The Hounds of the Morrigan (11 page)

‘Still, in spite of everything, we’ve got a soft spot for that frog, haven’t we, Breda?’ said Melodie.

‘Oh yes,’ Breda said. ‘And when he’s dead, we’re going to have him stuffed.’

‘And that might be sooner than he thinks!’ Melodie said sharply.

‘That’s enough!’ Pidge said courageously, for he had never spoken in this way to an older person before. ‘If you don’t leave him alone, I’ll report you to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.’

‘And I’ll report you to the Minister for Angryculture and Fishes,’ Brigit said cockily. ‘He’s a great friend of my father’s.’

‘Any more lip from you, madam—and that frog is a dead duck!’ Breda said to Brigit.

The frog howled.

Breda smiled and winked broadly to show that she was joking.

‘I don’t think you’re very funny,’ Pidge said, feeling even braver because nothing had happened to him when he had dared to check Melodie, a moment before.

‘You’ve made him cry; you’re about as funny as a gumboil,’ Brigit declared.

‘Ask um about dat mallet,’ mumbled the frog.

‘What mallet?’ Breda said innocently.

‘You know well what mallet,’ Brigit said.

‘Do you mean
this
mallet?’ Melodie asked sweetly and she produced a large, wooden mallet from behind her back. She reached forward and snatched up the frog who immediately squealed in despair.

‘Dear, dear! We shall have to put it out of its misery,’ she said. ‘Don’t know whether to pop it like a blister, or squash it with the mallet.’

‘You couldn’t do a thing like that,’ Pidge said. ‘It’s a disgusting thing to do!’

Melodie smiled at him amiably.

‘Such a thoughtful little object,’ she said. ‘But you mustn’t worry about me dear; I shan’t mind doing it one little bit. I was bred for it, you know, and Nanny helped, of course.’

‘We don’t care about you. Pidge is thinking of the frog,’ Brigit said.

‘Thinking of the frog—oh, is he?’ crooned Melodie and with that, she and Breda, with the poor frog as a prisoner, were back inside the glasshouse with the door closed behind them, before the children could properly realize what had happened.

After a few moments of bewilderment Pidge said:

‘We can’t just walk away and go home and just leave him with them.’

Without saying anything, Brigit walked over and very deliberately, kicked the door as hard as ever she could, though the softness of her sandals wasted some of her boldness. She wished she were wearing football boots to let them
really
know what she thought of them.

‘Open up in the Name of The Law!’ she shouted.

Immediately, the door opened and she was snatched inside and the door shut with a bang.

Pidge ran and began to hammer on the door with his fists. Two hands reached out and he was twitched inside and confronting the two strange women.

In a jolting split second, the amazed Pidge noticed the furniture, the dish of water on the floor and the harp standing by the table. On the table itself, the frog was cowering on a plate under a meat-cover of metal gauze, which stood horrifyingly close to a dish of stuffed olives, buttered bread and an arrangement of condiments and pickles, as if he were part of a meal. Melodie Moonlight was holding Brigit by the arm. All this he observed in a twinkling without once taking his eyes off Breda Fairfoul, who held him captive in a pincer-grip from which there could be no escape.

In coaxing, gentle, but perplexingly quick words, they commenced to ask questions—so fluid, so vague, so indefinite and blurred that they might be questions formed in a marsh instead of a brain. And each one hard on the heels of the one before, baffling, seeming to be about the horrible page and who had it, and over and over they asked—Was There Anything Said?

They went on and on, with voices that were somewhere between a twitter and warble, as they delicately sought answers without really asking questions—in case a question would contain too much and suggest an answer, and so give to the children information they hadn’t already got.

Pidge thought it was like being pecked to death by doves.

Throughout all this, he stood blank-faced and bewildered and Brigit wore a grimly stubborn expression on her face that would have put the wind up a Gorgon.

At length there was a lull in the quizzing.

Melodie Moonlight and Breda Fairfoul, without consulting each other, decided to try another tack.

‘We are not trusted,’ they remarked miserably to each other, and Melodie Moonlight began to cry. Tears like golf-balls dropped from her eyes, going splat as they landed on the floor. Brigit half-expected them to bounce.

‘There, there, Melodie my pet,’ Breda droned soothingly.

Melodie’s eyes took on the appearance of large wet oysters and her nose turned into a shapeless, overblown scarlet poppy, whose copious drips she mopped charmingly with a small table-cloth.

