Brother Dusty Feet

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  She came down the hall to where Hugh stood uncertainly in the middle of the family. She came rather slowly, because there was a small, round girl-child, who had only reached the staggering stage in learning to walk, clinging on to her skirts; but when she got there she smiled at Hugh in a way that took away his bewilderment and made him feel warm and wanted.

  ‘We’re so glad you’ve come, Hugh,’ she said. ‘We were afraid you would not; and we wanted you.’

  Hugh found he had been quite right in thinking that she would smell nice. She did. Not of clove carnations, but of lemon verbena, which was just as good. So he smiled back at her, shyly and gratefully, although he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Then the starry little girl poked a finger at the small, round one, and said, ‘That’s Meg. She’s my sister, and she swallowed a caterpillar this morning. It was woolly.’

  There was a shocked uproar at that (at least, some of it was shocked, but some of it was made by Martin trying to smother a laugh and getting it up the back of his nose by mistake). When it died down again, and Meg’s father and mother had told her what they thought of people who swallowed caterpillars, which she did not seem to mind at all, Mr Heritage said, ‘Martin, take Hugh off with you and show him his cubby-hole.’

  And Mistress Heritage said: ‘No, Tiggy, you can’t go with them. You haven’t finished sewing your seam yet.’

  So Hugh and Martin went off together, up a wide, shallow staircase with a deep design of honeysuckle carved on its newel post, to a long, tapestry-hung gallery that had the lovely window at its far end. Hugh recognized it by the gleam of the golden flowers on its sill, although it looked different from the inside, as windows do. They passed through so many rooms before they got to where they were going, that Hugh wondered how he would ever learn his way about, for the old house was like a honeycomb and had no passages.

  But at last they arrived in a little white-washed room with green rushes on the floor, and a truckle bed and a big polished clothes-chest, a medlar-tree peering in at the window, and a great many hawk-leashes and pots of glue, bits of wood and odd lengths of cord and sticky messes in chipped jars scattered over everything.

  ‘This is mine,’ said Martin, and pushed open one more door. ‘And here’s your cubby-hole.’

  Hugh’s cubby-hole was even smaller than Martin’s, and not yet so untidy, but otherwise it was exactly the same, even to the medlar-tree peering in at the window. It was a nice cubby-hole, and Hugh liked it at once.

  ‘Dump your bundle on the chest there,’ said Martin; and Hugh dumped his bundle, and arranged his pot of periwinkle carefully in the middle of the window-sill.

  Then they went back to Martin’s room, because his window-sill was wider for sitting on, and sat on it and looked at each other, while Argos and the greyhound, who had come up with them, sat down on the rush-strewn floor and thumped their tails and watched. Both boys felt that they were strangers, and all at once Hugh was so desperately shy of the dark boy that his mouth went quite dry inside.

  ‘I say,’ said Martin suddenly. ‘Will you tell me about being a Player? – I mean, not now – I don’t expect you want to talk about it just yet; but later on. It must have been fun!’

  And Hugh said, ‘It was fun! Oh, it was! Of course I’ll tell you about it, if you’ll tell me about Oxford.’

  ‘It’s a bargain,’ said Martin.

  They struck hands solemnly, and after that, somehow they did not feel nearly so strange to each other. They sat talking in a friendly and companionable way, Hugh rubbing Argos under the chin and Martin pulling gently at the old greyhound’s ears, until the door opened, and Antigone appeared.

  ‘I’ve sewed my seam, and I’ve practised my piece, and now I’ve come to talk to you,’ she said; and she scrambled on to the clothes-chest and sat there drumming her heels joyfully against its side.

  Martin sniffed. ‘That’s very gracious of you, I’m sure, Tiggy.’

  Hugh smiled rather shyly at the little girl, and the little girl smiled back, not at all shyly, at Hugh.

  ‘I wanted to watch for you out of the big window, so’s I could see at once if you came with Father,’ she told him. ‘But my Mammy said, “No!” She said, “How would you like to be watched through windows as if you were a performing bear?” Boy, should you like to be a performing bear?’

  Hugh remembered a bear he had met at Tunbridge, whose bear-ward was not kind to him and had let him get sore places on his back, and he said, No, he didn’t think he would.

  ‘I should like to be a performing bear,’ said Tiggy firmly. ‘I shouldn’t have to sew my seam or eat up my nice supper bread-and-milk or wash my ears.’ And she reached for a fishing-rod that was propped in the corner beside her.

  ‘Here, you leave that alone, Madame Meddlesome!’ said Martin. ‘Or you’ll go straight back on to bread and water and three beatings next Sunday!’

  Just for a moment Hugh was rather startled, and then he realized that it was a joke; one of those private jokes that families have among themselves. He and his father had had them, but that was so long ago that he had forgotten until this moment. It felt rather nice, being let into this one.

  ‘Yes, it’s very dreadful,’ said Martin, wagging his head. ‘If you’re going to be one of us, you’ll have to know about it. We keep her locked up in the disused orangery and feed her on bread and water and beat her every day – twice on Sundays. Put that rod back, Tiggy.’

