Dubious Deeds

by Philip Ardagh

  ‘Like who, dear?’

  ‘Moses –’ said Eddie.

  ‘Moses?’

  ‘Never mind, Mother,’ said Eddie. ‘I was wondering what we should do with it.’

  ‘Do?’ asked his mother.

  ‘With the baby,’ said Eddie. ‘To make sure that it’s comfortable and unharmed.’

  Mrs Dickens leant forward and unwrapped the blanket. ‘It,’ she pronounced, ‘is a he, and he looks perfectly happy to me. If he were hungry, unhappy or in pain he’d be crying.’

  ‘That’s a relief, mother,’ said Eddie, wrapping him up again. ‘Shouldn’t you take him?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Out of my arms.’

  ‘Why?’

  That was a good question. ‘Because – er – you’re a grown-up and a mother and you understand these things.’

  Mrs Dickens laughed again. ‘Really, Edmund! Where do you get such ideas from? Just because I’m an adult and a mother doesn’t mean I can make the slightest sense of this world, or anyone in it!’

  ‘Then what shall I do with him?’ asked Eddie, looking down at the baby, who looked back up at him with a pair of big, trusting, clear-blue eyes.

  ‘Name him, of course,’ said Eddie’s mother. ‘You can’t go around calling him “it” or “him” all the time.’

  Eddie stood up and walked over to one of the huge windows overlooking the lawn, sloping down to the lake in the distance.

  ‘But what about his parents?’ said Eddie.

  ‘They can call him what they like,’ said Mrs Dickens.

  ‘Shouldn’t we try to find them?’

  ‘Perhaps your father could place an advertisement in the local newspaper,’ she suggested. ‘“Found, one baby boy.” They’re bound to notice he’s missing sooner or later.’

  ‘But what if it was his mother or father who put him in the basket in the first place?’ Eddie suggested. ‘Maybe they couldn’t afford to look after him –’

  ‘It’s an expensive blanket,’ Mrs Dickens commented. She had joined her son by the window and was picking at the corner of the material.

  ‘So it is!’ said Eddie, clearly impressed. ‘I think I shall call him Ned.’ Eddie had recently been reading about the remarkable exploits of Ned Kelly, the Australian outlaw, in a book entitled The Remarkable Exploits of Ned Kelly, The Australian Outlaw, and thought the name rather exciting. (In case you were wondering, an Australian cousin on Eddie’s mother’s side of the family had recently sent over a whole box of books. I’ve no idea why.)

  ‘Baby Ned,’ said Mrs Dickens. ‘An excellent choice, Eddie.’

  Much to Eddie’s amazement, it was Gibbering Jane who took charge of Baby Ned. All Eddie had ever heard her do was gibber – hence the name – but the first thing she said on seeing the baby was, ‘Oh, ain’t he cute, Master Edmund? Can I ’old ’im?’ and, when he passed Ned over, Eddie was delighted to find that the baby didn’t start bawling again. It turned out that Jane (a failed chambermaid who spent most of her time in a cupboard under the stairs but, nowadays, did a few light duties about the place too) had been the second eldest of twelve children and had helped to bring up some of the younger ones before she’d ended up in service (which, in her case, meant working for the Dickenses).

  In next to no time, she’d found some old napkins to use as nappies and had washed and changed Ned. She took the cutlery drawer out of an empty old kitchen dresser in one of the many unused rooms in the house, and turned it into a cot for him.

  ‘What about food?’ asked Eddie. ‘What do babies eat?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said Jane.

  Eddie was incredibly impressed. He left Ned cooing happily, and went in search of his father, squelching his way around the house and garden.

  Unfortunately, he found Mr Dickens in conversation with Mad Uncle Jack at the foot of his treehouse (in which his great-uncle now lived much of the time). Unfortunately because Eddie knew that, with MUJ around, a straightforward conversation would be out of the question.

  ‘I was wondering how we should go about locating the baby’s parents, Father,’ said Eddie tentatively.

  ‘What kind of tree am I?’ barked Mad Uncle Jack, no pun intended. Tree … bark … Never mind.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘I should have thought that the question was perfectly clear,’ said Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘I – er –’

  ‘Do I speak with a stutter?’

  ‘No –’

  ‘Was I whispering?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘Was I speaking Chinese?’

