Limbo Lodge

Table of Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Her hands were behind her. She had kept them there, gripping the doorpost, distrusting their steadiness. The wooden jamb moved slightly as her fingers drove against it. She gave it a push sideways, her heart suddenly leaping; a section of it came away. With a swift, resolute tug she had a three-foot joist in her hands, rotten at one end. Ignoring the cloud of ant-infested dust that fell on her ankles, she held her weapon coolly, watching until the deadly skirmish on the floor came within reach; then she beat down with all her strength, striking for the snake’s head . . .

Also by Joan Aiken:

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence:

(in preparation)

The Felix trilogy:

(winner of the Guardian Award 1969)

Short Story Collections:

Young Fiction:

The St. Boan Trilogy

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Epub ISBN: 9781409024743

Version 1.0

  

This book is in affectionate remembrance of

Jean LeRoy

*

LIMBO LODGE

A RED FOX BOOK 9780099456674

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape

an imprint of Random House Children’s Books

Jonathan Cape edition published 1999

This Red Fox edition published 2004

5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Copyright © Joan Aiken Enterprises Ltd 1999

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.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any

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otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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a division of The Random House Group Ltd,

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library.

T
HE OLD SHIP
SIWARA
SMELT STRONGLY OF
dead shark, rancid oil, and rotten breadfruit. She crawled over the bright blue sea at rather less than two knots, creaking and groaning. She had after all, as Captain Sanderson told Dido Twite, already travelled about three-quarters of a million miles in her long, hard-working life, since first setting sail from the Port of London.

“I reckon it’s about time she retired then,” growled Dido. “Don’t I wish I was back on the
Thrush.
Why are all the cockroaches jumping overboard, Cap? Not that I’m sorry to see ’em go, mind you!” The cockroaches on the ship
Siwara
were three-and-a-half to four inches long, and their preferred diet was human feet. When you went to bed at night if you did not anoint your toes and soles with dark green celandine oil, you would wake to find a few toes missing in the morning; the cockroaches would do the job faster than a monkey peels a banana. Because there were more roaches below decks than up above, Dido, Mr Multiple, and Doctor Talisman had taken to sleeping on the foredeck, despite Captain Sanderson’s disapproval.

“So why
are
all the roaches jumping overboard?” Dido repeated, surveying the black procession that sped past her feet and out through the drainholes in the bulwarks. They made a soft scratching noise, like somebody secretly slipping small candies out of a paper bag.

“Why? Because we reach Aratu tomorrow.”

“But why should that make the roaches jump overboard? Aratu ain’t a bad island, is it? How come the roaches is so set agin it?”

“Because of the snakes. ‘Aratu’ means ‘Island of Pearl Snakes’ in the Dilendi language. The pearl snakes are those little fellows, black with pearl-coloured heads, about half the length of your arm. Deadly enough. A bite from one can do for you in a brace of shakes. But their favourite food is cockroaches – you won’t find many roaches in Aratu, the snakes have eaten them all. Soon as the ship docks you’ll see half-a-dozen pearl-snakes come aboard like beaters. But most of the roaches won’t have waited.”

“I can’t abide snakes,” said Dido.

“Better take some kandu nuts in your pocket, then, if you go ashore. Chew one of those, it lowers the chance of dying from snakebite. But my advice would be, don’t go ashore more than you can help.”

“
Somebody’s
gotta go ashore,” Dido said crossly, “to hunt for this pesky Lord Herodsfoot we’ve chased after all the way from Easter Island. Is Aratu a big island, Cap Sanderson?”

“About twenty miles long, ten miles wide. The main town and port, Regina, where we are headed, is at the north tip. At the south end is a big mountain, Mount Fura, and a small fishing-harbour, Manati. In between, nothing but rainforest and spice plantations.”

“What kind of spice?”

“Nutmeg, clove, white pepper, musk, aloes, danda-bark, mace, vanilla, cassia-bark. And djeela-powder – very expensive. I think it should not be hard to locate Lord Herodsfoot – if he is on the island.”

