by Joan Aiken
It seemed plain that Pye’s ability to send and receive thought-talk was increasing almost hourly.
“I gotta boy, now, in Blastburn. Name of Coppy. He sends love to you, Is.”
“Oh, yes, little Coppy! He was a right decent little character.”
And, later in the day, “I got Dido! I got Dido, way off in Whale Island! She sends love to you and Penny and coming home soon.”
“Good heavens, Pye! Are you sure?”
“Course I’m sure,” said Pye, rather offended.
Halfway through the day, Penny went out for provisions. She came back only after so long a time that Is and even Pye had begun to grow deeply anxious. When Penny did turn up, it was from the wrong direction, down the brambly hill, and she had a cut and bleeding cheek and a black eye coming.
“Pen! What happened?”
“Two chaps recognised me. They must have seen me, long ago, with Ruth. I think they were Gentry fellows. They shouted ‘Witch, witch!’ and chased after me and threw stones. I managed to give them the slip, but it took hours of dodging, and I had to go all round the houses.”
Penny flopped crossly down on to a heap of wool, while Is carefully swabbed her cut cheek and anointed it with some of Ruth’s feverfew ointment.
“The nuisance of it is, that means we dassn’t stay much longer in Folkestone,” Penny said. “Not if we’re that liable to be spotted.”
Towards evening Penny’s eye swelled up, and her head began to ache badly. It was plain that she would not be able to come on the spying expedition to the Admiral’s house.
“Don’t you stay there too long, now,” she warned. “For I’ll be in a terrible worriment about ye till I see you back. In case he’s left a charley on the look-out.”
“No, we’ll be as careful as King Solomon’s cat,” Is promised. “We won’t even go near the place till we’ve seen old Fishskin off the premises. And then we’ll lurk around a whole lot longer till we’re sure it’s all rug.”
“What’ll I do if you don’t come back?” demanded Penny, thrown off her usual brisk competence by headache, pain and weakness.
“Wait till dawn and then send the baker’s boy to Dover Castle with a message,” Is was suggesting, though rather doubtfully, since that would mean Penny had to go into town, when Pye unexpectedly said, “A girl called Jen says she’s coming to Folkestone. Tomorrow morning early. With a whole lot of friends. I’ll ask her to come round by Cold Shoulder Road. Then they can take a message for you. If you want.”
“That sounds all right,” said Penny, somewhat relieved. “Now – will you please watch out!”
Dusk was falling and light was thickening as Pye and Is climbed up the chalky path that led to the East Cliff. The weather was cloudy and windy.
“Blowing up a gale, feels like,” said Is. “That ain’t a bad thing. It ain’t so easy to hear boards creaking and doors shoved open in a house if the wind’s wuthering outside.”
They found a good vantage point, a thick clump of laurustinus not far from the front door of East Cliff House, and settled down to watch and wait. Pye had brought her ocarina, but Is firmly forbade her even to think of playing on it. Pye therefore went back to her message-game, sitting cross-legged on the damp ground with a look of immense concentration on her face, like a cat collecting spit for washing.
Three-quarters of an hour passed. Then a carriage driven by (presumably) Mrs Boles’s cousin’s boy Alf drew up at the front door, which opened, letting out a pool of light. Out came the Admiral, dressed up to the nines – white silk stockings, diamond-buckled shoes, blue velvet jacket, gold lace, cocked hat, and gold-hilted sword. He looked like an inn sign, Is thought, or something off a wedding cake. Surprisingly, he had a lady with him: he led her out of the door and politely helped her into the coach.
“Who’s that?” muttered Is, and heard Pye, beside her, give a little hiss of horror.
“Miss Twite! Twite’s sister!”
Merlwyn Twite, too, was dressed very grand, in a stiff dress of yellow Tribute Silk, some large diamonds, and feathers in her grey hair.
The coach door slammed, the horses broke into a trot.
“Give ’em fifteen minutes,” said Is. “Just in case Miss Twite forgot her fan.”
They made it twenty minutes. The house was all dark, not a light to be seen anywhere, and not a sound to be heard.
