Miss Worsfold shook her head. “No,” she said. “You can still see their houses, but nobody lives there permanently now.”
“Did they have to leave?” asked Fee.
“They agreed to go,” said Miss Worsfold. “They decided that there were too few of them to survive right out in the Atlantic. That was almost ninety years ago. They loaded all their possessions onto boats and brought them over to the mainland. They took all their animals too, except for some sheep, which were too wild to be caught, so they left them behind.”
For a few moments, nobody spoke. It seemed so sad, thought Poppy, to leave the place you lived and say goodbye to it forever. She wondered what it would be like to visit the houses the islanders had abandoned. Would they be exactly the same as they were on the day that everybody left? Were they about to visit a ghost island?
“I’ll show you some pictures,” said Miss Worsfold.
For the next half hour, she projected them onto the classroom screen, and everybody sat in silence and stared at images of a lost and almost forgotten world. Some of them showed people of their own age, standing outside their schoolroom in bare feet. The sun was shining on their faces and they were smiling.
It seemed to Poppy that they wanted to say something – perhaps about what it was like to live on a remote island, cut off from the rest of the world and only visited every few weeks by a boat that brought supplies from the mainland. She looked at the faces more closely. Did they know, when those photographs were taken, what was in store for them? That is the strange thing about old photographs. Often we know what lay ahead for the people we see in pictures, while they themselves had no idea. We know their future, but they didn’t.
Later that day Ben and Fee both had a long maths lesson with Mr Rigger. Rory was in the same group, as were Badger and Amanda Birtwhistle. Amanda was very good with figures, and could do complicated sums in her head almost as fast as most people could do with a calculator.
“It’s not all that hard,” she would say. “I don’t really have to think about it. The answers just come into my head.”
“You’re really lucky,” said Fee wistfully. Maths was not her best subject, though she tried her best.
Ben was a bit better at figures than his sister, although he had never been quite as good as Badger. If Amanda got top marks in every maths test, then Badger was usually in second place.
They sat in the classroom, trying hard not to be distracted by the sea outside. Ben would far rather have been out on deck, feeling the wind in his hair, than listening to Mr Rigger talk about mathematical problems. And there was another reason why he would have preferred to be up on deck, and that was because it was painful for him to have to sit in the same class as Badger and be ignored by him.
As they had filed into the classroom at the beginning of the lesson, Ben, who had decided that despite their row he would behave in a perfectly friendly way, had said good morning to Badger, but had simply been given a nod of the head in return. Not a word did his so-called friend speak to him; not a simple hello, or even an enquiry about how Ben was. Nothing. Just silence.
That morning, Mr Rigger was getting his class to tackle some simple problems.
“Now,” he said, “here’s something for you to work out. Are you ready? Right, if it takes one deckhand two hours to scrub forty square metres of deck, how long will it take three deckhands to scrub a hundred and twenty square metres of deck?”
Amanda’s hand went up within seconds. Fee frowned, and started to jot down various figures on a piece of paper. Once she had done that, she frowned even more, rubbing out most of what she had just scribbled down.
Mr Rigger saw that Amanda was ready to give the answer, but he decided to ask Badger instead.
“Your turn, Tomkins,” he said. “You should have no difficulty in giving me the answer.”
Badger had been staring down at his desk. Now he looked up. “Two days?” he said with uncertainty.
Amanda could not control herself and burst out laughing at Badger’s answer. Mr Rigger frowned. “Are you trying to be funny?” he asked severely.
Badger looked miserable, and it was clear to Ben at least that he had not been joking.
Badger tried again. “Ten hours?” He paused, and then, seeing Mr Rigger’s look of disbelief, he said, “I mean, eight hours.”
Mr Rigger shook his head. “What’s wrong with you, Badger?” he asked. “You’re normally good at this sort of thing.”
Badger did not reply. He was aware that all eyes were on him, and he squirmed in embarrassment. Watching this, Ben felt sorry for him. It was clear to him that Badger had not been paying attention. He must have been thinking of something else altogether.
