by Anna Dale
The wings grew at a staggering pace, and in no time they were beautifully curved and fully formed. Each wing was huge, easily matching Susan’s height. The feathers were the same shade of brown as her hair, and not unlike an eagle’s.
‘You wished for them,’ explained Arthur to Susan. ‘Say you’ve changed your mind. Unwish them quickly, Suze, before they fly away with you.’
‘T-take them off me!’ begged Susan as the wings flexed and began to flap. They displaced so much air that Arthur was nearly knocked off his feet.
Susan was frightened. She gulped and sniffed while tears began to stream down her cheeks. Arthur and Miss Quint had to shout to make themselves heard above the rasping, rhythmic wing beats. They unwished as earnestly as they could, but it did not appear to have any effect. Nevertheless, they kept trying.
The wings flapped harder. Susan gave a high-pitched scream as both feet lifted off the pavement. Jerking her roughly with every beat, the wings took her higher. Her heel clipped the top of a postbox and she tried to catch hold of a lamp post. Moments later her toes loosened some roof tiles and then there was nothing above her but sky.
‘Stop unwishing!’ yelled Arthur, clutching Miss Quint’s arm and gazing above him at Susan’s shrinking figure. ‘She’s too far up. If we unwish her wings now she’ll never survive the drop!’
They watched in helpless wonder as the great brown wings carried Susan in her gingham dress and sandalled feet over the rooftops of Plumford and out of sight.
‘We’ll have to go after her,’ said Arthur, his face taut with worry. ‘Do you think we should wish for wings too?’
‘No,’ Miss Quint said firmly. ‘We’ll go on the bus.’
Miss Quint unfastened her handbag and after delving deeply, she drew out a crumpled bus timetable and consulted it. ‘Aha!’ she said. ‘The 48A stops at Thornwick. Down-the-Ages Farm is on the outskirts of the village and that’s where the wings will have taken her.’
The bus was not due at the stop at the end of the road for seven minutes so Arthur judged that there would be time to run inside the shop and tell the others where he, Miss Quint and Susan would be for the rest of the morning. However, on reaching the first floor, he found the kitchen empty. Too well-mannered to wake them up, Arthur scribbled a message on the back of an envelope and propped it against the bread bin. He thought about calling the police to report the stolen van, but decided that it might cause too much of a delay. Catching the bus to Thornwick was what mattered most of all. A missing van was a trifling crime when compared with the abduction of Susan.
Miss Quint paid the bus fare (she had been to the bank and refilled her purse). They chose a seat on the top deck so that they would have a better chance of catching sight of Susan in the sky. Scallywag whined until Arthur pulled her on to his lap. The ride was a bumpy one, but neither Miss Quint nor Arthur complained. They were of the opinion that their journey must be arguably more comfortable than Susan’s.
In actual fact, once Susan had recovered from the shock of her own pair of wings transporting her into the atmosphere, she stopped crying and started to enjoy herself. Having no tail feathers (for she had not wished for those) meant that the flight was not smooth, but her wings did their best to keep her the right way up and swooped to avoid wisps of cloud, which were cold and clammy, and soared when they found an amenable current of air. It was freezing cold in the sky and the wind’s gusts pummelled her and filled her ears with noise, but Susan had never felt more alive, and when she summoned the courage to look below her, the view of all the fields and lakes and houses reduced to geometric shapes and bold, stark colours made her eyes swim with tears of delight. Flying, she decided, was not so very different from riding on a swing, only there were no chains and no plastic seat, and the distance from the ground was rather more awe-inspiring.
Susan’s fear returned when she began to lose height. As the wings took her downwards, the minuscule features of the landscape grew larger and more recognisable, and she started to dwell upon the perilous manner in which she was hanging in the sky and the scary realisation that she would soon be landing.
With a stomach-turning dive and a flurry of wing beats, Susan’s wings conveyed her to the ground. They avoided a flock of sheep, an oak tree and a roof of thatch, but it was not a textbook landing, by any means. As her toes touched down, Susan panicked, tripped and tumbled head over heels. Fortunately for her pride, there was no one nearby to witness her clumsiness. Susan lay still for a moment and caught her breath, then she patted herself all over and was relieved to find that all her limbs were intact.
