The Stolen Lake (12 page)

His voice was drowned by a tremendous shuddering, creaking, and clanking as the train drew to a standstill.

"Are we taking on more wood and water?" asked Dido, as Bran stopped singing.

"No," he said. "We have reached our destination. We are in Bath."

The peasants began leaping out of the boxcar. In two minutes they were all gone. Dido skipped out after them, and found herself on an icy, windswept stone pavement, inadequately sheltered by a thatched canopy. The air was bitter.

"Make haste, if you please, Miss Twite!" came the captain's voice. "No time to loiter about—and much too cold. We must get poor Holystone into shelter. Come along!"

"But Bran," said Dido, looking round. "Won't you please tell me—"

Bran's tall figure, however, had vanished among the peasants in their flowing ruanas and high-piled stacks of panama hats. Reluctantly Dido followed the captain's impatiently beckoning arm and walked, shivering, through a kind of open-fronted station hall to a paved courtyard beyond. Here there were hackney carriages waiting, and a number of sedan chairs with their poles resting on the ground, and the blue-coated chairmen standing by them.

"Sydney Hotel!" Captain Hughes ordered one of the hackney drivers in a loud, authoritative voice. "Gusset—Multiple—take Mr. Holystone up carefully and lay him on the carriage seat."

Mr. Holystone was still asleep, it seemed.

"Sydney Hotel?" one of the chairmen said to Dido. "Hop in, missie, and we'll have you there in the flick of a pig's tail."

Dido would have liked to ride in a chair—they had gone out of fashion in London and she had never seen one—but Captain Hughes called irritably, "Into the
carriage,
Miss Twite—look sharp now! We don't want to keep poor Holystone hanging about in this bitter cold!"

"Sorry, mister," Dido apologized to the hopeful chairman, and she clambered into the carriage. Glancing through the window next moment, she nearly dropped her cloak bag—for an instant she could have sworn that the rear chairman was Silver Taffy. But then he moved into the shadows and disappeared. It can't have been him anyway, Dido thought; what would he be doing here? We left him behind at Bewdley.

Dusk was falling as they clattered out of the station yard, over bumpy cobbles. Dido looked down to see if they were silver, but the light was too poor to be sure. It was freezing cold inside the carriage; and the steam from the horses' nostrils looked like dragons' breath. Dido shivered on the slippery leather seat and huddled against the comfortable warmth of Mr. Midshipman Multiple. He, Noah, Dido, and Plum rode in this carriage; Captain Hughes, Mr. Holystone, and Lieutenant Windward were in the other, which had already started.

Despite the cold, Dido would not have minded a long drive if it had been possible to see anything of the town, but there were hardly any streetlights; the only illumination came from dim gleams, here and there, behind lacecurtained windows. Bath Regis, for a capital city, seemed very quiet and glum.

Luckily it proved no more than a ten-minute trot from the station to the Sydney Hotel, over a covered bridge with closed market stalls on either side, and along an extremely wide street; then the travelers had reached their destination and were being solicitously helped to alight by half a dozen porters and footmen.

By the time Dido entered the vestibule, she heard Captain Hughes giving orders that a dressmaker be fetched immediately to fit his young companion with a court dress.

Oh no, thought Dido in despair, not again!

"Madame Ettarde is Her Majesty's court dressmaker and mantua maker, sir," the landlord was respectfully informing the captain. "Her establishment is in Orange Grove, no more than a step from here. But it will be all shut up at this time of night. My counsel to you, sir, if the matter is urgent, would be for the young lady to call round there first thing in the morning, with her abigail, and see what Madame has on the premises; that way, no time will be wasted."

Captain Hughes thought well of this advice. "If Holystone is feeling more the thing, he can take you there tomorrow as soon as this Ettarde female opens shop," he told Dido briskly. "I wish to spend no more time than need be in Bath, which seems a devilish dismal place, and is cold as a coffin. If Madam can rig you out in time, perhaps we can go to see Her Majesty tomorrow afternoon."

Ettarde, thought Dido. Where have I heard that name before?

She packed the name away in the corner of her mind which held unanswered questions. Such as the name Elen—where had that been mentioned, apart from on the cats' collars? And who had worn a gold ring? And what did Bran's stories mean?

