The Tale of Applebeck Orchard

by Susan Albert

  For the next hour, Bosworth stumped about, walking up and down steeply sloping passageways, climbing wooden ladders (for the rooms were on various levels), poking into corners, making notes in his notebook. Some of the rooms were low-ceilinged and cellar-like, with nothing much to recommend them, while others were vaulted and very grand and might serve for a conference of mice or a Sunday congregation of voles. Many had never been occupied, except by itinerant spiders and beetles who had come in the back way to get out of the weather. Some required whitewashing, some needed new carpets, others were in want of furnishings. By the light of his flickering candle, Bosworth could see that almost all were in need of a good turning-out.

  But the badger was not paying the proper sort of attention to his task, for his mind was occupied with the unpleasant business that the professor’s proposal had brought up. Now that he had begun to understand the extent to which female badgers were restricted in their advancement by certain prejudices, what was his proper course of action? Should he permit the professor to test Hyacinth? Or should he—

  Whilst he was thinking, he was trudging along the corridor. He came to Room 428 and opened the door, noticing that rainwater had dripped into the room, traveling along a large root that had grown through the ceiling. The floor was rather muddy. He was making a note to this effect when he heard a faint voice calling in the distance, “Uncle, Uncle, where are you?”

  Bosworth brightened. Well. It was always good to have company when he was doing this kind of work, and in this case—Perhaps he could take the opportunity to talk over the situation with her.

  “I’m here, Hyacinth,” he called.

  After a moment, the voice came again, more distant this time. “Where, Uncle? Where are you?”

  “You’re going in the wrong direction, Hyacinth,” he shouted, much more loudly. “I’m in Room 428.”

  “Where is Room 428?” the voice called. It was even fainter. Hyacinth was moving away from him.

  “Bother,” grumbled the badger. He should have to go and look for her. But it wasn’t a bother, really. He was tired of making inspections and taking notes. It was time for a cup of tea and a nice warm scone with lavender honey. Yum. Yes, that was exactly what he wanted. He would find Hyacinth and they would sit down together over tea and a scone, with a spoonful of lavender honey, and talk about . . . well, about all the things he had been thinking. So he put his pencil behind his ear, tucked his notebook under his arm, and took up his candlestick. He stepped out of Room 428 and turned right.

  But that was wrong, he realized, having gone some distance along the dark corridor. To get back to the main corridor, he should have turned left. So he went back and tried again.

  But this time, he went past Room 428 (the plate on the door was too tarnished to be easily read), and found himself in a strange corridor. Recognizing his error, he turned around and tried to retrace his steps. But he must have gone too far again, for now he found himself confronted by three corridors, one leading straight ahead, one angling off to the right, and the other angling off to the left.

  Well. This was easily solved. He should only have to consult his handy-dandy map and—

  But when Bosworth opened his notebook to look for the map, he saw to his breathless horror that it was not there. It must have dropped out somewhere along the way.

  And by this time, of course, poor Bosworth was thoroughly befuddled. He had not the foggiest notion which of these corridors would take him back to familiar territory. But even this would not have been an insurmountable problem, I suppose, except that our badger’s candle, which had been burning for quite some time now, had burnt all the way down to a very short stub. It flickered and flared as candles do when they are trying to tell us that they are about to go out, and that if we want more light, we shall have to fetch another candle. And in the space of a breath, the candle did just that. It went out, plunging Bosworth into a sudden and total blackness—for he had quite thoughtlessly failed to bring a spare candle. (Please take note of this, gentle reader. When you go underground, or wherever it promises to be thoroughly dark for an extended period of time, take not one candle but two, or perhaps even three. One can never have too many candles.)

  Of course, an absence of light would not ordinarily be a problem for badgers, who spend most of their lives underground and can see in the dark just as well as we can see in the light. What’s more, they have very reliable noses, which can lead them anywhere they want to go, particularly when there’s something to eat at the end of the trail—a fresh scone, say, warm, with lavender honey. I daresay a healthy badger can smell lavender honey a mile away.