Ben was sitting at the next desk, and, leant over to Badger. “Two hours, Badge,” he whispered. “Two hours – not eight or ten.”
It was not something that Ben would normally have done. Students were not meant to help each other with the answers, and if Mr Rigger saw that, there would be trouble. But watching his old friend struggle, Ben’s every instinct was to help him, and so he did.
Fortunately for Ben, Mr Rigger had turned his back for a moment and had not seen or heard what was going on. But even if Badger could then have given the right answer, he failed to do so. Instead, he turned to Ben and give him a withering look. It was the sort of look that said: Mind your own business. It was the sort of look that said: Don’t dare speak to me!
Ben was not prepared for this response, and Badger’s cold stare struck him like a slap in the face. “I was only trying to help,” he muttered.
Mr Rigger heard that. “What was that, MacTavish?” he snapped. “Have you got something to say to the class?”
Ben shook his head. “Sorry, Mr Rigger,” he said. “I was just muttering to myself.”
“Well, please don’t,” said Mr Rigger. Then he turned to Amanda, who had put up her hand again. “Very well, Amanda. Let’s have the answer.”
“Two hours,” said Amanda, giving Badger a pitying look.
“That’s right,” said Mr Rigger. “The amount of deck is three times larger, but there are three times as many people working. So the answer is that it would take the same time as it takes one deck hand to do forty square metres. Does everyone understand?”
They all nodded, except Ben, who was staring at the floor in his misery. It had been bad enough when Badger had refused to talk to him, but the look that Badger had just given him was far more hurtful. It was a look of … Ben struggled with the thought. It was a look of hatred – there was no other word for it. Badger hated him. It was hard to utter the word, hate, even to himself, but what other word was there to express that look of sheer loathing? And what had he done to deserve it? He had never addressed a cross word to his friend. He had never let him down in any way at all. He had never sided with others against him. There was no reason at all why Badger should behave that way towards him. It was not only puzzling, it was deeply and painfully wounding.
“But what if one of the deck hands is lazy?” Rory Quinn suddenly asked. “What if he sits about and doesn’t pull his weight?”
“Just like Flubber,” muttered Fee under her breath.
In spite of himself and in spite of his hurt feelings, like everybody else Ben was amused by Fee’s remark. He imagined how long it would take Flubber to scrub a hundred and twenty square metres of deck all by himself if he had to.
“It would take him forever,” he whispered back to Fee.
They both smiled at the thought. But Ben’s smile did not last long, as he went back to thinking about Badger’s peculiar behaviour. People did not act like that for no reason, and he decided that there must be something seriously wrong for Badger to behave in a way that was quite out of character. He would have to try to find out what it was. But he had no idea how to do that, as every effort to communicate with Badger so far had been rebuffed. Did that mean, after all, that he had no alternative but to stand on the sidelines and watch as things went from bad to w
orse for his old friend?
Classes had been over for a while by the time the Tobermory reached the shores of South Uist, one of the islands of the Outer Hebrides. Approaching the bay where they were due to anchor, all hands were on deck, helping to take down the sails that had carried them so quickly and smoothly across the Minch.
Fortunately, the wind had dropped and this made the task of lowering the sails easier, but such work can still be risky business even in calm weather. This is because you have to climb up rope ladders to the yard arms, the horizontal spars of wood from which the sails are suspended. Climbing a rope ladder is not easy at the best of times, but when the ladder is swinging with the movement of the sea, it is much harder. You have to keep your head; you have to look steadily up at the rungs of the ladder above you rather than down at the sea below. If you look down, you can quickly become dizzy and lose your balance. It is dangerous work, but it has to be done.
Ben and Thomas had been sent up together by Mr Rigger to deal with a small sail that needed to be furled up and lashed securely. They did this quickly, as it was something they had both done many times before. Then they began to make their way down the rope ladder back to the deck.
