The Dragonfly Pool (29 page)

The Central Station in the late afternoon was exceptionally busy. News of the takeover in Bergania was splashed over all the newspapers, and many people, thinking that war was very close now, wanted to be home.

The Swiss police might have been slow at first, but when they realized the seriousness of what had happened they could not have been more efficient. The children arrived in two police vans and were escorted to two locked compartments, while the superintendent and a constable kept watch with Matteo on the platform.

“We've put an alert out all over the city and its surroundings. With the description the boy gave us, they won't get away,” said the superintendent.

They waited while luggage was loaded into the van, and newspaper and fruit sellers walked up and down the platform.

Then, when the engine was beginning to let off steam and there were only ten minutes to go before departure, a police sergeant came running up to the superintendent.

“We've got them, sir,” he said, saluting hurriedly. “Two men exactly like the boy described. They were sighted in a beer cellar. One hung up his hat—and there it was—or rather it wasn't—his ear, I mean. We've sent for reinforcements to pick them up when they come out. They haven't a chance.”

The superintendent's face lit up. “Good. Good man.” He turned to Matteo: “Your lot will be safe now. I'll let you know what happens, of course.”

He shook hands and hurried away, wanting to be in at the kill, and Matteo made his way to the compartment and the anxious children who awaited him.

“It's all right,” he said. “They've found them.”

He looked at Kit, who was leaning peacefully against Magda, eating a piece of Swiss chocolate.

The boy was safe. The danger was over.

Matteo closed his eyes.

T
he Countess Frederica was traveling first class. She even had a sleeper—but she was not asleep.

Now that the danger to the prince was over she could think about the future—and the future meant Rottingdene House and that sweet child who always took such care to be pretty, and to please. Once Karil was married to Carlotta, her own work would be done and she could rest.

The children from Delderton were not traveling first class, nor did they have sleepers. They were curled up uncomfortably on the seats, dozing as best they could. Karil, sandwiched between Tod and Tally, was glad of the stuffy compartment, the huddle of people. He felt as though he never wanted to be alone again.

After a while he disentangled himself and made his way out into the corridor. He had expected it to be empty, but Matteo was standing there, his back to the compartment full of sleeping children, keeping watch.

“Can't you sleep?” he asked, and Karil shook his head.

“Well, it's not surprising,” he said, letting his arm rest on the boy's shoulder. “Your father could never sleep on trains either. In fact, he was a lousy sleeper altogether. We used to creep out of the palace at night sometimes—he had the key to the secret door at the back.”

“How did you get to know him? ”

In the darkness, Matteo smiled.

“It was at Johannes's seventh birthday party. They'd asked a whole lot of suitable children, all scrubbed up and wearing their most uncomfortable clothes. Chosen to be the right kind of friends for him, you know. They made me come—my parents had an estate on the other side of the mountain and I lived a very rough life, more like a peasant boy. I didn't want to come and I threw a tantrum when they made me dress up in a tight collar. And your father was in a bad temper, too. They tried to organize us into playing party games, but by then we'd caught each other's eye and—well, we just knew we were going to be friends. And we crept out and found a chicken in the kitchen quarters and climbed on to the roof and made it flutter down the chimney. There wasn't a fire, of course, and it was a good strong hen and it landed all right, though I wouldn't do that now. The ladies of the bedchamber, those aunts of yours, were all in their sitting room doing their embroidery, and there was this soot-black squawking chicken rushing around the room! Meanwhile, the people who were organizing the party were frantic, looking for Johannes. After that they said I wasn't a suitable friend for their future king, but Johannes dug his heels in. It ended with us sharing a tutor and more or less being brought up together.”

“Did you do other things like that . . . like the chicken?”

“Oh yes, plenty. We smuggled a piglet into a council meeting once, and there were all the usual things that children do—toads in the beds, and booby traps, and pretending to be vampires at night. But mostly we just escaped whenever we could. Your father was absolutely fearless—once we climbed to the top of the gabled roof on the palace and Johannes said we wouldn't come down unless they stopped asking him to eat semolina forever and ever.”

“I think it must have worked,” said Karil, “because I never got semolina to eat, not once.”

He looked gratefully up at Matteo. Hearing about his father as a boy was the best comfort he could imagine. And as if Matteo could read his thoughts, he said, “He really enjoyed life, your father. That was why I was so angry when he became imprisoned in all that kingship. But I was wrong to be angry—he grew up to be a brave and honorable man.”

But after Karil had gone back to the compartment, Matteo stood silent and perturbed outside. He had promised his friend to look after Karil and he would do so while there was breath in his body—but this war which was growing ever closer would impose duties on every able-bodied man.

“But somehow I will do it,” he vowed. “Whatever it costs.”

When Karil slipped back into his seat he saw that Tally was awake.

“I was thinking about the play we're going to do next term,” she whispered. “
Persephone
. I sort of feel I know quite a lot about the Underworld now and the sort of people who go to Hades. Like Gambetti—he belongs there all right. We could make it really good with the right kind of music. You absolutely have to help us do it.”

“I've never done anything like that.”

“You don't know what you can do yet; you've never had a chance with all those processions and people bowing and scraping. We're going to try to persuade Julia to act in it. There's so much we're going to do at Delderton and you need to be there.”

