The Tale of Applebeck Orchard (23 page)

And then Bosworth was struck by an insight that was so astounding in its simplicity and clarity that it almost knocked him over.
“Why, it’s because we are all males, that’s what it is!”
he thought, flabbergasted at this sudden and unexpected understanding.

“My father just assumed that his son had the ability to do the job, as did his father and grandfather before him. None of them would ever have considered choosing any of their daughters. And Owl would never have suggested giving
Thorn
a test to see whether he was competent.”
Bosworth kicked angrily at a clod of dirt.
“But a female—now, that’s an entirely different kettle of fish, isn’t it? A female ought to be tested to see if she’s up to the job.”
He sniffed in growing disgust.
“Why, I call that arrogant, I do! I call that supercilious and condescending, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it, not one bit!”

And the more the badger thought about it, the less he liked it. It seemed to establish one set of rules for males, another for females. What was more, it seemed to put Hyacinth—whom Bosworth knew to be every bit as bright and energetic and resourceful as her brother—at a distinctly unfair disadvantage, and (if one were to generalize from this situation to others) to give male badgers a serious edge in any competition.

Now, this may seem to you to be rather ironic (it does to me), since Bosworth had certainly been patronizing enough when he considered suggesting to Hyacinth that he train her for a job that she could turn over to her brother, in the event of his return. And this sudden insight about male badgers having the advantage—well, I’m sure it’s old news to you, for the issue of discrimination has been openly debated in our society for several decades, at least.

But Bosworth, who had never before been called upon to consider the question, found it deeply troubling. Was it possible . . . Could it be . . . Had he risen to his comfortable and authoritative place in the world entirely upon his
gender
? Had he gone through life with the idea that he had earned his success—and indeed, his triumphs—when all along these had come to him solely because he was a
male
?

Bosworth was still thinking these troublesome thoughts when he arrived at The Brockery. He had lingered so long in the woods that he had missed lunch, and Parsley, Primrose, and Hyacinth were in the kitchen, doing the washing-up. Bosworth put in his head, said hello, and quickly withdrew, because the sight of them made him oppressively aware of the way The Brockery’s duties were divided.

And then, as a kind of punishment, Bosworth set himself to a task that he truly detested and which, every year, he put off as long as he could. He donned a gray dust-smock to keep his fur from getting dusty, took a lighted candlestick in one paw and a notebook in the other, and put a pencil behind one ear. Then he struck off down one of the many corridors that angled away from the large dining hall, the central room in the occupied part of The Brockery. He would conduct his annual Survey of Renovation Requirements, an onerous and boring task and a very dirty one, to boot. It was something he needed to do, as manager of The Brockery, but he always put it off until he couldn’t put it off any longer. And today, this tedious job seemed a perfect retribution for all the privilege that he—a male—had enjoyed over the years.

To carry out the survey, Bosworth had to inspect every chamber in the sett, including all the hallways and corridors and inglenooks and crannies and parlors and bedsits and alcoves, in order to see what renovation and refitting might be needed. Since The Brockery had been excavated by many generations of badgers (none of whom ever bothered to draw a room plan or develop a decorating scheme), most of it was a bewildering labyrinth of rooms that were connected by dark, dusty corridors where few animals (other than the original badger-digger) had ever set foot. And no matter how thorough Bosworth had been when he made the previous surveys, he always managed to find himself in some remote part of The Brockery he’d never visited before. Many times, he would have been thoroughly lost had he not possessed the sketch map that had been drawn by his father after getting himself thoroughly lost on one of
his
annual inspections.

For the next hour, Bosworth stumped about, walking up and down steeply sloping passageways, climbing wooden ladders (for the rooms were on various levels), poking into corners, making notes in his notebook. Some of the rooms were low-ceilinged and cellar-like, with nothing much to recommend them, while others were vaulted and very grand and might serve for a conference of mice or a Sunday congregation of voles. Many had never been occupied, except by itinerant spiders and beetles who had come in the back way to get out of the weather. Some required whitewashing, some needed new carpets, others were in want of furnishings. By the light of his flickering candle, Bosworth could see that almost all were in need of a good turning-out.

