Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

Dicky came on so rapidly that his boots grazed the shoulder of the advancing Oswald. Alice was coming next, but Noël begged her to wait.

  ‘I don’t think H. O. ought to go in till we’re sure it’s safe,’ he said; and Oswald hopes it was not because Noël was in a funk himself, though with a poet you never know.

  The cellar into which Oswald now plunged had a damp and mouldering smell, like of mouse-traps, and straw, and beer-barrels. Another cellar opened out of it, and in this there was traces of coal having existed in other ages.

  Passing the coal-cellar, we went out to a cellar with shelves on the wall like berths in a ship, or the catacombs where early Christians used to be bricked up. Of course, we knew it was only a wine-cellar, because we have one at home. Matches had to be used here. Then we found a flight of stone steps and went up. And Oswald is not ashamed to own that, the staircase being of a twisty nature, he did think what it would be like if he and Dicky were to meet Something at one of the corners; but all was peace and solitude. Yet it was with joy, and like meeting an old friend, that we got out of the cellars, stairs, and through a door to the back-kitchen, where the sink was, and the copper and the plate-rack. Oswald felt like a brother to the broken coal-scuttle. Our first instant thought was the back door.

  It was bolted top and bottom, and the bolts were sort of cemented into their places with rust. But they were unable to resist our patient and determined onslaught. Only when we had undone them the door kept shut, and by stooping down and looking we saw that this was because it was locked.

  Dicky at once despaired, and said, ‘It’s no go.’

  But the researchful Oswald looked round, and there was a key on a nail, which shows how wrong it is to despair.

  It was not the right key, proving later to be the key of the chicken-house. So we went into the hall. There was a bunch of keys on a nail on the back of the front-door.

  ‘There now, you see I was right,’ remarked Oswald. And he was, as is so often the case. All the keys had labels, and one of these said ‘Back-kitchen,’ so we applied it at once, and the locked door yielded to it.

  ‘You can bring H. O. in quite safely,’ Oswald said when the door had creakingly consented to open itself, and to disclose the sunshine, and the paved yard with the paving stones marked out with green grass, and the interested expressions on the faces of Alice and the others. ‘It’s quite safe. It’s just a house like anyone else’s, only it hasn’t got any furniture in it.’

  We went all over the house. There were fourteen rooms altogether, fifteen if you counted the back-kitchen where the plate-warmer was, and the copper, and the sink with the taps, and the brotherly coal-scuttle. The rooms were quite different from the ones in old nurse’s house. Noël said he thought all the rooms in this house had been the scene of duels or elopements, or concealing rightful heirs. The present author doesn’t know about that, but there was a splendid cupboardiness about the place that spoke volumes to a discerning eye. Even the window seats, of which there were six, lifted up like the lids of boxes, and you could have hidden a flying Cavalier in any of them, if he had been of only medium height and slender build, like heroes with swords so often are.

  Then there were three staircases, and these must have been darkly convenient for getting conspirators away when the King’s officers were at the door, as so constantly happened in romantic times.

  The whole house was full of ideas for ripping games, and when we came away Alice said:

  ‘We must be really better than we know. We must have done something to deserve a find like this.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Oswald. ‘Albert’s uncle says you always have to pay for everything. We haven’t paid for this yet.’

  This reflection, like so many of our young hero’s, was correct.

  I have not yet told you about the finest find of all the fine finds we found finally (that looks very odd, and I am not sure if it is allity-what’s-its-name, or only carelessness. I wonder whether other authors are ever a prey to these devastating doubts?) This find was on the top floor. It was a room with bars to the windows, and it was a very odd shape. You went along a passage to the door, and then there was the room; but the room went back along the same way as the passage had come, so that when you went round there no one could see you from the door. The door was sort of in the middle of the room; but I see I must draw it for you, or you will never understand.

  The door that is marked ‘Another Door’ was full of agitated excitement for us, because it wasn’t a door at all — at least, not the kind that you are used to. It was a gate, like you have at the top of nursery stairs in the mansions of the rich and affluent; but instead of being halfway up, it went all the way up, so that you could see into the room through the bars.

