The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  Ridley did not witness the bloodbath because he was hiding in a manger in Farmer Potatoes’ barn, where he had taken refuge after being evicted from the attic. His eyes were squeezed shut and he was holding his paws over his ears, trying to shut out the terrifying tales of the Cat’s first killings, carried by the rats who had fled Hill Top and taken sanctuary in the barn. But he couldn’t keep his eyes shut and his paws over his ears forever. And when a few badly wounded survivors dragged themselves into the barn and began to describe in grisly detail the carnage of Custard’s Last Stand, Ridley’s horror knew no bounds, and he felt his cowardice and timidity even more than before.

  It was not that Ridley mourned the deaths of all those dozens of rats, for he was scarcely even acquainted with them, and anyway, they were the rowdies and ruffians who had caused all the difficulties in the first place. No, he was transfixed with horror because he knew what was bound to happen next.

  The Cat who had killed and eaten so many rats would now retire to sleep off his exertions. But in a matter of hours—six or eight, ten at the most—he would rouse himself and return to the attic refreshed, reinvigorated, and ravenous, to finish his work. And because he had polished off all the rats who dared to confront him, he would next target the defenseless Rosabelle and her sister Bluebell and Bluebell’s children, along with all the widows and orphans left in the attic. Of course, many of these would flee rather than face certain death at the hands of the killer. But Ridley knew his Rosabelle, and understood with an appalling clarity that she would never leave the place where she had lived for so long and so happily, and where she had extended her generous hospitality to so many hapless wayfarers, including Ridley himself. And look at the way he had repaid this selfless lady! Reprehensible coward that he was, despicable ingrate, he was to blame for what had happened. He and he alone had called this calamity down upon Rosabelle’s innocent head. The fault was his, and the guilt was his. He would never be able to forgive himself.

  Ridley closed his eyes, feeling dull-witted and doltish. He would be the first to admit that complex thought was his bête noire, and that his small brain was already so full of desperate self-reproach and awful foreboding that there was scarcely any space left for the serious consideration of what should be done.

  But he had to apply himself. He had to think of some means of disposing of the Cat. He had to imagine some method of bringing the creature to justice, envisage some way to protect poor Rosabelle and preserve the peace of the Hill Top attic, conceive of some . . .

  But so much focussed concentration was exhausting. Before he could tax his poor, weak brain any further, Ridley Rattail fell asleep. And as he slept, he dreamed of a long and winding passage in Alice in Wonderland, his favorite childhood book, which his beloved mother had read aloud to him in her sweet, comfortable voice every night before he went to bed, cuddling him up against her plump, warm body:

  But as Ridley went on dreaming (and smiling, for this was a sweet dream, and his mother’s warmth was consoling and her voice comforting), his dream seemed to modulate and mutate and metamorphose in the meandering manner of dreams, until it was no longer a dream of the mouse’s tail.

  It had become a dream about a rat’s tail, or tale, if you like.

  The rat in this tale was a fat, ugly old rat named Samuel Whiskers, and he lived with his wife Anna Maria in the Hill Top attic—at least according to Miss Potter, who was putting the two of them into a book. The pages lay, unfinished, on her work table, where Ridley had read them. In the story, the mischievous Tom Kitten climbs up inside the Hill Top chimney and blunders into the attic, where Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria fall upon him and pull off his blue coat and roll him into a bundle and tie him with string in very hard knots, intending to make him into a roly-poly kitten dumpling for their dinner.

  Now, this little book was a fine book for a rat to read (at least as far as the dumpling scene, which was as far as Miss Potter had got in writing it). But it proved an even finer book for a rat in Ridley’s position to dream about, for his dream took one odd turn and then another and yet another, and when Ridley woke up a little while later, his dreaming brain had solved the problem that had baffled his waking mind.

  Thanks to his dream, and thanks to his reading of the tale of Samuel Whiskers, Ridley knew exactly what had to be done to dispose of the Cat who had caused so much grief and anguish in the Hill Top attic.

