The Tale of Oat Cake Crag (16 page)

He has asked permission to call—I wonder: is it just a friendly visit, for old times’ sake? Or is he actually imagining that he might court this lovely and accomplished young lady? After all, he now has a paid position. He is a teacher, which is a situation of some honor and standing in the village, especially when it is held by a man, even a young man. There is no reason why, if he chooses, he might not advance to headmaster, at Sawrey School or Hawkshead, or somewhere nearby.

But I am sure you are aware that Jeremy has no status at all in the eyes of Lady Longford, who still thinks of him as that runny-nosed urchin whose aunt resides in one of her farm cottages and earns a poor living spinning and weaving. No, not in the eyes of Lady Longford. If Jeremy has courtship in mind, I foresee complications.

But our young friend does not seem to be troubling himself with the thought of complications, at least not at this moment. Whistling softly, his hat pushed back at a jaunty angle on his head, Jeremy pushes his hands into his pockets and, with a little skip, turns to go across Kendal Road and up Market Street. He has been boarding with Mr. and Mrs. Llewellyn at High Green Gate since the beginning of the school year, for it is not nearly so far to walk from there to the school as it is from the outlying cottage at Holly How Farm, where his aunt lives. He enjoys boarding with the Llewellyns. Mrs. Llewellyn is rather a sourpuss and fault-finder, but Mr. Llewellyn is always cheerful. He allows Jeremy to do the milking before school—a chore Jeremy enjoys—in exchange for his board and room.

Ah, Jeremy, young Jeremy. What are your dreams? Are you reaching above yourself?

And yes, I do think this is part of our story, and an important part, I believe—although I wasn’t sure of it until just now.

The villagers were not the only ones in attendance at the meeting. Throughout the evening, Rascal was stretched out on the floor beneath Lady Longford’s table. He was pretending to be asleep, but he kept one eye half-open, watching the door for Mr. Baum’s arrival. Tabitha Twitchit and Felicity Frummety, taking mental notes of all that was said, were crouched together on the hearth near Miss Potter’s feet. Crumpet had a better view from her place on the bar, where she kept an eye on the captain’s pocket watch, flicking the tip of her tail faster and faster as the speakers approached their three-minute limit. (The captain noticed this, and said to his wife when he got home, “The oddest thing, my dear. There was a gray tabby cat with a red collar on the bar, and she actually seemed to be keeping time with her tail.”)

Other creatures were present, too, although they were occupied with their own business and paid no attention to the people in the room, who, of course, paid no attention to
them
. There was a large family of mice gathering crumbs under the floor, silly and scatterbrained as mice always are, running off in all directions and forgetting where they were going before they got there. A small brown spider was dreamily spinning a new web in the corner. And another animal was present as well, nearly as large as Rascal, but heavier, dark, and handsomely striped. But she was outside, poking around under the window, where (because people were angry and talked in very loud voices) she could overhear every word that was said. After the meeting was finished, she went round the back to visit the few turnips that still lived in Mrs. Barrow’s wintry patch of garden. She was digging one up when she met Rascal and the three cats, who came out the back door.

“Well, hello, Hyacinth,”
Tabitha said cheerily.
“We haven’t seen you for a while.”

You have probably already guessed that this forager amongst the turnips is Hyacinth, the young female badger who now holds the Badge of Authority at Holly How. She and Bosworth had talked it over and decided that one of them should attend tonight’s meeting and learn what the Big People were going to do about the flying boat. Since Bosworth didn’t venture far from Holly How these days, Hyacinth had volunteered.

“Although I don’t think there was much to be learnt tonight,”
she added, when she had told the animals why she was there.
“Too bad that Mr. Baum couldn’t hear what people had to say. He might have changed his mind and decided to fly his aeroplane somewhere else.”

“It’s very strange,”
remarked Rascal, cocking his head with a puzzled look.
“He was planning to come.”
After he and Miss Potter had returned from Tidmarsh Manor that afternoon, Rascal had happened to meet the brewer’s drayman on Kendal Road. Having nothing else to do, the little dog hopped on the brewery wagon for a ride down to the ferry, then rode back at teatime with Dr. Butters, who was returning from a call on the eastern side of Windermere. The doctor, one of Rascal’s many friends, always invited him to ride in his gig. The doctor’s horse was very fast and Rascal was delighted to accept, since he loved the feeling of the wind blowing his ears.

“And just how do you know?”
asked Crumpet.

“You don’t suppose something happened to him, do you?”
Tabitha asked, frowning.

Crumpet giggled.
“You mean, like an aeroplane crash? His own medicine, going down the wrong way?”
She elbowed Felicity Frummety, proud of her clever little joke.
“Get it? Going down the wrong way?”

Felicity (the ginger cat who lives with Mr. and Mrs. Jennings) ignored Crumpet’s elbow.
“If his aeroplane had crashed, I’m sure we’d have heard about it.”
She shuddered.
“Some of the Big People who spoke tonight were very angry. You don’t suppose somebody’s koshed him over the head, do you?”
Felicity enjoyed both a delicate constitution and a vivid imagination, and loved to frighten herself by conjuring up the worst, whereupon she fled to the nearest corner and covered her eyes with her paws until the danger was past. Crumpet liked to say that Felicity gave new meaning to the term
scaredy-cat.

“I suppose he never intended to come at all,”
put in Crumpet, who is a very skeptical cat.
“Big Folks lie all the time.”

“Personally, I do not suppose at all,”
Rascal said in a definitive tone.
“There is never any point in supposing—at least for more than a minute or two. It is far better to find out the facts.”

“Oh, right,”
said Crumpet, with a sharply sarcastic meow.
“And just how far will you go to find out the facts? Where does Mr. Baum live?”
She answered her own questions.
“He lives at Lakeshore Manor, that’s where. On the far side of Raven Hall, on the lake shore below Oat Cake Crag. I make it”
—she squinted, calculating—
“well over a mile away.”

