Bedknob and Broomstick Part 13

"And yet," went on Miss Price, "in some ways Mr. Jones is rather helpless. That fire, you know, they say there were riots afterwards." Miss Price, without noticing what she was doing, put another spoonful of sugar in her tea.

"If one could write to him . . ." she suggested.

"Yes," said Carey, "but we can't.

Charles cleared his throat. "Would you like Paul and me just to run down and take a look at him?"

Carey opened her mouth. "Without me?" she said indignantly.

"No, no," put in Miss Price. "It wouldn't be fair to leave Carey. Perhaps-" she hesitated-"perhaps we ought all to go."

The children were silent. They dared not urge her. Carey crossed her thumbs and stared fixedly at the tablecloth.

"We could just go to his lodgings and peep in at the window. Just to see if he's all right, don't you know. We wouldn't disturb him. I think," said Miss Price, "it would be kind."

The children did not speak.

"Once we knew he was all right," went on Miss Price, "we could come back and settle down happily to our lives."

"Yes," said Carey guardedly.

"Don't you think?" asked Miss Price.

"Oh, yes," said Charles.

"Although this is a flying visit," said Miss Price, "I think we should be prepared for any emergency." She took down her father's sword from its hook on the wall and tested the blade with her finger. Then she strapped the scabbard to the bed rail. Carey and Charles were folding blankets, and Paul was opening out the ground sheet. It was nine o'clock in the morning, and they were all gathered together in Miss Price's bedroom to prepare for the journey.

"You see," went on Miss Price, "although I'm now convinced it is our duty to go, it is a great responsibility for me, now, at the end of the holidays. I don't feel justified in taking risks. I'm not sure that we shouldn't be disguised-"

"How do you mean?" asked Charles.

"We look so very twentieth century," said Miss Price. "And it will be daylight this time."

"I know!" exclaimed Carey. "Let's hire something from a costumer, like we did for the school play."

"No, no," said Miss Price. "I couldn't go in fancy dress. I shouldn't feel myself at all-but I have that black cloak, and you children would be all right in long dressing gowns, pinned up at the neck."

"Oh, Miss Price, that wouldn't look like anything. The costumer would have the exact dress. I have seven and sixpence."

"It would cost more than seven and sixpence," said Miss Price. "And we're only going to stay ten minutes. Dressing gowns are good enough. You are always apt to overdo things, Carey, and become fantastic. Now help me turn the mattress."

"I should think," said Carey, taking hold of the mattress, "we should look jolly fantastic walking about London in Charles IFs reign wearing twentieth-century dressing gowns pinned up at the neck-"

"Now, Carey, that's enough. I have not the remotest intention of walking about London, and you're very lucky to be going at all."

SO NEAR.

Emelius opened his eyes. Then he closed them again. The light hurt them. "It is a dream," he told himself, "a nightmare, the worst I have ever had." He felt cold, but too bruised and tired to mind that he felt cold. He just lay there, on the stone floor, trying not to wake up. But, after a while, his eyes seemed to open of their own accord, and he saw the small, barred window and the gray sky beyond. He sat up suddenly, and then cried out with pain as the movement hurt him. He smelt the wetness of his clothes, and his hands slipped on the floor. Slowly he began to remember: yesterday, the horsepond; today, the stake . . .

He had been betrayed. During the Fire of London men had lost their heads. A papist plot, they said, had caused it, and Frenchmen had thrown fireb.a.l.l.s to burn the city. Somebody had spoken of Emelius, who live i so mysteriously in his dim lodging off Goat Alley, and king's men had searched his dwelling. There they found evidence of witchcraft and of sorcery, and when, on his return, he had walked up the dark stairway, two men had met him at the head and another, appearing from nowhere, cut off his retreat at the foot. He had been thrown into prison and tried, so angry were the people, almost immediately. When it was proved that he was no Frenchman, nor implicated in any "papist" plot, they accused him of having helped to cause the fire by magic. It was strange, they said, how he had left the city just before and returned when danger was over, and that his house, in the midst of such destruction, was barely touched.

