The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels) Read online

  Just in case the Countess’ relatives turned up, I’d put it about everywhere – we all had – that Kaspar had escaped from the Countess’ rooms and could not be found. I made a great song and dance about organising a search of the whole hotel, pretended to be beside myself with worry, and I asked everyone to keep an eye out for him. Mr Freddie knew what I was up to of course, but besides Mary and Luke and all the gang on our corridor, no one else did. So now I could only take Kaspar for his walk at night time, when hardly anyone would be about. I’d hurry out the back way, through the tradesmen’s entrance, with Kaspar hidden under my coat. While we were out there in the park he seemed to perk up for a while, but it never lasted. Back in my room he would curl up again, and close his eyes. Often I would hear him sighing deeply, almost as if he wished every breath to be his last. It broke my heart to see him like this. I felt so utterly helpless.

  Meanwhile the Countess’ brother and sister came to take away all her things. They asked after Kaspar, and I told them, as I’d told everyone else, that he’d disappeared. In the Countess’ sitting room they stood by the piano for a while and cried on one anothers shoulders. I found myself looking again in the mirror, where I had so often caught a ghostly glimpse of the Countess. I did not see her this time but I felt her presence. I made her a silent promise then and there that I wouldn’t let Kaspar die.

  As it turned out Kaspar didn’t die. He was saved. But I have to say that it had nothing whatsoever to do with me. In the end, Kaspar was saved by happenchance, by pure happy circumstance.

  I had seen the Stanton family about in the hotel, but to begin with had paid them little enough attention. They seemed a lot like other rich families that came to stay for a month or two in the hotel. They were American; father, mother, and a little girl. Both the parents seemed rather stiff and prim and proper, even a bit standoffish, which in my experience was not at all like most of the Americans guests I’d met in the hotel. The little girl was different though. She was about seven or eight, I guessed, and was always in trouble, always being ticked off by her mother. She was for ever wandering off on her own and getting herself lost. As I was soon to learn, getting lost didn’t upset her one bit, but it did upset her parents, particularly her mother, whom I’d often see hurrying through the lobby in search of her. It was from her mother, one breakfast time, that I first learned the little girl’s name.

  “Elizabeth. I’m looking for Elizabeth,” she said, rushing up the stairs into the lobby from the Riverside Restaurant. All her usual composure was gone. There was a wild and anxious look about her. “She’s run off again. Have you seen her? Have you seen her?”

  Fortunately Mr Freddie was nearby. He was always good in these situations. “Don’t you worry, Mrs Stanton, we’ll find her for you. She hasn’t come through the front door, so she’s got to be in the hotel somewhere. Young Johnny here will look upstairs. Every floor, Johnny, make sure you search every floor thoroughly. And meanwhile, Mrs Stanton, I’ll have a good look around for her down here. We’ll have her back with you in a jiffy, lickedysplit. You’ll see.” He clapped his hands at me. “Off you go, Johnny lad. Jaldi, jaldi. Sharp about it now, there’s a good lad.”

  An hour later I’d searched every floor of the hotel, high and low, and there was still no sign of her. I was about to check downstairs to see if Mr Freddie hadn’t already found her, when I wondered if I should check the servants’ corridor up in the attic.

  I thought it very unlikely she’d be up there, but Mr Freddie had told me to search every floor. And besides, I remembered my own childhood well enough to know that children like to hide in the most unexpected places. So I climbed the stairs to have a look.

  From the far end of the corridor I could already see that the door to my room was open, and I knew at once she must be in there. As I stole along the corridor I could hear her talking inside my room.

  “Good cat,” she was saying, “nice cat, beautiful cat.” I found her kneeling at the foot of my bed. Beside her was Kaspar, eating ravenously from his bowl, wolfing down the liver I had left for him, and purring like a lion.

  “Who Gives a Fig, Anyway?”

  Elizabeth looked up at me and smiled. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Miss Elizabeth Stanton. What’s the cat called?”

  “Kaspar,” I told her.

  “Is he yours?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And this is my room too.”

