The River Bank

by Kij Johnson

  “Motor-cars!” said the Toad to the Rabbit (for he also had been listening), “These villains would buy motor-cars at my expense! I’ll show them motor-cars!” And he would have gone on in this vein for some time, save that the Rabbit showed no signs of hearing him at all.

  Suddenly the barn door slid open and shouts went up: “The Boss!—’Ey, Chief!—Three cheers for the Boss!—’Ip, ’ip, ’ooray!”

  “Quiet, all of you!” snapped the Fox as he entered and closed the door. “I could hear you from half a mile away, boys. We’re not rich yet—and we’re not safe yet, not by a long chalk.”

  There was some abashed shuffling of feet. “Sorry, Boss,” each outlaw said in turn.

  “So what’s the plan now, Chief?” asked a Stoat.

  “The letters were sent off,” replied the Fox. “Fifty thousand pounds for the Toad.” An awed murmur ran around the circle. “They’ll have no choice, for I didn’t give them any way to contact us, just the address for the exchange: a tree behind St Giles’s, in the Hills.”

  The Head Weasel said, “And the young miss?”

  The Fox shrugged. “Her too. I set her price at a hundred pounds.”

  The Rabbit pinned her ears back at this. No one likes to hear herself held cheap, whatever the circumstances.

  “I mean after,” said the Head Weasel.

  “She will be freed, of course.” There was just enough emphasis on the she to set the Rabbit to frowning and the Toad to tugging at her sleeve saying anxiously, “‘She’? What does he mean—‘she’?”

  The Barn Rat said, “So when are they bringing the ransom, Chief?”

  “When? I said— Hmm. I said . . .” The Fox trailed off a moment, frowning.

  Behind the Rabbit, the Toad was still bleating, “‘She’? Why not they? Did they mean they, but only said she? Why did they not say they?”

  “Do you know,” said the Fox at last. “I, ah, didn’t give them a specific time. It slipped my mind.” Consternation; uproar. “Look,” said the Fox loudly. “I forgot, that’s all! A chap can’t think of everything. It won’t matter, anyway,” he added in a more normal tone of voice as the sound ebbed. “We’ll go to the Hills tomorrow and stay until they show up, that’s all.”

  “An’ what about the prisoners?” said a Weasel.

  “They’ll stay here,” announced the Fox. “When we double-cross Toad’s friends, we don’t want them close enough to be rescued, do we, chaps?” Loud laughter. “We’ll be hearing from Scotland Yard in the next day, I expect. So we take the ransom money, and then we let her go, and turn him over to the authorities. And they’ll put him back in gaol, and we’ll get our pardons, boys!”

  The Rabbit gasped. The Toad stumbled back from the wall, repeating through numb lips, “‘Double-cross—Scotland Yard—turn him over—back in gaol’! It’s over, all over—doomed! Doomed!” And he let out a shivering screech so rich in mingled terror and despair that the brigands all fell silent and stared at the tack-room door with wide, haunted eyes.

  “What was that?” exclaimed the Fox. He was used to blood-curdling cries in the call of duty, as it were, but this was quite out of the common way.

  But the Head Weasel said dismissively, “O, that’s the Toad, right enough. ’E’s been goin’ off like that every so often all day—a-wailing and screeching and cryin’ out, ‘Doomed! Doomed!’ The Rabbit’s ever so much better mannered. A right lady, she is.”

  The Stoat who had spent the day with him on guard added, “If you ignore ’im, ’e settles down to weeping loud, but you get used to that after a while. An’ ’e does shut up from time to time, too.”

  The Fox shuddered. “The sooner he is out of our hands, the better.”

  The brigands went back to their planning—who was to stay with the prisoners at the barn and who to travel to the churchyard; the negotiations with Scotland Yard; how they would extract the money from the Toad’s friends at the churchyard without revealing that the Toad was not present for the exchange—but the Rabbit could no longer attend carefully. She had her paws full with the Toad, now clutching at her ankles while his eyes started nearly from his head as he shrieked, “Doomed!”

  There was a noise by the tack room’s back wall, as though a tree limb were knocking against it, and then there was a voice.

