by Angie Sage
“Not Gringe the Gatekeeper’s daughter? Oh, no.”
“I’m sure she’s a nice lass, Silas,” remonstrated Sister Bernadette.
“Well, I hope she’s nothing like her father, that’s all I can say. Lucy Gringe. Oh, goodness.”
“Well now, Silas, it seems Simon took himself back to the Castle for a pressing reason. He and Lucy had a secret appointment at the chapel. To be married. So romantic.” The nun smiled dreamily.
“Married? I don’t believe it. I’m related to the ghastly Gringe.” Silas looked whiter than some of the occupants of the tavern.
“No, Silas, you are not,” said Sister Bernadette disapprovingly. “Because unfortunately young Simon and Lucy did not actually get married.”
“Unfortunately?”
“Gringe found out and tipped off the Custodian Guards. He no more wanted his daughter to marry a Heap than you wanted Simon to marry a Gringe. The Guards stormed the chapel, sent the distraught lass home and took Simon away.” The nun sighed. “So cruel, so cruel.”
“Where have they taken him?” Silas asked quietly.
“Well, now, Silas,” said Sister Bernadette in her soft voice, “I was in the chapel myself for the wedding. I love a wedding. And the Guard that had hold of Simon walked right through me, and so I knew what he was thinking just at that moment. He was thinking that he was to take your boy to the Courthouse. To the Supreme Custodian no less. I am so sorry to be telling you this, Silas.” The nun put her ghostly hand on Silas’s arm. It was a warm touch but held little comfort for Silas.
This was the news Silas had been dreading. Simon was in the hands of the Supreme Custodian—how was he to break the terrible news to Sarah? Silas spent the rest of the day in The Hole in the Wall waiting, while Alther sent out as many ghosts as he could to the Courthouse to search for Simon and find out what was happening to him.
None of them had any luck. It was as if Simon had vanished.
27
STANLEY’S JOURNEY
On MidWinter Feast Day, Stanley was woken by his wife. He had an urgent message from the Rat Office.
“I don’t know why they can’t at least let you have today off,” his wife complained. “It’s work, work, work with you, Stanley. We need a holiday.”
“Dawnie dear,” said Stanley patiently. “If I don’t do the work, we don’t get the holiday. It’s as simple as that. Did they say what they wanted me for?”
“Didn’t ask.” Dawnie shrugged grumpily. “I expect it’s those no-good Wizards again.”
“They’re not so bad. Even the ExtraOrdinary Wiz—oops.”
“Oh, is that where you’ve been?”
“No.”
“Yes, it is. You can’t hide anything from me, even if you are a Confidential. Well, let me give you one piece of advice, Stanley.”
“Only one?”
“Don’t get involved with Wizards, Stanley. They are trouble. Trust me, I know. The last one, that Marcia woman, you know what she did? She stole some poor Wizard family’s only daughter and ran off with her. No one knows why. And now the rest of the family—what was their name? Oh that’s it, Heap—well, they’ve all upped and gone looking for her. Of course the one good thing is we’ve got a nice new ExtraOrdinary out of it, but goodness knows he’s got enough on his plate sorting out the mess the last one left, so we won’t be seeing him for a while. And isn’t it awful about all those poor homeless rats?”
“What poor homeless rats?” said Stanley wearily, itching to get off to the Rat Office and see what his next job was.
“All the ones from Sally Mullin’s Tea and Ale House. You know the night we got the new ExtraOrdinary? Well, Sally Mullin left some of that ghastly barley cake in the oven for too long and burned the whole place down. There’re thirty rat families homeless now. Terrible thing in this weather.”
“Yes, terrible. Well, I’ll be off now, dear. I’ll see you when I get back.” Stanley hurried off to the Rat Office.
The Rat Office was at the top of the East Gate Lookout Tower. Stanley took the quick route, running along the top of the Castle wall, over The Hole in the Wall Tavern, which even Stanley did not know existed. The rat quickly reached the Lookout Tower and scurried into a large drainpipe that ran up the side. Soon he emerged at the top, jumped onto the parapet and knocked on the door of a small hut bearing the words:
OFFICIAL RAT OFFICE
MESSAGE RATS ONLY
CUSTOMER OFFICE ON GROUND FLOOR
BY RUBBISH BINS
“Enter!” called a voice that Stanley did not recognize. Stanley tiptoed in. He didn’t like the sound of the voice at all.
