Bleak Expectations (11 page)

Was the servant right? Would our bizarre disguises work? Or was our escape over almost before it had begun?

Yet no alarm seemed to register on their nunny faces as they approached us. Indeed, they made conversation.

‘Ah, good morning, the late Admiral Nelson. How nice to see you alive again,’ remarked one to Harry.

‘Um, yes . . . Er, Trafalgar, bloody good battle, what?’ replied Harry.

To my amazement, the nuns giggled in response. ‘Oh, Admiral, you’re so witty.’

‘Am I?’ asked a bemused Biscuit.

Harry’s disguise worked! They were convinced he was Nelson and were actively flirting with him, as was the law with all military heroes back then.
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Unfortunately, now their gaze turned to my own rabbity self. Surely I would be revealed as the fraudulent escapee I was.

‘And good morning to you, Mr Rabbit.’

I struggled for a response, then remembered the servant’s instructions and tried to respond as any normal rabbit would. ‘Er . . . ttt-ttt-ttt?’

The nuns stared at me silently. I had ruined everything. But then: ‘You’re absolutely right. What an astute observation.’

Whatever astute rabbity observation I had made eluded me, but it had satisfied the nuns; I clearly spoke fluent Rabbit. Now there was only Pippa to pass the test. Without waiting to be spoken to, she boldly stepped forward and spoke: ‘Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong,’ she clockily ad-libbed, and the response could not have been more unexpected or welcome.

‘Oh! Six o’clock already! We are late for our early morning guilt-grating!
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We must hurry.’

And with a tip of the wimple, they scuttled nunnily away. We had got past them: perhaps the servant’s disguises were not as strange and wrong as I had suspected.

Or nuns are very, very stupid.

‘Back through here.’ Now the servant led us through the dormitory via which we had entered. We had to stop briefly for Harry to sign autographs as Nelson, but soon we were at the door that led back to St Bastard’s. ‘Once on the other side of this door, we are but a short walk from freedom, for I know a secret exit through the school salt-mines.’

Could it be true? Was freedom really so close at hand? Could that salty place of punishment provide our route to safety? As we passed through the door back into St Bastard’s, my heart soared with optimism and hope swelled inside me like a large benign cyst.

Alas, when we re-entered the school, that hope-cyst burst, spilling forth the pus of despair, as I beheld a sight that chilled me to my very marrow. I forget why I was carrying such a large vegetable. Perhaps it was part of the rabbit costume, though a carrot would have been more convincing and a lettuce leaf lighter.

There, in front of us, loomed the towering, terrifying figure of Headmaster Hardthrasher, a cane in his hand and a small, deadly-looking cannon by his side. I had a fleeting hope that we could bluff our way through in our disguises, but his words instantly destroyed that illusion.

‘Pip Bin. Harry Biscuit. I’ve been expecting you.’

At that moment I knew only two things: first, that I was

going to die, and second, that I had been right, and that nuns were very, very stupid.

¹
The author was the single greatest user of the exclamation point in nineteenth-century literature. It was the most expensive item of punctuation to print and publishers often charged its costs to the author – Sir Philip here is indicating he is so rich and successful he simply doesn’t care how many he uses.

²
Flavour-baths came in many different sizes, from tiny for marinading mice to ones big enough for an entire live cow, a size known as ‘moossive’.

³
In the nineteenth century a Sudoku was not the number puzzle we know today. It was in fact a shortening of the phrase ‘Super Dog Knot Undoing’, a popular sport of the time where competitors would attempt to disentangle complicated knots made out of greyhounds and dachshunds.

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The Flirtius Militaris Act of 1807 made it compulsory for women to flirt when they met a decorated military man. It also compelled men to speak to them in an awestruck, slightly higher-pitched-than-normal voice, before thinking less of themselves for not being as brave and virile.

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Penance in the form of a vicious scraping up and down a human-sized cheese grater.

We froze in our tracks, like an Eskimo with no shoes or a frightened train. So this was it: my last day on earth.

Harry’s last day.

And, once the headmaster had returned her to the nunnery to be Joan of Arc, then roasted and eaten as the Joan of Arc Day feast, Pippa’s last day.

‘Harry Biscuit. The ingratitude. Trying to escape when I’ve gone to all the trouble of getting you these lovely eighteenth-birthday presents?’ The headmaster stepped aside, revealing a table stacked high with neatly wrapped gifts. ‘Don’t you want to open them?’

