‘I’m actually quite good at looking after my things,’ I said, and I heard my voice becoming fractious. ‘And I waited for a very long time in the square. I thought there must have been an accident. I thought you were dead in a ditch! I saw you, dead in a ditch!’
‘Excuse me?’
‘But it turned out to be a scarecrow.’
Aunt Nancy burst into laughter. ‘You thought I was a scarecrow!’ She laughed even more loudly. ‘Oh, my!’
The laughter went on.
I sat at the kitchen table, shivering and listening to the laugh. I thought about how laughter can be warm as a dragon’s breath, or cold as a big block of ice. In some ways, Aunt Nancy’s laugh reminded me of Aunt Claire’s laughter when things went wrong at the conference—a raucous ha! ha! ha!—only with Aunt Nancy, the tone was a notch along. Just one notch was enough to change a thing from warm to cold.
I thought of my other aunts and all their different laughs: Aunt Sue’s softly murmured laugh as she helped her boys make paper chains, Aunt Emma’s sudden giggles, Aunt Sophy’s low chuckle as she stroked a dragon’s nose.
Then I thought of home, and Aunt Isabelle and the Butler playing cards in the study, all the different tones and notches of their laughter.
My father had made my mother laugh amongst the wild forest horses. I tried to imagine how my mother’s laugh sounded, but I couldn’t hear it at all.
I looked across at the empty fireplace grate and waited.
Eventually, Aunt Nancy’s laughter slowed, and she sighed contentedly and picked up the stapler again.
I felt cold right through to the centre of my being.
‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘if I could have a bath?’
‘Well!’ Aunt Nancy cried. ‘If you’d arrived at the time you were supposed to, this afternoon at four, instead of changing it to ten pm, you could have had a bath! But the hot water’s done for the day now.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
Aunt Nancy frowned at me. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Cheer up! What’s the matter?’
‘It’s just, I’m rather cold.’
‘Oh, there’s an easy solution to that. Hop into bed, why don’t you? The covers will warm you up! Take any of the girls’ rooms! You can have your pick!’
I stood up and waited, but Aunt Nancy remained sitting at the table. She picked up another pile of papers.
I should find the girls’ rooms myself?
I walked to the kitchen door and paused. Left?
‘Not that way!’ Aunt Nancy called. She was grinning and pointing right. ‘That way! Funny thing.’
‘Is there a bathroom this way?’ I enquired.
‘Of course there is! You think we have no bathrooms up here in the mountains! City girl through and through!’
‘I only meant …’ I began. ‘May I have a towel. To dry myself? I got quite wet walking here.’
‘I’m not surprised! Yes. There’s a towel on the hook right—oh, where’s it gone? Ah! That’s right. There.’
The towel I had used to wipe the spilled snow still lay on the kitchen floor. Aunt Nancy picked it up with the toe of her shoe and flung it in my direction.
‘Nice catch!’ she said.
Over the next three days, I wore every single item of clothing in my suitcase.
Aunt Nancy’s house skittered with icy draughts. Windows were cracked open in every room and the fires were never lit, although each was stacked with wood. I asked if she would like me to light one for her? ‘Oh gosh!’ she said. ‘A fire! You are accustomed to grandeur, aren’t you! Funny thing! Honestly, though, it’s not your fault.’ Then I had to wait while she laughed a whole storybook of laughter, after which she walked out of the room.
So I wore layers. All my dresses and cardigans, scarves and gloves, four or five pairs of stockings, my summer coat and my winter overcoat too. Still, I shivered. When I think of Aunt Nancy’s house, all her furniture seems to tremble and jitter, and that is because I was seeing it through shivers.
On the first morning, Aunt Nancy fried sausages. They smelled warm and delicious. My eyes watered happily at the smoke and spit of them.
‘Late riser!’ she said when I walked into the kitchen. ‘Sausages for breakfast?’
‘Yes, please!’
‘How did you sleep?’
