She told how anxious they had grown when after twenty minutes, after forty minutes, I had not come back, and how Uncle Adam had rung the police who said I had been in and out of the office in five minutes. A search had been started, but the weather conditions were so bad that it was a fairly hopeless task.
‘What happened to you, Ned?’ she asked again when my teeth had stopped chattering.
I explained, as well as I was able. I had picked up the key and then been abducted.
‘It must have been Mark and Alida,’ she said positively. ‘Taking you to the spot where their own lives ended. Hoping to finish you off in the same way.’
‘Why didn’t they push me down the hole?’
‘Perhaps he stopped them.’
‘Carl?’
‘Yes.’
I thought about my companion on the way home. I had not told her about that. I asked, ‘Has Uncle Adam managed to open the box?’
‘Not yet. He found the keyhole, but it was all caked up with rust. So he dribbled in a bit of oil and left it to soften the blockage. It should be worth trying by now.’
We went back to the front room. Inspector Mutton had gone, leaving a message for me to present myself at the police station tomorrow morning to give an account of what had happened to me.
Uncle Adam was dozing with Nibs on his knee, but he opened his eyes the minute we came in and said. ‘Did you get that key?’
I pulled it out of my pocket, thinking how unlikely it was that the same key would open the door of a shed and the lid of a lawyer’s deed box. But still it seemed the right size for the keyhole.
‘You try it,’ said Uncle Adam, when he had scooped and scrabbled in the keyhole with the quill of a gull’s feather and carefully scraped out some sludge of oily rust.
I slid the key into the hole. It went in, slowly and grittily. I tried to turn it. But it stuck fast.
Adam tried. Lal tried. None of us could turn it.
‘I wonder if I used pliers,’ Adam pondered.
‘No!’ cried Lal. ‘You might break the key.’
‘What then?’
‘I’ll try the radio,’ she said.
‘Radio!’
But she switched on, saying, ‘Anyway it’s time for my favourite programme, “Mislaid Melodies” – listen –’
And what came on was the twins’ tune. My fingers were on the key at that moment, I gripped it and turned steadily. At the end of the short piece of music the announcer said, ‘Nobody knows where that tune came from. Perhaps it is the national anthem of Never Never Land. That was a very ancient recording, played on Mozart’s harmonica, recorded on an early phonograph towards the end of the last century –’
The key finished its turn and I could hear the lock click.
Uncle Adam pulled up the lid, which resisted, but then came creakily open. The box was filled with yellow wrinkled documents, slightly crumpled at the edges, tied in flat packs with faded red ribbon. The top one was embossed with a red seal and inscribed in large gothic lettering: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF CARL FRANCIS PERNEL.
Uncle Adam opened it and read:
‘This is the last Will and Testament of me, Carl Francis Pernel, being of sound mind and good health on this 27th day of April 1898. In hopes that my beloved sons Matthew and Benjamin may yet be found live and well, I bequeath all my worldly goods to them. And I hereby revoke my previous Will leaving money to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law Mark and Alida Hardisty. I leave them nothing. And, if the twins are never found, my fortune shall go to endow a school of music to teach poor boys who could not otherwise afford lessons.’
‘Well,’ said Aunt Lal, ‘the twins have been found – at least their bones – so now what will happen to the money? If there is any left?’
‘Lawyers will have to argue about that,’ said Uncle Adam. ‘Probably most of it was spent on establishing the Hardisty School.’
He lifted out some other documents which he said were the title-deeds of Pernel’s house that had been pulled down. Then he came to a flat book with handsomely marbled covers. It was like a very grand school exercise-book. And it was labelled:
A NOTEBOOK
OF TUNES AND SONGS FOR MY
LITTLE SONS MAT AND BEN.
Inside, the very first tune, in the: key of D, written in ink, was the one I had been trying so hard to capture, with the words written underneath:
‘This is the song of Mat and Ben
This is the song of Ben and Mat
It bounds away like an acrobat
This is the song of Mat and Ben
It rattles along without where
or when
But yet some day the search will
be ended
The lost ones found and the
trouble mended
The seekers come to the end
of the quest
The hurts be healed and the
weary rest.’
