She had freed her hands from Arriman’s, and jumping out of bed, ran to the chair where her gown was lying.
‘Here it comes!’ whispered the ogre.
Belladonna had found the matchbox, had opened it, was staring at it while the colour drained from her face.
When she spoke it was in a voice so full of anguish and disbelief that they hardly recognized it. ‘Rover’s gone,’ said Belladonna. ‘He’s gone!’
There was a long and dreadful pause. ‘I have to find him, Arry, I have to. He’s my familiar, you see. Without him, I’m nothing.’
She began to search desperately, lifting up the Knickerbocker Glories, pushing aside the snow flakes. Arriman had started to help her when he saw the ogre beckoning to him from the other side of the room.
‘Sir,’ said Lester, when he’d got his master outside the door. ‘It’s my belief that it ain’t no good looking because that worm ain’t lost. He’s been stolen. I’ve thought so all along.’
‘All along? But Belladonna’s only just noticed that he’s gone,’ said Arriman, looking puzzled.
Lester saw that he’d made a mistake. If he told Arriman that Rover had been gone before the raising of Sir Simon, he’d get suspicious at once. Belladonna had made it clear that her blackness came from Rover, so if there was no Rover there was no blackneses, and that led right back to Sir Simon not being Sir Simon at all but an actor called Monty Moon.
‘I can’t go into that now, sir,’ he said. ‘But I can tell you one thing. Rover may be a good performer, but he’s not up to shutting a matchbox after he’s crawled out of it. No, that worm’s been nicked and I’ll bet my bottom dollar I know who did it.’
‘Who?’
‘Witch Number Six. That Madame Olympia. Leadbetter thinks the same.’
‘Oh no! Surely not!’ Arriman was very shocked. ‘The one with the interesting cruel smile and the . . . er . . . rats?’
Lester nodded. ‘And if I’m right we ought to be getting down to her caravan quick. The witches are due to go back tomorrow.’
Arriman was frowning. The more he remembered the ‘Symphony of Death’, the more he thought it would be better not to meet the enchantress head on.
‘I think we’d better take her by surprise,’ he said. ‘And that means disguises. How would you like to be a rabbit, Lester?’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Oh, come on! Be a sport!’
‘No, sir. Absolutely and definitely, no.’
While Arriman and the ogre were talking, Madame Olympia was packing her things.
Since Belladonna had won the competition, the enchantress had been in such a towering rage that she had made three holes in the floor of the caravan where she had stamped her feet. She had also come out in a rash from sheer temper, and it was this which made her decide to go back to London immediately, to her Beauty Parlour, where she could mix some creams and ointments to get rid of it. Then she planned to come back like the Queen in Snow White with a poisoned apple or some poisoned stays which she would sell Belladonna at the door and which would kill her. Except that probably Belladonna did not wear stays – people did not seem to nowadays – so she would have to think of something else.
So now she came out of the caravan to do one last job and that was to throw some rubbish she did not want on to the fire. Some nasty, useless, disappointing rubbish that she wanted to get rid of once and for all. And as she did so, a rabbit and a fox ran between her legs and bounded into the caravan.
If she had bothered to look, she might have noticed that the fox was an unusually handsome one with a great bushy autumn-coloured tail, and that the rabbit, which looked cross, had only a single eye. But she only turned round furiously and said, ‘Get out at once, you dirty animals. Shoo!’
But of course they weren’t dirty animals any more. Sitting round the table were Arriman the Awful and the ogre.
‘Good morning,’ said Arriman, polite as always.
‘How dare you!’ screamed the enchantress. ‘How dare you break in like this?’
Arriman looked at her. An enchantress’s power is useless on someone who is truly in love. Arriman could see her now as she really was and he did not like what he saw.
‘We believe you may have something which belongs to my fiancée,’ said the magician. ‘Her familiar, to be exact.’
‘Her familiar? What on earth are you talking about? I’ve a perfectly good familiar of my own, as you can see.’ Madame Olympia kicked the cowering aardvark with the heel of her shoe.
