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til e C Y e t c I PLATFORM 13 * - *u- -

$15.99 $23.50 CAN nder an abandoned railway platform in one of London's busiest stations is an old doorway covered with peeling posters. No one walking by (if anyone did) would guess that it is the entrance to a magical king­ dom—an island where humans live happily with mermaids, ogres, feys, and wonderful creatures called mist- makers. Carefully hidden from the world, the Island is accessible only when the door opens for nine days every nine years. A lot can go wrong in nine days. When the beastly Mrs. Trottle kidnaps the prince of the Island, it's up to a strange band of rescuers to save him. But can an ogre, a hag, a wizard, and a fey troop around London unnoticed? And what if the prince doesn't want to go back? In a plot thick with mayhem, mix- ups, and magic, there is something to please readers of all ages. Fantasy lovers in particular will not want to miss this peek through the door under Platform 13 into the imagina- tion of a deliciously clever writer. JACKET ILLUSTRATION © KEVIN HAWKES, 1998

Eva Ibbotson has written several books for chil­ dren and adults. A previous novel, Which Witch?, was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal, one of England's most prestigious children's book prizes. Ms. Ibbotson lives in the north of England. Sue Porter has illustrated more than fifty books for children. She lives with her hus­ band and their three children in the countryside of Rutland, England. a division of Penguin Young Readers Group 345 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 www.penguin. com/youngreaders PRINTED IN U.S.A.

ISBN 0-525-45929-4

THE SECRET OF PLATFORM 13



*T\v Secret c PLATFORM 1 Eva Ibbotson Illustrated by Sue Porter Dutton Children's Books NEW YORK *

Copyright © 1994 by Eva Ibbotson All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ibbotson, Eva. The secret of platform 13/Eva Ibbotson; illustrated by Sue Porter. —1 st American ed. p. cm. Summary: Odge Gribble, a young hag, accompanies an old wizard, a gentle fey, and a giant ogre on their mission through a magical tunnel from their Island to London to rescue their King and Queen's son, who had been stolen as an infant. ISBN 0-525-45929-4 [1. Fairy tales.] I. Porter, Sue, ill. II. Title. PZ8.l25Se 1998 [Fic]—dc2i 97-44601 CIP AC First published in the United States 1998 by Dutton Children's Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014 Originally published in Great Britain 1994 by Pan Macmillan Children's Books, London. Typography by Semadar Megged and Richard Amari Printed in U.S.A. First American Edition 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

For Laurie and for David



THE SECRET OF PLATFORM 13



1 @f F YOU WENT into a school nowadays and said to the children: "What is a gumpï" you would probably get some very silly answers. "It's a person without a brain, like a chump," a child might say. Or: "It's a camel whose hump has got stuck." Or even: "It's a kind of chewing gum." But once this wasn't so. Once every child in the land could have told you that a gump was a special mound, a

grassy bump on the earth, and that in this bump was a hidden door which opened every so often to reveal a tunnel which led to a completely different world. They would have known that every country has its own gump and that in Great Britain the gump was in a place called the Hill of the Cross of Kings not far from the river Thames. And the wise children, the ones that read the old stories and listened to the old tales, would have known more than that. They would have known that this particular gump opened for exactly nine days every nine years, and not one second longer, and that it was no good changing your mind about coming or going because nothing would open the door once the time was up. But the children forgot—everyone forgot—and per­ haps you can't blame them, yet the gump is still there. It is under Platform Thirteen of King's Cross Railway Station, and the secret door is behind the wall of the old gentlemen's cloakroom with its flappy posters saying "Trains Get You There" and its chipped wooden benches and the dirty ashtrays in which the old gentlemen used to stub out their smelly cigarettes. No one uses the platform now. They have built newer, smarter platforms with rows of shiny luggage trolleys and slot machines that actually work and televi­ sion screens which show you how late your train is going to be. But Platform Thirteen is different. The clock has stopped; spiders have spun their webs across the cloak- 4

room door. There's a Left-Luggage Office with a notice saying NOT IN USE, and inside it is an umbrella covered in mold which a lady left on the 5:25 from Doncaster the year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. The chocolate machines are rusty and lopsided, and if you were foolish enough to put your money in one, it would make a noise like "Harrumph" and swallow it, and you could wait the rest of your life for the chocolate to come out. Yet when people tried to pull down that part of the station and redevelop it, something always went wrong. An architect who wanted to build shops there suddenly came out in awful boils and went to live in Spain, and when they tried to relay the tracks for electricity, the surveyor said the ground wasn't suitable and muttered something about subsidence and cracks. It was as though people knew something about Platform Thirteen, but they didn't know what. But in every city there are those who have not forgot­ ten the old days or the old stories. The ghosts, for exam­ ple .. . Ernie Hobbs, the railway porter who'd spent all his life working at King's Cross and still liked to haunt round the trains, he knew—and so did his friend, the ghost of a cleaning lady called Mrs. Partridge who used to scrub out the parcels' office on her hands and knees. The people who plodged about in the sewers under the city and came up occasionally through the manholes beside the station, they knew . . . and so in their own way did the pigeons. 5