  It was the Mole.

  Chapter Eleven

  Escape

  The Mole and Beryl made excellent time on their journey. As children, they had spent their days rambling together through the Hills near their home: long, satisfying tramps in any weather with no goal but the pleasure of the long rolling downs under their paws. If the situation had not been so dire, this walk through the country would have filled each of them with that same quiet pleasure: everything ripe or ripening so that the air was filled with the heady smells of fruit and grain, the heavy scent of late-summer roses (so much graver than roses in springtime), the slight sweetness of the pollen that floated everywhere and gave the air a golden cast that made the world seem gilt. Their travel was harmonious, with only the minimal squabbling all siblings seem unable to resist, even siblings who generally like one another and are currently engaged upon some shared, important task: a few small disagreements about which fork of a road to follow, a bit of grousing about how early in the morning one should get started; but the number of times that Beryl said, “Well, really, Mole!” and the Mole said, “Do stop bossing, Beryl!” were very few.

  One such moment came at about in the evening of the first day, when Beryl paused to speak with two Squirrels who were standing in the path, gossiping. The Mole watched impatiently just out of earshot, shifting his weight from paw to paw and muttering, “Come on!”; but when she at last came over to him it seemed to have been worth it, for she had news: there were doings involving Stoats, Weasels, and such folks at an abandoned barn a few miles from where they were, and not so very far from St Giles’s church in the Hills.

  “And that,” Beryl concluded, “must be where Toad and the Rabbit are.”

  “Are you sure?” said the Mole.

  She looked at him quizzically. “It stands to reason, surely? We know they are kidnapped, and their captors will wish to keep them somewhere close to what I believe is called the exchange point, yet not too close. It would be a great coincidence if there were two gangs of hoodlums conniving in so limited an area. At any rate, my editor should never permit me to get away with it if I were to include something like this in one of my novels.”

  “But life is not like novels!” said the Mole.

  “It is like novels more often than anyone would like to admit,” said Beryl with a certain regret, “only not so interesting.”

  The Mole said unhappily, “I suppose you’re right. But it is hard, that there should be an entire gang of kidnappers and not merely one or two individuals. What are we going to do?”

  “Collect more information,” said Beryl, who had not written The Iron Hare of Chateau Sang for nothing. “Let’s go to the barn and find out what’s what. If we can, we’ll free Toad and the Rabbit; and if we can’t, then we’ll keep an eye on them until they’re moved to the church, and the Water Rat and the Badger arrive with the money for the ransom. It would be too bad that a band of criminals will get so much of Toad’s wealth, but it’s better than the alternative.”

  “O, I agree,” said the Mole fervently. “Off we go, then.”

  And off they did go, though their tempers ran a little short the next day, after the rain began and didn’t seem as though it would ever stop. Soaked to the skin, they trudged forward, following narrow roads and hollow lanes, and hiding whenever they heard the sounds of anyone approaching. At times (but, fortunately for the fates of the Toad and the Rabbit, at different times), it seemed to each of them that this was a fool’s errand unlikely to end in success, and that it would make more sense to go straight to whichever village was closest, hand the whole thing over to the local constabulary, and let the Toad take his chances in court. Then, too, the gossiping Squirrels had no
t been quite as precise as they needed to be for Beryl and the Mole to find the barn without trouble, and so there was further delay while Mole chatted with a suspicious-seeming Lizard, trying to get better directions without showing their intentions too clearly.

  But in the end, they found the barn. They crept up through the beechwood, and from the shelter of a dogwood bush at the bottom of the little grassy field they watched the bandits trickle in as evening fell: some Weasels, some Stoats, a Barn Rat, and finally (here the Mole tapped Beryl on the arm and they exchanged concerned glances) a Fox. The Fox—clearly the leader, but they would have expected nothing less from a Fox—set a guard at the barn door, a single Weasel who settled down immediately and pulled out some grimy dice, which he tossed from paw to paw. The door was pulled shut.