"Meanwhile," went on the captain, "we had best dine, and then you, child, may retire to your chamber. I have instructed Mr. Multiple to keep watch outside your door, as Holystone is ailing; we want no repetition of what occurred in Tenby."

Dinner, in the large, bare, and ice-cold dining room, was a horrible meal of hot water with bits of egg and potato floating about in it, succeeded by what Lieutenant Windward unhesitatingly identified as boiled llama and beans, followed by hard green bananas. Dido, who, like the rest, found herself breathless, aching, and limp, affected, as Mr. Holystone had prophesied, by height sickness, was glad to go off to bed, exchanging a rueful grin with Midshipman Multiple, who took up his station outside her door on a cane cot. A doctor had been summoned for Mr. Holystone, who had been carried to his chamber long before, but no doctor would come out at night in Bath, it seemed.

Dido tumbled into her damp and freezing bed—which consisted of a heap of quilts on a wooden frame—and was soon asleep.

She woke before dawn, hearing the cry of the watch: "Six o'clock and a fine, frosty morning!" and was thereafter kept awake by other street cries—milk girls, porter boys, straw-hat vendors, needle and powder sellers—and by the mewing of cats and the clatter of ironbound wheels over cobbles.

Recalled to wide wakefulness and curiosity, Dido scrambled out of bed (she observed now that the bedclothes were simply a pile of hides with the shaggy wool attached), pulled on such clothes as she had taken off the night before, and went to the window. Drawing back lace curtains adorned with blobs of red and blue wool, she discovered a stone balcony outside, so she opened the window and stepped out into the blistering cold. Sucking in her breath with shock, she retreated, wrapped herself in one of the shaggy hides, and returned to study the scene before her.

The city of Bath Regis lay in a kind of natural hollow. The biggest and most impressive buildings were grouped at the bottom, and streets of smaller dwelling-houses, elegantly laid out in circles, squares, and crescents, rose in tiers up the sides of the hilly basin. Cactuses, among the buildings, and spiky trees (which Dido later learned were called sigse thorn and capuli cherry) here and there indicated the location of a park or public garden. The houses were square, handsome, and clean, built of cream-colored stone; they looked brand-new, though most of them were many hundreds of years old, being preserved in excellent condition by the dry mountain air. The Sydney Hotel stood at the end of a large oval circus, and faced down a wide street.

At the far end of this street was the covered bridge which the travelers had crossed last night. Already morning traffic was plying busily up and down—carriages, carts, and a kind of streetcar which consisted simply of a roofed platform on wheels, drawn by mules. Burros were plentiful; also to be seen were numbers of the large fawn-colored llamas, ambling along at their leisurely gait, and gazing about them with absentminded expressions; these did not pull carts, but carried bundles on their backs, and were led by drovers, sometimes in processions of twenty or more. Leaning farther over her stone parapet, Dido discovered with amazement that the story had been true—the cobbles
were
made of silver, or some similar metal; though littered over with a layer of dry, pale dust, they gleamed where a hoof or wheel had scraped off the dirt.

"This must be a rich town!" thought Dido. "After all, I'm glad I came. Wonder which of them buildings is the palace?"

Away to her left rose a high wooded hill, on top of which she noticed a tall slender tower—but that seemed too small for a palace. Dido craned about inquisitively, wishing that she could see farther—a thin mountain mist concealed the more distant buildings.

And then, suddenly, as the sun climbed higher, the mist was drawn into the upper air and disappeared. Dido fairly gasped at the prospect which then lay revealed. Now she could see that Bath nestled in the scooped-out summit of a low hill in the middle of a high, flat plateau encircled by a ring of thirteen volcanoes—Ambage and Arrabe, Ertayne and Elamye, Arryke, Damask, Damyake, Pounce, Pampoyle, Garesse, Galey, Calabe, and Catelonde. All around the city their great symmetrical cones reared up like ninepins: some quite near at hand, some farther off, some snow-covered, or laced over by glaciers, some reddish, some llama-colored, some blue with distance, some flashing in the sun, some rising out of dazzling ice fields, some shrouded by forests on their lower slopes. From half a dozen ascended gray-white or black columns of smoke, showing that these great chimneys of the inner world still contained fires in their hearts and might erupt. One, Catelonde, had an enormous rock, big as a cathedral, balanced on its summit.

"Wow!" muttered Dido. "I wouldn't fancy being here if they all sneezed together. Guess it wouldn't be quite so chilly in Bath Regis then!"

