Hugo Pepper

by Paul Stewart

  Hugo jumped up from the barrel and ran through to join them in the shop.

  ‘You’re up early, Hugo, dear,’ smiled Daisy. ‘Perhaps you’d better open the door, Lily, dear. Before whoever it is breaks the knocker.’

  Lily slid back the bolts, top and bottom, and opened the door. A small, rather plump gentleman in a grey overcoat and large bowler hat stood holding a clipboard and pen. When he saw Lily and Daisy, he tipped his hat and gave a short, dry little cough.

  ‘ Ahem! Good morning, Miss Lily and Miss Daisy Neptune? My name’s Horace Pingle of Pingle, Pingle, Duff and Pingle, bailiffs acting on behalf of your creditors …’

  ‘Bailiffs?’ said Daisy.

  ‘Creditors?’ said Lily.

  ‘I’m afraid your rent became overdue today – at one minute past midnight to be exact,’ said Horace Pingle, ‘and the director of the institute has decided to evict you. Please sign here.’

  ‘Evict us!’ said Daisy and Lily, both together.

  ‘You have five minutes to collect your personal items. All other goods in the shop will be sold to pay your rent and, ahem … eviction costs.’

  ‘What eviction costs?’ said Hugo, flushing an angry red.

  ‘Well,’ said Horace Pingle, blushing himself. ‘There’s my fee, and the fees of Pingle, Duff and Pingle over there … Eviction is a costly business.’

  Hugo looked along the pavement. Three other bailiffs were there, one outside each of the other shops on the south side, clipboards in hand. Bang! Bang! Bang! – Bang! Bang! Bang! – Bang! Bang! Bang!

  They knocked on each of the doors in turn.

  Five minutes later, a motley group of individuals stood on the pavement on the south side of Firefly Square. Behind them, men in bowler hats were hammering signs reading UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT onto the door of each shop.

  ‘This is all Alfie Spangle’s fault,’ said Hugo bitterly, clutching his rolled-up blanket and reindeer herder’s costume.

  ‘Alfie Spangle?’ said Daisy and Lily Neptune.

  ‘The butcher’s boy?’ said the Camomiles and Edward Evesham.

  ‘Never mind that for the moment,’ said Meena Dalle, tearfully. ‘What are we going to do right now?’

  Tap-tap-tap!

  All heads turned to see the tall grey figure of the lamplighter come round the corner of Sleeping Horse Lane and walk towards them. He paused and reached up, and put out the lamp on the corner, then moved on.

  Tap-tap-tap!

  The lamplighter stopped and looked at the small group standing beneath the next lamppost with his watery, grey eyes. He looked at their suitcases and packing trunks; he looked at their sad, shocked faces; he looked at Hugo Pepper, small and defiant, in his sou’wester and oversized sailor’s jacket – and an extraordinary thing happened.

  The lamplighter did something no one had ever seen him do before. He smiled a sad, faraway sort of smile.

  ‘You’d better come with me,’ he said.

  “The lighthouse keeper loved the new fountain, with its statue of a cat …”

  The Family Secret

  Once upon a time, there was a lighthouse keeper whose lighthouse had no lamp. The lighthouse had just been built by the Harbour Board of Harbour Heights, a bustling little fishing town which had grown big enough to need one.

  Everyone was very proud of the lighthouse at Cyclops Point, which was painted in fresh red and white stripes and could be seen from all over the little town. Unfortunately, as soon as the sun set, it couldn’t be seen from the sea any longer, because it didn’t have a lamp. This was because the blacksmith who was supposed to be making it was busy working on another job. Whenever the lighthouse keeper asked him when the lamp would be ready, the blacksmith would just shrug his shoulders and mutter something about pirates and sea-beds and complicated wrought-ironwork.

  Then, one night, there was a terrible storm and the lighthouse keeper felt awful sitting in his lighthouse with no lamp, unable to help the ships out at sea. The very next day he went over to the blacksmith’s shop where he found him working on a fountain which he’d just been commissioned to make.

  Refusing to accept no for an answer, the lighthouse keeper forced the blacksmith to finish the lamp and to install it at the top of his lighthouse. In return, the lighthouse keeper helped the blacksmith – who was a really skilled craftsman – with the fountain which, when it was completed, was placed in Firefly Field, on the edge of town. The lighthouse keeper loved the new fountain, with its statue of a cat and two seagull spouts, and visited it often – which is where he met a beautiful woman with flashing blue eyes, sitting beneath a tree.

