Jasper and the Green Marvel (6 page)
Read Jasper and the Green Marvel Online
Authors: Deirdre Madden
The following morning, to Jasper’s great surprise, the rats were absolutely determined that they would go out into the garden with him. He would have much preferred that they stayed locked up in the room, because they had a habit of getting into mischief when they were out and about. But just as he was leaving the room they raced across the floor. They ran up his legs, like two squirrels climbing a tree, and hopped into his inside pocket. He plucked them out by the scruffs of their necks and dropped them back in their drawer, but they scampered out again and clung to his ankles as he walked
back to the door. With this, he gave up.
‘All right then,’ he said, ‘you can come out to the garden. But always remember – you have to behave! You have to be good!’ The two rats grinned as he removed them from his legs and lifted them into his pockets.
When he clumped down the wooden stairs he found Mrs Knuttmegg waiting there, just outside the kitchen door. To his surprise, she didn’t sneer at him or make the usual sarcastic remarks; in fact she looked surprisingly ill at ease. Seeing her there reminded him of something.
‘That horrible screaming in the middle of the night,’ Jasper said, ‘what was that all about? Was that you? It woke me out of a sound sleep.’ Instead of making some smart remark as he expected, Mrs Knuttmegg just stared at him with wide round eyes. She was clearly very frightened.
‘So you heard it too,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me, what exactly did it say? I thought it was
“Cats! Cats” and lots of screaming, but Missus thought it was “Bats! Bats!”’
‘Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?’ Jasper replied. ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t make out any words. But what do you mean, “it”? Who was that screaming, if it wasn’t you or Mrs Haverford-Snuffley?’
‘It was the ghost,’ Mrs Knuttmegg said. ‘Didn’t you know that there’s a ghost in this house?’
‘Don’t be so silly! There’s no such a thing as a ghost,’ Jasper said.
‘Well, if there isn’t, who was that screaming last night? It wasn’t me and it wasn’t the missus.’
‘It certainly wasn’t me either, although it seems to be quite the thing to blame me for everything that goes wrong around here,’ Jasper snapped, as he flounced out to the garden to begin his day’s work.
He spent the morning weeding flower beds. There was no gardening work he really liked but he particularly hated weeding. It was hard
labour, and because he didn’t know anything at all it was easy to get it wrong, and rip up the flowers instead of the weeds. He started on a long, curved flower bed and by mid-morning he had worked his way round to the front of the house, where he discovered Mrs
Haverford-Snuffley
asleep in the sun in a deckchair. A crumpled copy of the
Woodford Trumpet
lay on the ground beside her, where it had fallen from her hands. Being very careful not to wake her up, Jasper tiptoed over until he was standing right beside her.
The small bat hanging from the feather was asleep too. Ugh, how Jasper hated it! It made him mad to think of a nasty, ugly little creature like that being so pampered and spoiled. He wished he could play a trick on it. Maybe if he was very careful he could reach in and open the ribbons of its bonnet. Then its hat would fall off and it might get into trouble for being careless. But when he looked at it closely the ribbon was tightly knotted and Jasper knew
that his fingers would never be nimble enough to undo it without his being noticed.
And then he had another, even meaner idea. He pressed his middle finger firmly behind his thumb, turning his right hand into a kind of catapult. He would flick the bat off the end of the feather and into the middle of next week! Or at least into the middle of the lawn, he thought, sniggering to himself and carefully taking aim.
But at that very moment, he got a sudden and terrible shock. One of the rats – he would never know which one – bit him on his tummy with its pointed teeth, and a sharp, painful nip it was.
‘Oh that’s agony. AGONY!’
It happened just as he was about to attack Nelly and it made him stumble and lose his footing. Instead of flicking away the bat, he flicked Mrs Haverford-Snuffley hard on the nose just as he tumbled and fell on top of her. The deckchair collapsed and they both ended
up in a tangled heap on the ground, all mixed up with the sheets of the newspaper.
‘Professor Orchid, this is outrageous! What on earth is happening? My nose, my poor nose.’
‘The bat did it!’ Jasper screamed. ‘It’s all the bat’s fault!’
