For a brief moment the top of its head reappeared, and she thought she saw its round eyes glistening just below the surface of the water. Then it vanished from sight, and presently the last bubble rose and burst, the last ripple from its plunging reached the shore and died away. The marsh pool became perfectly still.
‘Great!’ said Jeff with satisfaction.
Tears rolled slowly down Samantha’s cheeks.
When he saw her distress Jeff tried to distract her.
‘I wonder where that drain leaks?’ he said. They explored the grass on the house side of the marsh pools, but there was nothing to give them any clue, and meanwhile the bogwoppit remained in terrible danger. Samantha could only hope that it would not betray itself to her Aunt Daisy by any unusual activity, or by battering too fiercely on the grid that Mr Price had made. But she knew just how noisy a noise it could make when it was bored or lonely.
She returned to the Prices feeling heavy-hearted, and Mrs Price was sorry for her missing her pet. She thought Samantha had had a hard deal in one way and another. ‘Would you like to take over feeding Bill Budgie, love?’ she offered. ‘He always whistles for you!’
But long before bedtime Samantha had something quite different to occupy her mind, for Deborah crept up to her, ashen-faced, and whispered in her ear:
‘You know those tadpoles the twins and I got that first time we went to the marsh pools? They’ve been all this time in the goldfish pond, and now they’ve just hatched. And they’re none of them tadpoles at all. They’re all bogwoppits!’
12. Tadpoles or Worse
Samantha raced into the garden with Deborah beside her.
Beside the goldfish pond the twins were staring speechlessly at the seething mass of tiny bodies in the water below, where a hundred baby bogwoppits, infinitely small, were busily shedding the protective jelly that encased them and taking their first swim, frantically searching for food.
Thankful that they had brought back those few precious leaves from the marsh pools, Samantha began feverishly to shred them with her nail scissors. As she threw them into the goldfish pond the little creatures seized them avidly, three or four to every fragment. They seemed to be born with enormous appetites, and the water was alive with them. The goldfish, terrified, huddled under the waterlily leaves. One could almost see them trembling.
The children dared not linger long beside the pond for fear of attracting attention. The last thing they wanted was for Mr and Mrs Price to discover the newly-hatched bogwoppits.
The children’s parents were in the habit of sitting out in the garden on a fine evening when the day’s work was done, and when in spite of all their hopes it failed to rain on that particular evening Jeff and Timothy thoughtfully placed chairs for their father and mother in a corner well away from the pond, arranging them with their backs towards the teeming, tearing surface of the water.
When darkness fell they breathed more easily. A subdued whimpering and squeaking arose from the goldfish pond, but passed for the twittering of drowsy birds.
Everybody went to bed.
In the morning the pond was not nearly so lively. The baby bogwoppits had grown a little, and the jelly had all disappeared. But they looked weak and flabby, unhealthy and subdued, lying about in opposite corners to the goldfish, which looked even more dejected than the bogwoppits.
Samantha shredded more leaves into the water, but the little creatures nibbled them listlessly.
‘It’s drains they want!’ said Samantha. ‘It isn’t natural for them living in a place like this! We have got to get them back to the marsh pools!’
The bogwoppits seemed doomed in all possible directions. If Mr Price saw them in such amazing quantities he would be bound to put them into a bucket of disinfectant, while up in the marsh pools they risked a similar fate at the hands of Lady Clandorris. The only hope was that they would keep to their own part of the drain and she would never discover how many of them were living on the wrong side of the grid. But it all seemed very unlikely.
‘We’ll take them up after dark, tonight!’ Samantha said. ‘It ought to be as safe as houses then.’
But in the meantime the baby bogwoppits died in their dozens. Jeff reported many floating on the surface at eleven o’clock. ‘And a goldfish!’ Tim said sullenly. The goldfish were his.
Frantically Samantha shredded aruncus wopitus into even smaller pieces, but it lay floating idly on the surface of the water. Another goldfish ate some and died. And the plants Samantha had brought out of the marsh pools had not survived in Mrs Price’s flower border. Already they had turned a sickly yellow colour, spreading decaying leaves across the soil of the flower bed.
