The Witch of Clatteringshaws (9 page)

“Things are different now. Nearly everybody can read. And reading does help to—to teach people about other people’s habits—so they don’t expect natives of other countries to be just like themselves. And think themselves better than their neighbors. Look at the way the McClans treat Fred, just because he was a foundling. I’ve heard Mrs. M telling him that he was sure to go to the Bad Place, where the devil will burn him. He told me he brought in a kitten once that was starving and Mrs. M said foundlings weren’t allowed to have pets, so Desmond killed it. He just threw it out of the attic window.”

“Hateful beast! I hope someone throws
him
out of the attic window.”

Since Desmond had risen out of his bed of “tonsillitis,” he had not endeared himself to Dido and Piers. He was mean, moody, overbearing, and spiteful. He treated them as members of a lower order, bawling commands and insults at them. And his vicious language came strangely
out of a face that seemed to have been smoothed over with a flatiron, as Dido had done to his cravats: it was pale and smooth; its expression never changed. Two light blue eyes stared fixedly ahead; they looked as if they had forgotten how to move in their sockets.

“I suppose,” said Dido to Piers, “that his da did him over—made him a new face to look like King Dick. And then took and died before he’d rightly finished the job. Maybe it hurts. And that’s why he’s so nasty-tempered.”

But Piers thought it was just his nature.

Dido had been racking her brains for an excuse to get her and the Woodlouse out of the Eagles that evening for their meeting with Malise, but, as it turned out, none was needed. Mrs. McClan herself was going out.

“I have a business meeting tonight,” she said, “with—with two members of the Regional Medical Board, at the Monster’s Arms. The Residents will have to be given their supper early. I can’t have you young ones rampaging about the house on your own for all that time. You and Peter will have to sleep in the shed with Fred.”

Mrs. McClan had never managed to get her tongue round
Piers
.

“Regional Medical Board! My foot!” said Dido to Piers. “I bet it’s MacGrind and Killick. I bet it was her husband who’d been sending those letters to old Lady Titania saying he had a claim to the throne. I bet it was Fred’s napkin gave him the notion.”

“Those men aren’t at the Monster’s Arms,” said Piers. “When I was buying herrings at the market I saw them going into one of those tenement buildings across the road
in Alarm Clock Street—the one that’s about nine stories high. Maybe the Monster’s Arms was too expensive.”

“
They
aren’t short of a groat,” said Dido. “I’ve seen them in London taking a cab from Saint Jim’s Palace to Piccadilly—two minutes’ walk. Maybe the Monster’s Arms isn’t private enough for them.”

Dido would have liked to take Fred along to the meeting with Malise, but he was not at all keen.

“Walk over the rail bridge? But it’s so high! I hate heights! And there are Hobyahs on the other side. They’ll chew us to bits!”

“Malise said she can scare them off.”

Dido hoped that this was true, though in a way, she was curious to see the Hobyahs.

But Fred was unshakeably opposed to crossing the high railway bridge.

“I
hate
high places. I have horrible nightmares of being snatched up and carried through the air—high, high up—and the awful fear of being dropped …”

“Maybe you
were
dropped by somebody when you were a baby,” said Dido. “Like Mr. Firebrace, the jester. He fell off a mountain and it gave him second sight. Well, if you won’t come, you won’t—I must say, I don’t wholly blame you. But I’m a bit worried about leaving you here all on your ownsome. Don’t answer the door if anyone comes.”

“I can’t. The house is all locked up.”

“That’s true. Well, make yourself snug in the greenhouse.”

They left him well wrapped up in a bit of sacking and went off up the steep hill with anxious hearts.

The troop train had backed away from Clatteringshaws station and was now out of sight. The men of the English Ninth Army were squatting on the heathery ground in a circle round Simon, waiting for him to address them.

“Men of the Ninth Army,” he began. “By the way, what happened to the other eight?”

“It was back in owd King Jamie’s time,” someone told him. “When we was fighting against the Frogs in the year thirteen. All got wiped out.”

“Oh. I see. Well, listen. Men of England. What you have to do now is walk a distance of about fifty miles to where the Wends have landed in Tentsmuir Forest. Does anybody here know the way, by any chance?”

Dead silence was his answer to this.

