“Did you do other things like that… like the chicken?”
“Oh yes, plenty. We smuggled a piglet into a council meeting once, and there were all the usual things that children do — toads in the beds, and booby traps, and pretending to be vampires at night. But mostly we just escaped whenever we could. Your father was absolutely fearless — once we climbed to the top of the gabled roof on the palace and Johannes said we wouldn’t come down unless they stopped asking him to eat semolina forever and ever.”
“I think it must have worked,” said Karil, “because I never got semolina to eat, not once.”
He looked gratefully up at Matteo. Hearing about his father as a boy was the best comfort he could imagine. And as if Matteo could read his thoughts, he said, “He really enjoyed life, your father. That was why I was so angry when he became imprisoned in all that kingship. But I was wrong to be angry — he grew up to be a brave and honorable man.”
But after Karil had gone back to the compartment, Matteo stood silent and perturbed outside. He had promised his friend to look after Karil and he would do so while there was breath in his body — but this war which was growing ever closer would impose duties on every able-bodied man.
“But somehow I will do it,” he vowed. “Whatever it costs.”
When Karil slipped back into his seat he saw that Tally was awake.
“I was thinking about the play we’re going to do next term,” she whispered. “Persephone. I sort of feel I know quite a lot about the Underworld now and the sort of people who go to Hades. Like Gambetti — he belongs there all right. We could make it really good with the right kind of music. You absolutely have to help us do it.”
“I’ve never done anything like that.”
“You don’t know what you can do yet; you’ve never had a chance with all those processions and people bowing and scraping. We’re going to try to persuade Julia to act in it. There’s so much we’re going to do at Delderton and you need to be there.”
Karil was silent. There was nothing he wanted more than to join his friends in this strange school of theirs. Because they were his friends. A few days ago they had been specks seen through a telescope and now they mattered more than anyone. But would he be allowed to go? His future was a blank; he had no right to make plans. And yet… Julia had told him about Tally’s determination to come to Bergania.
“She just bullied us all,” Julia had said, “making us invent the Flurry Dance — she seemed to know we had to come.”
So now, when Tally told him that he had to be with them at Delderton, Karil began to wonder if she might be right, and he felt hope begin to stir in him.
“I was so angry with my father when he told me I had to go away to school,” Tally went on. “I really loved being at home, with my aunts and my friends. And London. We had a silver barrage balloon up over our house; it was like having a giant sausage to look after us.”
For a moment both children were silent, thinking about this war which everyone expected and which they had forgotten in the excitement of escaping from Bergania.
“I tried to fight him,” Tally went on, “but he won and I’m glad he did, though I miss him horribly. You’d really like him, Karil. He’s the best doctor for miles; everyone wants to come to him, and of course he doesn’t charge his patients nearly enough, so we’ve always been poor but it doesn’t matter. You can’t imagine how proud I am of him.”
“I’m not surprised. Being a doctor must be wonderful.”
“Yes.” She turned to him. “You could be a doctor if you wanted to.”
“I suppose I could.” And then: “Yes, I could. I could be anything.”
“You could be a great scientist.”
“Or an artist,” said Karil, “or an engineer.”
“You could learn anything at Delderton and get ready. I can’t describe it, Karil, but it’s such an interesting place — you have to come.”
As the train ran on through the night Karil’s dreams, above the sorrow of his father’s death, took flight. He could be a great explorer, discovering the source of an African river; he could invent a cure for cancer, or write a monumental symphony. He could own a rare and exotic animal — an aardvark or a cassowary.
Afterward, looking back on his escape, he thought that this hour in the train, when everything was possible, was the one he would most like to have again.
The luggage van of the train carried the usual consignment of suitcases, trunks, wooden boxes, and other things too bulky to go into the compartments. There was also a crate with a goat in it. The animal’s yellow eyes peered through the bars and occasionally it let off a desperate bleat.
The two ladies who had smuggled themselves into the van were very strangely dressed. One was a woman of most unusual size, wearing a knitted bonnet pulled over her face, and a spotted pinafore. She had taken off her shoes and was rubbing her bruised and hairy toes.
“I’m not spending the night in here,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice. “That animal gives me the creeps.”
“I could pick the lock,” said her companion, who had a feather boa thrown over her shoulder and wore a straw hat trimmed with cherries, “but we’d only run into that blasted bandit standing guard in the corridor. He never lets those kids out of his sight.” She looked up at the ventilation grating. “When we’re over the border into France, we’ll get a radio signal and alert the Gestapo. There’ll be a crowd of people making for the boat and we’ll be able to grab the prince. It’ll be our last chance — once he’s aboard we have to let him go.”
“He won’t get aboard,” said the outsize lady, with a snarl.
The woman with the feather boa groped in her handbag and took out a syringe with which she squirted disinfectant onto her tonsils. “They must be crazy, thinking we’d be trapped in a beer cellar,” she said. “As though we’d drink anywhere with only one exit. Still, that’s the police for you.”
All the same, it had been a rush: driving through the town, finding a secondhand clothes shop, outfitting themselves, and dumping the car.
“I’m hungry,” said the giant in the woolen bonnet.
“Try milking the goat,” said her companion.
And the train thundered on through the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Reaching the Boat
It was extraordinary, stumbling out of the stuffy carriage, feeling the wind suddenly on their faces and seeing, in front of them, the harbor and the clean white world of the boats and the seagulls and the lighthouse.
The train had come to rest on the sidings beside the boat they were to catch to England. They only had to cross the tracks and make their way toward the gangway and in two hours they would be home in Britain, and safe. On the way out they had taken it for granted, traveling in a British boat, knowing they were protected, but now the ferry with her brightly painted funnels and cheerful flag seemed to be a vessel that had sailed in from Camelot to carry them over the sea.
The harbor was full of bustle and noise. Fishing boats chugged in and out between the ferries; crates of fish and lobsters were piled up on the quayside waiting for transportation; there were coils of rope and barrels of tar and nets — and everywhere, wheeling and shrieking and diving, the fearless, hungry gulls.
The children shivered in the sudden wind and turned their faces toward the SS Dunedin. They were among the last to leave the train. The first-class passengers had already embarked, with the Countess Frederica in the lead, shouting instructions to her porter as she strode up the gangway.