Charlie Bone and the Hidden King (Children of the Red King)

by Jenny Nimmo

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Charlie. Uncle Paton will be here if Maisie – unfreezes. If you can’t say anything nice, you’d better go.’

  Charlie’s hands fell to his sides. He felt that he was losing a battle. He didn’t know what weapons to use against the man who was stealing his mother with wonderful words. He crept out of her room and closed the door.

  On his way downstairs, Charlie looked in on Maisie. She was still lying in the bath. Someone had put a sleeping mask over her eyes, and it made her look more like a burglar than a frozen granny. Except for the pink sweater.

  ‘I suppose you’re hungry,’ said Grandma Bone when Charlie entered the kitchen.

  ‘No thanks, I’ve just had lunch,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I wasn’t offering, I was asking,’ said his grandmother, without looking up from her newspaper.

  Charlie sighed. ‘Did the hamper come?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. Paton wouldn’t touch a thing, silly man. It was all quite delicious.’ Grandma Bone smacked her lips.

  ‘So there’s none left?’

  ‘Not a crumb.’

  Charlie sighed again. He went upstairs and tapped on his uncle’s door.

  ‘Come in, dear boy, come in,’ called Uncle Paton.

  Charlie went in and sat on the edge of his uncle’s horribly untidy bed, while Paton pushed some papers into a drawer in his desk.

  ‘You’re right, Uncle P,’ Charlie said miserably. ‘Mum’s more than glowing. I think she’s been kind of enchanted.’

  ‘Me too!’ Paton whizzed round on his swivel chair and stared hard at Charlie. ‘But look here, dear boy, it’s not all gloom and doom. We’ve got news for you.’

  ‘Good news?’ said Charlie hopefully.

  ‘Interesting, at least,’ his uncle told him. ‘When our good ladies have left for the ball, Miss Ingledew will join us here for supper. Emma is staying with the Vertigos apparently. Julia has a most intriguing-looking package for you, and we are both dying to know what’s in it.’

  ‘For me?’ Charlie was puzzled. His uncle could tell him no more, so he went to his room and unpacked his bag. The white moth flew down from the curtain and settled on his shoulder. Charlie sensed that it was her way of greeting him.

  Time passed very slowly. Charlie thought of visiting Benjamin, but he felt uncomfortable in number twelve, knowing that the Browns were spies. Benjamin would have to come over to him.

  At seven o’clock, Grandma Bone’s door opened and she rustled downstairs. The front door slammed and Charlie looked out of his window. Below him, Grandma Bone and his two great-aunts, Eustacia and Venetia, stood in a huddle, talking in low voices. They all wore long dark cloaks, but Venetia’s had a particularly slimy look. It glistened like the track of a slug.

  The three sisters got into Eustacia’s car, and the next minute it was hooting its way, irritably, up Filbert Street. A few seconds later there was a swish of silk outside Charlie’s room. The door opened and a woman stepped in. Charlie barely recognised her. Was this beautiful woman in a blue gown really his mother?

  ‘How do I look?’ she asked.

  Charlie’s gaze travelled down her pale, bare arms. A wide silver bracelet encircled her left wrist, but her diamond ring had gone. Charlie shivered. He had never seen his mother without her ring. Never.

  ‘Your ring!’ He looked into her face.

  ‘My ring? Oh, I took it off. I don’t want to sparkle too much, do I?’ She gave a funny little laugh.

  ‘But, Mum . . .’

  ‘Goodnight, Charlie.’ She suddenly bent forward and kissed him on the cheek, and Charlie was enveloped in a scent that was utterly unfamiliar. For a few minutes, he stood in a daze, and then he rushed downstairs after his mother. Someone was already ringing the bell, and Amy Bone left the house without a backward glance. A man in a black uniform closed the door behind her.

  ‘Mum!’ Charlie wrenched open the door, just in time to see his mother get into the back of a long, gold limousine. It had dark smoked windows that he couldn’t see through. The man in black, a chauffeur no doubt, gave Charlie a nasty look, and then got into the driver’s seat. The gold limousine glided away, as silently as a serpent.

  ‘Don’t stand in the cold, dear boy.’ Uncle Paton came up behind Charlie.

  ‘Uncle P, did you see Mum?’