Ah, the horsepond . . . that was terror! One little boy he remembered, a little boy with bare feet, who had run along beside him, ahead of the crowd, as they half dragged, half carried him towards the pond; a little brown-faced boy who shouted and jeered, showing his white teeth, and who stooped every few moments to pick a stone out of the dust. Emelius would try to duck, to shy away from that stone when it came singing through the air. He felt the little boy's laughing delighted face as part of the pain when the stone cut his cheek or glanced off his head.

And the tying of his hands and feet, the constable standing by, the clergyman's solemn face. And then the sickening plunge downwards to the green water, the floating duckweed ... a little parchment boat, half soaked, caught on a twig . . . and then the choking, greenish darkness . . . a noise in his ears like a scale played quickly on a violin. If he sank and died there in the water, it showed he was a human man and innocent of magic, but if he lived, that was a sign that he lived by supernatural powers, and they would burn him at the stake.

Then up he had come, choking, spluttering, coughing. The thick robe, tied at the ankles, had held the air. He saw the sunlight and heard the frightened quack of ducks. Then down, down again, into the water . . . the singing in his ears, the blackness; a blackness that thickened and spread, calming his fear, blotting out his thoughts.

And now it was morning. He had lain all night where they had thrown him on the cold floor. Cold . . . yes, he was cold, right through to the kernel of his heart, but he would not be cold for long; soon his wet clothes would steam; he would feel the hot steam rise upward past his face, and then his clothes would smolder; he would feel the heat of their smoldering against his skin, and their dry smoke in his nostrils-then, suddenly, the clothes would flare up into a running flame. . . .

The stake ... it was years since they had burned anyone at the stake. Witches and sorcerers were hanged nowadays, not burned. It was barbarous, monstrous, to burn a man alive! But the people were obsessed today by fire, fire, fire. . . .

"Oh," cried Emelius, putting his hands on his closed eyelids. "The stake . . . the stake . . . save me from the stake!"

He sat quiet, his face hidden in his hands, as though, if he were still enough, he might find that, after all, he had died there in the horsepond and it was all over. "Here I am," he thought bitterly, "condemned for witchcraft, and I never knew a spell that worked."

If it had been Miss Price-that would have been faker; she was a witch, a real one, but no one would dare burn her. No one would pull Miss Price out of her tidy little house and drag her down the High Street to the village green. If she paid her taxes, observed the English Sunday, and worked for the Red Cross, no one bothered what she did with the rest of her time. She could create a black cat as big as an elephant, and no one would molest her as long as she kept it off other people's property and did not ill-treat it.

"Oh, Miss Price, if you knew-" groaned Emelius, his eyes hidden, "if you knew that I am to be burned at the stake!"

"I do know," said a voice. "They told me at your lodging."

Emelius slowly drew his fingers from his eyes. He stared round the cell. It was empty.

His fear, perhaps, was turning him crazy. The voice had seemed real, not very loud, and quite matter-of-fact. And then he saw her-a face at the window, and two hands with whitened knuckles grasping the bars. The face stared at him from under a black cowl, and, at first, he did not recognize the shadowed eye sockets and the lips compressed with effort, but then the long nose leapt, as it were, into his fear-dimmed vision, a pink-tipped banner of indignation and righteous wrath.

"Such a time getting here," she complained testily. "Asking, asking. And such rudeness."

Still Emelius did not speak. He was s.h.i.+vering as if, suddenly, he had come alive to the cold.

"Not a soul that seems to understand the king's English," went on the angry voice. She was panting slightly as if she held herself up by her own efforts. "I don't see how you've stood it. And the dirt, the untidiness, the smells . . . but we won't go into that now-" She slipped out of sight with a sharp exclamation. Then, after a moment, she appeared again. ."Lost my foothold," she explained. "I'm in a very awkward position. But you're locked in, and there's no room for the bed."

Emelius moistened his lips with his tongue. His eyes were fixed on the face at the window.