  27

  Miss Potter Takes a Walk

  SUNDAY, 28 APRIL

  Beatrix woke up on Sunday morning to find the cat asleep on the foot of the bed. She remembered trying several times in the night to push him onto the floor, but it was of no use. It was becoming very clear that this cat was a problem. Rats or no rats, she would have to get rid of him.

  But not today. As she threw open her window and put her head out, she was cheered and refreshed by a glorious blue sky and warm southerly breeze. The night had been a long one and she had been restless, disturbed by the recollection of what had happened at the party, as well as by a great deal of noise in the attic. Really, one would have thought a war was being waged up there!

  The weather in the Land between the Lakes was as changeable as a child’s temper, especially in the spring—slate-gray clouds in the morning, a smiling of sunshine in the afternoon, and a brisk north wind in the evening, rattling the shutters and chilling one to the bone. Tomorrow might be a day to spend indoors, while today was just right for that long tramp through Cuckoo Brow Wood that she had been promising herself. She was already starting to think about Jemima Puddleduck’s book, which was next after she finished the roly-poly pudding book, and she wanted to sketch a fox. There was one that denned in the badger sett at the top of Holly How—if she went there and waited quietly, she might get a glimpse of him. And there was Fern Vale Tarn, at the top of Cuckoo Brow Wood, where there were oak trees and very old beeches and a great many ferns, which might be useful as backgrounds. She hadn’t been up that way since the previous summer, and she was yearning for a nice long walk.

  So she boiled some eggs and made up two sandwiches with slices of cold mutton and put them into a canvas pack, along with an apple and a Thermos of tea and her sketchbook and pencils. She pulled on her stout leather walking boots, took her hat and her walking stick, shouldered her pack, and started out.

  It was still early and this was a Sunday morning, so there was no one about in the village except for old Spuggy Pritchard, who was carrying two buckets of milk from Castle Farm on a wooden yoke slung over his shoulders, and a trio of Mrs. Llewellyn’s chickens scratching in the grass in front of High Green Gate. A thrush was singing his dawn song from a chimney top and people must be up and about in their cottages, for Beatrix could smell bacon frying and hear the voices of mothers urging their young children to wash their faces and get dressed for church. Beatrix’s family was Unitarian and she didn’t usually attend Sunday morning services at St. Peter’s, although she and Dimity Woodcock sometimes went to Evensong together.

  Filling her lungs with the fresh, clean air, so different from the sooty stuff in London, Beatrix walked up to the top of Market Street, where it became Stony Lane, then followed the little three-rutted track: two ruts for the wagon wheels, with a rut in the center where the horse walked. The verges were green with fresh grass and bright with buttercups and daisies. The lane curled over the cusp of Oatmeal Crag, dipped down into the green valley of Wilfin Beck, and joined into a contented partnership with the little brook, which leapt and swirled and chuckled beside it, until the lane took its own way again, up the fellside. Beatrix crossed at the rocky ford between Tidmarsh Manor and Holly How Farm and climbed the narrow, zigzag path that the sheep had made to the top of Holly How, near the badger sett.

  She sat down on a rock, took out her pad and pencil, and waited, the sunshine warm on her face. She never felt dull or bored when she walked out into the countryside, for there was always something to see and sketch—something quite naturally magical, she always thought, for the wild plac
es had their own kind of natural magic. She had felt this from her childhood, during the long holidays she and her brother had spent in Scotland, where they could escape for hours and even whole days from the parental rules and regulations of the Potter household, into the magical places.

  This place was magic, too. In the next few minutes, a brown mouse with large brown eyes dashed past, chittering nervously that if she was late to breakfast, someone should have to answer for the consequences. Then a shiny click-beetle blundered across Beatrix’s boot, stopped to mutter an apology, and then blundered back again the same way he had come, like a half-blind old gentleman who had forgotten his spectacles. When the beetle had gone, a smug, self-satisfied lizard with a flickering tongue crawled out to sun himself on a warm, flat rock. He reminded Beatrix of Toby, the pet lizard that she and her brother Bertram had brought from Ilfracombe while they were children.

