The Secret of Platform 13 (3 page)

Thoroughly pleased with themselves, the nurses hurried through the dark streets, reached Platform Thirteen and entered the cloakroom.

Only when they were safe in the tunnel did they unpack the steaming fish and chips.

‘Let’s just give him one chip to suck?’ suggested Violet.

But Lily , w ho was the fussy one, said no, the Prince only had healthy food and never anything salty or fried.

‘He’s sleeping so sound,’ she said fondly .

She bent over the cot, peered under the hood . . . unwound the embroidered blanket, the lacy shawl . . .

Then she began to scream.

Instead of the warm, living, breathing baby – there lay a cold and lifeless doll.

And the wall of the gentlemen’s cloakroom was moving . . . moving . . . it was almost back in position.

Weeping, clawing, howling, the nurses tried to hold it back.

Too late. The gump was closed and no power on earth could open it again before the time was up. But in Nanny Brown’s little flat, Mrs Trottle stood looking down at the stolen baby with triumph in her eyes.

‘Do you know what I’m going to do?’ she said.

Nanny Brown shook her head.

‘I’m going to go right away from here with the baby. To Switzerland. For a whole year. And when I come back I’m going to pretend that I had him over there. That it’s my very own baby – not adopted but
mine
. No one will guess; it’s such a little baby. My husband won’t guess either if I stay away – he’s so busy with the bank he won’t notice.’

Nanny Brown looked at her, thunderstruck. ‘You’ll never get away with it, Miss Larina. Never.’

‘Oh yes, I will! I’m going to bring him back as my own little darling babykins, aren’t I, my poppet? I’m going to call him Raymond. Raymond Trottle, that sounds good, doesn’t it? He’s going to grow up like a little prince and no one will be sorry for me or sneer at me because they’ll think he’s properly mine. I’ll sack all the servants and get some new ones so they can’t tell tales and when I come back it’ll be with my teeny weeny Raymond in my arms.’

‘You can’t do it,’ said Nanny Brown obstinately . ‘It’s wicked.’

‘Oh yes, I can. And you’re going to give up your flat and come with me because I’m not going to change his nappies. And if you don’t, I’ll go to the police and tell them it was you that stole the baby.’

‘You wouldn’t!’ gasped Nanny Brown.

But she knew perfectly well that Mrs Trottle would. When she was a little girl Larina Trottle had tipped five live goldfish on to the carpet and watched them flap themselves to death because her mother had told her to clean out their bowl, and she was capable of anything.

But it wasn’t just fear that made Nanny Brown go with Mrs Trottle to Switzerland. It was the baby with his milky breath and the big eyes which he now opened to look about him and the funny little whistling noise he made. She wasn’t a particularly nice woman, but she loved babies and she knew that Larina Trottle was as fit to look after a young baby as a baboon. Actually , a lot
less
fit because baboons, as it happens, make excellent mothers. So Mrs Trottle went away to Switzerland – and over the Island a kind of darkness fell. The Queen all but died of grief, the King went about his work like a man twice his age. The people mourned, the mermaids wept on their rocks and the schoolchildren made a gigantic calendar showing the number of days which had to pass before the gump opened once more and the Prince could be brought back.

But of all this the boy called Raymond Huntingdon Trottle knew nothing at all.

Odge Gribble was a hag.

She was a very young one, and a disappointment to her parents. The Gribbles lived in the north of the Island and came from a long line of frightful and monstrous women who flapped and shrieked about, giving nightmares to people who had been wicked or making newts come out of the mouths of anyone who told a lie. Odge’s oldest sister had a fingernail so long that you could dig the garden with it, the next girl had black hairs like piano wires coming out of her ears, the third had stripey feet and so on – down to the sixth who had blue teeth and a wart the size of a saucer on her chin.

Then came Odge.

There was great excitement before she was born because Mrs Gribble had herself been a seventh daughter, and now the new baby would be the seventh also, and the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is supposed to be very special indeed.

But when the baby came, everyone fell silent and a cousin of Mrs Gribble’s said: ‘Oh dear!’