  But our badger had been suffering for several days from a bothersome cold, so even if Parsley took the lid off the honey-pot and held it under his nose, he could not have smelled it. Even worse, his eyes had been giving him trouble lately—it was all that tedious writing, of course—and he had brought the candle to help himself out. Now the candle was gone and he was stranded, thoroughly lost in the great earthen labyrinth of The Brockery, whose corridors twisted and turned and curled and coiled for miles and miles under Holly How.

  “Oh, dear,” the badger muttered. “This is not a good thing.” He pushed down the sudden wish that he had had the foresight to pack a picnic lunch, just something to tide him over, for it was possible that he would not get back in time for tea, or perhaps tomorrow’s breakfast, or lunch, or the next day’s dinner. He might even be lost forever.

  Perhaps you are thinking that this is highly improbable, but I am sorry to say that such things have happened before and—given the haphazard design and construction of the sett—are quite likely to happen again. Indeed, Bosworth’s great-great-uncle Benjamin (an elderly badger, but still quite spry, who used a cane with a curiously carved head) had gone off one afternoon to visit an invalid hedgehog who was staying in one of The Brockery’s farthest guest rooms. When he did not return for tea, a rescue party was sent out. But in spite of their efforts, Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin was never seen or heard from again. His sudden disappearance was one of The Brockery’s great mysteries.

  Bosworth thought of this with a shiver. But then he reflected that it would not do to lose his spirit, for that would only make things worse. He stood very still, trying to think. Then it occurred to him that he could think just as well sitting as standing and perhaps even better, and anyway, his legs were telling him that he should sit. So he sank down on the ground with his back to the wall.

  This was no time to panic, of course, and normally Bosworth was a very levelheaded badger who could meet any threat with a chipper, “Oh, there you are, silly old thing. Let’s see what can be done.” He had always tried hard to practice the Fifteenth Rule of Thumb, expressed thus: It is the better part of wisdom to keep one’s head when one is confronted with catastrophe, calamity, or cataclysm. Losing one’s head never solves anything.

  But when a substantial amount of time had passed (hours and hours, Bosworth thought, although of course it was too dark to see his pocket watch) and he had not yet thought of anything he might do to save himself, he had to acknowledge the panic that was clenching a fist in the general region of his breastbone. What was more, the air had begun to seem rather warm and close, and he realized that he must be in an area of the sett which was closed off from the outside and therefore had no ventilation. It wasn’t likely that he would suffocate—or at least, he didn’t think so—but the lack of fresh air was making him frightfully drowsy. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open, especially since there was nothing to look at but black, black, and more black.

  And worse, he had begun to feel that he was not quite alone. Spiders, perhaps, or was it beetles (he couldn’t see which in the dark) were creepy-crawling along the floor and across his paws. And then up his legs and over his shoulders and his face, tickling him with their little beetle feet, or spider feet, as it were. There were only a few at first, and then, just as he was telling himself sternly to stop imagining things, there were hundreds of the
m, dancing the fandango in his fur, investigating the recesses of his ears, tiptoeing out to the tip of his nose. And then he began to hear their conversations—whistlings and whisperings and murmurings and rustlings—and he got the impression that the spiders in the lot (or perhaps the beetles had gone away and they were all spiders!) were plotting to spin their sticky webs around him. If he didn’t do something, he would find himself wrapped like Gulliver and tied with Lilliputian threads into a tidy bundle so that he couldn’t move, breathe, couldn’t—

  He shook himself. This would not do! It would not do at all. He could not just sit here and let the spiders package him up, as if he were a butcher’s parcel. He would get up and walk on a bit, hoping to find a more congenial place to have a rest. Or perhaps, if he was lucky, he would come to the end of the corridor and find that he could push his way out into the open, where he could take big, deep gulps of fresh air and—

  Yes. He would walk on, that’s what he would do. He got painfully to his feet and began to feel his way along the wall. Walking was a dangerous business, because the sett was constructed on various levels. Some of the corridors took rather sudden plunges, and there were stairways and ladders that led up or down quite unexpectedly. If one were not extremely careful, one might find oneself stepping out into thin air.