‘Very well, thank you,’ I said politely, although I had found the mattress as hard as a board, and I had shivered and tossed under the thin blanket, eventually creeping down the hall and taking the blankets from the other girls’ beds. Even then, I had been too cold to sleep. Eventually, around dawn, I had drifted into dreams of ice-polar bears.
‘Oh, good!’ Aunt Nancy said, beaming. ‘Yes, I thought you would sleep well. The girls all have the best beds. We splurged on them. Orthopaedic SleepWells. You get the best sleep, don’t you think?’
‘Mm,’ I said, and sneezed.
Aunt Nancy smiled at me. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘make yourself useful and get the toast going, will you?’
I found the bread and the toasting iron and got to work, breathing in the smell of sausages.
‘Well, let’s have a look then!’ Aunt Nancy said suddenly.
Confused, I held up a piece of toast.
‘Ha ha! No, not the toast! I mean this gift that your parents have for me. Aren’t you here to deliver it?’
‘Oh,’ I apologised, replacing the toast in its stack. ‘I’m supposed to give it to you on my third day here, just before I leave. My parents put that in their instructions. They also suggested I go to the Mountain View Café after I give it to you, and order a hot chocolate. Is that far?’
‘Of all the things,’ Aunt Nancy cried. ‘You funny thing! I can’t say I’m a fan of the place myself.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Oh, the time! I know what I’ll do,’ and she reached for a slice of my freshly-made toast, popped a sausage onto it, and folded it up. Then she switched off the pan and tipped the remaining sausages into a container. She sealed this tightly, and put the whole thing in the refrigerator.
I blinked.
‘Butter for your toast is over there!’ she called through her mouthful of sandwich, as she hurried from the room. ‘The sausages will be perfect for everybody’s lunch! Lucky you didn’t want any!’
‘But I did,’ I whispered.
I sat at the table and ate my buttered toast. I thought about taking the container out of the fridge and getting a sausage for myself, but that would look rude if she caught me. And what would everybody have for lunch?
Now and then, Aunt Nancy hurried in and out of the kitchen, grabbing papers and muttering to herself. She seemed very excited about her meetings. I began to be interested to see what would happen.
In fact, the meetings were unbelievably dull. People kept arriving, unwinding their scarves and calling out droll things to each other, which I could not understand. Then they would gather in the living room and say things like ‘protocol’ and ‘funding cuts’, and ‘you know, those make excellent talking points but is this the time to talk?’ Or: ‘I’m going to go ahead and stop you right there, because is any of this legitimately productive?’
There were men with deep voices and coughs, and women who leaned forward, frowning and tapping their fingers on their chins.
After a while, the group would stand up and troop to the front door, winding their scarves back around their necks, calling more droll things, and slamming the door behind them. A few moments later, another group would arrive and do the same.
They were all ‘sub-committees’, it seemed, and Aunt Nancy was the ‘chair’ of every one. After the sausage incident, I had decided that she must be one of those absentminded people. But in the meetings, she seemed sharp as a tack. She kept reeling off regulation numbers, and the others always said, ‘Precisely. Good point.’
Meanwhile, I wandered around the house, blowing my nose and shivering. I read the storybooks my governess had packed for me, and then looked along the bookshelves in the living room for something else to read. But th
ere were only Uncle Nigel’s history books. I was so bored I even tried to read those.
Now I want to tell you about one surprising thing that I found amongst Uncle Nigel’s books. It was ancient and tattered and it was called:
That’s why I pulled it out. I saw the title on the spine and thought it must be a joke book. Nobody would want to visit the Whispering Kingdom! It’s full of evil Dark Mages! This will give me a good laugh, I thought—but then I read the first page:
The Whispering Kingdom is a tiny realm of gentle, private people who do not much like social interaction. To visit, you first need to seek permission of the King or Queen. If accepted, you will be given an appointed time, and the Whispering Gates will be opened for you.
Once inside the Kingdom, you will find picturesque gardens, cobblestone streets and a mild and musical people. Of course, Whisperers have the power of persuasion/ suggestion and can whisper thoughts into your head. You may find yourself stepping into restaurants or cafés, sitting down to order, then wondering: ‘Now why did I come in here? I don’t even LIKE pizza!’ However, you will quickly get to know the tickle of a Whisper, and will learn how to shake it off.