  ‘It’s not that, Mad Unc –’

  ‘Then what kind of tree am I?’

  ‘It’s a puzzle, my boy,’ said Mr Dickens. ‘Your great-uncle is asking you a riddle.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Eddie, somewhat relieved. ‘I don’t know, Mad Uncle Jack. What kind of tree are you?’

  ‘Tree?’

  ‘Yes. I give up,’ said Eddie. ‘What kind of tree are you?’

  ‘TREE?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eddie, a little nervously now. ‘W-What kind of tree are you?’

  Mad Uncle Jack glared at him and frowned one of his thinnest of thin frowns above his thinnest of thin noses. ‘Tree? Don’t be so damned impertinent!’

  Seeing his son’s predicament, Mr Dickens came to Eddie’s rescue. ‘We’ll see if anyone comes to the house asking about the missing child,’ he said, ‘and, if not, we’ll inform the authorities.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Eddie. They had a plan at last.

  ‘I’m an oak!’ laughed Mad Uncle Jack. He now had an acorn hanging from either ear, like a pair of nature’s earrings.

  Episode 2

  Disaster Strikes

  In which we learn of a proposed beating, and end with a ‘CRUNCH!’

  The following morning, Eddie didn’t get to see Baby Ned before breakfast, which began with his father announcing that – No, hang on, let him tell it:

  ‘Today is the annual beating the bounds!’ said Mr Dickens over the top of the bacon piled high on his plate.

  ‘What’s that, Father?’ asked Eddie politely.

  ‘Questions! Questions!’ said his father.

  ‘It means once-a-year,’ said his mother from her end of the table.

  ‘I know what annual means, Mother,’ said Eddie. ‘I was wondering about the beating the bounds part.’

  ‘Questions! Questions!’ his father repeated.

  Eddie reached for the china marmalade pot. It was shaped like an orange, with the leaves on the top acting as the handle to the lid. He lifted it. The pot was empty.

  ‘We appear to have run out of marmalade,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Disgraceful!’ said Mr Dickens. ‘Ring for Daphne.’

  Dawkins was Mr Dickens’s gentleman’s gentleman but, since coming with them to Awful End, now did just about everything around the house … but Mr Dickens called him Daphne. He wasn’t good at remembering names.

  Eddie got up from his seat and yanked the bell pull. Down in the depths of Awful End, a little bell (in a row of little bells) rang. Dawkins looked up from the ironing board on which he was ironing his favourite pieces of tissue paper and, by looking at the label under the jangling bell, which read ‘Morning Room’, he could see where his services were required. He put down the iron, slipped on the jacket of his suit and began the long trek up the stairs.

  Meanwhile, Mr Dickens was explaining ‘beating the bounds’ to his son.

  ‘The age-old tradition of beating the bounds goes back hundreds of years in this country, Jonathan.’ (See? I told you he was bad with names.) ‘Its origins have been lost in the mists of time.’

  ‘Oranges?’ asked Mrs Dickens. ‘Did you say oranges, dear?’

  ‘Origins,’ repeated Mr Dickens.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said his wife. ‘I was sure you said oranges.’

  Mr Dickens chewed on a piece of bacon and gave his wife a funny look. She didn’t seem to know
what to do with it, so she gave it straight back. Watching the funny look pass between them – quite a feat when they were at opposite ends of an impressively long breakfast table – Eddie wished his father would hurry up and explain the bounds part and get on to the beating. It sounded painful.

  ‘The bounds in question are boundaries, so if, for example, you’re beating the parish bounds it would be the perimeter of the parish.’ Mr Dickens pulled a small piece of bacon rind from his mouth, which had been lodged between his teeth.

  At that moment, Dawkins entered the breakfast room. He was about to say one of his favourite lines, ‘You rang, sir?’ (which is one of the first things they teach you to say at gentleman’s gentleman school), when Eddie’s mother preempted him, which isn’t as painful as it sounds. It simply means ‘got in there before he did’.

  ‘Oranges,’ she said. ‘We’ve run out of oranges.’

  ‘Origins, not oranges,’ Mr Dickens corrected her.

  ‘Marmalade,’ Eddie corrected them both. ‘Could we have some more marmalade, please, Dawkins?’

  ‘Very good, Master Edmund,’ said Dawkins, taking the empty pot in his gloved hand and leaving the room. (That ‘very good’ wasn’t a ‘very good’ as in ‘well done’ but as in ‘yes, I’ll do that at once’.)