  Just as the badger was thinking this thought, it happened. The corridor suddenly became a steep incline, and the floor fell away under his feet. He dropped his notebook and candlestick and scrabbled for some sort of handhold, a root or a stone sticking out of the earthen wall, grabbing at anything that would keep him from sliding and skidding and slipping over the edge. But there was nothing, nothing at all, to hold him back. Before he could even cry Help! or Save me! or even Bless my stripes! he was falling, toppling, tumbling tail over teakettle through the empty air.

  THunK!

  For a very long moment, Bosworth could only lie there, flat on his back, trying to get his breath, feeling the hard hammering of his heart as he looked into blackness, the thickest, darkest, murkiest, most sinister blackness he had ever seen. He had hit bottom. Or at least, what he thought was bottom.

  But perhaps it wasn’t the bottom, he thought, in a muzzy sort of way. Perhaps he had only fallen onto a ledge, and if he moved or tried to roll over, he might roll straight off and down, and heaven only knew how FAR down it was to the real bottom. He tried to put out his right paw to feel for the edge. But the paw was pinned under him, and it hurt. The pain was like fire, running up his wrist, to his elbow. Broken, probably. Oh, dear. A broken leg. That complicated things. It complicated things a very great deal.

  He took a deep breath, lifted his left paw, and wiggled it. Well, good. At least that one wasn’t broken. He reached out as far as he could, feeling flat earth, earth covered with inches of dust. He sneezed. He might be lying on a ledge, but at least it wasn’t a narrow one. He kept reaching, kept feeling, and then he felt something else. It was a heap of something, a pile of old clothing, perhaps, or an old fur coat that somebody had tossed into his pit.

  He patted it. Yes, fur, that was what it was. It was something furry, and dry, very dry, and dusty. And there was a stick of some kind lying across the heap.

  But it wasn’t exactly a stick, was it? No. Bosworth felt it with his paw. It was . . . It was a cane. A cane with a curiously carved head.

  Bosworth had found Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin.

  And that was when the bleak reality of his situation struck him. He squeezed his eyes shut and sucked in his breath, trying to quiet his hammering heart. Bosworth had found himself in some prickly patches, especially back in the days when—footloose and fancy-free—he had roamed the world. But this was the most terrible, most grave, most potentially deadly difficulty he had ever fallen into, never mind the pun. Here he lay in pitch blackness, one foreleg broken, at the bottom of a very deep pit in an unused corridor in a forgotten corner of his very large house, beside his deceased great-great-uncle, who had perished many years before. No one knew where he was—not Parsley nor Primrose nor Hyacinth nor any of the others. It was entirely possible that he could suffer poor Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin’s fate, and no one would ever be the wiser.

  If that was what happened, our badger would not be very happy about it, of course. But animals have rather a different view of death than we do. The Thirteenth Rule of Thumb reminds every badger that animals are prone to accidents and that there are many traps and snares in this world. One must be prepared to depart from this life (when it is time) in the same way that one arrives in it, without fuss or fanfare, with all one’s business in good order. Unfortunately, however, Bosworth’s business was not quite in good order, for he had not yet named anyone to wear the Badger Badge of Authority when he was gone.

  “And why not, is what I want to know.”

  Bosworth’s eyes popped wide open against the darkness. He had heard the words as clearly as if . . . as if they had come from the pile of fur and bones that lay within arm’s reach.

  “And why not? I ask you,” came the voice again, a little louder and testier. “Why have you put off doing the most important thing a wearer of the Badge ought to do? I tell you, boy, I am very disappointed in you.”

  This time, Bosworth was sure. He was in the presence of the spirit of Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin, who had himself been a wearer of the Badge and had every right to chastise him. The Fourteenth Rule of Thumb came into his mind, and he shivered. Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin had crossed the bridge to the Back of Beyond, but his spirit lingered behind. He, Bosworth, was in the company of one of his watchful elders.

