‘I suppose,’ I began, but then I shook myself hard. ‘Stop trying to distract me!’
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘What was it you wanted, precisely?’
‘This!’ I said, and I took a step closer to the shelf.
I was trembling.
What if I was wrong?
What if it didn’t work?
I looked at the glass of water in my hand. I looked at the bookcase.
Then I tipped the water all over the top shelf.
‘So unexpected!’ Sugar Rixel breathed.
‘Hush,’ I told her. I was trembling violently now.
‘Might I just get a couple of towels?’ she asked.
‘Wait,’ I said.
‘It’s just, I’d rather the water didn’t spill onto the next shelves down and damage the books?’
‘In a moment,’ I whispered.
And then it happened. The patches of red began to shrivel and then spread across the shelf. As they did this, they faded to a quieter, softer red.
Then, almost at once, they became deep pink.
A cheerful pink.
Pale pink.
White.
‘This is fascinating!’ Sugar Rixel exclaimed.
‘Wait, wait,’ I said through gritted teeth.
Pale green.
Pale blue.
Blue.
Blue.
Still blue.
‘There!’ I said.
‘Where?’
‘It’s not the crimson sap of the tehassifer tree!’ I shouted wildly. ‘It’s the blue oil of katamanchi kelp!’
Now an interesting thing happened to Sugar Rixel’s face. It was a lot like the paint actually: her face seemed to shrivel then expand while different colours rose and faded on her cheeks.
Eventually, she looked straight at me. She spoke in a hoarse voice: ‘The katamanchi kelp?’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘In the ocean, it’s blue, but if you take it out, it dries to red. You only have to splash water on it for it to go back to blue!’
Sugar Rixel gazed at the shelf and absentmindedly began to mop up the spilling water with her smock.
‘I got the idea from the syrup,’ I told her.
‘The syrup,’ Sugar Rixel repeated politely.
‘There were ants on the syrup at Aunt Emma’s cottage, but none on the red paint. None on the sap of the trees outside, either. But in the photos of your bookcase and your window ledge? Ants all over the red.’
Sugar Rixel nodded vaguely, but she wasn’t listening.
‘So I went to the library to see if any other plants made a red paint. And there it was. Katamanchi kelp.’
‘Katamanchi kelp,’ Sugar Rixel said, in a strange voice, ‘grows only in the ocean, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘In fact, it grows only in the secret forests of the water sprites.’ She was whispering now, almost to herself. ‘None who walks upon land may enter the secret forests.’
‘Exactly.’ I was impressed that she knew this. I had read it all in the book in the library just now. ‘Ants love the oil of katamanchi kelp,’ I added, hoping this at least was something she did not know. ‘They lap it up.’ I’d read that too.
Sugar wrung out her smock.
‘It was the water sprite,’ she said in a voice of wonder. ‘He must have come and got his pepper grinder back.’
‘That’s what I was thinking.’
‘I am astonished,’ Sugar said after a moment, quite forcefully, ‘that he would retrieve a gift.’
‘It does seem a bit rude,’ I agreed.
Sugar Rixel sighed. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it is a cultural thing. In the secret forests of the water sprites, maybe it is considered good manners to come and fetch your gifts back when you want them?’
‘Maybe,’ I said and then I was cross. She was always distracting me. ‘But the point is, Sugar Rixel, it was not my Aunt Emma who stole your pepper grinder!’
‘It was not!’ she agreed fiercely.
‘And yet you have thrown her into prison!’
‘Me?’ Astonishment flew onto her face. ‘No, no, child! Not me! I only reported the theft of the pepper grinder! I was very upset about it. It had sentimental value, you see, and the gold dust came in so handy. So Chief Detective Riley came and did his detective work with his magnifying glass and his camera and he was so excited about it! He loves detective work. And next thing you know, my dear Emma had been arrested!’
‘You should have called the whole thing off right then,’ I told her.
‘I tried! But Chief Detective Riley said it was out of my hands now, that the law had been set in motion, and none could stand before its churning wheels, and before you knew it, the Circuit Judge was here and they were locking dear Emma away!’
