by Joan Aiken
"Oh, very well, if your ma doesn't mind,” sighed Mrs. Perrow. “I'm so distracted I hardly know if I'm coming or going. Don't forget your wash things, Diz, and the bathsalts."
Harriet was enchanted with the bathsalts, no bigger than hundreds-and-thousands. On Midsummer Eve the Armitage children were allowed to stay up as late as they liked. Mark, a single-minded boy, said he intended to go on hunting for Lady Anne's necklace in the chimney. The girls had their baths and then went up to Harriet's room with a bagful of apples and the gramophone, intending to have a good gossip.
At half past eleven, Harriet, happening to glance out of the window, saw a light in the field.
"That must be Mr. Jones,” she said. “I'd forgotten he was coming to shampoo his beard. It's not Mark, I can still hear him bumping around in the chimney.” There was indeed an excited banging to be heard from the chimney-breast, but it was as nothing compared with the terrible racket that suddenly broke out in the field. They heard shouts and cries of rage, thuds, crashes, and the tinkle of smashed glass.
"Heavens, what can be going on?” cried Harriet. She flung up the sash and prepared to climb out of the window.
"Wait for me!” cried Dizzry.
"Here, jump into my pocket. Hold tight!"
Harriet slid down the wisteria and dashed across the garden. A moment later they arrived at the bathroom door and witnessed a wild scene.
Evidently, Mr. Jones the Druid had finished washing his beard and had been about to leave when he saw his doom waiting for him outside the door in the form of another, very angry old man who was trying to batter his way in.
"It must be his brother!” Harriet whispered. “Mr. Jones the Bard!"
The second old man had no beard, only a ragged white frill cut short round his chin. He was shouting:
"Wait until I catch you, you hocsdwr, you herwhaliwr, you ffrawddunio, you wiched old llechwr! A snake would think shame to spit on you! Cutting off your brother's beard, indeed! Just let me get at you and I'll trim you to spillikins, I'll shave your beard round your eyebrows!” And he beat on the door with a huge pair of shears. A pane of glass fell in and broke on the bathroom's tiles; then the whole door gave way.
Dizzry left Harriet's pocket and swarmed up onto her head to see what was happening. They heard a fearful bellow from inside the bathroom, a stamping and crashing, fierce grunts, the hiss of the shower, and more breaking glass.
"Hey!” Harriet shouted. “Stop wrecking our bathroom!"
No answer. The sound of battle went on.
Then the bathroom window flew open and Jones the Druid shot out, all tangled in his beard, which was snowy white now, but still damp. He had the bath mat rolled up under his arm. As soon as he was out, he flung it down, leaped upon it, and shouted, “Take me out of here!"
The mat took off vertically and hovered, about seven feet up, while Jones the Druid began hauling in his damp beard, hand over hand.
"Come back!” Harriet cried. “You've got no right to go off with our bath mat."
Jones the Bard came roaring out of the window, waving his shears.
"Come back, ystraffaldiach! Will you come down off there and let me mince you into macaroni? Oh, you wicked old weasel, I'll trim your beard shorter than an earwig's toenails!"
He made a grab for the bath mat, but it was just out of reach.
"He, he, he!” cackled Jones the Druid up above. “You didn't know your fine beard would make up so nice into a flying carpet, did you, Brother? Has to be woven on a hairloom on Midsummer Eve, and then it'll carry you faster than the Averdovey Flyer."
"Just let me get at you, rheibiwr!” snarled Jones the Bard, making another vain grab.
But Dizzry, who was now jumping up and down on top of Harriet's head, made a tremendous spring, grabbed hold of a trailing strand of Jones the Druid's beard, and hauled herself up onto a corner of the flying bath mat.
"O dammo!” gasped the Druid at the sight of her. He was so taken aback that he lost his balance, staggered, and fell headlong on top of his brother. There was a windmill of confusion of arms and legs, all swamped by the foaming mass of beard. Then Jones the Bard grabbed his shears with a shout of triumph and began chopping away great swags of white hair.
Harriet, however, paid no attention to these goings-on.