Geoffrey Shark and Badger had been working on another sail further up the mast. They, too, had completed their task and were coming down on the same ladder, just a little bit above Ben and Thomas.
Thomas reached the deck first. He looked up to see that Ben was about five rungs above him, and above Ben, getting rather close, thought Thomas, was Badger.
“Careful!” Thomas shouted up to Badger. “Don’t crowd him!”
But Badger either did not hear Thomas, or chose to ignore him. Suddenly, Ben felt a sharp pain in his right hand. He had been gripping the rung above his head when Badger, coming down above him, stepped on it. This made Ben lose his grip and fall.
Thomas later told Poppy and Fee exactly what happened. “I had reached the deck,” he said. “I was standing there, looking up at Ben, who was just above me. Badger was above him, with Shark up at the top. I saw Badger getting too close to Ben and I shouted out to him to be careful. Now I think about it, I’m sure he ignored me and put his foot down deliberately on Ben’s hand. Of course Ben had to let go of the rope – you can’t keep hold of something if somebody else is standing on your hand, can you?”
Poppy and Fee could hardly believe what they were hearing. “And then?” asked Poppy.
“Then Ben fell,” Thomas continued. “He wasn’t all that high off the ground, but still far enough for him to hit the deck with a real thud.
“If I’d been standing a bit closer I could have tried to catch him and break his fall. But I wasn’t close enough. Luckily he wasn’t really hurt – he could have broken a bone if he had been just a bit higher.”
“And Badger?” asked Fee. “What did Badger do? Did he say he was sorry?”
They waited for Thomas’s reply, but both she and Poppy knew what it would be before he spoke.
Thomas shook his head. “He laughed. And Shark thought it was funny too. He said, ‘Watch how you go, Butterfingers!’ Then they went off together, leaving Ben to pick himself up off the deck.”
The three friends looked at one another with dismay. Up until now, Badger’s bad behaviour had simply consisted of rudeness and silence, but this was far more serious.
“We have to do something,” Poppy said. “We can’t let this go on.”
Fee and Thomas both agreed, but when Poppy went on to suggest that they should tell Captain Macbeth about it, Thomas seemed unwilling. “I said that Ben should do that,” he said. “But he said he didn’t want to. So I offered to go myself, and that made him anxious. He said that it would only make matters worse, and that the best way of dealing with things like this is to ignore them.”
“You don’t ignore bullying,” said Poppy defiantly. “That’s how bullies get away with it.”
Fee was uncertain. “I suppose it is bullying, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Of course it’s bullying!” snapped Poppy. “Badger’s not just been rude to Ben, he’s even tried to hurt him.”
“Why don’t you talk to Ben, Fee?” suggested Thomas. “See if you can persuade him to go to the Captain.”
Fee pointed out that Badger might simply claim it was an accident. “After all, we don’t have any real proof,” she said. “Anyway, Ben doesn’t always listen to me, you know. Sometimes brothers and sisters don’t agree, even if they are twins.”
“All right, then,” said Poppy decisively, “I’ll speak to Ben and see if I can get him to do something.”
Fee said she thought that was a good idea, but she was not sure how her brother would react. She knew he could be stubborn once he had decided to do – or not to do – something. But the thought that Ben could have been hurt by Badger made it impossible to sit back and do nothing. She remembered something her mother had said. Don’t leave things too late. The longer you leave them, the harder they are to put right. Yes, she thought, that was true – that was definitely true. Perhaps she should remind Ben of that.
A mysterious journal
It was a long sail the following day. At five in the morning they left the bay where they had spent the night, and by breakfast time they were already rounding the southern tip of South Uist. To their south lay the island of Barra, and to the west was the open sea. Beyond that, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, were Greenland and Canada and the United States. St Kilda was before that, of course, less than fifty miles away, but this was open sea and the swell was large enough to be felt in every part of the ship as she ploughed through the waves.
