7
The Pipe
On a bend in the river not far from Papa King’s palace and Miniver House, stood a strange building. It was set apart from its neighbours, in the middle of a stone courtyard, and had no windows in any of its four stone walls. Its double bronze doors were surrounded by a glistening mosaic that shone in the sun by day, and by the light of the streetlamps at night. They were guarded around the clock by security guards with guns, though whether they were there to keep people out or in, no one could say.
The building contained the City Archives. Every morning, around six o’clock, the first person to arrive was Livia Wallace. Livia had work she needed to do before the rest of the staff turned up, and if she got there early, she had the building to herself for an hour and a half. This morning, as she nosed her little yellow car into its usual parking spot, Livia was very late and a trifle flustered, for she had spent two hours stuck in a traffic jam. The radio had said something about the Miniver sisters, but Livia had no interest in Emily and Rosamund, and had turned it off. She lived in her own world of files and papers and secrets, and this morning she had much more important things to worry about.
‘Morning.’ Livia flashed her pass at the security guards. One of them pulled out his enormous bunch of keys to unlock the doors, and she passed mechanically under the shining mural into the archives foyer.
The phone call from Madame had come in very early that morning. In fact, it had woken Livia up in her hammock on the verandah, and she had come tumbling inside in such a hurry she had kicked over the milk bottles. ‘You must speed up the search, Livia,’ Madame had whispered urgently down the phone. ‘Things are happening so quickly, I can’t hold them back. I’m doing everything I can to find the key, but I haven’t been able to get it yet. You understand, don’t you? If you don’t find that room quickly, it could all still go wrong.’
‘I understand,’ Livia had answered. Her bare toes curled up off the wooden floor, and she brushed a loose strand of hair off her cheek. ‘Only – it’s a big place. I can only do so much without people noticing –’
‘I don’t want your excuses, Livia.’ Madame’s voice was suddenly sharp. ‘You said you’d help me. I’m relying on you.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Livia’s fingers twisted in the telephone cord. ‘Of course, I promise, I’ll do whatever I can.’
‘You’re so kind to me, Livvy,’ said Madame pathetically. ‘So kind. I sometimes think you’re the only one who cares about me at all.’
‘You’re my cousin, Karen,’ Livia had said, and it was true. Although Madame was a lot older than she was, her mother, Susan, had been Livia’s mother’s older sister. ‘Of course I care about you. Don’t worry. I’ll get dressed and go in right away.’
The bronze doors closed behind Livia’s back, shutting out the sunlight. Livia drew a deep breath, and headed for the stairs that led down to the stacks.
The City Archives collected paper. If you were born or married or died, if you owned a dog, or bought a house, or did anything at all, it was there, locked away on nine floors of dingily lit basements, that reached below the level of the Artemisia River. The deeper down, the danker and more airless the basements got. Most of the files were never looked at, and many had mouldered almost to nothing. But there were some files that were so important or dangerous that nobody except Papa King was allowed to see them. These secret files were locked away in a Most Secret Room, somewhere in the very heart of the building – only now that Papa King was ill, nobody was exactly sure where it was.
It was this room that Livia was trying to find for her cousin Karen. She had been searching for months, without success. Livia had looked for hidden spaces in almost every room on the upper levels, and was currently mapping and measuring in the second bottom basement, a place where nobody went unless they absolutely had to. The eighth basement was infested with rats and giant cockroaches that filled the records with droppings. It was so bad there, that when somebody wanted a file, the archive porters drew straws to choose the person who had to do it. But even the eighth basement was not as bad as the ninth. No one, absolutely no one, went to the ninth basement of the City Archives. It was simply too horrible to be spoken of.