Then she shut her eyes and began to gabble something under her breath. But before she could get any further, Lester, following a signal from his master, had taken the full milk jug and upended it over the enchantress’s head.
‘Phloo,’ spluttered Madame Olympia. ‘Guggle!’
Milk is a well-known antidote to magic, almost as good as eating roses or holding a rowan twig.
‘Quick! Search the caravan!’ ordered Arriman, while the enchantress, groping for a towel, used some words that even Lester had not heard before.
So they searched the caravan, turning out the built-in cupboards, opening Madame Olympia’s half-packed suitcase, feeling under the bed.
Nothing. Not a sign of Rover.
‘You see,’ jeered the enchantress. ‘Turn the caravan inside out for all I care.’
She flung out of the caravan and, picking up the little bundle of rubbish, walked with a gleeful smile towards the fire.
It was Arriman who caught on first and ran after her, the ogre following.
‘Stop! Stop! Let’s see what you’re burning.’
‘Never!’ shouted the enchantress, and laughed.
Then she brought her arm over in an arc and threw her bundle on to the flames.
Arriman did not stop for any of the spells that would have made him fireproof, or any magic words that would have doused the flames. Instead, he plunged his hand into the red-hot blaze and drew out the crumpled bundle just as it had begun to catch.
And there – dry and bewildered-looking at the bottom of a cornflake packet – was Rover!
Belladonna, sitting wistfully in a chair in the Tower Room, greeted the earthworm with a shriek of joy. But then she saw the magician’s hand.
‘Oh, Arry! You’re hurt! How dreadful!’
And she took his hand and bent over it and began to croon one of her wholeness songs about the beauty of new skin and the cleverness of having five fingers, and almost at once, the pain disappeared and the blisters also.
‘My angel! My little blossom! You’ve healed me!’ cried Arriman, growing more and more besotted.
‘Yes, but that was the old me,’ said Belladonna hastily. ‘The new me is quite different, Arry. If you give me Rover, I’ll show you.’
The ogre handed her the worm which he’d damped down and fettled up with some moist earth as they came.
‘What would you like, Arry?’ she said. ‘Shall I turn the tinsel into some mouldering thigh bones, perhaps? Sort of in a criss-cross pattern? And what about making the snowflakes into gaping wounds? You do like gaping wounds?’
‘I adore them, my angel. They’re almost my favourite thing.’
So Belladonna closed her eyes while the ogre and Mr Leadbetter and Arriman stood and watched.
The next half hour was one that none of them ever forgot. Belladonna worked and she worked and she worked, not once letting the strain and puzzlement show on her face. But at the end of the time, she put down Rover and threw herself with a wail of anguish on to the bed.
‘It’s hopeless!’ she cried. ‘Quite, quite hopeless. You must forget me, Arry. You must wed another. My blackness has absolutely and completely gone!’
The others looked round the room once more. The strings of gold and silver tinsel were still there, but between them there sparkled a chain of most delightful fairy dolls. In the centre of each exquisite, still unmelted snowflake, shone a diadem of flawless pearls. But it was the pots of pink and rather blobby flowers which had sprung up a
ll over the place which made Lester’s voice, when he spoke, sound like a voice from the tomb.
‘Begonias,’ said the ogre, shaking his gigantic head. ‘Bloomin’ begonias.’
It was in this moment of complete despair that Arriman showed himself a most true and noble lover.
‘My angel!’ he said, gathering Belladonna into his arms. ‘What does it matter? You can fill the whole place with Knickerbocker Glories and those . . . er . . . pink blobby things, and it wouldn’t matter to me. All I care about is you!’
But though she let her head rest for a moment on his manly shoulders, Belladonna was firm.
‘No, Arry; you have a duty. Remember what the competition was about? “Darkness is All”, you said. Suppose we had—’ Her voice broke but she pulled herself together. ‘Suppose we had a white baby? Or even a grey baby? What could a baby like that do with a devilish maze and a fiendish laboratory and all the other lovely things you’ve worked so hard to make? How could a white baby keep wizardry and darkness alive in the land? You don’t just belong to yourself, Arry. You belong to all the doom and dastardy and devilment in the world and I’d never forgive myself if I let you forget what was right.’