‘All we wanneb wab to be frens wib you—swab bleasantries and’ be balsy-walsy—gossib, an’ exchange our harmbless segrets,’ she sniffled dismally as the golf-balls thundered down her cheeks as would crystal globes on a ski slope.

She looked like someone who had been crying bitterly for at least a week.

‘We
had
hoped to break bread and get a Social Circle going where we could practise our After-Dinner Speaking, with a few Soirées and Musical Evenings et cetera. A few tunes on the Harp, we thought,’ Breda said, and her voice expressed a great sense of loss.

‘Pretty pieces well within the scope of the Tonic Solfa; something catchy like The Howls Of Hoffman or The Turning Of The Screw; and now—hopes dashed!’ added Melodie and she sobbed pitifully.

Pidge wondered what he should do as Miss Moonlight looked so anguished, though her nose now seemed to be unblocked. Brigit had no doubts at all.

‘Aw shut up, you big cry baby,’ she said scornfully. ‘Stop pretending!’

Again there was an instant change in the women’s behaviour and, releasing the children, Melodie whisked the meat-cover off the frog while Breda grabbed the mallet in both hands.

‘Softness got us nowhere,’ Breda said with quiet menace.

Melodie seized the frog and held him cupped in her hands, all marks of her tragic weeping now casually and unaccountably missing from her face.

‘It’s up to you, dear children. You’ve got a choice. Do you talk, or does the frog get the coup de grace? Look at him; and look at this mallet; and give him the thumbs down if that’s your whim. Do you
want
him guttled and guzzled or not?’

She thrust the prisoner forward to within inches of their faces.

Breda did likewise with the mallet.

Pidge and Brigit looked with dismay at the helpless frog who was by now in a trance of horror. And Pidge was on the verge of gabbling out every single thing that had happened to him, when Breda mistakenly added a few more deciding words.

‘Speak or he joins his forefathers!’ she commanded.

Something was released in Brigit at this. She took her gaze off the wilted frog in amazement and glared up at Breda Fairfoul.

‘That’s stupid!’ she declared. ‘He hasn’t got four fathers, no one has!’ And for some strange reason and without even thinking, she threw her wilted daisy chains over the women’s wrists.

‘Handcuffs,’ she said.

At once, the daisy chains snapped tight shut. Melodie Moonlight dropped the frog who lay on the floor, inert as an empty paper bag.

‘Nóiníni!’ screamed Breda Fairfoul.

‘Angus Óg’s flowers!’ screamed Melodie Moonlight.

The daisy chains had turned to steel shackles of remarkable beauty; the yellow hearts and white petals being of a radiant enamel; the pollen was a dusting of glittering gold.

Pidge dashed forward and scooped up the frog, knocking over the crystal dish filled with water and breaking it in his haste.

‘Quick Brigit! Run!’ he cried.

Holding the frog carefully, he grabbed her hand and, in a kingfisher flash of speed, they were gone.

T
HEY
ran very hard.

Pidge, who was holding the frog in one hand and gripping Brigit’s hand tightly with the other, ran faster than he had ever done in his whole life before. Brigit, pulled along by Pidge’s speed, was skimming over the ground as would a low, purposeful wind. After a while, they realized that they were not being followed and they flopped down to rest in the lee of a stone wall.

‘Oh!’ said the frog, who was by now greatly recovered, ‘Dat’s better! Dey gev me da Quakers when dey said dat about Lousy da fourteenth of France. It made my blood run cold, if I had any warm to begin with. I wuz like a …. like a icicle!’

They sat still for a few moments to recover their breathing.

‘My heart is still galloping. Doesn’t it know that I’ve sat down now and it can go slow?’ Brigit gasped.

‘Hearts is like dat—dey got dere quirks,’ the frog said knowingly. ‘Mine wuz goin’ like knackers when I wuz trapped on dat great plate.’

Pidge, breathing a little better, said:

‘What did they really mean to do, I wonder?’

‘I wudden like to speckerlate, but I serpose it wuz to be a leg each wit’ torchure sauce,’ replied the frog, who was not at all breathless because of being a passenger during the mad, punishing dash.

‘Seems ta me,’ he went on, ‘I nearly got swoggled, an’ not by no swally-hole neither, cos dey said to me lassnight: “Lissen Gormless! Just you remember dat fried frog’s legs are by no mean to be despised an’ you’ll be welcummed in wit’ open jaws!” Seems ta me, dey nearly done mathematics on me, an’ made a short division sum of me: One into Two an’ None Over. Dey said I would be quite wholesome, trussed an’ stewed; not only a nibble but a novelty too, dey said. To think I nearly ended up in fractions! Oh dear, oh dear, I feel quite sweltered just to think of it,’ he finished a little shakily as some of his horror returned.

