The People in the Castle: Selected Strange Stories

by Joan Aiken

  More and more enslaved, he sat gazing as Clarissa played and sang Ariel’s songs. Sir Murdoch seemed completely charmed and relaxed. When Clarissa left, he let Ian persuade him to bed without the topic of the Furry Race coming up again.

  Next morning, however, when Ian went down to the village for a consultation with cheerful, shrewd-eyed old Dr. Defoe, he asked about it.

  “Heh,” said the doctor. “The Furry Race? My daughter revived it five years ago. There’s two villages, ye see, Polgrue, and Lostmid, and there’s this ball, what they call the Furry Ball. It’s not furry; it’s made of applewood with a silver band round the middle, and on the band is written,

  Fro Lostmid Parish iff I goe

  Heddes will be broke and bloode will flowe.

  “The ball is kept in Lostmid, and on the day of the race one of the Polgrue lads has to sneak in and take it and get it over the parish boundary before anybody stops him. Nobody’s succeeded in doing it yet. But why do you ask?”

  Ian explained about the scene the night before.

  “Eh, I see; that’s awkward. You’re afraid it may bring on an attack if he sees them crossing his land? Trouble is, that’s the quickest shortcut over the parish boundary.”

  “If your daughter withdrew her support, would the race be abandoned?”

  “My dear feller, she’d never do that. She’s mad about it. She’s a bit of a tomboy, Clarissa, and the roughhousing amuses her—always is plenty of horseplay, even though they don’t get the ball over the boundary. If her mother were still alive now . . . Bless my soul!” the old doctor burst out, looking troubled, “I wish Meredith had never come back to these parts, that I do. You can speak with Clarissa about it, but I doubt you’ll not persuade her. She’s out looking over the course now.”

  The two villages of Lostmid and Polgrue lay in deep adjacent glens, and Polgrue Chase ended on the stretch of high moorland that ran between them. There was a crossroads and a telephone box, used by both villages. A spinney of wind-bitten beeches stood in one angle of the cross, and Clarissa was thoughtfully surveying this terrain. Ian joined her, turning to look back towards the Hall and noticing with relief that Sir Murdoch was still, as he had been left, placidly knocking a ball around his private golf course.

  It was a stormy, shining day. Ian saw that Clarissa’s hair was exactly the colour of the sea-browned beech leaves and that the strange angles of her face were emphasized by the wild shafts of sunlight glancing through the trees.

  He put his difficulties to her.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, wrinkling her brow. “How unfortunate. The boys are so keen on the race. I don’t think they’d ever give it up.”

  “Couldn’t they go some other way?”

  “But this is the only possible way, don’t you see? In the old days, of course, this all used to be common land.”

  “Do you know who the runner is going to be—the boy with the ball?” Ian asked, wondering if a sufficiently heavy bribe would persuade him to take a longer way round.

  But Clarissa smiled, with innocent topaz eyes. “My dear, that’s never decided until the very last minute. So that the Lostmidians don’t know who’s going to dash in and snatch the ball. But I’ll tell you what we can do—we can arrange for the race to take place at night, so that Sir Murdoch won’t be worried about the spectacle. Yes, that’s an excellent idea; in fact, it will make it far more exciting. It’s next Thursday, you know.”

  Ian was not at all sure that he approved of this idea, but just then he noticed Sir Murdoch having difficulties in a bunker. A good deal of sand was flying about, and his employer’s face was becoming a dangerous dusky red. “‘Here, in the sands,/Thee I’ll rake up,” he was muttering angrily, and something about murderous lechers.

  Ian ran down to him and suggested that it was time for a glass of beer, waving to Clarissa as he did so. Sir Murdoch noticed her and was instantly mollified. He invited her to join them.

  Ian, by now head over heels in love, was torn between his professional duty, which could not help pointing out to him how beneficial Clarissa’s company was for his patient, and a strong personal feeling that the elderly wolfish baronet was not at all suitable company for Clarissa. Worse, he suspected that she guessed his anxiety and was laughing at it.