But the badger was not paying the proper sort of attention to his task, for his mind was occupied with the unpleasant business that the professor’s proposal had brought up. Now that he had begun to understand the extent to which female badgers were restricted in their advancement by certain prejudices, what was his proper course of action? Should he permit the professor to test Hyacinth? Or should he—

Whilst he was thinking, he was trudging along the corridor. He came to Room 428 and opened the door, noticing that rainwater had dripped into the room, traveling along a large root that had grown through the ceiling. The floor was rather muddy. He was making a note to this effect when he heard a faint voice calling in the distance,
“Uncle, Uncle, where are you?”

Bosworth brightened. Well. It was always good to have company when he was doing this kind of work, and in this case—Perhaps he could take the opportunity to talk over the situation with her.

“I’m here, Hyacinth,”
he called.

After a moment, the voice came again, more distant this time.
“Where, Uncle? Where are you?”

“You’re going in the wrong direction, Hyacinth,”
he shouted, much more loudly.
“I’m in Room 428.”

“Where is Room 428?”
the voice called. It was even fainter. Hyacinth was moving away from him.

“Bother,”
grumbled the badger. He should have to go and look for her. But it wasn’t a bother, really. He was tired of making inspections and taking notes. It was time for a cup of tea and a nice warm scone with lavender honey. Yum. Yes, that was exactly what he wanted. He would find Hyacinth and they would sit down together over tea and a scone, with a spoonful of lavender honey, and talk about . . . well, about all the things he had been thinking. So he put his pencil behind his ear, tucked his notebook under his arm, and took up his candlestick. He stepped out of Room 428 and turned right.

But that was wrong, he realized, having gone some distance along the dark corridor. To get back to the main corridor, he should have turned left. So he went back and tried again.

But this time, he went past Room 428 (the plate on the door was too tarnished to be easily read), and found himself in a strange corridor. Recognizing his error, he turned around and tried to retrace his steps. But he must have gone too far again, for now he found himself confronted by three corridors, one leading straight ahead, one angling off to the right, and the other angling off to the left.

Well. This was easily solved. He should only have to consult his handy-dandy map and—

But when Bosworth opened his notebook to look for the map, he saw to his breathless horror that it was not there. It must have dropped out somewhere along the way.

And by this time, of course, poor Bosworth was thoroughly befuddled. He had not the foggiest notion which of these corridors would take him back to familiar territory. But even this would not have been an insurmountable problem, I suppose, except that our badger’s candle, which had been burning for quite some time now, had burnt all the way down to a very short stub. It flickered and flared as candles do when they are trying to tell us that they are about to go out, and that if we want more light, we shall have to fetch another candle. And in the space of a breath, the candle did just that. It went out, plunging Bosworth into a sudden and total blackness—for he had quite thoughtlessly failed to bring a spare candle. (Please take note of this, gentle reader. When you go underground, or wherever it promises to be thoroughly dark for an extended period of time, take not one candle but two, or perhaps even three. One can never have too many candles.)

Of course, an absence of light would not ordinarily be a problem for badgers, who spend most of their lives underground and can see in the dark just as well as we can see in the light. What’s more, they have very reliable noses, which can lead them anywhere they want to go, particularly when there’s something to eat at the end of the trail—a fresh scone, say, warm, with lavender honey. I daresay a healthy badger can smell lavender honey a mile away.

But our badger had been suffering for several days from a bothersome cold, so even if Parsley took the lid off the honey-pot and held it under his nose, he could not have smelled it. Even worse, his eyes had been giving him trouble lately—it was all that tedious writing, of course—and he had brought the candle to help himself out. Now the candle was gone and he was stranded, thoroughly lost in the great earthen labyrinth of The Brockery, whose corridors twisted and turned and curled and coiled for miles and miles under Holly How.