  “I knocked and there was no one in,” she went on. “So I thought it would be a good place to hide. I like hiding. Then I saw this cat lying on the bed, and he looked so sad. He’s very beautiful, but he’s very thin, you know, and he doesn’t look at all well. Look at him. He’s starving hungry. You should feed Kaspar more often, that’s what I think.”

  “Your mother’s been looking for you. She thought you’d got lost,” I told her, trying my best to hide my growing irritation. To be honest, I didn’t much like being told by some hoity-toity little rich girl that Kaspar needed to eat more. Hadn’t I been trying for weeks on end now to get him to do just that? And although I was relieved to see Kaspar eating again, I have to confess I was more than a little upset that this little girl seemed to have succeeded so easily where I had failed. So the truth is that at our first meeting I was not at all disposed to like Miss Elizabeth Stanton. She seemed far too full of herself for my liking.

  “You just wait till I tell Mama and Papa about Kaspar,” she went on. “Can I take him downstairs to show them?”

  It hadn’t even occurred to me until that moment that this little girl could blow the whole secret. I crouched down so that we were face to face and put my hands on her shoulders. She had to know just how serious I was about this. “You can’t. You can’t say a word,” I told her. “The thing is, you see, I’m not allowed to keep pets up here. Against the rules, see? No pets in the servants’ quarters. If anyone finds out, I’ll get the sack, lose my position. I’ll have nowhere to live, and neither will Kaspar. No one else knows he lives up here. So you won’t tell anyone, will you? It’ll be our little secret, right?”

  She was looking at me very intently all the while. She thought for a moment or two. Then she said: “I don’t like rules, especially unfair rules like not being allowed to keep a cat. So I won’t tell anyone, cross my heart and hope to die.” Then she added, “But you will let me come up and feed Kaspar again sometime, won’t you?”

  I hadn’t any choice.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “If you want to.”

  “I do, I do,” she cried. “I like him so much, and he likes me, I know he does.”

  It was true. Kaspar was looking up at her adoringly. He could hardly take his eyes off her. She grabbed my hand and shook it. “Oh thank you, thank you. But I don’t know your name, do I?”

  “Johnny Trott,” I told her. She let out a peal of laughter. “Johnny Rot. Johnny Rot. That’s such a funny name. Bye Kaspar, bye Johnny Rot.” And still giggling she skipped off down the corridor and was gone. As I watched her go I remembered the last person who had found my name so funny. I was already disliking Elizabeth a little less.

  I had no idea then and I still have no idea now how she managed to get Kaspar to eat his liver that morning. I asked her later on, once I’d got to know her better, and she gave me one of her infuriating shrugs. “S’easy when you know how,” she told me. “Animals always do whatever I want, because they know I’d do anything for them, and that’s because they know I love them, and that’s why they love me.” She had this way, as some children do, of making everything sound so simple and straightforward.

  After that first surprise visit, Miss Elizabeth Stanton, or Lizziebeth as I discovered she liked to be called, came up to my room to feed Kaspar at least twice a day without fail. Sometimes I was there, sometimes I wasn’t. Whenever she’d been I’d find a little scribbled note on my pillow. It would say something like this:

  “Dear Jonny Rot, I came to feed Caspa again. I stoll some smoked samon from my breakfast. He likes it a lot which I don’t beca
use it smells of fish wich is horrible. I made your bed too which you didn’t. And you should too. Don worry your secrets safe. Promise. I like secrits because its like hidding and I like hidding. from your friend Lizziebeth.”

  There’s no doubt at all in my mind that it was the arrival of Lizziebeth that saved Kaspar’s life. Somehow she brought joy into his life where there had only been sorrow. With her there beside him he was eating and drinking everything that was put in front of him. Within a week he was beginning to sharpen his claws, mostly on the curtains, but sometimes on my trousers, and when I was wearing them too. That hurt a lot. I didn’t mind much, though, because I was just so happy to see him getting better. His coat shone, his tail swished, and when one day he smiled up at me I knew for sure that Prince Kaspar Kandinsky was himself again. Lizziebeth had lifted his spirits, and she’d lifted mine too. But I was worried that one day she might “let the cat out of the bag”, so to speak. I kept reminding her that secrecy was everything.

