The car rolled down the drive. It came to a stop inside the garage and the driver pulled on the brake and turned off the engine.
‘Gibraltar!’ Livia ran to the driver’s door. Gibraltar flashed her a reassuring smile. He turned to the back, where Emily and Rosamund were sitting, uncharacteristically silent, on either end of the seat. Livia stared at them.
‘What have you two been doing?’
‘Ask Emily,’ said Rosamund savagely. ‘It was her fault, not mine.’
Livia’s eyes fell on the smashed-up panel at the back of the car and she let out an involuntary scream.
‘My car! You little wretches. What have you done?’
A few blocks from the Royal Palace was the biggest railway shunting yard in Artemisia. It was a place where empty freight cars were stored, and trains were coupled together and held until needed. At two o’clock in the morning, all was quiet here. The last passenger trains had left for the night, and though there were still a few freight trains passing through on the up line, there was nobody about on the tracks.
A big, slow coal train came rumbling through the darkness. It was so long that it needed several minutes to clear the shunting yard, and as it clicked over the rails past the darkened sets of waiting passenger carriages, a flicker of movement showed in one of the cars. Dark shapes slid and clambered over the rim of the coal-filled hopper, dangling briefly before jumping to the ground. There was a soft crunch as sneakered feet hit the clinker, and the intruders quickly separated. One ran off into the shadows on the hill above the shunting yard, a second headed for a small wooden hut. Two more moved rapidly among the trains waiting on the sidings. There was a metallic shaking sound followed by a soft hiss, and, as if by magic, words began appearing on the carriages’ silver flanks.
Fiona coughed as she accidentally inhaled the fumes from her spray can. ‘Ugh. This stuff stinks.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ Bridget spoke in a hoarse whisper, her right arm sweeping up and down in a practised arc. ‘You get used to it, though. Just don’t breathe too much in, or you’ll throw up.’
Fiona giggled. ‘Imagine if they saw us doing this, back at Delinquent Central.’
‘If you don’t watch out, they will,’ said Bridget. She pointed warningly to a closed-circuit security camera that was angled on a pole overhead. ‘Those things are everywhere. Be careful.’
‘Sorry.’ It occurred to Fiona that being a competent delinquent needed quite a bit of practice. She shook her spray can and started squirting a wobbly message across the silver metal of the next carriage. Bridget was already working on her third slogan. Stop the Lies! Give us Back the Minivers – Free the Minivers – We Love the Minivers. At the end of each message, Bridget sprayed the letters MU, for Minivers Underground. In a few hours time, when the rush hour started, the trains would be carrying their messages all over Artemisia.
‘Make Yours a Miniver Morning.’ Bridget came up and read Fiona’s slogan approvingly. ‘I love that song.’
Fiona nodded. ‘Me too. It was Rosamund’s very first hit.’
‘Cute.’ Bridget tossed her empty spray can over her shoulder and took a new one out of her backpack. Her fingers were covered in red paint. Fiona saw that her own were now streaked blue. She hoped no one back at Delinquent Central would notice.
‘Bridget, Fiona – look at this!’ Tania came around the corner of the carriage, lugging a plastic box. ‘It looks like some sort of explosive. I found it over there in that shed.’
‘Do you think it’s safe?’ asked Fiona anxiously.
‘No idea,’ said Tania. ‘But you never know, it might come in useful.’
Bridget rolled her eyes. Given the chance, Tania would bring back anything she could lay her hands on. Every time she said that it ‘might come in useful’, but the others all knew that really, Tania just liked stealing things.
‘Well, if you must take it, don’t let Carla see it,’ said Bridget. ‘You know what she’s like with things that go bang. She might decide to start a revolution and I don’t trust her not to blow herself up. How’s she going?’
‘Nearly ready, I think,’ said Tania. ‘Look – there she goes now.’