“Don’t I jist hope he is,” sighed Dido. Three months ago, Dido had been on the point of setting sail for London from the port of Tenby, in New Cumbria, on board his majesty’s warship the
Thrush
when an urgent message had arrived from England, by naval pinnace, ordering Captain Hughes to make all possible speed round Cape Horn, into the Pacific Ocean, in order to pick up Lord Herodsfoot, roving ambassador to King James III of England. Lord Herodsfoot, the message said, had been sent abroad on a mission to scour the globe for new and interesting games (or old, and possibly even more interesting games) to rouse the attention and restore the health of His Majesty King James, who lay ill and wretched in London with a mysterious malady that no doctor seemed able to identify, let alone cure.

The bulletin received at Tenby said that Lord Herodsfoot was last heard of on his way up the Pacific Ocean to Easter Island in search of a special kind of chess game which was rumoured to be found there. But when the
Thrush
arrived at that lonely and faraway spot, Captain Hughes learned to his annoyance that they had just missed the wandering nobleman by a week; he had boarded a passing schooner bound for the Loyalty Islands, in quest of a game called Friends and Strangers. And when they arrived at the Loyalty Islands they discovered that Herodsfoot had just left them, planning to sail past New Guinea and the north tip of Australia, to the Molucca Sea, on the trail of a game called Fish, Prawn, King Crab. And he was then planning to go to China, in quest of roses and greyhounds. Lord Herodsfoot, it seemed, was a great natural historian and a man of many scientific interests.

“Oh,
scrape
it,” sighed Dido, when this news was broken to them. “At the rate we’re going, by the time we catch up with his plaguey lordship, he’ll have travelled all the way back to London. It’s like a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, so it is, keeping after the feller.”

There were to be plenty more annoyances and hindrances. The China Tea Wars were just now in their final and fiercest phase. A dozen Chinese warlords were battling with each other on land and by sea. The war was more complicated because the lords kept changing sides, and among this confusion it was the difficult task of King James’s ships to escort and protect British merchant vessels plying in and out of Chinese trading ports if the ports were being besieged or sacked by the Chinese warring armies.

The frigate
Thrush
had therefore been called to escort a group of tea and spice clippers until they were safely beyond Chinese waters, which took several more very active weeks. Then word came that Lord Herodsfoot had been seen in the Kalpurnian Sea, heading for the southernmost Kalpurnian Islands;
Thrush
had quickly changed course and gone in urgent pursuit of the footloose nobleman. At Amboina they were told that he was only a few days ahead, bound for Aratu; but here another difficulty arose. To reach Aratu, it was necessary to sail through a narrow, shallow, and winding channel, zigzagged by coral reefs; no British ship of war dare venture there.

“That’s why Aratu is such a hidden, remote place,” the British Resident at Amboina told Captain Hughes. “Very few foreigners ever get to it.”

Captain Hughes scowled. He did not approve of islands that could not be reached by British warships.

“Who does it belong to?”

“The Angrians took it, four hundred years ago, conquered the Dilendi, who lived there, settled, and established spice plantations. But fifty years ago there was a big uprising, the Dilendi rose up and pushed the Angrians out again. Now the Dilendi have their own king. (Dilendi means Forest People, in their language.) There’s a trading ship going there tomorrow, the
Siwara
; ought to be back here within the week. You could send a message on that.”

“I suppose I shall have to.”

In fact Captain Hughes was not sorry to be obliged to dock at Amboina for a few days, since the
Thrush
had sustained some damage during her escort duties and Captain Hughes had himself received a head wound. He began to write a note addressed to Lord Herodsfoot, and then sat scratching his head with the quill pen, wondering which of his crew would make the most suitable messenger to send on the
Siwara
.

“Windwards’s a capable, intelligent fellow . . . but then I want him here, to superintend the repairs. I can’t spare Fossil, for the same reason; it had better be young Multiple – but is he sensible and steady enough, on his own? What a plaguey nuisance this is, to be sure!”

The choice was further complicated by the behaviour of the supercargo, Miss Dido Twite, who, when she heard that there was to be a trip to the island of Aratu on the smaller ship, the
Siwara
, begged to be allowed to go along.