Whisperers are very sensitive people and can often pick up on your thoughts or emotions. So don’t be surprised if a Whisperer suddenly offers you a hug on a day when you’re feeling low. Some Whisperers can even pick up on ‘whispers’ from the future: if you see a fortune teller in the marketplace, you are likely to find out exactly what is going to happen!
I stopped reading there. I was too chilly to sit still any longer and too confused to turn another page. If this was a joke book, it was not very funny. It seemed to be perfectly serious. In fact, it was dangerous. Everybody knew that Whisperers were Dark Mages: if you went into the Kingdom, you would never come out. Whispers didn’t ‘tickle’, they seared into your brain! Most probably the book had been published by the Whisperers themselves, to lure people into their Kingdom. A shiver zig-zagged down my spine and I quickly shoved the book back onto the shelf.
I kept expecting Aunt Nancy to notice that I was wearing all my clothes at once—I resembled a tree stump and could hardly fit through doors—but she never did.
‘This is my niece, Bronte,’ she told the men and women as they arrived. ‘All the way from Gainsleigh for a visit!’ and the people would be kind and say, ‘Gainsleigh! You’re a long way from home!’ Then they would ask how old I was. After that, they seemed to run out of conversation, and would go back to making jokes with one another before settling into their meeting.
The committees had breaks for morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea, and Aunt Nancy set me to work buttering piles of bread and opening packets of biscuits to set out on plates. During these break times, people would sometimes think up more questions to ask me. Did my parents mind me travelling all the way from Gainsleigh to visit my aunt? they often asked. Then Aunt Nancy would step in and answer for me by telling a story. Over and over, she told this story as she hurried around serving tea and coffee. She swished the story behind her like a raincoat on a blustery day.
‘Well, you see,’ she began. ‘I was one of twelve children. Eleven were girls but the youngest, Patrick, was a boy. Oh, he was a mad, wild thing. Like a puff of dandelion, our mother used to say, blown about in pieces on the breeze. And we were that surprised when he settled down with his girlfriend and married her! What a turn of events, my sisters and I wrote to one another—for, by this point, most of the sisters had grown and moved across the Kingdoms and Empires, and many of us didn’t even have Gainsleigh accents any more.
‘Anyhow, Patrick and Lida rented a little cottage by the Gainsleigh Memorial, but they were never there. They kept running off on adventures! Still, they found time to have a baby girl and name her Bronte. And guess what happened next?’
‘Oh yes,’ people said, sipping their tea, and reaching for biscuits, ‘Mm, hmm,’ and ‘Oh, my,’ and ‘What?’
So then Aunt Nancy told them how my parents had left the baby in the lobby of Aunt Isabelle’s building and gone off to have adventures.
‘No!’ people cried, but in a delighted way, as if the story was getting really good now.
‘Yes! That was just like them, you see. Now, if Patrick and Lida had just told us all in advance that they wanted adventure sans child—well! we could have set up a sort of roster system for Bronte! Bundling her from here to there. Which would have been so great for her complexion. But no, the issue of what to do with the baby had apparently slipped their minds until they were approaching the docks. They must have panicked! What shall we do with her? Let’s drop her off at Isabelle’s with a note! Which, again, was exactly like them.’
‘Oh, my,’ people murmured, wide-eyed.
‘The note was addressed to my eldest sister, Isabelle, and the child was left in Isabelle’s building which meant that she was responsible, as I pointed out.’
‘I suppose so,’ the others agreed.
‘Anyway, then a very sad thing happened. Patrick and Lida were killed by pirates.’
At this point, the people would all turn to me, their faces so sad and aghast that I had to cheer them up.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I never knew them.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Aunt Nancy agreed. ‘But I did. And I am absolutely devastated. Anyhow, they left a will that instructs Bronte to deliver gifts to all her aunts! So! Here she is! On a journey of delivery!’
‘What a story!’ people said. ‘And what gift did you get, Nancy?’