Aunt Lal said, ‘Adam, why don’t you get your accordion and we’ll go out and play that music in the street.’
‘In this weather? At this time of night? Are you mad, woman?’
‘No, look,’ she said. ‘It has stopped snowing. The moon has come out. It would be the right thing to do.’
‘Oh, very well.’
‘Ned and I will sing the words. And – and perhaps people will hear and come out and join in. Wrap this muffler round your neck’ she said to me. ‘Where is the cap I gave you?’
‘It might be on Cold Point.’
‘Lucky I have several.’
Adam fetched his accordion – a very old one which came from Vienna over a hundred years ago – and wrapped like Eskimos, we stepped out into the blazing moonlight. The newly fallen snow was already crisp with frost and the white surfaces gleamed and flashed.
The harmonica’s loud joyful music fetched echoes from every corner. Lal and I both sang as loudly as we could.
Windows began to shoot open and heads popped out. Then doors began to open. People emerged to find out what on earth was going on. The hour was not late after all – no more than half-past nine. It was the weather that had kept everybody indoors. But now, tempted out by brilliant moonlight and irresistible music, householders and their children came bustling out again. The narrow streets filled up with singing, dancing neighbours.
Uncle Adam led the serpentine trail of singers and dancers twice around the town, up Fore Street and down Church Street, then out on to the harbour front.
‘This is the song of Mat and Ben
Of Ben and Mat, of Mat and Ben
Oh when oh where, oh where or when Will those twins find their dad again?’
Just for about twenty seconds I saw two little capering figures dart across the quay and greet a fair-haired young man who came climbing up the harbour steps to greet them and throw his arms round them. Then a mass of people swept across the cobbles and blotted out my view.
Rose Killigrew from the museum, arriving beside me, said, ‘So you managed to find the manuscript with that tune after all!’
‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘It’s in a book that Carl Pernel made for the twins. I’ll bring it round to you tomorrow. And there’s a lot of legal documents too. Maybe the Hardisty School will have to close down.’
A boy who was bounding along on my other side said, ‘Their Uncle Mark murdered them. He cut through the branch that supported their dog-kennel in the cherry tree. So the branch gave way when they climbed inside the kennel. They fell and broke their necks. And he buried them in the garden.’
‘Eden! Why didn’t you tell me that before?’
‘You had to find the book first. You had to learn the tune,’
‘That key of yours?’
‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘You haven’t finished with it yet. You’ll be wanting it again.’
Then he jogged away behind some dancing Tollmen and I lost sight of him.
Inspector Mutton said to Uncle Adam, ‘I ought to arrest you for creating a breach of the peace. But nobody see
ms to be doing any harm. So well let it go.’
The people went on dancing until sunrise.
Next day the snow melted as fast as it had come and I was able to go home by train.
Aunt Lal’s blue cap was found in the shed on Cold Point beside the twenty-metre-deep hole where the Hardistys had fallen to their death.
Aunt Lal phoned some days after I got home to tell me that the town council was changing the name of the Hardisty School to the Carl Pernel School, and there would be a big music department.
She said, ‘They are going to put up a memorial tablet in the church to Carl Francis Pernel, famous musician and composer of this town, and his twin sons, Matthew and Benjamin. And they are going to bury the twins’ bones in the graveyard and put up a gravestone beside their father’s. You had better come over for the ceremony.’
‘If you don’t want me before that,’ I said.
For when I got home, Mum told me, ‘Your friend Eden rang up. Which one is he? Do I know him? He said he’d soon have another job for you. What did he mean by that? What kind of job?’
I fingered the key in my pocket.
‘Opening something, I suppose.’
THE SONG OF MAT AND BEN
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 10150 4
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2012
Copyright © Joan Aiken, 2012
Illustrations copyright © Caroline Crossland, 2012
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox 9780099411376 2012
The right of Joan Aiken to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Joan Aiken, The Song of Mat and Ben
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