  ‘No. Sorry. I missed that. Did she look good?’ Uncle Paton drew Charlie aside and closed the door.

  ‘Yes,’ Charlie said slowly. ‘But she’d taken off her ring.’

  ‘Hmm. What does that signify, I wonder? Come on, help me to lay the table for Julia. She’ll be here any minute.’

  They went into the kitchen where Uncle Paton had already set candles on every available surface. Charlie laid the knives, forks and spoons, while Uncle Paton dealt with the glasses. There was a delicious smell coming from the oven and by the time Miss Ingledew arrived, Charlie was feeling so hungry, he had eaten three of Grandma Bone’s favourite cookies.

  The brown-paper parcel that Miss Ingledew carried certainly looked interesting. It was tied up with string and stamped with so much sealing wax, Charlie didn’t know where to start untying it. His name was printed in large capital letters above Miss Ingledew’s address.

  ‘It was delivered by hand,’ Miss Ingledew told Charlie, ‘by a rather nervous-looking Chinese woman. Quite elderly.’

  ‘Meng!’ Charlie nearly dropped the parcel.

  ‘Meng?’ said his uncle. ‘Do you know this Chinese person?’

  Charlie hesitated. In uttering Meng’s name, he had already half-broken his promise to Bartholomew. But surely, of all the people in the world, Uncle Paton and Miss Ingledew were the most trustworthy. So he sat down with the parcel on his lap and told them everything about his visit to the wilderness and, for good measure, added an account of what he’d heard during the Bloors’ Hundred Heads Dinner.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of it,’ said Miss Ingledew. ‘I worry about you all in the hands of those dreadful people.’

  Uncle Paton didn’t seem so concerned. ‘So, Dr Bloor’s father is back,’ he exclaimed. ‘Well I never.’

  ‘I promised him I wouldn’t tell,’ said Charlie, tearing at the brown paper. ‘He doesn’t want anyone to know.’

  ‘I don’t blame him. He had a bad time with Ezekiel, his father, and never got on with his son. And then Mary died.’ Paton shook his head. ‘Poor Barty.’

  ‘He knew my father,’ Charlie said.

  ‘He did indeed.’ Paton handed Charlie a steak knife. ‘They went climbing together, just a year before Lyell – disappeared.’

  Charlie used the knife on the last piece of string and the brown paper slipped to the floor, along with several small books. Charlie picked them up. Battered and weather-stained, they were each bound with a thin strip of leather to keep the loose and slightly dog-eared pages together.

  ‘Diaries,’ Miss Ingledew declared. ‘See, they all have the years printed on the cover. Five years in each book. How fascinating.’

  ‘Diaries?’ said Charlie. ‘Why has he sent them to me?’

  Uncle Paton advised eating his specially prepared meal before examining Bartholomew’s diaries. Roast duck, roast parsnips, potatoes, carrots and peas quickly appeared on the table, followed by a pineapple pudding that melted in their mouths. Uncle Paton was obviously trying hard to impress his guest.

  As soon as the dishes had been cleared away, Charlie put the diaries on the table and undid the first leather string. When he opened the book he found a letter tucked inside.

  ‘Dear Charlie,’ he read, ‘I thought you should know what you are up against. You talked of “the shadow” and I have remembered his name at last. In these diaries I have marked the places where he is mentioned. As you will see, I travelled extensively before settling in China. In almost every country I visited, I came across stories of the Red King. I wrote them down and, one day, you will have time to read them all. But now you must concentrate on those that concern “the shadow”. He is known by man
y different names but here, in Europe, he is Count Harken Badlock.

  ‘When you have pieced together the true accounts of the shadow, you will know that he is a hunter and a murderer. He steals souls and breaks hearts. Every creature that crossed his path has suffered for it. Somewhere in these books there is a spell that may defeat him. I wrote it down in the language of its creator, and I believe it will lead you to the Red King. But you may need help to understand it.

  ‘Be safe, my friend, and don’t be afraid.

  Bartholomew.’

  Miss Ingledew caught the letter as it fluttered out of Charlie’s hands. ‘He shouldn’t have written those things,’ she said crossly, ‘scaring Charlie half to death.’

  ‘I had to know,’ said Charlie.

  Uncle Paton scratched his head. ‘Let’s have a look.’ He picked up the diaries. Each one had several slim leather markers hanging out of it. ‘Let’s begin with 1965.’