‘He’s a dreadful man,’ I said, ‘Chief Detective Riley.’
Sugar Rixel clicked her teeth. ‘Well, yes and no,’ she said. ‘He can be a real grump, but he’s my godfather, you see, and he promised to take care of me when my father died, and he takes that responsibility so seriously! He knew I loved my pepper grinder.’
‘Hmph,’ I said.
Sugar Rixel fixed me with an earnest look. ‘Dear child, I have been so distressed about Emma! My tears have flown every which way!’ She flung her hands around, demonstrating the direction of her tears. ‘And when I haven’t been weeping, I’ve been rowing about, gathering the materials I need for a jailbreak.’
For the first time, I was struck silent.
She nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, I’m planning to bust her out of there,’ she told me. ‘I’ve got ropes and disguises and crowbars. She can’t stay! She can’t live without her painting! Remember when I saw you on the ferry wharf yesterday? I was on my way to Carafkwa Island to get some expert advice on jailbreaks. They have a marvellous criminal element on Carafkwa. They were so helpful. Some of them have even worked with the great Gustav Spectaculo! You’ve heard of him, of course?’
‘Of course,’ I agreed. Everyone knew the tales of Gustav Spectaculo. He was a master criminal. For years, he was pursued by a master spy known as The Scorpion. But when she caught him, she didn’t put him in prison. She talked him into becoming well-behaved and her partner. Together, they headed up the Anti-Pirate League, which did important work during the Whispering Wars, when the Whispering Kingdom, along with their pirate friends, tried to conquer all the Kingdoms and the Empires. But they retired when the peace treaty was signed.
‘Anyway,’ Sugar continued. ‘One of the criminals offered me a gun in exchange for a painting of daisies. Hence!’ She waved her hand at the easel. ‘The daisies.’
‘But a gun!’
‘I thought it might be handy. The criminal element agreed. Brilliant idea, they said. Do you not agree with them, Bronte?’
‘Well!’ I began. Was a gun a brilliant idea when you were breaking somebody out of jail? I tried to give some thought to my answer, weighing up the pros and cons, but then I shook myself and cried: ‘Who cares if it would have been handy! Guns are dangerous!’
‘But Detective Riley would have shot at me if I tried to break Emma out of jail. No question. So it would make sense to have a gun to shoot back.’
‘Detective Riley is a dreadful man,’ I said again.
‘Yes, you said that but, as I said, he’s my godfather and he’s always so protective of me.’
‘You just said he’d shoot at you!’
‘He would. That’s why I had the gun. To shoot back.’
‘But then you would kill somebody! Your godfather!’
‘Oh, no, just wound his foot. I was only planning to aim at his feet.’
I was stern with her. ‘You could have missed.’
‘Well, that would have been all right then. If I missed, no harm done.’
‘No! I mean you could have missed his foot and got him in the heart!’
‘That would make me a dreadful shot,’ Sugar began and then she paused. ‘We could argue about this for days. I e
xpect you would win in the end, Bronte, as you seem very committed, but so much time would be lost. The point is, I was going to get a gun and that’s why I’m painting daisies. Generally speaking, I’d never paint daisies. My flower phase is long behind me. But that is how far I was willing to go to free dear Emma.’
Now her eyes shone. ‘But I won’t need to finish the daisies! Or get the gun! My dear child, Emma is innocent! It was the water sprite! We will get Emma out of prison in a proper legal way!’
She grabbed my hands and began to dance me around the room. She laughed and I laughed and we spun around, and then, at exactly the same moment, we stopped. ‘But why did she confess?’ we said.
We decided she must have been thinking about something else when she confessed.
‘She is very absentminded,’ Sugar Rixel said. ‘Don’t you find?’
‘I’ve never met her,’ I admitted. ‘But Aunt Isabelle told me that Aunt Emma would forget her own feet if they weren’t fixed firmly to her legs. She was always dreaming about her next painting, Aunt Isabelle said.’
So that was all right.
Next we hurried out to tell Chief Detective Riley that Emma was innocent. We were halfway up the path when Sugar paused.
‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if Detective Riley will believe us.’
‘He has to! We will take him to the library and show him the book I found! Then we’ll take him to your shelf and I’ll tip the water on it again.’
Sugar Rixel looked thoughtful. ‘That’s a lot of taking,’ she said. ‘I think maybe we should get the water sprite to write a letter, confessing. You can’t argue with a letter.’
She swivelled and began marching in the opposite direction, down towards the water.
‘I’m a little irritated with the water sprite,’ she chatted, as we marched. ‘Even if it is a cultural thing. He gave me the pepper grinder to thank me for looking after him! Now that he’s taken it back, does that mean I didn’t look after him?’
‘I don’t think time works like that,’ I said.
‘Well, he shouldn’t have made that flowery speech about the pepper grinder being his most prized possession, and how he wished he could give me a thousand of them, that’s how grateful he was. I said, oh no, I wouldn’t have room for a thousand.’
By now, we had reached the little beach I had seen from the ferry wharf the day before. There was Barnabas, fishing again. We both waved at him, and he raised a hand and nodded.
Seaweed and driftwood were scattered about the sand. Sugar Rixel sat down on a rock, pulled off her sandals, and waved at Barnabas a second time. She turned to face the ocean. Waves plashed gently against the shore.
After a while, I said, ‘Now, then.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Sugar Rixel roused herself. ‘I was just thinking of the day I found my water sprite on the sand here, all battered and bleeding, poor thing. He’d been in a swordfight with his brother. And then I was thinking that I’d quite like to paint that crab there, do you see it?’
A large crab scuttled across the sand and disappeared behind a rock. ‘It’s gone now,’ I pointed out.
‘Isn’t that the way?’ sighed Sugar Rixel.
I began to wonder how my Aunt Emma and Sugar Rixel ever concentrated long enough to be friends.
‘Will we just wait here for the water sprite?’ I murmured, as politely as I could.
Sugar pushed herself up from the rock and squinted around. ‘Here we go!’ She picked up a damp, twisty piece of driftwood. ‘Perfect.’ Her eyes scanned the sand again, and then she pounced, dragging up another, bigger stick.
Next, Sugar waded into the water. She stopped when the water reached her knees, raised the sticks high, and began to beat them together. At first, it just sounded like a racket, but then a certain rhythm emerged.
Thwack-thwack-thwack
Thwack … thwack … thwack
Thwack.
Then the same pattern again, and again.
The sound echoed strangely on the beach. Over at the wharf, Barnabas watched Sugar Rixel. She lowered the sticks to her side, but the thwacking sound still drifted around us as echoes. The wharf creaked.
Barnabas turned back to his fishing.
There was a long quiet.
Sugar raised the sticks and began again.
Something troubled me. I took off my own sandals and waded into the water myself. It was cool and refreshing. ‘Is this how you call your water sprite?’ I asked, once I was standing beside her. ‘Or are you just having fun?’
‘Hm?’ Sugar Rixel glanced at me, thwacking away.
Oh gosh, I thought. She’s mad.
Then a water sprite was standing beside us, seawater streaming from his hair, down his face, past his smile.
I had never seen a water sprite before.
I wondered if they were all as handsome as this one. He looked a lot like a man—a shortish man, broad in the shoulders. His chest was bare and his skin was a rich dark-golden colour, seaweed dusting it, the way regular men are often dusted in hair. The seaweed thickened around his hips and became a sort of skirt.
‘Sugar Rixel!’ he said, and his voice had a deep, rough, friendly tone. It was difficult not to stare at his face, his eyes were so creased with his smile.
‘That is all very well,’ replied Sugar Rixel tartly, and she was not smiling. ‘But why did you take your pepper grinder back! I call that mighty rude!’
The water sprite glanced towards the sky and then abruptly sank into the water again and disappeared.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Just wait,’ Sugar told me. ‘He needs to replenish often, you see.’
The water sprite soared up again, with a splash.
‘Good morning, young one,’ he said turning his smile towards me. ‘My title is Cyphus, King of the Water Sprites, Division 32. May I know your title?’