  It was love at first sight and, although the woman (who called herself Katherine) was very secretive and wouldn’t talk about her past or where she came from, they got married within a week and lived happily ever after in the lighthouse at Cyclops Point.

  The years passed and they had a daughter, Molly, who grew up to be as beautiful as her mother – and Harbour Heights grew into a bustling city, visited by lots and lots of ships.

  Then one day, when a new automatic lighthouse at Mermaid Cove was opened, the Harbour Board closed the old lighthouse at Cyclops Point. Its lighthouse keeper and his wife put their affairs in order and moved to the Wild West. They were very happy to do this because they had always wanted to retire to a log cabin on the prairie. And besides, their beautiful daughter, Molly, was grown up now and happily married to the story collector, Wilfred McPherson.

  It was only after her parents were safely settled in the Wild West that Molly told Wilfred her family secret. Her mother was in fact the notorious pirate captain, Brimstone Kate.

  Brimstone Kate had been very ashamed of her past, and had kept it secret, because if anybody had ever found out that she had once been a notorious pirate, then her husband would have lost his job and of course they would have been endlessly bothered by treasure-hunters. But they had put her past behind them, and things had turned out pretty well in the end.

  As for Brimstone Kate’s treasure, try as they might, the few treasure-hunters who believed that Brimstone Kate hadn’t gone down with her ship could never find it. Years later, Brimstone Kate did send a note to her daughter about a one-eyed giant and a one-eared cat – but it got stolen by a slovenly, yet inquisitive, housemaid called Cressida Claw who, try as she might, could make neither head nor tail of it, and in the end gave up trying.

  obody argued; they just picked up their rugs, suitcases, packing trunks, flotsam and jetsam, and followed the old lamplighter as he tap-tap-tapped his way round Firefly Square lighting the lamps, before turning down Brimstone Alley. Nobody argued because nobody knew what else to do.

  The lamplighter led them down Brimstone Alley, along Pie Crust Row and through the warehouses and cobbled yards of Harbour Prospect in the lower town. When they reached the harbour itself, he taptap-tapped his way along the waterfront until they found themselves at Cyclops Point.

  There, they climbed the winding steps cut into the rock, up to the old lighthouse. Without a word, the lamplighter approached the lighthouse door, put an old rusty-looking key in the lock and opened it.

  ‘Welcome to my home,’ he said in a deep, slightly mournful voice, stepping through the doorway.

  Hugo followed the others inside and began to climb the stairs. In front of them, the lamplighter lit the lamps that studded every inch of the circular walls. They were of every shape and size – some, large round globes, others small and delicate. Some had glass covers, others just a naked flame. Edward Evesham whistled through his teeth.

  ‘A man after my own heart,’ he whispered.

  Reaching the first floor, the lamplighter picked his way through a jumble of driftwood, broken spars, splintered decking, chipped and worn ships’ figureheads, and climbed a ladder at the far end. Daisy and Lily Neptune exchanged looks of astonishment as they followed him.

  ‘What a treasure trove!’ gasped Daisy.

  ‘Such a discerning collector!’ nodded Lily.

  At the
top of the ladder was the second floor, which resembled the galley of an old pirate ship.

  In fact, Hugo noticed, there were two crossed cutlasses above the small window and a tattered-looking flag on one wall with the skull and crossbones on it. In the centre of the room was an old pot-bellied stove with a great brass kettle gently bubbling on it. Freda and Diego Camomile both let out little gasps of delight.

  ‘What a fine-looking stove!’ exclaimed Diego. ‘And such a magnificent kettle! Perhaps, if you’d permit, we might make everyone a nice cup of tea?’

  The lamplighter smiled his sad, faraway sort of smile and nodded.

  Hugo left the Camo-miles making tea and the Neptune sisters admiring the cutlasses and grappling hooks that hung from the rafters, and followed Meena, Edward and the lamplighter up another ladder to the third floor.

  This time it was Meena’s turn to gasp. Clasped under her arm, Tik-Tik the moth-dog gave an excited little bark.