“Oh, dear,”
the badger muttered.
“This is not a good thing.”
He pushed down the sudden wish that he had had the foresight to pack a picnic lunch, just something to tide him over, for it was possible that he would not get back in time for tea, or perhaps tomorrow’s breakfast, or lunch, or the next day’s dinner. He might even be lost forever.

Perhaps you are thinking that this is highly improbable, but I am sorry to say that such things have happened before and—given the haphazard design and construction of the sett—are quite likely to happen again. Indeed, Bosworth’s great-great-uncle Benjamin (an elderly badger, but still quite spry, who used a cane with a curiously carved head) had gone off one afternoon to visit an invalid hedgehog who was staying in one of The Brockery’s farthest guest rooms. When he did not return for tea, a rescue party was sent out. But in spite of their efforts, Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin was never seen or heard from again. His sudden disappearance was one of The Brockery’s great mysteries.

Bosworth thought of this with a shiver. But then he reflected that it would not do to lose his spirit, for that would only make things worse. He stood very still, trying to think. Then it occurred to him that he could think just as well sitting as standing and perhaps even better, and anyway, his legs were telling him that he should sit. So he sank down on the ground with his back to the wall.

This was no time to panic, of course, and normally Bosworth was a very levelheaded badger who could meet any threat with a chipper,
“Oh, there you are, silly old thing. Let’s see what can be done.”
He had always tried hard to practice the Fifteenth Rule of Thumb, expressed thus:
It is the better part of wisdom to keep one’s head when one is confronted with catastrophe, calamity, or cataclysm. Losing one’s head never solves anything.

But when a substantial amount of time had passed (hours and hours, Bosworth thought, although of course it was too dark to see his pocket watch) and he had not yet thought of anything he might do to save himself, he had to acknowledge the panic that was clenching a fist in the general region of his breastbone. What was more, the air had begun to seem rather warm and close, and he realized that he must be in an area of the sett which was closed off from the outside and therefore had no ventilation. It wasn’t likely that he would suffocate—or at least, he didn’t think so—but the lack of fresh air was making him frightfully drowsy. It was all he could do to keep his eyes open, especially since there was nothing to look at but black, black, and more black.

And worse, he had begun to feel that he was not quite alone. Spiders, perhaps, or was it beetles (he couldn’t see which in the dark) were creepy-crawling along the floor and across his paws. And then up his legs and over his shoulders and his face, tickling him with their little beetle feet, or spider feet, as it were. There were only a few at first, and then, just as he was telling himself sternly to stop imagining things, there were hundreds of them, dancing the fandango in his fur, investigating the recesses of his ears, tiptoeing out to the tip of his nose. And then he began to hear their conversations—whistlings and whisperings and murmurings and rustlings—and he got the impression that the spiders in the lot (or perhaps the beetles had gone away and they were
all
spiders!) were plotting to spin their sticky webs around him. If he didn’t do something, he would find himself wrapped like Gulliver and tied with Lilliputian threads into a tidy bundle so that he couldn’t move, breathe, couldn’t—

He shook himself. This would not do! It would not do at all. He could not just sit here and let the spiders package him up, as if he were a butcher’s parcel. He would get up and walk on a bit, hoping to find a more congenial place to have a rest. Or perhaps, if he was lucky, he would come to the end of the corridor and find that he could push his way out into the open, where he could take big, deep gulps of fresh air and—

Yes. He would walk on, that’s what he would do. He got painfully to his feet and began to feel his way along the wall. Walking was a dangerous business, because the sett was constructed on various levels. Some of the corridors took rather sudden plunges, and there were stairways and ladders that led up or down quite unexpectedly. If one were not extremely careful, one might find oneself stepping out into thin air.

Just as the badger was thinking this thought, it happened. The corridor suddenly became a steep incline, and the floor fell away under his feet. He dropped his notebook and candlestick and scrabbled for some sort of handhold, a root or a stone sticking out of the earthen wall, grabbing at anything that would keep him from sliding and skidding and slipping over the edge. But there was nothing, nothing at all, to hold him back. Before he could even cry
Help!
or
Save me!
or even
Bless my stripes!
he was falling, toppling, tumbling tail over teakettle through the empty air.