When Susan got up from the patch of grass, her wings folded against her back. She looked about her curiously to see where she had arrived.
Not far away was a large, white, timber-framed building, which had a plump, thatched roof and tiny windows, and closer still was a giant tree with a sturdy trunk and tapering branches, partly obscured by clusters of frilly light green leaves.
Susan decided to head for the house. It stood to reason that where there was a building there would be people and if Susan was to find out where she had landed and how she could get home again, she would need to ask someone for help. Susan guessed that she could not rely on the wings to return her to Meadow Street. Although they were joined to her body, they moved of their own accord, and she could not be sure that they would do as she asked.
Encumbered by her huge wings, Susan made her way across the field, through a gate and into a cottage garden. She walked along a dirt path, past beds of unruly plants, until she reached a wooden door, which was ajar. Susan had to open it wide before she could squeeze herself and her wings through the narrow entranceway.
Inside she found a dark, low-ceilinged room with a flagstone floor. There was a bench, a table, a fireplace and not much else. The lack of possessions made Susan think that the people who lived in the house must be poor. She was just about to call out and ask if anyone was home, when a tall, bearded man ducked under a doorjamb and took a few paces into the room. He froze when he saw Susan and consulted his watch.
‘You’re early!’ he said. ‘Make yourself scarce, kid, and come back in half an hour, OK?’
Susan was too astonished to move. She did not understand why this man had been expecting her. Could he have mistaken her for someone else?
‘Kid? What kid?’ called another voice. ‘Dave! Them goats got loose again, or what?’ At first all that Susan saw was a linen cap. Then a woman in a brown dress bustled into view.
‘Gawd!’ she said when she clapped eyes on Susan. ‘Where’d you spring from? It can’t be ten o’clock!’
‘It’s not,’ said Dave, sitting down on the bench, ‘so, please, Lind, don’t pester me to show this little girl around.’ He swung his long legs up on to the table and crossed his ankles.
‘But, Dave –’ said the woman, shooting Susan a regretful look.
With a shrug, Dave reached inside his tawny jerkin, pulled out a newspaper and opened it up. ‘Listen, just because that nutcase, Gary, decides to let someone in early, it doesn’t mean we’ve got to start work, all right?’
Dismayed by the couple’s less than friendly welcome, Susan clasped and unclasped her hands. ‘I’ll go, shall I?’ she asked.
‘No, don’t be silly!’ Lind took Susan’s hand. With a nod of her head, she gestured towards Dave, whose face was obscured by his newspaper. ‘Don’t you pay any mind to that old grump! Come on, hon, I’ll show you round the farm.’
‘This is a farm?’ cried Susan. ‘Golly! Do you mean to say that this is Down-the-Ages Farm?’
Lind led Susan towards the door. ‘Well, course, it is, babe!’ she said. ‘Don’t you know where you’ve been brought?’
As they stepped outside, swapping the dimly lit room for bright sunshine, Lind noticed Susan’s wings for the first time. ‘Cor!’ she said. ‘They’re smart. My little niece has got
a pair too.’
Susan was amazed to hear that someone else had wings. ‘I thought I was the only one,’ she said.
‘Nope, wings are popular with little girls,’ Lind told her. ‘Emily’s are pink with sparkly glitter on. She’s got a tiara to match and a wand. Wears them all the time. Even to the dentist’s.’
‘Really?’ said Susan, suddenly feeling less self-conscious.
They walked a little way before pausing by a clump of mint where the path divided into two.
‘Right,’ said Lind, squeezing Susan’s hand. ‘What do you fancy first, hon? Being pulled on a cart by a draught horse or having a go at making some cheese?’
.