The baby’s fingernails were short; not one whisker grew out of her ears; her feet were absolutely ordinary .

‘She looks just like a small pink splodge,’ the cousin went on.

So Mrs Gribble decided not to call her new daughter Nocticula or Va lpurgina and settled for Odge (which rhymed with splodge) and hoped that she would improve as she grew older.

And up to a point, Odge did get a little more hag-like. She had unequal eyes: the left one was green and the right one was brown, and she had one blue tooth – but it was a molar and right at the back; the kind you only see when you’re at the dentist. There was also a bump on one of her feet which just could have been the beginning of an extra toe, though not a very big one.

Nothing is worse than knowing you have failed your parents, but Odge did not whinge or whine. She was a strong-willed little girl with a chin like a prize fighter’s and long black hair which she drew like a curtain when she didn’t want to speak to anyone and she was very independent. What she liked best was to wander along the sea shore making friends with the mistmakers and picking up the treasures that she found there.

It was on one of these lonely walks that she came across the Nurse’s Cave.

It was a big, dark cave with water dripping from the walls, and the noise that came from it made Odge’s blood run cold. Dreadful moans, frightful wails, shuddering sobs . . . She stopped to listen, and after a while she heard that the wails had words to them, and that there seemed to be not one wailing voice but three.

‘Ooh,’ she heard. ‘Oooh,
ooh
. . . I shall never forgive myself; never!’

‘Never, never!’ wailed the second voice.

‘I deserve to die,’ moaned a third.

Odge crossed the sandy bay and entered the cave. Three women were sitting there, dressed in the uniform of nursery nurses. Their hair was plastered with ashes, their faces were smeared with mud – and as they wailed and rocked, they speared pieces of completely burnt toast from a smouldering fire and put them into their mouths.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Odge.

‘What’s the
matter
?’ said the first woman. Odge could see that she had red hair beneath the ashes and a long, freckled nose.

‘What’s the
MATTER
?’ repeated the second one, who looked so like the first that Odge realized that she had to be her sister.

‘How is it that you don’t know about our sorrow and our guilt?’ said the third – and she too was so alike that Odge knew they must be triplets.

Then Odge remembered who they were. The tragedy had happened before she was born but even now the Island was still in mourning.

‘Are you the nurses who took the Prince Up There and allowed him to be stolen?’

‘We are,’ said one of the women. She turned furiously to her sister. ‘The toast is not burnt enough, Lily. Go and burn it some more.’

Then Odge heard how they had lived in the cave ever since that dreadful day so as to punish themselves. How they ate only food that was burnt or mouldy or so stale that it hurt their teeth and never anything they were fond of, like bananas. How they never cleaned their teeth or washed, so that fleas could jump into their clothes and bite them, and always chose the sharpest stones to sleep on so that they woke up sore and bruised.

‘What happened to the Prince after he was stolen?’ asked Odge. She was much more interested in the stolen baby than in how bruised the nurses were or how disgusting their food was.

‘He was snatched by an evil woman named Mrs Trottle and taken to her house.’

‘How do you know that,’ asked Odge, ‘if the door in the gump was closed?’ (Hags do not start school till they are eight years old, so she still had a lot to learn.)

‘There are those who can pass through the gump even when it is shut and they told us.’

‘Ghosts, do you mean?’

Violet nodded. ‘My foot feels comfortable,’ she grumbled. ‘I must go and dip it in the icy water and turn my toes blue.’

‘What did she do with him? With the baby?’

‘She pretended he was her own son. He lives with her now. She has called him Raymond Trottle.’

‘Raymond Trottle,’ repeated Odge. It seemed an unlikely name for a prince. ‘And he’s still living there and going to school and everything? He doesn’t know who he is?’

‘That’s right,’ said Rose, poking a stick into her ear so as to try and draw blood. ‘But in two years from now the gump will open and the rescuers will go and bring him back and then we will stop wailing and eating burnt toast and our feet will grow warm and the sun will shine on our faces.’

‘And the Queen will smile again,’ said Lily .

‘Yes, that will be best of all, when the Queen smiles properly once more.’

