The Dragonfly Pool

  Prince Dmitri seized his wife and his mother and made for the door, reaching it at the same time as Archduke Franz Heinrich and Phyllis. Don Alfonso and Aunt Millicent only paused to catch the monkey before they caught up with them. Carlotta had run on ahead, looking pale and giving little cries of terror.

  “Come along, Karil,” said Countess Frederica. Although Karil was in a house full of relations, she still saw him as her responsibility.

  He was about to follow her when Pom-Pom freed himself from the arms of the old Princess Natalia and dived under the piano. The old lady tried to catch him, stumbled, fell under the piano on top of him and found she could not get up again.

  “Go on! I’ll be all right here,” she cried.

  But the people nearest the door turned back. No one minded about the old princess—she had had her life—but Pom-Pom was different. He was waiting to be united with the only other Outer Mongolian pedestal dog still in existence, a bitch now living in Brazil. When this happened, and puppies were born, they would be worth a fortune, and no one wanted him to be hit by a bomb before this happy event could come to pass.

  But after a moment fear won over greed and they hurried down to the basement, where another problem awaited them. The servants who were assembled there had to be removed, since it was out of the question that they be allowed to shelter in the same place as their masters. By the time this had been done the all clear sounded and everybody trooped back upstairs, where they found the old Princess Natalia still lying under the piano with her dog.

  Karil’s arrival at Rottingdene House had caused some serious problems for the duke and his household. It hadn’t taken long to move out the two governesses who occupied a bedroom on the top floor and give it to Karil, and the boy did not look as though he would be expensive to feed.

  No, the problem was that of precedence. Nobody had been absolutely certain whether the son of a king, even a king who was dead, should be served first at table, or go ahead of the others into the dining room. Was he more important than Prince Dmitri, who had a crest with sixteen quarterings, or Archduke Franz Heinrich, whose family had ruled over Lower Carinstein since 1304, or Don Alfonso, who was descended from a long line of Spanish conquerers?

  While the matter was being looked into, the uncles and Karil took it in turn to go ahead of the others into the dining room.

  The first supper after the declaration of war was much like the other meals Karil had endured at Rottingdene House. The duke sat at the head of the table in an ancient dinner jacket which smelled of mothballs, and slurped his soup. Don Alfonso appeared in one of the twenty or so military uniforms he had brought from South America and fed tidbits to the monkey, and Carlotta, who had changed her dress for the third time that day, simpered and smiled.

  On the whole the uncles were pleased about the war, because they thought that once it was over they would become rulers once again. Uncle Dmitri would return to his estate in Russia with ten thousand peasants doing his bidding; Uncle Franz Heinrich would be back in his turreted castle in Lower Carinstein, and Don Alfonso would once more have charge of his vast lands on the Pacific coast. Of course it was a pity that so many people might be killed first, but if it ended with them restored to power it was all worthwhile.

  They were kind, too, to Karil, assuring him that once Hitler was defeated, the people of Bergania would clamor to have him back as king.

  “It will all be over soon, my boy,” they said, “and then you will be back on the throne where you belong.”

  And Karil, who had begun by trying to tell them that he did not want to become king, had long since given up trying to explain.

  After dinner everybody retired to the Red Salon to take coffee—and then came the ritual that took place every night, and for which Karil, when he first came, had waited with such eagerness.

  A footman entered with a silver salver which he placed on a gilt-legged table—and on it were the letters that had come by the afternoon post.

  When he first came, Karil had always jumped up and looked at the tray, sure that there would be a letter from Tally and his other friends. He had never doubted that they would write straightaway and tell him what was happening at Delderton. When nothing had come, either by the morning or the afternoon post, he had told himself that they must be busy returning to school and catching up with their work, but as day followed day and the salver disgorged letters for everyone but him, his hopes had faded and died.

  He himself had written straightaway, long letters that he had been careful to seal tightly before he laid them in the brass bowl in the hall where all letters were put for the footman to stamp and carry to the letter box. It was a relief to know that Rottingdene House had a system for posting letters, because he had no money and even buying stamps would have been difficult. He had told Tally about Pom-Pom, who had to be accompanied by two footmen, one at each end, when he went out, in case he was kidnapped by anarchists and eaten. He had told her about the monkey, who looked sweet but bit as soon as one came too close, and about the duke’s hearing aid, which had fallen into the soup but not actually been swallowed. Gradually he found it harder to think of lighthearted things to write—he had begun to plead a little for an answer to his letters, and then to tear them up and try again because he did not want to seem to be making a fuss or admitting his unhappiness.

  But as the weeks passed and there was only silence, Karil realized he had been wrong to trust his friends so utterly—and he remembered his father’s words when he asked if he could meet the children who had come to his country.

  It never works trying to make friends with people outside our world, he had said. You’ll only get hurt.

  The king had been right. Karil had got hurt, and it served him right for being such a fool. Yet tonight, because the outbreak of war was after all not an ordinary day, he got up and walked over as he had done at the beginning, to look at the envelopes laid out on the salver.

  But there was nothing. Nothing from Tally—nothing from Barney or Julia or Tod. Nothing from Matteo, who had been his father’s friend.

