Eva Ibbotson - One Dog and His Boy

But it did not seem likely, and as the wretched night wore on there was worse to come. In a corner of the hut he heard the sound of one of the dogs being extremely sick. Shining his torch on to the ground, Sprocket saw – in a pool of vomit, the remnants of the blue flannel, and beside it, covered in slime but still quite recognizable, his much-loved and sadly missed moustache.

Hal and Pippa, as they stumbled through the wildness of the night, would have been grateful even for a leaking, windowless bothy in which to shelter. They were in the middle of the moor and hopelessly lost.

At first they had made good progress, navigating by the sun. Hal had even hoped that they might get to the coast that day. But very quickly the weather changed, the sun disappeared, and then came the darkness and the rain.

Both children had been brought up in town. The blackness of the night overwhelmed them. It was not just an absence of light, it was a malevolent force, and the rain did not come down only from the sky. It came from all sides, blown by the ceaseless wind. It ran down inside their anoraks; it drenched their shoes. And Hal was also suffering from delayed shock. That hour spent locked up in Kevin’s shed had shaken him more than he realized at the time. He began to think that they would never reach the cottage by the sea – that they were doomed to fail.

“If we stop now we’ll probably die of exposure,” said Pippa. “I never understood what that was, but I do now.”

“We’ll probably die of it whether we stop or not,” muttered Hal.

They stumbled on, over boulders, across streams that were hardly wetter than the ground beneath their feet, and the faithful dogs followed. From Li-Chee, shorn of his pelt, came noises that were not very lion-like. He gave small snuffles of distress, and when Pippa picked him up he buried his nose in her jacket. The others padded on resolutely. Fleck was keeping up well; he seemed to have grown up since he had saved Hal from Kevin’s clutches. And the dogs looked out for one another. If one of them for a moment vanished in the darkness, the others waited.

When they first saw a glimmer of light they hardly dared to believe it. They knew that people in the last stages of exhaustion see things that are not there. But the light was real. It grew stronger – and as they beat their way towards it they saw that it came from a tall, imposing building.

“It looks like a castle,” said Pippa.

“Probably belongs to an ogre,” murmured Hal. “Who else would live in the middle of nowhere?”

But whoever it belonged to, they had to go forward, and with the dogs pressing close behind them they made their way towards a great door. Even if whoever lived there was going to turn them in – even if he was going to eat them – they had no choice except to beg for shelter.

The bell clanged inside the great building and they waited. They were going to press it again when a slit opened in the door and a face appeared.

The face vanished and for a while nothing happened. Then slowly the door drew back and they saw a tall, hooded figure who stood there in silence.

“Please—” began Pippa. But she got no further because an awful thing now happened. Otto, the wise and gentle dog whom they would have trusted with their lives, had gone mad. A rumble came from his throat, and before they could stop him he reared up and with the full force of his weight, he landed with his paws on the shoulders of the hooded man.

The children started forward, horrified. This was the end of all their hopes of sanctuary. Then they saw what Otto was doing. He was licking the man’s face. The rumble in his throat had become a kind of purring, and his tail went so fast that it had become a blur.

The hooded man allowed himself to be greeted like this for a few moments. Then gently he removed Otto’s paws and came towards them.

“You are welcome, my children,” he said.

“Can we bring the dogs in?” asked Pippa. The tall man smiled.

“If you could not bring dogs into this place it would be strange indeed.”

They had come to the monastery of St Roc. The tall man who had greeted them was the abbot, in charge of the monks who lived there, and now he led them along a corridor hung with paintings of various saints. It was warm and very quiet and there was a smell of beeswax and lilies. To the frozen children it seemed like paradise.

Otto did not follow the abbot. He walked beside him, his nose within inches of the abbot’s robe.

“Of course,” whispered Pippa. “Otto came from a monastery in Switzerland. The abbot there bred him himself, Kayley told me.”

They were put in the charge of a round-faced monk with a friendly smile who introduced himself as Brother Malcolm and took them into a room where a fire burned brightly. Their wet clothes were peeled off and taken away and dry clothes brought in all sorts of shapes and sizes into which they fitted themselves as best they could. In a corner of the room, another monk was busy towelling the soaking dogs.

Then they were led into the refectory, where the monks were sitting at a long table, eating their supper. The abbot was in a carved seat at the top, while a very old monk, perched against a kind of high desk, was reading aloud from The Lives of the Saints.

The children slipped on to the end of a bench. Two plates of soup were put before them, and two hunks of bread, and as they began to eat they saw that five bowls had been put down on the floor beside the wall, and the dogs, with their heads down, were eating hungrily.

After the soup came a dish of fruit. Hal managed to make out the shape of the apples and pears; then they became blurred, and he could only just stop himself from falling forward with his head on his plate.

At the head of the table, the abbot made a sign, and Brother Malcolm came up to the children.

“You must be ready for your beds,” he said.

He led Pippa and Hal out of the room, and Li-Chee, Francine, Honey and Fleck followed close behind them. But not Otto. Otto gave an affectionate goodnight lick to his friends, then padded over to the head of the table and flopped down with his great muzzle across the abbot’s feet.

They followed Brother Malcolm up the stairs and along a silent corridor with a number of identical doors. They were hardly surprised any more when he opened the first of the doors and they found a number of dog beds and a water bowl.

“It’s like Goldilocks, only with dogs instead of bears,” whispered Pippa, and Hal nodded.

There was no need to persuade Li-Chee and Francine and Honey to lie down. They had already chosen their beds and begun to turn themselves round and round, getting ready to settle down for the night. But Fleck stood beside Hal, waiting. He did not seem pathetic or frightened as he had done before when he expected to be separated from his master. It was rather that he felt that it was necessary to look after Hal, and Brother Malcolm picked this up at once.

“Perhaps he’d better stay with you tonight,” he said.

Ten minutes later, Pippa was in bed in one of the small, whitewashed rooms which the monks kept for their guests, and Hal was in another, with Fleck on the floor beside him.

Hal fell asleep at once, but after an hour he was woken by a thump and found Fleck preparing to settle down on top of him.

“No, Fleck, get down,” Hal ordered, looking at the spotless white cotton bedspread and remembering Albina’s agitation about dogs on the coverlet. And as Fleck did not move: “You heard me. Dogs don’t sleep on beds, it’s not allowed.”