Bedknob and Broomstick Page 9

  When the old necromancer was dying, he sent for his assistant and said, "My boy, there is something I should tell you."

  Emelius folded his stained hands in his lap and dropped his tired eyes respectfully. "Yes, sir," he murmured.

  The old necromancer moved his head so that it fitted more comfortably into the pillow.

  "It's about magic," he said.

  "Yes, sir," replied Emelius soberly.

  The old necromancer smiled slyly at the carved ceiling. "There isn't such a thing."

  Emelius raised a pair of startled eyes. "You mean—" he began.

  "I mean," said the old necromancer calmly, "what I say!"

  When Emelius had got over the first sense of shock (he never completely recovered), the old necromancer went on:

  "All the same, it's a good-paying business. I've kept a wife and five daughters out at Deptford (whence I shall be carried tomorrow), with a carriage and four, fifteen servants, French music teacher, and a bark on the river. Three daughters have married well. I have two sons-in-law at court and a third in Lombard Street." He sighed. "Your poor father, may he rest in peace, paid me handsomely for your apprenticeship; if I have been hard on you, it is from a sense of duty toward one who is no more. My affairs are in good order, my family well provided for, so the business as it stands and these premises I leave to you." He folded his hands on his chest and became silent.

  "But," stammered Emelius, "I know nothing. The love philters—"

  "Colored water," said the old necromancer in a tired voice.

  "And foretelling the future?"

  "Child's play," murmured the old necromancer, "if you don't go into details; whatever you prophesy about the future comes true sooner or later, and what doesn't come true, they forget. Look solemn, don't clean out the room more than once a year, brush up your Latin, oil the globe so that it spins smoothly—and may good luck attend you."

  That is the first reason why Emelius was a nervous type of man. The second was because in the reign of good King Charles it was still the fashion to send witches, sorcerers, and all those who were reputed to work magic, to the gallows, and Emelius, if he made a slip or an enemy, might at any moment be delivered by an unsatisfied client to a very tight and uncomfortable end.

  He would have got out of the business if he dared, but all the money of his patrimony had been dispensed in learning magic, and he was not a strong enough character to start afresh.

  In the year 1666 Emelius, at thirty-five, had become old before his time, old and thin and terribly nervous. He would jump if a mouse squeaked, turn pale at a moonbeam, tremble at his servant's knock.

  If he heard a footstep on the stairs, he would immediately begin a little spell, something he knew by heart, so that his clients might be impressed as they entered by his practice of magic. He had also to be ready to sit down at the clavichord, in case it was a king's man come to spy upon him, and pretend he was a dreamy musician who had inherited the necromancer's lodging.

  One evening, hearing footsteps in the narrow hall below the stairs, he leaped up from the chair where he had been dozing by the fire (these late August nights held the first chill of autumn), trod on the cat (which let out an unearthly squeal), and seized a couple of dried frogs and a bunch of henbane. He lit a wick, which floated in a bowl of oil, sprinkled it with yellow powder so it burned with a blue flame, and hurriedly, with trembling hands, rushed off a little spell—with one eye on the clavichord and the other on the door, and all his body poised for instant flight.

  There was a knock, a hesitatingly fumbled knock.

  "Who's there?" he called, preparing to blow out the blue flame.

  There was a whisper and some shuffling; then a voice, clear and treble as a silver bell, said, "Three children who are lost."

  Emelius was taken aback. He made a movement toward the clavichord, then he came back to the blue flame. Finally, he stood between the two, with one hand carelessly poised upon the globe, in the other a sheet of music. "Enter," he said somberly.

  The door opened, and there, thrown into relief against the dark passageway, stood three children, strangely dressed and dazzlingly fair. They wore long robes after the style of the London apprentice, but tied by silken cords, and their cleanliness, in seventeenth-century London, seemed not of this world. Their skins shone, and Emelius's quivering nostrils detected a delicate fragrance, as of fresh flowers strangely spiced.