  It was a long time before he slept, that first night of the war, and when he did he found himself floating through a dark sky trying to chase a giant tray—a silver salver from which torn pieces of paper fell and whirled downward. When he managed to catch one it melted like a snowflake and he was left with nothing except a sense of misery and dread.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  New Term

  Daley sat in his big room overlooking the courtyard and watched the children arrive. The headache he always had at the beginning of term was magnified tenfold—he had already swallowed four aspirins, but the throbbing in his temples was no better and even looking at the cedar tree gave him no comfort.

  On his desk were the Blackout Regulations for Schools and Institutions and the First Aid Instructions in the Event of Casualties.

  There was also an urgent letter from the founders, once again urging Daley to evacuate the school to America. It was a generous offer, and the pictures of the bombing of Warsaw should have made the decision easy—but it was not easy. Outside, the peaceful Devon countryside slumbered in the sunshine; the idea that airplanes would come and drop bombs over Delderton was hard to believe—indeed Delderton village was full of evacuee children from London who had been sent here just because it was safe. But if Hitler invaded Britain, that might be a different matter.

  Half an hour later, Tally knocked on the door of his room. Daley had sent for her because he had been worried about her at the end of the summer term. The adventure in Bergania and the rescue of the prince had been kept from the newspapers, and the children seemed to have settled down well—but he had an idea that Tally was still troubled about something.

  “Well, how has it been? Is your father well?”

  “Yes, he is. Terribly busy with evacuating the hospital and everything, but he is well.”

  “And have you had any news from the prince? From Karil?”

  “No, nothing. The o
thers haven’t heard anything either. We’ve all written and written.”

  “And you think he has forgotten you, and is ungrateful?”

  “What else can we think?”

  “There are other things that occur to one,” said the headmaster.

  But he left it at that.

  “I’m going to put him out of my mind,” said Tally—and while it was a lie, it was a brave one. She changed the subject. “Is Matteo still my tutor?”

  “Yes, for now.” Everything was so unsettled and uncertain in this first fortnight of the war.

  All the same, it was good not being new, thought Tally, knowing one’s way about. Magda was still Tally’s housemother and she was still worrying about Schopenhauer. She had got to the part in Schopenhauer’s life where he was supposed to have thrown a washerwoman down the stairs because she was talking on the landing and disturbing him, and she didn’t know whether to leave it in or not.

  “It seems so unlike him to do that,” she told the children.

  She also had a new anxiety—Heribert would almost certainly be called up to fight in the German army and she was very much afraid for him.

  “I don’t think he will make a good soldier; he was very absent-minded,” she said.

  In the village, groups of children evacuated from London wandered about looking for fish and chips and cinemas and crying for their mothers. A fire-watching roster was pinned up—members of staff would take it in turn to watch for incendiary bombs from the flat roof of the gym.

  To everyone’s amazement, David Prosser volunteered for the army. No one especially liked him, but that didn’t mean they wanted him to be killed. Before he went he asked Clemmy to marry him and she refused him, but so nicely that he was hardly hurt at all. The man who replaced him was as old as the hills, but he knew his subject.

  The children who had shared the Berganian adventure still met on the steps of the pet hut to talk about their lives. When they first came back, expecting Karil to join them, they had been full of plans. Barney had bought a tree frog in a pet shop in St. Agnes as a present for the prince; it was an attractive animal with its shining pop eyes and glossy skin, but they did not try to name it—Karil would want to do that himself, they thought, but as the weeks passed the frog remained nameless.

  “Amphibians don’t really need to be called anything,” Borro had said. “They’re all right as they are, so there’s no hurry.”

  But as they met for the new term they stopped trying to make plans for Karil.

  The axolotl was in good health, and Tally now had charge of the white rabbit that had belonged to the little French girl who had not returned to school. Her parents didn’t want to risk sending her across the Channel and being attacked by the U-boats that now patrolled the waters. She had written to say that Tally could have her rabbit, but though Tally cleaned it out and fed it and took it on her knee, she found it difficult to love it.

  “Rabbits are not really very interesting,” she complained—but Julia said that rabbits weren’t meant to be interesting; they were meant to be nice, and this one was.

  Barney was very indignant about what had happened in the London Zoo. On the very day that war was declared all the black widow spiders and poisonous snakes had been killed in case their cages were bombed and they escaped and bit people.

  “And the boa constrictors, too,” he said angrily. “Just killed outright, which is ridiculous—people would have seen them coming. Or they could have sent them to Whipsnade like the elephants. But cold-blooded murder like that!”

  It was really strange, realizing the difference these last weeks had made to their friends overseas. Borro could write to the French girl whose mother bred Charolais cows, because France and Britain were allies, on the same side in the war, but the German and Italian children had become “the enemy” and were as unreachable as the moon.

  “It seems so silly,” said Tally. “Only a month ago we were just people.”

  As for Karil, it seemed clear now that they were not going to hear from him.

  “He’s obviously decided to be a prince after all,” Barney said. “I mean, he was brought up to all that since he was a baby, and now he doesn’t want to have anything to do with us. It’s quite natural really.”