Stanley didn’t care much for the look of the rat who owned the voice either. An unfamiliar large black rat sat behind the message desk. His long pink tail was looped over the desk and flicked impatiently as Stanley took in his new boss.
“You the Confidential I sent for?” barked the black rat.
“That’s right,” said Stanley, a little uncertainly.
“That’s right, sir, to you,” the black rat told him.
“Oh,” said Stanley, taken aback.
“Oh, sir,” corrected the black rat. “Right, Rat 101—”
“Rat 101?”
“Rat 101, sir. I demand some respect around here, Rat 101, and I intend to get it. We start with numbers. Each Message Rat is to be known by number only. A numbered rat is an efficient rat where I come from.”
“Where do you come from?” ventured Stanley.
“Sir. Never you mind,” barked the black rat. “Now, I have a job for you, 101.” The black rat fished out a piece of paper from the basket that he had winched up from the Customer Office below. It was a message order, and Stanley noticed that it was written on headed note paper from the Palace of the Custodians. And it was signed by the Supreme Custodian no less.
But for some reason that Stanley did not understand, the actual message he was to deliver was not from the Supreme Custodian, but from Silas Heap. And it was to be delivered to Marcia Overstrand.
“Oh, bother,” said Stanley, his heart sinking. Another trip across the Marram Marshes dodging that Marsh Python was not what he had hoped for.
“Oh, bother, sir,” corrected the black rat. “The acceptance of this job is not optional,” he barked. “And one last thing, Rat 101. Confidential status withdrawn.”
“What? You can’t do that!”
“Sir. You can’t do that, sir. Can do it. Have, in fact, done it.” The black rat allowed a smug smile to drift past his whiskers.
“But I’ve got all my exams, and I’ve only just done my Higher Confidentials. And I came top—”
“And I came top, sir. Too bad. Confidential status revoked. End of story. Dismissed.”
“But—but—” spluttered Stanley.
“Now push off,” snapped the black rat, his tail flicking angrily.
Stanley pushed off.
Downstairs, Stanley dropped the paperwork off at the Customer Office as usual. The Office Rat scrutinized the message sheet and poked a stubby paw at Marcia’s name.
“Know where to find her, do you?” he inquired.
“Of course,” said Stanley.
“Good. That’s what we like to hear,” said the rat.
“Weird,” muttered Stanley to himself. He didn’t much like the new staff at the Rat Office, and he wondered what had happened to the nice old rats who used to run it.
It was a long and perilous journey that Stanley undertook that MidWinter Feast Day.
First he hitched a lift on a small barge taking wood down to the Port. Unfortunately for Stanley, the barge skipper believed in keeping the ship’s cat lean and mean, and mean it certainly was. Stanley spent the journey desperately trying to avoid the cat, which was an extremely large orange animal with big yellow fangs and very bad breath. His luck ran out just before Deppen Ditch when he was cornered by the cat and a burly sailor wielding a large plank, and Stanley was forced to make an early exit from the barge.
The ri
ver water was freezing, and the tide was running fast, sweeping Stanley downstream as he struggled to keep his head above water in the tide race. It was not until Stanley had reached the Port that he was finally able to struggle ashore at the harbor.
Stanley lay on the bottom of the harbor steps, looking like nothing more than a limp piece of wet fur. He was too exhausted to go any farther. Voices drifted past above him on the harbor wall.
“Ooh, Ma, look! There’s a dead rat on those steps. Can I take it home and boil it up for its skeleton?”
“No, Petunia, you can’t.”
“But I haven’t got a rat skeleton, Ma.”
“And you’re not having one either. Come on.”
Stanley thought to himself that if Petunia had taken him home he wouldn’t have objected to a nice soak in a pan of boiling water. At least it would have warmed him up a bit.
When he did finally stagger to his feet and drag himself up the harbor steps, he knew he had to get warm and find food before he could carry on his journey. And so he followed his nose to a bakery and sneaked inside, where he lay shivering beside the ovens, slowly warming through. A scream from the baker’s wife and a hefty swipe with a broom eventually sent him on his way, but not before he had managed to eat most of a jam doughnut and nibble holes through at least three loaves of bread and a custard tart.