  The week passed peacefully enough. Sir Murdoch summoned the chairmen of the two parish councils and told them that any trespass over his land on the day of the Furry Race would be punished with the utmost rigour. They listened with blank faces. He also ordered man traps and spring guns from the Dominion and Colonial Stores, but to Ian’s relief it seemed highly unlikely that these would arrive in time.

  Clarissa dropped in frequently. Her playing and singing seemed to have as soothing an effect on Sir Murdoch as the songs of the harpist David on touchy old Saul, but Ian had the persistent feeling that some peril threatened from her presence.

  On Furry Day she did not appear. Sir Murdoch spent most of the day pacing—loping was really the word for it, Ian thought—distrustfully among his far spinneys, but no trespasser moved in the bracken and dying leaves. Towards evening a fidgety scuffling wind sprang up, and Ian persuaded his employer indoors.

  “No one will come, Sir Murdoch, I’m sure. Your notices have scared them off. They’ll have gone another way.” He wished he really did feel sure of it. He found a performance of Caesar and Cleopatra on TV and switched it on, but Shaw seemed to make Sir Murdoch impatient. Presently he got up, began to pace about, and turned it off, muttering,

  “And why should Caesar be a tyrant, then?

  Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf!”

  He swung round on Ian. “Did I do wrong to shut them off my land?”

  “Well—” Ian was temporizing when there came an outburst of explosions from Lostmid, hidden in the valley, and a dozen rockets soared into the sky beyond the windows.

  “That means someone’s taken the Furry Ball,” said Hudson, coming in with the decanter of sherry. “Been long enough about it, seemingly.”

  Sir Murdoch’s expression changed completely. One stride took him to the French window. He opened it and went streaking across the park. Ian bolted after him.

  “Stop! Sir Murdoch, stop!”

  Sir Murdoch turned an almost unrecognizable face and hissed, “‘Wake not a sleeping wolf!’” He kept on his way, with Ian stubbornly in pursuit. They came out by the crossroads and, looking down to Lostmid, saw that it was a circus of wandering lights, clustering, darting this way and that.

  “They’ve lost him,” Ian muttered. “No, there he goes!”

  One of the lights broke off at a tangent and moved away down the valley, then turned and came straight for them diagonally across the hillside.

  “I’ll have to go and warn him off,” Ian thought. “Can’t let him run straight into trouble.” He ran downhill towards the approaching light. Sir Murdoch stole back into the shade of the spinney. Nothing of him was visible but two golden, glowing eye points.

  It was at this moment that Clarissa, having established her red-herring diversion by sending a boy with a torch across the hillside, ran swiftly and silently up the steep road towards the signpost. She wore trousers and a dark sweater and was clutching the Furry Ball in her hand.

  Sir Murdoch heard the pit-pat of approaching footsteps, waited for his moment, and sprang.

  It was the thick fisherman’s-knit jersey with its roll collar that saved her. They rolled over and over, girl and wolf entangled, and then she caught him a blow on the jaw with the heavy applewood ball, dropped it, scrambled free, and was away. She did not dare look back. She had a remarkable turn of speed, but the wolf was overtaking her. She hurled herself into the telephone box and let the door clang to behind her.

  The wolf arrived a second later; she heard the impact as the grey, sinewy body struck the door, saw the gleam of
teeth through the glass. Methodically, though with shaking hands, she turned to dial.

  Meanwhile Ian had met the red-herring boy just as his triumphant pursuers caught up with him.

  “You mustn’t go that way,” Ian gasped. “Sir Murdoch’s waiting up there and he’s out for blood.”

  “Give over that thurr ball,” yelled the Lostmidians.

  “’Tisn’t on me,” the boy yelled back, regardless of the fact that he was being pulled limb from limb. “Caught ye properly, me fine fules. ’Tis Miss Clarissa’s got it, and she’m gone backaway.”

  “What?”

  Ian waited for no more. He left them to their battle, in which some Polgrue reinforcements were now joining, and bounded back up the murderous ascent to where he had left Sir Murdoch.

  The scene at the telephone box was brilliantly lit by the overhead light. Clarissa had finished her call and was watching with detached interest as the infuriated wolf threw himself repeatedly against the door.

