Margery Sharp - The Rescuers

First published in Great Britain by William Collins Sons and Co Ltd in 1959

This edition published by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

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Text copyright © Margery Sharp 1959

Why You’ll Love This Book copyright © Anne Fine 2010

Cover illustration © Emilia Dziubak 2016

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 2016

Margery Sharp asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007364091

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007390700

Version: 2016-05-20

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Why You’ll Love This Book – by Anne Fine

Chapter One – The Meeting

Chapter Two – Miss Bianca

Chapter Three – In Norway

Chapter Four – The Voyage

Chapter Five – Marching Orders

Chapter Six – The Happy Journey

Chapter Seven – The Black Castle

Chapter Eight – Waiting

Chapter Nine – Cat and Mouse

Chapter Ten – The Message

Chapter Eleven – The Other Way Out

Chapter Twelve – The Great Enterprise

Chapter Thirteen – The Raft

Chapter Fourteen – The End

Postscript by Nicholas Tucker

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

If there’s a more enchanting story than The Rescuers , I’ve yet to read it. For fifty years now it’s been delighting children – along with any adult wise enough to snatch the chance to share it.

Yet it’s as fresh today as it has ever been. How could readers fail to warm to a book so full of comedy and heart? We meet three of the most heroic mice in literature: delicate Miss Bianca, who selflessly abandons her pampered life in a porcelain pagoda to journey over rough seas and barren lands to the hideous Black Castle from which no prisoner has ever escaped.

Along with her on this terrifying errand of mercy go two steadfast companions: kind, loyal Bernard from the kitchen pantry (already honoured for Gallantry in the Face of Cats); and Nils, a fearless Norwegian sailor who’s never happier than when braving storm-tossed waves in his sturdy sea boots.

How these resourceful mice set about their adventure is a wonder. For though Miss Bianca means well, she is unable to confess that Nils has taken her idle doodle of a garden party hat for an accurate map of the waterways they must traverse. (Luckily, Miss Bianca’s refined manners and sprightly grace serve her better in her encounters with the head jailor’s cat, the fierce, yet somewhat dim, Mamelouk.)

This is a book which, once discovered, is read over and over. Each detail enchants and fascinates: the deliciously comfortable walnut-shell chairs in the committee room of the mice’s Prisoners’ Aid Society; the desperate message from the dungeons, cunningly stuck with black treacle to Mamelouk’s fur; even the flowery poems that Miss Bianca feels compelled to write at moments of high emotion.

Right from the start, The Rescuers was hailed as a classic. Since then, Margery Sharp’s short masterpiece has enthralled, amused and enriched the reading lives of young people everywhere.

Don’t miss it!

Anne Fine has won a host of literary prizes both here and abroad, and from 2001–3 she was the Children’s Laureate.

Visit her website at www.annefine.co.uk

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” cried the Chairwoman Mouse, “we now come to the most important item on our autumn programme! Pray silence for the secretary!”

It was a full meeting of the Prisoners’ Aid Society. Everyone knows that the mice are the prisoner’s friend – sharing his dry breadcrumbs even when they are not hungry, allowing themselves to be taught all manner of foolish tricks, such as no self-respecting mouse would otherwise contemplate, in order to cheer his lonely hours. What is less well known is how splendidly they are organised. Not a prison in any land but has its own national branch of a wonderful, worldwide system. It is on record that long, long ago a Norman mouse took ship all the way to Turkey, to join a French sailor-boy locked up in Constantinople! The Jean Fromage Medal was struck in his honour.

The secretary rose. The chairwoman sat back in her seat, which was made from beautifully polished walnut shells, and fixed her clever eyes on his greying back. How she would have liked to put the matter to the meeting herself! An enterprise so difficult and dangerous! Dear, faithful old comrade as the secretary was, had he the necessary eloquence? But rules are rules.

She looked anxiously over the assembly, wondering which members would support her; there were at least a hundred mice present, seated in rows on neat matchbox benches. The Moot-house itself was a particularly fine one, a great empty wine cask, entered by the bung, whose splendid curving walls soared cathedral-like to the roof. Behind the speakers’ platform hung an oil painting, richly framed, depicting the mouse in Aesop’s Fable in his heroic act of freeing a captive lion.

“Well, it’s like this,” began the secretary. “You all know the Black Castle …”

Every mouse in the hall shuddered. The country they lived in was still barely civilised, a country of great gloomy mountains, enormous deserts, rivers like strangled seas. Even in its few towns, even here in the capital, its prisons were grim enough. But the Black Castle!

It reared up, the Black Castle, from a cliff above the angriest river of all. Its dungeons were cut in the cliff itself – windowless. Even the bravest mouse, assigned to the Black Castle, trembled before its great, cruel, iron-fanged gate.

From a front seat up spoke a mouse almost as old and rheumatic as the secretary himself. But he wore the Jean Fromage Medal.

“ I know the Black Castle. Didn’t I spend six weeks there?”