  They were standing in a room filled with intricately strung hammocks. There were wide hammocks draped with blankets and padded with cushions, smaller hammocks that resembled armchairs, with small slings on which to rest your feet. There were even hanging tables and bookcases suspended from the ceiling.

  ‘How wonderfully cosy you’ve made it,’ said Meena in her musical voice. ‘It’s so clever of you!’

  ‘Please,’ said the lamplighter, ‘make yourself comfortable.’

  Meena sat on one of the wide hammocks and Tik-Tik wriggled free, jumped to the floor and ran over to the old lamplighter. He knelt down and tickled the moth-dog behind the ears, his eyes growing misty.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ he whispered to Tik-Tik. ‘A long, long time. I used to tickle Treacle behind the ear …’

  ‘Treacle?’ gasped Hugo. ‘The one-eared ship’s cat?’

  The lamplighter smiled and motioned to Hugo and Edward to follow him up the next ladder. This was a lot taller than the others, and led up to a small trapdoor in the ceiling high above.

  When Hugo got to the top and clambered through the trapdoor after Edward and the lamplighter, he found himself standing at the very top of the old lighthouse. He gasped with amazement. Through the glass panes of the circular window that ran around the great lamp, Harbour Heights lay spread out before them. Crossing to the other side and pressing his nose against the glass, Hugo stared out at the bright, glistening sea of the harbour.

  Far in the distance, a beautiful white liner – the S.S. Euphonia – was cutting through the waves, while down by the waterfront, the school ship Betty-Jeanne bobbed at anchor. Behind him, Hugo heard Edward Evesham tut-tutting. He turned to see the mechanical wizard examining the great lamp with his long, wand-like spanner.

  ‘Seems in perfect working order – except for the turning-mechanism,’ he mused to himself. ‘Completely jammed … Most odd. A lighthouse lamp that can’t turn. Now what use is that?’

  The lamplighter didn’t seem to hear him. Instead he was looking at Hugo with his watery, grey eyes and a mournful expression.

  ‘I was just about your age when I ran away to sea,’ he said, crossing to the glass and looking out to sea. ‘That was a long, long, long time ago …’ He shook his grey head and turned to Hugo. ‘Would you like to hear my story?’

  Hugo nodded.

  ‘Long ago,’ the lamplighter began, ‘I ran away to sea and became a pirate. You might not think it to look at me now, but back then – in the old days – I was full of spirit, with a thirst for adventure to match. Well, it wasn’t long before I fell in with some bad company and found myself serving as a cabin boy and gunner’s mate on the Lazy Lobster, a pirate schooner that sailed the seas preying on merchant ships, from the ice straits of the Frozen North to the steamy seas of the Dandoon Delta.

  ‘And what a pirate ship she was! Full of the most fearless desperados that ever set a peg-leg on a plank – and the most fearless and reckless of all was our captain, who went by the name of Brimstone Kate.’

  Hugo gulped, and the lamplighter smiled.

  ‘Firm but fair was Brimstone Kate, and she liked me on account of my rescuing the Lazy Lobster’s cat from the Dandoon corsairs – even though poor Treacle lost one of her ears. Ships’ cats are considered extremely lucky, you see, and pirates are a superstitious lot. Well, after that, Brimstone Kate and the Lazy Lobster had a lot of luck, I can tell you. And before long, she was the richest pirate captain of them all. And that, as so often is the case, was when disaster struck, like a black typhoon out of a clear blue sky.’

  Frowning with concentration, Hugo listened intently as the lamplighter’s voice grew hushed.

  ‘Brimstone Kate put in at Harbour Heights to get a new bed made,’ he explained, ‘and that took rather a long time. When it was finished we had the difficult task of hauling it back to the ship. It was only after we’d finally got the blasted thing on board and into the captain’s cabin that we noticed Treacle was nowhere to be seen. We searched the ship and the streets of Harbour Heights in vain, and were just about to give up when Brimstone Kate herself found Treacle in Firefly Field on the edge of town.

  ‘She’d been caught in a gamekeeper’s trap. Poor thing was a ship’s cat, not used to the ways of the land. We buried her there and then, and set off that very night. But our luck had run out, and not long after that the Lazy Lobster was wrecked on the rocks outside Harbour Heights.

