The Kneebone Boy (18 page)

That was true, actually.

“There must be some way to find him,” Lucia said.

They sat on the bench and thought, including Max, who could never resist a good think.

“Do you remember,” Max said after a while, “how Prince Andrei tamed his black fox?”

“He set a proper table by its den, didn’t he?” Lucia said, trying to remember what their father had told them. “And he ate his meals there.”

“Right, and he set a plate for the fox too, filled with chicken eggs. And after a while the fox began to get used to the idea of the prince and they ate all their meals together.”

“All right,” Otto said.

“All right,” Lucia agreed.

Max look alarmed. “I didn’t mean to literally
do
it. I only mean that if one
was
going to try to make friends with a wild boy that’s how one could do it, but I certainly don’t think—”

“There’s a corner store down the road. We could buy some food,” Otto said, rising from the bench, holding Chester.

“Well, that’s a complete waste of money,” Max objected.

It was two to one, so Max had to go along with it, though as they walked to the corner store he kept grumbling that the birds in the woods would eat the food in the end, and there goes the last of their money, into bird guts.

Lucia on the other hand was well pleased that Otto was going to spend the last of their money. It meant that there wouldn’t be any left to pay for his return ticket to Little Tunks.

Outside the market, Otto tucked Chester under his
shirt, arranging his scarf to hide the bump. They bought a loaf of bread, sliced cheese, a package of chocolate digestive biscuits, four bottles of cola, and four packages of cheese-and-onion crisps.

With a cantankerous look on his face, Max eyed the ten-pound note Otto handed to the clerk. Once they were outside, he grumbled, “Fine. Now let’s make a few sandwiches, leave them in the woods, and say good-bye to good money.”

“We’ll need plates,” Otto said. “And a tablecloth.”

“That’s right,” Lucia said, happy at the thought of more money spent. “We’ll set a proper table like the prince.”

Max groaned.

They found a little shop in town called Pickering’s This ’n’ That, which sold odds and ends and smelled of the fusty old curtains in the school’s assembly hall. It was so cluttered with knickknacks that for a few minutes they assumed they were alone in the shop. Otto let Chester out of his shirt and they all wandered through the narrow aisles, hands behind their backs so as not to break anything, gazing around at the shelves of kitten statuettes and flowered jugs and tiny cannons no bigger than a baby’s finger, and salt and pepper shakers and porcupine quills trapped in Lucite disks. They fingered through masses of ancient postcards in which people wrote about their cousin Henry who was down with the flu, and that the weather was unseasonably warm or frightfully damp, which shows that the really interesting letters are always thrown away, like Haddie’s to Casper.

“Ah, it’s a cat!” a thin voice said. “I thought it might be a small dog at first, and they’re not allowed, but a cat . . . a cat knows its way around knickknacks. Did you want something in particular?”

It took some looking round to discover who was talking. Sitting on a battered white armchair in the corner of the room was a man in a white button-down shirt that was yellowed around the collar. He had nice, worried brown eyes, very little hair, and crooked eyeteeth.

“Yes,” Lucia said. “We need plates.”

“Plates. Well,” the man slowly rose from his chair. He wasn’t very ancient—maybe in his fifties or so—but he moved carefully, like he was quite elderly. The children assumed he was Mr. Pickering, and in fact he was, so we’ll call him by his name now. “I do have a few plates,” said Mr. Pickering.

He guided them to the back of the store where there was truly the hugest assortment of plates the Hardscrabbles had ever seen: flowered; gold-rimmed; plates with roosters on them; souvenir plates of the Eiffel Tower; plates with Marilyn Monroe on them; and on and on.

“What sort are you looking for?” Mr. Pickering asked, using his thumb to wipe a bit of dust from the edge of a plate festooned with dancing mushrooms. They thought for a minute.

Otto said, “Something majestic.”

“Something majestic,” Lucia translated.

“Majestic is off to the right, up above the chubby angels, there you are.”

