The Dragonfly Pool

  The others waited.

  “I’ll stay with my friends,” Karil said and, ignoring the scowls of the Scold, he made his way to the pile of luggage on the deck which the Deldertonians had made their headquarters.

  The crossing was calm and uneventful. Magda bandaged Matteo’s arm and he stood alone by the rails, looking at the water. It was time to relax now; the hunt for the prince had come to an end, and he was so tired he could hardly keep on his feet.

  Squashed between the canvas bags that held the dancing clothes, Tally and Karil were making plans.

  “There’s only another five weeks of term but you could stay with us in the holidays; there’s lots of room in our house.”

  “I’d like that,” said Karil. “If I don’t bring trouble.”

  “You won’t. You can be ordinary now. We’re very ordinary. Barney’s family has a big house, too, and his parents sound nice, if you didn’t want to be with us all the time—though Matteo will probably want to see you, too.”

  “Thank you. I’d like to stay with you very much.”

  They were three-quarters of the way across when they saw the chalk cliffs above the harbor at Dover—and though it was true they were not exactly white—more a sort of pale and slightly dusty gray, all the children, even those who had been dozing, came to the rails to look.

  The boat docked smoothly, but they waited for a while in the harbor before the passengers were allowed to disembark. Then, as they crossed over to the customs shed, Karil stopped dead.

  Waiting on the other side of the road was a large black Daimler with an elaborate painted crest on the doors: the coat of arms of the Duke of Rottingdene picked out in gold. And leaning out of the window was a stunningly pretty girl with fair ringlets, wearing a blue velvet beret and waving.

  “This way,” she called. “This way, Karil!”

  The boy stared at her. Behind him stood the Countess Frederica and two men in the duke’s livery. She had sent a cable from the boat.

  “Say good-bye to your friends, Karil,” she said. “You won’t be seeing them again.”

  Karil said nothing. For a moment he wondered whether to make a run for it, but what would be the use? The Duke of Rottingdene was his grandfather, not a thug or an assassin.

  Tally stared at the ground, unable to bear the sight of her friend driven off into captivity. Surely there was something he could do. Run, fight . . . he had been so brave on the quayside. But after all, he was going to his grandfather’s house. He had a family. She had been stupid not to remember that.

  Matteo certainly had remembered it. He made no attempt to hold Karil back but came and hugged him—and then the children shook hands one by one and said good-bye.

  “This way, Your Highness,” said one of the footmen, and Karil got into the car and was driven away.

  The last thing Tally saw was the smug-looking girl with ringlets putting her arm around his shoulders.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  September the Third

  Nobody ever forgot where they were on the day that war was declared.

  Tally was in the kitchen helping Aunt May to prepare the vegetables for Sunday lunch when the music on the wireless stopped and the announcer said that the prime minister would address the nation at eleven o’clock. Everyone had been expecting it; Hitler had invaded Poland two days before and the democratic countries had had enough. Aunt Hester came hurrying in from the garden and Tally’s father from his study.

  The prime minister was old and tired; he had tried to keep the peace and now he told the people of Great Britain that he had failed. An ultimatum had been sent to Hitler demanding that he withdraw his troops from Poland and it had been ignored.

  “I regret to tell you, therefore, that a state of war now exists between England and Germany.”

  No one ever forgot what happened next either. Almost straightaway the air-raid sirens sounded—that hideous wailing that they had only just learned to recognize.

  “Quick, into the shelter,” said Dr. Hamilton, pushing his daughter toward the door.

  “Oh dear, my roast will be spoiled—couldn’t you go ahead, and let me—” began Aunt May, and saw her brother’s face.

  The shelter was at the bottom of the street. It was not really finished yet and a puddle of water had collected in the bottom. The lady from number 4 said she wasn’t going down into that wetness, she’d rather be bombed than die of pneumonia. She was a very large person and the people behind her got nasty because she was blocking the door.

  They had just climbed down when the all clear went. It had been a false alarm.

  “Were you frightened?” Kenny asked, when he and Tally met that afternoon in Primrose’s stable.

  “Yes, I was—it was the noise as much as anything—that awful wailing. But I’m glad I’ve got it over—the first time, I mean.”

  The date was September 3, 1939. The Delderton term began in just over a week.

  “Thank God you’ll be out of London,” said Dr. Hamilton.

  That evening the king spoke to his people. The aunts as usual were more anxious about the king’s stammer than about what he said, but he got through it very well, speaking slowly and pausing when things might have got out of hand.

  As she listened, Tally was back at the dragonfly pool, telling Karil about the British king. That he was a kind man and that his people loved him, but that he was not like Karil’s father.

  Well, now Johannes lay under a stone slab in Bergania’s cathedral—and Karil, too, might be dead for all Tally knew of him.

  There had been five weeks of term left when they returned from Bergania, and every day Tally had waited for a letter. Karil knew her address at school and at home; all the children had exchanged addresses. For while they had hoped that Karil would be able to come straight to Delderton; they knew that there might be delays.

