Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

Barney was standing by a large window at the end of a corridor, and as Tally came to join him she saw what he meant.

The window faced the town below, and one could make out everything. The river with its sheltering lime trees and the people taking the air; the spires of the cathedral and the clock tower and — amazingly clear — the field with their tents and the practice dance floor… even the marble statue of the queen.

“If I lived here I’d spend most of the time looking out of the window,” he said.

Tally gave a little shudder.

“What’s the matter?”

Tally didn’t answer. She had remembered the woman in black and her gaunt arm as she pulled away someone who was probably doing just what she was doing — looking out.

He climbed steadily; there was no need to seek the way. The fifteen years he had spent away from his country had not blotted out any memories.

The sights were familiar: the way the clouds were massed above the high peaks, the exact shade of azure of the sky, the shape of the clump of pines that edged the meadow he was crossing. The flowers were the same: the vetches in their tangle of blue and yellow, the delicate harebells growing out of sparse pockets of earth between the rocks, and now, as he gained height, the edelweiss, which no one was supposed to pick then, as now, because it was so rare.

There had been a burrow by the side of the path made by a family of marmots — and the burrow was still there. A kestrel circled, lost height to show its chestnut plumage, and rose again. As a boy he had watched such birds a hundred times.

The sounds were the same, too: the soughing of the wind in the pines, the droning of the bees clustering in the clover. And the scents, too, were utterly familiar: pine needles warmed by the sun, the tang of resin…

His feet made their own way, recognizing now the roughness of stone, now the softness of the earth as he walked through a patch of woodland. His time in the Amazon, in the Mato Grosso, might never have been.

Now he could see the hut; not the kind of place a woman of such great age should be living all the year round — isolated, exposed to the weather, often snowed up in the winter — but no one had been able to persuade the king’s old nurse to come down off the mountain and settle in the town.

He left the path and followed the track to the hut. For a moment he was afraid. She had been old when he left Bergania — anything could have happened.

Then the door opened and she came out carrying a basket of washing. She had not seen him yet, and he watched as she began to hang up her aprons — checked aprons in red and white, hemmed with a row of cross-stitch. She had always worn them to work and suddenly he remembered the comfort of their clean and starchy smell.

But now he moved out of the shadow of the tree and she saw him. Would she remember, after so long?

She remembered. She looked at him in silence — she did not shout or exclaim or drop the pillowcase she was putting on the line. She just looked. Then as he came up to her, she opened her arms and called him by his name.

The man who sat in the best bedroom of the Blue Ox could not be mistaken for anyone but a very high-ranking army officer — and a Nazi officer at that. Though he was still eating breakfast, Reichsgruppen Führer Anton Stiefelbreich was fully dressed in a khaki jacket so covered in medals that they dazzled and caught the eye, and afterward people who met him never quite remembered his face. His cap lay ready beside him, adorned with the swastika of the party he now served, and he wore jackboots even while buttering his roll.

As much as Karil detested his uniforms, with their scratchy collars and showy buttons and infuriating plumes, so did Colonel Stiefelbreich love his. Back in Berlin, where he now worked at the headquarters of the Gestapo, he had a whole cupboard of uniforms. That was one of the many things he valued in his new job — the job of stirring up trouble in those countries that did not understand how important it was to cooperate fully with Herr Hitler’s dreams for a united Europe. United, of course, under the German flag.

And to impress foreigners one had to be properly dressed. The colonel was waiting for Gambetti, the Berganian foreign minister, who was coming to see him on a private visit here in his room. Meanwhile, to make certain that his bodyguards were in place, he walked silently to the door and opened it.

The two men who had been sitting in chairs in the corridor got to their feet.

“Got any jobs for us to do, Colonel?”

“Not at the moment. But stay in position — I’m expecting the foreign minister. Make sure no one follows him upstairs.”

The two men Colonel Stiefelbreich had recruited as his bodyguards could not have been more different, nor were they simply bodyguards. They were more by way of being spies and sleuths and he used them for all the work that he wanted to be kept secret.

One of them was good at his job simply because of his enormous size and strength. He was one of those people who seemed to be made of something inorganic like iron or stone — in fact his huge, stupid face might well have been carved from granite, except that granite, when it catches the light, sometimes sparkles, and the thug’s face had never sparkled in its life. He was known as Earless, because he had lost his left ear in a fight. He had lost a lot of other things, too — the tip of one finger, part of a nostril, and more teeth than he could count — but it was his ear he worried about because his wife, Belinda, had been fond of it. She was a tiny blonde woman and Earless, who would throttle someone with his bare hands without thinking twice about it, was completely soppy about Belinda.

The other man was called Theophilus Fallaise, and he had been brought up in a library where his father was Keeper of the Books. One can read about all sorts of wonderful things in a library but the things that the young Theophilus had chosen to read about were not wonderful. He read about the tortures they had used in the olden days: the rack and the iron maiden and thumbscrews — and about the punishments they had used in foreign countries like China, where people were driven mad by having water dripped on to their skull.

The library was in a castle belonging to an eccentric nobleman in a country about which Theophilus never spoke, and because the boy had hardly ever gone outdoors, but only deeper and deeper into the basements in search of more and more horrible books about inflicting pain, he had grown up very unhealthy. His skin was pale and clammy, he blinked in the light and his upper lip was lifted by a wrinkled scar that parted to show a filled gold tooth.

But as a sleuth and a spy he was second to none. He could see in the dark, because of the years he had spent underground, and wriggle through the narrowest spaces — and there was nothing he didn’t know about the more silent and sinister ways of getting rid of someone.

The two bodyguards did not like each other. Theophilus thought that Earless was a stupid thug — which he was — and Earless thought that Theophilus was a slimy creep — which was true also — but the two men made a good pair. One had brains and the other had brawn — and Stiefelbreich had taken a lot of trouble to get hold of them for his latest assignment in Bergania.

Baron Gambetti arrived in Stiefelbreich’s room through the back entrance of the Blue Ox. He was extremely nervous; his goatee beard trembled slightly and he was sweating, but when he entered the room and saw the colonel he took heart. The bodyguards at the door, the glittering medals, the man’s air of importance were reassuring. In encouraging the Gestapo to come to the aid of Bergania he was doing the right thing, Gambetti told himself. He was saving his country from the king’s foolish obstinacy. The future lay with the people that Stiefelbreich represented.