He was a King! Nobody had told me that the water sprite was a King!
‘Take no notice,’ Sugar Rixel declared. ‘There are dozens of Kings amongst the water sprites. They’ve split themselves into that many divisions! It’s more like he’s a chairman or something. Cyphus, this is Bronte Mettlestone, and she is the niece of my dearest friend in all the world, Emma Mettlestone. And you’ve gone and got Emma locked away in jail!’
Cyphus nodded along with all of this, very interested. ‘A moment,’ he murmured, and into the water he went.
When he re-emerged, he lay on the water’s surface, hands behind his head, kicking his feet gently. I could see that his feet were large and flipper-shaped, the toes webbed, which was to be expected.
‘Sugar Rixel,’ he said, ‘most beauteous marvel of all marvels, Sugar Rixel. I often plead with the stars to contain my adoration of you, beautiful marvel who dazzles to behold and who once saved my life. But the stars cannot contain it, try as they might.’
We both looked at him.
‘I adore you,’ he clarified.
‘Oh pssht,’ Sugar Rixel complained. ‘Get to the point. Why did you take your pepper grinder?’
‘But I didn’t,’ he said, and he sank gracefully beneath the surface.
We only had time to glance at one another in consternation and then he was back.
‘Please,’ he said, twisting and turning in the water, ‘explain why you think that I did?’
So Sugar Rixel told him the story of her pepper grinder going missing and red paint everywhere, which meant that Emma was accused on account of her red phase, and so Emma was sent to prison, and then dear Bronte discovered that it was not the crimson sap of the tehassifer tree but the blue oil of the katamanchi kelp! Which is only available in the forests of the water sprites so it must have been Cyphus! It must have!
I noticed that she skipped the bit about Emma confessing, which seemed sensible.
Cyphus bobbed up and down in the water. His face became thoughtful. ‘Sugar Rixel,’ he said, raising his hands so that water rushed between his fingers. ‘I will return.’ And arcing like a dolphin, he dove into the water a
nd was gone.
We stood side by side in the quiet.
The quiet continued.
Over at the wharf, I saw that Barnabas was watching us with open interest. He raised a hand in a kind of questioning shrug. Sugar Rixel shrugged back.
‘When?’ I said forlornly. ‘When will he return?’
Sugar Rixel sighed. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’
We waited. The water moved around our ankles. The sun was warm on my head and face.
I began to think we ought to head in for lunch.
‘I am back!’ It was the water sprite again, only now his face was as ferocious as a gravel pit. ‘Come!’ He pressed us both towards the shore. ‘We will rush to your police station! Your friend must be released at once! My dear Sugar Rixel, he will pay for this! He will pay!’
Sugar and I hurried along beside him, water splashing everywhere.
‘But who are you talking about?’ Sugar Rixel cried. ‘Who will pay?’
‘My brother.’ His voice was now so deep and grim, it seemed to rise up from a canyon. ‘My brother stole your pepper grinder, Sugar.’
King Cyphus insisted on coming with us to the police station to see Chief Detective Riley.
‘No time to write a letter,’ he growled, when Sugar Rixel suggested this. ‘Your friend is wrongly accused!’
We ended up taking him there in a wheelbarrow. Seeing the commotion, Barnabas had put down his fishing line and joined us on the beach, and he ran to his place for the barrow. Now he pushed it, bumping along over the rough terrain, while Sugar and I ran on either side, carrying buckets of seawater. We splashed the water sprite with these as often as we could.
‘The injustice!’ he shouted. ‘I cannot abide it!’
I’d rarely seen anybody so angry. Certainly I’d never seen anybody riding in a wheelbarrow this angry. Ordinarily a person in a wheelbarrow will laugh and whoop at the fun of it all. (Although now I remember that my Aunt Isabelle fractured her ankle once while gardening, and the Butler gave her a ride back to the apartment in a wheelbarrow. She did not laugh so much as wince and be pale.)
‘He will pay for this! Oh, my brother will pay!’ the water sprite roared, and: ‘Hurry, man, spin the wheels of this contraption faster! A woman is falsely accused!’
The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone Page 8