  ‘Where was I?’ asked Mr Dickens. ‘I suspect these interruptions add nothing to the plot.’

  ‘You were about to explain the beating part,’ his son reminded him.

  ‘Tradition has it that, once a year, people would walk along a boundary, beating the ground with sticks,’ Mr Dickens continued. ‘This would have two functions: firstly, in order to remind everyone who traipsed after the beater exactly where the boundary was and, secondly, to thrash aside any nettles – for example – which may be obscuring the boundary.’

  Mrs Dickens laughed.

  ‘What’s funny about that, my love?’ asked her husband.

  ‘I wasn’t laughing at your explanation,’ Eddie’s mother explained. ‘It’s simply that I’ve made an amusing face out of the food upon my breakfast plate.’

  She held up the plate and turned it around for them to see. The sausage nose, rasher-of-bacon mouth and mushroom eyes did, indeed, make an impressive face. The scrambled-egg hair was a stroke of genius. What was equally impressive was the way in which she’d managed to stick everything in place so that it hadn’t slid off the plate when she held it up at right angles to the table. She’d used marmalade. Hence the empty pot.

  ‘Enchanting,’ said Mr Dickens. He loved most things about his wife, including the way she played with her food. They’d first met as children and, during one of their earliest encounters, she’d been in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek with a bowl of trifle.

  She put her plate back down on the linen tablecloth, and Eddie’s father went on with his explanation. ‘An alternative version of beating the bounds has a boy being beaten at regular intervals along the boundary. If you do this, he isn’t going to forget the route in a hurry, now, is he?’

  The door opened and Dawkins re-entered the room, the refilled orange-shaped marmalade pot on a silver salver (which is a small round tray). He placed it in front of Eddie. ‘Your marmalade, Master Edmund,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Eddie.

  The gentleman’s gentleman nodded and left the room, eager to get back to ironing his tissue paper. He loved tissue paper and his favourite tissue paper was freshly ironed tissue paper, still warm.

  Whilst Eddie spread the marmalade on his toast (from which he’d already pulled the watch springs his mother insisted on being added to the flour), and whilst his mother proceeded to pull each item of food off her plate with her fingers, lick the marmalade glue from the back and put it back down again, Mr Dickens proceeded to explain the Awful End approach to beating the bounds.

  ‘It isn’t common practice for private estates to have beating the bounds ceremonies, but Mad Uncle Jack says that it’s been going on here for as long as he can remember.’

  ‘But if it’s an annual event, Father, why haven’t I seen it before?’ asked Eddie, which was a good question. Eddie and his parents had been living at Awful End for a few years by then.

  His father was about to say ‘Questions! Questions!’ yet again, when Mad Uncle Jack burst through the door in person. (Mad Uncle Jack was the person, not the door.)

  ‘Good morning, everybody!’ he said, his eyes twinkling with excitement above his beakiest of beaky noses. ‘Today’s the day!’

  ‘No one could argue with that, Mudge!’ said Mrs Dickens, ‘mudge’ being how one pronounces MUJ unless one says ‘em-ew-jay’.

  ‘I want everyone up and out of here and ready to witness the beating of the bounds by ten o’clock,’ announced Eddie’s great-uncle.

  ‘What about Baby Ned –?’ Eddie began.

  ‘We’ve fine weather for it!’ said MUJ. He spun around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and strode out of the room as fast as his spindly legs would allow.

  At that precise moment a horrible thought struck Eddie. The colour drained from his face. (There’s no point in looking for the nearest illustration. They’re all in black and white.) His father said that, traditionally, it was a boy who was beaten when beating the bounds: a b-o-y.

  The last time that he’d checked, he was the only boy at Awful End, apart from Ned, of course, who was more of a baby than a boy. In a typical house of that size there would have been numerous servants including, at the very least, a boot boy, but Awful End was far from typical. The house itself was occupied by Eddie and his parents, Dawkins and Gibbering Jane. Mad Uncle Jack lived in the treehouse in the grounds; Even Madder Aunt Maud lived in Marjorie (a giant hollow cow) in the rose garden; and then there was the handful of ex-soldiers on the estate, who’d once served under Mad Uncle Jack in his regiment.

