by Eva Ibbotson
‘And any normal father would ring and find out why she wasn’t being sent.’
‘Are you accusing me of not being normal?’ said the professor in a dangerously quiet voice. ‘A woman who stubbed out her cigarette on a poached egg.’
‘It wasn’t a poached egg, it was a fried egg. And if you hadn’t kept turning the lamps off because you were too mean to pay the electricity bill I’d have seen it wasn’t an ashtray. And anyway, how a man who leaves a bath full of scum every time he—’
‘Scum!’ yelled the professor down the phone. ‘Are you accusing me of leaving scum? Why I couldn’t even get into the bath without wading through a heap of your unspeakable toenail clippings.’
They went on like this for some time but then they remembered that their only daughter was missing and pulled themselves together.
‘Can she have run away?’ wondered Mrs Danby.
‘Why should she run away? She has two perfectly good homes.’
‘Yes. But she’s been looking a bit peaky. And she sees tigers on the ceiling. Perhaps I should have let her have a nightlight.’
‘If every child who sees tigers on the ceiling ran away, there’d be very few children left in their homes,’ said the professor.
But obviously the next thing to be done was to go to the police. So Professor Danby went to the police station in Edinburgh and Mrs Danby went to the police station in London. Then she rang her ex-husband and said that the police wanted them to come together and compare their stories exactly.
‘You have to come down,’ said Mrs Danby. ‘And quick. They say there’s no time to waste.’
So the professor took the train to London and the next day both of Minette’s parents sat side by side in a taxi on the way to the Metropolitan Police Station.
The officer they saw this time was a high-ranking one, a detective chief superintendent who had a secretary sitting beside him to take everything down.
‘Now, I understand that you have heard nothing since your daughter disappeared ten days ago?’ he asked. ‘No messages? No ransom demand?’
Both the Danbys shook their heads.
‘I have very little money,’ said the professor. ‘I’m on the staff of the University and they pay abominably. It’s a disgrace how little—’
‘And I’m on the dole,’ said Mrs Danby, unusually honest. ‘So even if they asked us for money, it wouldn’t help.’
The detective wrote this down. ‘Now tell us, please, Mrs Danby, exactly where and when you last saw your daughter.’
‘It was at two o’clock on the fifteenth of April. At King’s Cross Station, Platform One. I handed her over to an aunt—’
‘Wait a minute!’ The superintendent’s eyebrows drew together sharply. ‘You mean your aunt … or her aunt …?’
‘No. An aunt. An aunt from an agency. Minette always travelled with aunts.’
The detective seemed to find this very interesting. ‘Go and get me the file on the Mountjoy case,’ he said to the secretary. ‘Sergeant Harris has it.’ He turned back to the Danbys. ‘Now tell me from what agency you hired this aunt. It’s an extremely important point.’
Mrs Danby frowned. ‘Well, generally they came from an agency called Useful Aunts. I’ve used them for years – they’re very reliable. But I think …’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I’m not sure … I think this one may have been labelled Unusual Aunts. Yes, I think so. And there was some writing above that which said “My Name is Edna”. Or maybe it was Etta.’
‘If you hadn’t rotted your brain with tobacco you might be able to remember,’ said the professor under his breath.
But at that moment the secretary came back with a blue folder. ‘Yes,’ said the detective as he opened it. ‘Yes. The two cases are extraordinarily similar.’ He looked up at the Danbys. ‘Another child disappeared on the same day as your daughter and he too was put in the charge of an aunt. I think we’re getting somewhere at last!’
The old Mountjoys were always pleased when Hubert-Henry went back to boarding school. They hated having children about and they could never quite forgive their son for having married a foreign dancer in a nightclub and producing such an unsuitable grandson.
Then just a week after Hubert-Henry had left for Greymarsh Towers, a letter came from the headmaster which told old Mr Mountjoy that even though Hubert was not at school because of Burry-Burry fever, the full fees for the term would still have to be paid.