Chapter Fourteen
A Stinging Attack
Susan’s tour of Down-the-Ages Farm lasted for half an hour, and by the end of it she found that she had learned a lot. She knew, for instance, that Lind was short for Lindsey. She also knew that Dave and Lind did not live on the farm and were not husband and wife, as Susan had supposed. The farm was a museum. It was owned by a man called Dr Godfrey Webb and had been opened to demonstrate to its visitors what life on a farm had been like down the ages (hence the farm’s name). Lind and Dave were employed by Dr Webb to impersonate a couple from centuries past, and they spent their working week showing members of the public around the various rooms or ‘time zones’ in the farmhouse. The hall was medieval, the kitchen late Tudor, and upstairs was mainly Victorian. The museum was open six days a week between the hours of ten and four, teas were served in the granary, and dogs were allowed on leads.
For the whole of Susan’s tour, she was the museum’s only visitor. She walked two thirds of the site with Lind, stopping at the cattle shed which housed two oxen, the pigsty where four Tamworths rooted in their troughs, the stables where the draught horses lived and the dairy where butter and cheese were made. At ten o’clock, Gary, who sat in a shed at the museum’s entrance, opened the shutters and let the visitors in. Muttering her apologies, Lind went back to the farmhouse and Susan continued the walk around the farmstead on her own.
She liked the goats, but was fonder of the sheep and spent a good long while watching the lambs wriggling their tails and leaping about in a madcap manner. It was the bees, however, that Susan liked the best.
The bee-keeper, whose name was Pam, told Susan that the bees’ cone-shaped homes were called skeps and that bees knew when bad weather was coming and that bees would only sting you if you made them cross.
Pam asked Susan about her wings and when Susan told her how they had grown, she did not seem surprised. ‘I thought as much,’ Pam said. ‘It doesn’t do to make wishes in the wrong sort of places. I know that to my cost. When I was ten, I wished for chocolate fingers and I think you can guess what happened . . .’
Apart from Susan, the only visitors to Down-the-Ages Farm were two families with children and an old, white-haired couple with a rotund dog. None of the adults, apart from Lind and Pam, made any remarks about Susan’s wings, although she did get the feeling, from time to time, that alarmed looks were being cast in her direction. Without exception the children found the wings deeply fascinating, and one small boy called Jarrett thought that he had the right to tug at them and to yank out the longest, most lustrous feathers.
‘You’re being a pest,’ Susan hissed at him. ‘Go away, little boy!’
It seemed that Jarrett was not only a nuisance to Susan. All around the farmstead she heard his mother shouting, ‘Jarrett, don’t touch that!’ and ‘Jarrett, get down! You’ll hurt yourself!’ and ‘Jarrett, I won’t tell you again!’ except, of course, she did because Jarrett was a boy who did exactly what he wanted and never took any notice of what his mother said.
When Susan had seen everything, she decided to seek out Lind and ask her how she might get home. On her way to the farmhouse, Susan passed the granary and wished that she had some money to spend on a cup of tea and a bun.
Then, for the second time that day, her wish came true.
‘There she is!’ shrieked a voice, and Susan looked across the field to see Miss Quint waving her hands and Arthur and Scallywag racing towards her along a dirt track. Scallywag reached Susan first, but Arthur was not far behind.
‘You all right?’ asked Arthur.
Beaming, Susan said, ‘Yes, thanks. Golly, I’m glad to see you! How did you get here without the van?’
‘We . . . took . . . a bus,’ said Miss Quint, who was slightly out of breath, not being quite as fit as her companions. She kissed Susan’s cheek, and glanced around impatiently. ‘Where’s this teashop, then? The man at the entrance told us about it. I think we all deserve a sit down and a bite to eat.’
Over three pots of tea and an equal number of Swiss buns, Susan told the others about her flight and all that she had seen and heard at Down-the-Ages Farm. When she had finished, it was the turn of Arthur and Miss Quint to speak. They described their journey by bus and admitted the reason why they had wanted to visit the farm in the first place.
It was explained to Susan what magic was and that the magic in the bookshop needed to be moved elsewhere. They managed this in the time that it took for Susan to eat her bun, and while she licked the icing off her fingers they told her of the advert, Mr Hardbattle’s trip and the letter from Mrs Carruthers. Susan was a trusting, impressionable girl, and believed every word that she had been told. She liked the idea of going on a quest.
