by Eva Ibbotson
‘Please, Daddy, take me home,’ he whined. ‘Look, there they are; they’re coming for me!’
Stanley Sprott looked up. The three dreaded women whose pictures were on the wall of every police station in London were coming towards them.
Aunt Myrtle was in the lead, which was unusual for her. She was carrying a brown paper parcel and she was very nervous – but in a way Lambert was hers, just as Fabio was Aunt Coral’s, and Minette belonged to Etta, and she felt she had to hand him back herself.
‘Good morning,’ she said, bracing herself. ‘I see you have come to fetch Lambert – he will be pleased to go home. I’m afraid he never quite fitted in.’
Mr Sprott stared at her. The cheek of the woman was unbelievable!
‘I’ve washed and ironed his underclothes and his pyjamas. I wasn’t able to take many of his clothes in the cello case but you’ll find everything is there.’
Myrtle now felt she had done all she could and stepped back, leaving her sisters to take charge, which they did by asking Mr Sprott if he would care to stay to lunch.
As she spoke, Etta was looking warily over the bay. She had told everyone to stay out of sight as soon as the dinghy had rounded the point but one could never be sure, she thought, not realizing that it was already too late.
‘No, don’t,’ begged Lambert. ‘Don’t eat anything in there – you’ll think you’ll see creepy-crawlies.’
‘Be quiet, Lambert,’ said his father – and told the aunts he would be delighted.
It was a strange lunch. The aunts had been well brought up and though they thought that Mr Sprott was just as nasty as one would expect from someone who was Lambert’s father, they were most polite, passing him the salt and pepper and filling up his plate.
‘Won’t you try a brandy snap?’ asked Aunt Coral. ‘They were freshly made this morning.’
Mr Sprott took one and decided it was time to come to the point.
‘Now, ladies,’ he said, smiling his oily smile. ‘I have a suggestion to make to you.’ He leant forward, folding his hands on the tablecloth. ‘I am getting on in years and I need somewhere to end my days – so I want you to sell me this island.’
There was a gasp from Myrtle, and Aunt Etta stared at him in amazement.
‘Sell the Island?’ said Coral.
‘Sell the Island?’ said Myrtle.
‘Sell it!’ thundered Aunt Etta.
‘I take it it belongs to you, does it not? And Captain Harper?’
The sisters looked at each other. They had never thought of owning the Island. It was just there and they looked after it. But now they remembered that their father had in fact bought it from an old couple who could no longer do the work.
‘I suppose it does,’ said Etta now. ‘But there’s absolutely no question of selling it.’
‘No question at all,’ said Coral.
‘Oh no, we couldn’t do that,’ said Myrtle bravely.
Mr Sprott leant back in his chair and smiled. They did not seem to realize that they were completely in his power.
‘I’m prepared to offer ten thousand pounds,’ he said. ‘And that’s generous for a miserable little island … I mean for a simple unspoilt island with only one house on it.’
He’d get the money back in a month, charging two hundred pounds for helicopter rides to the Island of Freaks. The pretty mermaid was worth a fortune on her own; he’d put her in an aquarium and people would have to pay extra to hear her sing and comb her hair. As for that creepy worm, he could just see the visitors clutching each other and screaming.
He’d have to keep him in a cage with electric wire. It would be a cross between a zoo, a funfair and Disneyland.
‘Very well, ladies. Twelve thousand pounds and that’s my last word absolutely!’
But Etta had had enough of this unpleasant game. ‘I’m afraid we wouldn’t sell the island for a hundred million pounds,’ she said. ‘We regard it as a Sacred Trust. Now if you would care to take Lambert back with you, I will tell Art that he can clear the table.’
‘Oh no you won’t!’
Mr Sprott’s voice had changed. He had become the dangerous bully that he was before. ‘I think you have forgotten something, dear ladies. You have kidnapped three children. Abducted them by force. My son and two others. The penalty for kidnapping is life imprisonment – and it might even be hanging. They’re thinking of bringing back the death penalty, I’ve heard. So I really think you’d better sell me the Island – or would you rather I turned you over to the police?’