  Beryl and the Mole slipped unobserved to the barn walls, and heard voices: rough, low voices (though they couldn’t hear quite what was being said) and quite a lot of coarse laughter. It seemed to be a meeting of some sort. “But how shall we find out if Toad and the Rabbit are here?” breathed the Mole into Beryl’s ear. “They could be anywhere!”

  But most conveniently for them, they heard it: a voice that was not that of a Stoat or a Weasel: a wretched voice, the quavering voice of one of the more severely Damned, a lost soul wailing as though he were being boiled by devils on a particularly ill-tempered day. It was the Toad, right enough, and after that, it was the matter of a moment for the rescuers to circle the barn until they came to the correct section of the wall.

  “Toad?” whispered the Mole into a crack. “Toad?”

  There was a pause, then: “Mole?” came the Rabbit’s voice through a chink in the wall.

  “Rabbit!” exclaimed the Mole, stating the obvious. He grinned at Beryl.

  She leaned forward. “I’m here too, Rabbit! We’ve come to rescue you!”

  “O, I do hope you can!” whispered the Rabbit. “You have no idea how dull this is—not that Toad isn’t perfectly congenial company—” There was an awkward momentary pause, for no one could believe her (Toad was still howling “Doomed!” periodically, and had not yet noticed what was happening at the back of the tack room), and even the Rabbit, that most light-hearted of souls, sounded guilty at so patent a lie. “We have been trapped here for days, and I have not been able to make a hole big enough to get us out.”

  The Mole said, “A hole, you say?”

  The Toad had been having a very hard time of it these past two days. He had slept upon a blanket that smelt of horses and mildew. He had eaten dry bread of a depressingly brown hue, without roast beef, cheese, mustard, gherkins, or any of the other civilizing forces that might have improved it. He had drunk water from a pail without ice or even a splash of something to make it go down more easily. He had been denied a toothbrush, a clothespress, a valet, and a hot bath. He had behaved very well despite the near hopelessness of his situation; and so, now that he had given in to despair—real despair, he knew, not some pale on-again, off-again imitation—he felt as though he rather deserved the chance to do the thing thoroughly.

  He was so wrapped up in his wailing that he had heard none of the whispering, and so one may imagine his surprise when out of the dark corner behind the feedbox popped Beryl, exactly as though she had been conjured in a pantomime. “Why, Beryl!” he exclaimed loudly. She was across the little room in a step and threw her paw over his mouth, but there was a sudden ominous silence from the main area.

  “Shh!” she hissed in his ear. “Don’t let them know!”

  For nearly the first time in his life, the Toad acted with presence of mind in an emergency, and so cleverly that he liked to think of it in later years, just before falling asleep. After scarcely a moment, he cried loudly, “Peril! O, peril! Doom!” He trailed off a minute later, when he was further flabbergasted by the Mole appearing just as Beryl had, panting a little and minus some of his buttons (he was somewhat stouter than Beryl); but the day had been saved: the Stoats and Weasels were back at their discussions again.

  The Rabbit quickly brought them up to date on the situation. “So what are we to do?” she ended. “There are nine of them—and one is a Fox, and you know how they are—and there are only four of us. And we cannot simply slip out the way you came; or rather, I might, but it is not possible for Toad, alas.”

  They all looked at the Toad, who drew himself up, looking wretched and shamefaced. “I know—I know! It’s my fault we can’t just escape. I’ve tried slimming programs— I’ve tried exercise regimens— I’ve tried salt water and electricity— I’ve tried Mesmerism— Useless, all useless.” He choked back a sob.

  Beryl mused, “Rabbit, you said some of the criminals are leaving for St Giles tomorrow, yes?” The Rabbit nodded. “Then we shall just have to wait until there are fewer here, and break you out then.”

  “But how?” whispered the Mole. “There will still be four or five of them, and there’ll only be the two of us until we can get the door to this room unlocked.”

  “Perhaps we might start from inside?” said Beryl. “Tomorrow, after they are fewer, we could slip back into this room, and then get them to open the door somehow and rush them!”

  The Mole frowned. “That’s no good. We left a letter for the Badger and the Water Rat. They’ll be bringing the ransom to the churchyard. If we wait, we shan’t be able to stop them from handing over the ransom.”