  ‘Somebody must have kept tame lunatics here,’ said Dicky.

  ‘Or bears,’ said H. O.

  ‘Or enchanceried Princes,’ said Noël.

  ‘It seems silly, though,’ said Alice, ‘because the lunatic or the bear or the enchanted Prince could always hide round the corner when he heard the keepers coming, if he didn’t happen to want to show off just then.’

  This was so, and the deep mystery of the way this room was built was never untwisted.

  ‘Perhaps a Russian prisoner was kept there,’ said Alice, ‘and they did not want to look too close for fear he would shoot them with his bomb-gun. Poor man! perhaps he caught vodka, or some other of those awful foreign diseases, and died in his hidden confinement.’

  It was a most ripping room for games. The key of it was on the bunch labelled ‘Mrs. S.’s room.’ We often wondered who Mrs. S. was.

  ‘Let’s have a regular round of gaieties,’ said Oswald. ‘Each of us to take it in turns to have the room, and act what they like, and the others look through the bars.’

  So next day we did this.

  Oswald, of course, dressed up in bath-towels and a sheet as the ghost of Mrs. S., but Noël and H. O. screamed, and would not be calm till he tore off the sheet and showed his knickerbockers and braces as a guarantee of good faith. Alice put her hair up, and got a skirt, and a large handkerchief to cry in, and was a hapless maiden imprisoned in a tower because she would not marry the wicked Baron. Oswald instantly took the part of the wicked Baron, and Dicky was the virtuous lover of low degree, and they had a splendid combat, and Dicky carried off the lady. Of course, that was the proper end to the story, and Oswald had to pretend to be beaten, which was not the case.

  Dicky was Louis XVI. watch-making while waiting for the guillotine to happen. So we were the guillotine, and he was executed in the paved yard.

  Noël was an imprisoned troubadour dressed in bright antimacassars, and he fired off quite a lot of poetry at us before we could get the door open, which was most unfair.

  H. O. was a clown. He had no fancy dress except flour and two Turkish towels pinned on to look like trousers, but he put the flour all over himself, and it took the rest of the day to clean him.

  It was when Alice was drying the hair-brushes that she had washed after brushing the flour out of Noël’s hair in the back-garden that Oswald said:

  ‘I know what that room was made for.’

  And everyone said, ‘What?’ which is not manners, but your brothers and sisters do not mind because it saves time.

  ‘Why, coiners,’ said Oswald. ‘Don’t you see? They kept a sentinel at the door, that is a door, and if anyone approached he whispered “Cave.”’

  ‘But why have iron bars?’

  ‘In extra safety,’ said Oswald; ‘and if their nefarious fires were not burning he need not say “Cave” at all. It’s no use saying anything for nothing.’

  It is curious, but the others did not seem to see this clear distinguishedness. All people have not the same fine brains.

  But all the same the idea rankled in their hearts, and one day father came and took Dicky up to London about that tooth of his, and when Dicky came back he said:

  ‘Look here, talking of coiners, there was a man in St. Swi
thin’s Lane to-day selling little bottles of yellow stuff, and he rubbed some of it on a penny, and it turned the penny into a half-crown before your eyes — a new half-crown! It was a penny a bottle, so I bought three bottles.’

  ‘I always thought the plant for coining was very expensive,’ said Alice.

  ‘Ah! they tell you that to keep you from doing it, because of its being a crime,’ said Dicky. ‘But now I’ve got this stuff we can begin to be coiners right away. I believe it isn’t really a crime unless you try to buy things with the base coin.’

  So that very afternoon, directly after dinner, which had a suet pudding in it that might have weighed down the enterprising spirit of anyone but us, we went over to the Enchanceried House.