That did it of course. Mr Mountjoy rang the headmaster and said what nonsense was this about Burry-Burry fever and where was the boy, who had been delivered to school on the first day of term?
And the headmaster said, no he hadn’t, the aunt from the agency had told Matron that Hubert-Henry was ill.
So after the old Mountjoys had shouted down the telephone and threatened to sue the headmaster they went to the police. They might not be fond of Hubert-Henry but he was their grandson and their property and if anyone had taken him they wanted to know the reason why.
Which meant the police knew of two cases in which a child had vanished in the care of an aunt and it was now that the Great London Aunt Hunt began.
The police only knew about two aunts because Lambert’s father was still in America, so that the boy had not yet been reported missing. But two aunts were enough to be going on with – and the newspapers and the police and the general public now went slightly mad.
Aunt Plague Menaces the City screamed the headlines, and Monster Aunts on Killer Spree!
Once people had been warned they saw these murdering women everywhere.
An aunt was caught outside a supermarket trying to impale a sweet little baby with a giant knitting needle while his mother shopped inside.
‘I was only trying to spear a wasp,’ she quavered, ‘I didn’t want it to sting the child.’ But she was hauled off to the police station and it was only when they found the back end of the squashed insect in her knitting bag that she was set free.
An even more sinister aunt was seen in Hyde Park, kicking in the head of a little boy who lay in the grass.
‘I seen her clear as daylight,’ said a fat man who’d been walking his dog and sent for the police. ‘Kicking like a maniac she was!’
And, ‘Look how he’s crying, the poor little fellow,’ said the other dog owners who had crowded round – and it was true that the boy, holding on to his football, was crying. Anyone would cry, seeing their aunt bundled into a police van when she’d been showing them how to curl a penalty into the top right hand corner of the goal. She’d been a striker for the Wolverhampton Under-Eighteens and he thought the world of her.
There was talk in Parliament of a curfew for aunts, forcing them to be in bed by eight o’clock; the Daily Echo said aunts should be electronically tagged like prisoners – and an elderly lady was arrested in the shoe department of a department store for abusing her great-niece who was trying on shoes for a party.
‘She was shouting and screaming at the child and her eyes were wild,’ said the woman who had turned her in – and the aunt would probably have gone to prison, but while she was in the cells, the shop assistants downed tools and marched on the police station with banners, demanding that she should be freed.
‘I wouldn’t just have shouted at the girl, I’d have wrung her neck,’ said a motherly shop assistant to the reporters standing round.
‘The poisonous child had thirty-nine pairs of shoes out and she was throwing them round the floor,’ said another shop girl. ‘If you ask me, that aunt had the patience of a saint not to scream at her earlier.’
So the police let her go and then the newspapers said they were too soft and aunts should be flogged like in the good old days.
Meanwhile posters of Etta and Coral were stuck up in police stations and public libraries and bus shelters everywhere. These pictures had been drawn by an artist from the descriptions he had been given by the people who had seen them last, and they were extremely odd. Aunt Etta had a nose like a pickaxe, a blob of hair like a jelly
bag on top of her head and a moustache she could have twirled, it was so big. Aunt Coral had a mad squint in one eye, seven pairs of earrings in each ear and absolutely no neck.
Have you seen these women? it said at the bottom of the posters.
But of course no one had, because women like that do not exist. And so the days passed and still the police had no clues to go on. The Aunts’ Agency had closed down and it seemed as though the stolen children and their kidnappers had vanished off the face of the earth.
Chapter Eight
Aunt Etta woke and stretched and immediately felt very strange. Something had happened. And the something was important: perhaps the most important thing that had ever happened to her.
She got out of bed and went to the window. Her long grey pigtail hung down her back; her hairy legs and bony feet stuck out from under her flannel nightdress, but her mud-coloured eyes were as excited as a young girl’s.
