by Joan Aiken
small wonder that I am is
what I seem.
‘No – wait – strike out saurian. That does not fit. Savage. It should be savage snatch -’
We heard a faint cry of distress from the study.
‘Oh, now what?’ cried Aunt Lal and, despite Fuchsia’s efforts to stop her, she swept through the door.
I paused an instant to pull the little silver bell from my pocket and shake it energetically. Fuchsia stared at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, then ran into the study.
I had felt – even with the wall between us – the choking, suffocating gasp of Jonquil’s terror.
‘Where is Granda?’ I heard Fuchsia’s furious, frantic voice through the doorway. ‘Jonquil! Where has Granda gone?’
The reply came slowly, after a gap of several minutes. But when it came it was in Jon’s own voice – not the flat, mechanical tone of her trance.
‘He – he went out through the window. He went up the garden . . . with them. With the others.’
‘He went? But he can’t walk by himself – he can’t walk any distance. How did he go? Who went with him?’
‘He went,’ Jonquil repeated. And she added. ‘He was taken.’
‘Taken?’
‘They came for him,’ said Jonquil. And then she fainted, flat out on the floor.
CHAPTER SIX
AUNT LAL AND I lifted Jonquil on to the sofa, rubbed her hands, called her name. She did not stir.
‘Ring the bell again,’ said Aunt Lal. I rang it but, though she moaned a little, she did not rouse.
‘I’m going to get her away from here,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘I’ll take her home in his wheel-chair.’
‘But shouldn’t we help Fuchsia look for him? He may need the chair himself,’ I said doubtfully.
In fact at this moment Fuchsia came bursting back in, crying, ‘You must help me! You must help me look for him! I’ve hunted up as far as the summerhouse. Where can he be?’
‘Ned, you had better go and help Fuchsia,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘You are a good finder. I’ll take Jonquil to our house and get a doctor.’
‘Oh, never mind her! She’ll be all right,’ cried Fuchsia distractedly, but in spite of her protests we shifted Jonquil into the wheelchair – she was very light – and Aunt Lal took her out of the house.
Then I followed Fuchsia into the garden.
The rain had ended – but only just – large drops were hanging from all the leaves. Heavy dank fog filled the air, which had a strong smell of juicy dark greenery, cut grass, and the rotten thick scent of lilacs and azaleas that have finished blooming and turned brown. Birds were flitting in and out of the bushes with nervous cries.
The garden felt strange – as if a heavy threat had just lifted, as if pressure had been withdrawn, as if something awful had gone away, but not very far. I noticed a couple of slow-worms slip across the path, and a hedgehog trot nervously past – shy creatures which normally would stay out of view. What had disturbed them?
Fuchsia didn’t notice them. She was clenching her hands, beating her fists together, wailing. ‘It’s so strange! He never goes up the garden without his two sticks – or with me pushing him in his wheelchair —’
We crossed the wet grass, passed the summerhouse with the safe, and went on to the lilac grove. Something rustled among the bushes. I hoped that it was only birds. A little path wound through the middle of the grove.
‘He must be in there . . .’ shivered Fuchsia. ‘You go first.’
I didn’t like going first. Not at all. I was remembering my dream too clearly. I looked up, half expecting to see some great scaly body about to drop on me from among the leaves.
But then – as often, in anxious moments – I thought of my friend Eden. In my mind’s ear I thought I could hear his calm voice. ‘It’s all right, mate – they’ve gone. And they’ve taken old Boss-bones with them. You won’t see him again.’
Hugely relieved, I slid my hand into my pocket and felt Eden’s key, warm and slender. But where was the tiny silver bell? ‘She won’t be wanting that, mate. Better she never had it.’ ‘Will she be all right? Will she get better?’ ‘It’ll take a while. But she’s a tough kid – she’ll make her own fortune out of it later on.’ ‘Thanks, Eden!’ ‘No sweat!’ he told me cheerfully, and then we were beyond the wet, claustrophobic, narrow path and looking over a wrought-iron gate at a saddleshaped tract of hillside, green and quaking, which was plainly bogland. St Boan Mire.
‘He couldn’t have gone there,’ said Fuchsia fearfully. ‘Besides, the gate is padlocked.’
‘Yes.’
But I could see that the bog had recently been disturbed; the part nearest to us heaved and bubbled much more than the farther reaches.
‘Let’s go back,’ urged Fuchsia nervously. ‘He can’t possibly be here. And this place scares me to death.’
We went back. And when we got to the summerhouse I said, ‘I’d like to look into the safe again.’
‘Why? Granda can’t be in there.’
‘Just in case – in case he left a message.’
‘A message? Are you crazy?’
But he had. When the warm key had opened the safe for the second time, we found old Tod’s gold teeth in there on top of the manuscripts, weighing down the last verse of his poem. Also a hand. Bones only. The right hand of a skeleton, centuries done for. But it wore Sir Thomas’s ruby ring.
The handwriting was his own:
‘Crunch on the spine, take
counsel of the tomb
quick, cancel me, and dead
I’ll enter you
to me the history of my bone
is dream
small wonder that I am is
what I seem.’
And he had signed it, J. Thomas Menhenitt, with the date, in a grand flourish, before they carried him off.
The three goldfish had vanished from the pool when we went back across the garden. Perhaps a seagull had got them.
‘I won’t come into the house, if you don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll go home and see how Jonquil is getting on . . .’
‘But what shall I do?’ demanded Fuchsia.
‘Tell the police. Let them hunt for him.’
So she did that, but of course they never found him. They came later on to ask Jonquil if she remembered how Sir Thomas had left his study, and in what company. But her memory was clean gone. She had not the slightest recollection. ‘And just as well,’ said Aunt Lal.
The fog was lifting as I got back to Aunt Lal’s house, and the lighthouse let out its last howl as I opened the door. Jonquil was just walking.
‘I had such a queer dream,’ she said.
‘About dinosaurs?’ suggested Aunt Lal.
‘Dinosaurs? No, why should I dream about them? No, it was about a boy I never met in my life, but he said he was a friend of Ned’s. We had a long talk. He said I’d better go home and learn to get on with my stepmother. We were walking along beside the harbour and he told me to throw my tiny looking-glass into the water. He said it had served its purpose and might do more harm than good if I kept it. The queer thing is, it has gone; I thought it was in my pocket, but it isn’t.’
‘My key has gone too,’ I said. ‘But you never know, it may come back.’
‘He said his name was Eden. Have you really got a friend called Eden?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘He’s the best friend I have.’
*
So Jonquil went home, changed her name to Joanna, and made friends with her stepmother. Fuchsia published the last collection of her grandfather’s poems, and the book was a great success. In fact several people wrote to The Times suggesting that the old man ought to be buried in Westminster Abbey in Poets’ Corner.
But they couldn’t do that because his body was never found.
His house has been turned into a museum, but I never visit it.
In the St Boan Series
IN THUNDER’S POCKET
THE SONG OF MAT AND BEN
BONE AND DREAM
AN RHCB DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 44812 061 1
Published in Great Britain by RHCB Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2011
Copyright © Aiken, Joan 2002
Copyright illustrations © 2002 Caroline Crossland
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox 2002
The right of Joan Aiken to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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