. The ransom had not stipulated anything about condition.
17. Fame at Last!
Suddenly the park became the centre of a great deal of interest, from a great many different sources.
Miss Mellor reported her Project to the Society for the Protection of Rare and Rural Species, who told her at once that bogwoppits were extinct, and that even if they were not, they were a protected animal and nobody was allowed to kill them.
This was a great relief to Samantha, but she was very much afraid that it would not prevent her aunt from sluicing the cellar out with disinfectant just whenever she felt like it, once she was free and in her own territory again.
There had been no message since the hat incident, and everything seemed quiet down the drain. Samantha kept the two thousand black beetles in a box in her bedroom, and pondered on the best moment to offer up the ransom.
Overnight, it seemed, the Park became crowded with people. It was all coming true, just as Samantha had dreamed it; first the Preservation Society in a van, then a television company. They put up tents and hides in the Park all round the marsh pools, and kept coming up to the house to ask Lady Clandorris’s permission for being there at all.
Slowly it was appreciated that Lady Clandorris was not in residence, and had not been there, in fact, for a long time. Bills were unpaid, letters from months back lay in the letter box, and all rateable amenities had been cut off by the appropriate authorities.
Samantha was asked all kinds of questions, but pretended to know nothing at all about her aunt. She agreed that she had been up at the Park, but thought her aunt had gone away on a visit. No, she didn’t know when she would be back again. She explained that she herself was staying with the Prices, and just went up now and again to have a look round the place.
When the Preservation Society heard that it was Samantha who had discovered the bogwoppits they took her photograph, which appeared in the national press, and it looked very much as if she and the Prices, as well as Miss Mellor, might all appear on television.
Samantha and the Prices said nothing about the cellar or the grid, or Lady Clandorris being kept as a prisoner down there somewhere underneath their feet. Even Timothy realized that once the truth came out there would soon be an end to the tents in the Park and the television appearance and all the fame and the fun. It would very likely be the end of the bogwoppits as well.
But Samantha’s usually robust conscience was for once uneasy, and she began to plan the right moment for offering her black beetles and driving a bargain at the same time with her aunt that would keep everybody satisfied, if not exactly happy.
When Mrs Price realized that Lady Clandorris was no longer at the Park she was quite upset, and refused to let Samantha sleep up there alone. Samantha missed living in the house and playing at being lady-of-the-manor to all the new arrivals, but she went up every evening after tea. Sometimes she went down the drain and looked for the One-and-Only, and one unforgettable evening she actually saw it and was able to kiss it through the bars, but it was not safe to let it out with so many strangers about.
The other bogwoppits were becoming much more friendly. They began to come to the grid and make cheerful little noises as if they were glad to see her. Sometimes she fed them with black beetles, to sharpen their appreciation. But of her aunt she neither heard nor saw a sign.
Once she wrote a note and sent it by the One-and-Only.
DEAR AUNT DAISY. ARE YOU STILL ALL RIGHT?
Nothing happened. But two days later an empty cereal carton floated on the surface of the marsh pool. Written across it was the one word: YES. It did not mean anything to anybody except Samantha.
Meanwhile, the Society for the Preservation of Rare and Rural Species and the television people were kept excited and happy by occasional glimpses of bogwoppits in the pools, usually just underneath the surface, and usually when the sun went down. Once they were filmed actually eating aruncus wopitus, much to the envy of Miss Mellor, who still had only the muddy flurry of a bogwoppit diving under the water recorded on her instamatic camera.
The time was drawing near, Samantha reluctantly admitted to herself, when she must make a definite move. She hoped to be able to turn it to her own advantage, but meanwhile she sent a further message down the drain: RANSOM READY. WHAT NOW?
Nothing happened. She tried again, less tersely: DEAR AUNT DAISY. THE RANSOM IS READY. WHEN WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE RESCUED?
‘When she says when,’ Samantha told the Prices, ‘I shall tell her my terms. She has got to let me live with her again. I like living with you and I love your mum, but the Park is my home.’
The Prices agreed that this was true, but they were really thinking about the pianola.
To their astonishment
a note came back by way of the grid. Written on it in firm black letters were two words only:
TOO LATE.
Samantha stared and stared, so did the Prices. What could it possibly mean?
‘Do you think she can be dead?’ asked Deborah.
‘It’s her writing! She wrote it!’ said Samantha sturdily. ‘There’s something else up and we’ll have to find out what it is.’
A further proof of Aunt Daisy’s aliveness were the number of cans and empty cereal packets floating about on the surface of the marsh pools, with which the bogwoppits played a kind of water polo, to the great delight of the television and film company. The Preservation Society accused them of leaving their litter about, and were very caustic about vandalism.
Samantha wrote another letter, putting it into the now friendly beak of a bogwoppit at the grid. WHAT SHALL WE DO NOW? she wrote.
The reply was even more surprising than the last:
YOU CAN LEAVE ME ALONE AND GO AWAY.
Samantha and the Prices simply did not know what to make of it. That night it began to rain.
It must have been very disagreeable for the people camping in the Park. For a while they braved the weather, taking endless films of the bogwoppits splashing and sporting in the marsh pools, enjoying their favourite weather, but first Miss Mellor and then the rest of the Preservation Society abandoned their projects, and sat it out in their tents waiting for finer weather. The film people took what pictures they could in the rain, but there was a limit to shots of bubbling mud and wallowing bogwoppits, whose antics became a little monotonous. They too retired to their tents, while the rain went on and on and on.
Samantha, just a little worried by the turn things had taken, slopped up to the Park in gumboots, keeping an eye on the cellar, but no bogwoppits came to the grid, and a message she sent to her aunt asking after her health remained uncollected between the bars. Then it really became too wet to go up to the Park at all, so she stayed away.
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