Eva Ibbotson - The Abominables

Con was beginning to understand. “Was that why you wanted me to be grown up? So that I could help you to take your yetis to England?”

“So that you could take them for me. I’m far too old to travel. I shall die here in this valley where I have lived so happily.”

Con’s mind was racing ahead, thinking out the yetis’ journey.

“It would have to be a secret, I suppose?”

“Indeed, yes,” said Lady Agatha. “The strictest secret. It would be most dangerous if anyone came upon them before they were safe at Farley Towers.”

Con was silent, his forehead furrowed. “Do yetis hibernate?” he said at last. “Go to sleep through the winter, I mean, like bears?”

“Not hibernate, exactly,” said Lady Agatha, “but in severe weather conditions with extreme cold they can go into a sort of coma. Their heartbeat slows down, and they don’t need food or drink. They can survive almost anything. No yeti has ever died of exposure.”

“Well, in that case,” said Con, “I think I can see how to get them to England without anyone knowing.”

And he told her his plan. Once a week, said Con, huge, refrigerated lorries came all the way from Britain to the Hotel Himalaya, trucking in frozen meat for the visitors who were too picky to try the local delicacies — sour cheese smoked in yak dung, or tea with rancid butter floating in it. Usually these lorries returned with a load of spices, or cloth, or goatskins that the Bukhimese wanted to sell in Britain. “But just once,” said Con, “if I can square it with the driver, I reckon it could return with yetis.”

Lady Agatha stared at him. Then: “I have something that might help persuade the driver,” she said.

She disappeared into her stone hut and came back with a little bag made out of the hem of her flannel nightdress. “Open it!” she commanded.

Con took the bag, which was surprisingly heavy, and undid the string. The metal inside, catching the sunlight, was unmistakable.

“Gold,” he said wonderingly.

“I dredged it up from the river,” said Lady Agatha. “It’s silly stuff but I thought it might come in useful. I need hardly tell you that no one must ever know where it came from.” She closed the bag and sat down again on her tussock. “There’s one thing you’ve forgotten,” she said. “Where would you hide the yetis till the lorry came?”

Con grinned. “In the last place that anyone would look for them. In the bridal suite of the hotel. It’s a terribly grand set of rooms on the top floor, quite cut off from the rest of the hotel, with its own lift and everything. The Prince of Pettelsdorf booked it this week for his honeymoon, but he’s canceled. My sister knows where the keys are; she’d help me smuggle them in.”

Lady Agatha was silent. “It’s quite impossible, of course. Quite out of the question that I could let a child as young as you take on the responsibility of such a journey.”

But Con wasn’t so easily beaten. “How old were you when you came to the valley?” he asked innocently.

Lady Agatha blushed. “Older than you.” There was a pause. “Well, not much older … Oh, dear, I don’t know what to say.”

“Then say yes,” begged Con.

This time the pause seemed endless. “All right,” said Lady Agatha at last. “You can take my yetis for me. I’ll say it. Yes.”

Over breakfast the next day Lady Agatha broke the news to the yetis, and they spent the rest of the morning crying.

When yetis cry, just as when they smile, they do not hold back. They do not sniffle or hiccup or gulp. They weep rivers.

Now they cried so hard that their fur became all dark and wet, so that they looked more like huge walruses or seals than Abominable Snowmen.

They cried because they were leaving Lady Agatha, whom they loved so dearly, and the beautiful valley of Nanvi Dar, where they had lived all their lives. They cried because they were leaving the trees and the birds and the flowers, and they cried because the yaks would be sad without them.

“I will be able to take Hubert?” Ambrose asked anxiously.

“Now, Ambrose,” said Lady Agatha gently, “I’ve told you time and time again that this is going to be a difficult and dangerous journey. How do you think Con can take a yak? Especially a yak that doesn’t even know its own mother.”

So that of course started Ambrose off again. But when they had cried so much that there was hardly a tear left in any of them, the yetis secretly began to get rather excited about their journey.

“Tell us again about Farley Towers,” Ambrose begged. And Lady Agatha closed her eyes, and in a dreamy voice she told them about the great vine that grew on the south wall, about the yew trees clipped into the most beautiful shapes, about the big peaceful library with over five thousand books bound in rich, dark leather and the carved four-poster bed in which Queen Elizabeth had slept and in which Ambrose might be allowed to sleep, too, if only he was a good yeti and stopped crying .

While the yetis went up and down the valley saying, “Good-bye, juniper bush,” “Good-bye, bird’s nest,” “Good-bye, beetles,” Lady Agatha told Con some of the things she thought he ought to know, like what to do when Grandma’s knees went under her and about Clarence not having a brain and about Lucy’s sleepwalking. She told him that Uncle Otto liked having something rubbed into his bald patch once a day (“Anything will do,” she said. “It’s just to show you care.”) and that Ambrose, although he looked abominable, definitely was not — quite the opposite.

Above all she warned Con to be very careful, because the yetis, though the gentlest of creatures, did not always know their own strength and could easily break someone’s arm while just shaking hands with them. And she showed him some scars she had got in the early days before the yetis had understood that people were so frail and breakable.

Then she called all the yetis together and made a speech. She said how painful it was for her to part with them, but that she knew Con would be like a father to them and that they would be happy at Farley Towers. She reminded them how wrong it was to use Bad Language, or Forget to Do to Others as They Would Be Done By, and that they were to be sure to chew everything they ate thirty-two times so as not to get Lumps in the Stomach. “And now,” she said, “I’m going to give each of you a present to take away.”

“’Esent,” said Clarence excitedly. “’Esent, ’esent!” He always seemed to understand things like that.

Lady Agatha turned and went into the little stone hut that had been her home since she first came to the valley. There she kept some of the things she had been wearing when Father carried her away, which were the only treasures she had.

“Grandma first,” said Lady Agatha when she came out. And she gave Grandma the delicate, fleecy white shawl that had been round her shoulders when she slept.

Grandma really loved it. It was far too small to wrap around her shoulders, but she could use it as a headscarf and tie it under her chin. It was a crochet shawl with big openwork holes so that little tufts of gray and ginger hair sprouted out of the center of each rosette, giving her a most distinguished look. To Uncle Otto Lady Agatha gave the woolly nightcap she had been wearing when she was carried away. With a couple of hairpins, she fastened it with her own hands over Otto’s bald patch — a most tactful present, because even if the bald patch did grow bigger, no one, now, would ever know.

For Lucy, Lady Agatha had kept a golden locket with a picture of Queen Victoria and all her nine children in it. She had made an extra-long cord of braided yak’s hair for it, and when Lucy put it on, everybody agreed that nothing more beautiful than Queen Victoria and all her children nestling against the furry dome of Lucy’s stomach had ever been seen in Nanvi Dar.