‘Ooh, presents. I do love presents.’

Harry put down Pippa’s anvil and headed for the present-laden table.

‘No, Harry! They are almost certainly lethal!’ I shouted, remembering the long roll-call of birthday deaths at St Bastard’s.

Harry turned to me with desperation in his eyes. ‘I know! But I just can’t help myself.’ He reached for the nearest present and gave it a shake. ‘Ooh, is it a book?’ He unwrapped it. ‘No, it’s a grenade. Now, what is this one?’ said Harry, shaking another. ‘Chocolates, maybe?’ He opened it. ‘No, it’s some unstable nitroglycerine. How thoughtful.’

‘And after you’ve opened your presents, you can light the candle on your cake.’ The headmaster grinned murderously as he pointed to a distinctly untasty-looking cake.

‘Ooh, is that dynamite cake? My favourite.’

Though Harry was my best friend, I am not ashamed to admit that at this moment in time I began to believe he might be . . . How shall I put this? A sandwich short of a full-house in picnic-poker? One colony short of an empire? A bit thick? Yes, that’s the one.

‘As for you, Pip Bin, don’t you want the delicious soup Mr Benevolent left you?’ The headmaster held up the tin and poured the contents into a bowl, which immediately started to melt and dissolve. ‘It looks nice and spicy. Do you want me to feed you?’

He advanced on me wielding the deadly bowl and a distinctly threatening spoon. I backed away, terrified.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the servant rummaging yet again in her manure-stained yet capacious skirts; suddenly she produced a sword and, more surprising yet, a cold, hard voice of upper-class command, which I really very nearly could identify. ‘Leave the boy alone, Hardthrasher.’

The headmaster stopped in his tracks and turned to her. ‘Or what?’

‘Or this.’ She poked him hard in the ribs with the sword – once, twice, thrice, even fourice.

He clutched at where she had struck him, his hands coming away covered with blood, or possibly some other red substance, such as ketchup, though blood seemed the likeliest, what with a sword being involved and everything.

‘Ha! I have drawn blood,’ the servant crowed, in her now clearly natural voice, which I really was incredibly close to being able to pin down.

‘Maybe. But does not medical science tell us that drawing blood from a patient strengthens them?’
²
He licked his ichorous fingers and raised himself threateningly back up to his full height.

The servant drew herself up too, sword defiantly pointed forward. My heart beat faster: if she lost we were doomed, but on the other hand . . . sword-fight. Cool.
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But it turned out there was to be no fight for she now yelled, ‘Run! Everyone, run!’

With a final jab at the headmaster, the servant spun round and ran for the door.

‘But my presents!’ cried Harry.

‘Leave them!’

‘And my anvil!’ cried Pippa.

‘Leave it!’

‘Never!’

‘Your anvil must come even before my presents, Miss Bin!’ Harry cried, as he abandoned the gifty table, heaved the anvil into his solitary Nelsonian arm and ran at less than walking pace through the door, which the servant immediately slammed behind us.

‘There! That will hold him for a while.’

She was wrong. Unless by ‘a while’ she had meant less than a second and a half, for within that time the headmaster had crashed through the wood as if it was the paper it might have become had it not chosen to be a door as its timbery career, and he stood in the corridor, face studded with splinters like a man with a porcupine for a head.

‘You will never escape St Bastard’s!’ he shouted, and advanced on us.

There were two doors nearby. Above one was written ‘No Exit’ and above the other ‘Dangerous Exit’. The servant wrenched open the latter, revealing steps leading down into a scary darkness. Salt-tanged air rolled up from below, and not in a good way, like that from a jolly seaside, but in a bad way, like that from a deadly salt-mine, which this was: the school salt-mine.

‘Down, quickly!’

She pushed us forwards; we stumbled on the top step, fell and now finally the anvil came into its own as its huge massiness provided momentum to our descent, rapidly turning it into a plummet until we landed in a heap at the bottom, where the atmosphere was already brackish and thirst-making.

Then we ran.

Not fast, obviously, because an anvil was involved. But eventually we were deep in the salty maze of the mine, and paused to catch our breath. As I panted desperately, I could already feel thirst starting to tickle my throat with its maddening fingers.