‘Can we find Mrs Carruthers now?’ asked Susan, taking one last sip from her teacup and rising out of her chair.
‘Yeah, let’s go!’ said Arthur, following Susan’s lead. ‘I don’t reckon it’ll be too hard to track her down.’
They made the decision to split into two groups and reconvene twenty minutes later on a bench beside the hen coop. Arthur agreed to comb the fields with Scallywag and Miss Quint said that she and Susan would make enquiries in the farmhouse and the stables. When the time came to meet up on the bench, acute disappointment was etched on all their faces.
‘I suppose this woman does exist,’ said Miss Quint, taking off her shoes and massaging her feet.
‘They only know each other’s first names,’ grumbled Arthur. ‘It’s going to be tougher to find her than I thought.’
They sat on the bench in dejected silence, watching the chickens, which were scratching in the earth, then a shout rang out across the farmstead.
‘Help me, someone! Jarrett’s gone missing!’
Arthur, Miss Quint and Susan rushed to help Jarrett’s mother at once, and the other family, the couple with the dog, and Pam, Lind and Dave, who had all been within earshot, sped to offer their assistance too.
It emerged that Jarrett’s mother was of the opinion that her son had been kidnapped, but this was pooh-poohed by the rest of the group, who had seen enough of Jarrett to be sure that no one in their right minds would want to go anywhere near the boy.
‘Let’s spread out and look for him,’ suggested Pam. ‘We’ve got fifty acres to cover so we’ll have to be as quick as we can. He’s only five years old. He could be in danger.’
‘I don’t know why I’m botherin’ to help out,’ muttered Dave, striding towards the cattle shed. ‘Ruddy little tyke put chewing gum in my beard.’
As the group scattered, Susan remained where she was. She had had an ingenious thought and, as luck would have it, her wings had come up with the exact same one. The best way to track down Jarrett in the fastest possible time was to carry out a search by air.
Susan’s wings unfolded and shook themselves, and she braced herself to withstand the pull on her shoulder blades, which would come with every beat the wings made. The wings began to flap, stretching higher and wider until they had reached the required speed to lift Susan off the ground. None of the search party saw her take to the sky because they were far too busy looking in feeding troughs and behind hay bales for the m
issing boy.
When the wings judged that Susan had risen to a sufficient height, they started to sweep through the air in a wide circle over the farmland.
She saw Arthur moving towards the sheep pen with Scallywag at his heels and other human shapes that she could not identify, all haring from one place to the next like worker ants. She picked out the stables and the farmhouse, and then in the furthest corner of the plot she saw who she was looking for.
Jarrett was standing by the beehives, striking at the air with his fists, and as the wings swooped to carry her lower, Susan could hear his yells and squeals. She recalled Pam’s advice: that bees were placid creatures unless you made them cross. Over the course of the morning, Jarrett had annoyed almost everyone at the farm and now it seemed as if he had met his match.
Before she could worry about the likelihood that she would be stung, the wings had plunged her through a cloud of buzzing dots. Susan stretched out her arms and grabbed the tormented boy and then the wings flapped hard, driving the bees away and taking Susan and Jarrett up into the clear, cold air, which was free from angry bees and their painful stings.
Holding on to Jarrett was not easy or pleasant. True to form, he was uncooperative; pinching and kicking Susan and shouting for his mum. Eventually, the horror of being high up stopped Jarrett from squirming and his roars quietened to a murmur.
Sensibly, the wings brought them to earth again within minutes. The landing was chaotic. Both children ended up lying on the ground with their limbs inelegantly splayed. Susan got to her feet first and seized Jarrett’s hand so that he could not run off and get into further mischief.
They had landed behind a barn, which was used to store farm machinery. Susan walked around it, struggling to keep hold of Jarrett, who was straining to get away.
She spied Dave in the distance and waved to get his attention. Soon the others arrived, having received the message that Jarrett had been found. Jarrett’s mother smothered him in kisses and cried over the smattering of red marks on her son’s arms, which showed where the bees had vented their displeasure. She complained to Pam the bee-keeper and was given short shrift.