‘I’m sure Mummy’s little darling wasn’t to blame at all.’
And in the mad confusion that followed, Jasper didn’t notice that the rats had slipped quietly out of his pocket and scampered off.
They ran and ran as fast as they could, off down the gravel path and round the side of the house, where they stopped for a moment.
‘Do you think he saw us?’ Rags said, gasping for breath.
‘No, but he’ll soon notice that we’re gone. Let’s get to that folly thing.’
Nelly and Georgiana had given them directions: at the back of the house turn right, away from the kitchen garden. Go straight along until you come to the greenhouse, and then turn left. Go straight on, turn left again at the big oak and after a short while they would
see the folly before them. They were good clear directions, and before long the two rats saw in the distance a small building of grey stone. It was circular, with pillars all around it and a domed roof. It was exactly as it had been described to them.
‘That’s it! That’s the folly!’ Bags said excitedly. But as they got closer they realised to their dismay that Nelly and Georgiana had left out one significant detail.
The folly stood on an island in the middle of a small lake.
‘Oh no! Now what are we to do?’ They stared across the water in silence for a few moments and then Rags said stoutly, ‘Well, I’m not giving up. We’re just going to have to find a way of getting there.’
They talked for quite some time about making a little boat or a raft. They looked around and found a few pieces of wood, but they were all too small.
‘There’s nothing else for it. We’re going to
have to swim.’
‘Do we know how to?’ Rags asked. ‘I don’t know if I can. I’ve never tried.’
‘Swim? Of course we can swim. We’re rats, after all. Have you forgotten about
Great-Great-Great-Uncle
Dinny?’
Although Rags and Bags were prison rats, as were their mum and dad and grannies and grandads, there had been lots of stories in the family about other rats, cousins and aunties and great-uncles, who had led quite different lives. There was cousin Joey, whose home had been in a flour mill, and who had lived the kind of life the prison rats could only dream about. All the grain he could eat! Great shiny golden heaps of wheat! He would eat his bellyful as often as he wanted, and then sleep it off in the sun beside the mill-race, as the water tumbled over the mill-wheel.
But more legendary still had been
Great-Great-Great-Uncle
Dinny, who had lived many years ago on a trade-ship. He wore a
small gold ear-ring, they had been told, and he had tattoos on both forepaws, one of an anchor and one of a heart with the word MUM in it. He ate oranges and spices every day, and at night he slept curled up in bales of coloured silk.
Then the day came when his ship was attacked by pirates. A cannon ball blew a hole in the side of the ship and the sea poured in. So what did Great-Great-Great-Uncle Dinny do? He immediately became the Rat Who Deserted the Sinking Ship. Amidst all the shouting of the crew, the smoke and the gushing of the water, he hopped over the side without so much as a backward glance, and started swimming. He swam and he swam for days, until he came to a tropical island. ‘I was getting tired of life at sea anyway,’ he said to himself, as he plodded up the hot white sand. There were coconut groves on the island, and banana trees and pineapples, and Dinny had lived there happily ever after. Rags and Bags’
mum had told them this story so many times when they were small rats. They thought of it now as they stared at the grey water of the lake.
‘He swam for days,’ Bags said. ‘Days and days.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t true.’
‘Rags! How can you even think such a thing!’
Rags shrugged. ‘It looks cold,’ he said, pointing at the lake, ‘but I suppose there’s nothing else for it.’
They stepped into the water together, pulling faces and going ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ because the water was indeed very cold; but, fair play to them, they kept going. As they moved out of their depth, they kicked and flicked their legs, not quite sure what they should be doing, and hoping it would work out.
And it did.
‘Look! Look at me!’ Bags cried. ‘I’m swimming!’
‘Me too!’
They weren’t very good at it, but they weren’t bad either, given that it was their first attempt. Bags found it hard to swim in a straight line, and kept drifting off course. Rags, try as he might, couldn’t help splashing water up his own snout, which was most unpleasant. To begin with, they were just pleased to be able to do it, but as time passed the novelty wore off. It seemed to take forever, and they were both shivering with cold and exhausted by the time they finally reached the island and stumbled up the steps of the folly.