They knew that the gump was still there and they knew where it led: by a long, misty, and mysterious tun­ nel to a secret cove where a ship waited to take those who wished it to an island so beautiful that it took the breath away. The people who lived on it just called it the Island, but it has had all sorts of names: Avalon, St. Martin's Land, the Place of the Sudden Mists. Years and years ago it was joined to the mainland, but then it broke off and floated away slowly westward, just as Madagascar floated away from the continent of Africa. Islands do that every few million years; it is nothing to make a fuss about. With the floating island, of course, came the people who were living on it: sensible people mostly who under­ stood that everyone did not have to have exactly two arms and legs, but might be different in shape and differ­ ent in the way they thought. So they lived peacefully with ogres who had one eye or dragons (of whom there were a lot about in those days). They didn't leap into the sea every time they saw a mermaid comb her hair on a rock. They simply said, "Good morning." They under­ stood that Ellerwomen had hollow backs and hated to be looked at on a Saturday and that if trolls wanted to wear their beards so long that they stepped on them every time they walked, then that was entirely their own affair. They lived in peace with the animals too. There were t 6 «



a lot of interesting animals on the Island as well as ordi­ nary sheep and cows and goats. Giant birds who had for­ gotten how to fly and laid eggs the size of kettle drums, and brollachans like blobs of jelly with dark red eyes, and sea horses with manes of silk that galloped and snorted in the waves. But it was the mistmakers that the people of the Island loved the most. These endearing animals are found nowhere else in the world. They are white and small with soft fur all over their bodies, rather like baby seals, but they don't have flippers. They have short legs and big feet like the feet of puppies. Their black eyes are huge and moist, their noses are whiskery and cool, and they pant a little as they move because they look rather like small pillows and they don't like going very fast. The mistmakers weren't just nice, they were exceed­ ingly important. Because as the years passed and newspapers were washed up on the shore or refugees came through the gump with stories of the World Above, the Islanders became more and more determined to be left alone. Of course they knew that some modern inventions were good, like electric blankets to keep people's feet warm in bed or fluoride to stop their teeth from rotting, but there were other things they didn't like at all, like nuclear weapons or tower blocks at the tops of which old ladies shivered and shook because the lifts were bust, or bat­ tery hens stuffed two in a cage. And they dreaded being 8

discovered by passing ships or airplanes flying too low. Which is where the mistmakers came in. These sen- sitive creatures, you see, absolutely adore music. When you play music to a mistmaker, its eyes grow wide and it lets out its breath and gives a great sigh. "Aaah," it will sigh. "Aaah . . . aaah . . ." And each time it sighs, mist comes from its mouth: clean, thick, white mist which smells of early morning and damp grass. There are hundreds and hundreds of mistmakers lolloping over the turf or along the shore of the Island, and that means a lot of mist. So when a ship was sighted or a speck in the sky which might be an airplane, all the children ran out of school with their flutes and their trumpets and their recorders and started to play to the mistmakers . . . And the people who might have landed and poked and pried saw only clouds of whiteness and went on their way. Though there were so many unusual creatures on the Island, the royal family was entirely human and always had been. They were royal in the proper sense—not greedy, not covered in jewels, but brave and fair. They saw themselves as servants of the people, which is how all good rulers should think of themselves, but often don't. The King and Queen didn't live in a golden palace full of uncomfortable gilded thrones which stuck into people's behinds when they sat down, nor did they fill 9

the place with servants who fell over footstools from walking backward from Their Majesties. They lived in a low white house on a curving beach of golden sand studded with cowrie shells—and always, day or night, they could hear the murmur and slap of the waves and the gentle soughing of the wind. The rooms of the palace were simple and cool; the windows were kept open so that birds could fly in and out. Intelligent dogs lay sleeping by the hearth; bowls of fresh fruit and fragrant flowers stood on the tables—and anyone who had nowhere to go—orphaned little hags or seals with sore flippers or wizards who had become depressed and old—found sanctuary there. And in the year 1983—the year the Americans put a woman into space—the Queen, who was young and kind and beautiful—had a baby. Which is where this story really begins. The baby was a boy, and it was everything a baby should be, with bright eyes, a funny tuft of hair, a button nose, and interesting ears. Not only that, but the little Prince could whistle before he was a month old—not proper tunes, but a nice peeping noise like a young bird. The Queen was absolutely besotted about her son, and the King was so happy that he thought he would burst, and all over the Island the people rejoiced because you can tell very early how a baby is going to turn out, , 10 •