There was a sudden scuffle at the door.
‘You can’t! You can’t turn them over to the police because they didn’t kidnap us.’ Minette had run all the way from the North Shore. Her hair was tousled, her clothes were in a mess but what was strange was that she wasn’t at all frightened. ‘I asked if I could come. I asked Aunt Etta if there was a third place and she brought me here.’
Fabio, who had followed her into the room, caught on at once. ‘And I wasn’t kidnapped either! Aunt Coral saved me from a vile school where they tie you to pillars and try to set fire to your clothes. If anybody says I was kidnapped, I’ll thump them!’
‘And Lambert wasn’t really kidnapped either.’ Minette, who never lied, seemed to have gone crazy. ‘He tried to steal Aunt Myrtle’s chloroform and the fumes knocked him out and Aunt Myrtle brought him along because there was no one at home to look after him.’
Both children stood and glared at him like angry tigers.
What they were saying was rubbish, Mr Sprott knew that. The police would get the truth out of them in no time – but he had changed his mind. It had seemed worth a try to do everything the easy way – buy the island and then do what he wanted with it when they’d all gone. But there were other ways of getting what he wanted.
‘Very well, it looks as though I was mistaken. Come along, Lambert, I’ll take you home.’
He took the brown paper parcel with Lambert’s pyjamas, shook hands politely, and left with his son.
Oh yes, there were other ways of getting his hands on those weird beasts, thought Stanley Sprott. Before he’d finished they would wish they had sold him the island, because what was going to happen now would not be pleasant at all!
Chapter Seventeen
Meanwhile, in London, Minette’s parents had found a better way of making money than suing the police.
Mrs Danby thought of it first and Professor Danby didn’t hear about it till he saw a newspaper which the tea lady had brought into the University Common Room.
On the front page was a picture of Minette as a baby in her mother’s arms. Heartbreak Mother Mourns Lost Daughter said the headline, and underneath the picture were some terribly sad things that Minette’s mother had said, like there was no second of the day when she did not feel the pain of being without her daughter like a wound in her side. She was a little angel Mrs Danby had told the reporter, and she went on to say that a candle burnt night and day by Minette’s bed and would go on burning till she was safely returned.
As soon as he saw the newspaper, Professor Danby rang his wife.
‘How much did they pay you for that?’ he wanted to know.
‘Twenty thousand,’ said Minette’s mother, ‘and no more than I deserve with what I’ve been through.’
‘I don’t know how you can bring yourself to talk to a filthy rag like the Daily Screech,’ said the Professor and slammed down the phone.
But all day he was furious. Twenty thousand pounds! It wasn’t as though he wasn’t suffering just as much over his lost daughter. He didn’t light candles by her bed because of the fire risk but the housekeeper, who was fond of Minette, had bought a bunch of flowers and put them in her room. Of course the Daily Screech was out of the question – he wouldn’t be seen dead with his photograph in a rag like that – but if the Morning Gazette was interested he might say a few words about his sorrow and his loss. There was a photograph somewhere that the housekeeper had taken outside the university in which he was st
anding beside his daughter wearing his gown and hood. It had come out rather well and made it clear the kind of background that she came from.
Fabio’s grandparents were too snobby to talk to any kind of newspaper, but they appeared on a late night television panel to bleat about the lack of discipline in modern life and the feebleness of the police who still hadn’t returned their grandson.
And even as Minette’s parents were getting rich and Fabio’s grandparents were complaining, a helicopter was getting ready to take off from the Metropolitan Police pad outside London. It was a small machine manned only by one policeman and a policewoman – and their orders were clear.
‘Remember, if you get a chance to land, it’s the two children we want. The aunts can wait. And don’t pick a fight with Sprott. We’re after the boy and the girl right now, and nothing else.’
As soon as they opened the door of the mermaid shed, Fabio and Minette realized that something serious had happened.
Loreen lay on the tiled floor, chewing mouthfuls of gum and weeping. In her sink in the corner, Oona looked stricken and pale. Old Ursula was shaking her head and muttering.