To their relief, the folly didn’t have a proper door, just an open archway through which they went. In the shelter of the building they shook the water of the lake from their pelts, and looked around them, starting to get quite excited again. ‘Just think, at any moment now, we could find the Green Marvel!’
The folly was circular, with six high rectangular windows. Against the walls were two curved benches made of stone, and the floor was covered in big square grey flagstones. They looked under the benches, but there was nothing there. Where could the emerald
necklace be hidden? Puzzled, the two rats scratched their heads. The problem was that there was nowhere else to look. Apart from the benches, the folly was completely empty. There were no cupboards or boxes, no little nooks where something might be concealed.
‘This is a stupid place anyway,’ Bags grumbled. ‘I don’t see the point of it.’
‘Maybe the bat got it wrong,’ Rags said, as he walked across the floor. But as he did so, he noticed something.
One of the stones moved beneath his paws!
He stopped and thought about this, then carefully inspected the flagstone. It was identical to all the others except for one small detail: it had a crack running across it, which marked off a triangle in one corner. And that little corner, Rags now saw as he bounced up and down on it, was quite loose.
‘There could be something hidden under it. Help me, Bags, quickly!’
It didn’t take them long to prise up the broken piece of stone, and Bags held it while
Rags looked underneath.
‘Hurry up! This thing’s heavy.’
‘There’s nothing there,’ Rags said, with terrible disappointment in his voice.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘No necklace. No jewels. Just a measly piece of paper, exactly like the one Georgiana had, the one with the clue written on it.’
‘Urrrrgh … well, grab it, you nitwit,’ Bags cried. ‘And hurry up, I can’t hold this thing forever.’ Rags darted his paw in and had just managed to snatch out the note before Bags’s strength gave out, as he let the triangle of stone fall back into place, just missing Rags’s head.
‘Really, I wonder about you sometimes,’ Bags said crossly. ‘“Nothing there”! Give that note to me. I’ll keep it safe and give it to Georgiana.’ Not for the first time in their lives the rats regretted that they didn’t know how to read.
‘Sorry,’ Rags said meekly. ‘I suppose we should think of heading back.’
‘I suppose so.’ Neither of them was looking forward to getting into the cold water of the lake again.
‘Look, there’s another doorway.’ Rags pointed to the far side of the folly. ‘Let’s have a peek through there. Perhaps we won’t have to swim quite so far this time.’
But when they went over to the doorway and looked out, they couldn’t believe their eyes. It wasn’t just that the distance between the folly and the land was much shorter on this side – it was that there was an elegant little humpbacked bridge across the narrow channel of water.
‘Yippee! We don’t have to swim at all!’
Rags and Bags scampered across the bridge and then went around the edge of the lake. In the distance they could see Haverford-Snuffley Hall. It would be a bit of a walk home but that didn’t bother them because they weren’t in a hurry. They took it in turns to carry the note they had found.
‘What do you say we go home via the kitchen garden?’ Bags suggested. ‘Stop off for a little something.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Rags replied.
There was a high ivy-covered wall around the kitchen garden, and as the rats drew near, they saw someone they didn’t recognise. It was a young man with fair hair cut in a wide blunt fringe. He was dressed in soft brown
work-clothes
. ‘Another gardener, by the look of it,’ Bags whispered. ‘Jasper will be delighted. He’ll make him do all the work.’
But as he spoke, something extraordinary happened. The young man walked up to the wall and then
he walked straight through it!
‘How did he do that? Where’s he gone?’ The rats ran up and slipped through the gate into the kitchen garden to see where he was, but there was no sign of the young man anywhere.
They might have thought more about this had they not been immediately distracted by all the scrumptious fruit and vegetables that
were there for the taking. The warm,
sun-ripened
tomatoes were a big hit, and then they feasted on soft fruit.
‘Do you know what I think, Bags?’ Rags said as he popped a sweet pink hairy gooseberry in his mouth.
‘What?’
‘We should get out more!’
And the two rats fell about laughing.