  It is not easy to address your employer in such circumstances.

  Ian chose a low, controlled, but vibrant tone.

  “Down, Sir Murdoch,” he said. “Down, sir! Heel!”

  Sir Murdoch turned on him a look of golden, thunderous wrath. He was really a fine spectacle, with his eyes flashing, and great ruff raised in rage. He must have weighed all of a hundred and thirty pounds. Ian thought he might be a timber wolf, but was not certain. He pulled the ampoule from his pocket, charged the syringe, and made a cautious approach. Instantly Sir Murdoch flew at him. With a feint like a bullfighter’s, Ian dodged round the call box.

  “Olé,” Clarissa shouted approvingly, opening the door a crack. Sir Murdoch instantly turned and battered it again.

  “‘Avaunt, thou damnéd door-keeper!’” shouted Ian. The result was electrifying. The wolf dropped to the ground as if stunned. Ian seized advantage of the moment to give him his injection, and immediately the wolf shape vanished, dropping off Sir Murdoch like a label off a wet bottle. He gasped, shivered, and shut his eyes.

  “Where am I?” he said presently, opening them again. Ian took his arm, gently led him away from the door, and made him sit on a grassy bank.

  “You’ll feel better in a minute or two, sir,” he said, and, since Shakespeare seemed so efficacious, added, “‘The cure whereof, my lord,/’Tis time must do.’” Sir Murdoch weakly nodded.

  Clarissa came out of her refuge. “Are you all right now, Sir Murdoch?” she asked kindly. “Shall I sing you a song?”

  “All right, thank you, my dear,” he murmured. “What are you doing here?” And he added to himself, “I really must not fly into these rages. I feel quite dizzy.”

  Ian stepped aside and picked up something that glinted on the ground.

  “What’s that?” asked Sir Murdoch with awakening interest. “It reminds me— May I see it?”

  “Oh, it’s my medallion,” said Clarissa at the same moment. “It must have come off. . . .” Her voice trailed away. They both watched Sir Murdoch. Deep, fearful shudders were running through him.

  “Where did you get this?” he demanded, turning his cavernous eyes on Clarissa. His fingers were rigid, clenched on the tiny silver St. Francis.

  “It was my mother’s,” she said faintly. For the first time she seemed frightened.

  “Was her name Louisa?” She nodded. “Then, your father—?”

  “Here comes my father now,” said Clarissa with relief. The gnarled figure of the doctor was approaching them through the spinney. Sir Murdoch turned on him like a javelin.

  “‘O thou foul thief!’” he hissed. “My lost Louisa! ‘Stol’n from me and corrupted/By spells and medicines.’”

  “Oh, come, come, come,” said the doctor equably, never slowing his approach, though he kept a wary eye on Sir Murdoch. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. She came to me. I was quite looking forward to bachelorhood.”

  “‘For the which I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor,’” murmured Ian calmingly.

  “And I’ll tell ye this, Sir Murdoch,” Dr. Defoe went on, tucking his arm through that of Sir Murdoch like an old friend, “you were well rid of her.” He started strolling at a gentle but purposeful pace back towards the Hall, and the baronet went with him doubtfully.

  “Why is that?” Already Sir Murdoch sounded half convinced, quiescent.

  “Firstly, my dear sir, Temper. Out of this world! Secondly, Macaroni Cheese. Every night until one begged for mercy. Thirdly, Unpunctuality. Fourthly, long, horrifying Dreams, which she insisted on telling at breakfast . . .”

  Pursuing this soothing, therapeutic vein, the doctor’s voice moved farther away, and the two men were lost in the shadows.

  “So that’s all right,” said Clarissa on a deep breath of relief. “Why, Ian!”

  Pent-up agitation was too much for him. He had grabbed her in his arms like a drowning man. “I was sick with fright for you,” he muttered, into her hair, her ear, the back of her neck. “I was afraid—oh well, never mind.”

  “Never mind,” she agreed. “Are we going to get married?”

  “Of course.”

