The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood Read online

  “I’m not sure I’ll go,” Beatrix said apologetically. She was shy and self-conscious in crowds, and avoided large social gatherings when she could. “There’s so much to be done here, and I promised my mother that I would only stay away a fortnight. If the weather is fine, I should very much like to get into the garden.”

  “Nonsense,” Sarah said decidedly. “You have to go, and that’s all there is to it.” She glanced at the clock and stood up. “My buns have risen, so I’m off to put them into the oven. Lovely to have you back, Bea. Do get another cat, will you, before I have rats in my bread bin? Ta, Dim. See you at Raven Hall.”

  “I’m off, too,” Dimity said, as Sarah bustled out the door. “I must go down to the school this morning and look for the May box.”

  “The May box?” Beatrix asked curiously.

  “The crowns and May Pole ribbons,” Dimity said. She sighed. “Mrs. Peachy always manages the May Pageant, which is just a week away. But she’s gone to Edinburgh to help her sister, who’s ill. So I agreed to take her place.”

  “That’s no surprise,” Beatrix said with a smile. Dimity was always agreeing to do this, that, or the other thing, usually on very short notice. But perhaps the May Pageant was good for her. It might keep her mind off Major Kittredge and his mysterious new wife.

  “I know.” Dimity made a face. “But the children always look forward to the May Pole. I couldn’t find it in my heart to say no.” She picked up her basket. “So you’re staying just a fortnight?”

  “Yes,” Beatrix said, going with her to the door. She glanced out at the stone wall, where Crumpet was perched, victorious, with her prize. “And it looks as if I shall have to spend a good part of it dealing with rats.”

  3

  Ridley Rattail Arrives at a Conclusion

  At the same moment that Miss Potter was asserting her determination to do something about the rats, Ridley Rattail was pacing around his parlor in the northwest corner of the Hill Top attic, his hands clasped beneath his coattails. He and Miss Potter were puzzling over the very same problem.

  Ridley, a stout, mild-tempered gentleman rat from the Midlands, had come to live at Hill Top at the invitation of his friend Rosabelle, just about the time Miss Potter had purchased the place. His introduction to the Lake District had been most unpleasant, as you will remember if you read a book called The Tale of Hill Top Farm. If you’ve not read it or have forgotten the story, perhaps I ought to tell you that Ridley had been cheated out of some money (never mind how he acquired it) by a pair of very disagreeable rats, and that he had just missed being snatched up by an enormous owl, and had lost most of his clothes when he was forced to swim across Wilfin Beck in the middle of the night. He had arrived in Rosabelle’s attic wet, miserable, and thoroughly frightened.

  But Rosabelle was a most gracious and hospitable friend. Various guests who had stayed with her over the years had left one thing or another behind, and Ridley was able to outfit himself quite handsomely in the way of trousers, shirtfronts, waistcoats, slippers, and a fine briar pipe, to which he added his own possessions, forwarded from his previous residence. The Jennings family, who occupied the rooms downstairs, were also generous (or careless—it amounted to the same thing in the end), and there was a regular supply of beans, bacon, and cheese, with the occasional savory bubble and squeak, and no end of delicious cake and pie. In fact, Ridley had never before enjoyed such substantial provender, and as a result, his already stout figure had grown several sizes stouter, and he could no longer button his waistcoat and jacket.

  It wasn’t just the fine dining that Ridley enjoyed, either. For when the renovations to the farmhouse were completed and Miss Potter took up residence in the older part of the house, she brought with her a great number of handsome leather-bound books, gilt-framed paintings, pieces of antique china and porcelain and silver, and so many other fascinating treasures that Ridley felt he was living in what might fairly be called an art museum—exactly the right sort of residence for a gentleman of fine taste.

  What’s more, Miss Potter was an artist and children’s author of wide reputation, and she liked to do her artwork on the table in front of the window in what had once been Mrs. Jennings’s kitchen. So Ridley had the rare opportunity to enjoy her little books before they were seen by the public. He often lurked in the chimney corner until she went up to bed, so he could have an admiring look at her current project. He very much liked the one she was working on now, which involved a pair of rats, something like himself and Rosabelle, who captured an impertinent young kitten and tied him up with string, preparatory to wrapping the saucy fellow in pastry and steaming him like a roly-poly pudding.