The three of them turned and looked up onto the hillside above the yard. A smell of petrol and flames wafted towards them and they saw Carla’s small dark figure running down the slope. Behind her, gigantic fiery letters were springing into life, burning brightly in the night, and leaving scorch marks in the grass for everyone in Artemisia to read:
MINIVERS FOREVER
‘Ha! Let’s see what Madame thinks about that,’ said Bridget with satisfaction.
When the members of the Minivers Underground had set off on their late-night mission to the shunting yard, the fifth delinquent, Mo, had been left behind at Delinquent Central. There were a number of reasons for this. Officially, Mo had been told to guard the tunnel entrance and keep watch over the exit, which could not be opened from the outside. Unofficially however, Mo had been left out because the others did not quite trust her to behave herself on such a delicate mission. Mo did not think: she just reacted, and sometimes she even surprised herself with the crazy things she did.
Mo was not very happy about being left behind. Even by the standards of Delinquent Central she was a slightly scary person, but it was not very nice to find that the others preferred to take Fiona, who had only been there two days. Mo felt hurt and lonely. Why couldn’t she do something for the Minivers, too? She was sure she loved Emily and Rosamund just as much as the others did. As she wandered up and down the tunnel, dark resentful thoughts started creeping through Mo’s head. Suppose she shut the others out, and used the tunnel to escape herself? That would serve them right for leaving her behind. The idea grew with frightening rapidity, and Mo had almost made up her mind to do it when the sound of human voices floated unexpectedly down from the building above.
Mo froze in her tracks. As far as she could make out, she was somewhere under the hospital. Because the girls at Delinquent Central were all young and healthy, it was usually empty, and she could not understand why there was anybody there so late at night. Yet there were definitely people moving around, and a yellow light clearly showed through a wire grille in the wall. Mo climbed up onto a piece of broken concrete and tried to peer into the room above. Her view was restricted, but she could just distinguish three people. One was the Delinquent Central Governor, popularly known to the girls as Sharkface, and the second was the hospital Matron, Squelchy. The third person was a young man, a stranger. He had fair rumpled hair and was wearing black jeans and a T-shirt.
‘Do you want to see the prisoner?’ said the young man. He gave a rolled-up bundle on the floor a little kick. It groaned softly, and Mo realised that it was a person, swaddled tightly in blankets like a corpse.
‘No, thank you.’ Sharkface’s voice was stiff. ‘I have to say, Mr Titus, this is extremely irregular. This Home is under the authority of the Artemisia Prisons Board. If they get word of this –’
‘They won’t,’ Titus assured her. ‘And if they do, I assure you that my authority will override theirs. No need to stand on formality, by the way. Plain “Titus” will do, and may I call you … Hattie?’
If the danger had not been so real, the thought of the Governor being called Hattie would have made Mo burst out laughing. Squelchy knelt and started unwrapping the bundle of blankets. The prisoner groaned again and gave a terrible rattling cough.
‘She’s pretty sick, I’m afraid,’ said Titus. ‘Just try and keep her alive, if you can. It would be inconvenient if she died just now.’
Squelchy felt the prisoner’s pulse. ‘She’s in very poor shape,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘I’d say she’s got pneumonia. I’ll have to put her in the ward. There aren’t any other patients, so it should be safe.’
A trolley was found, and the prisoner lifted onto it. Mo saw that the person under the blankets was very small indeed, about the size of a toddler, and obviously not heavy. What sort of prisoner was
this, a miniature inmate so secret that she could not go through the normal admission procedures? Suddenly Mo was struck by a terrifying realisation. There were two people in Artemisia who were that important and that tiny, and they were Rosamund and Emily Miniver.
The two women wheeled the trolley away. Left behind to wait, Titus sat down on a chair and stretched out his legs. He was looking at nothing in particular and after a while he began humming softly under his breath. At first, Mo could not quite work out what the tune was, but then he began tapping out the rhythm on a side-table near his chair, and she realised that it was ‘Miniver Morning’.