‘They will soon all be dead!’ said Deborah sorrowfully.
‘And all my goldfish!’ added Timothy with resentment.
‘They ought to be put in the marsh pools now!’ said Samantha.
‘Yes they ought!’ all the others agreed.
‘We had better take them at once!’ said Samantha.
Relieved that she had made a definite decision the twins began to bail bogwoppits out of the pond with a bucket, while Deborah fetched her father’s toolbag. They emptied bogwoppits into the bag and removed goldfish back into the water until at last it seemed as if everything was where it was intended to be. There was enough water slopping about inside the bag to keep the baby bogwoppits alive, if not happy.
As it was Sunday afternoon they all hoped the keeper would be off duty, added to which the success of the previous expedition had made them braver.
With Samantha carrying the bogwoppits, the four of them left Mr and Mrs Price watching telly and climbed over the railings into the Park.
‘It’s leaking terribly!’ Samantha said as water splashed on her jeans and ran down into her shoes. ‘There can’t be an awful lot left inside it!’
They stopped to look, and she was perfectly right, because at the bottom of the toolbag the baby bogwoppits lay thrashing about in a welter of wet and wriggling bodies, some of which lay ominously still.
‘We were so stupid not to bring some mud!’ said Samantha. ‘We could have mixed it up out of the flower beds. Now they may all die before they get there. Come on, let’s run!’
But they had hardly closed the toolbag before Deborah stopped short in her tracks uttering a shriek. In the not so far distance they could all hear the sound of loud barking across the Park, and out of the woods strode Lady Clandorris’s keeper, who had already unleashed his two large dogs, which, uttering horribly fierce and threatening noises, were bearing down upon the children as fast as they could gallop.
Deborah turned tail and scurried for the Park palings. She reached them and sat on the top rail trembling and crying as she expected Samantha and the boys to be eaten up in front of her eyes.
Samantha would have run too, but she was hampered by the bag of wet bogwoppits, which was not light, due to the wet canvas and all the pond water running through it. Also, they were not a great distance from the marsh pools, and she wanted to empty out the precious cargo before the keeper reached them. In spite of her very real fear of the dogs she had her pride. She still regarded herself as belonging to the Park, even if living in exile. Lady Clandorris was still her Aunt Daisy, and if she could prevent it she was not going to flee for her life in front of her Aunt Daisy’s gamekeeper.
So she waved her arm furiously and shouted across the Park:
‘Call your dogs off! Stop them! Stop them at once! Make them go away!’
Jeff and Timothy had followed Deborah for a few paces only, terrified of the keeper and his dogs but unwilling to desert Samantha. They thought she was quite crazy to defy the man in such a reckless manner, but they hesitated, just to see what would happen. After all, they were closer to the fence than they were to the keeper.
Samantha was actually advancing, and to their surprise and admiration they saw that the angry dogs had stopped on the far side of the pools, and were barking loudly across the water. Their heads were held low and
their hackles were bristling.
Samantha took a few paces forward and the dogs became even more furious. It was rather like a game of Grandmother’s Steps with the grandmother never turning her back but always looking at you.
The keeper was approaching fast. Contrary to Samantha’s order he seemed to be urging his dogs on from a distance. The children could hear his exhortations to ‘See ’em off, boys! Just see ’em off!’
The dogs grew braver as their master came up behind them. They bounded forward, splashing into the pools which was the quickest way to reach the children. Samantha had reached the pools too, but she was frightened, and now for the first time she began to retreat. As the dogs came on so she retreated, and the twins were quite prepared to see her drop the toolbag and break into a run, when something happened.
The dogs were bounding through the mud and water, barking at the same time and making great leaps that landed them now in deeper and now in more shallow water.
Suddenly, just in front of their noses and loudly snapping jaws, something rose like a bullet out of the mud, screaming and chattering and flailing its small wings. It was the bogwoppit.
