Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

“Roun’ de room an’ roun’ de room an’ roun’ de room,” said Titty to herself, counting with a finger as she said it. “Three times round. That’s easy enough. And the cave ought to be a good enough room to do it in.”

She had trouble over the making of the image, even though she did not try to make a very good one. Candle-grease is not wax and the able-seaman soon found that she could do nothing with it unless it was warm and almost liquid. She had nothing to warm it in except the mate’s cooking pans. She did not much like using them, but decided that to save anybody’s mother from a great-aunt of this kind it would be right to use anything, and anyhow it would soon be over and she would be able to get the frying-pan (which seemed to be the best shape for melting candle-grease) clean and shiny again before Susan came back from Swainson’s farm.

She remembered that before frying anything the mate always put a little butter in the pan, so that nothing should stick to it. It was a good thing she remembered that, she thought, and by the time she had put the butter in the frying-pan and was warming it over the fire she felt she had been doing this kind of cooking all her life. As soon as the butter was properly melted and sizzling on the bottom of the pan she broke up the slab of candle-grease and dropped the bits in and tilted the pan first one way and then the other until the bits all melted and ran together again. There seemed to be very little candle-grease to make an image of. She got the other three lanterns out of the tents. There was only a stub of a candle-end in each, and there were plenty of new candles in one of the tin boxes. So she put the three candle-ends into the frying-pan with the stuff that was there already, added a little more butter and warmed it up again until, as she tilted the pan, the candle-grease poured round like thick sauce. Then, of course, the trouble was that it was too hot. She had to wait for it to cool. But the moment it was cool enough, she began scraping it up with a spoon, and presently had a good big lump of candle-grease, not quite too hot to touch, and was kneading it between her hands and keeping it moving from one hand to the other as if it were a hot potato.

She turned it quickly into a great-aunt. There was a small round blob for a head (“It’s no good trying to do snakey hair”) stuck on a long straight body, rolled between her hands, plumped down on a stone and made to stand upright, and then pinched in a little at the middle. The arms, too, were made separately and then stuck on. She scraped a little more candle-grease from round the edge of the frying-pan and used it to make two feet. They were not a success, so she squashed them together and made them into a hat instead, pressing it down on the blob that was meant for a head. There was no time to do much modelling. The candle-grease hardened too quickly as it cooled. Anyhow it was horrid to touch, but that, perhaps, was partly the fault of the butter. She gave the thing eyes, marking them in with a charred and blackened stick from the edge of the fire, and she scratched a slit of a mouth somewhere below the place where she would have liked to make a nose if the candle-grease head had still been soft enough.

The frying-pan smelt as nasty as it looked. There was no time to lose if it was to be cleaned and polished before the others came back. So Titty borrowed Susan’s torch out of her tent and hurried into the cave to get on with the spell. She did not think of it as Peter Duck’s. Nor did she think of asking Peter Duck to help. Peter Duck had nothing to do with magic. It was not the sort of thing in which he could be of any use.

She set the torch on the ground in the middle of the cave, pointing upwards so that it lit the roof, and then, holding the candle-grease doll before her, she walked three times round the cave, talking to the image as she walked.

“Be the great-aunt! Be the great-aunt! Be the great-aunt!”

Then, catching her breath, she ran hurriedly out into the sunlight. It was a comfort, after that, to see that the parrot had gone back into his cage and was eating a lump of sugar as if nothing special was going on.

The great-aunt, smelling horribly, now felt somehow different to her fingers. Had she really found the right spell? She almost wished the others would come back before anything else happened. Then she remembered what Nancy had said about Mrs. Blackett crying and she bit her teeth tightly together. She was not going to stop now.

But the question was, what, exactly, ought she to do? It would be no good just pushing pins into the great-aunt’s legs and arms, or into her body, because if something went wrong with a leg or an arm, or if she were seriously ill, the great-aunt would be sure to stay at Beckfoot and be horrible to everybody until she felt better. Besides, perhaps it was true that only a real silver pin would be any good. What she wanted was just to make the great-aunt thoroughly uncomfortable, so that she would want to go away. Titty looked doubtfully at the image. If she rolled the image in the dust would it mean that the real great-aunt, away at Beckfoot, would suddenly throw herself on the ground and begin rolling about? That would be most worrying for Mrs. Blackett.

Then she remembered reading in the book how the native wizards when they make the wax image of an enemy melt it slowly over a fire, and believe that as the image melts away so does their enemy lose strength until at last, when the whole image is melted, he dies.

Of course, the thing would be to melt the image just a very little, not enough to make the great-aunt ill, but just enough to make her feel not quite herself, and that she would be better in a more bracing air. Then she would pack her boxes and go away and everybody would be perfectly happy.

She held the candle-grease doll out over the fire. Nothing happened except that the hand in which she was holding it grew very hot long before the doll seemed to feel the heat at all. She changed hands until that hand too was very hot. Then she changed hands again and this time, perhaps because she took hold of a part of the image that had been nearest to the heat, perhaps the wood shifted and a little flame licked up and burnt her fingers, perhaps just because the candle-grease was melting and slippery (how it was she never could explain to herself) the thing was gone, her fingers closed on nothing, there was a dreadful spluttering in the fire, yellow smoky flames shot up and a moment later, though Titty scattered the sticks in all directions trying to save her, no one could have told that a great-aunt had ever been there at all.

Titty’s first thought was that there would never be time to make another. But the next moment she had thought of something else, and, no longer an able-seaman, no longer even a negro witch, she burst into horrified tears.

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” she wailed. “I really didn’t.”

CANDLE-GREASE AUNT

She saw the great-aunt, at Beckfoot, stricken suddenly, gasping for breath, dead. She saw Nancy and Peggy running along the lake road not knowing that when they came home they would find the blinds down in the windows of the house. Would they guess at once what she had done? What would they think? Even Nancy would think it was too much. It was all very well for the scuppers of a pirate ship to run with blood. This was different. The great-aunt dead, and dead in such a manner, was worse than the great-aunt alive even if she made Mrs. Blackett miserable and was spoiling the Amazons’ holidays. And she had done it. She felt as if she had tried to ring the bell quietly at the door of a big house and the bell was going on pealing and pealing as if it would never stop.