and they could see that the Prince was going to be just the kind of ruler that they wanted. Of course as soon as the child was born, there were queues of people round the palace wanting to look after him and be his nurse: Wise Women who wanted to teach him things and sirens who wanted to sing to him and hags who wanted to show him weird tricks. There was even a mermaid who seemed to think she could look after a baby, even if it meant she had to be trun­ dled round the palace in a bath on wheels. But although the Queen thanked everyone most politely, the nurse she chose for her baby was an ordi­ nary human. Or rather it was three ordinary humans: triplets whose names were Violet and Lily and Rose. They had come to the Island as young girls and were proper trained nursery nurses who knew how to change nappies and bring up wind and sieve vegetables, and the fact that they couldn't do any magic was a relief to the Queen who sometimes felt she had enough magic in her life. Having triplets seemed to her a good idea because looking after babies goes on night and day, and this way there would always be someone with spiky red hair and a long nose and freckles to soothe the Prince and rock him and sing to him, and he wouldn't be startled by the change because however remarkable the baby was, he wouldn't be able to tell Violet from Lily or Lily from Rose. 11

So the three nurses came and they did indeed look after the Prince most devotedly and everything went beautifully—for a while. But when the baby was three months old, there came the time of the Opening of the Gump—and after that, nothing was ever the same again. There was always excitement before the Opening. In the harbor, the sailors made the three-masted ship ready to sail to the Secret Cove; those people who wanted to leave the Island started their packing and said their good-byes, and rest houses were prepared for those who would come the other way. It was now that homesickness began to attack Lily and Violet and Rose. Homesickness is a terrible thing. Children at board­ ing schools sometimes feel as though they're going to die of it. It doesn't matter what your home is like—it's that it's yours that matters. Lily and Violet and Rose loved the Island and they adored the Prince, but now they began to remember the life they had led as little girls in the shabby streets of north London. "Do you remember the Bingo Halls?" asked Lily. "All the shouting from inside when someone won?" "And Saturday night at the Odeon with a bag of crisps?" said Violet. "The clang of the fruit machines in Paddy's Parlour," said Rose. * 12

They went on like this for days, quite forgetting how unhappy they had been as children: teased at school, never seeing a clean blade of grass, and beaten by their father. So unhappy that they'd taken to playing in King's Cross Station and had been there when the door opened in the gump and couldn't go through it fast enough. "I know we can't go Up There," said Lily. "Not with the Prince to look after. But maybe Their Majesties would let us sail with the ship and just look at the dear old country?" So they asked the Queen if they could take the baby Prince on the ship and wait with him in the Secret Cove—and the Queen said no. The thought of being parted from her baby made her stomach crunch up so badly that she felt quite sick. It was because she minded so much that she began to change her mind. Was she being one of those awful drooling mothers who smother children instead of let­ ting them grow up free and unafraid? She spoke to the King, hoping he would forbid his son to go, but he said: "Well, dear, it's true that adventures are good for people even when they are very young. Adventures can get into a person's blood even if he doesn't remember hav­ing them. And surely you trust the nurses?" Well, she did, of course. And she trusted the sailors who manned the ship—and sea air, as everybody knows, is terribly good for the lungs. 13

So she agreed and had a little weep in her room, and the nurses took the baby aboard in his handwoven rush basket with its lace-edged hood and settled him down for the voyage. Just before the ship was due to sail, the Queen rushed out of the palace, her face as white as chalk, and said: "No, no! Bring him back! I don't want him to go!" But when she reached the harbor, she was too late. The ship was just a speck in the distance, and only the gulls echoed her tragic voice. 14

