The Witch of Clatteringshaws (4 page)

Simon laid the paper down and dug a spoonful of boiled egg from the shell. It had not been boiled quite long enough; the white was transparent and runny. It ran over Simon’s chin, which he crossly wiped, using a stiffly starched napkin embroidered with a coronet in gold thread. The gold thread scratched his chin.

“Oh, plague take it!”
said Simon.

“Have a tissue.”

The man approaching from the other end of the extremely long dining table pulled a tissue from a gilt container shaped like a crown and passed it to Simon.

“Thanks,” said Simon, wiping egg yolk off his fingers. “Who are you?”

“Your Majesty’s court jester. Name’s Rodney Firebrace.”

“You don’t look very funny.”

Rodney Firebrace was a tall, stringy, harsh-faced character with a reddish complexion slightly scarred by smallpox, a thin thatch of ginger hair, jacket and trousers of rust-colored broadcloth, and a small silver badge pinned to his lapel that said
COURT JESTER BY APPOINTMENT OF H.M
. A sharp-eyed gray parrot perched on his shoulder. Nothing about him suggested humor. He said:

“Court jesters are not necessarily expected to be funny.”

“Oh? What, then?”

“They tell the truth at all times. At all costs.”

“How did you get the job?”

“I was King Richard’s jester,” Firebrace said. He had a loud, carrying voice, not unlike a bird’s croak. Each time he spoke the parrot on his shoulder raised and lowered its wings and let out a subdued squawk. Now it suddenly remarked:

“Highly humorous. Ha ha ha. Shoot a second arrow to find the first.”

“King Richard gave me the job five years ago.”

Were there many applicants? Simon wondered. Reading his thought, Firebrace went on, “My qualifications were better than those of the nineteen other people applying for the position. They were all music-hall comedians. I had been tossed by a bull. And fallen off a mountain. And I had a university degree from Saint Vigean’s.”

“What in?”

“Humor, Its Sources and Uses. And Communication with Bulls.”

“Well, I’m sure you will be a great help,” said Simon politely. “I am sorry you have just missed my friend Dido. She enjoys a good joke.”

“The Right Honorable Miss Twite? Is she not in residence here?”

“She just took off from King’s Wrath station this morning. For Caledonia.”

“Indeed?” said Rodney Firebrace. “Perhaps that is just as well for Miss Twite.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I was just about to warn you. There is a faction moving against Miss Twite. Her position here at court is critical—I should say highly precarious.”

“This isn’t a joke? You are serious?”

“Never more so. The Civil Service,” explained Firebrace, “don’t like her.”

“You mean all the old boys, the Purveyor of the Royal Venison, Keeper of the Privy Purse, and the rest of them—they don’t like Dido?”

“Not at all. They fear for their own positions. They are afraid that Miss Twite might use her persuasive powers to—”

“Get me to sack them all and hire younger staff?”

“Just so. There is a movement to have Miss Twite pushed down the oubliette. Or sent to the Tower on some trumped-up charge.”

“Highly humorous,” said the parrot. “Ha ha ha.”

“I didn’t know there
was
an oubliette.”

“Halfway along the passage to the small Throne Room.”

“I’ll have it filled in.” Simon made a note on his daily program.

“Why has Miss Twite gone to Caledonia?”

“To have a hunt around,” Simon explained, “and see if she can’t find that other applicant for the Throne. For I don’t mind telling you, I’m not above half keen on the job. Now that I’ve tried it.”

“Ah,” said Firebrace. “I did wonder. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Unhappy sits the head that wears a crown.”

“Highly humorous. Ha ha ha. The second side of the slice toasts faster.”

“Could you ask your parrot to say something else?”

“Wiggonholt, shut up.—May I ask,” said Rodney Firebrace, “for which part of the North Country is Miss Twite bound?”

“Well, that’s one of the problems. Father Sam, you know, the Archbishop—”

“Yes, he’s my cousin—”

“—he sometimes gets letters from a kind of cousin of his—yours too?—who lives up there. But she only writes about once in ten years, and he hasn’t heard from her for a while. And she’s a bit unreliable, he says. But she was supposed to know something about a rumor that a royal child went missing after the Battle of Follodden. Child of King Malcolm of Caledonia and his wife, who was Princess Ethelfleda of Lower Saxony, both of them in direct line from Aelfred the Great and Brutus of Troy.”

