Yet, once through it, Bump realized he was standing in the Vestibule of Large Roman Things. He had heard tell of it from Horton and some of the other servants. Several generations earlier, a Luggertuck lord had been obsessed with collecting examples of ancient Roman masonry—bricks, broken columns, the occasional besandaled foot and leg of a Caryatid statue. Now nobody knew what to do with all of it, so the Large Roman Things sat in this unused room and, for all I know, they may be sitting there to this day.
As Bump slipped into the room and slid behind a column, he watched Luther approach a mosaic that covered an entire wall. The mosaic, made out of thousands of small tiles, formed a picture of Hercules completing one of his twelve tasks—The Cleansing of the Augean Stables. Bump thought this was the greatest piece of art he’d ever seen.
Luther moved forward and removed a largish tile from just under Hercules’s bulging arm muscle. (Yes, it was his mighty Armpit, but I didn’t want to come right out and say that.) Then he—Luther, not Hercules—selected a key from the large key ring he had stolen from Old Crotty and inserted it into the hole. He turned the key and the entire wall swung open like a big door.
Luther walked through, leaving the door open behind him. Silently, Bump followed.
As they walked down a long, twisting passageway, the light grew dimmer and dimmer until nothing could be seen at all. Suddenly, Bump realized that Luther’s scuffling footsteps had stopped.
Bump had been following too closely. He was only a few feet from Luther, who was rustling around in the dark. Bump didn’t move or breathe or blink.
He heard the sound of papers being pushed aside and then a strange soft sound and a clink.
Then Bump heard Luther’s footsteps again, but this time Luther was walking toward him. The tiny stable boy sank to the ground and pushed himself up against the wall. As Luther walked past, Bump felt something hairy drag across his arm, but Luther kept walking.
“By M’Lady’s Bunions! He almost got me,” thought Bump. “I’ve pushed my luck too far. I’ve got to be more careful or I’ll wind up throttled by that villain.”
Being careful, Reader, is usually good. But in times of evil deeds, sometimes a stable boy must be bold. Bump had been bold so far and had come out all right. Now he had lost his nerve, and that’s a bad thing to lose when you’re in a tight, dark secret passage with an evil Luggertuck.
This time Bump didn’t follow Luther so closely, and he felt for each step to be sure he didn’t trip in the dark.
Gradually it got a little lighter as they neared the open door. Bump realized he had fallen far behind Luther.
But not so far behind that he couldn’t now see what Luther held in his hand—an elaborate, ridiculous, ugly-as-a-wet-gopher wig.
“He is the wig thief! He must have hidden it in here for safekeeping,” Bump thought.
That was a very good thought and a correct one, but alas, this was not a time for thinking. It was a time for action, because Luther was pushing the heavy door shut.
Bump wasn’t close enough to slip out. The door shut with a heavy thunk and the lock slipped back into place with a rusty clank.
Bump was trapped.
In Which a Simple Errand Turns Smelly and Scary . . .
M’Lady Luggertuck suddenly decided that she wanted to add leg of lamb to the smorgasbord being prepared for the ball. (She’d had a hankering for lamb lately. The loosening of her corset had done wonders for her appetite.)
Miss Neversly, who had already purchased a wagonload of food for the party, had not bought any lamb legs, so she dispatched Horton to the village to buy one from the butcher.
Old Crotty reluctantly gave him a coin to pay for the lamb leg. The coin was of such a high value that Horton did not even recognize it. It would have been very easy for him to simply take the coin and leave forever. To his family such a coin would seem like a fortune and the Luggertucks would never miss it. (Although M’Lady would eventually miss her lamb leg.)
But we know Horton too well to entertain such a notion, however appealing it may be.
He got the lamb leg all right, but something strange happened as he returned from the village with the nicely wrapped meat. Something never before seen anywhere in those parts.
Pirates were afoot, and Horton was the first to see them.
Pirates? you ask. In a landlocked county in the near-middle of England?