RS. TROTTLE was rich. She was so rich that she had eleven winter coats and five diamond neck­ laces, and her bath had golden taps. Mr. Trottle, her husband, was a banker and spent his days lending money to people who already had too much of it and refusing to lend it to people who needed it. The house the Trottles lived in was in the best part of London beside a beautiful park and not far from Buckingham Palace. It had an ordinary address, but the tradesmen 15

called it Trottle Towers because of the spiky railings that surrounded it and the statues in the garden and the flagpole. Although Larina Trottle was perfectly strong and well and Landon Trottle kept fit by hiring a man to pummel him in his private gym, the Trottles had no less than five servants to wait on them: a butler, a cook, a chauffeur, a housemaid, and a gardener. They had three cars and seven portable telephones, which Mr. Trottle sat on sometimes by mistake, and a hunting lodge in Scotland where he went to shoot deer, and a beach house in the South of France with a flat roof on which Mrs. Trottle lay with nothing on, so as to get a suntan, which was not a pleasant sight. But there was one thing they didn't have. They didn't have a baby. As the years passed and no baby came along, Mrs. Trottle got angrier and angrier. She glared at people pushing prams, she snorted when babies appeared on television gurgling and advertising disposable nappies. Even puppies and kittens annoyed her. Then after nearly ten years of marriage, she decided to go and adopt a baby. First, though, she went to see the woman who had looked after her when she was small. Nanny Brown was getting on in years. She was a tiny, grumpy person who soaked her false teeth in brandy and never got into bed t 16 *

without looking to see if there was a burglar hiding underneath, but she knew everything there was to know about babies. "You'd better come with me," Mrs. Trottle said. "And I want that old doll of mine." So Nanny Brown went to fetch the doll, which was one of the large, old-fashioned ones with eyes that click open and shut, and lace dresses, and cold, china arms and legs. And on a fine day toward the end of June, the chauf­ feur drove Mrs. Trottle to an orphanage in the north of England, and beside her in the Rolls-Royce sat Nanny Brown, looking like a cross old bird and holding the china doll in her lap. They reached the orphanage. Mrs. Trottle swept in. "I have come to choose a baby," she said. "I'm pre­ pared to take either a boy or a girl, but it must be healthy, of course, and not more than three months old, and I'd prefer it to have fair hair." Matron looked at her. "I'm afraid we don't have any babies for adoption," she said. "There's a waiting list." "A waiting list!" Mrs. Trottle's bosom swelled so much that it looked as if it were going to take off into space. "My good woman, do you know who I am? I am Larina Trottle! My husband is the head of Trottle and Blather- spoon, the biggest merchant bank in the City, and his salary is five hundred thousand pounds a year." '< 17

Matron said she was glad to hear it. "Anyone lucky enough to become a Trottle would be brought up like a prince," Mrs. Trottle went on. "And this doll which I have brought for the baby is a real antique. I have been offered a very large sum of money for it. This doll is priceless!" Matron nodded and said she was sure Mrs. Trottle was right, but she had no babies for adoption, and that was her last word. The journey back to London was not a pleasant one. Mrs. Trottle ranted and raved; Nanny Brown sat hud­ dled up with the doll in her lap; the chauffeur drove steadily southward. Then just as they were coming into London, the engine began to make a nasty clunking noise. "Oh no, this is too much!" raged Mrs. Trottle. "I will not allow you to break down in these disgusting, squalid streets." They were close to King's Cross Station, and it was eleven o'clock at night. But the clunking noise grew worse. "I'm afraid I'll have to stop at this garage, Madam," said the chauffeur. They drew up by one of the petrol pumps. The chauffeur got out to look for a mechanic. Mrs. Trottle, in the backseat, went on ranting and raving. Then she grew quiet. On a bench between the 18

garage and a fish-and-chip shop sat a woman whose frizzy red hair and long nose caught the lamplight. She was wearing the uniform of a nursery nurse and beside her was a baby's basket ... a basket most finely woven out of rushes whose deep hood sheltered whoever lay within. The chauffeur returned with a mechanic and began to rev the engine. Exhaust fumes from the huge car drifted toward the bench where the red-haired woman sat holding on to the handle of the basket. Her head nodded, but she jerked herself awake. The chauffeur revved even harder, and another cloud of poisonous gas rolled toward the bench. The nurse's head nodded once more. "Give me the doll!" ordered Larina Trottle—and got out of the car. For eight days the nurses had waited on the ship as it anchored off the Secret Cove. They had sung to the Prince and rocked him and held him up to see the sea birds and the cliffs of their homeland. They had taken him ashore while they paddled and gathered shells, and they had welcomed the people who came through the gump, as they arrived in the mouth of the cave. Traveling through the gump takes only a moment. The suction currents and strange breezes that are stored up there during nine long years have their own laws 19

and can form themselves into wind baskets into which people can step and be swooshed up or down in an instant. It is a delightful way to travel but can be mud­ dling for those not used to it, and the nurses made themselves useful helping the newcomers onto the ship. Then on the ninth day something different came through the tunnel . . . and that something was—a smell. The nurses were right by the entrance in the cliff when it came to them and as they sniffed it up, their eyes filled with tears. "Oh Lily!" said poor Violet, and her nose quivered. "Oh Rose!" said poor Lily and clutched her sister. It was the smell of their childhood: the smell of fish and chips. Every Saturday night their parents had sent them out for five packets, and they'd carried them back, warm as puppies, through the lamplit streets. "Do you remember the batter, all sizzled and gold?" asked Lily. "And the soft whiteness when you got through to the fish?" said Violet. "The way the chips went soggy when you doused them with vinegar?" said Rose. And as they stood there, they thought they would die if they didn't just once more taste the glory that was fish and chips. 20