  “I ought to find my Furry Ball,” she said presently. “They seem to be having a pitched battle down below; there’s a good chance of getting it over the boundary while everyone’s busy.”

  “But Sir Murdoch—”

  “Father will look after him.”

  She moved a few steps away and soon found the ball. “Come on; through the wood is quickest. We have to put it on the Polgrue churchyard wall.”

  No one accosted them as they ran through the wood. Fireworks and shouting in the valley suggested that Lostmid and Polgrue had sunk their differences in happy saturnalia.

  “Full surgery tomorrow,” remarked Clarissa, tucking the Furry Ball into its niche. “Won’t someone be surprised to see this.”

  When Ian and Clarissa strolled up to the terrace, they found Sir Murdoch and the doctor amiably drinking port. Sir Murdoch looked like a man who had had a festering grief removed from his mind.

  “Well,” the doctor said cheerfully, “we’ve cleared up some misunderstandings.”

  But Sir Murdoch had stood up and gone to meet Clarissa.

  “‘As I am a man/,’” he said gravely, “‘I do think this lady/To be my child.’”

  The two pairs of golden eyes met and acknowledged each other.

  “That’ll be the end of his little trouble, I shouldn’t wonder,” murmured the doctor. “Specially if she’ll live at the Hall and keep an eye on him.”

  “But she’s going to marry me.”

  “All the better, my dear boy. All the better. And glad I shall be to get rid of her, bless her heart.”

  Ian looked doubtfully across the terrace at his future father-in-law, but he recalled that wolves are among the most devoted fathers of the animal kingdom. Sir Murdoch was stroking Clarissa’s hair with an expression of complete peace and happiness.

  Then a thought struck Ian. “If he’s her father—”

  But Dr. Defoe was yawning. “I’m off to bed. Busy day tomorrow.” He vanished among the dark trees.

  So they were married and lived happily at the Hall. Clarissa’s slightest wish was law. She was cherished equally by both father and husband, and if they went out of their way not to cross her in any particular, this was due quite as much to the love they bore her as to their knowledge that they had dangerous material on their hands.

  Hope

  It was on a clear, frosty November evening, not many years ago, that Dr. Jane Smith, having occasion to visit a patient in the part of London known as Rumbury Town, was suddenly overtaken by the impulse to call on an old teacher of hers, a Miss Lestrange, who had a bedsitting-room on the edge of that district, where she earned a meager living by giving lessons
on the harp.

  Rumbury Town is a curious region of London. Not far from the big stations, adjacent to Islington, beyond, or anyway defying the jurisdiction of smokeless-fuel legislation, it lies enfolded generally in an industrial dusk of its own. The factories of Rumbury Town are not large, and their products are eccentric—artificial grass for butchers’ windows, metal bedwinches, false teeth for sheep, slimmers’ biscuits made from wood-pulp, catnip mice, plastic Christmas-tree decorations—these are a random sample of its exports. But the small gaunt chimneys, leaning from the factories at various precarious angles, belch black smoke as vigorously as any modern electric power station, and so do those of the houses, like rows of organ-stops, along the ill-lit, dour little terraced streets that lead up in the direction of Rumbury Waste, the ragged strip of tree-grown land fringing Rumbury Town on its eastern edge.

  Rumbury Waste is a savage place enough, on no account to be visited after dark, but many a police officer would agree that the centre of Rumbury Town itself is far more of a hostile wilderness, far more dangerous. Here lies an area of mixed factories, business premises, and wholesale markets, interspersed with a few lanes of private dwellings and some dingy little shopping precincts; seamed by narrow alleys and shortcuts; a real maze where, it is said, only those born in Rumbury Town or who have spent at least forty years within earshot of the bells of St Griswold’s, Rumbury, can ever hope to find their way.

  So cold and clear was this particular evening, however, that even the smoke from the Rumbury chimneys had dwindled to a slaty wisp against the sky’s duck-egg green; so little wind was there that in the derelict corners of factory lots where goldenrod and willowherb cloaked piles of rubble, the withered leaves and feathery seeds drifted straight and unswerving to the ground.