Then Nancy said, ‘Oh, she refuses to give it to me until her very last day! Just before she leaves, she says!’
At which everybody laughed and said, ‘Isn’t she a darling?’ and they looked at me and smiled.
‘It’s not funny!’ I said. ‘It’s Faery cross-stitched!’ But by then they were busy with their papers again and didn’t hear me.
On my last morning at Aunt Nancy’s place, I took her gift from the treasure chest and carried it into the kitchen.
‘Good morning,’ I said, and my voice rasped so strangely that it made me jump.
Aunt Nancy grinned at me. ‘Up then, are you? Another lovely sleep?’
‘Not bad,’ I agreed, still rasping. I touched my throat. There was an ache deep inside it. I thought I could avoid the ache if I just never swallowed again.
‘How did you sleep?’ I asked, more to hear my own voice again than because I was interested. This time I sounded like a barrow being dragged over gravel. It also felt that way.
‘Perfectly,’ Aunt Nancy replied.
A sudden, powerful image came to me of my Aunt Isabelle. She was frowning and pressing her palm against my forehead. She was turning to the Butler—‘You had better fetch the doctor,’—while she took my hand and hurried me to bed.
I shook the image from my mind, and placed my parents’ gift on the table. Aunt Nancy glanced at it. ‘Ah-ha!’ she said. She pursed her lips. ‘May I open it now?’
I nodded.
Aunt Nancy reached out with both hands and tore off the wrapping.
She pulled out a tiny box and peered at its label. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘They’ve got that wrong anyway. Dried rose petals. A nice thought, except that they’re pink! I’ve always had a fondness for the red ones. Never mind! You mustn’t blame yourself, dear.’ She pushed the box to the side and carried on working. Her face looked a little stern, but then she blinked the sternness away and smiled.
‘You’re having your toast, as usual?’ she asked.
I moved towards the bread, but the idea of toast crumbs in my throat was too awful to imagine. Instead, I pulled out a chair.
‘Is there somewhere I could buy a postcard?’ I enquired. ‘I’d like to send one to Aunt Isabelle.’
‘Oh, gosh! You didn’t think to bring stationery with you, did you? Just like my girls! And why ever doesn’t Isabelle get a telephone? Far too old-fashioned!’
I coughed, took a breath and tried to speak around the rasping. ‘I did bring stationery,�
�� I said. ‘Only I promised Aunt Isabelle I would send her a postcard from every place I visited.’
‘Rash promise! And I’m afraid that’ll be a no-go here. The village shops are all closed because of the avalanche risk. Oh gosh, I must book the chair for you! It will take you to the station, and I think you get a train to the Jumian Wharf and then join the Cruise Ship there. What time will you be ready to leave, do you think?’
I fetched myself a glass of water. It ran down my throat like an icy flame.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘First I’m supposed to go to the Mountain View Café and order a hot chocolate, remember?’
‘Oh, the Mountain View Café, I’m not a fan of the place. Why would you go there?’
‘It’s in my parents’ instructions.’
‘Oh. Compulsory then? The Faery cross-stitch?’
‘No. Just a recommendation.’
‘In that case, skip it.’
‘But they want me to go.’
Aunt Nancy burst out laughing. ‘Oh, my,’ she said. ‘Trust me, child, you don’t need to go to that café!’
‘I’d like to go,’ I said.
‘Skip it! What have your parents done for you, besides running off and then tying you up with Faery cross-stitch? I’ll get the chair to come and fetch you straight to the station,’ and she stood, still laughing to herself, and reached for the phone.
Everything changed colour for a moment. Honestly, that’s what happened. My eyes went flash! flash! flash! and the room went blue! purple! red!
Then it settled back to its ordinary colour.
I felt floaty. I watched Aunt Nancy pick up her telephone and begin to dial a number. My eyes filled with tears. Sorry, I thought towards my parents, I’ve failed you. I imagined the hot chocolate they wanted me to have. How smooth and warm in my throat! I imagined it tipping sadly away into the snow. The tears slid down my cheeks.
The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone Page 13