  We found our good rope ladder among its congealing bed of trusty nettles, and got over into the paved yard, and through the kitchen-door. Oswald always carried the key of this hung round his neck by a bootlace, as if it was a talisman, or the hair of his lost love. Of course, Oswald never had a lost love. He would scorn the action. But some heroes do have. De gustibus something or other, which means, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

  When we got up into the room with the iron-grated door, it all seemed very bare. Three bottles of yellow stuff and tenpence halfpenny in coppers is not much to start a coining enterprise with.

  ‘We ought to make it look like coining, anyway,’ said Oswald.

  ‘Coiners have furnaces,’ said Dicky.

  Alice said: ‘Wouldn’t a spirit-lamp do? Old nurse has got an old one on the scullery shelf.’

  We thought it would.

  Then Noël reminded us that coiners have moulds, and Oswald went and bought a pair of wooden lemon squeezers for sevenpence three farthings. In his far-sightedness he remembered that coiners use water, so he bought two enamelled iron bowls at sixpence halfpenny the two. When he came back he noticed the coal-scuttle we had always felt so friendly to, and he filled it with water and brought it up. It did not leak worth mentioning.

  ‘We ought to have a bench,’ said Dicky; ‘most trades have that — shoemakers and watchmakers, and tailors and lawyers.’

  This was difficult, but we did it. There were some planks in the cellar, and a tub and a beer-barrel. Unluckily, the tub and the beer-barrel were not the same height, but we taught them better by getting old nurse’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and the Wesleyan Magazine, to put on top of the tub; and then it was as high as the barrel, and we laid the boards across, and there was a bench as beautiful as you could wish.

  Dicky was allowed to put the stuff on the coins, because he had bought the bottles with his own money. But Alice held them for him to do, because girls are inferior beings, except when you are ill, and you must be kind to them or you need never hope to be a hero. There are drawbacks to every ambition.

  She let Noël hold them part of the time.

  When she was not helping Dicky, she tried covering pennies with the silver paper off chocolate, but it was not the kind of success that would take anyone in.

  H. O. and Noël took it in turns to be sentinel, but they said it was dull, so Oswald took it on. And before he had been there three minutes he cried, ‘Hist! someone approaches!’ and the coining materials were hastily concealed and everyone hid round the corner, like we had agreed we would do if disturbed in our unlawful pursuits.

  Of course, there wasn’t anyone really. After this the kids wanted to be sentinels again, but Oswald would not let them.

  It was a jolly good game. And there was something about that house that made whatever you played in it seem awfully real. When I was Mrs. S. I felt quite unhappy, and when Dicky was the unfortunate monarch who perished in the French Revolution he told me afterwards he didn’t half like it when it came to the guillotine, though, of course, he knew the knife was only the little sliding-door of the chicken-house.

  We played coiners for several days, and all learned to give the alarm, but we were beginning to feel it was time for something new. Noël was saving the hairs out of his comb, and pulling them out of the horsehair sofa in the parlour, to make a hair shirt to be a hermit in, and Oswald had bought a file to get through the bars and be an escaped Bastille prisoner, leaving his life-history concealed in the fireplace, when the great event occurred.

  We found the silvered money turned to a dirty black when a few hours had elapsed, and we tried silver paint and gold paint. Our pockets were always full of gold and silver money, and we could jingle it and take it out in handfuls and let people see it — not too near.

  Then came the great eventful day.

  H. O. had fallen into the water-butt that morning. We dried his holland smock, but it went stiff like paper, so that old nurse noticed it, and thus found out that he was wringing wet underneath. So she put him to bed, for fear of his catching his death of cold, and the inveterate gang of coiners had to go to their fell lair without him. We left all our false money at home, because old nurse had given Alice a piece of trimming, for dolls, that was all over little imitation silver coins, called sequences, I believe, to imitate the coinage of Turkish regions. We reached our Enchanceried House, got in as usual, and started our desperate work of changing silver sequences into gold half-sovereigns, with gold paint.

  Noël was very grumpy: he was odd altogether that day. He was trying to write a poem about a Bastille prisoner. He asked to be sentry, so that he could think about rhymes.