Feeling much refreshed, Stanley set about looking for a lift to Marram Marshes. It was not easy. Although most people in the Port did not celebrate the MidWinter Feast Day, many of the inhabitants had taken it as an excuse to eat a big lunch and fall asleep for most of the afternoon. The Port was almost deserted. The cold northerly wind that was bringing in flurries of snow kept anyone off the streets who did not have to be there, and Stanley began to wonder if he was going to find anyone foolish enough to be traveling out to the Marshes.
And then he found Mad Jack and his donkey cart.
Mad Jack lived in a hovel on the edge of Marram Marshes. He made his living by cutting reeds to thatch the roofs of the Port houses. He had just made his last delivery of the day and was on his way home when he saw Stanley hanging about by some rubbish bins, shivering in the chill wind. Mad Jack’s spirits rose. He loved rats and longed for the day when someone would send him a message by Message Rat, but it wasn’t the message that Mad Jack really longed for—it was the rat.
Mad Jack stopped the donkey cart by the bins.
“’Ere, Ratty, need a lift? Got a nice warm cart goin’ to the edge of the Marshes.”
Stanley thought he was hearing things. Wishful thinking, Stanley, he told himself sternly. Stop it.
Mad Jack peered down from the cart and smiled his best gap-toothed smile at the rat.
“Well, don’t be shy, boy. Hop in.”
Stanley hesitated only for a moment before he hopped in.
“Come and sit up by me, Ratty.” Mad Jack chuckled. “’Ere, you get this blanket wrapped around ya. Keep them winter chills out yer fur, that will.”
Mad Jack wrapped Stanley up in a blanket that smelled strongly of donkey and geed up the cart. The donkey put its long ears back and plodded off through the flurries of snow, taking the route it knew so well back along the causeway to the hovel that it shared with Mad Jack. By the time they arrived, Stanley felt warm again and very grateful to Jack.
“’Ere we are. ’Ome at last,” said Jack cheerfully as he unharnessed the donkey and led the animal inside the hovel. Stanley stayed in the cart, reluctant to leave the warmth of the blanket but knowing that he must.
“Yer welcome to come in and stay a while,” Mad Jack offered. “I likes to ’ave a rat around the place. Brightens things up a bit. Bit a company. Know what I mean?”
Stanley very regretfully shook his head. He had a message to deliver, and he was a true professional, even if they had withdrawn his Confidential status.
“Ah, well, I expect yer one a them.” Here Mad Jack lowered his voice and looked about him as if to check there was no one listening. “I expect yer one a them Message Rats. I know most folk don’t believe in ’em, but I do. Bin a pleasure to meet you.” Mad Jack knelt down and offered Stanley his hand to shake, and Stanley could not resist offering Mad Jack his paw in return. Mad Jack took it.
“You is, isn’t you? You is a Message Rat,” he whispered.
Stanley nodded. The next thing he knew Mad Jack had his right paw in a vicelike grip and had thrown the donkey blanket over him, bundled him up so tightly that he could not even try to struggle and had taken him into the hovel.
There was a loud clang, and Stanley was dropped into a waiting cage. The door was firmly closed and padlocked. Mad Jack giggled, put the key into his pocket and sat back, surveying his captive with delight.
Stanley rattled the bars of the cage in fury. Fury with himself rather than with Mad Jack. How could he have been so stupid? How could he forget his training: A Message Rat always travels undetected. A Message Rat never makes himself known to strangers.
“Ah, Ratty, what good times we’ll have,” said Mad Jack. “Just you and me, Ratty. We’ll go out cuttin’ them reeds together, and if you’re good we’ll go to the circus when it comes to town and see the clowns. I love them clowns, Ratty. We’ll have a good life together. Yes, we will. Oh, yes.” He chuckled happily to himself and fetched two withered apples from a sack hanging from the ceiling. He fed one apple to the donkey and then opened his pocketknife and carefully divided the second apple in half, giving the larger half to Stanley, who refused to touch it.