‘We should be safe for a while,’ the servant said. ‘Hardthrasher won’t dare come down here without help.’

At that there was the sound of dozens of men entering the salt-mine, for the headmaster had a huge number of wastrels, brigands, rapscallions, ne’er-do-wells, miscreants, savages, brutes, sadists and criminal scum at his disposal, whom he utilized as both PE teachers and security guards for hunting down escaped boys.

‘Ah. He now has help. Run again!’

We did.

Still not very fast because of . . . well, you know.

The anvil.

The briny air filled our lungs but emptied our mouths of moisture. Thirst’s fingers were now not just tickling maddeningly but clawing angrily.

‘Oh, the salt!’ cried Harry. ‘It’s driving me mad! It’s making me hallucinate. I keep thinking I can see a giant rabbit!’

‘Harry, I’m disguised as a rabbit,’ I reminded him.

‘Damn, now there’s two of them!’

‘This way!’ The servant wheeled towards a sliver of light in the distance – could it be the way out she had talked of?

But, alas, as we approached the luminous glow of safety, a great phalanx of the headmaster’s roguish battalion placed itself in our path, cutting off both light and escape, while behind us we could hear the rest of his barbaric force approaching. We would shortly be trapped between these two grim groups.

‘Behind here!’ the servant shouted, ushering us towards a large, salty rock, and we hurried behind it and sat still, scared and very, very thirsty. Indeed, so thirsty that Harry started trying to lick his own forehead for the sweaty moisture thereon, succeeding only in increasing his thirst and spraining his tongue.

‘Where have they gone?’ demanded Headmaster Hardthrasher, his frustration and rage as obvious as a large transvestite who has forgotten to shave or put on a lady-wig. ‘Everybody, halt!’

Silence fell like a shot goose.

‘Now, where are you, little ones? Don’t you want your birthday presents, Harry Biscuit? I’ve brought them with me. Just for you.’

I could see a twitch of gift-avarice in Harry’s eyes, and quickly clamped a hand over his mouth. ‘Harry, I know how much you love presents, but we must keep completely quiet or we will die.’

Harry nodded and, trusting him like only a best friend could, I released my hand from his mouth.

He immediately starting yelling, getting no further than ‘Presents! I want pre—’ before I re-clamped my hand over his mouth, but the damage was done.

I stared at him. Pippa stared at him. The servant stared at him. The anvil stared at him. Or would have done, had it had eyes. In fact, I quickly picked up two pebbles and placed them on its surface such that they looked like eyes and then the anvil did stare at him.

‘What?’ said Harry, all hurt, misplaced innocence.

There now came a headmasterly shout of ‘Over there! Get them!’ and then massed footsteps were racing towards us.

‘Right,’ said Pippa. ‘I am going to weep now and, just to avoid any confusion, I am informing you in advance that it will be very much of the forlorn and despairing nature. Wah-blee—’

The servant cut her off. ‘No! We must never give up! Never surrender!’ She lifted her head and sniffed. ‘Is that— Can I smell pepper?’ She instantly sneezed in affirmative answer to herself. ‘Of course, the pepper-mine neighbours the salt-mine!’ She approached a nearby wall and touched it. ‘There is a crack. Pepper is getting through. We must smash this wall down and let the pepper mix with the salt!’

‘Why?’

‘Just do it!’

She grabbed a piece of rock and started smashing it against the wall. The rest of us joined in, hitting the wall, tugging at it with our hands, digging as if our lives depended upon it, which they did. Finally, the wall gave way and great gusts of pepper swept into the mine, mingling with the salt and forming a blizzard of seasoning.

A lot of sneezing now started, from us, the headmaster and his approaching horde.

‘We need a spark to ignite the mixture!’ shouted the servant, between her own sneezes.

‘Why?’ I asked, baffled.

Back then, neither I nor science knew of the tremendous explosive potential of combined salt and pepper. True, most people knew of someone who had inexplicably exploded while eating soup or been found spontaneously combusted over a plate of chops, but in our ignorance we attributed such deaths to the cook using deliciously flammable ether in the consommé or to random acts of a pyromaniac God, while continuing to cause explosion after explosion by putting salt and pepper in the same shaker; only recently have we separated them on the dinner table, saving thousands of lives a year.
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Yet somehow this servant knew what she was doing.