‘Let them try a trick like that and we’ll soon see who gets swoggled,’ muttered Brigit with a terrible scowl.

‘Don’t worry about it anymore, you’re safe now,’ Pidge said reassuringly. He didn’t truly believe that they were entirely out of danger but he hoped to make the frog feel better.

‘Tanks to you two, I am. I doan know what I would hey done but for you. I’d follow you to da ends of da earth for it, so I would,’ the frog said, emotionally.

‘Really? All the way to the ends of the earth?’ Brigit wanted to know.

‘But no furder. I’d follow you to da ends of da earth but no furder,’ he answered earnestly. He honestly tried to make himself plain and wanted them to understand that the ends of the earth seemed far enough, to him.

At this, they both laughed.

‘You’re laffin’ agin,’ he said.

‘We can’t help it,’ Pidge replied.

‘Muss be a disease.’

He looked at them anxiously.

‘You should take a bottle for it or hev your chests rubbed wit’ emanations.’

They laughed even more and he looked very puzzled.

‘You’re laffin’—an dose two could be the other side of dis wall,’ he said, and instantly looked as if he’d frightened himself to near-death.

Brigit stood up and looked over the wall.

‘Nobody there,’ she said, and sat down again. ‘You know, you never told us your name?’

‘It’s Puddeneen Whelan,’ the frog said, with pride. ‘I cudden tell you before ’cos of dem. Dey should hev dere heads banged togedder, tête-à-tête as da Frenchies say. Pickin’ on da likes of me an’ making me feel like a cabbitch—born to be biled.’

‘Fried, more like,’ Brigit said.

Sitting and laughing had done much to restore ease of breathing to Brigit and Pidge, but Pidge’s mind had not stopped running on the behaviour of the women in the glasshouse.

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m sure now that they wouldn’t have hurt you, anyway. I think you were only like bait to trap us—so that they could ask all those questions. I don’t think they would have harmed you really and I don’t think they would have harmed us either. They only wanted to find things out because they are after something, so you see you were only like bait after all.’

‘Only bait? ME? What a cheek! Squorms is bait—frogs isn’t.’

‘Squorms?’ said Brigit.

‘Thim little pink wispies that squorms an squiggles in da ground. Dey’s only got faint, skinny figures wit’ no mighty back leggies; in fack—dey got no leggies at all. Frogs is different. If I’m nuthin’ else, I’m a Nathlete. Any swimmin you ever want done—I’ll do it.’

They were just about to thank him for his kind offer, when another frog sprang into view and landed on a stone beside them. He looked very surprised and said:

‘Where you bin, Puddeneen? Miss Fancy Finnerty hev bin fit to pop.’

‘Hev she?’

‘She hev bin poppin’ mad at you. Bin doing her gypsy dance an’ bashin’ her tangerine, wit’ a bitta watercress clenched in her mouth. You know how she gets when she’s poppin’?’

‘I hev bin at death’s door. Dat’s where I bin,’ said Puddeneen.

‘How’d you get dere?’

Puddeneen told his story again, just as he had told Pidge and Brigit, but this time with all the things that had happened afterwards, added on. The other frog listened with astounded attention. Puddeneen dwelled at great length on the threat of the mallet and finished by saying:

‘Dey took all da GO outa me an’ it’s only tanks to dese two, dat my brain is still in puffect workin’ order an’ I still got me legs.’

‘I kin harbly believe it,’ said the second frog.

‘I kin harbly believe it myself but the trufe is bitter when it’s told.’

‘I muss go an heva gawp at dem. I love gawpin’ at anything like dat, so I’ll go now an’ hev a good gawp.’

‘You better not. Dey set a booby trap to ketch boobies; dey cot me an’ dey might ketch you.’

‘It appeals to me sportin’ instinck; an’ ye know me, Puddeneen—if it appeals to me sportin’ instinck—I’m sunk!’

‘Oh Bagsie,’ pleaded Puddeneen, ‘doan go. Dey’ll ate ye if ye do. Lissen to your elders an’ betters Bagsie, an’ be led by da wise.’

‘Dat’ll be da day!’ Bagsie said cheerfully, and he sprang away.

‘Come back, Bagsie Curley! Come back or I’ll tell yer Grannie!’ shouted Puddeneen but there was no reply and Bagsie had gone from sight.