"We can't go," said Lily, who was the careful one. "You know we can't." "Why can't we?" asked Rose. "We'd be up there in a minute. It's a good two hours still before the Closing." "What about the Prince? There's no way we can leave him," said Lily. "No, of course we can't," said Violet. "We'll take him. He'll love going in a swoosherette, won't you, my poppet?" And indeed the Prince crowed and smiled and looked as though he would like nothing better. Well, to cut a long story short, the three sisters made their way to the mouth of the cave, climbed into a wind basket—and in no time at all found themselves in King's Cross Station. Smells are odd things. They follow you about when you're not thinking about them, but when you put your nose to where they ought to be, they aren't there. The nurses wandered round the shabby streets, and to be honest they were wishing they hadn't come. The pave­ ments were dirty, passing cars splattered them with mud, and the Odeon Cinema where they'd seen such lovely films had been turned into a bowling alley. Then suddenly there it was again—the smell— stronger than ever, and now, beside an All Night garage, they saw a shop blazing with light and in the window a sign saying FRYING NOW. • 21 t

The nurses hurried forward. Then they stopped. "We can't take the Prince into a common fish-and- chip shop," said Lily. "It wouldn't be proper." The others agreed. Some of the people queuing inside looked distinctly rough. "Look, you wait over there on the bench with the baby," said Rose. She was half an hour older than the others and often took the lead. "Violet and I'll go in and get three packets. We're only a couple of streets away from the station—there's plenty of time." So Lily went to sit on the bench, and Rose and Violet went in to join the queue. Of course when they reached the counter, the cod had run out—something always runs out when it's your turn. But the man went to fetch some more and there was nothing to worry about: they had three-quarters of an hour before the Closing of the Gump, and they were only ten minutes' walk from the station. Lily, waiting on the bench, saw the big Rolls Royce draw up at the garage . . . saw the chauffeur get out and a woman with wobbly piled-up hair open the window and let out a stream of complaints. Then the chauffeur came back and started to rev up . . . Oh dear, I do feel funny, thought Lily, and held on tight to the handle of the basket. Her head fell forward and she jerked herself awake. Another cloud of fumes 22

rolled toward her . . . and once more she blacked out. But only for a moment. Almost at once she came round and all was well. The big car had gone, the basket was beside her, and now her sisters came out with three packets wrapped in newspaper. The smell was mar­ velous, and a greasy ooze had come up on the face of the Prime Minister, just the way she remembered it. Thoroughly pleased with themselves, the nurses hurried through the dark streets, reached Platform Thirteen, and entered the cloakroom. Only when they were safe in the tunnel did they unpack the steaming fish and chips. "Let's just give him one chip to suck?" suggested Violet. But Lily, who was the fussy one, said no, the Prince only had healthy food and never anything salty or fried. "He's sleeping so soundly," she said fondly. She bent over the cot, peered under the hood . . . unwound the embroidered blanket, the lacy shawl . . . Then she began to scream. Instead of the warm, living, breathing baby—there lay a cold and lifeless doll. And the wall of the gentlemen's cloakroom was mov­ ing . . . moving ... it was almost back in position. Weeping, clawing, howling, the nurses tried to hold it back. « 23 •

Too late. The gump was closed, and no power on earth could open it again before the time was up. But in Nanny Brown's little flat, Mrs. Trottle stood look­ing down at the stolen baby with triumph in her eyes. "Do you know what I'm going to do?" she said. Nanny Brown shook her head. "I'm going to go right away from here with the baby. To Switzerland. For a whole year. And when I come back I'm going to pretend that I had him over there. That it's my very own baby—not adopted but mine. No one will guess; it's such a little baby. My husband won't guess either if I stay away—he's so busy with the bank, he won't notice." 24