Livia made her way down flight after flight of badly lit stairs. She passed the land records and the probate section, and continued on through Education and Public Works. At the top of the eighth flight of stairs she paused. A horrible smell rose up from the darkness to meet her; the smell of long years and decayed paper, of thousands upon thousands of forgotten lives. It was the smell of Artemisia. Livia closed her eyes briefly. She reminded herself of how poor Cousin Karen had been sent away for doing nothing at all, how she had been treated so unfairly by Papa King that her life had been ruined forever. She thought of how Karen had come back to Artemisia and needed Livia’s help. Livia opened her eyes. She switched on her torch, gripped her tape measure, and slowly began to descend the metal stairs.
Inside the pipe, Emily sat panting and shaking in a trickle of dirty water. There was a lot of activity outside in the pond, and she could hear Primrose and Alastair talking on their radios. From time to time arms or torches were poked into the opening, but her tormentors could not reach her. The fact was small consolation to Emily. A metal grating blocked the pipe at her back. If the guards could not get in, she could not get out.
Finally, a voice Emily recognised called her name. It was Ron.
‘Emily? Emily, what are you doing?’
A torch flashed into the opening. Emily whimpered and hid her eyes, but the torchlight raked over her body and stayed there. Ron’s face, with its thatch of sandy hair, appeared like a hideous gargoyle at the pipe’s end. When he spoke, it was in the sort of coaxing voice he might have used to call a lost dog. ‘Emily. Come out, Emily. Please, come out.’
‘Get lost!’ Emily’s voice sounded small and wobbly. ‘Leave me alone!’
‘You’re being silly, Emily. You can’t stay down there. It’s not safe. We’re your security team. We’re here to look after you.’
‘You’ve got a funny way of doing it.’
‘Come out, Emily,’ Ron repeated. This time, he did not sound quite so polite. ‘You know you’re trapped. I can set a round-the-clock watch on you. There’s no way out.’
‘Go away!’
The torch flicked off. Emily heard the guards talking. ‘She’s not going to come out,’ said one of them. Emily thought it might have been Alastair. ‘She knows something’s up. She was always the one with brains.’
‘If she won’t come out of her own accord,’ said Ron, ‘then we’ll have to make her change her mind. Try this.’
There was a scraping noise at the entrance to the pipe. A broken rake with a fan of sharp metal tines thrust into the opening and wriggled violently around. Emily screamed and recoiled against the grating. To her surprise, it shifted a little under her weight. The rake thrust vainly back and forth a few more times, then disappeared.
‘She’s too far back, sir,’ reported Primrose. ‘I can’t reach her.’
‘We could hose her out, I suppose,’ said Ron. ‘One of those big high-pressure hoses would do the trick. Or a smoke bomb, if we could get one quickly.’
‘We’d have to be careful,’ said Alastair dubiously. ‘We don’t want her to drown or suffocate.’
‘What about the rat patrol?’ asked Primrose. Emily shuddered. The rat patrol was a pack of horrible little dogs trained to hunt rats out of buildings. They chased the creatures into every sort of nook and cranny and shook them by the head to break their necks.
Fortunately, Ron seemed to like the idea as little as Emily did. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think that would be overdoing things. Go and get the high-pressure hose, Primrose, and be quick about it. Alastair, you wait here to make sure she doesn’t go anywhere. Put that rock across the entrance to keep her trapped in the pipe. I’m going to report to the palace.’
Ron and Primrose waded away and climbed out of the pond.
Alastair set his torch down on a boulder. He picked up the rock Ron had indicated, and was starting to shove it into the end of the pipe when he was interrupted by a shrill cry.
‘Don’t shut me in! Please, don’t shut me in!’
Alastair stopped. For a moment he balanced the rock against the edge of the pipe, and then he set it aside and shone his torch into the opening. A tiny abject figure in a bedraggled T-shirt and jeans was sitting hunched up against a grating about three or four metres in. Its face was filthy and wet with tears. Alastair had known to expect this, but he had been with Emily and Rosamund for several years and had seen them many times at their glamorous best. Despite himself, he was shocked.
‘I’m sorry, Miss. I don’t really have any choice,’ he said. ‘The boss told me I had to do it. It’d be more than my job’s worth not to.’