  And then, to her enormous delight, a red fox poked his narrow, pointed nose out of one of the sett’s side entries, sniffed the air, and ventured outside, stretching himself, forelegs out, rump and tail up, a dog’s stretch. His fur was tufted and tatty from his spring molt, giving him a rakish charm and making him exactly right for the part of Jemima Puddleduck’s would-be seducer. He lay down in the sun for a time, licking his paw and smoothing his ears, like a cat.

  Beatrix sat very still, moving just her pencil and breathing as little as possible. If the fox was alarmed when he looked up and saw that a lady artist in a flopping straw hat and walking boots was drawing his picture in her sketchbook, he didn’t show it. Finally, he got up and trotted down the hillside toward the meadow, where he was no doubt hoping to find an unwary rabbit or vole who might agree to join him for breakfast.

  Amused, Beatrix put away her sketchbook and got up, too. She cocked her head, hearing the call of the cuckoo, the clear, sweet bell that tells the world that spring has come at last to the Land between the Lakes. Like the timely cuckoo in the grandfather’s clock that sat at the foot of her stair, it reminded her that if she dallied all day, she would never get to Cuckoo Brow Wood.

  So she took the path that circled round behind Holly How, where last summer she and Sarah Barwick had searched for the Herdwick sheep she’d bought from old Ben Hornby. The narrow meadow just beyond was as bright as a painting, blue with harebells, golden with cowslips, and accented by purple pasque flowers and red campion, and beyond rose the great, green wildness of Cuckoo Brow Wood. She would stop for a bit to sketch wildflowers in the meadow, then climb through the wood to the top of Claife Heights and walk along the ridge to the little tarn she remembered, which sported a green ruff of fern along its banks. She would come back down again by the road Captain Woodcock had taken yesterday, going to and from Raven Hall. It would be a longish walk, but she had the whole pretty day for it, and no need to hurry.

  And so she loitered along the path, delighting in the spring flowers that brushed against her skirt and the very blue sky that arched over her head, sitting for a time to sketch, then going on again, completely unaware that this was the very same path along which, just the afternoon before, Rascal (following Badger’s map) had led the children through the ancient woods to Fern Vale Tarn, in search of the fairy village.

  Beatrix had been up to the tarn the previous summer, but the path she took on that occasion had led to the lake’s north end, rather than the south, as it seemed to do now. So when she climbed the last steep hill and put her head over the crest of the bank as the children had done, she found herself looking down into a magical green glade that was entirely new to her. In fact, she was every bit as astonished and delighted as they had been at the sight of the velvety pillows of moss, the soft carpet of leaves, and the emerald lake just beyond, fringed with fern and floating water-lilies. And just as they had, she imagined the little glen transfixed in the silence of a magical enchantment.

  But her imagination was framed by what she had read. She remembered Mr. Barrie’s description of the fairy balls in the Fairy Basin at Kensington Gardens, and the magical woodland in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine . . .

  Then she thought of the old Cumbrian saying, “Fairy folk live in old oaks,” and the country people’s belief that the huge, gnarled roots of the oak and fir and beech trees concealed the doors to the houses where the Folk lived.

  And when she remembered Arthur Rackham’s drawings of fairy doorways in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, she got down on her hands and knees to look for a door amongst the roots, which might have a gold doorbell hung beside it and open into little hallways, with miniature umbrella stands and pegs for hanging coats and hats and signs that said MIND YOUR STEP.

  She wasn’t surprised when she didn’t find a door, for she had the feeling that fairies were extremely rare these days. If any still lived in this glen, they would have taken the trouble to hide their doors so that an inquisitive person would not be easily able to find them. But if there were fairies, they would need some fairy furniture, and so she collected some twigs and bark and leaves and small vines as pliable as twine, along with several other interesting woodsy bits. She sat down on a hummock of moss and constructed a tiny table with two fat red toadstools for stools. And then, inspired, she built a canopy of branches over it, with slabs of bark at the back and sides and ferns for a roof and a path of white pebbles leading across the mossy turf to a nearby rock, overlooking the tarn. She set two acorn caps on the table for plates and filled them with tiny red berries, and stuck a sprig of wild thyme in a bit of moss for a centerpiece. And all the while she was smiling at herself for fancying that fairies and Folk were real, and then smiling at herself for fancying they weren’t.

