“Shall I tell you a story, Ambrose?” Con begged.
But Ambrose just shook his great, shaggy head and sighed.
From the first moment she had found him, wall-eyed and crumpled and desperate to be loved, Lady Agatha had known that Ambrose wasn’t quite like the others. “I really think you could kill Ambrose by thinking unkind thoughts about him,” she had said to Con in the valley of Nanvi Dar. Since then, Ambrose had seen people come over the ice with guns; he had seen his uncle shot; he had known hatred.
And now he turned his face to the wall and prepared to die.
In a week or so the doctors and nurses became worried too. There was talk of force-feeding and intravenous drips and things which made the children’s blood run cold when they heard of them. And on the news bulletins, now, it was announced that though the other four yetis were improving steadily, there was slight concern about the youngest, Ambrose the Abominable.
After a few more days the “slight concern” was changed to “serious concern”.
At night, the doctors made Ellen sleep in a spare room, she was so exhausted from the strain. But nothing could shift Con. He sat by Ambrose’s bed murmuring to him, telling him jokes, begging him for Lady Agatha’s sake, for Father’s sake, to make an effort — to eat something, to get well. But Ambrose just said, “People are not my brothers,” and grew steadily weaker and more lifeless and ill. Until a day came when the television newscaster looked out of the screen in a very serious way and said: “It is feared that there is little hope for the youngest of the yetis, Ambrose the Abominable, now seriously ill at Park Square Hospital, London.”
In the silent hospital, Con sat by Ambrose’s bed, trying to believe the unbelievable. There was no hope. It was going to happen. Ambrose the Abominable was going to die.
All day, children had thronged the square outside and stood silently, their faces turned to the hospital windows, waiting for news. Now it was night. Out in the corridor the sister on duty sat in her glass cubicle guarding the white and disinfected room where Ambrose lay.
Inside the room there was no sound — even the soughing of the ventilator had ceased. Ambrose’s eyes were closed, his breath would not have stirred a feather. It could not be long now.
Suddenly in the corridor outside there was a scuffle. Then a voice: high and sharp and bossy, saying, “Let me go! Let me go at once!”
The door opened and a girl came into the room. She was about Con’s own age, with long, fair hair and grey eyes. She was wearing faded jeans and an old sweater and a haversack hung over one shoulder.
“Is that Ambrose?” she said, still in that loud, high voice, pointing to the bed.
Con nodded, frowning at her to be quiet. Where on earth had he heard a voice like that? And why was her face so familiar?
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m Aggie. I came as soon as I heard. They’d walled me up in some beastly boarding school in Switzerland and I had to get back.”
She went over to the bed and stood looking down at Ambrose.
“He’s bad, isn’t he?”
“Yes.” Con had stopped trying to think where he could have seen the girl before. What did it matter? What did anything matter?
Aggie put down her haversack. Then she bent over Ambrose and still in that high, clear, governessy voice said: “And what, pray, do you think you are doing?”
Con glared at her. No one had spoken above a whisper in that room for days. Yet something held him back from interfering.
“Open your eyes at once!” the bossy voice went on. “And your ear lids. You’re supposed to have been brought up as a Farlingham. Let’s see you behave like one.”
To Con’s amazement, a flicker passed over Ambrose’s face. A chink of blue appeared, then a chink of brown. The left ear lid wavered…
“That’s better. And what does one do when a lady comes into the room?”
“Stand… up,” came a thread of a voice from the bed.
“Quite right. So you can sit up for a start.”
And, unbelievably, Ambrose really did begin to move up on the pillow, almost to raise his head.
“I suppose you realize that dying is Very Bad Manners,” the relentless girl went on.
“Is… it?”
“Certainly it is. What are manners for?”
“Making… people… comfortable,” Ambrose managed to bring out.
“Exactly. Well who’s going to be comfortable if you die?” said Aggie briskly. “Sad, that’s what they’re going to be. What’s that by your bed?”
“It’s… my… milk.”
“Your milk! Standing there gathering dust! I’m surprised at you, Ambrose. Drink it up at once,” said Aggie, sounding more than ever like an old-fashioned governess.
“I… can’t.”
“Can’t, Ambrose? Or do you mean won’t?”
She took the glass and put it in Ambrose’s hands. Then she raised his head from the pillow and put her own hand under it for support. And Con, who had understood at last what it was all about, looked on, blinking back tears, while Ambrose said weakly, “Yes, Lady Agatha. I’m sorry, Lady Agatha,” and drank his milk. Every single drop.
17
Home
As soon as it was clear that Ambrose was going to get quite well again, Aggie went down to Farley Towers to get it ready for the yetis.
Farley Towers belonged to her. Her real name was Lady Agatha Caroline Emma Hope Farlingham and since her father had died in a sailing accident and her mother had married again, Aggie had inherited it. But when Con tried to explain to Ambrose that Aggie was Lady Agatha’s great-great-niece, Ambrose just shook his head. “No, she’s our own Lady Agatha come back again,” he said. “You see, Lady Agatha was awfully tired of her old body, she told us, so she just died and went up to heaven quickly and came down again in a nice new one.”
And the other yetis, looking very splendid in their hospital dressing gowns, nodded their heads and said, “You can see she’s our own Lady Agatha; you can see.”
So Con, who knew that people think differently about dying in the place the yetis came from, didn’t try to argue any more.
It was a golden day in late summer when the hospital ambulances, with a special police escort, brought the yetis, with Con and Ellen, to Farley Towers. Aggie was waiting on the steps to greet them and beside her, getting his front feet tangled in the shoe scraper and bleating like a foghorn, stood Hubert.
The yetis were so happy to see them both that they ran into the house without thinking. But inside the hall they hesitated.
Suppose the THINGS were still on the walls?
But of course they weren’t. Aggie had been in such a temper when she saw them that she and her nice old butler had worked from dawn to dusk, stripping the walls and throwing all the stuffed heads and mounted tusks and stretched skins into the lake.
And now Farley Towers was just as Lady Agatha had described it to the yetis in the valley of Nanvi Dar. There were patchwork covers on the four-poster beds, the smell of wax polish on the cedar-wood floors, and bowls of roses on the gate-legged tables. But instead of one sacred relic under a glass case there were now two, because Aggie had found Ambrose’s bedsock and washed it and put it with the other one.
Soon the yetis were settled in so happily at Farley Towers that it was hard to believe that they had not spent all their lives in an English stately home. Grandma took over the housework, vanishing with the Hoover and a packet of sandwiches in the morning, and the sound of her singing “Oh, Happy Band of Pilgrims” would grow fainter and fainter as she hoovered herself away through the Gold drawing room and the Blue salon, reappearing in the evening through the armoury, the banqueting hall and the Spanish dining room.