‘It’s dark in here,’ wailed a small voice. ‘I’m scared of the dark. You know I’m scared. Please don’t shut me in here without a light!’
‘You could always come out,’ Alastair pointed out.
‘I can’t. Please, Alastair. At least give me the torch. You know I’m only little. I’m so frightened!’
Alastair hesitated. He had never heard Emily complain about being small before. On the other hand, the thought of what was happening to her made him feel extremely uncomfortable. Alastair did not understand what Ron and the others were up to, but he was a decent man and knew in his heart the explanations he had been given were a sham.
‘All right. I suppose you can have my torch.’ Alastair turned it off and pushed it as far as he could down the pipe with the broken rake. A few seconds passed, and then a faint glow shone out from between the rocks.
‘Got it. Thank you. Thank you so much.’
‘You’re welcome, Miss Emily,’ said Alastair, and he reluctantly blocked the mouth of the pipe with the stone.
Emily turned on the torch. She could not believe her luck, for she had been sure Alastair would not fall for her claim to be afraid of the dark. But then, he had always been nice to her. Perhaps he had simply been sorry. As she shone the torch over the surrounding pipework, Emily saw for the first time that it was made of long straight terracotta sections. Everything was caked with filth, but when the light flashed over the metal grating at her back, it was all she could do to stop from crowing. Her suspicions had been right. The metal was old and badly rusted, and the pipe around it was cracked in several places.
Emily put down the torch and scraped away the rubbish. At first she was uncertain whether it would be better to push or pull, but after a moment’s thought she sat down, braced herself with her hands, and kicked out with all her might. The grating did not give way and the noise she was making sounded horribly loud in the confined space. After a few more kicks, the terracotta crumbled and the metal broke free. Emily got up and leaned against the grating with all her weight. The pipe cracked, the grating collapsed and she half fell, half stumbled through to the other side.
The pipe ahead was made of the same sort of terracotta, badly damaged, with a trickle of sludgy water in the bottom. It seemed to go for quite a distance. Emily had no idea where it went, but there was no other way out. Luckily the torch was a good one, and she hoped the batteries were new. She pushed the grating roughly back into place behind her and hurried forward, sensing as she did that the pipe was sloping gently downwards. The further she went, the more horrible it became. Festoons of roots hung through the cracks in the roof of the pipe and brushed against her head and shoulders, and the cockroaches and beetles that ran from her torchlight grew bigger with every step forward. Worst of all, the further she got from the entrance, the more it stank.
Emily began to feel sick and dizzy. The air was foul, her back ached from the constant stooping, and from time to time her foot stuck in a broken bit of pipe, or squelched in some particularly sludgy patch she preferred not to identify. It seemed as if she had been walking in the darkness forever when something completely unexpected happened. The pipe came to a join and forked in two.
‘Oh, no.’ Emily slumped into a miserable squat against the wall and began to sob. Ever since she had started her journey down the pipe, part of her had been wondering whether it was a wise thing to do. Now, she wished the idea had never entered her head.
I’m going to die, she thought. Who knows where this pipe will end up? They’re going to put that hose in the entrance, or else they’ll send a dog after me, and I’ll be killed. That’s what they want, I’m sure. And I’ll never even get to know what this is all about.
Well, that’s a fine way to think, said Millamant’s familiar voice inside her head. I never thought you’d give up so easily, Emmie. Use your brains: what goes in must come out, you know.
At the thought of Millamant, Emily’s tears streamed even harder. Eventually she managed to mop her face with the end of her T-shirt and shine her torch first one way, and then the other. The pipe on her left sloped up and she realised it must come from Miniver House. There was no point in going that way. Ron would certainly have posted guards there, and with Millamant arrested, there would be nobody left to help her. The right-hand fork continued downwards. It was darker and smellier, but Emily realised she had no choice save to follow it.