There were plates with the Queen’s face on it and a few lovely ones of Princes William and Harry and some of Buckingham Palace and others with the royal crests, which were nice and colorful. But the one that caught their eye showed a lumpy castle on the edge of a cliff.

“That’s Kneebone Castle!” Lucia pointed.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Pickering said, “there have been quite a few souvenir plates done of Kneebone Castle. Here’s one with the original Lord and Lady Kneebone.” He pointed to a pale blue plate with two portraits, each inside little gilded ovals. Lord Kneebone had no chin and Lady Kneebone had two of them.

“This one here is of Kneebone Castle as well, but it’s very unusual.” He took down a plate and held it out for them to look at more closely. “Do you see the red things hanging from windows?”

The Hardscrabbles nodded.

“They’re scarves. Famous incident that happened way back in the late 1800s. I’m assuming you know about The Kneebone Boy?”

It took all their self-control not to make eyes at one another. They simply nodded and tried not to look quite as interested as they felt.

“Well, there had been talk about this monster child for many years. That he’d been locked away in a hidden room in the castle. So some smart fellow who was visiting Lord Kneebone waited for him and his lady to leave the castle and then quickly went from room to room, hanging a red scarf out of every window in the castle. When he stepped
outside in the courtyard to examine the windows, he saw exactly what he hoped to see: one of the windows had no scarf hanging from it. He hadn’t missed it. Oh, no, he was very thorough. It was simply that the room was tucked away, with a secret entrance that was very hard to discover. Right in there.” Mr. Pickering tapped one slender white finger on the plate’s scarfless window. “That is where The Kneebone Boy was kept prisoner.”

The window was high up on the last tower, closest to the sea. You know the window. You’ve seen the Hardscrabbles stare into it twice already, once when they were on the way to the beach, and again when Lucia was looking through the binoculars.

“Have you ever seen him?” Lucia asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

“Seen him?” Mr. Pickering looked startled, as though it were a question he’d never expected to be asked, and so had not thought up a sensible-sounding answer. “Not seen him, per se.”

“Lucia hasn’t seen him per se either,” Max said, then instantly looked at Lucia because he knew he shouldn’t have said it. But Mr. Pickering didn’t seem to notice.

“But
something
happened,” Lucia urged him after she had made a face at Max.

“Well, yes, but so long ago, and under such strange circumstances that I can’t be sure it was anything at all.” Mr. Pickering stopped then and there, and probably would not have gone any further.

But then Otto did something most out of the ordinary
for him. He turned to Mr. Pickering and signed to him very earnestly. Of course Mr. Pickering had no idea what Otto was saying, but he guessed that it was an appeal to hear the story. And Mr. Pickering had enough good sense to know that this was no silly appeal, but that important things were at stake. He glanced at the shop door to see that no one was coming in, then crossed his arms against his narrow chest.

“I never saw him, but . . . my father was an electrician, the only one in Snoring, and the Kneebones hired him to wire the folly for electricity. I was about eleven at the time and my dad took me along on the first day, because I’d always wanted to see inside the folly. No one I knew had ever been in there. The Kneebone children all had tutors, so none of the other kids in Snoring had met them, though we’d see them playing by the sea from time to time. So of course I was eager to go.

“But when we crossed the drawbridge and all three of the Kneebone children met us at the gatehouse, I wondered if I’d made an awful mistake. Three fierce faces—two boys and a girl—staring at us just as though we had invaded their castle, which in a way we had. My father didn’t notice. He said, ‘Have fun,’ or something like that and left me at their mercy.

“They questioned me for a few minutes and they made fun of my teeth. After that they were quite friendly. They showed me all their toys and we shot arrows from the siege tower at my cap, which they had swiped from my head and flung to the courtyard below—the younger boy
was the best shot. He skewered my poor cap to bits. We even had a joust on their little ponies. I fell off right away but they played on, charging at one another at top speed, hooting and screaming. They were the most fearless, wild children I’d ever met in my life. I was dizzy with admiration.