  Miss Potter had not yet got to the end of her book, so Ridley could not be sure how the story came out. But if it went as it seemed to be going, he knew he should like it very well. It included a stunning passage that made him shiver with fright and grin with delight at the very same time, for in it he recognized Hill Top itself, with its staircase hidden in the wall:

  It was an old, old house, full of cupboards and passages. Some of the walls were four feet thick, and there used to be queer noises inside them, as if there might be a little secret staircase. Certainly there were odd little jagged doorways in the wainscot, and things disappeared at night—especially cheese and bacon.

  Miss Potter’s fictional Hill Top seemed dark, somehow, and sinister, as though its walls and passages might hide macabre secrets beneath the serene ordinariness of everyday life. This description made Ridley shiver because it gave him the sense that disruptive powers might lurk behind any respectable façade, and since he was so comfortably contented, this little frisson of horror was pleasurable indeed.

  And all taken together, Ridley Rattail enjoyed every domestic pleasure that any rat might wish. He and Rosabelle lived a sedate, self-satisfied, and entirely pleasant life, rich in civil discourse and the pleasures of gentility, always careful not to call attention to themselves in any way. Of course, had there been a mouser downstairs who paid the proper attention to larder or dairy, it might not have been so easy to escape notice, and get away with the cheese and bacon. But the only cat was a young, inexperienced feline named Miss Felicia Frummety, who belonged to Mrs. Jennings but liked to boast that she was Miss Potter’s cat. Felicia, a vain creature who spent a great deal of time grooming herself, could not be bothered to notice, so the rats’ forays into the kitchen and dairy went unchallenged.

  But Ridley’s contentment was short-lived. It happened that Rosabelle’s sister Bluebell and Bluebell’s husband and four children had been left without a home when a storm blew the roof off their barn on the other side of Esthwaite Water. Rosabelle, generous to a fault, hospitably offered them refuge.

  And that was when things had turned sour, Ridley thought darkly, taking another turn around his comfortable, nicely furnished parlor. He could not in good conscience object to a brief visit from Rosabelle’s homeless relatives. But then Bluebell’s husband Rollo, a brash, brutish fellow with menacing whiskers and bad breath, had invited three or four of his bachelor friends—ne’er-do-well rogues from Hawkshead—for a fortnight’s holiday. They had set up a dartboard and a billiard table at the east end of the attic, rolled a keg of ginger beer and a round of ripe yellow cheese up the spiral stairs in the kitchen wall, and commenced to enjoy themselves long and loudly.

  Ridley deeply resented this intrusion into his tranquil life, the life of a self-satisfied gentleman rat settled in comfortable lodgings, which heretofore had been altogether civilized and enjoyable. Finally, one midnight, when the gaiety had reached an unendurable pitch, he went to the east end of the attic (he had taken to calling it the Hill Top Saloon) to remonstrate. But Rollo took immediate offense.

  “Wot’s all this, eh?” he growled, raising himself up on his back legs and glaring down his whiskery nose at Ridley, who found himself feeling suddenly rather short and out of trim. “Interferin’ wi’ me gennulmen friends, are ye?”

  “Well, no,” replied Ri
dley nervously. “I only—”

  “Stow it,” Rollo growled. His tail twitched threateningly. “Give me any more o’ yer lip, Rattail, and I’ll punch ye in the nose.”

  In the circumstance, Ridley thought it just as well to allow the party to continue. He took himself off to his room and comforted himself with the reminder that this was only a temporary situation. Rollo’s riotous friends would be gone soon, the Saloon would be closed, and attic life would return to its normal, decorous state.

  But the fortnight came and went and Rollo’s friends showed no signs of departing. Instead, they invited their friends to join them. More cheeses were pilfered from the Hill Top dairy and supplemented by mutton, bacon, bread, and scones from the Jenningses’ kitchen, as well as apples from the apple barrel and corn from the barn. When the ginger beer ran out, it was replaced by bottles of stout pinched from the nearby Tower Bank Arms. And all the while Felicia Frummety slept on the warm hearth below, allowing the renegade rats to run rampant wherever they liked.