And nothing that the desperate wizard could say would shake her.
‘I’ll go as soon as I can get my things together,’ she said, keeping her voice steady with an effort. ‘If I’m so white that I can ruin a powerful familiar like that, the further away I am the better. Only I must say goodbye to Terence and give Rover back to him.’ She turned to Mr Leadbetter and the ogre who were standing miserably by the door. ‘By the way, where is Terence? I haven’t seen him for ages.’
The ogre frowned. ‘He wasn’t at the campsite,’ he said.
‘Are you sure?’ said Mr Leadbetter sharply. ‘He said he was going down to the campsite to get Belladonna’s things and help the witches clear up. I was sure he’d spent the night down there. You know what boys are with tents.’
And, their great sorrow laid aside for a moment, they all looked at each other with a new anxiety.
Where was Terence?
Eighteen
Terence at that moment, was locked in a small dark room with high barred windows in the place he feared and hated more than any other in the world. For the worst thing that could have happened to Terence had happened. Matron had come unrooted; she sent out an alarm; he’d been recaptured as he ran across the road to go to the campsite and now he was back in the Home.
It had happened so suddenly that he’d had no chance to defend himself. A police car had been waiting outside the gates (even policemen didn’t dare to go inside the gates at Darkington). Two men had stepped out of the car and grabbed him, and before he knew where he was, he was inside the car and driving at seventy miles an hour back to Todcaster.
The policemen had been quite kind, only telling him what a stupid thing it was to run away: children were always caught in the end, they said. Apparently a tradesman who delivered groceries to the Home had seen Terence at the station on the day he went to find Miss Leadbetter and had noticed him buying a ticket back to Darkington.
But if the policemen had been fatherly enough, Matron had received the woebegone little boy with a gloating triumph. She said nothing about the rooting; most probably she had forgotten it (there is often loss of memory after rooting), but she had not forgotten her grudge against Terence. And now, after a night spent on a lumpy mattress with only a bowl of claggy porridge for his breakfast, he was waiting for her to come and punish him.
The door opened and Matron entered. She was yellower and more like a camel than ever and she began at once:
‘Now then, what are we going to do with you? Beat you? Send you to Borstal? Keep you locked up for good?
On she went, scolding and threatening, while Terence cowered against the wall and wondered why God hadn’t given people earlids as well as eyelids so that they could shut out such dreadful sounds. And all the while, his anxious thoughts raced back to Darkington. Had Belladonna noticed yet that Rover had gone? Had Arriman learnt that Sir Simon was a fake? Would anyone miss him and try to find him or would they think he’d run away because he didn’t like it at the Hall? No, they couldn’t think that; they couldn’t.
Matron was still standing over him, shouting and blustering, the steam of ugly words pouring out of her mouth like pitch. She’d have liked to hit Terence, to knock him against the wall, but there were stupid health inspectors who came round these days and made trouble. One had actually had the nerve to tell her that her methods were old-fashioned. Still, there were plenty of things you could do that didn’t leave marks. A pinch under the wrist, for example. Matron had a special line in pinches.
‘So just you remember, my boy. One squeak out of you, one more bit of trouble and you’ll stay in this room for the rest of your life, do you understand?’
Terence nodded. In the few hours since he’d been back at the Home, all his sparkle and bounce had gone. Terence could stand the blackest magic and enjoy it, but unkindness and spite just finished him.
And so the greyness and misery of the Home closed over Terence once again. By the time he’d eaten his boiled fish and black-eyed potatoes at the scrubbed dining table, had his fingernails inspected, and put on his mackintosh for the boring walk they always took when there was no school – past the formica factory, left at the gas works and back down a long road of seedy terrace houses – he’d almost forgotten that only a few hours ago life had been an exciting and wonderful thing.
But just as the crocodile, led by the Assistant Matron, a watery lady called Miss Kettle, was crossing the road back to the Home, a strange thing happened. Terence heard his name called and looking up he saw Miss Leadbetter carrying a shopping basket and waving her umbrella.