Nanny Brown looked at her, thunderstruck. "You'll never get away with it, Miss Larina. Never." "Oh yes, I will! I'm going to bring him back as my own little darling babykins, aren't I, my poppet? I'm going to call him Raymond. Raymond Trottle, that sounds good, doesn't it? He's going to grow up like a little prince, and no one will be sorry for me or sneer at me because they'll think he's properly mine. I'll sack all the servants and get some new ones so they can't tell tales, and when I come back, it'll be with my teeny weeny Raymond in my arms." "You can't do it," said Nanny Brown obstinately. "It's wicked." "Oh yes, I can. And you're going to give up your flat and come with me because I'm not going to change his nappies. And if you don't, I'll go to the police and tell them it was you that stole the baby." "You wouldn't!" gasped Nanny Brown- But she knew perfectly well that Mrs. Trottle would. When she was a little girl, Larina Trottle had tipped five live goldfish onto the carpet and watched them flap themselves to death because her mother had told her to clean out their bowl, and she was capable of anything. But it wasn't just fear that made Nanny Brown go with Mrs. Trottle to Switzerland. It was the baby with his milky breath and the big eyes which he now opened to look about him and the funny little whistling noise he made. She wasn't a particularly nice woman, but she 25 *

loved babies, and she knew that Larina Trottle was as fit to look after a young baby as a baboon. Actually, a lot less fit because baboons, as it happens, make excellent mothers. So Mrs. Trottle went away to Switzerland—and over the Island a kind of darkness fell. The Queen all but died of grief, the King went about his work like a man twice his age. The people mourned, the mermaids wept on their rocks, and the schoolchildren made a gigantic calendar showing the number of days which had to pass before the gump opened once more and the Prince could be brought back. But of all this, the boy called Raymond Huntingdon Trottle knew nothing at all. 26

0. DGE GRIBBLE was a hag. She was a very young one, and a disappointment to her parents. The Gribbles lived in the north of the Island and came from a long line of frightful and mon­ strous women who flapped and shrieked about, giving nightmares to people who had been wicked or making newts come out of the mouths of anyone who told a lie. Odge's oldest sister had a fingernail so long that you could dig the garden with it, the next girl had black * 27 i

hairs like piano wires coming out of her ears, the third had stripey feet and so on—down to the sixth who had blue teeth and a wart the size of a saucer on her chin. Then came Odge. There was great excitement before she was born because Mrs. Gribble had herself been a seventh daugh­ ter, and now the new baby would be the seventh also, and the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is sup­ posed to be very special indeed. But when the baby came, everyone fell silent and a cousin of Mrs. Gribble's said: "Oh dear!" The baby's fingernails were short; not one whisker grew out of her ears; her feet were absolutely ordinary. "She looks just like a small pink splodge," the cousin went on. So Mrs. Gribble decided not to call her new daugh­ ter Nocticula or Valpurgina and settled for Odge (which rhymed with splodge) and hoped that she would im­ prove as she grew older. And up to a point, Odge did get a little more hag­ like. She had unequal eyes: the left one was green and the right one was brown, and she had one blue tooth— but it was a molar and right at the back; the kind you only see when you're at the dentist. There was also a bump on one of her feet which just could have been the beginning of an extra toe, though not a very big one. Nothing is worse than knowing you have failed your 28

parents, but Odge did not whinge or whine. She was a strong-willed little girl with a chin like a prizefighter's and long black hair which she drew like a curtain when she didn't want to speak to anyone, and she was very independent. What she liked best was to wander along the seashore making friends with the mistmakers and picking up the treasures that she found there. It was on one of these lonely walks that she came across the Nurse's Cave- It was a big, dark cave with water dripping from the 29

walls, and the noise that came from it made Odge's blood run cold. Dreadful moans, frightful wails, shudder­ ing sobs . . . She stopped to listen, and after a while she heard that the wails had words to them, and that there seemed to be not one wailing voice but three. "Ooh," she heard. "Oooh, ooh ... I shall never for­ give myself. Never!" "Never, never!" wailed the second voice. "I deserve to die," moaned a third. Odge crossed the sandy bay and entered the cave. Three women were sitting there, dressed in the uniform of nursery nurses. Their hair was plastered with ashes, their faces were smeared with mud—and as they wailed and rocked, they speared pieces of completely burnt toast from a smoldering fire and put them into their mouths. "What's the matter?" asked Odge. "What's the matter7." said the first woman. Odge could see that she had red hair beneath the ashes and a long, freckled nose. "What's the MATTER?" repeated the second one, who looked so like the first that Odge realized she had to be her sister. "How is that you don't know about our sorrow and our guilt?" said the third—and she too was so alike that Odge knew they must be triplets. Then Odge remembered who they were. The tragedy 30