  A flurry of sleet whirled past the window and Miss Ingledew closed the curtains. Uncle Paton brought another candle to the table and they pulled their chairs close together, so that they could all read Bartholomew Bloor’s spidery, travel-stained writing.

  Hardly a word was said. They only spoke to tell each other when to turn a page, or to exclaim over some unbelievable atrocity. The night grew colder and the candles wore down until they were flickering stubs of wax. Uncle Paton got up and fetched new candles from a drawer.

  They read on. All three were now caught up in the adventures that had led Bartholomew to uncover the stories of ‘the shadow’. It seemed that he had passed through almost every country in Europe, Asia and Africa. But it was on his Italian journey that he found the true origin of the Red King’s portrait.

  A certain Luigi Salutati had inherited the king’s red cloak from his ancestor the Princess Guanhamara. Luigi was a painter and sometime in the fifteenth century he had travelled to Venice to study with the great painter, Jacopo Bellini. One night, alone in the studio, Luigi had thrown the cloak over his shoulders to keep warm. As soon as he did this he had been overwhelmed by a desire to paint a portrait of a man who had been visiting him in dreams. The face had now become so clear to him, it was as if they were in the same room. Realising that this must be his ancestor, the legendary Red King, Luigi began to paint him. But while he worked, Luigi was aware of a hostile presence in the room, a shadow that persisted in entering the portrait. Try as he might, Luigi could not prevent his brush from drifting sideways, where a dark shadow began to form behind the figure of the king. Luigi accepted that he was in the power of some malevolent enchanter who was determined to haunt the Red King’s memory.

  The painting had remained in Venice until Luigi’s descendants brought it to Britain in the sixteenth century. It was at this time that they changed their name to Silk.

  ‘Gabriel!’ cried Charlie. ‘Gabriel’s family owns the Red King’s portrait.’

  ‘Not any more.’ Uncle Paton ran his finger down the page. ‘It says here that the painting was bought from the Silks by trickery and now hangs in Bloor’s Academy.’

  Charlie rubbed his eyes. Reading by candelight wasn’t easy, especially when he was half asleep. ‘It was all lies,’ he said, ‘all that stuff I heard about Count Harken when I was under the table. They said he had come to protect the king’s children, but he only wanted to cause trouble. He taught them to murder and torture; to hunt animals to extinction, just like Bartholomew said.’

  ‘So much for our books, Julia,’ Uncle Paton remarked. ‘I have never found a single reference to such a person in my library.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said Julia, ‘but there must have come a time when people didn’t look favourably upon men like the Count. The descendants of the five children who had so slavishly followed him probably decided to cut him out of their histories.’

  ‘Not Miss Chrystal,’ Charlie mumbled through a yawn. ‘She would choose a name that makes you think of something good and beautiful. Her real name’s Tilpin.’ He gave another huge yawn. ‘I wonder what it was before that.’

  ‘Time for bed, Charlie Bone,’ said his uncle. ‘We’ve read everything that Bartholomew marked for us, now let’s sleep on it. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.’

  Charlie was relieved to be sent to bed. His eyes were already closing. Leaving the diaries with his uncle and Miss Ingledew, he bid them goodnight and went up to bed.

  As he passed the bathroom, he saw the white moth fluttering outside the closed door. How thoughtless he’d been! The moth was his wand. It could help him. Opening the door, he stepped inside. Was it his imagination, or had Maisie slipped a little further into her frozen stage? Charlie pulled the mask up to her forehead and saw that her eyes had closed.

  ‘Stay with us, Maisie,’ he whispered. ‘Cling on. Tight. We’ll help you!’

  The moth swung wildly round the light and Charlie quickly turned it off. Now the only light came from the moth’s shining silver-white wings. The little creature settled on Maisie’s feet and crawled slowly towards her face. When it reached her chin it lifted into the air and hovered above Maisie’s closed eyes. Suddenly they flew open.

  ‘Maisie!’ cried Charlie. ‘Maisie, Maisie, come back. It’s me, Charlie!’

  She seemed to see him and her lips moved the tiniest fraction. The moth flew down and perched on her grey curls. A flush spread across Maisie’s cheeks and then, all at once, her eyes clouded over and a look of panic appeared on her face. Her eyelids drooped and she looked more frozen than ever. Whoever had frozen Maisie wanted to prove that they were more powerful than Charlie and his wand together.