  So, just when Ridley had hoped that these unwanted guests would be gone and the attic restored to its former broad expanse of dusty peace, the party in the Saloon only grew louder and larger. One of the rats had engaged a concertina player, who sat on a stool and entertained the crowd—the growing crowd—with bawdy songs he had learned from veterans of the war in South Africa. After a few days, the concertina player invited a trio of can-can dancers, who kicked up their heels on a wooden crackerbox stage that their admirers had cobbled together, with curtains made of scraps stolen from Mrs. Jennings’s workbasket.

  Poor Ridley. He who had preferred the quiet life and liked to retire early to his chambers found himself kept awake almost until dawn by the sound of rats enjoying themselves in his attic. His attic, he thought resentfully, as he lay sleepless through the night, with bits of cotton wool stuffed in his ears and the covers pulled over his head.

  Bad as the situation was, it was about to get worse—oh, much, much worse. Quite a few of the fellows noticed with approval that the Hill Top attic was clean and dry and undisturbed (Miss Potter had better things to do than bother about the attic), and decided to bring their wives and children and all their family furnishings to take up lodgings there. And of course, rats—as Tabitha Twitchit has already pointed out—multiply faster than rabbits. In no time at all, there were some six dozen rat families in permanent residence. (This was according to the January census, which could not be relied upon as accurate, for several large litters had been produced since the count was made and more were on the way.) The roomy attic no longer seemed roomy at all, and Ridley—who valued his privacy more than anything else in the world—could scarcely manage a ten-minute nap in his favorite chair without having his slippered feet tread upon or his tail pulled by rowdy, ill-behaved rat children.

  “We would not have this problem,” Ridley grumbled to Rosabelle when they had a private moment in the kitchen, “if you were not so obliging.”

  “You are making too much of it, Ridley,” Rosabelle said mildly, rolling up her sleeves in preparation for the washing up. “You should be a little forgiving, and allow the children to have their play.”

  “I could tolerate the children during the daytime,” Ridley retorted, “if I could get my sleep at night. It’s the music and dancing and laughing and the crack of billiard balls—crack! crack! crack!—on and on until the wee hours. That’s what’s got me down, Rosabelle.”

  “You might speak to Rollo,” Rosabelle suggested, stacking the dirty dishes. “I’m sure he’d be willing to—”

  “I spoke to Rollo,” Ridley said glumly. “He offered to punch my nose.”

  Rosabelle gave him a sympathetic look. “I urge you to try again,” she said, ever the peacemaker. “I’m sure he—”

  “I invite you to allow Rollo to punch your nose.” And with that pained retort, Ridley stalked off to his private apartment, where he closed and locked the door and began to pace back and forth, feeling deeply injured.

  But the sense of injury was soon overtaken by a growing sense of . . . well, shame, that’s what it was. Rosabelle had been too kind to call him a coward, but she didn’t need to, for he knew himself all too well. He was a rat of no courage, a rat who was too meek and mousy to do what had to be done. He was a coward, and the knowledge cut like a sword to the heart.

  Ridley stopped pacing and stood very still, trembling, until finally the dark shame of his cowardice began to transform itself into something like resolve. What was needed in this situation was not brawn, but brains; not muscle, but mental acuity. Surely, if he put his mind to it, he could think of a way to rid the Hill Top attics of this infestation of uninvited, unwelcome, and unruly rats. He could think of a solution.

  Now, if you have ever been acquainted with rats (and most of us have, in one way or another), you know that they are astonishingly intelligent along practical lines: where to find the best cheese and bacon, how to be stealthy when stealth is required, and which is the quickest means of escape when danger threatens. But you may also know that rats are not among the most intellectual of animals. Disciplined thought is a challenge for the entire species. Their minds are apt to wander off into pleasant topics, having to do with crumbs in kitchen cupboards and corn in feed bins and bright trinkets lying in a dish on the bureau top—crumbs and corn and trinkets that might be put to better use by an enterprising rat. In fact, their rat brains are full of a great many things all tumbled about with no particular order or method, so finding anything specific in them is even more difficult than finding a needle in a pile of hay.