“Which is why I had better be going,”
said Rascal, getting to his feet.
“Major Kittredge must be ready to leave for home. I’m sure he won’t mind if I ride along with him as far as Raven Hall. From there, I can take the path through the woods. Won’t be far at all.”

“Not far to go, maybe,”
Crumpet said ironically.
“Plenty far to come back.”
Crumpet wasn’t lazy, but she did like to conserve energy.

Rascal ignored her.
“Anybody want to go with me?”
he asked, looking around the little group.
“Tabitha?”

“Not I,”
said Tabitha firmly.
“I have a date with a vole in the Anvil Cottage garden.”

“You won’t find out a thing,”
Crumpet remarked cattily. She smoothed her whiskers.
“Waste of time.”

Felicity shook her head.
“I don’t go beyond the village at night.”
She shivered.
“One never knows what beasts one might encounter.”

“Well, then, it’ll have to be just me,”
Rascal said bravely.
“I’ll let you know what I find out.”
It wasn’t that he was afraid, of course. Jack Russell terriers are never afraid of anything. Or rather, they never admit to being afraid—which is not quite the same thing.

“I’d love to go with you,”
Hyacinth offered. Unlike the village cats, who are domesticated creatures with a preference for staying close to home, badgers are adventuresome animals, always eager for new experiences.
“But I doubt that the major would offer
me
a ride,”
she added,
“and I don’t think I can run as fast as the major’s horse.”
Most Big Folks in the Land Between the Lakes are prejudiced against badgers, whom they think of as pests who raid gardens and chicken coops. Granted, badgers do a certain amount of this, for they have to eat, too. If badgers have set up housekeeping in your neighborhood, you would do well to fence your turnips (Mrs. Barrow has not) and install a strong clasp on your chicken coop door.

“He probably wouldn’t offer,”
Rascal agreed with a grin.
“But the gig he’s driving has an empty wooden box on the back, for carrying bundles and such. I’ll distract him and give you time to jump into it. He’ll never know you’re there.”
Rascal was happy to have Hyacinth along, because badgers have very strong claws and are fierce fighters, particularly when they are cornered. He knew he could count on Hyacinth to back him up if they ran into something unexpected and . . . well, dangerous. In that event, the cats wouldn’t be any help at all. It was just as well they stayed home.

So Rascal ran to Major Kittredge’s gig and barked and jumped and begged with a great deal of excited energy, and the major, who knew the little dog, immediately invited him to sit on the driver’s seat. Whilst this was going on, Hyacinth climbed into the box and shut the lid. As it turned out, the box wasn’t completely empty. It contained (in addition to one badger) a dozen eggs that the major was taking home to his wife, as well as a parcel of biscuits that Mrs. Woodcock had baked for her sister-in-law’s tea. Showing great restraint, Hyacinth touched neither the eggs nor the biscuits, feeling that since she was getting a free ride, so to speak, she ought not to take advantage. A less well-mannered badger might have enjoyed supper en route and arrived fully fed.

The horse was fast and they reached Raven Hall expeditiously. Rascal made a big show of thanking the major whilst Hyacinth climbed out of the box and hid in the shrubbery. The two met a few moments later and made their way to the footpath that led through the trees of Claife Woods. The nearly full moon was rising over the lake and cast a silvery light, more than enough to see the narrow path that wound through the still-leafless trees. And since both the badger and the dog are accustomed to going about the countryside after dark, they had no trouble at all in finding their way to Lakeshore Manor, where Mr. Baum lived.

The two-story, early Victorian manor house, built of brick and topped with a slate roof, was set on a bluff above the waters of Windermere. Before it, a grassy park sloped steeply to the lake’s edge, where the moon painted a wide swath of silver across the water. Behind it towered the high cliff of Oat Cake Crag. The house was dark and seemed (so Rascal thought) to wear an almost frightened look, as if it were waiting for something.

“No lights,”
Hyacinth whispered.
“P’rhaps Mr. Baum has already gone to bed.”

“Or he’s gone out and hasn’t returned,”
Rascal replied. But where had he gone? Not to the pub, certainly. And they hadn’t met him on the road to the village, or on the path from Raven Hall.

At that moment, there was a stir in a tree on the crag, followed by the ominous crack of a twig. A dark triangular shadow swooped with frightening suddenness down the face of the cliff, exactly like the shape of a falling man.

Hyacinth ducked under a bush, remembering Parsley’s tale about the ghost of a Scottish soldier who had fallen to his death from the crag. Was it the ghost? But Rascal (who had a pretty good idea what was going on) bravely stood his ground.

Without a sound, not even a rustle of wings, the shadow settled in the top of a nearby tree.
“Whooo?”
inquired the owl’s commanding voice. The great head swiveled from side to side, the amber eyes glaring.
“Whooo goooes there, I say! Halt, and identify yourselves!”

“Good evening, Professor,”
said the dog in a deferential tone. All of the local animals know that it is well to speak respectfully to the owl, who is quite large and formidable.
“It’s Rascal, from the village. And Hyacinth, from Holly How. We hope we haven’t disturbed you.”

“Yooou have not,”
the owl said in a kindlier tone, and settled his feathers. To tell the truth, he was rather glad to see Rascal, who had a nose for news and often carried interesting bits of village tattle.
“A bit far from home, I’d say. What brings yooou here at this hour of the night?”

“We rode with Major Kittredge,”
the dog explained.
“Mr. Baum was supposed to come to the meeting at the pub tonight, so people could tell him how they feel about his aeroplane. But he didn’t, and everyone is wondering why. Hyacinth and I thought we would try to find out.”