  In the company of watchful elders. Of course! That was why he was here. Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin had arranged events in such a way that Bosworth would tumble into the very same pit where the elder badger had lost his life! But why go to all that trouble? Surely, as a spirit, Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin could talk to Bosworth whenever and wherever he chose. He did not need to engineer a twenty-foot drop to tell Bosworth to get on with the business of naming his successor.

  Cradling his injured foreleg, Bosworth pulled himself into a sitting position. Of course Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin could talk to him—and perhaps he had. Perhaps it had been his voice that had been nagging at the back of Bosworth’s mind these past few weeks!

  And Bosworth had ignored him. Well, not exactly ignored , perhaps, but he hadn’t moved very speedily to get something done. Suppose Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin had nagged and nagged and kept on nagging, until he realized that Bosworth was not really listening? Suppose he decided, then, that the only way to make his great-great-nephew come face-to-face with the decision he had to make was to put him into an entirely helpless position, flat on his back at the bottom of a very deep, very dark pit, with a broken foreleg.

  Bosworth was covered with chagrin. He could see now that he had dragged his feet, held his fire, delayed, deferred, procrastinated, and postponed. Unforgivably, he had put off doing the most important thing a holder of the Badge ought to do, his last, his most important task. If he died here beside Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin—and he very well might, since no one knew where he was—there would be no one to carry on the work. There would be no one to take responsibility. What would happen to The Brockery, and all the animals in it? What would happen to the History? The Genealogy?

  At this thought, Bosworth began to feel deeply ashamed of himself, which I perfectly understand. Don’t you? Just imagine for a moment how you would feel if you were lying with a broken arm at the bottom of a pit filled with the darkest, heaviest blackness you had ever experienced, in the company of a long-dead relative who was reminding you of something you were supposed to do that you had failed to do, something so urgent, so important, that the continuing life and health of your family depended on it.

  I know how I should feel. I should feel dreadful. I should feel frightened, of course, and panicked. In fact, I should feel terrified. And I would most likely start screaming.

  Afterward, Bosworth said he wasn’t screaming, e
xactly. “I was calling out,” he explained, when it came to telling this part of the story. “I was shouting, just in case there might be anyone nearby who could hear me and come and fetch me out of that hole.”

  But to tell the plain, unvarnished truth, Bosworth was screaming. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was bellowing at the top of his lungs, and there is no shame in saying so, none at all. Indeed, I think it was a very good thing that our badger did bellow, for if he had not made such a very great commotion, he might not have been heard.

  But I am happy to tell you that he was heard.

  Hyacinth heard him, and this is how it happened.

  When she could get no answer to her own shouts for directions to Room 428, Hyacinth had gone back to the main living area to fetch a large torch. And because she had an intuition (a female intuition?) that something very unpleasant had happened to her uncle Bosworth, she also fetched with her Parsley’s nephews, who had dropped in for a brief visit. These young badgers—Paolo and Pedro were their professional names, although they had been born Tom and Dick—were trapeze artists. They starred in a traveling circus called ALEXANDER AND WILLIAM’S CIRCUS, on its way to Carlisle for an upcoming series of performances.

  There were a great many small circuses in those days, and they traveled all over the country in their gaily painted caravans, bringing exotic entertainments to rural people. Miss Potter herself wrote about this particular circus in her book The Fairy Caravan, noting that it featured a “pigmy” elephant (that was Paddy Pig with a moss-stuffed black stocking for a trunk and a howdah made of a bright-colored tea caddy), a dormouse named Xarifa, Jane Ferret (no relative to Fritz), and Tuppenny, a long-haired guinea pig. She neglected to mention the badger trapeze artists, I’m sorry to say. But she did tell all about the clever caravan, which was no doubt just like the ones she had seen touring the Land Between the Lakes. She described it as a tiny four-wheeled caravan, painted yellow and red. It had windows with muslin curtains, just like a house, and outside steps up to the back door, and a chimney on the roof. All the animals could be invisible at will, because they carried fern seed in their pockets. (If you want to know what happened when the pony lost his fern seed, you will have to read Miss Potter’s book.)