  “Remember, Lizziebeth, you’ve got to keep schtum,” I told her one evening, tapping my nose conspiratorially. She liked that. So whenever she left my room after that, she’d tap her nose. “Schtum,” she’d whisper. “I’ve got to keep schtum.”

  Lizziebeth became quite a little mascot on our corridor, and quite a hero too on account of everything she’d done for Kaspar. She may have been a little bit on the talkative side, and could be quite mischievous too – she was a bundle of fun and she made us all laugh. But I couldn’t help wondering whether she might one day become too overexcited and blurt out our secret by mistake.

  I took all the precautions I could, asking her to always check behind her before she climbed the stairs to our corridor, and I made it an absolute rule that she spoke in whispers whenever she came to see us. Those, it seemed, were the kind of rules she was quite happy with. Lizziebeth liked anything, I discovered, that involved some kind of conspiracy. It was during these long whispered conversations in my room that I got to know so much more about her. Actually, to begin with they weren’t conversations at all, not as such. They were more like monologues. Once Lizziebeth started one of her stories, there was no stopping her. “Do you know…” she’d begin, and on she’d go, on and on. She’d sit there cross-legged on the floor of my room with Kaspar on her lap and just talk and talk. And I’d be happy to listen, because she told me of a world I’d never seen inside before. For over a year now, ever since I’d left the orphanage, I’d served people like her at the Savoy; fetched and carried for them, polished their boots, brushed their coats, opened doors for them, bowed and scraped, as bell-boys have to do. But until now not one of them had ever really talked to me, unless they were snapping their fingers at me, or ordering me to do something.

  It’s true that I wasn’t sure sometimes whether Lizziebeth was talking to me or to Kaspar. It didn’t much matter either way. Both of us would listen as entranced as the other, Kaspar gazing up into her eyes all the while, purring with pleasure, and me hanging on her every word.

  Once she told us about the great ship she’d come over on from America, about the icebergs she’d seen, as tall as the skyscrapers in New York, which was where she lived, how one day when they were at sea she’d wandered off on her own to find somewhere to hide, and found herself right down below in the engine room. There was quite a kerfuffle, she said, because everyone thought she’d fallen overboard. When at last she was found and brought back to their cabin her mother had cried and cried, and called her “my little angel”, but her father had told her she was “the naughtiest girl in the whole world”. So she wasn’t sure what she was.

  Afterwards they had taken her to the Captain of the ship who had a great, fat face and sad eyes, like a walrus she said, and they’d made her apologise for causing so much trouble to the crew who had been searching for her all over the ship for two hours before she was found, and to the Captain who’d had to stop the ship in mid-ocean, and had lookouts scanning the ocean with binoculars looking for her. She had to promise faithfully in front of the Captain never to go off on her own while they were on the ship. She promised with her fingers crossed behind her, she said, so it didn’t count. So when it got rough a day or two later and they were being tossed about in the biggest, greenest waves she’d ever seen, and everyone was as sick as dogs, she decided she’d do what one of the sailors had told her to do if it ever got rough, to go down to the very bottom of the ship where the boat doesn’t roll so much, and just lie down. The very bottom of the ship, she discovered, was full of cows and calves. So she lay down beside them in the straw, and that was where they found her, fast asleep, when the storm was over. This time they were both “mad” with her. So she was locked in the cabin as a punishment. She shrugged. “I didn’t care,” she told me. “Who gives a fig, anyway?”