Horton asked himself the same question as chills ran up his spine and fear waded through his stomach.
Of course he’d never seen pirates before, but he’d read about them in Lord Emberly’s books, and the motley group clomping down the road looked just right—long knives, leathery skin, broken noses, filthy clothes, earrings, lice, scabs, nose hair. An unmistakable odor of old fish wafted toward him in the air.
“Hey, boy, you got some meat there?” one called as they drew near.
Horton nodded.
“Hand it over, then,” growled the brigand, a burly, bearded fellow carrying, of all things, an anchor.
“Oh, no, please, sir,” said Horton, desperate. “It’s not mine. I’ve got to take it up to the castle. Please, sir, I’ll get a real beating if I don’t bring it back with me.”
“Hmmm, what do you say, Cap’n Splinterlock?” said the bearded man to a tall, handsome gentleman with an enormous scar on his back. Horton couldn’t see the scar, of course, but it was there all right.
“Don’t worry, lad,” cried the captain in a booming voice more appropriate for use on board a ship during a typhoon or a mutiny. “Servants we all were once upon a time when our teeth were still in our skulls and not littering the seafloor along with Roland’s leg and Harvey’s thumbs.”
Horton noticed a peg-legged man and a thumbless man wincing at this comment.
The captain continued:
“Steal that meat off your master’s table, aye, we might do that, but we’ll not steal it from you.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Horton.
Some of the pirates grumbled.
“Cap’n Splinterlock always takes the fun out of being a pirate,” whispered one.
“We’re supposed to take whatever we want! Well, I want a leg-o-lamb tonight!”
“Aye, that would taste a lot better than Cap’n’s sermons about the Pirate’s Code of Honor.”
“Quiet back there!” snarled Splinterlock.
“Excuse me,” Horton asked, against his better judgment—and mine, too, I should say. “Are you pirates?”
“Aye.”
“Where’s your boat?”
“Ahhhh,” said the captain, finally lowering his voice. “A sore subject you’ve hit upon. You won’t mention it again unless you fancy walking the plank.”
Horton assumed this was a joke, as none of the pirates were carrying a plank. However, instead of laughing, several pirates seemed to be fighting back tears. He thought he heard the bearded one with the anchor give a little sigh-like sob.
It was indeed a sore subject, because these were Shipless Pirates. Oh yes, they’d had a ship once. The Very Scary Shark had been a fine ship. And the captain was in truth a fine captain. Though he plundered and looted, murdered and maimed, he always did it with a sense of fair play.
Then one night—a dark and stormy one, with rough seas and hurricane winds—they came up behind the infamous pirate ship Seasickness.
“Let me hoist the mainsail, come around three points hard a’starboard and give ’em a broadside o’ cannon shot,” the first mate yelled to the captain through the gale.
“No,” Captain Splinterlock hollered back, “that wouldn’t be honorable. We’ll hold our fire until the storm clears and I’m sure the captain of the Seasickness will do the same.”
Just then the Seasickness opened fire. The Very Scary Shark was sunk, and the pirates had to cling to their cargo—stolen barrels of Peruvian Bat Guano—to survive.
Though they would follow their captain to the ends of the Earth, the crew couldn’t help resenting his honorable ways, and grumbl
ing about them, as they were now.
“No, no, lads! To the future we sail, not the past,” the captain went on, booming again. “A new ship will be ours. We’ve a little errand to run and a rich reward to claim, then we’ll sail again. Right, boys?”
The pirates murmured halfheartedly and began trudging on toward the village.
And that was that, piratically speaking—until Chapter 36.
In Which the Alarm Is Raised . . .
Horton decided to stop at the stables before returning to the kitchen with the lamb leg. He wanted to tell Bump and the other boys about the pirates.
He found Blight and Blemish in such a state of panic that they had abandoned butleresque speaking in favor of babbling.
“Bump hasn’t come back! He got up early this morning to follow Luther,” Blemish said. “Nobody has seen him since. He’s hours late.”
They told Horton about how they’d been taking turns trailing Luther.