"Dizzry!” she shouted, cupping her hands round her mouth. “It's a wishing-mat. Make it take you—"
Dizzry nodded. She needed no telling. “Take me to Cathay!” she cried, and the mat soared away through the milky air of Midsummer Night.
At this moment Mark came running across the field.
"Oh, Mark,” Harriet burst out. “Look what those old fiends have done to our bathroom! It's ruined! They ought to be made to pay for it."
Mark glanced through the broken window. The place was certainly a shambles: bath and basin were both smashed, the sponge rack was wrapped round the hairdryer, the towels were trodden into a soggy pulp, and the curtains were in ribbons.
The Jones brothers were in equally bad shape. Jones the Bard was kneeling on Jones the Druid's stomach; he had managed to trim every shred off his brother's head, but he himself was as bald as a coot. Both had black eyes and swollen lips.
"Oh well,” Mark said. “They seem to have trouble of their own. I bet neither of them comes into that legacy now. And I never did care much for washing anyway. Look, here comes Dizzry back."
The bath mat swooped to a threepoint landing; Dizzry and Min rolled off it, laughing and crying.
"You wicked, wicked, bad little girl,” Dizzry cried, shaking and hugging her sister at the same time. “Don't you ever dare do such a thing again!"
"Now I will take my own property which is my lawful beard,” said Mr. Jones the Bard, and he jumped off his brother's stomach onto the mat and addressed it in a flood of Welsh, which it evidently understood, for it rose in the air and flew off in a westerly direction. Mr. Jones the Druid slunk away across the field looking, Dizzry said, as hangdog as a cat that has fallen into the milk.
"Now we've lost our bath mat,” Harriet sighed.
"I'll help you make another,” Dizzry said. “there's plenty of hair lying about. And at least we've got Min back."
"Was it nice in Cathay, Min?” Mark asked.
"Smashing. I had rice cake and cherry ice and Coca-Cola."
At this point Mr. and Mrs. Armitage returned from their dance and kindly drove Dizzry and Min home to break the joyful news to their parents. Harriet and Mark had a try at putting the bathroom back to rights, but it was really past hope.
"I must say, trouble certainly haunts this household,” remarked Mr. Armitage, when he came back and found them at it. “Hurry up and get to bed, you two. Do you realize it's four o'clock on Midsummer Morning? Oh, Lord, I suppose now we'll have to go back to the old regime of sooty footmarks all over the bathroom."
Certainly not,” said Mark. “I'd forgotten to tell you. I found Lady Anne's pearls."
He pulled them out and dangled them: a soot-black, six-foot double strand of pearls as big as cobnuts, probably worth a king's ransom.
"Won't Ernie Perrow be pleased to know they really were in the chimney?” he said.
"Oh, go to bed!” snapped his father. “I'm fed up with hearing about the Perrows."
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The Stolen Quince Tree
* * * *
* * * *
Harriet was sitting alone upstairs in the dormer window over the porch. There was an old basket chair and a shelf full of entrancing books: Jackanapes, The Silver Skates, the Curdie books, and many others with thick, glossy old bindings and gold lettering. The afternoon sun shone in and made a pinkish patch on the floor. Harriet felt drowsy and comfortable. The remains of whooping cough were still troublesome and kept her awake at nights; Granny had said that she must rest for at least an hour after lunch, from two to three. She was resting now, while Mark practiced archery somewhere in the garden.
Granny had gone to call on Mrs. Cheevy, a
nd Nursie was at her weekly Women's Institute meeting, so Harriet was in command. It was nice, she thought, to hear the aged house stretching itself and creaking a little around her; the only thing she did wish was that Granny kept a cat, a comfortable tabby or marmalade to stretch beside her in the patch of sunshine and let out a friendly purr from time to time.
Cars passed occasionally in the lane below Granny's ten brick front steps, but they never stopped. All Granny's friends were very, very old and exchanged letters with her in crabbed, trembling handwriting, but they never came calling. Now, however, to Harriet's surprise, a large glossy car did draw up outside the white gate, and a lady jumped out of it and came purposefully up the steps, calling back a remark to someone in the car as she did so.