"They swam me in the horsepond," he moaned, as if he were talking to himself. "In the horsepond-"

"Well, never mind," said Miss Price briskly. "Don't dwell on it!" She looked down, and Emelius heard her say indistinctly: "Well, move your finger, Carey. It's your own fault. I didn't mean to tread on it." There was a pause, then he heard Miss Price say: "Yes, he's all right. Very wet. But the cell's too small for the bed." She peered in at him. "Just a minute," she said, and disappeared.

He heard the gentle sound of voices. He lay back. Thankfulness^ crept up from his toes, up and up, until his heart swelled from it, and it forced tears from his eyes-hot painful tears that squeezed out from between his closed lids. Miss Price was here. She would save him. Miss Price never undertook a thing she did not finish, and Miss Price did everything so well.

After a while she appeared again. "Now," she said, "you must pull yourself together. We're not going to let you be burned, but we can't stay here. It's broad daylight, and I'm standing on the bed rail-"

"Don't go!" begged Emelius.

"I must go, for the moment, and find a place for the bed. There's going to be a storm. And it was such nice weather when we left home."

"What shall I do?" gasped Emelius.

"There's nothing for you to do at the moment, and there are two men at the main door playing dice. You must keep calm and try not to fuss." She looked at him speculatively. "Tidy yourself up a bit and you'll feel better." Then, once more, she disappeared.

This time she did not come back, and, after a while, Emelius, because Miss Price had told him to, began picking long strands of green slime off his furred-trimmed robe. He found a water beetle up his sleeve, and his shoes were full of mud. Yes, she would save him, but how? It was not going to be easy. The barred window, sunk deep in the wall, was only a foot square, and the locked door was made of iron.

9 AND YET SO FAR.

"She's an awful long time coming," said Carey.

The three children sat on the bed in a disused cow-byre. The ground was trodden and dusty, and a pile of grayish hay rotted in the corner. Through the broken door they could see a bleak field below a dark and lowering sky. It was a dismal place but, as Miss Price had pointed out, a secluded one in which to hide the bed. She had gone off, wrapped in her black cloak, broomstick in one hand and sword in the other, to see what could be done for Emelius.

"She's been gone an hour, about," said Charles, walking to the door. The dark sky had a whitish streak in it, which shed an unreal, livid light on the trees and hedges. There was a sudden quivering brightness. Charles dodged back as a rumbling arch of thunder unrolled itself above the roof. "It startled me," he said.

"Do you think we ought to go and look for her?" asked Carey.

"What about the bed? Someone ought to stay and watch it."

"n.o.body will come here," said Carey. "They're all gone to the burning. I think that we ought all to go or all to stay. Not split up."

Charles looked thoughtfully across the field toward the gate that led into the road. "Let's all go then," he said.

At the doorway Carey glanced back at the bed. It stood incongruously bright, with its legs sunk deep in dust and broken straw. I wonder if we shall see it again, she thought to herself. I wonder what we are letting ourselves in for.

As they walked along, in the gloomy light, between the uneven houses and their deserted gardens, they looked around them curiously. It was not very different from parts of England they knew. New houses squatted beside old ones. An inn sign creaked in a sudden gust of wind, but the inn was deserted. Everyone had gone to the burning.

"Smithfield," said Charles, "where the meat market is. It's really part of London, but it looks like country."

Horses and carts were tethered to posts. There were a great many half-starved cats about and rough-coated, mangy-looking dogs, which ran slyly down the alleyways, but there were no people. Old bones and rags and broken pan-lids lay in the gutters, and there was a strong smell of tanning. ~As they walked, they began to hear the murmur of a crowd.

"Look!" said Carey in a low voice.

A richly dressed man was leading a horse out of a stable yard. He wore leather boots or leggings, which came up to his thighs, and a skirted coat. Lace fell over his wrists as far as his knuckle bones, and a great dark wig moved heavily on his shoulders. As they came abreast of him, they smelt his perfume, a strange, rich, spicy smell, which mingled oddly with the stench of the tannery. Preparing to mount, he stared at them wonderingly. His pale face was full of disapproval. Carey nervously put up her hand to cover her safety pin, but he was not looking at their clothes. Something deeper seemed to worry him. "A poor wretch burned at the stake," he said as they pa.s.sed close beside him, "a fine sight for children!"

