Although they could use Mrs Walker’s kitchen with the big black cooker, there was a gas ring and a fire in their room which they used whenever it was possible. With miracles of timing they managed to cook most of their meals here. Rosemary made the toast while her mother tidied the bedrooms.
‘I meant to go and ask Mrs Walker about your Pussums before I went this morning,’ called Mrs Brown through the open door, ‘but I doubt if I shall have time.’
‘He isn’t here, Mummy. When I woke up this morning he had gone. But I am quite sure he will come back. And please don’t call him Pussums, he doesn’t like it. His name is Carbonel.’ Her mother laughed again.
‘What a grand name! You know, if you brush him and feed him up I think he will be a beautiful cat… If he comes back. I had better wait until this evening, then if he is here I will go and see Mrs Walker. I do hope I can persuade her. It would be such company for you. Rosie, darling, do be careful!’
Through the half-open door drifted the unmistakable smell of burning toast. The idea that Carbonel really might not come back filled Rosemary with such alarm that she forgot what she was doing. But of course he would come back! All the same it was a worrying idea. A second piece of toast was smoking ominously when her mother cam? in.
‘Rosie, how careless of you! Sitting there looking at it burning!’
‘I’m sorry, Mummy, I really am. I was thinking how awful it would be if Carbonel didn’t come back. I’ll eat the scraped bits of toast myself, really I will.’
‘Are you sure you won’t be lonely while I’m away, darling?’ said her mother anxiously over their boiled eggs.
‘Not a bit!’ said Rosemary, with such conviction that her mother was comforted. ‘When Carbonel comes back,’ Rosemary said to herself, ‘we will search the town until we find the hat and the cauldron, and I expect it will take days.’
‘I want you to take the dressing-gown round to Miss Withers for me this morning. I finished it last night,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘You had better go by bus, and be careful to change when you get to the Town Hall.’
To spend the morning going with a parcel to the other end of the town was the last thing that Rosemary wanted to do, but as she could not explain why, there was no help for it.
After her mother had gone Rosemary tidied the rooms and washed the dishes. Egg, as everyone knows, is one of the most clinging of things to wash away, and it all seemed to take her a very long time. When at last she had finished Carbonel had still not returned. She set out with her parcel, after leaving a saucer of milk in case he came back while she was away. She had half thought of using the broom again, and had got as far as peering into the gloom of the wardrobe, but the faint quiver she felt in the handle, without Carbonel to advise her, was a little alarming, so she said as carelessly as she could,‘I just looked in to see if you were all right,’ and shut the door again rather hurriedly.
It took her a long time to find the right house, but when she did Miss Withers gave her a piece of seed cake, which she did not much like, and sixpence, which she did. The sixpence she took to the fishmonger on her way home. He was a large man with large rubber boots and large hands permanently spangled with fish scales. As he was an old friend of Rosemary’s she told him what she wanted the fish for. He gave her half-a-pound of Coley and three shrimps, and he would only take fourpence.
‘The Coley’s for bread, as you might say, and the shrimpses is for jam,’ he explained.
Rosemary burst eagerly into the room when she reached home. The saucer she had left on the hearthrug was empty and polished clean, and Carbonel was lying curled up beside it. Rosemary dashed off for the broom and came whirling back.
‘Carbonel, you are very, very naughty! I’ve been so worried. Where have you been?’
The black cat stretched himself and yawned so that she could see his magnificent white teeth and his pink tongue, frilled like a flower petal, between.
‘I don’t know what you are making a fuss about,’ he said. ‘You could have said the Words and called me back again any time you wanted to.’
‘What Words?’ said Rosemary.
‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ She shook her head. ‘The Summoning Words. You simply say…
By squeak of bat,
And brown owl’s hoot,
By hellebore,
And mandrake root
Come swift, and silent
As the tomb,
Dark minion
Of the twiggy broom.
‘The merest doggerel I know, but it works. It wouldn’t be so humiliating if it were better poetry,’ he said bitterly. ‘Whenever you say it I’m bound to come, no matter how important the business I may be engaged upon. Have you never seen a black cat hurrying relentlessly along as though he’s being pulled by an invisible string? Well, that is what has happened to him, not a doubt.’
Rosie repeated the rhyme until she had learned it by heart.
‘It doesn’t sound very polite,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I wouldn’t quite like to call you, “minion of the twiggy broom”.’
‘Well, you’ll have to get over that if you want to summon me. You can’t expect magic to be ladylike. And that reminds me. I was looking at the broom before you came in and there is precious little life in the old thing.’
Rosemary looked at it thoughtfully. It was indeed a sad sight. It reminded her of a parrot she had once seen that was moulting.
‘When the last of those twigs drop off, her power has gone, and it will be too late to find the cauldron and the steeple hat, and I shall be your slave for ever whether you want it or not.’
‘Couldn’t we mend it somehow?’ said Rosemary. ‘I could tie on the twigs with string or raffia or something.’ Carbonel was horrified.
‘Good gracious, no! You can’t mend magic with string!’ he said in a shocked voice. ‘You will be suggesting glue and tin-tacks next. A few weeks ago the cauldron sprang a leak, and SHE insisted on filling up the hole with one of those pot-mender things you get at an ironmonger’s, at sixpence a card. And what was the result?’He paused dramatically.
‘What?’ breathed Rosemary.
‘Her spells worked out lumpy. But I tell you what, we’ve no time to lose. We’d better start searching this afternoon.’
They had their dinner first. Rosie cooked the fish on the gas ring, and then she warmed up the stew that her mother had left her. They ate together in companionable silence on the hearthrug. Carbonel seemed really touched by the three shrimps.
‘A Prince of the Royal Blood,’ he said with emotion, ‘and yet nobody before has given me shrimps. I shall not forget.’
When they had finished they decided on the plan of action. It was agreed that they would do best to go back to Fairfax Market.
‘We must take the broom with us so that I can talk to you, but we mustn’t ride on it. I’ve still got tuppence from this morning so we can take a bus there, but we shall have to walk home.’
5
The Search Begins
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They reached the market without any adventures. The bus conductor was quite nice about Carbonel going on top, and insisted on calling Rosemary‘Miss Whittington’, which made everyone in the bus laugh. When they reached the Market it was looking as she had expected to find it the day before. There was a jolly bustle of busy people with bulging shopping bags and baskets, with the noise of people chatting, and stallholders crying their wares. Rosemary could have happily spent the afternoon just looking round, but she knew that more serious work was on hand. They had agreed to go round all the stalls that sold second-hand things first, in the hope that Mrs Cantrip might have sold the hat or the cauldron to one of them, and all the time they were to keep a lookout for the old woman herself. There was always the chance that they might find her there. Rather regretfully Rosemary left the cheerful stalls that sold fruit and groceries, and cotton frocks, and china ornaments. The second-hand stalls were on the edge of the Market, near the spot where Rosemary had bumped into Mrs Cantrip.