The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  ‘Turned up at the cottage like a pair of wet rats.’

  ‘Shivering so hard I chipped a tooth.’

  ‘They gave us dry clothes, whisky and their last box of cranberries! They’re the bees knees, that family.’

  ‘Back across the lake with the cranberries.’

  ‘Back down the cliff with the cranberries.’

  ‘Back into the ship with the cranberries.’

  ‘A day behind schedule now. Had to hightail it, ripped a couple of sails, called in a favour from a friend and got a permit to shortcut through the Sfajdji Waters.’

  ‘Made it to Gainsleigh on the morning of the wedding.’

  ‘Tore through town to the Gainsleigh Nightingale Club, carrying the cranberries.’

  ‘That’s where the wedding was held?’ I asked. ‘At the Gainsleigh Nightingale Club?’

  ‘You bet. Lisbeth had to hop the whole way, what with her twisted ankle—turned out to be fractured, later, but we didn’t know that then—anyhow, she can hop like a demon when she needs to.’

  ‘Flew into the kitchens.’

  ‘And there’s Peng-Lee, still sulking, still refusing to cook a single thing for that wedding.’

  ‘There are Patrick and Lida. Trying to persuade him to get started. Please, just get started. Offering him the second, third, fourth-best cranberries from all the Kingdoms and Empires.’

  ‘We’re here! we shouted.’

  ‘Slid the box of cranberries along the countertop to him.’

  ‘Both of us gasping for breath.’

  ‘Peng-Lee looks up. You can tell he doesn’t believe it.’

  ‘He picks up the box.’

  ‘He reads the label. Seacliff Mountain Cranberries, it says, clear as day.’

  ‘You got them! he crows. Now he’s tearing open the box.’

  ‘We’re all grinning. Patrick and Lida are mouthing, thank you, thank you at us. They’re ready to hightail it out of there to get themselves dressed for the wedding.’

  ‘And then Peng-Lee stops.’

  ‘Wait, he says, frowning. Are these from the east or the west face of the Seacliff Mountain?’

  ‘We stare. Gobsmacked. No clue, we say. Does it matter? Peng-Lee is turning the box around and around. Studying the label. There, he says, and he’s grim as granite.’

  ‘He points to a teeny-tiny line. East Seacliff Mountain, it says.’

  ‘He looks up at us. The east side of the mountain? he sneers. Useless to me. I need cranberries from the west! And he tosses the box into the trash.’

  Everyone at the table exploded into laughter, including me. Caught up in the story, I’d forgotten my mood.

  ‘Patrick grabbed the box right back out of the trash,’ Aunt Maya continued, ‘and then both Patrick and Lida got stuck into Peng-Lee. Before that, they’d been gentle and coaxing, see, but now they were blasting him.’

  ‘That was something about your parents.’ Aunt Lisbeth looked over at me. ‘Most of the time, they were sunny and fun, but when they got mad, they both got mad at the exact same moment. Turned themselves into a hurricane of shouting, their shouts piling up and overlapping.’

  ‘They’ve got your blazing cranberries! Patrick bellowed.’

  ‘They’ve been through so much to get them! Lida roared.’

  ‘You ridiculous, ungrateful git!’

  ‘Look, Lisbeth’s even fractured her ankle!’

  ‘We hadn’t told Lida what we’d been through, by the way,’ Aunt Maya added. ‘Not even that Lisbeth had hurt her ankle. But those are some of the things she shouted at Peng-Lee.’

  ‘A doctor confirmed my ankle was fractured later that night,’ Aunt Lisbeth put in, ‘after I danced on it for hours at the wedding. It swelled up like a zeppelin!’

  ‘Your mother seemed to just know things, sometimes,’ Aunt Maya added, smiling at me now. The rest of the table also smiled at me, and then turned back to my aunts. Aunt Lisbeth carried on.

  ‘Anyhow, they were hopping mad! You’d think they’d have been hopping mad before this, what with Peng-Lee ruining their wedding, but it was only when they thought Maya and I had been mistreated that they lost it.’

  ‘In the end, Peng-Lee hugged both Patrick and Lida (while they were still shouting), shook our hands, and promised to make the grandest banquet in all the kingdoms and empires.’