  ‘I managed to swim ashore, but I was the only one. Or so I thought … Anyway, by then I’d had enough of the sea, so I became an apprentice to a lamplighter – back in the days when all of Harbour Heights had old lamps that needed lighting. All gone now, of course,’ he said, his voice full of regret. ‘Replaced by new-fangled lamps …’

  Edward Evesham flushed red and cleared his throat.

  ‘There’s only Firefly Square left now,’ the lamplighter added mournfully.

  ‘When did you move into the lighthouse?’ asked Hugo, after a brief silence.

  ‘I was just getting to that,’ said the lamplighter. ‘Years passed and Harbour Heights grew from a little fishing town into a bustling harbour full of ships. One day I was down by the waterfront when I saw an amazing sight. Coming out of the old lighthouse at Cyclops Point, arm in arm with a handsome young man, was a young woman who looked exactly like Brimstone Kate – or rather, exactly as Brimstone Kate had looked when I’d first met her as a young cabin boy. The same flaming red hair, the same dazzling blue eyes … You could have knocked me down with a mizzen spar!

  ‘I realized at once that Brimstone Kate hadn’t gone down with the Lazy Lobster at all. She must have settled in Harbour Heights, just like me, and that this was her daughter. I found out that the lighthouse was being closed because a new one had been built at Mermaid Cove, and the lighthouse keeper’s pretty daughter was getting married to Wilfred McPherson, the story collector.

  ‘Of course, there were rumours that she was the daughter of Brimstone Kate, the notorious pirate captain, and that when she had come ashore, Brimstone Kate had buried her treasure somewhere in Harbour Heights. But no one could actually prove anything, and with both her parents now dead, the poor girl deserved the chance of happiness. So I said nothing. She moved to Firefly Square and had a little daughter of her own.

  ‘I used to see her playing in the gardens around the fountain when I did my rounds. She loved the statue of Treacle. Brimstone Kate had arranged for the same blacksmith who had made her bed to make the statue. Sometime later, it was put over the spot where we found Treacle’s body. Occasionally, hopeful treasure-hunters would start digging round it and underneath it, searching for Brimstone Kate’s treasure, but they never found a thing, so they all gave up in the end …

  ‘So anyway, I moved into Cyclops Point lighthouse when the Harbour Board closed it, and I’ve lived here ever since.’

  The lamplighter turned to Hugo and looked into his face with a quizzical expression in his watery, grey eyes.

  ‘You know,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Your eyes – they’re the exact sa
me colour as Brimstone Kate’s …’

  he shops are all locked and boarded up,’ said the lamplighter. He propped his pole against the wall and sat down in a hammock with a heavy sigh. ‘And the institute is shut up as usual. I’ve lit all the lamps – though I don’t know why I bothered. Firefly Square is deserted.’

  Meena was sitting on a small hammock with TikTik on her lap. Edward Evesham was tinkering with an old lamp in one corner, and the Neptune sisters were examining various interesting pieces of driftwood in another. The Camomiles climbed the ladder, each carrying a tray laden with teacups, a teapot and a large plate of hot buttered toast, and were greeted by murmurs of approval.

  Hugo looked around the lighthouse’s cosy sitting room. Everybody looked so comfortable and settled, and almost relieved to have left the worries and cares of Firefly Square behind. Even the lamplighter seemed cheerful, and obviously enjoyed the company. The only person not happy and relieved and cheerful was Hugo himself. He let out a long deep sigh. Everybody stopped what they were doing and looked at him.

  ‘Are you all right, Hugo, dear?’ said Lily Neptune.

  ‘Not really,’ Hugo admitted sadly. ‘I mean I’m happy that everything’s worked out so well for all of you, but …’ His lower lip trembled.

  ‘Yes, Hugo, darling?’ said Lily. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Hugo, turning from the small window through which he’d been watching the twinkling lights of Harbour Heights, ‘I was just wondering how I’m ever going to get back to Harvi and Sarvi without the snow chariot. It’s up on the roof of Evesham’s Workshop, which is all locked and boarded up!’

  He sat down next to Meena and let out another long, deep sigh. Everybody gathered round, looks of concern on their faces.

  ‘Oh, Hugo, dear!’ exclaimed Daisy Neptune. ‘We’re so sorry. We’ve been having such a lovely time here in this wonderful lighthouse that we forgot all about you.’