Yet there was nothing unusual to be seen. A flock of gulls were out fishing; the sun was just beginning to come up behind the two islands to the east.
‘All the same, there is something,’ thought Aunt Etta, and the excitement grew in her. ‘Only what?’
Then she realized that the excitement was coming from her feet. It was being sent through her toe bones, and up her ankle bones and through her body.
For a moment she felt quite faint. Could it be …? But no … that would be a miracle; she had done nothing to deserve anything as tremendous as that.
The sound of heavy breathing made her turn. It was Coral. She too was in her nightdress, folds of it wrapped round her like a bell tent, she too was barefoot and she too was panting with excitement.
‘Oh, Etta,’ she gasped. ‘I feel so strange.’
Coral’s long hair, which she dyed an interesting gold, hung down her back; she looked like a mad goddess. ‘I feel as though … only it can’t be, can it? Not after a hundred years?’
‘No … it can’t.’
But they clutched each other’s hands, because it hadn’t stopped, the extraordinary, amazing … feeling.
‘We must wake Myrtle. She’s musical.’
But there was no need to wake Myrtle. Myrtle did not wear a nightdress; she wore pyjamas because she often went out before dawn to talk to the seals and she thought that pyjamas were more respectable. They were made of grey flannel so that she did not show up too much in the dusk and for a moment her sisters did not see her lying on the floor with her face pressed to the threadbare carpet.
‘Myrtle, do you feel—’ her sisters began.
But before she could answer, Myrtle lifted her head. They had never seen their sister look like that.
‘Can it be?’ began Coral.
‘We must go up the hill,’ said Myrtle and she spoke like someone in a dream. ‘We must turn our faces to the north.’
‘But dressed,’ said Etta, coming to her senses for a moment. ‘Not in our nightclothes. Not even if—’
But her sisters took no notice and Etta herself only had time to put on her dressing gown before there was a thumping noise from next door. It was the Captain’s walking stick banging on the wall and it meant, ‘Come at once.’
The sisters looked at each other anxiously. If he had heard it too it could strain his heart. So much excitement is bad for old people.
And when they first saw the Captain they were very worried. He was lying slumped on his pillows, his eyes shut, and he was trembling so much that the whole bed shook. But when they came up to him, they were amazed. Captain Harper was a hundred and three years old, but he looked for a moment like a boy.
‘I’ve heard it,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve heard it and I’ve felt it. Even if that’s all, even if there’s no more than that, I’ll die happy now.’
‘We’re going on to the hill, Father,’ said Etta. ‘We’ll tell you as soon as—’
The door burst open and Fabio and Minette came running into the room. They had tumbled straight out of bed, bewildered and still half asleep, and followed the sound of voices.
‘Something’s happened,’ said Minette. She was wearing quite the silliest nightdress that even her mother could have bought, covered in patterns of dancing elephants and picnicking zebras, but with her dark hair wild about her shoulders and her bewildered eyes, she seemed to be listening to music from another land. ‘We were woken …’
‘It’s a feeling … only it isn’t only a feeling.’ Fabio shook his head, trying to understand. ‘It’s a sound, except it’s all through us. We’re not making it up.’
The three aunts and the old Captain looked at the children, and nodded. It was a pleased nod, and it meant that the children were all right; they were proper ones, without a touch of a Boo-Boo or a Little One. Lambert, they were sure, would have heard and felt nothing.
‘You’d better come with us. Get your shoes on at least.’
Outside the feeling was stronger. Minette and Fabio, struggling for words to describe it, were lost. They followed the aunts on to the turf path which led to the hill. Minette wore Myrtle’s shawl round her shoulders – no one had taken time to dress properly.