Mo was hard to scare. She had seen and done a lot of bad things in her life, and had been in more trouble than she could remember, but something about the way Titus sat and tapped and hummed was more than just creepy: it was sinister. Mo realised that Titus must be the enemy Fiona had spoken of, the person who was trying to destroy the Minivers, and who had sent Fiona to Delinquent Central. She had said he enjoyed deceiving people, in making them do wrong things, in making them suffer. Mo knew she had to do something to stop him, but she could not think what. As Mo watched, Titus’s face changed. It took on the shape of Rosamund’s features until he almost was Rosamund, mimicking her at her most temperamental and ill-behaved. Then Rosamund was gone, replaced by an Emily who was not quite Emily, and Emily was followed by someone else Mo did not know, but whose face was vain and mean and stupid altogether. So quickly did the impersonations follow each other that it was hard to tell when one stopped and the next one started. Mo was transfixed. She stood, clinging to the grille like an animal whose gaze was held by a snake, and then suddenly something happened. Her foot, which was balanced precariously on the bit of concrete, wobbled slightly and pitched her forward.
The movement made the slightest of noises, but Titus heard. His expression went instantly blank, and he stood up, looking around the room for the source of the sound. Mo felt faint with terror. She stared at Titus, waiting for him to see her behind the grille, and as she looked at his face she realised that she had never before seen so complete a void. It was as if she was looking inside the real Titus and there was nothing there: no emotion, no compassion, and no conscience. Instead, into the vacuum that lay at his heart, all kinds of evil had been drawn and made their home.
Titus’s eyes fell on the grille. He took a step towards it, and then the door opened behind him, and Sharkface and Squelchy came back in. Titus swung round to them enquiringly, his face once more dressed up in its pleasant smile.
‘I’ve put her on a drip,’ said Squelchy. ‘She should be comfortable for the rest of the night. We’ll tell the other staff she has to stay in isolation because she’s infectious.’
‘Good,’ said Titus. ‘Thank you, ladies. We’ll let matters rest there, and I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow morning.’
The three of them turned off the lights and departed. As soon as they had gone, Mo went to find a jemmy. A deft wrench pulled the hospital grille from its place, and she scaled up the wall and through the opening. Was the prisoner Rosamund, or Emily? Hoping desperately it was Emily, she gently pushed open the swing door into the ward.
A weak voice called out from inside the room. ‘Who’s that?’
Mo stopped with her hand on the door. The excitement that she had been feeling turned to bitter disappointment. She had never met either Rosamund or Emily Miniver, but she knew their voices as well as she did her own. Whoever was in the bed was not a Miniver. It was not even a girl’s voice, but a woman’s.
The prisoner called out again. ‘Who is it?’ This time, Mo entered the room and went up to the bed where the voice was coming from. A small and extremely plain woman was lying in it, hooked up to a drip and looking very ill. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a snub nose, and at the sight of her, Mo’s heart began to pound. The prisoner was neither Emily nor Rosamund, but Mo had seen her picture many times in Minivers Monthly and knew she was the next closest thing.
She was Millamant.
9
Councils of War
Emily had not thought it possible that things could get worse after their disastrous visit to the Bridge House. She soon found out that she was wrong. All of a sudden, it seemed that everyone was angry with her. Gibraltar was annoyed that she had been irresponsible and ignored his instructions, and Livia was furious about her car, which she could not afford to have repaired. As for Rosamund, she was angry with Emily about everything, and nothing Emily could say or do seemed to make the slightest bit of difference.
By bedtime, Rosamund was still not talking to her. Worse followed. As soon as Emily entered their bedroom, Rosamund pointedly picked up her pillow and went to sleep on the living-room sofa. When Emily tried to talk her round, Rosamund screamed and threw a hairbrush at her. This brought down a lecture from Livia and sent Emily running for the bedroom to cry over the injustice of it. Nothing in her past life with Rosamund had equipped her to cope with such behaviour. It was simply inexplicable.
The next morning was Saturday. At breakfast, Rosamund would not eat with Emily, would not speak to her, and would not look her in the eye. Instead she curled up in the living room with a book – Rosamund, who was famous for never reading anything but the fashion hints in Artemisian Vogue. Emily locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed herself into near hysteria. After that, she kept to herself and tried not to talk to Rosamund at all.