  ‘Which is exactly what he did,’ Aunt Lisbeth concluded. ‘The gourmet pages in the Gainsleigh News wrote a feature on it.’

  ‘Still dream about that feast,’ Aunt Maya sighed. ‘Especially the roast duck with the pistachios and cranberries.’

  ‘The cranberries were excellent,’ Aunt Lisbeth noted. ‘Afterwards, Peng-Lee told Maya and me that all this time he’d been mistaken. That we’d opened his eyes to the actual superiority of cranberries from the east side of mountain.’

  They both smiled down at the package on the table before them.

  ‘And where are your cranberries from?’ said Bo.

  The aunts studied the fine print, until Aunt Maya pointed.

  ‘East,’ Aunt Lisbeth said.

  ‘Of course,’ Aunt Maya whispered.

  Everyone, still smiling, got back to eating dinner.

  I was packing my suitcase early the next morning when Aunt Maya knocked on the door.

  ‘Topnotch news,’ she said. ‘The boy from the turtle hole’s awake.’

  I had to think for a moment what she was talking about. ‘The boy from the turtle hole’ sounded to me like a boy with a long neck and a shell.

  Then I remembered. ‘The boy with no shoes! He’s all right!’

  ‘Still a ways-away from all right, Junior Captain. Still buried deep under the weather, you might say. But the doc says he’ll likely pull through. All packed? Shall we walk to breakfast together?’

  I told her I needed another quarter of an hour, and we agreed to meet in the dining hall. But as soon as her footsteps faded, I slipped out and ran to the infirmary.

  The doctor bit her lip when she saw me. She set aside her paperback novel. ‘Oh, honey, no,’ she said. ‘He’s not ready for visitors. He’s awfully weak.’

  ‘But it’s my last chance,’ I pleaded with her. ‘I’m disembarking this morning.’

  So she said that I was to be very quiet, and only stay a minute, then she pulled open a curtain and there he was.

  He was propped against pillows and his bright, black eyes looked right into my eyes. His face did not have the blue-ish corpse look any more, but he was still grazed and bruised and bandaged.

  ‘Here’s Bronte,’ the doctor smiled at him. ‘She’s the niece of the captains, and one of the children who found you and brought you aboard.’

  Now the boy’s eyes brightened even more. ‘I am glad to meet you,’ he said. His voice was a little raspy. ‘You saved my life, you and your friends, and I thank you.’ He had an accent I couldn’t place.

  ‘It was nothing,’ I said.

  We studied each other for a moment. I was waiting for him to mention the baby we’d rescued from the river, but he didn’t. In fact, everything about his expression suggested that he was only meeting me properly for the first time now—that I was just a girl who had carried him half-conscious across the moor.

  So perhaps I was wrong after all.

  Disappointment like cold tea spread all around my body, down my arms to my fingertips, down my legs to my toenails.

  Strange, I know. I hadn’t realised that sadness could move like cold tea. And I hadn’t realised how much I wanted this boy to be my boy with no shoes. Not just because that would prove me right and Taylor wrong, although that was a scratchy part of it.

  The doctor said she had to run out for a moment and would I look after Alejandro, please, while she was gone.

  ‘What sort of looking after does he need?’ I panicked, but she laughed and said, ‘Oh, give him a glass of water if he wants one,’ and ran out the door.

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ I asked. ‘Alejandro?’ Trying out his name.
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  ‘No, I thank you,’ Alejandro replied, and he grinned in such a friendly way that I was sure, all over again, that he was the boy with no shoes.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked next.

  He shrugged. ‘I am right as rain.’ Looking at him and all the violent purple bruising on his collarbone, I found that unlikely.

  ‘If I may,’ I began. Then I stopped. I was trying to imagine how Aunt Isabelle would phrase this. ‘If it is not too forward of me,’ I tried next. ‘May I enquire how you came to be—in such a wretched state—in the shallow hole of a Faffle-Toed Turtle?’

  Alejandro laughed, but flinched and touched his chest. ‘Cracked ribs,’ he explained, but still smiled. ‘It is like this …’

  I sat down on the chair by the bed and waited for Alejandro to begin.

  ‘It is like this,’ he said again. ‘I was raised on a pirate ship. The Dagger and Serpent, so called.’

  ‘You’re a pirate!’ I gasped.

