Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

She found him in his room, looking down a microscope on the windowsill, but when he saw her tearstained face he pulled out a chair for her at the wooden table.

“I see you have a problem,” he said. “A proper one, for yourself.”

“Yes, I do.” She felt better now that she was taking some action. “It’s… I want you to tell the headmaster not to write to my father about the fare to Bergania. Verity says it’s thirty pounds — that’s right, isn’t it?”

“It sounds about right. Why?”

“Well, I know my father can’t afford it, and I don’t want Daley to ask him in case he… I don’t want him to be asked. I don’t have to go. I can show one of the others how to take my place.”

“I see. But you want to go, don’t you?”

Tally wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Yes, I do. I wanted to go from the minute I saw the travelogue about Bergania. But—”

“Why?”

Matteo had spoken sharply. Tally blinked at him. “I don’t know really. It’s very beautiful… the mountains and the river… And the procession. Usually processions are boring, but the king…”

“Yes?” Matteo prompted her. “What about the king?”

“He looked so strong and… brave — except I know you can’t really look brave just for a moment in a film. Only he did. But tired, too. And there was the prince… he was hidden by plumes… feathers all over his helmet. I was sorry for him.” She shook her head. “I don’t know… there was a big bird flying above the cathedral.”

“A black kite, probably,” said Matteo. “They’re common in that part of the world.” But he seemed to be thinking about something else. Then: “I’ll speak to the headmaster.”

“You’ll tell him not to write to my father about the money?”

“Yes, I’ll tell him that.”

As Matteo knocked on the door of Daley’s study, four children came out — Julia and Barney and Borro and Tod.

“You’ve had a deputation, I see,” said Matteo. “Not connected with the trip to Bergania?”

“Yes,” said the headmaster. “They want the school to pay for Tally’s fare to Bergania — they don’t think her father could afford it. I must say that girl has made some very good friends in the short time she has been with us.”

“And will the school pay it?”

Daley looked worried. “The trouble is if you do that kind of thing once you have to do it again, and we simply don’t have funds for that.”

“So it would have to come out of the Travel Fund. The fund that exists for worthy cultural exchanges to broaden the minds of the young and all that.”

Daley looked at him blankly. “There isn’t such a fund.”

“There is now,” said Matteo. “I shall pay in thirty pounds this afternoon.” And as the headmaster continued to stare at him he said, “Don’t worry, I have the money — after all, I got paid last month. Who are you sending with them?”

“I thought Magda should go — her German is fluent, of course, and she also speaks Italian and French. But one will need somebody who can actually cook because they’ll be camping some of the time, and I can’t send Clemmy — I shall need her here to look after the children left behind in Magda’s house. And I’ll want a man as well. O’Hanrahan is rehearsing a play for the younger ones and the professor is too old. I thought maybe David Prosser.” The headmaster sighed. “It has to be someone who can be spared.”

Matteo nodded. Prosser could certainly be spared. He was famous for being the most boring man in the school, and for being in love with Clemency — but for not much else. There was a pause. Then: “I can cook,” said Matteo.

“Good God!” said Daley, staring at him. “Don’t tell me you meant to go yourself all along?”

“Only if the children had been serious. Only if they really meant to work. Not just Tally, all of them.”

“And if they hadn’t been?”

Matteo shrugged. “Who knows?” he said.

It was a very large bed — a four-poster draped in the colors of

Bergania — red, green, and white. Green was for the fir trees that hugged Bergania’s mountains, red for the glowing sunsets behind the peaks, white for the everlasting snows. On the head-board were carved a crown and the words THE TRUTH SHALL SET THEE FREE, which was the country’s motto.

The bed was too large for the boy who now woke in it — but then everything in the palace was too large for him. His bedroom could have housed a railway carriage; in his bathtub one could have washed a company of soldiers. Even his name was longer than he needed it to be: Karil Alexander Ivo Donatien, Duke of Eschacht, Margrave of Munzen, Crown Prince of Bergania.

He was twelve years old and small for his age, with brown eyes and brown hair and an expression one does not often see in the portraits of princes: the look of someone still searching for where he belongs.

Now he stretched and sat up in bed and thought about the day that faced him, which was no different from other days. Lessons in the morning, inspecting something or opening something with his father in the afternoon, then more lessons or homework… and always surrounded by tutors and courtiers and governesses.

For a moment he looked out at the mountains outside the windows. On one peak, the Quartz Needle, the snow never melted entirely, even now in early summer. He imagined getting up and escaping and walking alone up and up through the fir woods, across the meadows where there were marmots and eagles… and up, up till he reached the everlasting snow and could stand there, alone in the cold clear air.

There was a tap on the door and a footman entered with his fruit juice and two rusks on a silver tray. Not one rusk, not three, always two. After him came the majordomo with the timetable for the day, and then another servant to lay out his clothes: his jodhpurs and riding jacket, his fencing things, and the uniform of the Munzen Guards which Karil particularly hated. The stand-up collar rubbed his neck, the white trousers had to be kept spotless, and the plumes on the helmet got in his eyes.

And now came the woman who would scold him and hover over him and criticize him all day. Frederica, Countess of Aveling, was tall and bony and dressed entirely in black, because someone in the Royal Houses of Europe had always died. She was in fact a human being, but she might as easily have been a gargoyle that had stepped down from the roof of a dark cathedral. Her ferocious nose, her grim mouth, and jagged chin looked as though they could well be carved in stone.

Officially she was the First Lady of the Household, but she was also the prince’s second cousin and had come over from England after the death of the prince’s mother in a riding accident when he was four years old.

Queen Alice of Bergania had been British — the daughter of the proud and snobbish Duke of Rottingdene, who lived in London, in a large gray mansion not far from Buckingham Palace. Although English was the second language of the Berganian court, the duke did not trust foreigners to supervise the education and behavior of his grandson and had sent the fiercest of his unmarried relatives to see that the boy behaved correctly and with dignity at all times — and never forgot exactly who he was.

In the palace, and to Karil himself, she was known as the Scold, because scolding was all she seemed to do.

“Good morning, Your Highness,” she said, and curtsied. She always curtsied when she greeted him in the morning, and from the depth of her curtsy Karil could tell how badly she was going to scold him. The more displeased she was, the deeper did she sink toward the ground. This morning she practically sat down on the floor, and sure enough she began to scold him straightaway.