The Tale of Oat Cake Crag (35 page)

“I’m not,” Beatrix said firmly. “I’m not one bit sorry, Will. Once I got through the difficulty of actually putting the words on the paper, I felt very good about it. It’s right that Mama and Papa know, and it was high time that I told them. Secrets are a terrible burden. I was very tired of keeping this one to myself.”

Will’s face lightened and he reached for her hand. “What a joy it is to hear you say that, my dear.” He picked up her hand and kissed it. “My own very dear.”

I don’t know about you, but I do not especially care to witness Agnes Llewellyn’s guilty embarrassment when she learns that her secret has been discovered (Will was able to avoid mentioning Jeremy’s role in the matter), and I don’t really want to watch her squirm like a beetle on a pin when Mr. Heelis lectures her in his sternest solicitor’s manner, or look on as she apologizes, abjectly, to Mrs. Lythecoe (who accepts her apology with graciousness and a great deal of relief). Suffice it to say that when the discovery of her guilt was presented to her by Mr. Heelis, Agnes immediately saw the error of her ways and promised that she would never again do anything so foolish.

So I think we can bring this chapter to a close and with it one of the plots of this book, with special thanks to Jeremy Crosfield, our very own Miss Potter, and her dear Mr. Heelis for solving the mystery of the poisoned pen letters.

Excuse me. I’m sorry—what’s that?

Oh. Oh, yes. How could I forget?

And Tabitha Twitchit, too, of course.

It was a dark and stormy night.

The dark was the usual sort of dark, only darker and deeper, since the moon and the stars were completely covered with an ominous blanket of storm cloud. The storm, however, was rather stormier than usual, even for March, for it was carried along by a tempestuous north wind. The storm began swirling somewhere in the lap of Lapland, and was then swept south by the wind across the Arctic Circle and Sweden and Norway and the icy North Sea, happily howling and shrieking as it passed over the Orkney Isles and danced down the mountainous spine of Scotland’s highlands. The storm was enjoying itself so thoroughly that it didn’t feel like stopping at the border (what storm ever does?), but whistled across the western fells and the Pennines and skipped into Wales and on across the Lizard and into the Channel, where it blew itself out before it got to France. It snowed in some places, sleeted in others, and rained in the rest, everywhere hurling lightning bolts as carelessly as a boy throws darts and scattering thunder claps in its noisy wake. Yes, indeed, from the northernmost, rockiest tip of Scotland to the southern-most cities of Falmouth and Dartmouth, it was truly a dark and stormy night.

In the Land Between the Lakes, the little villages of Near and Far Sawrey sat squarely in the storm’s path. There, the houses turned their backs against the roguish, high-spirited north wind and huddled as close together as they could get without stepping into the next-door gardens, whilst the barns and sheds locked their doors and shut their windows tight and held on as best they might to the slates and shingles on their roofs.

Inside the barns, the cows and horses and pigs were grateful for the steamy warmth of their friends’ and neighbors’ bodies. As it always does, the devilish wind wanted to get in where she shouldn’t, so she knocked at the door and rattled the window sash, whilst Mesdames Boots, Bonnet, and Shawl pressed close together on their roost, convinced that the wind was going to get inside and pluck out their pretty feathers. Meanwhile, the ducks snuggled the younger ducklings under their wings, quacking and clucking in a comforting way about the other just-as-stormy nights they had managed to live through, just as they would live through this one, too, you wait and see if we don’t.

Outside the barns, in the gardens and on the hills around the village, the grass and trees and shrubs had no choice but to yield to the unruly wind as it lashed them from side to side, but they clung fast to the earth and felt very grateful for the roots that pushed down deep and held them in their proper places. This wasn’t true for limbs and branches, though, and the trees found that they couldn’t hold on to all of them and might as well let the wind have the ones they were no longer quite so attached to. On the distant fells, the ewes sought refuge behind low stone walls, where they sheltered their little lambs from the boisterous, blustery gale, whilst in the rookeries, the rooks clung to tossing branches and wished that the wind would get tired of whipping them around and go somewhere else to play her rowdy games.