The wind had picked up again and it was coming from just the right direction to allow them to follow a direct course to St Kilda. Captain Macbeth announced at breakfast that he expected them to make landfall in about five hours as long as the wind kept up. They would anchor, he said, in Village Bay, off the main island of Hirta – the only place that provided any shelter. Then they would go ashore in the afternoon, and there would be several hours for everybody to explore the island before returning to the Tobermory for dinner.
There was a high level of excitement on board. There were to be no lessons, although Mr Rigger would be holding one of his special knot-tying classes on deck for anybody who was interested. These were popular sessions, and just about everybody attended, including Henry, who loved to sit on the edge of the group, chewing on a piece of rope as if he were trying to work out how to tie a knot with his teeth.
It was Poppy who noticed that Hardtack and his friends, who now, of course, included Badger, were not at the knot-tying class.
“Where do you think they are?” she asked. “It’s odd, because they all fancy themselves as champion knot-tiers.”
Fee shrugged, as did Ben. “I don’t care,” he said flatly.
Poppy took the opportunity to ask him if he would speak to the Captain about what had happened on the rope ladder. “You can’t let Badger get away with something like that,” she urged. “It was really dangerous. And who knows what he might do next?”
Ben looked away.
“You have to do something, Ben,” Fee implored. “Poppy’s right, you know.”
Ben turned around. “Just leave it,” he said. “It may have been accidental after all.”
Poppy and Fee exchanged glances. At least they had tried, and if Ben was not prepared to do anything, they could hardly force him. For now, Poppy decided, they would have to leave things as they were. She knew that at heart Badger was not really like Hardtack, Shark and Flubber, and she was sorry that he might end up getting into serious trouble because of his new friends. But she did not say anything, as she could see that Ben was miserable enough already.
“All right,” Poppy said to Ben. “But I’m telling you, Ben, if Badger tries to bully you again, I’m going straight to Captain Macbeth. I don’t care what you say. I won’t stand by and let a bully get away with it.”
Ben looked at her, but said nothing. At that moment
, Mr Rigger started to explain a complicated new knot, and everybody’s attention was focused on that. And it was while they were struggling with the new knot that they heard a cry from the lookout. It was Wallace Springleg, who was high up in the crow’s nest, shouting, “Land ahoy!”
Knots were forgotten in the excitement. Even Mr Rigger joined the rush to the port railings from which, on the distant horizon, a smudge of dark blue could be seen.
“St Kilda,” said Mr Rigger. “There it is.”
The wind was now was even stronger and the sails needed to be adjusted in order to stop the boat from leaning too far over. This done, the Tobermory cut through the waves with all the determination of an athlete trying to reach the finishing line of a race. Spray and foam were thrown up by the prow, and those standing nearest the railings felt the salt water on their faces. Nobody minded, though. After all, in no time at all they would be dropping anchor and seeing, for the first time, the famous island.
Fortunately, the wind was in just the right direction to allow the great sailing ship to nose her way into the sheltered waters of Village Bay. There were just a handful of other boats bobbing at anchor – including a powerful motor boat that had brought visitors and a polished racing yacht with fine teak decks and shiny fittings. It looked out of place here, and there was no sign of life on board. Ben looked closely as they passed it and saw its name – Swordfish – painted in black letters on the bow. There were also a couple of rowing boats used by the island’s caretakers tied to moorings near the shore.
With a great clanking, the anchor chain slipped down into the sea below. When the anchor touched the seabed, the chain went slack, allowing a good length of it to lie out across the mud and seaweed below. The weight of the chain was just as important in keeping the Tobermory from drifting as the heavy hook of the anchor itself.
The liberty boats were prepared and lowered into the water. In small groups the excited students made the short journey to the pier. There they clambered up over barnacle-encrusted stone to set foot on the soil of St Kilda. Above them were hundreds of puffins, those strange seabirds with their rainbow-coloured beaks. The birds nested not far away, in large colonies, on the face of steep cliffs, from which they launched themselves into the clear Atlantic sky down towards the sea in search of fish.
The Secret of the Dark Waterfall Page 4