‘It isn’t a fairy wand we want today, it’s a sardine tin opener,’ said Rosemary gravely.
‘A sardine tin opener?’ he said, going off into a paroxysm of wheezes. ‘You’ll be the death of me!’ he said at last, wiping his eyes. But he rummaged about in an old box and brought out a key, very old and rusty, but nevertheless a key.
‘I don’t fancy sardines myself, but it takes all sorts to make a world. If it was sweets, now, it would be different. A regular sweet tooth I’ve got.’
Rosemary took the opener from him.‘Thank you very much indeed! How much is it?’
‘I’ll make you a present of it!’ said the old man gallantly, and turned away to attend to a customer.
It was precisely this minute that the two children became aware of Carbonel licking his dusty paws a few feet away. Far from being cross at having been summoned, he was most gracious.
‘I wondered if you would have enough sense to say the Words,’ he said. ‘Of course I was coming anyway, but the Words give one’s paws the power of coming the shortest way possible. I was following the bus route when they whipped me round and down an alley I had never noticed before. Got me here in half the time. Not a whole tin of sardines specially for me? Really, I feel quite touched! Believe me, I shall never forget it!’
And Carbonel rubbed himself against the children’s bare legs, winding in and out between them and purring, as John said, ‘Like a space ship.’
They found a couple of packing cases at the edge of the stalls and settled down to eat their sandwiches, while Carbonel, still purring, licked the sardine tin until even the smell of sardine had gone.
‘I tell you what I bags we do,’ said Rosemary, as she wiped the crumbs from her lap. ‘Let’s go and buy the old man a present. He has been so jolly kind and helpful. We shouldn’t have found either the hat or the cauldron without him, and now there is the opener.’
‘That’s a good idea. But whatever could we give him?’
‘He said he’d got a terribly sweet tooth,’ said Rosemary. ‘There is a sweet shop over there I went to once. Let’s go there and see what we can afford.’
She led the way to the little shop where she had weighed the merits of toffee apples and liquorice bootlaces on the day that she had first met Carbonel. What a long time ago it seemed now! When they reached the shop they were in deep discussion as to what happened to a sweet tooth if you had to have false ones, so that Rosemary did not notice anything different about the shop at first.
‘I don’t expect they can replace a sweet tooth,’ she was saying. ‘That is why old people don’t seem to like toffee. Besides…’
John interrupted,‘Is this the shop you mean? What a miserable place!’
It was indeed. There was no longer a cheerful display of jars of sweets, of pink coconut ice, and sticks of peppermint rock. Except for one or two jars of pallid toffee and some dusty odds and ends of stationery the window was empty. Rosemary looked with distaste at two dead blue-bottles which lay on their backs near some yellowing envelopes.‘I think this is it,’ she said doubtfully.
‘Well, p’r’aps that explains it,’ said John. And he pointed to a hand-printed notice which was stuck rather crookedly on to the window with stamp paper:
UNDER NEW MANGEMENT
it said in wobbly capital letters.
‘Well, I shouldn’t think the “new mangement” gets many customers!’
But as he spoke a young woman with a whimpering small boy opened the door with an angry jangle of the bell and went in.‘I say, look at that!’
Rosemary looked where he pointed excitedly.
Over the door was another notice which said KATIE CANTRIP. LICENSED TO SELL TOBACCO.
John whistled.‘Gome on!’ he said.
Rosemary began to say,‘Don’t go in till we’ve decided what to do…’ but it was too late. John had opened the door with a jangle of the bell that could not be ignored, and Carbonel had slipped in after him. There was nothing for Rosemary to do but follow down the two steps into the shop.
19
Mrs Cantrip
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It was dark inside the shop, and the old woman behind the counter was so busy with her customer that she paid no attention to the children. She was grinning and bobbing, but saying nothing to the young woman, who was talking very fast and angrily, while she held the small boy by the arm.
‘I tell you straight,’ she was saying. ‘It’s the third time ’e’s ’ad a stomach ache after eating your ’ome made sweets. Once I could ’ave understood, because ’e never was a child to know when to stop. But today ’e’d only sucked a couple, that I do know, when the poor little kid was doubled up. I’m not one to complain, neither, but you can take the rest of them back!’ And she threw the bag of sweets on the counter. The little boy howled anew, as much at the sight of his property bursting its bag and bouncing all over the floor, as at the pangs of stomach ache. The young woman gave him a shake.
‘And don’t you ever let me find you coming ’ere again!’ she said, and pulled him, still complaining, out of the shop.
The clanging of the bell died away and the children watched Mrs Cantrip as she scrabbled round the floor, picking up the sweets. As she put them back into the jar without so much as a dust, both John and Rosemary were doubtful about helping her to pick them up. However, it gave Rosemary a moment or two to notice that the old woman had made some attempt to tidy herself since the day she had sold the broom. Her grey hair was twisted into a wispy bun by means of several large hairpins that reminded John of staples. She wore a shawl over her shoulders edged with scarlet bobbles, some of them missing, and a grubby apron with a pattern of enormous pink flowers on it.
She peered short-sightedly over the counter and said to John, amiably enough:
‘What can I do for you, lovie?’
There was a pause while the cat and the two children instinctively drew nearer together. It was John who spoke first.
‘Are you Mrs Cantrip?’ he asked.
‘Katie Cantrip, that’s me,’ said the old woman. ‘Licensed to sell tobacco,’ she added with some pride.
‘Then, if you please, we want you to tell us the Silent Magic that will make Carbonel free for ever.’
The old woman stiffened, and the amiability drained from her face as completely as water drains from a sieve, leaving her sharp nose and chin looking sharper than ever. Her deep-set eyes snapped angrily.
‘Have you got that cat there?’ she asked harshly.
‘I’m here!’ said Garbonel, and he leapt up on to the counter.
Mrs Cantrip seemed to pull herself together.
‘Well, we’d better talk it over fair and square. Put the broom on the counter so that we can all hear His Highness Prince Carbonel talking.’
Carbonel’s tail twitched at the very end where it hung down from the counter, otherwise he might not have noticed the mock deference with which she gave him his full title.
‘Do as SHE says,’ he said, without taking his great golden eyes off her. ‘But don’t leave the broom unguarded for an instant. Goodness knows what she might get up to.’
So they put the broom longwise down the counter, with the twigs still wrapped in Rosemary’s shoe bag, and John held it one end, and Rosemary held it the other, and from the other side of the counter Mrs Cantrip laid her gnarled hand on the middle. But as she stroked the wooden handle the children felt the broom quiver in response.
‘Ah, my beauty!’ said the old woman, so softly that Rosemary was startled. ‘We had some fine times together, you and me! Do you remember swooping over the North Pole with the Northern Lights flickering through your tail? And beating back home against a north-east gale with the clouds scuddingover the moon so thick and dark that many a broom would have lost its way? But not you, my beauty! Ah, you were as fine a besom as ever took the sky, but now you are old, and so am I, and the glory is gone from us.’ She stroked the broom and cruddled over it like a woman with a sick child. Rosemary seized on her softened mood. ‘But why won’t you set Carbonel free?’