Emily forced herself to start walking. Her torch, which was designed for an ordinary sized adult, was getting heavy, and a few minutes further along she found a dead rat, bloated and horrible, jammed against the wall. It smelled so bad Emily had to hold her nose to stop from throwing up as she passed it. The downward slope seemed to be getting steeper, and the water grew deeper. Before long Emily had to wade. What would she do if the pipe came out underwater? Suppose she ended up in the sewer, and was attacked by rats? The batteries in the torch were running down. If her light went out, she would be trapped forever in the darkness, until she died or went mad, or starved …
And then, when she had almost given up, Emily saw it. There was light ahead, and another grating. Emily began wading more quickly. As she neared the grating, she found she could turn off the torch and see by daylight. The grating was cracked and broken like the first one: a swift kick smashed it open, and then Emily was out in the open, standing in the sunlight she had thought she would never see again, alone on the muddy banks of the Artemisia River.
In a shabby office in a corner of the royal palace, Madame was waiting for a telephone call. She had not slept properly for two whole nights, and was drinking a cup of coffee to try and keep herself awake. It was watery coffee, because that was the only sort Madame made. In fact, if somebody had given her coffee that was properly made, she would probably have thought it tasted very nasty indeed.
Madame was thinking about Rosamund Miniver, and what she was going to do with her. It was a subject she found eternally fascinating. In her heart, Madame was convinced that Rosamund had stolen her place in Papa King’s affections, and that it was because of her and Emily that she had been sent away. In fact, Madame and her mother had been exiled for a very good reason before Rosamund was even born, but like most evil people, she was reluctant to accept that she had done anything wrong. Sometimes, at night in bed, Madame used to make believe she had killed Rosamund Miniver and taken her place. She would stab her, or poison her, or drown her, and when Rosamund begged for mercy she would laugh and strike her down. So strong and powerful were these dreams, and so real, that Madame would often forget who she really was and become, in some strange way, Rosamund Miniver herself. In her dreams, she would become beautiful, rich and famous, and people everywhere would love her. They would cheer at the sound of her voice, and tremble with excitement at the very mention of her name.
For many years Madame’s dreams had remained just that: dreams. Then two things happened that changed everything. First, Madame’s mother died. And gradually, it became known that, following his stroke, Papa King was completely helpless. Madame had seized her chance. She had gone home to Artemisia and moved into the palace. Her plans to become queen had been progressing nicely, and she ha
d been almost ready to move when Papa King had ruined everything by giving Rosamund Miniver the key.
Madame had panicked. The key, so seemingly unimportant, was essential to her plans. She had ordered Rosamund to be kidnapped, and immediately everything had started to go wrong. Madame was desperate. She had to know where the key was. She had to get the Miniver sisters back …
The telephone rang. Madame picked up the receiver and listened in mounting anger to the person at the other end. ‘This is all your fault,’ she said in a cold voice. ‘I’m not interested in your excuses. Do whatever you have to, but find those girls. I’d prefer them to be alive, but dead will do. No, I don’t want to hear about your injuries. Just get me the Miniver sisters, and everything will be all right.’
8
Emily Adrift
Black Monday.
Afterwards, whenever people in Artemisia referred to the day on which they learned the Minivers had gone missing, this was the name by which it was called. It was the day Artemisia changed forever, when the golden legend of the Miniver sisters came to an abrupt and ugly finish. Black Monday was the end of an era. Even the most dull-witted citizen realised the fact, though at the time, the real nature of the change was not yet fully understood.
The official announcement was made on the news at midday. A spokeswoman from the palace confirmed that the Minivers were missing, believed kidnapped. Mr Ron Burgess, the Minivers’ Chief of Security, refused to comment on whether the abduction was an inside job. By then, rumours had been flying around for hours, and there were few Artemisians who had not heard some garbled version of what was happening. Crowds had been milling around the gates of Miniver House since before dawn; as hope faded, and the rumours were confirmed, they grew larger and more tearful. The worst was whispered: that Rosamund was certainly dead, that a ransom had been demanded for Emily, that both sisters had been smuggled out of Artemisia to an unknown location.
The Minivers Page 6