“Oh. Well, it’s about due east of where we are now, so the rising sun will be a help presently. I hope you are all good walkers.”

More silence.

“Now. We don’t want our country inhabited by a lot of Wends, do we?”

“Dunno,” somebody said.

Ignoring this, Simon went on: “We don’t know how many Wends there are, but there are not very many of us, so we all have to be extra brave and tough. I’m not particularly brave myself, but I like to think that all of you are with me, backing me up, and that, perhaps, in a hundred years’ time, this day will be remembered by our grandchildren as the day when a not very large force of English beat off an attacking army of Wends who wanted to turn this island into a place where everybody spoke Wendish. Don’t you agree?”

“What’s Wendish like, then?” one of the men inquired.

Rodney Firebrace spoke up.

“Wendish is an awful language. It’s highly inflected—there are nine declensions of nouns—”

“What’s
inflected
?” somebody shouted.

“When words have different endings to express different grammatical relations. And Wendish has thirty different kinds of verbs. You have to decline them as well as conjugate them.”

“What’s
verbs
?”

“I hit. You run.”

“Who says we run? We ain’t a-going to run!”

“No way!”

“Hoo-ray for English verbs!”

“We don’t want no foreign verbs!”

“Are you all with me, then?” called Simon.

“Sure we are!”

“Let’s go!”

“We’ll show those Wends the way back to Wendland!”

“Let ’em wend their way!”

The men jumped up and started bustling about, picking up their arbalests and repacking their hard-boiled eggs. In ten minutes the whole mass of them had drifted off down an eastward-facing valley (Rodney Firebrace had prudently brought a compass) and were out of sight of the station. Simon and Rodney walked alongside the lengthy, straggling column, talking to the men, telling them jokes and stories to keep their spirits up, and encouraging them to sing marching songs.

“We need Dido here,” Simon said. “She knows all the tunes her father made up—‘Grosvenor Gallop’ and ‘Penny a Ride to Pimlico’ and ‘Lighthearted Lily of Piccadilly’—”

“Well, I expect a lot of the men know those anyway.”

So it proved, and the men of the Ninth Army marched eastward in a gale of song.

Mrs. McClan and her son Desmond were shown into a private parlor in the Monster’s Arms.

“The gentlemen you are expecting will be with you very shortly,” a waiter told them. “Kindly be seated.”

There were a table and some chairs. Mother and son sat down.

“Not very civil to keep us waiting,” grumbled Desmond.

A bottle of firewater and glasses had been provided. After a few minutes Desmond helped himself to a glass of liquor.

“How about you, Ma? Will ye take some?”

“Och, no! And no more than ain glassful for ye, Desmond! Keep yer heid clear for business.”

“What business? All I want is to be King of England and nae beating aboot the bush.”

“The gentlemen want proof.”

“Proof? What better proof can there be than that I’m the spit image of King Charles—I mean King Richard? Poor old Dad may have been a dummy in most ways, but nobody doubts he was a rare hand at a likeness. Too bad he couldn’t keep off usskie water. If he hadn’t been half-seas over he’d never have mistaken a jar of embalming fluid for a glass of iced tea—”

“
Hold your whisht, boy!
Who knows what ear may be listening! And, forbye, it’s no’ respectful to your father—puir douce man! He’s a sore loss to me each day when it comes time to gie the Residents their deener.”

“Ay, he went down the row of them like a dose of salts!”

Desmond burst out laughing and helped himself to another glass of spirit.

“Hush up, will ye! For these gentry ye need yer wits about ye—’tis a sad peety ye canna find yon napkin—and the bit paper—a sad, sad peety—”

“For land’s sake!” growled Desmond. “Who’d have known they’d set such store by an auld bit of rag with yellow thread on it, and a scrap of paper that had a few names and lines on it? Dad probably used them for lighting the kitchen fire.”

“No, no, he told me he’d given them to you for safekeeping.
You
were the one who stood to gain, after all.
Don’t
take any more liquor, ye camsteery boy!”

“Oh, go to blue blazes!”

The door opened and two gentlemen came in. They looked decidedly put out and harassed.