  Tiggy was just stacking the fishing-rod carefully back into its corner, with her little pink tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth to help her get it arranged exactly right, when in at the open window stole a far-off swirl of music, very faint, but very gay – and growing louder. Everybody turned their heads to listen, as it drew nearer and nearer yet, until they could hear the joyous lilt of drum and sackbut playing ‘Mary Ambree’.

  ‘It’s our Company,’ cried Hugh. ‘It’s Jonathan and all the rest.’

  ‘I say, we could see them pass from the gallery window,’ said Martin.

  But Hugh shook his head. ‘No. You go. I – I’ll stay here.’

  So he stayed, sitting quite still in the window recess, and Martin stayed too, and Tiggy went flying off on her own to watch the Players pass.

  Nearer and nearer came the music, swelling louder and more joyous every moment, and through the music Hugh could hear the clip-clop of Saffronilla’s hooves and the trundling and lurching of the tilt-cart. Right along the foot of the garden it went, the little cavalcade hidden from sight by the high garden wall and the branches of the medlar tree; and then the music began to grow fainter again, as the Company went swinging on down the dusty road towards Shaftesbury. Fainter and fainter yet, until the last distant lilt of it died away into the sleepy stillness of the summer noon-tide.

  ‘Do you – do they play tunes to march to, all the time?’ asked Martin.

  Hugh shook his head again. ‘Oh no; only when we’re going through a town, to make people take notice, you know. They were playing just now for a sort of – good-bye and good luck and – and don’t forget us.’

  Martin got up off the window-sill and said rather gruffly, ‘I say, come and see my hawk. I trained her myself, and she’s a beauty. You can have a half share in her until you have one of your own.’

  But at the head of the stairs they met Tiggy. ‘The Players were lovely,’ said Tiggy. ‘And look! There’s a rainbow with its foot in our orchard!’

  The sun had begun to come out while the Players were passing, and when the two boys looked over her head through the great stairway window, they saw that all the world was sparkling gold, and there really was a rainbow – a most lovely and glorious rainbow – with one end lost among the wooded hills, and the other coming down into the orchard, just beyond the herb-garden wall, so that it looked like an orchard in a fairy-tale, where all the apple-trees were flushed with emerald and blue and vermilion, and the fruit shone like gems.

  ‘Let’s go there!’ gabbled Tiggy. ‘Let’s – go �
�� there – at – once – this – moment!’

  Somehow they all wanted to get to the foot of that rainbow quickly, quickly, before it faded. So they all went scurrying down the stairs, down and down and round and round, at top speed. Halfway down they met Meg coming up on all fours to join them. They said, ‘Hullo, Meg!’ and swarmed round and over her, and dashed on, down the stairs and out by a side door, while Meg, who was a persevering sort of person, turned round and followed still on all fours, and head first, in a way that her mother would not have liked to see.

  Outside in the garden, where mint and marjoram and cinnamon roses grew all mixed up together, Tiggy butted in between the two boys and pushed one hand into Martin’s and the other into Hugh’s, and they scurried on together, breathless and laughing, with the dogs dancing and yelping round them; down through the tall herbs and the rose-bushes, and out through a small fortress-looking door into the orchard beyond.

  Of course the rainbow had moved on by the time they got there. They had not really expected that it would wait for them; rainbows never do. But the gold that lives at the Foot of the Rainbow was there; apples turning gold on the dripping branches of the old trees, and a golden tide of dandelions in the long grass, and a swarm of tiny, bright-eyed golden ducklings scattering and exploring everywhere, despite all that their anxious hen-mother could do to keep them together.

  ‘Boy,’ said Tiggy, after they had got their breath back, ‘doesn’t it feel nice, having a home of your own and a family of your own, when you haven’t had one for such a long while?’

  And Martin said, ‘Give him time, Tiggy! He doesn’t know yet.’

  Now, at that moment Argos met a bright-eyed duckling round a clump of dandelions. Argos blew at it in a friendly way, and the duckling was so surprised that first it fell down flat, and then it got up and rushed squeaking to its hen-mother. But this time nobody was at all put out. Nobody but the duckling and the hen and Argos, that is. Argos had hurt feelings and his tail trembled forlornly downwards, and when Tiggy saw what was happening to Argos’s tail, she sat down on her heels in front of him and put her arms round his neck, and said, ‘Never mind, dearie; it just didn’t understand.’

  And suddenly Hugh felt quite different about everything. He knew that it wasn’t going to be easy to learn to be respectable again, after being a rogue and a vagabond so long, and he knew that he would hate wearing a clean ruff and sleeping in the same place more than four nights running. But he knew, too, that he would manage it in time, and that one day the brown man and the lady who smelled nice, the starry little girl and small Meg whom he could see in the distance arriving as fast as her hands and feet would carry her, and Martin most of all, really would come to belong to him and he to them, in the way that families do belong to each other.

  So he said, ‘Yes, I do know; and it does feel nice!’

  And it did.

  BROTHER DUSTY-FEET

  AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 446 43061 3

  Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,

  an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK

  A Random House Group Company

  This ebook edition published 2012

  Copyright © Anthony Lawton

  First Published in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, 1952

  Red Fox edition published 1995

  The right of Rosemary Sutcliff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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