  Only Augusta, sitting on the bottom step so that the animal fur would not set off her allergy, said: “All the same, I think it’s funny that you can save someone’s life and they just forget all about you.”

  Her brace had been removed in the holidays and her words were very clear.

  Hearing their own thoughts spoken aloud upset the others badly—and from then on they did not speak of the prince again.

  It was a beautiful autumn, that first autumn of the war, and Clemmy was busy pitting herself against the coming shortages—food rationing was expected the following month and she was determined to garner every berry, every rose hip, every mushroom before the coming frosts.

  So every minute that the children were not in class she herded them through the lanes, armed with jam jars and saucepans and pots. The blackberries were more succulent that year than ever; the rose hips hung like crimson jewels from the briars, and on the moors the blueberries clustered between tufts of heather. There were sloes, so dark that their blueness was almost black, and chanterelles growing between the roots of trees. Clemmy was in her element as she led her troop of helpers, her hair streaming in the late sunshine, her cloak blowing in the wind. It is very different picking berries because you feel like a mouthful of something juicy and picking them because you are helping your country and can lay by stores against hardship. Even the detestable Ronald Peabody, who had broken the topmost branch of the cedar tree, picked with the best of them.

  In her art classes Clemmy had let the children paint what they wanted, thinking that they might need to depict what they were going through in the changing world. When they came back after the journey to Bergania they had painted the mountains and the palace and the folk dancers, but that was before the outbreak of war. Now they painted orange and scarlet explosions and tanks and toppling houses as they saw them on the newsreels of the invasion of Poland.

  But not Tally. Tally, as the term progressed, painted the things she saw on her walks with Clemmy: rowan berries on laden boughs; late foxgloves; fallen leaves, veined and crimson on the grass—and Clemmy realized that Tally was seeking comfort in nature as people have always done when their lives have run into difficulties.

  “Nothing matters really when the world is so beautiful,” said Tally—and Julia, who did not agree, who knew that for someone like Tally it is people that matter, just nodded and smiled.

  All the time they were in Bergania Julia had not mentioned her mother, and Tally hoped that she was no longer so unhappy about her. But when they had been back at school for nearly three weeks she called Tally into her room and held out a copy of The Picturegoer.

  “Look!” she said.

  On the center page was a picture of Gloria Grantley in her most pouting pose. The caption read: “Is Glorious Gloria running out of steam?”

  The blurb underneath said that the plans for her new film, The Devil in Velvet, had been shelved. The studio refused to comment on the reasons for this decision, and her agent was not available.

  “What do you think it means?” said Julia.

  “Haven’t you heard anything from Mr. Harvenberg?” asked Tally, who knew that Gloria’s agent was a very important figure in her life.

  Julia shook her head. “Not since the holidays. My grandmother wrote when war was declared because she wanted me to go out to America and spend the war there—well, I told you—but my mother didn’t want me to come. She said it was too dangerous traveling by sea because of the U-boats, but of course I knew it was because . . . she didn’t want me. But do you think she’s in trouble?”

  “No, of course not.” Tally was very firm. “This kind of thing happens all the time in the film business, you know it does. I expect her agent wanted more money and the studio is
being difficult. You’ll see, it will all resolve itself.”

  “It will be awful if it doesn’t. She absolutely lives for her work.”

  Tally looked at the picture again. Ridiculous Gloria was lying on her stomach on some sort of animal skin with one foot in very high heels cocked up behind her. Yet it was only because she had gone to see Gloria at the cinema in St. Agnes that they had seen the newsreel which had set the whole Bergania adventure off. But for this horrible woman who treated her daughter so abominably, Karil would now be in the clutches of the Nazis.

  That evening Tally wrote one last letter to the prince, calling up everything she could think of to amuse and interest him: Matteo’s last biology lesson, when they had camped for a night on the moor and watched the stags preparing for their annual rut . . . the visit of the Spanish children, who had given a marvelous moonlit concert in the courtyard . . . and that the cow Borro was looking after was expecting a calf.

  But once again, there was no reply.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Karil and Carlotta

  When you are unhappy, time goes very slowly. Karil had been at Rottingdene House for only a few weeks, but he felt as though he had been buried at the bottom of a well for years.

  When he woke in the morning, he thought for a moment that he was still at home, because the first thing he saw was a tray with two rusks on it and a glass of fruit juice. But it was not an equerry who brought them; the duke’s servants were so hard-pressed, looking after a household packed with people who could do nothing for themselves, that they could take on nothing extra and it was the Countess Frederica who handed him the tray. The countess had seen to it ever since they had arrived in London that Karil’s life went on exactly as before, and now she told him his lessons for the day and his engagements for the afternoon.

  Karil never thought he would be homesick for Monsieur Dalrose’s history lessons, nor that he would miss riding in a procession to open a railway station or welcome a foreign deputation, but it was so. For his lessons now were given by his uncles and they taught him the very few things that they knew. Uncle Dmitri showed him how to design crests and mottoes; Uncle Franz Heinrich taught him how to write national anthems and music for royal occasions, and Uncle Alfonso was a specialist in the design of state uniforms.