“Now we’ll go round to the back,” breathed Is, who remembered the way in to the garden room where they had taken Ruth’s pictures. By now their eyes were well accustomed to the dark. Is had remembered that the door to the conservatory had a broken pane in it. Sure enough, there was not the least trouble in slipping a hand through the hole and pushing back the bolt. The door opened with a gentle scrunch and they tiptoed into the warm interior, which smelt of earth and geraniums.
“Shut the door behind you, Pye, but don’t bolt it. We may need to scarper fast. Now we’ll wait again till our eyes is used.”
When they had done this they went next door into the garden room where, Is remembered, there had been candles, matches and small oil-lamps on a shelf. Is lit a couple of lamps.
“Now we go into the kitchen,” she whispered, and opened the door at the back of the garden room.
The kitchen seemed exactly as Is remembered: cosy, stuffy and unbelievably untidy; musty with the smell, almost a taste, of many potatoes that had boiled dry, and many slices of bread fried in rancid lard.
“Now, keep your eyes peeled for Rosamund.”
They had not long to wait.
Down her silver thread, silent as shade, large as a black and eight-legged cushion, shot Rosamund, her brilliant little eyes fixed on the visitors in a very unwelcoming manner. She began to advance towards them.
“Oh, flame it,” muttered Is. “I really hate spiders.”
The fact that Rosamund was followed by two friends or sisters did not improve the moment. Is looked round for a rolling-pin or a fish-slice.
“Don’t do that,” said Pye. “It’ll only aggravate ’em. I can fix ’em.”
She pulled the ocarina from her pocket and played a gentle tune.
To the huge relief of Is, this had exactly the required effect. The spiders, lulled and charmed, sank together into a sooty, hairy, shaggy heap with eyes like diamonds gazing sleepily in every direction.
“Nice!” said Pye. “Cosy! Ain’t they?”
She seemed inclined to give them a pat.
“Never mind that, Pye, how long will they stay that way?”
“I dunno,” said Pye. “The book don’t say. But I can always play some more.”
“Well, let’s have a lookabout quick while they are dozing.”
Is and Pye went down the long passage that Is remembered, and she noticed with interest that a large number of Ruth’s pictures had been brought in from the cave and replaced the engravings of ships on the walls. On the floor were the same piles of books and papers. Open doors showed rooms filled with rusty machines, rolls of carpets, mouldy and blistered furniture, whole sets of chinaware.
“How the plague are we going to find anything in this clutteration?” said Is. “Let alone we don’t rightly know what we are looking for.”
By the front door they found twenty black cloaks and twenty black hoods hanging on pegs.
“But that,” Is pointed out, “don’t prove a thing. Old Fishskin ‘ud say he likes to have plenty of extras in case it rains. Let’s try upstairs. Maybe we’ll find a white hat.”
At the top of the stairs, unfortunately, they were faced by another group of spiders who advanced in a menacing, semicircular formation, waving legs, champing jaws. It took Pye longer, this time, to charm them to sleep with her music.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” said Is, drawing several deep, unhappy breaths as the spiders collapsed into a whiskery heap. “But I’ll just take a look in one or two bedrooms—”
She opened a door, and discovered a bedroom that was packed right up to the ceiling with large, buff-coloured smoothis
h pointed objects. They were about the size of double-basses. There appeared to be hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands.
“What the blue blazes are these?”
“Oh, I know,” said Pye. “I’ve seen lots of those taken on and off trains. Mammoths’ tusks, they are. They get made into sneezeboxes.”
“Ah hah! That really shows he’s a queer cove then – scaly as an old alligator! If we can get one of those out and take it away with us, we have him on toast.”
Is braced herself, put her arms round one of the tusks – which were packed together tight as sausages in a packet – and gave it a tug.
The result was disastrous.
The whole stack of carefully piled tusks, once disarranged, came crashing and tumbling out of the doorway. They started a domino effect. More and more tusks cascaded down. They bowled over Pye and Is. They went thundering from step to step down the staircase.