“I’ve just been to spy on Luther myself,” Blight told him. “I peeped through the dining room window and there he was, dribbling wine down the front of his shirt. I didn’t see Bump anywhere!”
“Bump should have come to the stables when Luther went in to supper,” said Blemish. “In fact, he should have come during Luther’s luncheon, too, but he didn’t. I’m afraid Luther might have caught him and . . .”
As Blight and Blemish rattled on, Lord Emberly’s warning echoed in Horton’s ear. Luther was more than just spoiled and rude; he was dangerous. Bump—Horton’s best friend in all the world—could be in real trouble.
“We need to find him fast,” Horton told the boys.
“But where do we look?” moaned Blight.
“We must look everywhere,” said Horton. “We’ve got to get all the other boys to help us. While Luther and the other Luggertucks are eating, we should be safe to search the house. We’ll check every room we can, even the Very Off-Limits ones. The footmen and butlers are very fond of Bump; hopefully they’ll let us through.”
Blight and Blemish couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Horton Halfpott—who wouldn’t break the tiniest rule, who wouldn’t even eat a slice of Loafburton’s Sweet Sugarapple Pie—was planning to lead a mob of filthy stable hands and gardeners through the manor, breaking rules right and left.
In truth, Horton was shocked by his own suggestion. To him the plan seemed almost like mutiny. To the other stable and garden boys—when they were asked to join—it sounded like a good deal of fun. There was no shortage of volunteers.
“We’ll start as soon as I’ve delivered this leg of lamb to the kitchen,” declared Horton, before hurrying off toward a sure spoon-beating for lateness from Miss Neversly.
In Which Bump Finds Forks, but Not Freedom . . .
Bump worried about getting out, of course. But believe it or not, he had something else on his mind to take care of first.
“If this is where Luther hid the wig,” he figured, “maybe this is where he hid the Lump.”
He felt his way back down the narrow hallway to the place where he had heard Luther rustling around with some papers.
He found the papers. They felt like envelopes and a few sheets of writing paper. They smelled like wilted flowers.
I believe I have mentioned Bump’s clever brain before. Thus it should be no surprise that he quickly deduced that these were the items stolen from M’Lady Luggertuck’s writing desk. He pocketed these as Valuable Clues.
He felt around again, but found nothing more. Luther must be hiding the Lump somewhere else. But where?
Bump sat down to think it out. Then he remembered that he was trapped deep in the innards of Smugwick Manor with no windows, no candles, no food, and possibly very little air. He immediately turned his attention to that problem instead.
He quickly determined that there were no trapdoors hidden in the floor, no iron rungs leading up the wall to an ivy-covered turret, and no iron grate covering an unused ventilation shaft that led to freedom. There was no way out but the way he had come in.
His hopes were raised when he found a small alcove. However, after some fumbling around in the dark, he realized it was lined with shelves and the shelves seemed to be full of silverware. No, not just any silverware, he realized, as he felt around blindly. Forks. No spoons or knives. Just hundreds and hundreds of forks.
Strange, but it was to no immediate purpose.
Bump returned to the wall that Luther had opened. Did he see a small bit of light? Yes!
Luther, being lazy, had forgotten to put the tile back over the keyhole in Hercules’s Armpit. Bump could see most of the Vestibule of Large Roman Objects.
It was empty, of course. But since he had nothing better to do, Bump stood and looked through the keyhole, mulling over various Lump-related mysteries all the while.
I hope, Reader, that it will not lessen your appreciation of young Bump’s heroic doings if I record here that after two hours he began to cry a little. He was just a young fellow, and he began to think about all the tons and tons of stones and bricks on all sides of him.
After three hours, he imagined that one day Luther would come back through the door and find his tiny skeleton a’lying there and would kick it out of the way.
But he wiped away the tears and kept his eye pressed to the keyhole and kept thinking about what needed to be done when he got out.
After four hours, someone did come into the room. It was a stable boy, Tarpitch, who had joined the search party mostly because he liked the idea of snooping around.