For as long as she could remember, Emily had looked up to her older sister. She had loved her, admired her, and secretly wanted to be like her. Emily had always known that Rosamund was the most popular Miniver, yet she had never resented this for an instant, because in a sense she was Rosamund’s biggest fan herself. It had been Rosamund who had patiently helped Emily with her dancing, Rosamund who encouraged her when she was making her first recording, Rosamund who told her what clothes and make-up to wear, and how to cut her hair. From the moment their nightmare adventures had started, all that had mattered to Emily was that she and Rosamund should be together. Of course, Emily had known that she was doing the wrong thing in deceiving Rose, but she had hoped the fact that she was doing it for Millamant would make a difference. She now knew she had been wrong. It was not that Rosamund did not care about Milly’s fate: quite clearly, she did, or she would not have gone to the Bridge House in the first place. What she could not forgive, it seemed, was the fact that Emily had ignored her position as the elder sister. Rosamund was accustomed to being the leader and Emily had tricked, ignored and disobeyed her.
The stand-off lasted until Saturday evening. By then, Emily had spent the whole day more or less by herself. Gibraltar had gone to get clothes from his caravan, and Livia had spent her day in the garden in a frenzy of pruning and mulching. She had come back inside at six to cook an uninteresting dinner of fish fingers and frozen chips, and when they had eaten it, she left the table without a word and started running a bath. Emily sat at the kitchen table, looking mutely at the tablecloth. When she glanced up, she saw that Rosamund was looking straight at her.
Rosamund finally broke the silence.
‘I want you to know,’ she said, ‘that I’m not angry with you any more. I was angry last night. What you did wasn’t fair. It could have been the end for both of us. I don’t care about that, though. I don’t even care that you hurt my feelings. What I care about is the fact that we stopped being a team. You just did what you wanted without even worrying about what I thought. You behaved as if I didn’t count for anything. I might as well not have been there.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Tears seeped out from Emily’s eyelids and ran down her cheeks, but the relief of finally talking to Rosamund was so great that she did not care about the lecture. ‘It was just that I wanted to find Milly. She was so close, and I couldn’t bear it. It never occurred to me that Gibraltar would try and rescue her. Honestly, I never dreamed it would happen.’
‘Neither did I,’ said Rosamund. ‘But I would have done what Gibraltar wanted and stayed back here, if you’d
only passed on the message. That’s another thing. I don’t think you realise how important Gibraltar is in all of this. You’d hardly even met him when we left for the forest, but I spent a whole week hiding with him. I know he can seem mysterious, but I’ve been through enough to be sure that he understands exactly what he’s doing. You’ve got to listen to Gibraltar’s advice, Emily. If you try and do things your own way, we’ll all end up worse off than we can imagine.’
‘I do listen to Gibraltar, and you, too,’ said Emily. ‘It’s not that I’m trying to make you do what I want, Rose. I’ve just got used to making my own decisions.’
‘Well, you can’t do that any more,’ said Rosamund. ‘We can’t make decisions without telling each other; there’s too much at stake. Besides, if anyone’s in charge it’s me, not you. I’m the eldest, remember. I’m the one Papa King gave the key to; I’m the one he wants to be queen when he dies. I know I’m not ready for it, not yet, and maybe never, but Papa King is the only father I’ve had, and if that’s what he wants, I’m not going to let him down. But I can’t do that if my own sister lies to me. Do you understand, Emily? I have to be able to trust you.’
‘You can trust me,’ said Emily. ‘A hundred percent, Rose. I promise.’
‘A hundred percent, then,’ said Rosamund. ‘I believe you. But that’s not enough, Emmie. There’s something else you have to agree to. If I’m going to be a queen, it’s time I started acting like one. From now on, I’m completely in charge of what we do. I’ll always ask for your opinion, but I must have the final say. Promise me, or this simply isn’t going to work.’
The Minivers Fight Back Book 2 Page 8