Eva Ibbotson - The Dragonfly Pool

“Would I get in?” Tally had asked. “I’d have to get a scholarship.”

“If you work like a maniac I’ll get you in,” he’d said.

And he had kept his promise.

Their rooms in the palace were crowded, for everyone wanted to come and see the ceremony in which the Berganians finally shook off the dreadful years of Hitler’s occupation and took the government back into their own hands. Daley was there, and Magda, and Anneliese, the German girl with the auburn curls who had been at the festival. Even the two little girls who had started the rumpus on the hill that probably saved Karil’s life had managed to make it.

VE Day, when the end of the war in Europe was celebrated, had seen the Deldertonians spilling out of school onto any train or bus or car that was available to take them to London, along with what seemed the whole population of the free world. They had climbed the railings of Rottingdene House for a view of the dancing and the revelry and the bonfires — and no one shooed them away, for the duke’s old home was now a tax office, and people swore that the ghost of the old man stomped through the house at night cursing and swearing.

The city had suffered cruelly when the air raids came at last, but already grass grew in the bomb craters and the spaces between the ruined buildings had become picnic sites.

In the following month there had been two weddings — one nice, one nasty. The nice one was between Clemmy and Francis Lakeland. It was held at Delderton on a wonderful day in June and was one of those occasions that nobody forgot, with the aunts crying in a most satisfactory way from the moment that the bride appeared.

The other wedding was ostentatious, pompous, and pointlessly extravagant at a time when England was still in the grip of shortages. This was the wedding of Carlotta and the Prince of Transjordania. The nastiness was not the prince’s fault, he was a modest young man, but Carlotta had to have everything — a vast guest list, costly presents, a reception in St. James’s Palace. Karil had been invited and asked Tally what to send her as a wedding present.

“Rat poison?” she had suggested.

In the end he did not go, and Carlotta set off with the Scold and her parents (who had had enough of their Scottish island) for a life of luxury in one of the Middle East’s wealthiest states.

Before they left, Karil had a long talk with the Scold. Now that his own life was so happy he was able to value the care she had given him, and she went off contentedly, knowing she was no longer misunderstood.

The other uncles fared less well. Nobody invited them back to sit on their former thrones, so Uncle Dmitri continued to work as a doorman and Uncle Alfonso went on driving taxis.

The new constitution was to be celebrated in the great hall of the palace and the Deldertonians were getting ready, helping each other with pins and buckles and straps. After six years of clothes rationing they were not really ready to take part in a gala — but Bergania, like the rest of Europe, was no longer interested in show. Most of the citizens wore national dress, and whatever else was lacking, there were always the old flags and the bunting that had been kept in their attics — and above all the flowers which grew so abundantly in that lovely land.

Karil was not with his friends.

“I think we should leave him to himself,” Tally had said when they arrived. “The whole thing’s going to be an awful strain for him.”

So Karil had watched by his father’s grave and then disappeared up into the mountains, getting up the strength to face the ceremony.

The waitress who had stared at them in the Blue Ox when they first came to Bergania put her head around the door to see if they needed any help. She was back in the palace now as housekeeper, and when they said they could manage, she said, “Well, I’d better get back to him. If only he’d keep still —and he absolutely won’t wear a sash. Just one sash across his chest to make him stand out — is that so much to ask? Really he’s impossible, and I’ve told him so. Sometimes I wonder whether he won’t turn tail and run at the last minute.”

All of them wondered this — whether they would get him onto the platform to play his part on this historic day.

The party from Delderton had seats in the front row. Uncle Fritz had retired from politics and was sitting next to Magda. They had found a philosopher who was even sadder and harder to understand than Schopenhauer and were going to collaborate on a book about his life. Poor Heribert had not returned from the war, but Magda, who was helping Uncle Fritz with the Delderton Summer Festival, had quite stopped thinking about marriage.

The delegates made their way into the hall and took their seats. There were scarcely any uniforms; it was ordinary men and women now who represented their country in parliament: teachers and doctors, lawyers and farmers had been elected by the people to speak for them.

Then a man in a dark suit, with touches of gray in his black hair, came out of a side door and made his way to the place of honor: a carved chair in the center of the semicircle.

The waitress had not persuaded him to wear a sash or anything else that would pick him out from the other people on the platform. The only decoration he wore was a medal given to him by the king for services to Great Britain in the war — the George Cross. Yet he did stand out: on account of his height, his air of authority, perhaps a certain weariness, for it had been a long war and he had suffered in it.

When they had first come to ask Matteo to be the president of the new Republic of Bergania, he had laughed in their faces.

“You are joking, of course,” he said.

He was back at Delderton, busy setting up an experiment to establish the egg-laying preferences of crested newts.

But the delegation was not joking. Bergania had decided to become a republic, but they wanted a president. Not a figure of power, like the American president, but a figurehead who would coordinate the work of the assembly and represent the country. They pointed out that other European states had done the same thing, appointing playwrights or respected scientists to preside over the assembly, and they made it clear that as a Berganian, a friend of the former king, and a war hero, he was the perfect choice.

Matteo continued to say no — but he made a mistake. He returned to Bergania to help them find another candidate, and this was his undoing. He returned to the mountains that he and Johannes had climbed as children, to the streams they had fished, to the forests in which they had roamed.

There is a saying that the landscape in which a child spends the first seven years of its life will leave a mark it cannot escape. A child brought up by the sea will always carry a longing for the ocean; a town child, reared to the sound of traffic and the warm bustle of neighbors, will never quite settle in the silence of the countryside.

So it was with Matteo. Standing on the snowcapped peaks of his homeland, breathing in the pine-scented wind, he was caught.

“I’ll do it for five years,” he had said, “and then you must find someone else.”

The hall erupted into applause. The secretary announced the historic inauguration of the new Republic of Bergania. And the president rose to make a speech.