  ‘Well…’ He considered this. ‘I suppose so. As I was brought up by pirates and lived aboard their ship. You are wishing you’d left me in that turtle hole, aren’t you?’

  I hadn’t thought that far. I was still caught up in the surprise of his being a pirate.

  ‘And I would not blame you,’ Alejandro continued. ‘For I am thinking you were on this ship as it was pursued by the Dagger and Serpent? You must loathe pirates now above all others!’

  ‘Chased by pirates, yes,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘There’s also the matter of my parents having been killed by pirates.’ I was only reflecting aloud, really, rather than meaning to strike a dagger in his heart—I was still trying to catch up with him as a pirate (and therefore, certainly not my boy with no shoes)—but he recoiled as if I had struck him.

  ‘I am truly sorry,’ he said. ‘On behalf of all pirates, I am sorry. Your parents!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I reassured him. ‘It was the Thistleskull. Not your ship.’

  ‘The Thistleskull,’ he nodded, and then his eyes went up to the ceiling. ‘The Thistleskull, you say? The Thistleskull.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I thought it was perhaps insensitive of him to keep repeating the name of the ship that had ended my parents’ lives. But his eyes were so bright and his accent so beguiling that I didn’t mind all that much. Perhaps this was falling under a pirate’s spell? I had heard they could be bewitching.

  ‘Only, I don’t know that pirate ship,’ he apologised. ‘And I thought I knew them all. The pirates used to quiz me. But not the Thistleskull.’ He seemed disappointed in himself. ‘Must be a new one.’ Then he shook himself and said, ‘Again, I am sorry.’

  ‘Don’t give it another thought,’ I said. ‘I hardly knew my parents. Keep on with your story.’

  He looked doubtful but then he took up the story again.

  ‘I never did any pirating,’ he said. ‘I was sent below decks to play, at first, and then later to read my pirate manuals, or carve things of wood, or feed the parrots. So I never really knew what went on.’

  I was a bit dubious about that. ‘Everyone knows what pirates do,’ I said.

  ‘Pirates themselves do not discuss it,’ Alejandro explained. ‘It’s a sort of code.’

  ‘Well, what did you think they were doing when they chased ships and went aboard and came back loaded down with treasure?’ I was getting a bit scornful. ‘And didn’t you say you read pirate manuals?’

  Alejandro smiled at my tone. ‘This is fair,’ he said. ‘But the pirate manuals are only statistics about ships, not about thieving and killing. And you see, these people were family to me—all that I had. You don’t imagine your family are out slaying innocents and setting ships alight, you see?’

  This seemed a fair and interesting point.

  Alejandro gave me a rueful look. ‘I even looked forward to turning twelve, and being able to join in the pirating. But then, of course, on my eleventh birthday, my training began.’

  ‘And then you knew.’

  ‘And then I knew. They told me everything. I wanted none of it.’ His smile had vanished. ‘But would they allow that? No. This one’s got empathy, they laughed at each other. What sort of a pirate ship raises up a boy with empathy! We’ve made him soft! They kicked me around, trying to beat the softness out of me.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, my voice small.

  He didn’t seem to notice. He was grinning wryly. ‘In time, I saw that the only thing for it was to run away. The first time I did it was about six weeks ago. We’d set anchor a way off coast. The nearest big town was Livingston and some were going ashore to pick up provisions.’

  ‘Livingston!’

  ‘Yes. Livingston. I slipped away. Took nothing but a handful of coins.’

  ‘To Livingston?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said patiently. ‘First, I followed the river into the town of Livingston. I wanted to send a telegram, to warn a certain Queen Alys of the pirates’ plan to kidnap her son, Prince William. I had heard of this plan and did not like it.’

  ‘Queen Alys!’ I said. ‘And Prince William!’

  He nodded.

  ‘But those are my aunt and my cousin!’

  ‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I have told my story to the captains, your Aunts Maya and Lisbeth, and they exclaimed this same way. Anyway, once I telegrammed, I set out to return to the docks, to find work on a regular ship. I know plenty about sailing, but that is all I know. So I headed back along the river.’

  ‘Along the river?’

  ‘Yes. There was a terrible rainstorm that day. And—’

  ‘A terrible rainstorm?’