  Nevertheless, within the hour, and by dint of applying himself with rigorous and exhausting mental effort, Ridley Rattail had come upon the solution to his problem. He felt at once proud of having thought of it and foolish that he had not thought of it before.

  What was needed to rid the Hill Top attic of the plague of unwanted rats was, quite obviously and simply, a cat.

  A cat unlike Miss Felicia Frummety, who disdained to chase rats and spent her time either asleep on the hearth or admiring herself in the mirror.

  A fierce and stalwart cat who had an insatiable appetite for rats.

  A cat who had enough fortitude to face an army of rats if necessary.

  A cat who—

  And then, just as Ridley was getting well started on the list of important feline qualifications required to deal with this unfortunate situation, he heard a commotion in the hallway outside his rooms, and a loud shrieking and wailing.

  Startled, he opened his door and put out his head. “What’s happened?” he inquired anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s been a murder!” a rat shouted, tearing at his ears and running in frenzied circles. “A foul, filthy, fiendish murder! Oh, it’s too horrible, too hideous for words!”

  A shiver started between Ridley’s ears and quivered all the way down to the tip of his tail. “A murder, you say?” he whispered. “Who was murdered?”

  “Rollo,” the rat cried. “Our wonderful, hospitable host! He was killed by a vicious cat when he went to fetch a bun from the kitchen, not five minutes ago. Oh, horrors, oh, woe! Oh, dear, departed Rollo!”

  “Oh, really,” murmured Ridley.

  Now, we all know that we are supposed to forgive our enemies, even those who have kept us awake until all hours and offered to punch us in the nose when we complained, and to be sorry when something bad has happened to them.

  But I am afraid that Ridley was not so sorry as he ought to have been. Instead, hiding a rattish sort of smile, he went back into his apartment, shut the door, and danced a jig of pure delight.

  4

  At Sawrey School

  The village of Sawrey is made up of twin hamlets, the two separated (or joined, if you will) by a lush green meadow with Wilfin Beck threaded like a long silver ribbon through the middle. The hamlet nearest the market town of Hawkshead (some three miles to the northwest) is called Near Sawrey, logically enough, whilst the hamlet a half-mile farther a
long the road to the east, closer to the ferry crossing over Lake Windermere, is called Far Sawrey. Near Sawrey, its inhabitants have always judged, is the more important because that’s where the Tower Bank Arms is located, and the smithy and joiner and bakery. It is also where the Justice of the Peace lives, and John Braithwaite, the village constable. Those who live in Far Sawrey, on the other hand, consider that hamlet to be the more important, because they possess St. Peter’s Church, and the vicarage, and the Sawrey Hotel, and Sawrey School. (Both hamlets boast a post office and a shop, so these are generally left out of the calculation.)

  Miss Margaret Nash, the new headmistress at Sawrey School, was one of the fortunate people who lived in Near Sawrey and worked in Far Sawrey, and thought this arrangement gave her the best of all possible worlds. At half past three on Wednesday afternoon, as she stood at the school door and watched as her jubilant charges skipped out of the school yard, the girls in companionable pairs and trios, the boys leaping and shouting from sheer joy, she thought again how singularly fortunate she was to live in such a beautiful place and to have work that gave her such an enormous sense of satisfaction. She had been appointed head teacher upon the retirement of Miss Myrtle Crabbe, although Margaret herself had at one point given up hope of having the position. If it had not been for Miss Potter’s discovery that Margaret’s chief competitor for the post was a sham and a fraud, she was sure she would not have had it.

  But all’s well that ends well, Margaret reminded herself cheerfully. She picked up Jane Jackson’s blue hair ribbon, Tommy Tyson’s grimy sweater (recognizable by the hole in the elbow), and an arithmetic exercise paper with Willie Adams’s name printed crookedly at the top. She placed all three articles prominently on the Lost and Found shelf, where their careless owners might see and claim them. Then she picked up the broom and applied it industriously to the patch of dried mud in front of the boot-box.