by Lou Kuenzler
“That’s Lady Trim – she’s head of the council,” whispered Uncle Martin.
“There are swarms of rabbits chomping our cabbages!” said a man with a rake.
“A plague of bouncing bunnies!” agreed Lady Trim.
Swarms? A plague? What were they talking about? Surely eleven little bunnies couldn’t cause all this trouble…
Just then I saw Esme running towards me from the bus stop. She was waving her gold top hat wildly in the air, pointing to something behind me.
“Look!” she cried.
I turned around and saw the village green for the first time…
The whole area was covered – absolutely smothered – with rabbits. Big ones. Small ones. Brown ones. White ones. Ginger ones. Grey ones. All different … except each one had a perfect magic star on its tail!
“Popping potions! They must have appeared in the hat during the night,” I whispered, remembering how Esme had left it at the village bus stop by mistake.
“Multiplication!” hissed Esme, dragging me to one side. “I thought you only did one magic sum yesterday?”
“Oh dear…” I had a horrible squirmy feeling in my tummy as I remembered the second multiplication sum I had begun:
“Ninety!” I thought. I had never actually written down the answer, but chanting the sum and accidentally waving the magic pen in my hand must have been enough. “I will never use my flamingo biro for doing maths ever again!” I groaned. “There are ninety new rabbits now, plus the ten from yesterday. That makes…”
“One hundred!” said Esme.
“One hundred and one!” I said as I spotted Nibbles greedily chewing the corner of a little boy’s lunch box.
Lady Trim clapped her hands loudly.
“We can’t have rabbits rampaging all over the village,” she announced. “They’ll eat everything in our gardens.”
A large silver car pulled up at the edge of the green and Mr Seymour climbed out. Everyone fell silent.
“This is all Esme Lee’s fault,” he said, pointing at her as Piers climbed out of the car too. “My boy here says she was doing stupid magic tricks all day yesterday. She made a rabbit appear in a hat.”
“A vicious one,” said Piers, rubbing his nose.
I thought I heard old Mrs Brimblecombe from the post office giggle. But everybody else was staring at Esme.
“It’s not her fault!” I said quickly.
“Do you know anything about this, Esme?” asked our head teacher.
“It’s true. I was practising conjuring,” said Esme. “Then Nibbles appeared. He’s the bunny who bit Piers on the nose…”
“Gracious me!” Now old Mrs Brimblecombe really was giggling.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the head teacher raised his voice, “I must ask you to move away from school so that we can take the children inside and begin our lessons. I was aware there was some fun with conjuring tricks going on in the playground yesterday, but I am sure none of you are seriously suggesting that a little girl can be responsible for all these rabbits.”
“I don’t care who is responsible!” said Lady Trim. “We are going to have to put a stop to these greedy pests before they eat every vegetable in Merrymeet!”
“Leave it to me!” said Mr Seymour, climbing back into his shiny grey car. “I’ll have this village rid of rabbits by tomorrow morning. Just you wait and see…”
Chapter Twelve
“Oh, Esme. What are we going to do?” I said as soon as we were safely inside our classroom.
“About the bunnies?” she whispered.
“Yes. And the windmill,” I groaned. Everything that had gone wrong was all because of my magic.
“Well, we’ve still got a week until the bulldozers arrive in the meadow,” said Esme. “That gives us time to think of something to save the windmill. But Mr Seymour said he was going to get rid of the rabbits tomorrow.”
“So bunnies first?” I said.
“Bunnies first!” agreed Esme.
“I don’t know what Mr Seymour is planning, but it will be something horrible!” I shivered. “We need to find the bunnies somewhere new to live … and quickly.”
“They definitely can’t stay in the village,” agreed Esme. “Nobody wants a plague of rabbits eating their vegetables and digging up their gardens. Especially Lady Trim and the Allotment Committee. They win the Harvest Festival Gardening Competition every year. They won’t risk ruining their chance of that.”
“But where can we find a new home for so many rabbits?” I said. “They’ll need plenty of space and lots of grass to eat.”