Carey stared back at him with frightened eyes. She felt as you always feel when a complete stranger speaks to you angrily. As the clatter of his hoofs died away behind them, the children walked in silence. They felt guilty, as if it were their fault that Emelius was to be burned alive.

Then suddenly the road opened into a square, or green, and they came upon the crowd. It was like a painting Carey had seen somewhere, or like a historical film, except it was more colorful than a painting and dirtier than a historical film. Boys had climbed trees and railings; every window was full of people. Above the babble of talk certain voices were heard calling some indistinct, monotonous phrase. Carey jumped when just behind her a woman yodeled: "Fair lemons and oranges. Oranges and citrons."

They could get in no closer. They were jammed close beside a fat woman with three children and what seemed to be the railings of a cattle pen. The fat woman, who wore a white cap round her red face, with a hat on top of it, was breaking a cake for her children. It smelt of cinnamon and made Carey feel hungry.

Carey put her foot on the bottom rail of the cattle pen and pushed herself up between the knees of the boys who sat on top of it. Ah, now she could see the stake! It was raised only a little above the crowd. Two men with muskets slung on their backs were busy with ropes. When they moved aside, she saw Emelius, a limp, sagged figure. He was tied round the chest. She could not see any lower than his knees. She could not see the f.a.gots. There was no sign of Miss Price.

Charles climbed up beside her. She heard him exclaim when he saw Emelius, and then Paul was pulling at the skirt of her dressing gown.

"Could I have a toffee apple?" he said.

Carey stepped down. Paul was too young to see Emelius burn, or even be told about it. "We haven't any money, Paul," Carey explained kindly, "to buy toffee apples," but she looked round and there indeed was a woman with a tray slung round her neck selling toffee apples right and left-toffee apples and lollipops on sticks. The woman with the three children gave Paul a piece of cinnamon cake. She stared at them curiously. "She notices our clothes," thought Carey.

Then a hush fell on the crowd. Someone up near the stake was speaking, but they could not see him, nor hear what he said. "They're going to start soon," announced Charles from his perch on the railing. Carey saw a thin trail of smoke. She climbed up beside Charles again to see, but it was only a man with a spluttering torch, which he held aloft as if waiting for an order. Someone else was speaking now. Carey glimpsed a long form in black, a lawyer,' perhaps, or a clergyman.

The figure at the stake still sagged, the head hanging forward on the chest. "Miss Price . . . Miss Price..." breathed Carey, clinging to the rail. "Save him. Oh please, save poor Emelius."

The voice finished speaking. The crowd became terribly silent. Other people tried to climb on the railing. All eyes were turned toward the stake. Suddenly there was a roll of drums. The man with the torch circled it about his head and flung it downwards, in amongst the f.a.gots.

Carey shrieked and jumped down off the railing, hiding her eyes. The roll of drums went on, swelling in intensity. Clouds of smoke rose up against the dark and threatening sky. A quivering flash and, for one livid second, the whole scene stood etched in lightning-lightning that played in forks across the gloomy sky-then the sound of drums was drowned in a cras.h.i.+ng, ear-splitting roll of thunder, roaring and trembling across the heavens until it seemed to shake the very earth on which they stood.

Then Carey heard shrieks and cries. She clambered, pus.h.i.+ng for a foothold, upon the railing to see what had happened. Something seemed to be bending the crowd like a field of corn in wind, something of which they seemed afraid. The shrieks of the women shrilled and multiplied. There was a movement of pus.h.i.+ng, of fighting, of panic. Carey pulled Paul beside her close against the railing. Paul began to cry.

"Charles," cried Carey, her voice breaking with excitement. "Look! Look!"

Something was skimming low over the crowd, a great black bird it seemed, which flew in narrowing circles and whose pa.s.sage seemed to cut a swath in the frightened mob as it pa.s.sed, as hair falls aside from the comb.

"It's she! It's Miss Price!" cried Carey. "Paul, it's Miss Price! Charles . . ."