had happened before she was born, but even now the Island was still in mourning. "Are you the nurses who took the Prince Up There and allowed him to be stolen?" "We are," said one of the women. She turned furi­ ously to her sister. "The toast is not burnt enough, Lily. Go and burn it some more." Then Odge heard how they had lived in the cave ever since that dreadful day so as to punish themselves. How they ate only food that was burnt or moldy or so stale that it hurt their teeth and never anything they were fond of, like bananas. How they never cleaned their teeth or washed, so that fleas could jump into their clothes and bite them, and always chose the sharpest stones to sleep on so that they woke up sore and bruised. "What happened to the Prince after he was stolen?" asked Odge. She was much more interested in the stolen baby than in how bruised the nurses were or how disgusting their food was. "He was snatched by an evil woman named Mrs. Trottle and taken to her house." "How do you know that," asked Odge, "if the door in the gump was closed?" (Hags do not start school till they are eight years old, so she still had a lot to learn.) "There are those who can pass through the gump even when it is shut, and they told us." "Ghosts, do you mean?" • 31 '

Violet nodded. "My foot feels comfortable," she grumbled. "I must go and dip it in the icy water and turn my toes blue." "What did she do with him? With the baby?" "She pretended he was her own son. He lives with her now. She has called him Raymond Trottle." "Raymond Trottle," repeated Odge. It seemed an unlikely name for a prince. "And he's still living there and going to school and everything? He doesn't know who he is?" "That's right," said Rose, poking a stick into her ear so as to try and draw blood. "But in two years from now, the gump will open and the rescuers will go and bring him back and then we will stop wailing and eating burnt toast and our feet will grow warm and the sun will shine on our faces." "And the Queen will smile again," said Lily. "Yes, that will be best of all, when the Queen smiles properly once more." Odge was very thoughtful as she made her way back along the shore, taking care not to step on the toes of the mistmakers who lay basking on the sand. The Prince was only four months older than she was. How did he feel, being Raymond Trottle and living in the middle of London? What would he think when he found out that he wasn't who he thought he was? And who would be chosen to bring him back? The 32

rescuers would be famous; they would go down in history. "I wish I could go," thought Odge, nudging her blue tooth with her tongue. "I wish J could be a rescuer." Already she felt that she knew the Prince; that she would like him for a friend. Suddenly she stopped. She set her jaw. "I will go," she said aloud. "I'll make them let me go." From that day on, Odge was a girl with a mission. She started school the following year and worked so hard that she was soon top of her class. She jogged, she threw boulders around to strengthen her biceps, she studied maps of London, and tried to cough up frogs. And a month before the gump was due to open, she wrote a letter to the palace. When you have worked and worked for something, it is almost impossible to believe that you can fail. Yet when the names of the rescuers were announced, Odge Gribble's name was not among them. It was the most bitter disappointment. She would have taken it better if the people who had been chosen were mighty and splendid warriors who would ride through the gump on horseback, but they were not. A wheezing old wizard, a slightly batty fey, and a one-eyed giant who lived in the mountains moving goats about and making cheese . . . 33

The head teacher, when she announced who was going in Assembly, had given the reason. "Cornelius the Wizard has been chosen because he is wise. Gurkintrude the fey has been chosen because she is good. And the giant Hans has been chosen because he is strong.11 Of course, being the head teacher, she had then gone on to tell the children that if they wanted to do great deeds when they were older, they must themselves remember to be wise and good and strong, and they could begin by getting their homework done on time and keeping their classroom tidy. When you are a hag it is important not to cry, but Odge, as she sat on a rock that evening wrapped in her hair, was deeply and seriously hurt. "I am wise," she said to herself. "I was top again in algebra. And I'm strong: I threw a boulder right across Anchorage Bay. As for being good, I can't see any point in that—not for a mission which might be dangerous." And yet the letter she had written to the King and Queen had been answered by a secretary who said he felt Miss Gribble was too young. Sitting alone by the edge of the sea, Odge Gribble ground her teeth. But there was another reason why those three people had been chosen. The King and Queen wanted their 34

son to be brought back quietly. They didn't want to unloose a lot of strange and magical creatures on the city of London—creatures who would do sensational tricks and be noticed. They dreaded television crews getting excited and newspapermen writing articles about a Lost Continent or a Stolen Prince. As far as the Island was a Lost Continent, they wanted it to stay that way, and they were determined to protect their son from the kind of fuss that went on Up There when anything unusual was going on. So they had chosen rescuers who could do magic if it was absolutely necessary but could pass for human beings—well, more or less. Of course, if anything went wrong, they had hordes of powerful creatures in reserve: winged harpies with ghastly claws; black dogs that could bay and howl over the rooftops; monsters with pale, flat eyes who could disguise themselves as rocks. . . . All these could be sent through the tunnel if the Trottles turned nasty, but no one expected this. The Trottles had done a dreadful thing; they would certainly be sorry and give up the child with good grace. Yet now, as the rescuers stood in the drawing room of the palace ready to be briefed, the King and Queen did feel a pang. Cornelius was the mightiest wizard on the Island; a man so learned that he could divide twenty- three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-forty-one by six-and- three-quarters in the time it took a cat to sneeze. He i 35 i