“Windmill Meadow would be perfect,” whispered Esme as Miss Marker began taking the register. “But that’s no good now Mr Seymour is going to cover it with concrete!” She chewed her lip. “Operation Rabbit Rescue will meet again at break.”
I gave a quick thumbs up.
“Who’d want to be a conjurer,” she whispered, her eyes sparkling, “when they could be an undercover agent working to free rabbits from an evil villain instead?”
That was the brilliant thing about Esme. She always kept smiling. If she was disappointed I hadn’t come up with a magic spell to save the windmill, she didn’t show it.
“So,” said Miss Marker brightly. “Who found out some interesting facts about the Romans?”
I hesitated. Our project looked amazing – Uncle Martin had helped me burn the edges and I’d dipped it in tea to make it look like a brilliant ancient scroll. But Esme and I looked at each other and we both shook our heads. This really wasn’t the right moment to announce that the Romans had introduced rabbits to Ancient Britain. Any talk of bunnies would just make everyone more suspicious that the fluffy-tailed invasion of Merrymeet was all Esme’s fault.
Luckily, Piers’s hand shot up in the air. “Did you know, miss, it was the Romans who invented CONCRETE!”
The whole class groaned.
“Quiet please! That is very interesting!” said Miss Marker. And she listened to some of the different things the class had found out. When she came back to Mercury table again, the twins had so much to say about Roman shopping that she didn’t seem to notice Esme and I had missed our turn. I slipped the scroll into my bag.
“Well done, everyone!” she said at last. “You have all worked very hard. We are going to have a wonderful time with our Roman project. And, to make it even more special, we are going on a trip tomorrow.”
“A trip?” Everybody clapped their hands and cheered.
“We are going to the ruins of a Roman villa about an hour up the road,” said Miss Marker. “The coach will arrive first thing and we can take packed lunches and stay all day. I hope we can have a picnic outside. The villa is part of an old Roman farm so there are acres and acres of grassland with beautiful fields and woods…”
“Boring! Who cares about fields,” muttered Piers under his breath. “Will there be any swords and spears, miss?”
But Esme and I were practically jumping out of our seats with excitement – we’d both had the exact same thought.
“Fields!” I whispered, as Miss Marker explained about some of the things we could see in the visitors’ centre.
“Fields full of grass,” mouthed Esme.
“And woods too!” I squeezed her hand. “Are you thinking what I am thinking?”
Esme nodded. “Operation Rabbit Rescue has just found our long-eared friends a new home.”
“Perfect!” I grinned. “All we’ve got to do now is get one hundred and one rabbits to come along on our school trip.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was hard for Esme and I to talk much for the rest of the day. The twins wanted to play with us at break time. Then we had a noisy music lesson in the big hall. Everybody in Indigo Class was given a recorder. We were supposed to play a tune called “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. But none of us were very good. It sounded more like “Screechy, Screechy, Squawky Crow”.
“Oh dear,” sighed Miss Marker. “I think you had better put you
r recorders away in your book bags and practise a little at home.”
At last it was lunchtime. (No more sprouts for me – I had pizza. Delicious!) Then Esme and I sat outside on the Friendship Bench where people can go for a quiet chat. We huddled together, trying to come up with the perfect plan to sneak the rabbits on to the school coach.
“I’ll get up really early in the morning, go to the village green, and call all the rabbits together,” I said. “I’ll tell them they’re in danger if they stay here, but they will be safe at the Roman villa. And then—”
“What are you two whispering about?” asked Piers, appearing behind us like a shadow. “I know you’re up to something…”
We just smiled and skipped off to the other side of the playground.
“Look! There’s Nibbles now,” said Esme, pointing through the railings as the fat little bunny hopped over the zebra crossing outside school. “You can tell him what’s happening. Thank goodness you can talk to animals. You’re so clever, Bella!”
“Psst!” I said, feeling proud as I pressed my face against the railings and twitched my nose. “I need to talk to you,” I said, calling out to Nibbles in rabbit language.
