Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

“You don’t know what you can do yet; you’ve never had a chance with all those processions and people bowing and scraping. We’re going to try to persuade Julia to act in it. There’s so much we’re going to do at Delderton and you need to be there.”

Karil was silent. There was nothing he wanted more than to join his friends in this strange school of theirs. Because they were his friends. A few days ago they had been specks seen through a telescope and now they mattered more than anyone. But would he be allowed to go? His future was a blank; he had no right to make plans. And yet… Julia had told him about Tally’s determination to come to Bergania.

“She just bullied us all,” Julia had said, “making us invent the Flurry Dance — she seemed to know we had to come.”

So now, when Tally told him that he had to be with them at Delderton, Karil began to wonder if she might be right, and he felt hope begin to stir in him.

“I was so angry with my father when he told me I had to go away to school,” Tally went on. “I really loved being at home, with my aunts and my friends. And London. We had a silver barrage balloon up over our house; it was like having a giant sausage to look after us.”

For a moment both children were silent, thinking about this war which everyone expected and which they had forgotten in the excitement of escaping from Bergania.

“I tried to fight him,” Tally went on, “but he won and I’m glad he did, though I miss him horribly. You’d really like him, Karil. He’s the best doctor for miles; everyone wants to come to him, and of course he doesn’t charge his patients nearly enough, so we’ve always been poor but it doesn’t matter. You can’t imagine how proud I am of him.”

“I’m not surprised. Being a doctor must be wonderful.”

“Yes.” She turned to him. “You could be a doctor if you wanted to.”

“I suppose I could.” And then: “Yes, I could. I could be anything.”

“You could be a great scientist.”

“Or an artist,” said Karil, “or an engineer.”

“You could learn anything at Delderton and get ready. I can’t describe it, Karil, but it’s such an interesting place — you have to come.”

As the train ran on through the night Karil’s dreams, above the sorrow of his father’s death, took flight. He could be a great explorer, discovering the source of an African river; he could invent a cure for cancer, or write a monumental symphony. He could own a rare and exotic animal — an aardvark or a cassowary.

Afterward, looking back on his escape, he thought that this hour in the train, when everything was possible, was the one he would most like to have again.

The luggage van of the train carried the usual consignment of suitcases, trunks, wooden boxes, and other things too bulky to go into the compartments. There was also a crate with a goat in it. The animal’s yellow eyes peered through the bars and occasionally it let off a desperate bleat.

The two ladies who had smuggled themselves into the van were very strangely dressed. One was a woman of most unusual size, wearing a knitted bonnet pulled over her face, and a spotted pinafore. She had taken off her shoes and was rubbing her bruised and hairy toes.

“I’m not spending the night in here,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice. “That animal gives me the creeps.”

“I could pick the lock,” said her companion, who had a feather boa thrown over her shoulder and wore a straw hat trimmed with cherries, “but we’d only run into that blasted bandit standing guard in the corridor. He never lets those kids out of his sight.” She looked up at the ventilation grating. “When we’re over the border into France, we’ll get a radio signal and alert the Gestapo. There’ll be a crowd of people making for the boat and we’ll be able to grab the prince. It’ll be our last chance — once he’s aboard we have to let him go.”

“He won’t get aboard,” said the outsize lady, with a snarl.

The woman with the feather boa groped in her handbag and took out a syringe with which she squirted disinfectant onto her tonsils. “They must be crazy, thinking we’d be trapped in a beer cellar,” she said. “As though we’d drink anywhere with only one exit. Still, that’s the police for you.”

All the same, it had been a rush: driving through the town, finding a secondhand clothes shop, outfitting themselves, and dumping the car.

“I’m hungry,” said the giant in the woolen bonnet.

“Try milking the goat,” said her companion.

And the train thundered on through the night.

It was extraordinary, stumbling out of the stuffy carriage, feeling the wind suddenly on their faces and seeing, in front of them, the harbor and the clean white world of the boats and the seagulls and the lighthouse.

The train had come to rest on the sidings beside the boat they were to catch to England. They only had to cross the tracks and make their way toward the gangway and in two hours they would be home in Britain, and safe. On the way out they had taken it for granted, traveling in a British boat, knowing they were protected, but now the ferry with her brightly painted funnels and cheerful flag seemed to be a vessel that had sailed in from Camelot to carry them over the sea.

The harbor was full of bustle and noise. Fishing boats chugged in and out between the ferries; crates of fish and lobsters were piled up on the quayside waiting for transportation; there were coils of rope and barrels of tar and nets — and everywhere, wheeling and shrieking and diving, the fearless, hungry gulls.

The children shivered in the sudden wind and turned their faces toward the SS Dunedin . They were among the last to leave the train. The first-class passengers had already embarked, with the Countess Frederica in the lead, shouting instructions to her porter as she strode up the gangway.

The other passengers followed, the throng gradually thinning; then came the Deldertonians in Magda’s charge.

“Go straight to the boat,” Matteo had ordered. “No dawdling. I’ll catch you up.”

They did not exactly dawdle, but Borro and Barney needed to examine the recently caught fish; Verity wanted to try out her French on a good-looking fisherman, and Tally was telling Karil about the white cliffs of Dover.

“They’re not really as white as all that, but all the same when you see them you get a lump in your throat.”

Matteo watched them go and paced the train once more. Satisfied that the coast was clear, he picked up his bundle and jumped down onto the platform. He could see the children ahead of him. They had reached the boat at last.

He was just crossing the track when he heard the sound of pounding footsteps and turned to see two extraordinary-looking people running toward him. One was huge and massively built, and the remains of a spotted apron clung to his baggy trousers. The other was smaller, wearing the remnants of a feather boa, and there was a scar on his upper lip.

They were almost level with him, running hell for leather for the boat in a last effort to snatch the prince.

Matteo kicked aside a fire bucket, threw down his pack… and charged.

The children, with Magda, had begun to make their way up the gangway. Standing near the top was the first mate in a smart blue uniform with brass buttons and a peaked cap. And on either side of him were two men in black leather coats and jackboots. Their hats were pulled down low, and what could be seen of their faces made the blood run cold.