"Oh, bother,” Harriet thought, “now the bell will ring and I shall have to answer it."
She waited. The bell rang.
Uncoiling herself with reluctance from the squeaking chair (which had left basket marks all over her legs), she went downstairs, absentmindedly stepping over the patch of sunshine where the cat ought to have been lying.
The lady was standing outside the glass-paned front door, looking inquisitively about her. She had on a most interesting hat, Harriet noticed, flowerpot-shaped and made of reddish furry material; out from under its brim curled green-and-white tendrils of Busy Lizzie, which then turned round and climbed up the sides of the hat. The lady's pale, smiling eyes peered from underneath this in rather an odd way.
"Well, little girl,” the lady said, and Harriet took an instant dislike to her, “is your mummy in?"
"She doesn't live here,” Harriet said politely. “This is my grandmother's house."
"I see,” the lady said. “Well, may I see her then?” She spoke with a hint of impatience.
"I'm afraid everyone is out except me."
"Oh dear,” said the lady, smiling, “then I shall have to explain to you. You see, the fact is that I am Miss Eaves, Wildrose Eaves, and I have been looking everywhere, but everywhere, for a quince tree. Well! I was driving along this lane and I looked up, and I said to myself, ‘There's my quince tree!’ So I came straight up here to ask if I could buy it."
"Do you mean,” said Harriet doubtfully, “buy Granny's quince tree? Or do you want to buy some quinces? Because I don't think they'll be ripe for a few days, but we could let you know when we pick them."
"No, dear,” said Miss Eaves patiently, “I want to buy the tree."
"I'm sure Granny would never think of selling the whole tree,” said Harriet decidedly. “For one thing, wouldn't it die? And she's very very fond of it, I know—"
"I can see you don't quite understand, dear. I am Wildrose Eaves, the Wildrose Eaves, you know."
Harriet plainly didn't know, so the lady explained that she wrote a very famous column, which appeared in a Sunday paper every week, about gardening. “And people all over the world, you see, know every inch and corner of my mossy old garden just from reading about it in the Sunday Tidings."
"How nice,” Harriet said.
"Well it would have been nice, dear, if there was such a garden, but the fact is the whole thing was made up. But now I've had this very tempting offer from an American magazine which wants to come and take pictures of it, so you see I'm quickly putting the whole thing together, my charming old cottage, Shadie Thatch, and the yew hedges and pansy beds, but the one thing I couldn't get hold of was a quince tree, and that's very important because I've mentioned it more than once."
"Couldn't you say it had died?"
"Oh, no, dear. Nothing in the garden at Shadie Thatch ever dies."
"Well,” said Harriet, “I'm afraid it's not at all likely that Granny will want to sell the tree, but I'll tell her about it. Perhaps you could ring her up about teatime?"
"Tell her I'll pay five hundred pounds for the tree—with its quinces on, naturally. That's most important,” said the lady, and she ran down the steps again to her shiny car.
"I never heard such nonsense,” said Granny when she came home and Harriet had made her put on her hearing aid and pay attention to the matter. “Sell the quince tree! Whatever next? The woman's a fool, and about as shady as her thatch, from the sound of her."
When the telephone rang, Granny stomped off to give Miss Eaves a piece of her mind. Harriet heard her shouting, “I wouldn't take five hundred pounds nor yet five thousand. And that's my last word; no, certainly not, I shouldn't dream of it.” And she rang off vigorously.
"Why,” she went on, coming back and picking up her knitting, “your grandfather planted that tree the year we were married, and I've made quince jam from it for the last fifty years. The impertinence of her! But it's all the same nowadays—people think they can have all the benefits without doing any work for them."
And then it was time for supper and shortly after that time for Harriet and Mark to go to bed.
* * * *
The children generally woke early in the morning, and if it was fine, they got up, took biscuits from the pantry, and went out riding. There were two fat, lazy ponies called Dapple and Gray who lived in the paddock at the bottom of the orchard and whose job it was to pull the roller over Granny's wide lawns, wearing felt slippers on their little hoofs. The children were allowed to ride the ponies, and although they could seldom be persuaded out of a jiggling trot, it was a nice thing to do before breakfast. So next morning Harriet and Mark put on their jeans, went down through the orchard, caught the ponies with a bait of sugar, and took them up across the lawn to a side gate leading into the lane.