“Not now!” He chomped his teeth as he spotted a juicy-looking dandelion leaf on the the side of the lane. “Lunch!”
“Wait!” I called. But he hopped away.
This was impossible! Every time I tried to talk to Nibbles he was always thinking about his tummy.
“Rabbits may have long ears but they never seem to listen to me,” I groaned.
“Looks like you’re going to need help getting them together in the morning,” said Esme.
“I know. But you’ll be at the windmill,” I sighed.
“Not if I stay at your house tonight,” said Esme.
“You mean?”
“Exactly!” Esme grinned.
“Sleepover!” We both cheered.
Despite all the worry about the windmill and the rabbits, I felt as if a thousand happy frogs were hopping in my tummy.
“Aunty Rose won’t mind one little bit!” I said.
“And I know Mum will agree to it, even though it’s a school night. She wants to take my mind off everything that’s happening at the windmill,” said Esme.
“Of course.” I squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry. I’m going to make this the best sleepover ever,” I promised. “It’ll be magic!”
And it was.
Next morning, Esme and I were up at the crack of dawn. We gobbled down our breakfast and were ready to leave at least an hour before the coach was due to arrive for the school trip.
“Can we go out early?” I asked Uncle Martin as he handed us our packed lunches. “We want to see if all those rabbits are on the village green again.”
“Fair enough,” said Uncle Martin, who was often up early himself to go birdwatching. “As there’s two of you, you can walk down by yourselves. Have a good time at the Roman villa.”
“We will,” I said as Esme grabbed her book bag and we hurried out of the door.
“Look!” I said as we passed the high iron gates of Hawk Hall.
A dark-grey van was parked on the drive. The back doors were open and we could see a terrible tangle of metal boxes inside with glinting rows of jagged spikes like dragon’s teeth.
“Traps!” I gasped. “So that’s what Mr Seymour’s going to do. He’s going to set traps for the rabbits,” I had seen animal traps before. Aunt Hemlock used horrible sharp-jawed snares just like this.
“Bye bye, bunnies,” grinned Mr Seymour, coming out of his house as an enormous man in a boiler suit closed the doors of the van.
“That’s Knox’s uncle, Bruiser Bailey,” whispered Esme. “He works in security at Seymour Cement.”
“Murmuring mountains!” I gulped. He was as big as a giant.
“Set those traps all around the village,” said Mr Seymour as Bruiser Bailey climbed into the driver’s seat. “If we can destroy those greedy little rabbits, everyone in Merrymeet will love me. Especially Lady Trim and her Allotment Committee. She’s head of the council. If I save her precious garden she’ll agree to anything I want. She’ll let me knock down that old windmill and bulldoze the meadow without any trouble at all.”
“I’ll be pleased to see the back of the bunnies myself, sir,” growled Bruiser in a voice like an ogre “I’ve got a little allotment of my own, you know.”
“Just do the job, will you?” said Mr Seymour, turning back towards the house. “I don’t see the point in flowers, or fruit, or lawns. Not when you can have a lovely patch like this. Isn’t that right, son?”
Esme and I ducked as we saw Piers standing on the front steps admiring his concrete courtyard.
“I hate rabbits! Especially that Nibbles!” he said, still rubbing his nose.
“Tell you what, son,” laughed Mr Seymour, “I’ll get Bruiser to bring you back a fluffy bunny tail. You can wear it as a bow tie!”
“What a monster!” shivered Esme. But I grabbed her hand.
“Quick!” I hissed. “We’ve got to find the rabbits and tell them they’re in terrible danger. Knox’s uncle is going to start setting those traps right away.”
Chapter Fourteen
Esme and I ran towards the village green.
“The sooner we get the rabbits safely to the Roman villa, the better,” she puffed.
“We might be too late,” I groaned as we dashed along the pavement past the allotments. A gaggle of furious-looking gardeners were marching up and down in wellington boots. There had been green rows of leaves yesterday. Now there was nothing but chewed-up stalks poking out of the mud.