  But there had been nothing. Tally knew now how Julia felt as she waited for a letter from her mother. None of the others had heard anything either; nor had Matteo. At first Tally had written almost every day, then three times a week, then twice . . . Pride didn’t come into friendship, she told herself, and she knew it might take him a while to settle down, but still there was only silence.

  Now, as the king said, “With the help of God we shall prevail,” and the national anthem was played, Tally was remembering Karil’s words as they sat by the dragonfly pool.

  “I would have liked us to be friends.”

  She had believed him. She had believed everything he said about wanting to be free, about being weary of being a prince.

  But she had been wrong. Surely there was no one who could not write a letter and put it in a letter box.

  And it hurt. For the rest of the term she had waited and hoped, and here in London, too, when she came home for the summer holidays, but still there was nothing. Well, she wasn’t going to turn into one of those people who sighed and hovered around postmen. There were plenty of other things to do.

  And indeed, during those first few days when the long-awaited war became a fact, there was hardly a spare moment.

  Aunt May went off to the town hall hoping to become an air-raid warden but was directed to the wrong room and found herself lying on a stretcher, covered in bandages and labeled SERIOUS BURNS in a first-aid practice. Aunt Hester and Tally filled sandbags in the park and tried to shoo off the little children who wanted the sand to make castles.

  New gas masks were issued, but Mrs. Dawson, whose dachshund Tally took for walks, refused to be fitted for hers unless there was a gas mask also for the dog. The blackout began and Dr. Hamilton’s surgery was filled with patients who had fallen downstairs in the dark or walked into lampposts. No one knew whether laying in stocks of food was sensible or unpatriotic. Aunt Hester thought it would be hoarding and therefore bad, but Aunt May thought it must be good to save space on ships which had to bring food from overseas, and bought a large sack of pepper which she put under her bed.

  “They s
ay pepper is going to be very hard to get,” she said.

  Statues were boarded up and the aunts found a paragraph in the newspaper that excited them very much. Among the paintings which were being crated up and sent for safety into a disused mine in Wales were the pictures in the Battersea Arts Museum, which included The Angel of Mercy for which Clemency had posed.

  “So she’ll spend the war underground,” they told Tally. “She’ll be as safe as can be.”

  Evacuation of schoolchildren to the country began, but without Maybelle and Kenny.

  “They didn’t even try to make me go,” said Maybelle. “I drew blood last time.”

  Two days after the outbreak of war, Tally’s aunt Virginia telephoned to say that she was taking Roderick and Margaret down to safety in the West Country till it was time for term to begin. Fortunately she had been able to buy their new uniforms before there was talk of shortages or even rationing.

  “Roderick has had such a good term,” she told them. “He has made friends with the Prince of Transjordania—such a nice boy—and Foxingham has won their cricket match against Eton. It really is a splendid school.”

  She kindly offered to take Tally away with them, but Tally told her father she would rather be hung, drawn, and quartered than go with her cousins to Torquay—and Dr. Hamilton, endlessly busy at the hospital with the evacuation of patients, did not argue.

  On the last night before she was due to go back to Delderton, Tally and her father climbed up the hill past the convent and looked out over London. Their own barrage balloon had been joined by dozens of others, silvered in the moonlight. They did not look like kindly uncles now, nor like benevolent sausages—but like serious sentinels protecting the much-loved city.

  “We shall come through,” said Dr. Hamilton, and took his daughter’s hand. “You’ll see, in the end we shall come through.”

  The next morning, just as the taxi arrived to take them to Paddington Station, the postman came—and there was a letter for Tally in an unfamiliar hand. In an instant she was filled with certainty and happiness. Karil had written at last—he must have been ill; she had been completely wrong to doubt him. She tore the letter open.

  It was not from Karil. It was from Anneliese, the German girl who had befriended them in Bergania and who had said she did not want to die young like St. Aurelia. She had managed to write before mail between her country and Great Britain ceased; she hoped that when the war was over they would still be friends and she sent “so much, much love indeed” to Tally and her friends.

  She could write from an alien country declaring her friendship, but not Karil.

  At Paddington there were throngs of men in uniform and evacuees with labels around their necks saying good-bye to their tearful mothers. Among the bustle and confusion the boys of Foxingham marched, as they had done before, toward their platform, their brand-new striped red-and-yellow uniforms standing out in the gloom of the station, but Roderick was not among them. He was going straight to Foxingham from Torquay. Tally thought she could make out the serious dark-haired boy who might or might not be the Prince of Transjordania—but she turned away. She had had her fill of princes.

  Then she saw David Prosser, peering at a clipboard. Even he, efficient though he was, looked as though he had mislaid a child. Not Augusta Carrington—Tally could make her out at the end of the platform. And then she saw her other friends—Julia and Barney and Borro—and ran eagerly toward them.

  It was time to forget Karil and move on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Rottingdene House

  Karil stood looking out of his bedroom window at the gray London street. He had pushed aside the heavy damask curtains, and the dusty net curtains, and the blackout curtains which had just been put up, but the view of tired-looking people going about their business did little to lift his spirits.

  Rottingdene House was packed from the roof to the basement with his relations, yet he had never felt so alone.