Odge was very thoughtful as she made her way back along the shore, taking care not to step on the toes of the mistmakers who lay basking on the sand. The Prince was only four months older than she was. How did he feel, being Raymond Trottle and living in the middle of London? What would he think when he found out that he wasn’t who he thought he was?

And who would be chosen to bring him back? The rescuers would be famous; they would go down in history .

‘I wish I could go,’ thought Odge, nudging her blue tooth with her tongue. ‘I wish
I
could be a rescuer.’

Already she felt that she knew the Prince; that she would like him for a friend.

Suddenly she stopped. She set her jaw. ‘I
will
go,’ she said aloud. ‘I’ll make them let me go.’

From that day on, Odge was a girl with a mission. She started school the following year and worked so hard that she was soon top of her class. She jogged, she threw boulders around to strengthen her biceps, she studied maps of London and tried to cough up frogs. And a month before the gump was due to open, she wrote a letter to the palace.

When you have worked and worked for something, it is almost impossible to believe that you can fail. Yet when the names of the rescuers were announced, Odge Gribble’s name was not among them.

It was the most bitter disappointment. She would have taken it better if the people who
had
been chosen were mighty and splendid warriors who would ride through the gump on horseback, but they were not. A wheezing old wizard, a slightly batty fey and a one-eyed giant who lived in the mountains moving goats about and making cheese . . .

The head teacher, when she announced who was going in Assembly, had given the reason.

‘Cornelius the Wizard has been chosen because he is
wise
. Gurkintrude the fey has been chosen because she is
good
. And the giant Hans has been chosen because he is
strong
.’

Of course, being the head teacher she had then gone on to tell the children that if they wanted to do great deeds when they were older they must themselves remember to be wise and good and strong and they could begin by getting their homework done on time and keeping their classroom tidy .

When you are a hag it is important not to cry, b ut Odge, as she sat on a rock that evening wrapped in her hair, was deeply and seriously hurt.

‘I am wise,’ she said to herself. ‘I was top again in Algebra. And I’m strong: I threw a boulder right across Anchorage Bay. As for being good, I can’t see any point in that – not for a mission which might be dangerous.’

And yet the letter she had written to the King and Queen had been answered by a secretary who said he felt Miss Gribble was too young.

Sitting alone by the edge of the sea, Odge Gribble ground her teeth.

But there was another reason why those three people had been chosen. The King and Queen wanted their son to be brought back quietly . They didn’t want to unloose a lot of strange and magical creatures on the city of London – creatures who would do sensational tricks and be noticed. They dreaded television crews getting excited and newspaper men writing articles about a Lost Continent or a Stolen Prince. As far as the Island was a Lost Continent they wanted it to stay that way, and they were determined to protect their son from the kind of fuss that went on Up There when anything unusual was going on.

So they had chosen rescuers who could do magic if it was absolutely necessary but could pass for human beings – well, more or less. Of course, if anything went wrong they had hordes of powerful creatures in reserve: winged harpies with ghastly claws; black dogs which could bay and howl over the roof tops; monsters with pale, flat eyes who could disguise themselves as rocks . . . All these could be sent through the tunnel if the Trottles turned nasty, but no one expected this. The Trottles had done a dreadful thing; they would certainly be sorry and give up the child with a good grace.

Yet now, as the rescuers stood in the drawing room of the palace ready to be briefed, the King and Queen did feel a pang. Cornelius was the mightiest wizard on the Island; a man so learned that he could divide twenty-three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-forty-one by six-and-three-quarters in the time it took a cat to sneeze. He could change the weather, and strike fire from a rock, and what was most important he had once been a university professor and lived Up There so that he could be made to look human without any trouble. Well, he
was
human.

But they hadn’t realized he was quite so old. Up in his hut in the hills one didn’t notice it so much, but in the strong light that came in from the sea, the liver spots on his bald pate did show up rather, and the yellowish streaks in his long white beard. Cor’s neck wobbled as if holding up that domed, brain-filled head was too much for it, you could hear his bones creaking like old timbers every time he moved, and he was very deaf.