‘Wait!’ she shouted. ‘I want to speak to you!’
She marched up to Terence, ignoring Miss Kettle who was wittering away at the top of the crocodile, and said, ‘Just the person I wanted to see. Though what you’re doing here, I don’t know. I thought you were staying with my brother.’
‘I was,’ said Terence. ‘But they caught me.’ He looked up at her eagerly. ‘ If you could tell Mr Leadbetter I’m here, please. I don’t want him to think—’
‘Come along, Terence Mugg. No loitering,’ called Miss Kettle sharply.
But Miss Leadbetter, who had once thrown a drunken actor down three flights of stairs, was not at all cowed by Miss Kettle.
‘What I was going to say,’ she said, bending down and speaking quickly into Terence’s ear, ‘was that I’ve just had a message from the hospital. From poor Monty Moon. He’s so sorry he’s had to let you down. It was the van – the one belonging to the electrician. Monty says the tyres were worn to a shred, but he wouldn’t listen. Anyway, they ran into a ditch on the way to Darkington and the whole lot of them were taken to hospital. Just cuts and bruises, but poor Monty didn’t really come round till this morning. It was last night, wasn’t it, that he was supposed to do the show?’
Terence was looking at her in amazement.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was last night. But he didn’t let us down. He did do the show. He was there.’
‘No, he wasn’t. Not Monty. He’s been in hospital since Sunday and the stage manager and electrician with him. He never got to Darkington at all. That’s what’s worrying him, on account of having taken the five hundred pounds.’
But now Miss Kettle had had enough. She left the front of the crocodile, yanked Terence by the arms, and marched him away.
Terence made no move to resist. He had too much to think about.
If Monty Moon had never got to Darkington, who had appeared from behind the tapestry? Who was the Elizabethan knight they had ‘raised’? Could it be . . . didn’t it have to be . . . Sir Simon Montpelier himself?
So Belladonna had really done it! But Rover hadn’t been there, that was certain. The box Terence had handed Belladonna was empty. And without Rover, Belladonna was absolutely white.
Where
had all that darkness come from, then? What did it mean?
‘Take your coat off, you lazy boy, and don’t stand there dreaming,’ said Miss Kettle, who took her tone from Matron.
Terence didn’t even hear.
The afternoon darkened, the children had beans on toast. Miss Kettle read them a story from Struwelpeter about a boy who had his thumbs cut off, and then they all trooped up to bed. Lying in hisiron cot, looking at the same crack in the ceiling that he’d looked at for years and years, Terence heard Billy, in the next bed, begin to snuffle and cry.
‘What is it, Billy?’ asked Terence.
‘I’m thirsty; I want a drink.’
‘Well, why don’t you go and get one?’
‘I’m scared,’ said Billy. He was partly deaf and wet his bed and was always in trouble too.
‘I’ll go,’ said Terence.
He slipped out of bed and tiptoed out into the corridor towards the bathroom. Matron and Miss Kettle were talking in the hall below – and they were talking about him.
‘Of course, he is a troublemaker,’ Miss Kettle agreed. ‘But I’ve always felt, Matron, that you dislike him particularly.’
‘Dislike him? Of course I dislike him. And I’ve every reason to. Look!’
She held up her hand, and Miss Kettle peered at it.
‘The little finger, do you mean?’
‘Yes,’ shouted Matron. ‘The little finger I do mean. The little finger that Terence Mugg bit to the bone and mutilated when he was brought to me, a babe in arms, and I bent over to say “Ickle Bickle Boo” to him as I do to all my babies. Even now I get shooting pains in it when I knit.’
‘Goodness,’ said Miss Kettle. ‘And he was only three weeks old, wasn’t he, when they brought him from the kiosk? Most unusual!’
‘Everything about that horrible child is unusual. He gives me the creeps. Do you know, whatever you do to him, he never cries? Never. He’ll sit there with his eyes like saucers and he’ll wince with pain, but he’s never shed a tear in all the time he’s been here. It’s unnatural, that’s what it is, and I’ll knock it out of him, see if I don’t!’