  His grandfather’s home was not far from Buckingham Palace where the king lived with his two small daughters, and in many ways it resembled it. Rottingdene, too, was surrounded by spiky railings and boasted a sentry box in the courtyard and a flagpole on the roof with a flag to raise and lower to show whether the owners were at home.

  It was not till one got up close to the building that one noticed that though the house was so imposing, it was actually somewhat shabby; that the woodwork needed painting and the stonework was crumbling and that altogether Rottingdene was rather a rundown place. But if the building was run down, the people who lived in it were very grand indeed.

  They never went out of doors without a footman or a maid; the carriage or motor that took them through the streets of London had the Rottingdene arms emblazoned on the side, and the soldier who guarded the door had to present arms whenever anybody entered or left.

  Which was only right and proper, because the house had as many blue-blooded and royal personages living in it as there are woodlice under a stone.

  The Duke and Duchess of Rottingdene had had four daughters and all of them had made brilliant marriages.

  The eldest daughter, Diana, had married a Russian prince; the second one, Phyllis, had married a European archduke; the third daughter, Millicent, had captured the heart of a South American ruler who governed a country the size of France.

  And the youngest daughter, Alice, had married a proper king—Johannes of Bergania.

  But the map of the world had changed cruelly, and one by one the proud Rottingdene daughters came home as their husbands were deposed or hounded out of their country or fell victim to sinister plots.

  In Russia, Prince Dmitri, who had married Diana, had to flee his country after being attacked by peasants with pitchforks when the tsar was overthrown.

  In central Europe, Archduke Franz Heinrich, who had married Phyllis, had to leave his land and his castles when his country became a republic. And in South America, Millicent and her husband only just escaped being slaughtered in one of the bloodiest uprisings the country had known.

  Only Alice did not return home but lay in the soil of Bergania beside her husband.

  The daughters who came home did not come alone. They brought their husbands—proud men with mustaches or monocles, who were used to drinking the best champagne and smoking the rarest cigars and clicking their fingers at their valets when they wanted anything. Some came with ancient relatives, who had never in their lives put on their own stockings and would have starved to death if they had had to boil an egg. Some brought nurses or governesses, who had to be crammed into distant attics and boot cupboards where they coughed and quarreled and cried.

  Prince Dmitri’s mother, the old Princess Natalia, brought a small, low-slung dog with a topknot and an ancient pedigree. Pom-Pom was descended from a long line of Outer Mongolian pedestal (or snuggle) dogs, which had been bred to warm the feet of the Great Khans in their drafty palaces and now wheezed through the corridors of Rottingdene House, seeking the dark, familiar world of legs and shoes and toes.

  Don Alfonso, the South American ruler, brought a monkey which shivered and gibbered from morning to night—and Franz Heinrich brought that treasured jewel, a pearl beyond price, his daughter, Carlotta.

  And spying on everybody, controlling everything, was the ancient, bullying, terrifying Duke of Rottingdene. The duke’s teeth rode up and down when he chewed, his hearing aid fell regularly into the soup, and one of his legs was largely made of metal, but he missed nothing that was going on.

  It was to this house, full to the brim with discontented rulers, underpaid servants, and disturbed animals, that Karil was brought after his flight.

  There was a knock at Karil’s door and a footman in the Rottingdene livery of purple and gold stood in the doorway.

  “Your Highness is requested in the Red Salon immediately.”

  “Thank you.”

  Karil knew why . . . Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister, was going to make a speech—and there was littl
e doubt about what he was going to tell the nation.

  The Red Salon was packed with his relations. Uncle Dmitri sat on one enormous sofa with Aunt Diana and his aged mother, the Princess Natalia, who clutched Pom-Pom on her knee. On another sofa sat Uncle Franz Heinrich and Aunt Phyllis, and on two satinwood chairs sat Uncle Alfonso, Aunt Millicent, and the monkey, looking as always as though it was about to die of misery and cold. The duke sat in an imposing carved chair, closest to the wireless, and scowled. Lesser relatives were dotted about the room.

  “Here, Karil,” came Carlotta’s voice, “sit next to me.”

  Carlotta looked flushed and excited, and had dressed for the expected announcement of war in a white dress with a big lace collar. The man who came to take the photographs that were sent to Karil in Bergania had told her that she resembled an angel when wearing white, and on important days like this she took care to be angelic.

  Karil took the place she offered. At the beginning he had tried to keep his distance from his cousin, but he was getting very tired, and his future here in this place was so bleak that Carlotta could hardly make things worse.

  The prime minister came on the air. It was, as everyone had known it would be, an announcement of war. When it was over, the royal uncles got to their feet and saluted the wireless set, and Karil followed suit. In his high-backed chair the ancient duke harrumphed and shook his head, and Pom-Pom coughed.

  So that was that, thought Karil. Bergania, occupied as it was by Hitler, was now as far away as the moon; there would be no letters and no contact with his native land.

  He was still thinking about this when the air-raid alarm sounded—and at once the seemingly moribund relatives jerked into activity.

  “Down into the basement,” shouted the duke, “but in an orderly manner.”