“Tarpitch!” cried Bump.
“What ho, Bump? Where are you? We’re all looking for you.”
“I’m in Hercules’s Armpit.”
“What—”
“There’s no time to explain. Get Blemish and Blight as fast as you can! Tell them Luther is up to something. They must follow him wherever he goes tonight. Oh, and also, tell Horton where I am.”
Tarpitch, who hated Luther as much as any of the servants, was glad to deliver this news. Blight and Blemish knew what they needed to do and Horton knew he could find Bump in Hercules’s Armpit.
However, he didn’t have any idea how to get him out.
In Which Blight and Blemish Yell “Giddyap” . . .
When Blight and Blemish heard Bump’s message, they panicked for the second time that day.
Simply put, they had no idea where to find Luther. They were so busy looking for Bump, they hadn’t bothered to watch where Luther went after dinner.
Then, in a way that was miraculous and unpleasant at the same time, a voice came to them upon the evening breeze.
“Where are all the boneheaded, foul-smelling, be-spotted stable boys?”
It was Luther!
“Why must we put up with such lazy, brainless, stupid, worthless lollygaggers,” he bellowed. “I’ve been kept waiting for a horse for almost three minutes now! This is what we get for hiring orphans and midgets.”
“Hark!” cried Blight. “Luther must be waiting for assistance in the stables.”
The two boys ran for the stables at full speed.
They arrived to find Luther in full deviltry. Their young master’s face, usually pasty white with a touch of yellow, shone nearly as purple as M’Lady’s Wig Room.
“Where have you been? Why don’t you have a horse ready for me, you lazy hoof-lickers?” he snarled, as Blemish ran to get a saddle and Blight ran to get a horse. “I’ve not time to waste now, but be certain that I will beat you as soon as I have the chance. In the meantime, this will have to do!”
He bopped Blight on the head with a small satchel he was carrying.
Blemish stared in amazement as the satchel popped open and, for one second, the fading light of early eve shone on its contents—long locks of golden hair. Luther hastily closed the satchel and this time used his fist to clout Blemish on the head.
“Stop gawking, you dungbrain!”
Blemish and Blight finished saddling the horse, and Luther mounted. He kicked the hor
se hard and galloped down the long drive.
“What destination draws him hence in such a hurry?” asked Blight.
“I do not know, Mr. Blight,” said Blemish. “However, wherever he’s going he’s taking M’Lady Luggertuck’s finest wig with him. It was in the bag he hit you with.”
“That was a wig, you say? To my estimation, it felt like it weighed at least twenty-three pounds.”
“Bump was right! Luther is up to something tonight. We’d better get moving with all due expediency if we wish to follow him.”
“Right you are, Mr. Blemish. Shall we saddle Siegfried?”
“So shall it be,” said Blemish.
They hurried to saddle Siegfried, the mightiest stallion in the stable. In fact, the mightiest stallion in all the British Isles. A barely tamed creature of furious power and speed.
Blemish said, “Do you know what’s quite surprising, Mr. Blight?”
“What’s that, Mr. Blemish?”
“I’ve spent my whole life around these stables, but I’ve never actually ridden a horse.”
“By a curious coincidence the same fact is true of myself, Mr. Blemish,” said Blight as he scrambled into the saddle and then pulled Blemish up after him.
“I have, however, often heard the term ‘giddyap’ used by riders,” said Blemish.
“Shall we employ that phrase now, Mr. Blemish?”
“Yes, I should think an advantageous time for its usage has arrived, Mr. Blight.”
“Giddyap, Siegfried!” they both shouted, and the horse took off like a cannonball.
Blight and Blemish held on to each other and to the saddle as best they could. Since there seemed to be no means of controlling the fey beast, they could only hope that Siegfried would go in the right direction.
Horton Halfpott; Or, the Fiendish Mystery of Smugwick Manor; Or, the Loosening of M’Lady Luggertuck’s Corset Page 6