"We could go to Cloud Bottom,” Mark was saying as they came round the corner of the house. “We haven't—good heavens, look!"
They both stared in astonishment and horror. For where, yesterday, the quince tree had grown, beautiful with its rusty leaves and golden fruit, this morning there was nothing but a huge, trampled, earthy hole.
"Tire marks,” said Mark, “and big ones. Someone's been here with a truck or a big van."
"The beasts!” exclaimed Harriet. “That beastly woman! I thought she looked sly. Now what are we going to do?"
"I wonder how long they've been gone?"
"Granny'll be awfully upset when she finds out."
"It's still jolly early,” said Mark, looking at his watch, “and they can't have dug it up in the dark. I bet they haven't gone far yet. Let's follow the tracks and see if we can find which way they went. Do you remember where the woman said she lived?"
"Didn't give an address,” Harriet said gloomily.
They mounted and went out into the lane. It was easy to see from the tire marks and broken bushes where the truck had backed in, and a trail of snapped twigs showed which way it had gone. Luckily the lane was a muddy one, and where it widened, the tread marks showed plainly. The children kicked Dapple and Gray into a sort of amble, their fastest gait, and went on like bloodhounds. They hadn't much idea what they would do if they caught up with the thieves, but they did feel very strongly that the tree must be put back before Granny discovered its loss.
"Remember the time when the black-marketeers stole the holly from the two round bushes?” Mark asked Harriet. “She was quite ill. Goodness knows what this would do to her."
"And the time when the little pippin tree died,” Harriet said, nodding. “I say, look over there!"
The lane curved round a couple of meadows, and across the tops of three hedges they could see what looked like a big removal van, stationary at the edge of a little wood.
"I bet it's them,” said Mark. “We must make a plan."
They cut across the fields, skirted the wood, and came out into the lane on the far side of the van. Here there were no tire marks. “It's them all right,” pronounced Mark. “We'd better send the ponies home—they may have seen them when they were taking the tree."
They dismounted and thumped off Dapple and Gray across the fields in the direction of home.
"Now you must limp,” Mark said.
Harriet picked out two or three good s
harp flints from the mud in the lane and put them in her shoes. She never did things by halves. Then they went on towards the van, which was still not moving. They saw two men sitting on the road bank, smoking.
The children walked slowly towards them, Harriet hobbling and clutching Mark's elbow.
"Up early, aren't you?” said one of the men. “What's the matter? Little girl hurt her foot?"
"I think I've sprained it,” gasped Harriet.
"Lower Little Finching,” answered Mark, inventing quickly.
"Never heard of it. We're going to Gorsham."
"Oh, that would be fine. You could put us off at Gorsham crossroads."
The men finished their cigarettes and stood up, moving slowly towards the van. It was the usual enormously high furniture removal van, and said simply SMITHS REMOVALS AND STORAGE on its side. Mark noticed with suppressed excitement that a couple of rusty leaves were jammed at the bottom of the roll-down steel back. He wanted to draw Harriet's attention to this but didn't dare.
"Lift the little girl in, Weaver,” said the shorter man. “I want to check the fuel."
When he started, he said, “First garage we see I must stop for juice. Only half a gallon left. All that winching used a lot."
The other man scowled at him in a silencing way. “So they've got a winch inside there,” Mark thought, “run by a belt-drive off the engine.” He had been wondering how they had gotten the tree out of the ground and into the van.
The driver edged his way cautiously along the narrow track which was called Back Lane because it swung out in a semicircle behind the village and then joined the main road again farther along. Just past this road junction was Smalldown Garage, and Ken Clement, who owned it, was a friend; it was Ken who came and mowed Granny's lawn with her crazy, temperamental old motor mower.
"I'll pull in here,” said the driver, when he saw Ken's sign.
"How about a bit of breakfast?” suggested Weaver, noticing that the sign also said Snacks.