The dogs stopped short in their tracks. Their barking turned to uneasy growls as the mud and water streamed off their heaving sides. With a howl they pulled themselves out of the pools, turned tail and fled towards their master, still whimpering, and slavering at the mouth in fear and disgust.
‘Bogwoppit!’ cried Samantha.
The bogwoppit flopped and flapped towards her, then rose head high in its spinning flight, and dropped like a wet fruit on her shoulder, where it smothered her head and neck in muddy kisses. Then it crashed back into the pool and disappeared, while Samantha, looking calmer and more collected than she felt, emptied the contents of the toolbag under the very eyes of the keeper, who now arrived on the far side of the pools to challenge her.
‘And what may you be doing here?’ he said disagreeably. He had been very shaken by the behaviour of his dogs, and thought the children must have ill-treated them.
‘Tadpoles!’ said Samantha, firmly shaking out the bag among the half-submerged roots of aruncus wopitus.
‘And I guess you rightly know you are not allowed to come trespassing in this Park!’ the keeper said warningly.
‘Lady Clandorris is my aunt!’ said Samantha coldly. The keeper looked interested.
‘Oh, you are that one, are you?’ he said reluctantly. ‘Well, who are all those others then?’
‘Those are my friends,’ said Samantha, looking towards the retreating Prices, who, now that Samantha seemed to be in charge of the situation, were walking fast and in a dignified fashion towards the fence.
‘Well, Lady Clandorris doesn’t want children coming into the Park!’ said the gamekeeper. ‘And that’s the orders she has given me. “You keep ’em out of the Park!” she tells me. “Or else”.’
‘You had no business to set your dogs on children,’ Samantha said. ‘Did my aunt tell you to do that, too?’
‘They wouldn’t hurt anybody. It’s all just row with them,’ said the gamekeeper. ‘What did you do to them anyway, to make them run away like that? Did you throw something at them?’
‘No, of course I didn’t!’ Samantha retorted. ‘They just don’t happen to like tadpoles, that’s all.’
The keeper looked at her with suspicion, tinged with respect.
‘Well if your aunt told you to bring children in the Park she never told me!’ he said, turning away. ‘I’ll have it out with her in the morning. I mean, it can’t be one thing one day and another the next! I’ll have to see what she wants me to do about it. I can’t be monkeyed about like this.’
‘Just as you like!’ said Samantha. Her mission being accomplished she joined the Prices, while the keeper, still grumbling, made his way home across the Park.
Samantha looked back, just once. Not at the keeper, but at the marsh pools. She hoped to see the not-quite-One-and-Only-Bogwoppit-in-the-World holding out its wings to her, or at least peering after her as if it cared. But no head of frowsty feathers, no round eyes appeared above the surface of the pools. Instead, the water was feverish with dancing, darting, delirious baby bogwoppits, hurtling about among the leaves of aruncus wopitus, so that from where she stood anyone might have thought the water was being whipped and tormented by the frenzy of a summer storm.
13. The Disappearance of Lady Clandorris
‘I saw your auntie in the town on Saturday!’ Miss Mellor said to Samantha on Monday morning. ‘Now I really would like to begin a Project on those little rare animals we were talking about. Have you still got yours?’
‘No,’ said Samantha. ‘It’s back in the marsh pools.’
‘Ah!’ said Miss Mellor. ‘Well, that will be still more interesting, because we can study all its natural ways and habits. Will you ask your auntie if it is all right for us to go into the Park one afternoon?’
‘I don’t see her nowadays,’ said Samantha. ‘I’m staying with the Prices.’
Miss Mellor looked puzzled.
‘Don’t you see your auntie sometimes?’ she asked in surprise.
‘Not ever,’ said Samantha flatly.
‘Then perhaps I had better ask her myself,’ said Miss Mellor. ‘I will write her a note.’
‘She doesn’t read notes. Or letters,’ said Samantha. ‘She leaves them lying in the letter box for weeks and weeks. Nobody ever looks at them.’
‘Oh dear!’ said Miss Mellor. There was a long silence.
Samantha spoke first.
‘If we found things out about the bogwoppit, would the television people come and photograph it?’ she asked.