The normal evening fog lay in layers over the dark blue waters of Loch Grieve, like steam over a simmering pot of soup. Piers and Dido, inching their way up the steep, slippery hillside toward the point where it would be possible to climb on to the rail bridge, found that the fog helped, in that they could not look down at the nerve-racking drop below them, but made the climb harder because it cut off the view ahead and hindered their choosing the right route.

“It’s a right good thing we didn’t bring Fred up here,” Dido said, panting, as they scrambled up a slope. “He’d never have stood for this.”

“There’s the station, over to the left.”

The station building was no bigger than a toolshed, with a long granite platform to accommodate the majestic train that came to a stop there once every twenty-four hours. Now the track was empty and the station locked and silent. Nothing except a few bits of eggshell and an odd bullet or two glistening among the heather betrayed the fact that a whole army had disembarked here some hours before.

The night was cloudy, no stars or moon shone; Dido and Piers did not notice the eggshells or the bullets. They set off at once to cross the bridge, walking between the rail tracks, two parallel metal lines that glimmered faintly ahead of them, hopping from sleeper to sleeper. The bridge was about half a mile in length.

Dido could not help thinking about Hobyahs. What were they? How large? Did they make a noise or run silently? Did they run on four legs or two?

At last the bridge was crossed. The rail tracks continued southward, sloping downhill now. But off to the left was a walled enclosure, the coach park Malise had described.

Why was it on this side of the loch when the station was on the north side?

Ah, Malise had explained. In the old days there had been a ferry, a boat that plied daily back and forth across the water. Carts and coaches had waited in this field, for the ferry could take only two vehicles at a time. But first the Hobyahs and then the construction of the rail bridge had put an end to the ferry traffic.

Over at the bottom end of the coach park they could see a small stone hut, even smaller than the station building.

“That must be where Malise lives. But it’s
tiny—
smaller than a broom cupboard.”

“It’s not lit up,” said the Woodlouse. “Looks as if there’s no one at home.”

“She
said
she’d be there all evening.”

Behind them, on the track that led downward to the loch, Dido could hear a kind of panting mutter. She did not like the sound at all.

“Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah …”

“Yah-yah-yah-yah-yah …”

“Hah-yah-hah-yah-hah-yah …”

“Dido, do you think those are the Hobyahs?”

She looked back. A black wave seemed to be coming
up the hillside—a black wave with pairs of pale shining eyes set at different levels.

We are done for, thought Dido.

Piers, turning round, picked up a rock and threw it.

“Get back!” he shouted. “Get back, you hateful beasts!”

At this moment Malise arrived, riding on her golf club. She dismounted and swung the club in great sweeping crescents; each swing made a loud whistling drone.

The black mass on the hillside wavered, halted, and then began to melt away back down the hill. Faint whimpers were heard. In three minutes there was nothing to be seen.

“I’m so sorry I was a little late,” said Malise, panting. “I was held up by a case in Knockwinnock—they thought it was athlete’s foot but it was really Achilles’ heel. Come over to the hut and I’ll put on the kettle. Have you brought the napkin? Oh, good. And the ancestral chart? Oh, too bad. Well, they’ll have to make do without it. But where is Fred?”

Dido explained about his fear of heights.

“Oh, pity; well, I suppose it’s not to be wondered at. Given his history.”

By now they were in the hut, which was the size and shape of a public lavatory, but without the equipment. There was just room for the three of them. Piers would have had to carry Fred.

“I got rid of the furnishings twenty years ago,” Malise explained, putting a kettle on a trivet over an oil burner. “Nothing worked anyway. I get water from the burn.”

“Burn?”

“Brook.”

There was no room to sit and nothing to sit on, so they stood. Malise made herb tea, served in tin mugs that she took from hooks on the wall.

“Malise, the Hobyahs—”

“Well?”

“What
are
they?”

“Oh, I think they are something leftover from the Ice Age. They migrated here from Siberia, I believe; you can’t blame them really, can you? In Siberia it’s dark so much of the time.… But now, about Fred—”

“Yes, about Fred.”

“Let’s have a look at the napkin.”

Malise examined it. It was a square yard of fine damask, old and worn but in good condition, with a crown about the size of an orange embroidered in gold thread at one corner.

“Yes; to the best of my recollection this is what the baby was wrapped in when I took him after the Battle of Follodden.”