could change the weather and strike fire from a rock, and what was most important, he had once been a uni­ versity professor and lived Up There so that he could be made to look human without any trouble. Well, he was human. But they hadn't realized he was quite so old. Up in his hut in the hills one didn't notice it so much, but in the strong light that came in from the sea, the liver spots on his bald pate did show up rather, and the yel­ lowish streaks in his long white beard. Cor's neck wob­ bled as if holding up that domed, brain-filled head was too much for it. You could hear his bones creaking like old timbers every time he moved, and he was very deaf. But when they suggested that he might find the jour­ ney too much, he had been deeply offended. "To bring back the Prince will be the crowning glory of my life," he'd said. "And I'll be there to help him," Gurkintrude had promised, looking at the old man out of her soft blue eyes. "I know you will, dear," said the Queen, smiling at her favorite fey. And indeed, Gurkintrude had already brought up a little patch of hair on the wizard's bald head so as to keep him warm for the journey. True, it looked more like grass because she was a sort of growth goddess, a kind of agricultural fairy, but the wizard had been very pleased. i 36

If the Queen couldn't go herself to fetch back her son (and the Royal Advisors had forbidden it), there was no one she would rather have sent than this fruitful and loving person. Flowers sprang from the ground for Gurkie, trees put out their leaves—and she never forgot the vegetables either. It was because of what she did for those rich, swollen things like marrows and pumpkins— and in particular for those delicious, tiny cucumbers called gherkins which taste so wonderful when pickled —that her name (which had been Gertrude) had gradu­ ally changed the way it had. And Gurkintrude, too, would be at home in London because her mother had been a gym mistress in a girls' school and had run about in gray shorts shouting, "Well Played!" and "Spiffing!" before she came to the Island. Gurkie had adored her mother, and she sometimes talked to her plants as though they were the girls of St. Agnes School, crying, "Well grown!" to the raspberries or telling a lopsided tree to "Pull Your Socks Up and Play the Game." The third rescuer was lying behind a screen being tested by the doctor. Hans was an ogre—a one-eyed giant—a most simple and kindly person who lived in the mountains putting things right for the goats, collect­ ing feathers for his alpine hat, and yodeling. As giants go he was not very big, but anyone bigger would not have been able to get through the door of the 37

gentlemen's cloakroom. Even so, at a meter taller than an ordinary person, he would have been noticed, so it had been decided to make him invisible for the journey. This was no problem. Fernseed, as everyone knows, makes people invisible in a moment, but just a few people can't take it on their skin. They come out in lumps and bumps or develop a rash, and it was to test the ogre's skin that the doctor had taken him behind the screen. Now he came out, carrying his black bag and beaming. "All is well, Your Majesties," he said. "There will be no ill effects at all." Hans followed shyly. The ogre always wore leather shorts with embroidered braces, and they could see on his huge pink thigh a patch of pure, clear nothingness. But he was looking a little worried. "My eye?" he said. "I wish not seed in my eye?" (He spoke in short sentences and with a foreign accent because his people, long ago, had come through a gump in the Austrian Alps.) Everyone understood this. If you have only one eye, it really matters. "I don't think anyone will notice a single eye floating so high in the air," said the Chief Advisor. "And if they do, he could always shut it." So this was settled and the Palace Secretary handed Cornelius a map of the London Underground and a 38



briefcase full of money. There was always plenty of that because the people who came through the gump brought it to the treasury, not having any use for it on the Island, and the King now gave his orders. "You know already that no magic must be used directly on the Prince," he said—and the rescuers nod­ ded. The King and Queen liked ruling over a place where unusual things happened, but they themselves were completely human and could only manage if they kept magic strictly out of their private lives. "As for the rest, I think you understand what you have to do. Make your way quietly to the Trottles' house and find the so- called Raymond. If he is ready to come at once, return immediately and make your way down the tunnel, but if he needs time—" "How could he?" cried the Queen. "How could he need time?" The thought that her son might not want to come to her at once hurt her so much that she had to catch her breath. "Nevertheless, my dear, it may be a shock to him, and if so," he turned back to the rescuers, "you have a day or two to get him used to the idea, but whatever you do, don't delay more than—" He was interrupted by a knock on the door, and a palace servant entered. "Excuse me, Your Majesties, but there is someone waiting at the gates. She has been here for hours, and 40

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