People were pus.h.i.+ng, screaming, rus.h.i.+ng to get out of reach. Now, it was coming toward their corner, swooping low and steady on its curving flight. The fat woman shrieked and ran, dragging her children after her. The boys jumped down off the railing. "A witch, a witch!" they screamed hoa.r.s.ely. "A witch on a broomstick!"

But Carey and Charles, holding Paul tight against them, kept their places. They gazed upwards with anxious eyes at the black and fluttering figure that came toward them in the gloom. Shrouded and unrecognizable, it swept past, and an eerie wail, thin and terrifying, trailed behind it on the wind.

People had run away, down the side streets, down the alleys. There were s.p.a.ces of empty trodden gra.s.s and littered dusty ground. A basket seller was collecting his stock, which rolled around in every direction, but he dropped it all again as the dark figure flew near him and ran "h.e.l.l for leather" for the entrance of a tavern.

Now the children could see the stake quite clearly. The smoke had cleared, and red tongues of flame, licking their way upwards through the f.a.gots, shone weirdly in the leaden gloom. Emelius, bound round the chest and ankles, hung forward on his ropes.

"He's catching fire!" shrieked Carey. "Oh, Miss Price, hurry, hurry!"

Soldiers, who had acted as a cordon against the crowd, formed a group, training their muskets on the broomstick's flight. Only one remained beside the stake, and he seemed to be charging his gun, looking up fearfully from time to time as if he feared the dark swooping figure might come upon him from behind.

"Perhaps she's forgotten," Charles reminded Carey fearfully. "She burnt the books."

There was a report, which echoed back against the houses. One of the soldiers had fired. Once more the lightning flashed, and thunder pealed across the angry sky. The square was empty now, save for the soldiers and the huddled group of children beside the cattle pen. The ground was scattered with litter. Benches, chairs, and stools-things that people had brought to stand on-lay overturned and broken.

As the flying figure approached the stake, the remaining soldier fled to join the others, clutching his musket. The broomstick and the sweeping black cloak seemed almost to touch the burning f.a.gots when the children saw a sword flash.

"It's her father's sword," exclaimed Charles excitedly. "She's going to cut him free."

Carey was reminded, watching the awkward efforts to bring the broomstick within striking distance yet not too close, of a left-handed golfer trying to play polo.

"Oh, dear," she cried in an agony of fear. "She'll cut his head off."

Emelius, aware at last, twisted and leaned and strained at his cords in terrified efforts to escape the deadly thrusts. A gust of spark-filled smoke blew against his face, and the children saw him coughing. Still the attack continued.

"Careful," she shouted. "Please, oh please, Miss Price!"

Again there was a report, followed immediately by two others. The soldiers were firing. Carey, glancing fearfully at the bell-mouthed weapons, wondered how such guns could miss.

"They've got her," said Charles then, in his most reserved voice.

"No," cried Carey wildly, "no, they can't have!" Her eyes flew back to the stake, and she covered her mouth quickly to hold back a scream.

The broomstick was poised, motionless, shuddering, above the crackling wood. The sword dropped and stuck upright, quivering among the f.a.gots. The broomstick wavered and sank downward toward the smoke and flame. Then, as they watched, painfully it seemed to pull itself free. It rose a little and made a limping, hesitating flight toward the head of a road leading out of the square. The soldiers turned slowly, keeping the fluttering object covered with their guns. Figures appeared in doorways. Several men, braver than the others, ventured into the street. All eyes were fixed on the black and tattered object that rose a little and then sank once more toward the ground, in painful hopping flight.

The children no longer watched the stake, where each second for Emelius became uncomfortably warmer; their eyes were fixed on the broomstick. They gripped each other in an agony of fear. Nothing seemed to matter in the world except Miss Price and her safety. As they watched, the broomstick rose a little. Jerkily swaying, rather drunkenly, as if it had lost its sense of direction, it made off down the street, at about the level of the first-floor windows.

Then a man threw a brick, and the soldiers fired again. The broomstick stopped in mid-air.