Out on Lake Windermere, the storm was having even more fun, for the waves had joined forces with the wind with such a lively, playful rough-and-tumble of foam and froth that you could not tell which was wind and which was wave. Indeed, the lake was having a jolly old time of it, the water sloshing about and the waves dancing gaily from the north to the south, working themselves up into higher and higher crests as they went, so that by the time they reached Newby Bridge, they were as wildly frothy and foamy as they had ever been in the whole life of the lake, which (it must be said) is a very long life indeed. And then they tried to crowd all at once into the narrow mouth of the River Leven, so that there was a grand and glorious and gleeful melee of wild waves, just as there is at a football match when the home side has won and the people all begin to push toward the exits, shoving and shouting happily.

Speaking for myself, I should be quite happy, on such a tumultuous night, to be indoors and out of the wind—beside Miss Potter’s glowing hearth at Hill Top Farm, for instance, or in the library at The Brockery, listening to Hyacinth read aloud to Bosworth from the
History
, with a nice glass of elderberry wine at my elbow and a plate of Parsley’s tea biscuits on the table.

But that is not where our story takes us. We are going out into the storm on an adventure, so I must ask you to put on your mackintosh and rubbers. I’m afraid an umbrella would do you no good—the wind would have it inside out in an instant, for she loves to flip umbrellas nearly as much as she loves to twist the limbs off trees. However, if you have a rain hat that ties on securely, do bring that, and a muffler might be nice, for the wind likes to go down necks, as well. Of course, you may choose to stay indoors by your own fireside and read about this adventure, but you are likely to miss a great part of the fun of what is about to happen. Wouldn’t you rather
be
there?

So. One way or another, we are going up to the top of Oat Cake Crag, where we will join two of our friends: Thorvaald the dragon and Professor Galileo Newton Owl. It is much too stormy for anyone (besides us, that is) to be out looking for dragons, and even if they were, it is very dark, so Thorvaald does not have to disguise himself as a bush. He is sitting on his haunches, studying the opposite side of the lake through the owl’s binoculars, whilst the owl hunkers down close beside him, in the shelter of one of his dragon wings. There is no moon, for the storm has blanketed the whole sky with billowing black clouds, but on the other side of the lake, the dragon can see a pinprick of light near the airplane hangar. It bobs around the hangar, disappearing when it goes behind, then reappearing shortly after.

The dragon lowered the binoculars.
“There’s a guard. It appears that he is patrolling the aeroplane hangar. He’s going around and around is the way it looks.”

“Of course there’s a guard,”
the owl said crossly.
“I told yooou as much. Yooou won’t be able to get inside, if that’s your plan.”

The dragon sighed.
“I’m afraid I don’t really have a plan. Not yet, anyway.”

“Excuse me?”
cried the owl, pushing out from under the dragon’s sheltering wing.
“If yooou don’t have a plan, what are we doooing out here? It is wet and cold and excessively windy. My feathers are about tooo be blown right off my back. If yooou are just going tooo sit on this crag and stare across the lake through those binoculars, I’m going tooo fly back tooo my beech tree and see what there is in the larder.”

“Go right ahead,”
the dragon said.
“Nobody’szs keeping you. Anyway, I don’t know what you’re making such a fusszs about. It’s a perfectly pleasant evening, if a bit windy.”
Of course, it is easy for the dragon to talk. He has a built-in belly-fire to keep himself warm, and his wings and scales are an impervious cloak against the rain and wind. Sitting on this exposed point, buffeted by the wind and rain, Thorvaald is just as comfy and toasty as if he were basking beside the Briar Bank fire .

The owl seriously considered leaving, for he had (if he remembered correctly) a bit of leftover
Vole à la Chateaubriand
on his shelf. But somehow he felt that he had an investment in whatever sort of scheme the dragon was hatching. He gritted his beak and muttered,
“I’ll wait. But don’t be toooo long about it.”