  Emelius began to tremble. His knees felt unsteady. He wanted to sit down. Instead he looked unbelievingly toward the paraphernalia of his spell. Could two dried frogs and a bunch of henbane do this? He tried to recall the gabble of Latin he had said over them.

  "We are lost," said the female child in that strange foreign voice, clear-cut as rock crystal. "We saw your light burning, the street door was open, so we came up to ask the way."

  "Where to?" asked Emelius in a trembling voice.

  "Anywhere," said the female child. "We are quite lost. We don't know where we are."

  Emelius cleared his throat. "You are in Cripplegate," he managed to say.

  "Cripplegate?" said the female child wonderingly. "In London?"

  "Yes, in London," whispered Emelius, edging away toward the fireplace. He was terribly afraid. From whence had they come if they did not know they were in London?

  The elder male child took a step forward. "Excuse me," he said, very civilly, "could you possibly tell us what century we are in?"

  Emelius threw up trembling hands before his face as if to ward off the sight of them. "Go back, go back," he implored, in a voice broken by emotion, "from whence you came."

  The female child turned pink and blinked her eyelids. She looked round the dim and cluttered room, with its yellowing parchments, its glass vials, the skull on the table, and the candlelit clavichord.

  "I'm sorry," she said, "if we are disturbing you."

  Emelius ran to the table. He picked up a bowl with oil, the two frogs, the twisted henbane, and with an oath he threw them on the fire. They spluttered, then flared up. Emelius rubbed his fingers together as he watched the blaze, as if to rid them of some impurity. Then he turned, and again his eyes widened so that the whites showed. He stared at the children.

  "Still here?" he exclaimed hoarsely.

  The female child blinked her eyes faster. "We will go at once," she said, "if you would just tell us first what year it is—"

  "The twenty-seventh day of August, in the year of Our Lord 1666."

  "1666—" repeated the elder male child. "King Charles the Second—"

  "The Fire of London will take place in a week's time," said the girl child brightly, as if she were pleased.

  The elder boy's face lit up too. "Cripplegate?" he said excitedly. "This house may be burned. It will start at the king's baker's in Pudding Lane, and go on down Fish Street—"

  Emelius suddenly fell on his knees. He clasped his hands together. His face was anguished. "I implore you," he cried, "go, go ... go..."

  The girl child looked at him. Suddenly she smiled, with kindness, as if she understood his fear. "We won't harm you," she said, coming toward him. "We're only children—feel my hand."

  She laid her hand on Emelius's clasped ones. It was warm and soft and human. "We're only children—" she repeated. "Out of the future," she added. She smiled at her companions as if she had said something clever.

  "Yes," said the elder boy, looking pleased and rather proud. "That's what we are, just children out of the future."

  "Is that all?" said Emelius weakly. He got to his feet. He spoke rather bitterly. He felt very shaken.

  Now the youngest child stepped forward. He had a face like an angel with dark gold hair above a white brow. "Could I see your stuffed alligator?" he asked politely.

  Emelius unhooked the stuffed alligator from the ceiling and laid it on the table without a word. Then he sat down in the chair by the fire. He was shivering a little as if with cold. "What else is about to come upon us," he asked gloomily, "besides the fire that wil
l burn this house?"

  The little girl sat down on a footstool opposite him. "We're not awfully good at history," she said in her strange way. "But I think your king gets executed."

  "That was Charles I," the elder boy pointed out.

  "Oh, yes," said the little girl. "I'm sorry. We could go back and look it all up."

  "Do not give yourselves this trouble," said Emelius glumly.

  There was a short silence. The little girl broke it.

  "Have you had the plague?" she asked conversationally.

  Emelius shuddered. "No—thanks be to a merciful Providence."

  "Good show," exclaimed the elder boy heartily.

  The little girl, asking permission, poked the fire to a brighter blaze. Emelius threw on another log. He stared miserably at the broken bowl blackened by burning oil. The old necromancer had doubly deceived him, for he, Emelius, quite by accident, had found a spell that worked. These children seemed comparatively harmless, but another mixture, lightly thrown together in the same irresponsible way, might produce anything—from a herd of hobgoblins to Old Nick himself.