‘It’s my fault,’ Loreen wailed. ‘I’ve been a rotten mother and I deserve all I get.’
‘What is it?’ the children asked. ‘What’s happened?’
Loreen hiccuped and tried to speak but what with her gum and her sorrow no one could make out what she was saying and it was Old Ursula who said: ‘Queenie’s eloped. She’s swum off with that muscleman who came yesterday and tried to catch her.’
‘What muscleman?’
‘He came in the dinghy with Lambert’s father and Queenie went up to sing to him. We didn’t think she fancied him but she’s gone.’
A low croak came from Oona as she tried to speak. ‘She … didn’t … fancy him. She … said his biceps were silly.’
But the other mermaids took no notice of Oona, who was trying to make out that Queenie hadn’t gone of her own free will. Twins always stuck together and what had happened with Lord Brasenott made Oona think that all men were evil, which was silly.
‘I spoiled her,’ wailed Loreen. ‘She always had the best shells and the prettiest pearls for her hair.’
‘Now don’t carry on so,’ said Ursula. ‘It isn’t your fault Queenie turned out so flighty.’
‘She didn’t—’ began Oona – but Loreen only put another piece of gum in her mouth and went on wailing. ‘I’ve been a rotten mother, and it’s all my fault,’ she said again, and she picked Walter out of the washing-up bowl and slapped his tail though he hadn’t done anything except grizzle and whine in his usual way.
‘We must tell the aunts,’ said Fabio.
‘Oh dear, must we?’ cried Loreen.
But Old Ursula said yes, it was best to own up. ‘Get some wheelbarrows and we’ll go up to the house,’ she said.
So the children came back with three barrows and Art, because flopping about overland made the mermaids’ tails sore, and no one took any notice of Oona who went on croaking that her sister had not liked the muscleman.
The aunts were very much upset. Not because Queenie was flighty, which they’d known all along, but because it meant that Mr Sprott now knew that there were mermaids on the Island – and maybe other things too.
‘I wonder if he knew before he came to lunch,’ said Coral. ‘Do you think that was why he wanted to buy the Island?’
‘Perhaps he’ll come back with photographers?’ faltered Myrtle.
Fabio and Minette looked at each other. They had lived in the world outside long enough to know that Mr Sprott might come back with something much more serious than that.
A day passed, and half a night, and then they heard the sound they had been dreading: the noise of a boat coming into the bay. So Sprott was back already!
In an instant the aunts were out of bed. Etta ran for the Captain’s blunderbuss, Coral fetched Art’s catapult, Myrtle grabbed the long-handled brush she used to scrub her back.
Outside, the night was black and moonless but they could make out the boat nosing in beside the jetty. The engine died … the cargo was unloaded … and almost instantly the boat went into reverse and moved away.
The aunts, clutching their weapons, peered into the darkness. Then suddenly Etta broke the silence with a great shout and ran towards the jetty. And there, standing tall among her suitcases, was a woman in a long raincoat holding what seemed to be a frying pan.
‘Dorothy! Oh my dear, how wonderful to see you!’ She hugged her sister, unable to keep back her tears of happiness and relief.
It was only then, as the other aunts came forward, that Etta could make out two small figures standing behind the luggage.
‘Good heavens, Dorothy, what have you got there?’ she asked, shining her torch.
‘You may well ask,’ said Dorothy, and pushed Boo-Boo and the Little One forward into the light.
Having Betty’s children to stay would have been bad at any time. Now with Queenie gone and everyone so jittery, it was a nightmare.
They were awful children. Not awful like Lambert but awful all the same. It wasn’t their fault; they’d been brought up to behave like idiots. Boo-Boo (who was a boy called Alfred) wore a bow tie and kept asking Art for shoe polish.
‘It’s got to be tan, not brown,’ he said to poor Art, who was trying to prepare mash for the boobrie chicks and take the Captain his meals and cope with the extra people to feed.