“Those pesky rabbits have had my Brussels sprouts. I was saving them for Christmas dinner!” growled a red-faced man with a wheelbarrow.
“Yuck! Don’t tell me rabbits like those things!” I whispered to Esme as we peeped over the hedge. I spotted Nibbles lolloping out from behind a watering can. His cheeks were bulging, with a Brussel sprout stuffed in each one.
“There’s one of the little pests right now,” cried Lady Trim, waving a spade. “Grab it by the ears!”
“Look out, Nibbles!” I squeaked.
Lady Trim’s sharp spade missed his fluffy tail by a centimetre as he squeezed his fat bottom through a hole in the hedge.
“The sooner Mr Seymour sets those traps the better!” sighed Lady Trim as Nibbles lolloped off down the lane. “He’s promised me a pair of rabbit-skin gardening gloves.”
“How horrid!” I whispered as Esme and I crept away, keeping out of sight below the hedge. The whole village would be wearing rabbit fur if we didn’t act fast.
“You really mustn’t eat Persons’ vegetables, Nibbles,” I hissed as we turned the corner and caught up with him by a bridge over Merrymeet river.
The greedy little rabbit ignored me as usual and started to nibble the long, lush grass at the edge of the water.
“Look!” said Esme as her favourite rabbit, Bunnykins the Second, hopped into view.
He almost tripped over his long ears as he bumbled over the bridge towards us.
I spotted Cozy and Dozy, snoozing as usual, behind a log.
Then Speckles and Fluffy and Ginger scampered along the riverbank too.
“They’re all here! The whole gang,” I said, counting the group of eleven special magic bunnies we had given names to. Even shy Midnight poked her head out from under the bridge for a moment.
“Listen to me, bunnies! This is important,” I said. To my amazement the rabbits turned towards me at last. Even Nibbles stopped chewing for a moment.
“You are in real danger!” Now I finally had their attention, I explained how Mr Seymour was planning to trap them. “Not just you, but every rabbit in the village,” I said, thinking of the other ninety bunnies who must be close by somewhere.
“Tell them all to watch out for Knox’s uncle,” said Esme as I clicked my teeth together.
“He’s as tough as a troll and big as a giant,” I warned the rabbits. “And
he drives a grey van. It’s full of traps.”
Dozy yawned. She reminded me of Rascal. “Shh! I’m too sleepy for all this,” she said.
“Me too!” Cozy rolled into a ball.
“You’re not listening to me!” I cried as the other bunnies started to hop away. I made a grab for Fluffy but was left with nothing but a handful of soft white hair. “Stop!”
Nibbles raised his head and sniffed the air. I held my breath – for a moment I thought he was going to call the other rabbits back…
Instead, he twitched his nose, hopped forward and chomped a mouthful of tall green reeds.
Behind us the church bells struck.
“We’re running out of time,” said Esme. “The coach will be here in half an hour.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I groaned. The bunnies were setting off in all directions. They were absolutely adorable – especially these eleven that we had named – but they wouldn’t listen to a word I said. “It’s like I don’t even speak their language.”
“We’ll have try something else,” said Esme. “And quickly…”
We could hear the clanking rattle of the grey van coming up the lane.
“We need to think of a way to get the rabbits to follow us,” I said.
“Like the Pied Piper!” Esme clapped her hands. “It’s one of Mum’s favourite fairy tales.”
“The one with the rats?” I shuddered, remembering a horrible picture in Aunt Hemlock’s storybook as the animals followed the Piper’s tune.
“But we don’t have any music,” I sighed. Why was Esme talking about storybooks? We were wasting time. I glanced back to see Bruiser Bailey climbing out of the van to set a trap at the other end of the lane.
“We do have music,” said Esme. “Look!” She rummaged in her book bag and pulled out her recorder. “Ta-da!”
“Spluttering serpents! You’re brilliant!” I cried. “You be the Pied Piper and I’ll add a little magic to the tune!”
Chapter Fifteen
As Esme danced across the bridge playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on her recorder, I waved my wand in the air.