  Fortunately for Eddie, it transpired that Mad Uncle Jack and Even Madder Aunt Maud had a slightly different approach to the more traditional beating the bounds. Each year – on the years that they remembered to do it, that is (and no one was in a hurry to remind them) – they now beat one of the ex-soldiers with Maud’s stuffed stoat Malcolm (or was it Sally?).

  Each year, MUJ asked for a volunteer from their ranks and each year one of their number was pushed forward by the others to act as the unwilling participant.

  In the year that the events in this Further Adventures unfolded, Mad Uncle Jack’s ex-soldiers were spending much of their time working on the vast cast-iron bridge he was having constructed between his treehouse and Marjorie the hollow cow (‘So that I can hurry to my love pumpkin with grace and ease’ was how he’d put it. The love pumpkin, of course, being his dear wife Even Madder Aunt Maud).

  The bridge was designed by that fairly well-known engineer Fandango Jones who – according to him, at least – had once worked alongside the very famous Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. What no one ever dared ask, and Fandango Jones never volunteered, was what kind of work it was, exactly, that he’d done alongside Brunel. Some of the less kind critics of his work have suggested that it was carrying the great man’s hat, others that it was selling those little bags of roast chestnuts, but we can’t be sure. What we can be sure about, though, was that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a better engineer than Fandango Jones, which is probably why he had three names when Fandango Jones only had two.

  According to an anonymous pamphlet praising the life and achievement of Fandango Jones, published a year or so before his death (and probably by Jones himself, with help with the spelling of some of the harder words from his wife Clarissa), Jones’s given name was Clement; it being a tradition in his branch of the Jones family that all eldest sons were called ‘Clement’. On page three of Bridging the Gap: Being the Life of that Fairly Well-Known Engineer Fandango Jones, it reveals that this Clement Jones gained the nickname Fandango from the way in which he would explain his latest design by ‘pacing it out upon the floor, with the sure and swift-footedness of one dancing the fandango’ but, I
assume, without the aid of castanets or a tambourine.

  As well as being a little – how shall I put it? – eccentric, Mr Jones was also quite frightening to look at. He was small and squat with a stovepipe hat – made from two stovepipe hats riveted together to give it extra height – and very bushy side-whiskers which his loving wife Clarissa referred to as his ‘mutton chops’. What was most unusual, though, was that the small round spectacles he wore at all times contained blue-tinted lenses. Most unfortunate (and this is well recorded, but not in the pamphlet Bridging the Gap: Being the Life of that Fairly Well-Known Engineer Fandango Jones) is the fact that he was one of those people who spat when he spoke …

  … which is why, when Eddie and his parents congregated at the front of the house after a marmalade-filled breakfast, Eddie found Even Madder Aunt Maud had her umbrella up and in front of her whilst in conversation with the engineer.

  ‘But why iron?’ she was arguing for the umpteenth time. ‘Why not wood? A wooden bridge would do.’

  ‘Your husband specifically specified an iron bridge, madam,’ said Fandango Jones, spraying EMAM’s umbrella as he spoke.

  ‘Or rope? I believe in some parts of the empire, there are some perfectly good rope bridges.’

  ‘The use of iron was at your husband’s insistence.’

  ‘Or paper. I have it on good authority that the Japanese build the walls of their houses from paper. How about a nice paper bridge? Thick paper mind you.’

  ‘Madam. The choice of material was not mine, but –’

  ‘Or soup. Why not a bridge of soup?’

  ‘Soup?’

  ‘Soup!’

  ‘That’s –’ Fandango Jones was about to say ‘madness’ when he stopped himself. Not because he thought it’d be rude to call his current employer’s wife mad – with a name such as Even Madder Mrs Dickens it might even be considered appropriate – but because the thought occurred to him that this lady brandishing a stuffed stoat in one hand and an umbrella in the other might have a point. If no one had built a bridge of soup before, and he was to do so, then he could be the first! He could imagine the headline in Civil Engineers BiMonthly: ‘FANDANGO JONES BUILDS FIRST BRIDGE MADE FROM SOUP’. It was when he was imagining the subheading, ‘They Said It Could Not Be Done’, that his face fell. Of course it couldn’t be done. It was an impossible idea. It was a ridiculous, silly idea. ‘The bridge is to be made of iron, madam, and there’s an end to it.’