  Now, you may think it strange and perhaps even silly that a woman of Beatrix Potter’s age (I won’t say exactly what that is, but some might say she was old enough to know better) would get down on her hands and knees to hunt for fairy doorways in the mossy roots of old oak trees, or stop to build a little garden-house for fairies who wanted to have their supper out of doors.

  But if that’s what you think, you must think again. When Beatrix was a child, she played with fairies in exactly the same way she played with the animals who shared her third-floor nursery at Bolton Gardens. She believed (or wanted to believe, which came to the same thing) that real fairies lived amongst the real creatures of the real forests and fields, and that even though she might not have been lucky enough to see them on her last visit to the garden or the woods, she was bound to see them the next time, or the next, or the next. If she believed, there was always hope.

  Grown up at last and required to live all day long in the real world, it now seemed to Beatrix that imaginary fairies were of a great deal more use than real ones. And I think we must agree with her on that score. It is undeniably true that the imagination is far more powerful than knowledge, and that it is much more important to believe in something than to know it! There is, after all, a limit to the things we can know (even if we are fortunate enough to be geniuses), but no limit whatsoever to the things we might imagine. And if we cannot imagine, we will never know what we have yet to learn, for imagination shows us what is possible before knowledge leads us to what is true. For Beatrix, dreaming, imagining, creating, improvising, and fancying redeemed the stern and sometimes frightening world in which she lived, and allowed her to transform it.

  Well, if the fairies wouldn’t open their doors and come out and let her draw them, there were certainly many other things that belonged in her sketchbook. She drew her fairy table with its red toadstool chairs. Then, thinking about Jemima Puddleduck and the fox, she drew several trees and a view of the path, which might come in handy as a background. Then she spent some time drawing lichens growing on a larch and others on a fir tree and put a few samples into her pack, so she could take them back to Bolton Gardens and look at them under her microscope.
After that, she sketched the ferns and the sedge grass along the lakeshore, and a red squirrel who ran out onto an oak branch and perked his ears and flicked his bushy tail and watched her curiously with his brilliant black eyes. (Since Beatrix didn’t know about the dwelves, she couldn’t know that they are shape-shifters and enjoy turning themselves into squirrels and magpies and even fish or frogs, when the day is very warm and they feel like having a swim. And it is, of course, quite impossible for me or you or anybody to know whether the red squirrel on the oak was really a squirrel, or a dwelf having a bit of a squirrel-frolic. Only the dwelf could say for certain and only if he wanted to, which he probably wouldn’t, since his purpose in shifting his shape in the first place was to deceive.)

  It was in this way that Beatrix completely lost herself for quite a time in this magical glade, beside the small, placid tarn, imagining that she was in a primeval forest far removed in time and space from the rest of the world. In fact, it seemed so ancient and so completely, delightfully, naturally wild that when she looked up and glimpsed, at a distance through the trees, the shapes of round towers and battlemented turrets, their conical roofs silhouetted against the very blue sky, she thought at first that it had to be an enchanted castle, where a princess was waiting to be released from the spell that bound her.

  And then she realized that what she was seeing was no enchanted castle, but the solid stone shape of Raven Hall. This recognition brought her back to civilization with an unpleasant thump, and looking around, she saw that the little lake (which she had thought to be far away from anywhere, away at the back of beyond) must lie instead at the bottom of Major Kittredge’s garden. She glimpsed a wide, mown lawn that sloped up to Raven Hall, the green shape of a neatly trimmed yew hedge with an arch cut into it, and the outline of an elaborate folly, like a Greek temple.