“You’ll eat it soon enough, Ratty,” said Mad Jack with his mouth full, spraying apple spit all over Stanley. “There ain’t no other food comin’ your way until this snow stops. An’ that’ll be a while. The wind’s shifted to the north—the Big Freeze is comin’ now. Always ’appens round about MidWinter Feast Day. Sure as eggs is eggs, and rats is rats.”
Mad Jack cackled to himself at his joke, then he wrapped himself up in the donkey-smelling blanket that had been Stanley’s undoing and fell fast asleep.
Stanley kicked the bars of his cage and wondered how thin he would have to get before he could squeeze out.
Stanley sighed. Very thin indeed was the answer.
28
THE BIG FREEZE
The remains of the MidWinter Feast of stewed cabbage, braised eel heads and spicy onions lay abandoned on the table as Aunt Zelda tried to coax some life into the spluttering fire at Keeper’s Cottage. The inside of the windows were glazing over with ice, and the temperature in the cottage was plummeting, but still Aunt Zelda could not get the fire going. Bert swallowed her pride and snuggled up to Maxie to keep warm. Everyone else sat wrapped in their quilts, staring at the struggling fire.
“Why don’t you let me have a go at that fire, Zelda?” Marcia asked crossly. “I don’t see why we have to sit here and freeze when all I have to do is this.” Marcia clicked her fingers and the fire blazed up in the grate.
“You know I don’t agree with Interfering with the elements, Marcia,” said Aunt Zelda sternly. “You Wizards have no respect for Mother Nature.”
“Not when Mother Nature is turning my feet into blocks of ice,” Marcia grumbled.
“Well, if you wore some sensible boots like I do instead of prancing around in little purple snakey things, your feet would be fine,” Aunt Zelda observed.
Marcia ignored her. She sat warming her purple snakey feet by the blazing fire and noted with some satisfaction that Aunt Zelda had made no attempt to return the fire to Mother Nature’s spluttering state.
Outside the cottage, the North Wind howled mournfully. The snow flurries from earlier in the day had thickened, and now the wind brought with it a thick, swirling blizzard that blew in over the Marram Marshes and began to cover the land with deep drifts of snow. As the night wore on and Marcia’s fire at last began to warm them up, the noise of the wind became muffled by the snowdrifts piling up outside. Soon the inside of the cottage had become full of a soft, snowy silence. The fire burned steadily in the grate, and one by
one they all followed Maxie’s example and fell asleep.
Having successfully buried the cottage up to its roof in snow, the Big Freeze continued its journey. Out over the marshes it traveled, covering the brackish marsh water with a thick white layer of ice, freezing the bogs and quags and sending the marsh creatures burrowing down into the depths of the mires where the frost could not reach. It swept up the river and spread across the land on either side, burying cow barns and cottages and the occasional sheep.
At midnight it arrived at the Castle, where all was prepared.
During the month before the advent of the Big Freeze, the Castle dwellers stockpiled their food, ventured into the Forest and brought back as much wood as they could carry, and spent a fair amount of time knitting and weaving blankets. It was at this time of year that the Northern Traders would arrive, bringing their supplies of heavy wool cloth, thick arctic furs and salted fish, not forgetting the spicy foods that the Wendron Witches loved so much. The Northern Traders had an uncanny instinct for the timing of the Big Freeze, arriving about a month before it was due and leaving just before it set in. The five Traders who had sat in Sally Mullin’s cafe on the night of the fire had been the last ones to leave, and so no one in the Castle was at all surprised by the arrival of the Big Freeze. In fact, the general opinion was that it was somewhat late, although the truth was that the last of the Northern Traders had left a little earlier than they had expected, due to unforeseen circumstances.
Silas, as ever, had forgotten that the Big Freeze was due and had found himself marooned in The Hole in the Wall Tavern after a huge snowdrift blocked the entrance. As he had nowhere else to go anyway, he settled down and decided to make the best of things while Alther and a few of the Ancients pursued their task of trying to find Simon.
The black rat in the Rat Office, who was awaiting Stanley’s return, found himself marooned at the top of the iced-up East Gate Lookout Tower. The drainpipe had filled with water from a burst pipe and then promptly froze, blocking his way out. The rats in the Customer Office downstairs left him to it and went home.