Worse: the collapse started up some kind of alarm mechanism which must have been cunningly set up by the Admiral. Bells rang. Gongs clanged. And a huge rusty cage, which had been suspended above the stairwell, came creaking out of the ceiling and locked itself into four slots in the floor.
Pye was caught inside the cage. Also, she had been hit on the back of the head by a falling tusk, and looked not a little dazed. She crouched in a nest of tusks, rubbing her head in a bewildered manner.
“Pye! Are you all right? Are you hurt bad?”
“I’ll havta see,” mumbled Pye after a moment. “Dunno yet.”
Is tugged and wrestled frantically with the bars of the cage. But, though rusty, they were strong and solid, locked firmly into place And they were set too close together for Pye to escape between them, small though she was.
“Like old times, eh?” she said vaguely. “Shut in a cage.”
“Oh, Pye!”
For a moment – no more – Is felt real despair.
Then she set her lamp on the floor – Pyre’s had gone out but mercifully hers had not – and carefully inspected the cage.
“There’s a keyhole here. So there’s gotta be a key.”
“Oh, aye?” muttered Pye, still dazed.
“Don’t you fret, Pye. I’ll find that key.”
But where? Is thought, in this rabshackle house? Perhaps in the Admiral’s bedroom?
But all the rooms on the upper floor were now inaccessible, barred off by the cage, which fitted across the head of the staircase.
The kitchen seemed the likeliest place. Practically everything was kept in the kitchen. But what about the spiders there? Might they have livened up again by now?
Is really hated the idea of hunting for a key through the chaos of the kitchen, hampered in her search by half a dozen spiders the size of terriers.
“Pye, lend us the ocarina.”
It took three or four minutes for Pye to comprehend what Is wanted. Then she pushed her hand into her pocket and brought out a broken earthenware mouthpiece.
“Oh, frizzle it,” said Is. “Musta been smashed by a tusk. Or by the cage.” Pye looked stricken – much more upset by this than by the previous mishaps.
“My pipe,” she said forlornly. “Busted.”
“Never mind it, Pye. Very likely Penny can fix it. Penny’s extra good at mending things.”
Anyway, Is thought, most like I couldn’t fix the spiders the way Pye can. I don’t have the gift.
Fortunately she remembered seeing a brass-hilted sword in the hall umbrella stand (the Admiral’s second-best, no doubt); armed with this she returned to the kitchen.
Here, the spiders were still piled up in a furry, drowsy heap. Sword in hand, Is skirted round them warily, hunting in all the places where a key might be kept; behind the clock on the mantelpiece, in the knife-and-fork drawer, in a bowl of coins, razors, and thimbles on the kitchen table, in a flowerpot, in a jug, in the soap container by the sink. She had almost reached the point of giving up when she lifted the lid of an earthenware crock which had once held Mrs MacBeavor’s Superior Potted Highland Grouse, and found that it contained a whole mass of keys, rusty and shining, large and small.
In the middle of her joy over this find, she heard a skittering on the floor, and spun round with horror to see that Rosamund and family were awake again and hurrying towards her.
Not wasting a second, Is leapt out of the kitchen, sword clutched in one hand, lamp and pot in the other, and kicked the door to behind her.
She was close to the main hall when – to her utter dismay – she heard the front door open and, worse still, the voices of the Admiral and Miss Twite in the hall.
So early! What could possibly have happened?
“Very vexatious indeed!” the Admiral was saying angrily. “Cannot understand it . . . How could they have made a mistake over out admission tickets? The whole thing seems deucedly queer to me . . . all that way for nothing. And in our best clothes . . . and in the rain—”
“I did not observe anyone else being turned away. Our tickets were the only ones they rejected, so far as I could see. You should certainly write to the Times about it,” Miss Twite remarked in her grating tone. “But, stay, Percival – something is surely amiss here? You had not left a light burning in the house?”
“Damme no, certainly I didn’t—”
Then the Admiral saw Is in the passageway, with her lamp, and let out a hiss like a cobra. He snatched a blunderbuss from the umbrella stand.
“So, Miss! I find you here, poking and prying! What explanation have you for this?”
Now that’s a foolish question, thought Is. What explanation could I have, except to find out some of his haveycavey secrets? Specially considering all the tusks that are lying about.
