Authors: Diana Wynne Jones
Witch's Business
FOR JESSICA FRANCES
Excerpt from
Howl's Moving Castle
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Chapter One: In Which Sophie Talks to Hats
Excerpt from
The Merlin Conspiracy
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Chapter One
Excerpt from
Dark Lord of Derkholm
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Chapter One
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Chapter One
Reading Group Guide for
Witch's Business
Frank and Jess thought Own Back Ltd. was an excellent idea when they first invented it. Three days later, they were not so sure. The trouble was that they were desperate for money. They had broken a new chair and all pocket money was stopped until the summer. They had to face four penniless months and, somehow, as soon as they knew this, they found all sorts of things they could not possibly do without.
“I can't go
anywhere
,” said Jess. “The other girls expect you to pay your share. It isn't fair. Just because it was such a badly made chair. The other chairs turn upside down without breaking. I don't see why this one had to go and fall to pieces.”
“Nor do I,” said Frank, who was worse off than Jess. “I owe Buster Knell ten pence.”
“Why?” said Jess.
“A bet,” Frank answered. Jess was sorry for him, because Buster Knell was not the boy you owed anything if you could help it. He had a gang. Frank, in fact, was desperate enough to go down to the newsagent and ask Mr. Prodger if he wanted another boy for the paper route. But Mr. Prodger said Vernon Wilkins was all he needed and, besides, Vernon needed the money.
So Frank came dismally home and, after some thought, he and Jess put up a notice on the front gate, saying
ERRANDS RUN
. It had been up half an hour when their father came home and took it down. “As if you two haven't done enough already,” he said, “without decorating the gate with this. When I said no money, I meant no money. Don't think I'm going to let you get away with immoral earnings, because I'm not.”
It was the talk of immoral earnings that gave them the idea.
“I say,” said Jess. “Do people pay you to do bad things for them?”
“If they want them done enough, I suppose,” Frank answered. “If it's something they don't dare do themselves, like pull Buster Knell's nose for him.”
“Would they pay us?” said Jess. “If we were to offer to do things they didn't dare do?”
“Like what?” said Frank. “I don't dare pull Buster Knell's nose, either.”
“No. More cunning than that,” said Jess. “Suppose someone came and said to us: âI want something dreadful to happen to Buster Knell because of what he did to me yesterday,' then we could say, âYes. Pay us five pence, and we'll arrange for him to fall down a manhole.' Would that work?”
“If it did,” said Frank, “it would be worth more than five pence.”
“Let's try,” said Jess.
So they spent the rest of the evening making a notice. When it was finished, it read:
OWN BACK LTD.
REVENGE ARRANGED
PRICE ACCORDING TO TASK
ALL DIFFICULT TASKS UNDERTAKEN
TREASURE HUNTED, ETC.
The last two lines were put in by Frank, because he said that if they were going to arrange things like booby traps for Buster Knell, then they might as well agree to
any
dangerous task. Jess put in the Ltd. to make it look official.
“Though it shouldn't be, really,” she said, “because we're not a proper company.”
“Yes,” said Frank, “but if anyone asks us something too difficult, we can always say it means Limited Own Back, and we don't touch things too big for us.”
The next morning, they pinned the notice to the back of the potting shed, where it could be seen by anyone who went along the path beside the allotments, and sat in the shed with the back window open to wait for orders.
All that happened, that entire day, was that two ladies exercising their dogs saw it and shrieked with laughter.
“Oh, look, Edith! How sweet!”
“Limited, too! The idea!”
Frank and Jess could hear them laughing about it all down the path.
“Take no notice,” said Jess. “Just think of when the shekels start to pour in.”
That was all very well, but Frank began to wonder if they were going to spend the entire Easter holiday sitting in the potting shed being laughed at. It was a dismal place at the best of times, and the view over the allotments always depressed him. They were dank and low. Beyond them, there was the marshy, tangled waste strip beside the river where everyone threw rubbish, and under the trees, the hut thing where old Biddy Iremonger lived. The only real house in sight was as damp looking and dreary as the restâa big square place, the color of old cheese. The trees had been slow to put out leaves that year, so it was all as blank and bleak as winter.
The next day was, if anything, worse still. To start with, it was raining on and off, with a cold wind steadily blowing showers up and away again. Drafts whined through the potting shed and fluttered all the cobwebs. Jess and Frank sat in their coats and began to think their idea was a failure.
“And we can't even buy sweets to console ourselves with,” Jess was saying when somebody rapped on the window.
They looked up to see old Mr. Carter, who had the nearest allotment, leaning on the sill of the potting shed window.
“This your notice?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Frank, feeling foolish and rather defiant about it. “Why?”
Mr. Carter bent down and read the notice, out loud, so that Frank felt even more foolish by the time he finished, and Jess went very pink. “My, my!” said Mr. Carter. “Just wait till the prime minister hears of this. He'll have you in his cabinet. Got any customers yet?”
“Not yet,” Frank admitted.
“We've not been in business long,” Jess said.
“Well,” said Mr. Carter, “I can't help with the revenge part, but I know where you'll find some treasure.”
“Do you? Where?” they said. Jess reached for her notebook to take down the details.
“Yes,” said Mr. Carter. “Rainbow, this morning. Ended right beside Biddy Iremonger's place. Saw it with my own eyes. You dig there, and there'll be a crock of gold for you.” And before either of them could answer, he went away laughing.
“Beast!
” said Jess.
Frank was too angry even to say what he thought. Instead he suggested taking the notice down. Jess said that would be giving in too easily.
“Let's keep it the rest of today and tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe the news will get round.”
“Then we'll have the whole town knocking on the window to laugh at us,” said Frank, and he went indoors to cadge some biscuits to cheer them up with.
They were eating the biscuits when they heard quite a crowd of people coming along the path. There was a noise of wheels turning and sticks being trailed along the allotment railings and the fences of the gardens. There were also loud, crude voices, swearing. Frank wished most heartily that Jess had agreed to take the notice down. He did not even need to hear the voices to know that it was Buster Knell and his gangâand, to judge from the language, Buster Knell and his gang in a very bad mood indeed. They all stopped outside the potting shed, and Jess said afterward that she saw the air turn blue.