  Alejandro studied me a moment. ‘I mean no offence, but you put me in mind of the parrots on my ship.’

  I laughed. His bright eyes and smile made this less insulting somehow, more funny. And it was a fair comment.

  But my heart was pattering, because if it was Livingston, the river, the rainstorm, then it was the boy with no shoes, it must be.

  But he did not recognise me. He didn’t know I was the girl who’d been across the river from him.

  I felt an odd twist at that—at having been forgotten.

  I found my way around the twist to ask, ‘So you ran along the river?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, patient again but raising an eyebrow. ‘But it occurred to me I should allow time for the Dagger and Serpent to sail away. There was a festival that day and I decided to go to it.’

  ‘The Festival of Matchstick,’ I said.

  ‘That is the one,’ he agreed, but he did not seem to register anything strange in my knowing. Caught up in his story, I supposed. ‘I saw a game of soccer played by elves.’

  Yes, I thought, and I saw you at that game. I caught your eye and you grinned at me.

  ‘By nightfall,’ Alejandro continued, ‘I thought to myself, well, it will be safe now, ahoy for a sailor’s life—I was trying to be positive—and along I went.’

  ‘And was it safe?’ I asked, doubtfully. For a boy raised aboard a pirate’s ship, he seemed to know very little about pirates. You can’t simply step off a pirate ship and start a new life. They would never allow it.

  ‘No,’ Alejandro replied. ‘Not safe at all. I had been a fool in thinking it. They were lying in wait. They took me back aboard and locked me in the ship’s dungeons, and there I’ve been ever since.’

  ‘You haven’t,’ I breathed.

  ‘I have,’ he said, quite mildly. ‘They thought they’d wear me down.’

  ‘And then your ship was wrecked?’

  ‘Torn all to pieces in the Demon Playground. Your aunts! They make the finest sailors I’ve ever known.’

  ‘They do seem rather good,’ I said, modestly.

  ‘Rather good,’ he chuckled, teasing again. ‘Anyhow, I thought I was certain to drown in the dungeon as we sank, except the hull was breached by the Demon rocks, and the waves poured in, and took me out with them, and eventually I washed up on the beach at Braewood. I crawled all the way to the moor, looking for help,
and that is where you found me.’

  Again, he smiled, but it was slowly unfolding to me, how he came to be so battered—that his pirate friends had beaten him, and he’d been smashed against the rocks in the Demon Playground, his bones broken, his skin torn, nearly drowned, and here he was grinning about it.

  Alejandro’s eyelids began to sink. He tried to blink them open.

  ‘You sleep now,’ I said. ‘I only wanted to say hello.’

  I stood up. Already he had sunk back down to the pillow. I must have worn him out, asking for his story. I watched him sleeping and felt very small. All I had cared about was his being the boy with no shoes. And then I’d been so bothered that he’d forgotten me.

  But his story was so much bigger and bolder than anything I had encountered. And here he was, teasing me gently, as he lay bruised and broken in his bed.

  The doctor had come back in while we were talking, I realised. She was reading, head bent, at her desk in the opposite corner.

  I crept towards the door.

  ‘Bronte?’ said a faint voice—a whisper—behind me.

  I turned and Alejandro’s eyes were open again. ‘Was the baby all right?’ he said.

  ‘The baby?’

  ‘The baby in the basket? In the river?’

  ‘In the river?’

  He chuckled. ‘Your swimming was champion that day,’ he murmured, almost to himself. ‘I have never seen the like.’ Then his eyes closed again, and he slept.

  A carriage stood waiting at the wharf. It was the grandest I had ever seen, so gold-and-jewel encrusted that it dazzled your eyes when you tried to look at it. Six noble horses, midnight-black, stood tall in their harnesses.

  ‘That’s not it, is it?’ I asked my aunts, nervously. We were standing on deck, looking down.

  ‘You bet it is,’ Aunt Maya replied. ‘See? On the door? Coat of arms of the Mellifluous Kingdom. The violin bow crossing the drumsticks.’

  ‘And look!’ Aunt Lisbeth pointed. ‘There’s Alys herself waving from the window!’

  Aunts Lisbeth and Maya began leaping up and down, waving their arms madly. They were pulling hilarious faces, dragging down their lips and blowing air into their cheeks. I was a bit worried about them.