She did not trouble to reply – her mind was too occupied with wondering how she and Pye could possibly extricate themselves from this unpromising situation.
“Who is this girl, Percival?” Miss Twite was enquiring. “She looks somewhat familiar but I—”
The Admiral, however, had noticed the cage at the top of the stair.
“Ho! I see that my little anti-theft device has caught another intruder!”
He stumped up the stairs and peered through the bars at Pye, who was still crouching among scattered tusks and squashed spiders, looking sleepy and bemused. “And who are you, might I enquire?”
“Why, anybody can see who she is,” said Merlwyn, now following him up. “That is the Handsel Child, the brat who resided in the care of myself and my brother, until abducted by Ruth Twite.”
Indeed, at the sight of Miss Merlwyn, Pye let out a faint pitiful wail. Is, who, temporarily forgotten at the foot of the stair, had been wondering if the most sensible course would not be to nip out through the open front door and yell for help, now changed her mind.
She ran up the stairs and said rapidly, “Admiral, I dunno why I should do you any good turn, considering you left me and my cousin shut up in your cave, but I’ll tell you summat you don’t seem to know: there’s three huge crocks of cash and joolry and silver fal-lals stashed away down in your cave. Look—” and she rummaged in her pocket and brought out the last two of her Charles the First sixpences and tossed them on the stairs.
“A likely tale!” said the Admiral, but the speed with which he snatched up the coins contradicted the chilly incredulity of his tone.
“Is that coin genuine?” grated Miss Twite. “If it is, Percival, do you not think we should delay our departure while we investigate . . .”
“First we have to rid ourselves of these intruders. Over the cliff, perhaps—”
“But, if the girl knows where the cache is situated—”
“Oh, we can soon extract that information from her,” said the Admiral, directing his blunderbuss towards Is in a very menacing manner.
Can you, though? she thought to herself, just as another voice entered the conversation.
“Well I never did! The Admiral, his own self. And Miss Twite! Back home early from the party, ain’t ye? Did you come over poorly, then? Or wasn�
�t the wittles up to your taste?”
The newcomer was Mrs Boles, who, to the amazement of Is, now came through the front door. She wore a crocheted scarf over her head, and a shabby shawl over her shoulders. Her red-rimmed eyes gleamed and her long nose twitched interestedly, as she peered about. Then she looked up the stairs and saw Pye in the cage. She let out a loud cry of real astonishment.
“My little Abandella! What the Gentry took, ever so long ago! Well I will be jiggered. What have you got her buckled up in there for, you old monster? You make haste, right away, and let out the poor little precious, afore I call the Watch!”
“What the deuce are you talking about, woman?” snapped the Admiral, pale with fury. “Pray walk your chalks out of my house, before I set Rosamund on you.”
“And I’ll tell you summat else you don’t know, you nasty old man,” pursued Mrs Boles (though she did flinch a bit at the mention of Rosamund), “my little Abandella is your own grandchild, for her dad was your good-for-nothing son Horatio. Of course I never said nothing when she turned up at the Twites. Least said’s soonest mended, is my motter.”
“Wh-what s-spiteful nonsense are you talking?” stammered the Admiral, even more startled.
“Well! If you don’t believe me – look at her! Isn’t she the spitting likeness of you, close as one halfpenny is to another? (That my own daughter Meena should ever go off with such a capsy fellow I never could understand, and a lucky chance it was he got killed in a smugglers’ fray afore she had cause to repent it – but there! Done is done.)”
Now, for the first time, Is realised why, when she looked at Pye, she always absent-mindedly fitted her with a pair of imaginary rimless spectacles. Put them on her nose, and she was the identical image (only smaller) of the Admiral. Mercy, what a grandpa to have, thought Is.
Though I dare say mine was a right skellum, too, for that matter.
All this time, Is had been almost unconsciously combing through the boxful of keys, hunting for one that looked as if it might fit the small keyhole in the metal cage. Now, having found a likely key, she edged up the stair, past the Admiral, who had come down to engage in heated dispute with Mrs Boles.