‘I should think that is quite likely … if it really is a bogwoppit!’ said Miss Mellor. ‘Almost everybody is bound to be interested.’
‘Would it be conserved?’ asked Samantha.
‘Oh yes!’ Miss Mellor said. ‘The moment I find out that it is really what we think it is I shall write to the Society for the Protection of Rare and Rural Life, and there is no doubt at all that it will be given strict protection.’
‘Nobody would be allowed to kill it for any reason at all?’ pursued Samantha.
‘Most certainly not!’ said Miss Mellor very emphatically. ‘Once it is proclaimed a protected animal, or bird, or whatever it calls itself, it will be a crime to harm it in any way at all.’
‘Good!’ said Samantha in great relief. ‘Do you mean they would be punished by law if they hurt it?’
‘Yes I do!’ Miss Mellor assured her.
‘Well then, I’ll ask Aunt Daisy,’ said Samantha.
‘Of course, passing a protection order isn’t done all at once … it would probably have to go through Parliament,’ said Miss Mellor.
‘Then we had better hurry up!’ said Samantha.
She wrote a letter to Lady Clandorris in class, and decided to ask Ozzy Wallace to ask his father to deliver it with the milk. At the same time she remembered her own decision never to speak to her aunt again, but after all, a letter was different to a conversation. She was not at all confident of success, but she wrote the letter just the same.
Dear Aunt Daisy Clandorris,
I hope you are well. My class would like to go into the Park to study the habits of the bogwoppits that you killed in the marsh pools. It is a crime to kill rare and innocent animals like bogwoppits and this is to be an act of Parliament in future punished by the laws of our land. I hope you will say yes to my teacher Miss Mellor and give the answer to the milkman Mr Wallace.
Yours sincerely,
Samantha
Ozzy Wallace assured Samantha that he had given the note to his father to deliver to Lady Clandorris in the morning. Samantha had not enclosed it in an envelope so that it would be easier to read, and there would be no excuse for Lady Clandorris to leave it unopened. On Wednesday morning Ozzy told Samantha that his father had delivered it into her aunt’s hands, but no answer came.
Samantha wrote the letter again, word for word, an
d again Ozzy’s father took it up to the Park. When still no answer came Samantha wrote it out for a third time, in block letters, using a felt-tipped pen. She asked the milkman herself to leave it wide open on the doorstep.
The next evening Ozzy brought her an answer which his father had collected in the morning. It consisted of her three letters pinned together, and across each letter in large black capitals was scrawled the word ‘NO!’
Ozzy did not repeat his father’s comment, which was that both Samantha and her aunt were round the bend.
To Miss Mellor, Samantha worded her aunt’s refusal rather differently. She explained that her aunt did not want any of them in the Park just at present. It was something to do with the drains, she said.
Miss Mellor at once agreed that if there was any doubt about the drains it was much better to wait for a while. ‘Perhaps later in the summer!’ she suggested.
Samantha went across the Park in the dusk to have a look at the bogwoppits. She only caught a brief glimpse of about half a dozen, but these were already half grown. She had not realized that they could develop so fast. And to her hidden shame she had to admit that they all looked very alike. It was extremely difficult to tell them apart from her own especial One-and-Only-Bogwoppit. None of them came out to greet her. They seemed very much wilder and less tame than the original bogwoppits, sinking below the surface of the water and eyeing her suspiciously from between the aruncus wopitus leaves, with their round, blue, limpid eyes.
The Prices had other things to think about … sports and athletics, a school excursion to the sea, and a school camp in Wales. Samantha was good at sport and enjoyed camping, but she thought all the time of the bogwoppits and the Park, and the stately home that ought to have been hers if Lady Clandorris had been a more natural aunt. Not that she wasn’t happy with the Prices, which was as good a home as anybody could wish for, but it just didn’t happen to be hers.
Her Aunt Lily had written again from America to say that Duggie had lost his job and they couldn’t have Samantha after all. This letter too lay in the hall letter box up at the Park, and nobody read it or was any the wiser. America was such a long way away.
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