“I’ll try,”
said the dragon. He began to hum softly and in a minor key, an odd little melody that coiled and curled around his head like a wisp of smoke until the wind heard it, liked it, and made off with it. After a little while he said,
“I think I have it.”

“Have what?”
asked the owl.

The owl was alarmed.
“Ride?”

The dragon pointed across the lake.
“Why, over there, of course.”

“Over . . . there?”
The owl gulped.
“Tonight?”

Now, the lake at this point—at the foot of Oat Cake Crag—is less than five miles wide. But the wind was wild and growing wilder, and the owl (while he is certainly large as tawny owls go) was understandably nervous about venturing too far from shore on such a night. Out there, in the unprotected middle of the longest lake in England, the wind could toss him around as easily as if he were a hummingbird or a dragonfly. He was a very brave owl—but not that brave.

“That’szs why I’m offering you a ride,”
said the dragon in a kindly tone.
“I suggest that you climb aboard and hang on to my neck, and we’ll fly acrosszs the lake. It’szs not at all difficult for me, for I am heavy and air-worthy enough to resist being tumbled about by that frisky wind. But I should think it would be a bit breathtaking for you, if you attempted to wing it on your own.”

Frisky
was not the word the owl would have chosen to describe the wind.
“But why are we going ooover there?”
he asked, rather desperately.
“What in the world dooo yooou think yooou can dooo?”

“Why, deszstroy the aeroplane, of course,”
said the dragon.
“It iszs an ill wind that blowszs nobody any good.”

The owl was taken aback.
“Destroy the—But how? The Bird is very large, you know, much larger than yooou are.”
(The Professor was quite right to say this, for our dragon is only twelve or thirteen centuries old and not very large, as dragons go.)
“The aeroplane is also quite heavy, and anyway, it’s probably chained down, so you can’t possibly lift it. And if you break intooo the hangar and try tooo damage the plane, I’m sure the guard will stop you. He probably has a gun, not tooo mention—”

“If you’re coming,”
the dragon interrupted impatiently,
“please climb aboard. I’m ready to take off.”
To demonstrate how ready he was, he lifted his wings and puffed smoke out of his nostrils.

The owl was in a quandary. He much preferred to return to his beech tree. But as the senior owl in the district, he had a responsibility to the animals who lived there. If the dragon thought he could rid them of Water Bird, he felt obliged to go along and help. If the dragon couldn’t, if he failed—well, somebody ought to be there to document the debacle. And to tell the truth, the owl was becoming rather fond of Thorvaald, who, in spite of his impulsive and somewhat thoughtless nature, was a likable beast. He would be sorry if something happened to Thorvaald and nobody was around to notice.

“All right,”
the owl replied bravely, although a voice within him (the voice of the not-so-brave owl) was crying,
“This is a terrible mistake!”
Summoning all his courage, he clambered onto the dragon’s shoulder, dug in his claws, and threw his wings around the dragon’s neck.

“Hang on,”
said the dragon. With a hiss of live steam, the dragon (don’t ask me how he did this, for it is a trade secret known only to dragons) lifted himself off the flat rocky top of the crag and straight up into the air. Once they were airborne, he began to flap his leathery wings. They were off.

The dragon was heavy and airworthy, as he said, but it was clear from the beginning that this was not going to be an ordinary flight. When the wind discovered that someone other than her wild and willful self was out and about in the sky that blustery night, she took it as a personal affront and attacked, from all sides at once, and above and below. She hissed and screeched and wailed at the dragon and his passenger, churning the clouds and the water in the most astonishing tumult. She pushed and shoved and clawed and buffeted the fliers and bellowed in their ears, lobbing lightning bolts all around and dropping great thuds of thunder directly in their path. The dragon flew on as steadily as he could, although even he had considerable difficulty maintaining his course through the mushrooms of updrafts and downdrafts the wind planted in front of him. By the time they got to mid-lake, the owl was feeling airsick and giddy (it’s one thing to fly, and another to be flown), as well as terribly frightened. He wished mightily that he had obeyed his first instinct and flown home to the comfort and safety of his beech tree, or that at the very least he had insisted on a parachute or water wings.