  And it wasn't as if he knew the antidotes. Whatever came would come to stay. He would never feel safe again. Never more would he dare throw sulfur on the fire with muttered imprecations; never more would he dare boil soups of frogs' spawn and digitalis; never more reel off Latin curses or spin the globe of the heavens into a dizzy whirl of prophecy. His uncertainty would manifest itself before his clients. His practice would fall off. His victims might turn against him. Then he would have to fly, to hide in some filthy hovel or rat-infested cellar, or it might mean prison, the pillory, the horsepond, or the rope.

  Emelius groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

  "Don't you feel well?" asked the little girl kindly.

  Emelius kicked the log further into the blaze. Then he raised haggard eyes to the little girl's gentle face.

  "A child..." he said wonderingly. "I never knew"—he dropped his voice sadly—"what it was to be a child."

  "Oh, you must have known!" exclaimed the elder boy reasonably.

  "Did you always live in the town?" asked the little girl.

  "No," said Emelius, "I lived in the country. I should have said," he went on, adventuring into truth, "that I had forgotten what it was to be a child."

  "Well, you're pretty old," remarked the elder boy consolingly.

  Emelius looked stung. "Thirty-five summers!" he exclaimed.

  "Have you had a sad life?" asked the little girl.

  Emelius raised his eyes. A sad life. Ah, he thought to himself, that's what it is—I have had a sad life. Suddenly he longed to tell of his life. The years of fruitless labor, the dangers of his profession, its loneliness. He could talk with safety to these strange children who (if he managed to hit on the right spell) would disappear again into the future. He pulled his fur-trimmed robe up over his knees away from the fire, showing coarse yellow stockings, which hung upon his legs in wrinkles.

  "There are few lives," he began rather gloomily, but as if he might be going to warm up later, "sadder than mine..."

  Then, in quaint words and phrases, he told the children of his childhood, the childhood he said he had forgotten; of how he had been sent out, at an early age, to gather herbs and simples; of the old schoolmaster who had taught him; of May and Maying; of a man who had stood in the stocks for poaching; of being beaten for stealing sugared plums; of how he had hated the nine times table and had worn a dunce's cap for Latin. Then he went on to his apprenticeship in London, the hardships and the disillusionment; the fear of starting on his own; the terror in which he lived; and the people who wouldn't pay their bills.

  As the children listened, the candles grew long shrouds of wax and the fire died low. So absorbed were they in the story that they did not hear the watchman cry the hours or note the presence of dawn behind the curtain.

  "Yes," concluded Emelius with a sigh, "my father's ambition was his son's undoing. In truth I have amassed some small store of gold, but would I had remained a simple horse doctor in the vale of Pepperinge Eye."

  "Of Pepperinge Eye," exclaimed the little girl. "That's close to where we're staying."

  "In Bedfordshire," said Emelius, his gaze still caught up in the past.

  "Yes. Near Much Frensham."

  "Much Frensham," said Emelius. "Market day at Much Frensham ... then were great doings!"

  "There are still," said the little girl excitedly. "I dare say there are lots of new houses, but the main road doesn't go through there, so it isn't much changed."

  They began to exchange impressions. Emelius it seemed had bathed in their brook; Lowbody Farm had still been called Lowbody Farm; "a fine new residence," Emelius called it, and he, too, had roamed the short grass on the tiered mound known as Roman Remains.

  "Five of the clock," called the watchman, as he passed below the window, "and a fine, clear, windy morning."

  They drew back the curtains. The dim room shrank from the clear light, and dust danced golden in the sunbeams.

  "I wish you could go back to Pepperinge Eye," cried the little girl. "I wish you could see it as it is now."

