Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

“No,” said Tally, “you’ll be caught.” And then: “There are better ways of getting Karil out of the country.”

Matteo was about to cut her short. Yet it was uncanny, the feeling she had had about Bergania from the start. Perhaps she deserved to be listened to.

“Karil said he had to trust you,” Tally went on. “Well, you have to trust us. All of us. Barney and Julia and Borro… even Verity.”

Matteo waited.

“It’s quite simple,” she said. “Karil must become a Deldertonian.”

As soon as she returned to the campsite Tally was surrounded.

“Where have you been?” everyone wanted to know. And then, lowering their voices: “Did you find him?”

Tally nodded and told them what had happened.

“Matteo’s with him. But we have to get him down from the hill and into our tent. And then smuggle him back to England. We’re going to pretend he’s one of us.”

Magda frowned. “Does Matteo agree to this?” she asked.

“He didn’t like it, but there’s no other way. Matteo wanted to take him alone over the mountains, but they’ll already be watching the borders.”

“There have been announcements the whole time on the loudspeakers,” said Barney. “Everybody is to keep off the streets.”

“But do they say anything about keeping off the mountains?” asked Tally.

“How are we going to bring him down without being seen?” Julia was very worried. “I suppose in the dark—”

“No, we’re not going to wait for the dark. And we’re not going to creep about or slink. I’ve had an idea.”

Julia sighed. “I wish you’d stop having ideas.”

“This one is about trust. Karil said he’ll trust Matteo, and I told Matteo he’ll have to trust us. And we’ll have to trust the other children here. We’ll have to tell them what we’re doing so that they can help us and know what to do.”

“And what are we going to do?” asked Borro.

“We’re going to do what we came to Bergania to do. We’re going to dance.”

There was a pause while the others stared at her.

“All of us,” Tally went on. “In full costume. And we’re going to sing, too, and maybe recite — I don’t know exactly; we may have to improvise. It’ll be a sort of homage to the king, a… a rite for his passing. Only the point is, there’ll be so many of us that no one will notice if we come down with one more person. There’s a meadow by the entrance to the hunting ground that’s almost flat — that will make a kind of dancing floor. We’ll wear our Flurry clothes and make sure that we’re closest to the entrance, and while the ceremony is going on, Karil can slip out and join us. Only we’ll need some clothes for him.”

“I’ve got a spare shirt,” said Tod eagerly. “And he can have my white trousers — I’ll find something else.”

He was desperately keen to help the prince.

“He can have my hat,” said Kit. “It’s got the most stuff on it. It’ll hide his face.”

“There’th a lot of ivy under the bridge,” said Augusta. “We can drape our headth so that you can hardly see our faces. Ivy’s uthed a lot for funeralth.”

But the most important thing was to get the other groups to join in, because Tally’s plan depended on a swirling mass of people in which one extra dancer would not be noticed and it was this that everyone was worried about.

“There must be more than a hundred children here,” said Julia. “We can’t trust so many children not to give anything away.”

“Why not?” said Tally. “Why should anyone betray the prince when they know he is in danger? Why do there have to be traitors?”

“Not traitors,” said Barney, “but idiots who blab.”

“We have to trust them,” repeated Tally. “We have to. If they don’t know what’s happening, they won’t be able to cover up if anything goes wrong.”

But the others still looked doubtful.

“Do we know them well enough?” Borro wondered.

“How long does it take to know whether people are decent?” Tally demanded. “One can make friends in a minute. Look at the little German girl with the pigtails around her head and Conchita? They only knew each other for a day and Conchita’s still crying. When I was six I fell on the pavement outside my father’s surgery and Kenny came past driving Primrose and stopped to pick me up — and that was that. I’d trust him with my life.” She looked around entreatingly. “Only we haven’t got much time,” she said. “Matteo is sure it was the Gestapo who organized the shooting of the king, so the prince is in dreadful danger.”

“I could ask Lorenzo,” said Verity — and for the first time she spoke about the Italian boy she had been flirting with without her usual simper.

“I’ll talk to Jacqueline,” said Borro, thinking of the French girl who had been so informative regarding the milk yield of her mother’s dairy cows.

Barney said the Scandinavians would join in, he was sure. “They’re really keen on justice and things being fair.”

“The Spaniards did that lovely saraband when they were practicing,” said Julia. “That would work beautifully for a funeral dance.”

“You see, we do know them,” said Tally joyfully. “Even after two days we know they’ll help. Only we must hurry — any minute now they could be closing in on the prince.”

And they did hurry. Even Augusta who didn’t speak much because of her lisp, even Kit who was so easily frightened of people, ran to the other tents. Magda watched them go, crouching on her camp stool, desperately worried. The whole plan seemed mad and dangerous to her, but the headmaster had made it clear before they left Delderton that it was Matteo who was in charge of the trip, and if Matteo knew what was going on, there was nothing she could do.

Not all the teams could come — some of them had packed up already, some had teachers who refused. But less than an hour later, a most unexpected cavalcade set off across the park and made its way up the hill.

The Deldertonians were in the lead; they had draped their hats in so much ivy that it was almost impossible to see their faces. Borro, who was the hobbyhorse rider, carried a bundle shaped like the medieval bladders that jesters used to hit each other with. It contained the clothes that Karil would have to change into before he joined the dancers.

Behind them came the others. Some of the boys had found black scarves, which they had tied around their throats; some of the girls wore black ribbons around their sleeves or in their hair.

At first they walked in silence. Then from the group of children in red skirts and boleros there came a lone voice, singing a song: fado, the saddest, most heartrending music in the world.

And with this lone song, the whole ceremony became real. The children did not forget that they were here on a quest to save the prince, but they remembered, too, that a just and noble king had died that day.

When the voice of the singer died away, there came a hymn from the heartlands of Sweden, sung by the children in blue and white, and after that, from the Yugoslavs, the mournful wail of the fur-covered horn, like an animal in pain.

And as they made their way up the hill, every single child in the throng knew exactly what they were doing and why they were there and was proud to be helping the boy whose father had died so cruelly before their eyes.

“Look!” said Herr Keller, standing on the terrace of the Blue Ox. “It’s the foreign children.”