The Little One (who was a girl called Griselda) began to cry straight away because Dorothy had forgotten to pack the hankie with a picture of a flower fairy on it which she kept under her pillow, and both the children were terrified of germs. Fortunately they were so wrapped up in their silly fusses about which pyjama case was which that they didn’t even notice the strange animals or the danger they might be in. They just went on dusting the chairs before they sat down in them and looking at themselves in mirrors and complaining because their underclothes hadn’t been ironed, exactly as if they were still in Newcastle upon Tyne. If Fabio hadn’t been so busy with the kraken his temper would certainly have got the better of him but as it was he hardly saw them.
But having Dorothy made up for everything.
Dorothy knew that there was evil in the world. She had met people like Stanley Sprott and she had seen some dreadful things abroad – ‘monsters’ that were supposed to be mermaids kept pickled in jars, or deformed beasts put in cages for people to gawp at – but she was not afraid. It was Dorothy who filled the Captain’s blunderbuss with carpet tacks and set up tripwires behind the house and showed them how to make a cosh.
But when at the end of the first day Etta took her sister down to see the kraken, the tough, hard-faced woman changed into someone very different.
‘Oh Etta,’ she breathed, looking down at the little creature as he slept, ‘that I should live to see this day!’
Queenie sat in Mr Sprott’s bathroom on the Hurricane up to her waist in scented water. The bath was a jacuzzi, with water bubbling up from all sorts of places. The taps were gold and so were the shower fittings and on shelves all round were cut-glass bottles full of wonderful things: coloured crystals and glittering hair sprays and creams for making the body firm and more creams for making it soft once it was firm and more creams still for making it not just soft and firm but also pink.
The creams belonged to Mrs Sprott, but she wasn’t there so Queenie had the bathroom to herself. It was exactly the kind of bathroom she had dreamt of when she heard stories about mermaids marrying princes and going to live in palaces, but as she splashed more water over her tail, the tears kept welling out of her eyes and she was shaken by terrible sobs. She had never in all her life been so unhappy and afraid.
For Oona had been right. Queenie had not swum away to be with the muscleman. Queenie had been most cruelly caught by Mr Sprott’s henchmen and this bathroom was as much her prison as any cell in a cold and dirty dungeon.
She had gone out for a moonlight swim and when she got t
o the end of the bay she found a net under the water stretched between two rocks. At first she thought the net had been put there by fishermen but as she tried to free herself it was pulled tighter and tighter still, and she was towed away behind the dinghy and hauled aboard the Hurricane like a slab of dead meat.
‘Oh, why didn’t I listen?’ cried poor Queenie. ‘My mother told me to stay out of the way of men.’
She would have given anything now to see Loreen chewing her gum or Old Ursula with her toothless smile; she even missed Walter. But the person she longed for most was Oona. She understood now how Oona had felt on board Lord Brasenott’s yacht; no wonder the poor girl had lost her voice. The round window of the bathroom had a curtain but Des and the two horrible men who guarded the boat had pulled it aside and every so often their faces leered in at her.
‘Oh, what is to become of me!’ cried poor Queenie, and felt so sad that she wanted to die.
And while Queenie wept in the bath, Lambert snivelled in his father’s cabin.
‘I don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother,’ he whined. ‘I don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother anyway and I certainly don’t want a mermaid for a stepmother who isn’t really there.’
‘Don’t be silly, Lambert,’ said Mr Sprott. ‘One doesn’t marry mermaids, and anyway your mother is still alive.’
But he sighed deeply as he said it for Queenie was much prettier than Mrs Sprott with her purple hair and her claw-like fingernails and her greedy eyes. Mrs Sprott was a kind of dung beetle, only instead of collecting balls of nice soft manure she collected clothes and shoes and jewels and furs and dumped them in his house before going out for more.
‘They’ll laugh at me at school if I have a mermaid for a stepmother and I don’t like fish. Even half a fish I don’t like … even a fish that isn’t really there,’ moaned Lambert.
‘Oh be quiet, Lambert,’ said Mr Sprott. ‘No one’s going to marry her. We’re going to show her off in a tank and make a fortune out of her. But first she’ll have to tell us where the other creepy-crawlies are to be found. I’m going to catch the lot of them and then—’