Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

Then he stopped, drew in his breath — and threw himself into the old man’s arms. “Oh, Uncle Fritz, I never thought you’d be able to get away.” And then: “Have you brought him?”

Uncle Fritz nodded. “He’s in the car.”

He led Karil to the shabby limousine and opened the door — and the last of the Outer Mongolian pedestal dogs lifted his head from the seat and wagged his tail. Committing a dreadful crime seemed to have done him good. He looked younger and fitter.

“Poor little murderer,” said Uncle Fritz, scratching his ears.

For it was Pom-Pom who had killed the Duke of Rottingdene.

Trying to get away from the duke as he stamped and raged and swore, the little dog had taken shelter on the hearth rug in front of the fireplace in the Red Salon. The room was usually quiet during the day, and Pom-Pom was fast asleep when the duke came rampaging in, looking for his hearing aid and cursing the servants who must have stolen it and sold it at a vast profit. He started to pull open drawers and throw sofa cushions onto the ground, and in his fury he knocked over a heavy brass lamp.

The lamp clattered to the floor and Pom-Pom leaped up terrified, just as the duke staggered backward, stepped on him, and crashed with his full weight into the marble edge of the chimney piece.

There was nothing to be done. By the time the uncles came running, the duke was lying on the floor with a fractured skull — and quite definitely dead.

But that was only the beginning.

For when the lawyers and the accountants came and the duke’s affairs were looked into, it was discovered not only that he had absolutely no money but that he had been cheating the bank, borrowing money and embezzling it.

And the bank did what banks do when this happens; they took over all his possessions, including his house and his furniture — indeed everything he owned.

Karil came back for the funeral but he returned straightaway to Delderton. He had inherited his grandfather’s title, but anyone addressing him as “Your Grace” got thoroughly snubbed, and all he wanted was never to hear the name of Rottingdene again. Fortunately the uncles were too busy worrying about what would happen to them and their families to want to look after him.

And even if they had wanted to keep Karil they could not have done so, for by then Matteo’s plan had succeeded and he had arranged for the Berganian government-in-exile to declare Karil as its ward.

But Rottingdene House now emptied as everyone left to avoid the bailiffs the bank had put in to wind up the duke’s affairs. The servants were dismissed and the governesses went off to stay with relatives who were even harder up than they were themselves. And poor Princess Natalia went mad.

After she found Pom-Pom lying squashed under the duke, she scooped up the little dog (who was not dead though he ought to have been) and started rushing through the emptying rooms wailing and crying.

“Oh, when will the messenger come?” she moaned. “When… when?”

She was still rampaging through the house a few days later when a tall, distinguished-looking stranger came up the steps, and with a screech that echoed to the rafters she ran toward him.

“You have come!” she cried joyfully. “You are the messenger! You have come to take my Pom-Pom to his bride.”

And before he could protest, she had thrust the little dog into Uncle Fritz’s arms.

So now Pom-Pom had become the mascot for the government-in-exile, and it was clear that Uncle Fritz was already very fond of him.

“And the uncles?” asked Karil as they scooped Pom-Pom out of the car. “Are they all right?”

The minister for culture nodded.

“They’ve all got jobs. Uncle Dmitri is a doorman at the Ritz and Uncle Alfonso is driving taxis. And Franz Heinrich is going up to an island in the Outer Hebrides as gamekeeper to a Scottish landowner.”

“Goodness! I can’t see Carlotta on a Scottish island.”

“No. Carlotta couldn’t either. She threw some remarkable tantrums. But Countess Frederica has got a job as adviser to the aunt of the Prince of Transjordania, who has a house in London. She wants someone to live in and show her how things are done in British society, and the countess has accepted as long as she can bring Carlotta.”

They had reached the courtyard and a number of children came to pat the dog, but Uncle Fritz’s mind was elsewhere.

“These buildings,” he said, looking around, “do you know what happens to them in the holidays?”

“I don’t think anything does,” said Karil. And the children standing around agreed that the buildings stayed empty.

The minister of culture’s eyes lit up. “Good,” he said. Good. They would make an excellent center for a festival. Not folk dancing perhaps but drama or music…

The hall was full, everyone was in their seats, when a large cream-colored limousine drew up under the archway. Cars like that were seldom seen at Delderton, where the parents didn’t go in for obvious luxury and were more likely to arrive on a tandem or hitch-hike to their destination. Two people got out — a woman wearing a hat with a veil and a silver fox fur over her shoulder, and a small man in a raincoat.

Everyone was in the hall except for one of the maids, who had been stationed by the door to collect latecomers.

“Just take us straight in,” ordered the woman, talking with a slight American accent. “We’d like to sit near the front.”

“I’ll do my best,” said the maid, looking hard at the newcomers, “but it’s very full.”

She led them into the hall and, as luck would have it, there were two vacant seats in the third row. Followed by disapproving stares, for not only were they late, but parents at Delderton did not wrap themselves in the pelts of dead animals, the elegant woman and the small man in the raincoat slipped into their seats.

And the curtain went up.

It went up on a ravishing Greek landscape — flowers and a view of light blue sea and streaming sunshine — and on Persephone and her maidens playing with a painted ball.

Whatever was wrong with Verity’s acting, she looked lovely, with her tousled dark hair and her bare feet and the delicate ankles she set such store by, and from Verity’s parents and the parents of the girls who were her companions there came a sigh of pleasure.

Musicians came in from the wings and Persephone led her girls into a dance. One of the maidens, a very small junior, stumbled and for a moment it looked as if she would fall, but Verity scooped her up and dusted her off with scarcely a break in the rhythm, and the people in the audience smiled, thinking the mishap had been meant.

The music died away. Persephone was left alone to gather flowers with which to bind her hair. She picked crocuses and lilies and asphodels — and then bent down to the narcissus with its multiple heads and roots deep in the ground: the flower that had been grown as a lure for the innocent girl.

The sky darkened. There was a rumble of thunder, faint at first, then growing stronger… a bolt of lightning and a grim moaning as of sufferers in the bowels of the earth… and with a final crash, the Lord of the Underworld burst from the rocks. This was no pantomime villain but a powerful ruler — there had been enough children at hand to coach Ronald Peabody in the true bearing of a king — and seizing the pale and trembling girl, he drew her slowly, relentlessly, down into the terrifying dark. In the moment that the light was lost to her forever, she emitted a single, piercing cry — and then all was silence.