“Then they said, ‘There’s another one of us, you know. Our oldest brother. The Kneebone Boy, people call him.’ They had a wicked look in their eyes. That should have tipped me off right then, but I was very curious.

“ ‘Do you want to meet him?’ they asked. I nodded, too excited and frightened to even speak.

“ ‘We’ll take you to him,’ they said, ‘but we’re going a secret way, so first we have to blindfold you.’

“They tied an old rag over my eyes and led me through the house. We stopped suddenly and in a moment I heard noises—a
tap-tap-tap
ping, then scraping and grunting. After that there was a hiss that seemed to fly over my head and then an awful screech. I thought one of the Kneebones was hurt and I said, ‘Are you all right?’ but they just told me to ‘Shut it.’ They made me crouch down and pushed me through a door—my head banged against it as I went through. Then they said I could stand up again. Someone held my hand. I hoped it wasn’t the girl because my palm was so sweaty. We walked a long way—downhill it felt like. I could smell damp earth and the air was clammy and cold. I put out my free hand and felt a rock wall. After a while, I began to hear water running somewhere far below and soon after that we stopped.

“ ‘We’ve got to cross a bridge here,’ the girl said.

“Someone placed my hands on the shoulders of the person in front of me. Someone else put their hands on my hips from behind and we walked like that, very slowly. I knew we’d crossed when one of the boys shoved me up against a wall.

“ ‘Right, here’s the part where you could fall and die,’ he said. ‘So keep your back to the wall and shuffle along sideways until we tell you otherwise.’

“I shuffled very carefully, my heart beating like mad, careful to keep my spine pressed hard against the wall. We went this way for some time. The water sounded very, very far below and I could smell the emptiness of the air around me. Once I tipped the toe of my shoe forward and found that it touched nothing at all. I was terrified the entire time, right up until when the girl said, ‘All right, we can walk normal now.’

“But it wasn’t quite normal. We were soon walking up steps that were very tricky. Under my feet, they felt bumpy and lopsided. The person holding my hand—it was the girl, much to my embarrassment—kept having to steady me as I fumbled along, tripping every few minutes. We went up and up and up. I was growing winded, and I could hear from their huffing and puffing that they were as well. Then suddenly we stopped.

“They warned me that if I made a single sound they would leave me there all alone, never to be found again, so you can be sure I was quiet as a tomb. They took off my blindfold. We were standing in a tiny little alcove no
bigger than a lift. Apart from the rough-cut stairs that we had just climbed, we were completely surrounded by a solid stone wall. At first I thought it must be some trick and they’d led me all this way for nothing. But then they got down on their knees and began to feel around the wall.

“ ‘Found it,’ the girl said, and all together they shoved very hard.

“A section of the wall began to move. It swung open as if it had a hinge, though I couldn’t see one, and light began to fill that little alcove. We crawled through the opening, which I soon realized was actually the back of a large fireplace. Once through, I stood up and found myself in a room, clean and bare except for a heavy canvas curtain that stretched from one wall to the other, blocking a section of the room from view.

“I looked around carefully, searching for a misshapen creature that might be crouching behind a chair or in a shadowy corner, but the room seemed perfectly empty of anything alive.

“ ‘Is he here?’ I whispered shakily.

“ ‘Shh!’ the older boy ordered.

“ ‘Charlie?’ the girl called out. ‘Charlie, sweetheart, we’ve come for a visit.’

“From behind the curtains, I heard the most awful noise I’d ever heard in my life. It was an animal sound but no, not quite an animal . . . it was too full of frustration and grief. It was so deeply shocking that I was ashamed to hear it, ashamed and terrified. I told them I wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let me spoil their fun so quickly.

“ ‘Don’t be stupid. He can’t get at you. He’s tied to his bed,’ the older boy told me.

“He dragged me over to the curtain while his sister and brother shoved me from behind.