The ‘feeling’, whatever it was, was growing stronger. It came through the soles of their feet, but also now from above, from everywhere. If they’d been doubtful whether it meant anything, the creatures would have put them right at once. In the dawn light the birds wheeled round the cliff in a frenzy of agitation. The seals, usually drowsing on the point at this hour, were all in the water, swimming towards the northern strand – and in the lead was Herbert. Like all selkies he slept with one eye open: he had been the first to know that something incredibly important was going to happen and at once he had put aside his everyday worries. What did it matter now whether one was a man or a seal? He moved through the waves like a torpedo – and close behind Herbert came his mother.
The sky was changing. It was filled with strange colours which belonged neither to the dawn nor to the sunset; colours that the children had never seen and afterwards could not describe.
On her great nest, the boobrie honked with all her power … honked and stirred … and flapped her wings, trying to fly off after the others, but she couldn’t, with the eggs so heavy and stuck inside her … and she pushed her muscles together, pressing and pressing as she tried to become airborne …
The stoorworm came out of the lake and slithered over the ground, following the aunts and the children. He was no longer the muddled creature who had lost control of his far end. He moved like a great serpent, controlled and lean and fast.
Down by the house the goats butted their horns against the walls of their sty, and broke free and went galloping along the shore like mad creatures.
The door of the mermaid shed opened and Loreen and her daughters slithered across the rocks and plunged into the water.
‘To the north,’ she shouted, holding Walter in the crook of her arm, and they set off for the wild strand beneath the hill.
‘Wait for me, wait for me,’ shouted Old Ursula, but they had gone and she was left beating her tail furiously against the side of the sink.
The Sybil had come out of her cave. The mucky old prophetess was not talking about the weather now. She was writhing and moaning, her face had turned blue and her hair was standing on end. ‘It’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘It’s going to happen.’
But the aunts did not wait for her to tell them what. They raced panting up the hill with the children beside them, and all the time the feeling was getting stronger, was going through every cell in their bodies.
They reached the top of the hill – and then they were certain. From all sides it came now, like the breath of the universe. Below them the sea boiled against the northern shore; the mermaids, their troubles forgotten, trod water and stared towards the horizon; the seals made a semicircle, and those who were more than seals, who had been human once, could be seen bowing their heads.
And to make everything certain, from behind the largest of the tombstones with its strange
carvings, there now rose a white, mysterious wraith, with rays of light coming from her face, and outstretched hands.
‘It’s Ethelgonda,’ breathed Aunt Etta, ‘Ethelgonda the Good!’ And everyone fell to their knees, for this was a ghost who had not appeared for well over a hundred years.
The saintly hermit was smiling. She was totally happy; she enfolded them in her blessing.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a deep and beautiful voice. ‘You have not been mistaken. What you have heard is most truly the Great Hum.’
Minette and Fabio, who had been spellbound by the apparition, heard the sound of the most heartfelt sobbing beside them and turned their heads. All three of the aunts were crying. Tears streamed down Aunt Etta’s bony cheeks, tears made a path through Aunt Coral’s nourishing night cream, tears dropped on to Aunt Myrtle’s hands as she brought them to her face.
‘It is the Hum,’ repeated Aunt Etta, in a choking voice.
‘It is the Hum,’ nodded Aunt Coral.
And Myrtle too said, ‘It is the Hum.’
‘What is—’ began Fabio but Minette frowned him down. She felt that this was not the moment for questions.
‘So does that mean …?’ faltered Aunt Etta, and the children looked at her, amazed. They did not know that this fierce woman could sound so shy and uncertain and humble.
The hermit nodded. ‘Yes, my dears,’ she said in her melodious voice. ‘It means that this place above all others has been chosen. You have been blessed.’
The aunts rose slowly to their feet. They could still not quite believe what they had heard, yet the Hum now was everywhere, filling the sky, coming up from the earth.
‘So he is really coming? After a hundred years?’
The holy woman nodded.
The aunts did not ask when he was coming. They knew that one must not pry into mysteries, but accept them gratefully, and they were right.
‘I can say no more,’ said the saint. ‘You must hold yourself in readiness.’
And then she vanished and they were left alone with their miracle.