“Mind you,” said Rodney Firebrace, “mind you, I’m not saying those qualifications are not exemplary, they certainly are that—but even if Miss Twite succeeds in rummaging out this contender for the Crown, how are we to know that the Civil Servants will find them in any way superior to yours? Or find this person preferable? How old is he or she, by the way?”

“When was the Battle of Follodden?”

“Around fifteen years ago.”

“Humph …”

“Truly diverting,” said the parrot. “Rib-tickling. Ho ho ho. First for a curse. Second for a laugh. Third for telling.”

“Shut up, Wiggonholt.”

A footman came in with a note for Simon from the Lord Chancellor.

“The King and Queen of Finland and Princess Jocandra are due to arrive in ten minutes.”

“Oh, bother it,” said Simon.

To the Archbishop of Canterbury, c/o St. James’s Palace, London SW1 HRH

Funny old Smowell! Fancy hearing from you after all this time! You say you have not had any letters from me. Well, I didn’t have any from you, so that makes us even. You still feel bad about the awful thing we did. What puzzles me is this: you say we failed to hear the words, so they are lost to posterity. I suppose that is so. But the thing is, Sammy, that it would have been kept secret in any case—so what difference does it make? Nobody would have heard the words either way—so where’s the loss? You tell me that. And I still think that my penance was a lot worse than yours
.

Things here go on much as usual. There have been extra high spring tides, and the twin whirlpools of Mindluck and Hartluck have been so active that no boat could cross the loch. It is just as well they built the rail bridge where they did—any
farther west toward the mouth of the loch would have been hopeless. There’s a rock bar in the middle that makes it very shallow at low tide. That’s what causes the whirlpools
.

Your penance. How can you make atonement in the middle of city luxuries? I realize that you have to crown the King (may he live forever), but won’t that make your reparation time twice as long? Quartered in my Ladies’ Convenience for the next dunnamany years, I feel quite sorry for you
.

You say that you have this problem about the King. (I feel sorry for him too; he sounds as if he is having a hard time). You ask about descendants of Brutus of Troy born in Follodden year. My dear friend, I must point out that even in this small town there are at least thirty children, male and female, born in that year. Is that the only pointer you can provide? There is a large rock near here, carved with the figure of a giant boar, and beside it a human foot; these relics are supposed to be connected with the coronation ceremonies of the Ancient Kings of Lerryn in 1108 B.C. A local belief has it that if a descendant of the Ancient Kings passes that way, there will be a loud clap of thunder. But do you seriously suggest that I gather together thirty schoolchildren and take them on a picnic to the Crag of Lerryn on a day when it is likely to thunder? Half of them would fall into the ravine
.

The Hobyahs are still active, and when the loch froze in January, they raided this side on several occasions. The golf course was not safe after four p.m
.

My friend has not been seen in public for two years; he is being dismissed as a myth, something like the Red Etin. Mothers use him to threaten their children—“Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret ye, or the Loch Grieve Monster will get ye!”

Something odd is taking place in the graveyard. More of that in my next. Fancy having a proper address for you! Lambeth Palace, ho ho ho!

(Do you remember old Wiggonholt? I wonder what ever became of him? And of Cousin Rodney?)

You say that you are sending two investigators northward. You had better give me more information about them or they are likely to run into trouble
.

Cousinly greetings
,
M

Dido and the Woodlouse sat in a first-class compartment of a train that was making its way over the heights of Willoughby Wold.

Dido looked at the Woodlouse with huge satisfaction. His real name was not the Woodlouse but Piers Ivanhoe le Guichet Crackenthorpe. But he had been called Woodlouse when she first met him because of his habit of curling up in moments of danger, and she had become fond of the name. It seemed to suit him. He was a thin, pale, dark-haired boy somewhere in his early teens. He wore green-tinted glasses. He was nothing like so thin and pale as he had been when Dido first met him at a school run by criminals and werewolves, where he had been starved and ill-treated.

Now, for some months, he had been the guest of the Green family at Willoughby Chase, where two kind girls, Bonnie and Sylvia, and their benevolent parents, Sir Willoughby and Lady Green, had fed and tended and encouraged him, until he was now as active and cheerful as any other boy his age.