  We had not coined more than about four half-sovereigns when we heard Noël say: ‘Hist! Hide the plant!’

  We didn’t take any notice, because we wanted to get enough of them done to play a game of misers, which was Alice’s idea.

  ‘Hist!’ Noël said again. And then suddenly he rushed in and said: ‘It’s a real hist! I tell you there’s someone on the stairs.’

  And he shut the wooden-grated door, and Oswald, with rare presence of mind, caught up the bunch of keys and locked the wooden-grated door with the key labelled ‘Mrs. S.’s room.’

  Then, breathless and furtive, we all hid in the part of the room near the fireplace, where no one could see us from the door.

  We hardly dared to breathe. Alice said afterwards that she could hear Oswald’s heart beating with terror, but the author is almost sure that it was only his watch ticking. It had begun to go that week, after days of unexplained idleness. If we did have to pay for finding the Enchanceried House, this was when we paid.

  There were feet on the stairs. We all heard them. And voices. The author distinctly heard the words ‘replete with every modern inconvenience,’ and ‘pleasantly situate ten minutes from tram and rail.’

  And Oswald, at least, understood that, somehow or other, our house had got itself disenchanceried, and that the owner was trying to let it.

  We held our breaths till they were nearly choked out of us.

  The steps came nearer and nearer. They came along the passage, and stopped at the door.

  ‘This is the nursery,’ said a manly voice. ‘Ah, locked! I quite understood from the agent that the keys were in the hall.’

  Of course we had the keys, and this was the moment that Noël chose for dropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on the mantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There is something about ‘previously demented’ in some Latin chap — Virgil or Lucretius — that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on the cracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any rate, will never forget.

  There was an awful silence — quite a long one.

  Then another voice said:

  ‘There’s someone in there.’

  ‘Look at that bench,’ said the other man; ‘it’s coiners’ work, that’s what it is, but there’s nobody there. The keys must have blown down!’

  The two voices talked some time, but we could not hear all their conversation. We were all wondering, as it turned out afterwards, what exactly the utmost rigour of the law was. Because, of course, we knew we were trespassers of the very deepest dye, even if we could prove that we
were not real coiners.

  ‘No,’ we heard one of them say, ‘if we go for the police very likely the gang will return and destroy everything. There’s no one here now. Let’s secure the evidence. We can easily break the door down.’

  It is a sickening feeling when the evidence against you is going to be secured, and you don’t know what the punishment for coining is, or whether anyone will believe you if you say you were only playing at it.

  We exchanged pallid glances.

  We could hear the two men shaking the door, and we had no means of knowing just how weak it was, never having seriously tampered with it ourselves.

  It was then that Noël suddenly went quite mad. I think it was due to something old nurse had read to us at breakfast that day about a boy of eight who played on the fiddle, and composed pieces of music. Affected young ass!

  He darted from us into the middle of the room, where the two intruders could see him, and said:

  ‘Don’t break down the door! The villains may return any moment and destroy you. Fetch the police!’

  The surprised outsiders could find no word but ‘Er?’

  ‘You are surprised to see me here,’ said Noël, not taking any notice of the furious looks of the rest of us. ‘I am an infant prodigy. I play the violin at concerts; I play it beautifully. They take me to London to play in a closed carriage, so that I can’t tell anyone my woes on the way.’

  ‘My poor child!’ said one of the outsiders; ‘tell us all about it. We must rescue you.’

  ‘Born of poor but honest parents,’ said Noël — and this was what nurse had read out to us—’my musical talent early manifested itself on a toy violin, the gift of a devoted great-aunt. Torn from my home —— I say, do fetch the police. If the monsters who live on my violin-playing return and find you here, they will brain you with the tools of their trade, and I shall be lost.’

  ‘Their trade?’ said one of them. ‘What trade?’

  ‘They are coiners,’ said Noël, ‘as well as what they do to me to make me play.’

  ‘But if we leave you?’