  Back at home in New York her governess was always sending her up to her room to make her do her writing all over again, or because her spelling wasn’t good enough. She was always being sent to her room by her mother too, for running around the house when she should walk, or making a noise when her father was working in his study. “I didn’t mind,” she said, with a shrug and a little laugh. “I didn’t give a fig, anyway.” In the holidays the family would sail up the coast to Maine in their three-masted yacht, which was called the Abe Lincoln, and they’d live in this big house on an island where there was no other house but theirs, and no one there except them, their guests and the servants. One day she decided to be a pirate, so she tied a spotted pirate’s scarf around her head and went off with a spade to look for buried treasure. And when they came calling for her she hid away in a cave, and she only came out when she was good and ready. She knew they’d be mad at her, but she really didn’t like anyone calling for her “like I was some kind of a dog”. So when she strolled back into the house that evening, she was sent straight up to bed without any dinner. “I didn’t want any dinner anyway,” she said, “so I didn’t give a fig, anyway, did I?”

  Bit by bit, through these stories and dozens of others, I pieced together something of the lives of Lizziebeth and her family. I looked at them now with very different eyes whenever they walked by me on their way into breakfast, whenever I opened the door for them or wished them good morning. Lizziebeth would give me a great beaming smile whenever she saw me in the lobby, and Mr Freddie would wink at me from the front door, and sometimes he’d miaow softly as he passed me by. Such moments were enough to lift my spirits all day long. Life was suddenly good, and fun too. Kaspar was well again, we had both found a new friend, and our secret was safe. Everything was fine, or so I thought.

  Running Wild

  Everything after that seemed to happen suddenly, and in very quick succession. It was a quiet weekend at the hotel, with fewer guests around. There were no big dressy dinners, no grand balls, no smart parties. All of us who worked there preferred it like this, even if the days could drag a bit. Everyone was more relaxed. I liked the weekends anyway, because Kaspar and I usually saw more of Lizziebeth then. She’d be bored out of her mind downstairs, and would often sneak up to see Kaspar, sometimes three or four times a day, leaving me a note each time. I finished work earlier on a Sunday, so usually she’d be up there in my room with Kaspar, waiting for me when I got back. Sometimes she’d steal away some scones and cake, hiding them away in a napkin – she was always saying I was too thin and needed feeding up – and since I was always more than a little hungry after work, I didn’t argue with her.

  We were sitting there one Sunday evening tucking into some delicious fruit cake, when I heard a voice in the corridor outside. Skullface! It was Skullface! She was talking to Mary O’Connell, and she was not in a good mood.

  “That idiot boy, Johnny Trott, is he in?”

  “I haven’t seen him, Mrs Blaise,” Mary told her. “Honest.”

  The footsteps came closer and closer, the bunch of keys rattling louder with every step.

  Skullface was ranting now. “Do you know what that he’s gone and done? Well, I’ll tell
you, shall I? He’s only used a black brush on Lord Macauley’s best brown boots. There’s black all over them. And who gets the blame? Me. Well. I’ll have his guts for garters, I will. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs Blaise, honest to God I don’t.” Mary was doing her best for me.

  The footsteps were right outside my door now, and there I was with Lizziebeth in my room, and Kaspar cleaning himself on her lap. All she had to do was to open the door and I’d get the sack for sure. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. I was praying that somehow, anyhow, Mary would prevent her from opening that door. It was this very moment that Kaspar chose to stop washing his paws and spring out of Lizziebeth’s lap, yowling in his fury. It wasn’t his gentle miaow, this was his wailing war cry, and it was shrill and loud, horribly loud. For a moment or two there was silence outside the door. Then, “A cat! As I live and breathe, a cat!” cried Skullface. “Johnny Trott’s got a cat in his room! How dare he? How dare he? It’s against the rules, my rules!”

  I looked aghast at Lizziebeth. Without a moment’s hesitation she picked up Kaspar, and dumped him unceremoniously in my arms. “In the wardrobe,” she whispered. “Get in the wardrobe. Quick!”

  Once in there I crouched down, stroking Kaspar frantically to calm him down, to stop him from yowling again. Then I heard something I simply couldn’t believe. Kaspar was yowling again, from outside the wardrobe, from my room. Yet he couldn’t be, because he was with me, inside the wardrobe, in my arms and he definitely wasn’t yowling. Yet he was yowling – I could hear him! In my panic and confusion it took several moments before I realised what was going on: Lizziebeth was out there in my room and mimicking Kaspar pitch perfectly.