  The Toad, who had been staring at his paws despairingly, started up with horror on his face and gargled out a single word. “No!”

  “We may have to accept that as an unfortunate necessity, Toad,” said Beryl sternly. “We simply cannot fight them all, that’s all there is to it.”

  “There’s more, Beryl!” said the Rabbit. “They mean not to free the Toad in any case! After they take the ransom, they are going to turn him in to Scotland Yard, in exchange for pardons for their gang.”

  The Toad choked out another sob.

  “That’s a lot of cheek from them!” said Beryl. “Take poor Toad’s money and then send him to gaol anyway? Really!” There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the Toad’s weeping, as they dwelt on the perfidy of bandits.

  “But we don’t have any weapons, in any case,” the Rabbit said sadly. “I’ve searched and searched, but nothing in here is useful at all, unless we wish to throw horseshoes at them. They took away my pocketknife, even.”

  “You may have my pocketknife,” said Beryl, who as an Authoress never travelled without one. “But I do think throwing horseshoes is a famous idea, Lottie.”

  The Mole was understandably a little smug when he said, “But we’re not completely unarmed. I brought a few things.” He pulled from his waistcoat the pistol he had taken from Rat’s house, and slapped his paw upon his cutlass, which he had been wearing tucked into his belt—for it was not merely stoutness that had made passage through the hole in the wall difficult for the Mole.

  And then Beryl pulled from a hidden pocket of her skirt a dainty but very serviceable pistol with a pearl handle and a silver barrel—and a leather-covered blackjack, small but ruthlessly efficient-looking.

  “Beryl!” exclaimed the Mole, forgetting to be quiet. “You—thug!”

  “Shh,” hissed Beryl, the Rabbit, and the Toad together. They listened for a second (even the Toad, who was becoming interested in the plans for his rescue in spite of himself), but it seemed all right: they could still hear a Weasel and the Fox speaking, and others chiming in, “’Ear, ’ear!”

  “Beryl!” the Mole said more softly. “A pistol? A truncheon?”

  She blushed faintly but only said, “One must be sensible, Mole! So, this is our plan, then: Mole and I shall leave. We’ll find boughs in the beechwood that may be used as cudgels, and we’ll bring them with us when we return tomorrow, after some of the gang are gone to St Giles’s. We shall sneak back into this room through the hole—Toad or Rabbit shall trick the remaining bandits into opening this door—and then we shall all attack at once, and subdue them!”

  “
And whack ’em and whack ’em and whack ’em,” murmured the Toad with a wide, absent smile on his face, as though he were in a delightful trance.

  The Mole paused; he had been on the verge of handing the cutlass to the Toad, but it occurred to him that to do so at this moment might encourage the sort of noisy, dramatic outbreak on Toad’s part that might bring down the entire gang upon them and ruin all their plans. Instead, he said only, “And if they don’t open the door tomorrow, we’re not worse off than we are now. Beryl and I will just slip out and think of something else.”

  “Slip out without me? Leaving me behind?” said the Toad, coming down from his Parnassian heights.

  The Mole said, “Toad, only for a moment! We would just sneak out and come back through the main barn door, and rescue you that way!”

  “No, no,” said the Toad. “There’s no need. Save yourselves. It’s the only sensible thing to do, I know that. It’s just— Moley, Scotland Yard! Prison!” His voice was getting a little loud again. “Just—leave me the cutlass. They shan’t take me alive!”

  “Toad, shut up,” hissed the Mole, Beryl, and the Rabbit. But it was too late. The tack room door burst open. For one instant, exactly as though they had all been woven into a tapestry of a genre found in the Great Halls of the better sort of medieval castle, the two forces faced one another: on the one hand, the Heroes—the Mole, armed with pistol and cutlass; Beryl, with a shining pistol in one paw and her blackjack in the other (though, in light of the pistols, a better comparison might be the pen-and-ink illustration for a serial adventure in a Saturday magazine); the Toad, paws curled into unconscious fists; and the Rabbit behind them, looking fierce yet feminine—and against them, casting towering shadows from the dark lantern: the Fox, the Barn Rat, and a veritable horde of Stoats and Weasels.