  Charlie trudged back to bed with the moth on his shoulder. Tired as he was, he knew he wouldn’t sleep.

  Billy Raven was kneeling on the landing above the great hall. Blessed crouched beside him. The main doors were open and flurries of sleet blew in with the guests. Billy had never seen so many fine people all at once. The women, in particular, looked as if they had stepped out of fairytales. The colours of their ballgowns were breathtaking. Even Charlie’s great-aunts looked reasonable.

  There was a sudden lull in the conversation. Heads turned towards the doors and a couple walked in. Billy clutched the banisters. The woman was Charlie’s mother, Mrs Bone. Mrs Bone as Billy had never seen her. Dressed in a floating blue gown, she looked like a dazzling angel.

  A low growl throbbed in Blessed’s throat. He backed away, whining and trembling.

  ‘Blessed, what is it?’ Billy grunted softly.

  ‘Green – man – shadow,’ whined Blessed.

  ‘Green man?’ Billy looked down into the hall. Charlie’s mother was holding the arm of a man in a green velvet suit. He had thick brown hair that was touched with gold, and a nose like a hawk.

  Billy shuffled away from the light. ‘The shadow!’ he breathed. ‘I must tell Charlie.’

  Blessed grunted, ‘Come away, quick.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I must.’

  As Billy scrambled to his feet, a voice said, ‘What are you doing here?’ Manfred stepped out of the passage.

  ‘I–I was only looking, sir,’ Billy stuttered.

  ‘Spying more like,’ said Manfred, coldly.

  ‘No. Not spying. Honestly.’

  ‘It’s a shame you can’t spy for me any more.’ Manfred’s pitiless black eyes found Billy’s and glared into them.

  Billy’s red, albino eyes had always managed to withstand Manfred’s hypnotising glare, but tonight Billy felt there was something different about Manfred. His gaze had lost the power it used to have. Something had changed.

  ‘Don’t stand there gawping,’ snarled Manfred. ‘Get to bed. And send that mangy dog down to the kitchens.’

  But Billy continued to look at Manfred, trying to guess what had happened to him.

  ‘What did I say?’ Manfred grabbed Billy’s wrist, and there was a bright flash as his long fingers pressed into Billy’s flesh. The small boy felt that his whole arm was on fire.

  ‘Owwwwww!’ yelled Billy.


  Several of the guests looked up, but Manfred dragged Billy away from the landing and deep into the passage. ‘Get to bed,’ he hissed.

  Billy’s arm was released, and the headmaster’s son whirled away. Moments later the tap of footsteps could be heard descending the stairs.

  Sobbing with pain, Billy rushed back to the dormitory. He held his arm under the cold water tap but the pain persisted. There were four deep red welts above his wrist and one beneath it where a thumb had squeezed his flesh. Manfred’s hypnotising power had been replaced by something even worse.

  Billy lay on his bed, holding his injured arm across his body. Blessed jumped up and attempted to lick it, but Billy pushed him away. ‘It’s no good,’ he grunted. ‘Sorry, Blessed.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ howled the old dog.

  The harsh light in the dormitory was beginning to give Billy a headache. He needed comfort. Scrambling off the bed, he turned out the light and put all five of his guardian’s candles on the windowsill. A tiny flame appeared at the top of each one, and they all burned with a clear, steady light.

  Billy began to breathe more easily. His head cleared and his arm stopped throbbing. In a few moments the angry red marks had completely faded.

  Charlie heard the soft purr of an engine in the street. He rolled out of bed and went to the window.

  The gold limousine was parked outside number nine. A man in a green velvet suit walked round the back and opened the door nearest the kerb. Charlie’s mother stepped out: her blue dress gleamed in the street light. They walked towards the house, the man’s arm round Amy Bone’s shoulders.

  Mum, don’t let him kiss you, Charlie silently prayed.

  When the couple reached the steps, the man bent his head and kissed Amy Bone on the lips. Charlie felt as though all the breath had been knocked out of him. As his mother climbed to the front door, the man looked up and saw Charlie at the window. He smiled. And, in that instant, Charlie knew that his mother had been kissed by an enchanter.

  The altered photograph

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