“Woodlouse,” said Dido, “you’re a credit to those Greens. I only wish we could a stayed longer. They seemed a right decent pair of gals, that Bonnie and Sylvia. A few more days of crossbow practice and I reckon you’d be all set to win the county championship.”

“Well, they did say to come back when we’d finished our errand in the North Country. Bonnie promised that she’d teach me singlestick and quarterstaff and how to tilt at the quintain. And Sylvia was going to teach me to skate. Sir Willoughby promised he’d write to my pater, who’s the British ambassador in New Galloway, the capital of Hy Brasil, to tell him that I was alive and bobbish. I’d really like to go out and visit the pater and mater, but it’s a three-month trip. And they might just be coming back.”

Piers sighed and looked out at the wild and desolate moorland country through which the train was passing.

“How long before we get to Caledonia?”

“Four hours—maybe five. Depends a bit, Sir Willoughby said, on whether we meet any highwaymen along the way. Railwaymen they call them in these parts. Then we get to Roman Wall. There’s a train station, but we don’t get out. We go on, through a lot of mountains, and come to a big lake, what they call a loch. There’s been a new rail bridge built across it. Just as well, Sir Willoughby said, as there’s a monster living in or near the loch, the Loch Grieve Monster, what used to nobble a lot of folks off the ferry, afore the bridge was built. And there are Hobyahs too. The town we’re going to, Clatteringshaws, is on the north side of the loch.”

“Is that where Father Sam’s cousin lives?”

“I’m not sure,” Dido admitted. “Father Sam didn’t seem to know. But that’s the town she’s witch of.”

“Seems mighty odd—for an Archbishop’s cousin to be a witch. I never met a witch, did you, Dido?”

“Well,” said Dido, “when I was in New Cumbria, that’s next to Hy Brasil, there were some mighty rummy old gals there. If they weren’t witches, they was the next best thing. One of ’em turned into an owl and flew about at night. And she got shot and turned back into herself again. But dead.”

“Shot when she was an owl?”

“Yup. And the Queen of that country was a right spooky old crumpet what had been waiting umpty hundred years for her hubby to come back; and to keep herself going all that time she ate a lot of gals’ bones.… I reckon you could call her a witch.”

Piers looked thoughtful.

“Monsters, Hobyahs, witches—it sounds like an odd spot we’re heading for. What are Hobyahs?”

“I don’t rightly know. But they ain’t things you’d want to give the time of day to, that’s for sure. Oh, well—how about a spot of grub?”

“I’m agreeable.”

But before they could sample the contents of the lavish picnic hamper provided by the Green family, the train came to a sudden grinding halt.

“Hey!” said Dido, putting her head out of the window, “how come we stopped in the middle of nobody’s land?”

Outside there was nothing to be seen but wild rocky moorland with mountains ahead in the distance.

Toward the front of the train they could hear shouts and musket shots.

“Sounds to me like a holdup. Best get out our pistols, Woodlouse.”

The Green family had provided Dido and Piers with these essentials for travel in the North country. Dido withdrew hers from an outside pocket in her knapsack and cocked it, leaning out of the window again and looking toward the front of the train.

“Well, there’s a bit of fussation going on up there, but seems like our help won’t be wanted this time—the robbers seem to be making off.”

Two figures on horseback were visible galloping away into the mist.

“Fat fellows,” said Dido. “Don’t seem as if they’d need to rob a train—neither of ’em looked as if they’d ever gone hungry … Funny thing, they looked a bit like two coves I used to see about at Saint Jim’s Palace, a couple of those unCivil Servants.”

After a few jolts and jiggles the train resumed its journey. Presently Piers and Dido heard steps coming along the corridor. A figure halted outside the door of their compartment and tapped on the glass inquiringly. Dido nodded for her to come in.

“Guess she looks harmless enough, eh, Woodlouse?”

“I should think so,” Piers agreed. Though
harmless
was not quite the word he would have chosen to describe the woman who entered their carriage.

She might have been anywhere between thirty and fifty, though she moved with the balance and easy stride
of a much younger person. Her hair, done in a knot at the back of her neck, was black and smooth. Her long thin face had regular features and would have been handsome, but there was something a little forbidding about it. She looks, thought Dido, as if she could have a mighty nasty temper if she was crossed. Her eyes were seaweed colored. She wore a red dress.