However, the larger of the smoking peaks appeared to be some thirty or forty miles away; it was to be hoped that there was no great danger from them.

Becoming too cold to remain on the balcony, Dido made her way down to the breakfast parlor. Here she found Noah Gusset, Mr. Windward, and Mr. Multiple, partaking of gravelly barley bread and cups of hot chocolate that seemed to consist principally of brown sugar and boiling water.

"How's Mr. Holy?" was Dido's first question.

"He's still sleeping," the lieutenant told her. "Captain Hughes is waiting for the physician. The sleep is so heavy that it hardly seems natural. Meanwhile I have instructions to escort you to the dressmaker, Miss Dido."

Dido pulled a face at the prospect, but still she was longing to go out, and bolted down her unappetizing breakfast with dispatch. In ten minutes they were out in the street, accompanied by Mr. Multiple.

There were no shops in Pulteney Street, the wide thoroughfare which led to the hotel. But on the covered bridge over the rushing Severn they found many little booths; Dido was interested to see that these advertised their wares by means of flags: red for meat, white for milk, green for vegetables, fruit, or flowers, yellow for bread. The stall holders were in the process of unlocking their premises, using enormous heavy keys, shaped like swans or lions or fishes. Many of the people walking about seemed to have wooden legs. Why? Dido wondered. Had they been bitten by aurocs? Rich people, who rode in sedan chairs, wore elaborately piled and powdered hair. The market women had black mantos, or shawls, wrapped tightly round the upper part of their bodies, above long black skirts, and often a kind of blanket, folded in three, on their heads. The men wore ruanas, black jackets and trousers, wooden clogs on their feet, and straw hats. As in Bewdley and Tenby, there were no children to be seen, and Dido was a target for many stares of astonishment, and some hostility.

Mr. Windward pulled his watch from his pocket and consulted it; then he tapped it, with some annoyance. "It's stopped; it never did that before. Still, we must be in good time if the lady opens up shop at nine. It was half past eight when we left the inn."

Orange Grove, a small street of superior dwellings, lay to their left, not far beyond the bridge.

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed Lieutenant Windward. "Half these houses are Roman villas."

"Well, a lot o' Romans did come and settle here; Mr. Holy told me so," Dido reminded him. "Look, here's a sign that says Mme Ettarde, Modiste."

Madame Ettarde's establishment had been adapted from a Roman villa, and was built around a court where a fountain splashed and pinched-looking orange trees grew in tubs.

Dido could tell, as soon as they stepped inside, that Madame Ettarde had been tipped off to expect them.

"Is this the lucky young lady who is to see the queen?" cooed a welcoming voice. "Step in here, miss, if you please!"

During the night the recollection had returned to Dido of where she had previously heard the name Ettarde. It had been mentioned by Mrs. Morgan and Mrs. Vavasour. This was not likely to recommend it; nor did the appearance of its owner. Lady Ettarde was a dwarf, hardly more than three feet high. Her shoulders were crooked, giving her a lopsided walk. She had a pale, sharp-featured face and greenish eyes, rather close set, which studied Dido appraisingly. Her hair, dressed high and lavishly ornamented with pearls, was a much more brilliant red than nature could have managed on its own. She was richly dressed in dark-olive silk taffeta pinstriped in yellow.

She was also—Dido felt almost certain—the short woman who, wrapped in a black shawl, had limped along the quay and spoken to Silver Taffy at Bewdley.

"What a fortunate coincidence," purred Lady Ettarde, beckoning a couple of assistants, one tall, one short. They wore black silk dresses, muslin mobcaps, and black half-masks. "We have here, my dear, a dress originally ordered for a young lady who had been planning to make her come-out at court this spring—when, only last month, she unexpectedly disappeared. Young ladies
do
have a way of suddenly popping off in these parts! But I believe her gown will fit you to a tee, miss—with just a tuck or so, and a take-in. See, now, if that isn't just the article—complete to a shade—gown, silver scarf, sandals, gloves, petticoat, feathers—everything needful for you to make your curtsy to the queen!"

A very pretty silver-embroidered white mull dress was displayed by the silent assistants.

"That looks well enough," said Lieutenant Windward, who appeared somewhat weighted down by this unusual responsibility. "But I reckon she'd best try it on?"