  Then they, in their turn, told him of their lives, of the war, of their first visit to the country, of the magic bed. They told him how they had left the bed a few yards down the road in a walled churchyard. It was then they remembered the string bag, tied fast to the bed rail, with the cheese sandwiches and the thermos of hot cocoa. Emelius, his housekeeper being still "abed," was much put to it to find food, but at length he produced from the larder two legs of cold roast hare and a jug of beer. He was deeply relieved to hear that it was no spell of his that had called these children from the mysteries of the future and was more than anxious to go with them to the churchyard so that he might see the bed.

  They set out, a strange procession, Emelius carrying the jug of beer with the hare wrapped neatly in a napkin. The yard gate was open, and there, behind the biggest tomb, they found the bed just as they had left it, with the string bag tied securely to the foot.

  It was there they had their early breakfast, while the hungry cats prowled around and the city slowly woke to the clang and rumble of a seventeenth-century day. And it was there, without mentioning her name, that they told about Miss Price.

  5. A Visitor

  Miss Price slept in Carey's room the night the children were away. She had a restless night. She was not feeling at all happy about having let them go off on their own. She had been caught between two sets of fairnesses. What was fair, she thought, to the children was hardly fair to their parents. Besides, a trip into the past could not be planned with any degree of accuracy. They had seen first how many twists the bed-knob allowed, and then they had made a rough calculation of period. They had aimed for the time of Queen Elizabeth, but goodness knew what they had got. Charles rather cleverly had made a scratch with a pin, from the side of the knob, across the crack, and down the base of the screw. And when Paul twisted, he was supposed to twist until the two ends of the scratch met evenly. All very rough and ready, as neither Miss Price nor the children knew if the period covered by the bed-knob embraced the beginning of the world or just the history of England from 1066 onward. They had assumed the latter.

  "Oh, dear," muttered Miss Price to herself, tossing and turning in Carey's bed. "If they come back safe from the trip, it will be the last, the very last, I shall allow."

  She had tried to be careful and to take all sensible precautions. The bedclothes had been carefully folded and put away and the mattress covered by a waterproof groundsheet. She had provided the children with a thermos of hot cocoa, bread and cheese, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs. She had given them an atlas and a pocket first-aid kit. Should she have furnished them with a weapon? But what? She had no weapon in the house barring the poker and her father's sword.

  "Oh, dear," she muttered again, pulling the bedclothes round her head as if to shut out a persistent picture of the children timidly wandering through a blea
k and savage England inhabited by Diplodocus Carnegii and saber-toothed tigers. And that Neanderthal man, she told herself unhappily, would be utterly useless in an emergency....

  Toward morning she fell into a heavy sleep and was awakened by the sudden opening of the bedroom door. The bright sunshine streamed in through the partially drawn curtains, and there, at the foot of her bed, stood Carey.

  "What time is it?" asked Miss Price, sitting bolt upright.

  "It's nearly nine o'clock. The boys are dressed. I didn't like to wake you—"

  "Thank heaven you're back safely!" exclaimed Miss Price. "You can tell me all your adventures later. Is breakfast ready?"

  "Yes, and the boys have started. But—" Carey hesitated.

  Miss Price, who had put her feet out of bed and was fumbling for her slippers, looked up.

  "But what?"

  "We've got to lay another place," said Carey uncomfortably.

  "Another place?"

  "Yes—I, we—You see, we brought someone home with us."

  "You brought someone home?" said Miss Price slowly.

  "Yes—we thought you wouldn't mind. Just for the day. He needn't stay the night or anything." Carey's eyes seemed to plead with Miss Price. She grew pinker and pinker.

  "He?" repeated Miss Price.

  "Yes. His name is Emelius Jones. Mr. Jones. He's a necromancer. He's awfully nice, really, underneath."

  "Mr. Jones," echoed Miss Price. She hadn't had a man staying in the house since her father died, and that was more years ago than she cared to remember. She had forgotten all their ways, what things they liked to eat and what subjects they liked to talk about.

  "What did you say he was?" asked Miss Price.

  "He's just a necromancer. We thought you wouldn't mind. He lived near here once, with an aunt. We thought you'd have a lot in common."