Karil was silent. There was nothing he wanted more than to join his friends in this strange school of theirs. Because they
were
his friends. A few days ago they had been specks seen through a telescope and now they mattered more than anyone. But would he be allowed to go? His future was a blank; he had no right to make plans. And yet . . . Julia had told him about Tally's determination to come to Bergania.

“She just bullied us all,” Julia had said, “making us invent the Flurry Dance—she seemed to know we had to come.”

So now, when Tally told him that he had to be with them at Delderton, Karil began to wonder if she might be right, and he felt hope begin to stir in him.

“I was so angry with my father when he told me I had to go away to school,” Tally went on. “I really loved being at home, with my aunts and my friends. And London. We had a silver barrage balloon up over our house; it was like having a giant sausage to look after us.”

For a moment both children were silent, thinking about this war which everyone expected and which they had forgotten in the excitement of escaping from Bergania.

“I tried to fight him,” Tally went on, “but he won and I'm glad he did, though I miss him horribly. You'd really like him, Karil. He's the best doctor for miles; everyone wants to come to him, and of course he doesn't charge his patients nearly enough, so we've always been poor but it doesn't matter. You can't imagine how proud I am of him.”

“I'm not surprised. Being a doctor must be wonderful.”

“Yes.” She turned to him. “You could be a doctor if you wanted to.”

“I suppose I could.” And then: “Yes, I could. I could be anything.”

“You could be a great scientist.”

“Or an artist,” said Karil, “or an engineer.”

“You could learn anything at Delderton and get ready. I can't describe it, Karil, but it's such an
interesting
place—you have to come.”

As the train ran on through the night Karil's dreams, above the sorrow of his father's death, took flight. He could be a great explorer, discovering the source of an African river; he could invent a cure for cancer, or write a monumental symphony. He could own a rare and exotic animal—an aardvark or a cassowary.

Afterward, looking back on his escape, he thought that this hour in the train, when everything was possible, was the one he would most like to have again.

The luggage van of the train carried the usual consignment of suitcases, trunks, wooden boxes, and other things too bulky to go into the compartments. There was also a crate with a goat in it. The animal's yellow eyes peered through the bars and occasionally it let off a desperate bleat.

The two ladies who had smuggled themselves into the van were very strangely dressed. One was a woman of most unusual size, wearing a knitted bonnet pulled over her face, and a spotted pinafore. She had taken off her shoes and was rubbing her bruised and hairy toes.

“I'm not spending the night in here,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice. “That animal gives me the creeps.”

“I could pick the lock,” said her companion, who had a feather boa thrown over her shoulder and wore a straw hat trimmed with cherries, “but we'd only run into that blasted bandit standing guard in the corridor. He never lets those kids out of his sight.” She looked up at the ventilation grating. “When we're over the border into France, we'll get a radio signal and alert the Gestapo. There'll be a crowd of people making for the boat and we'll be able to grab the prince. It'll be our last chance—once he's aboard we have to let him go.”

“He won't get aboard,” said the outsize lady, with a snarl.

The woman with the feather boa groped in her handbag and took out a syringe with which she squirted disinfectant onto her tonsils. “They must be crazy, thinking we'd be trapped in a beer cellar,” she said. “As though we'd drink anywhere with only one exit. Still, that's the police for you.”

All the same, it had been a rush: driving through the town, finding a secondhand clothes shop, outfitting themselves, and dumping the car.

“I'm hungry,” said the giant in the woolen bonnet.

“Try milking the goat,” said her companion.

And the train thundered on through the night.

I
t was extraordinary, stumbling out of the stuffy carriage, feeling the wind suddenly on their faces and seeing, in front of them, the harbor and the clean white world of the boats and the seagulls and the lighthouse.

The train had come to rest on the sidings beside the boat they were to catch to England. They only had to cross the tracks and make their way toward the gangway and in two hours they would be home in Britain, and safe. On the way out they had taken it for granted, traveling in a British boat, knowing they were protected, but now the ferry with her brightly painted funnels and cheerful flag seemed to be a vessel that had sailed in from Camelot to carry them over the sea.

The harbor was full of bustle and noise. Fishing boats chugged in and out between the ferries; crates of fish and lobsters were piled up on the quayside waiting for transportation; there were coils of rope and barrels of tar and nets—and everywhere, wheeling and shrieking and diving, the fearless, hungry gulls.

The children shivered in the sudden wind and turned their faces toward the SS
Dunedin
. They were among the last to leave the train. The first-class passengers had already embarked, with the Countess Frederica in the lead, shouting instructions to her porter as she strode up the gangway.

The other passengers followed, the throng gradually thinning; then came the Deldertonians in Magda's charge.

“Go straight to the boat,” Matteo had ordered. “No dawdling. I'll catch you up.”

They did not exactly dawdle, but Borro and Barney needed to examine the recently caught fish; Verity wanted to try out her French on a good-looking fisherman, and Tally was telling Karil about the white cliffs of Dover.

“They're not really as white as all that, but all the same when you see them you get a lump in your throat.”

Matteo watched them go and paced the train once more. Satisfied that the coast was clear, he picked up his bundle and jumped down onto the platform. He could see the children ahead of him. They had reached the boat at last.