Wild Robert (4 page)

Robert calmly picked another strawberry and stood up with it, raising his eyebrows. “Stealing?” he said. “I have a right to pick my own berries, surely? And if we are to talk of stealing, I have known other gardeners before you who took Castlemaine fruit and sold it as their own.”

Heather tried to crawl away backwards into the currant bushes. This was awful! Robert had misunderstood. But she stopped when she saw that Mr McManus’s
mottled brown face had turned a sort of mottled soap-colour. That was interesting. It looked as if Mr McManus really had been taking fruit. But of course this made Mr McManus angrier than ever. He plodded towards Robert with his teeth showing.

“You’ll prove nothing!” he said, grunting with fury. “Get out of here or I’ll tear your smooth face off! I don’t care who you are!”

Robert popped the strawberry into his mouth and spread his hand out in front of him again. This time he tipped only ever so slightly. Mr McManus still tried to plod towards him, but now he was plodding on the spot, rather like a tortoise that doesn’t know it has come to the end of the string tied to its shell.

“But you
should
care who I am,” Robert said, when he had swallowed the strawberry. “My brother had that other gardener whipped from our gates. Castlemaine is mine now, and I should do worse to you, for your snarls and threats. But for now I shall leave you as you are. Come, Heather. Help yourself to my fine fruit.”

Robert bent down and started picking strawberries again. After a little while, Heather came out of the bushes and picked strawberries too. This was the only time she had ever been able to do this. But she wished she was enjoying it more. The plod-plod-plodding figure of Mr McManus made her feel like a thief, or worse. Every time one of them crawled near him, he shouted, “I’ll get you for this! You won’t get away with it!” Heather grabbed strawberries with both hands every time he shouted. She knew she would never be given another chance to eat as many as she wanted.

At last, when Mr McManus’s tramping boots had worn quite a hole in the earth, Robert Toller stood
up and dusted straw from his black silk knees. “I have had my fill,” he said. “Come and show me my house and castle now.”

Heather thought of Castlemaine full of tourists and the coaches parked at the side. She knew it would be a terrible shock to him. “Why don’t you wait until this evening?” she said. “It’ll be much more peaceful.”

Robert gave her a strange sad look, almost as if he was sorry for her. “Sweetheart, I know those tricks,” he said. “And by then, all will be straight and tidy because you are bound to warn your father I am here. No, my time to see the place is now.”

He crunched across the straw, past Mr McManus. “You won’t get away with this!” Mr McManus snarled. “I’ll have the law—”

“Oh, be quiet, you cur, you growling dog!” Robert said. He spread his hand out again, and this time he tipped it sharply. Heather saw the line of the world slant past her eyes like the top of the water when someone ducks you in the swimming pool. She felt rather as if she had been ducked, too. While she was gasping for air, Mr McManus fell on his hands and knees and shrank. His mottled face grew into the long muzzle of a large spotted dog. His legs bunched up and became the hind legs of a dog. His hands grew into paws and he sprouted a long spotted tail. He growled nastily at Robert.

“Leave this place, you mongrel!” Robert said. “Go home and see if your wife knows you.”

The ugly spotted dog tucked its tail between its mottled back legs and raced away into the bushes, howling. Heather had never seen a dog look so frightened. She led the way to the house, not quite as amused or as pleased as she expected to be. True, Mr McManus deserved it, but Heather kept finding herself wondering if Mrs McManus
would
know who the dog was.

T
he formal gardens were crowded with people by this time. For a while, Robert Toller hardly seemed to notice. He was staring at the house. Heather thought his stare had a lost sort of look to it, but when Robert noticed her watching him, he made his face look proud and amused.

“By horn and hoof!” he said. “What a splendid pile of a building this has become! It seems I inherit a house with a hundred windows or more! How did this come about?”

“The Franceys and the Tollers kept adding bits to make it grander,” Heather explained. “I think Dad said they only stopped when one of them betted all the money that Napoleon would win Waterloo.” She saw that Robert did not understand this, so she added comfortingly, “But the older bits are still there, really.”

Robert nodded. “I see the shape of my father’s house sketched along one side,” he said. “And our old stables are there still, beyond the kitchens. But I only see one tower out of all the castle where I used
to scramble with my brothers.”

“There’s more of it than that,” Heather said, “but it’s sort of built into the inside now.”

“I must see,” Robert said.

Heather could tell he had enjoyed climbing about the castle with his brothers. She envied him rather. She had often thought that she would have enjoyed living in Castlemaine more with a brother or sister or so to keep her company. But then it came to her that Robert’s brothers must have been dead now for three hundred years. And the house was quite changed since his day. She found she did not envy Robert any longer.

While she was thinking this, Robert had begun to walk faster and faster towards the house. Heather spotted his strangely bright figure some way ahead. As the crowds were thickest nearer the house, she could see him bumping into people and bouncing off others. She could hear cries of, “Steady on!” and, “Who do you think you’re shoving?” That seemed to make Robert notice what he was doing. He stopped and waited for Heather. When she caught up at last, she found he was looking very haughty.

“Your father keeps a mighty big court here,” he said. “Who gave him permission to have so many followers?”

“They’re not followers. They’re tourists,” Heather said. She took Robert on a walk through the box hedges while she did her best to explain how Castlemaine now belonged to the British Trust, which meant that anyone in the country could pay to see round the grounds.

Robert walked beside her, nodding and frowning and narrowing his eyes. Heather could see he was doing his best to look businesslike, but she had a strong feeling that he had never done anything businesslike in his life. “I do not see how a house can stand without an owner,” he said.

As luck would have it, a crowd of schoolchildren stampeded in among the box hedges just then, shouting and eating ice lollies. Heather could tell
they were a party from a school that had not broken up yet. They all wore blue uniform blazers and they were followed by a teacher who was shouting even louder than they were.

“You are to walk, not run, Two X!” the teacher screamed.

She was the kind of teacher nobody listens to. The children went on shouting and ran round and round the pond in the middle, forcing Heather and Robert to back away into the tall hedge at the end.

“Silence!” shrieked the teacher. And when that made no difference at all, she howled, “You are all to come and put your ice-cream wrappers in this litter bin this instant!”

The only difference this made was that each child promptly threw away his or her wrapper wherever he or she happened to be. Wrappers snowed across the paths, draped themselves over hedges and strewed on the flower-beds behind the hedges. The pond in the middle was thick with floating papers, showing lime-green or raspberry-red or chocolate-brown faces labelled Mr Lolly.

“Pick up these papers at once!” the teacher yelled.

No one seemed to hear her.

Robert stared. “Is this a school for the deaf?” he asked Heather.

“No, it’s just a feeble teacher,” Heather said.

“You mean, she does not take the whip to them often enough?” Robert said. Before Heather could explain that teachers did not generally whip people these days, Robert said, “Then I must teach her a lesson along with her pupils.” He stretched out his hand. He tipped it. Heather seemed to feel the edge of the world rustle as it peeled past her ears – a soggy sort of rustle, like wet paper. She swallowed, because it made her ears pop.

In the pond, a lime-green ice lolly wrapper began to grow. It spread swiftly, somehow eating up all the other wrappers it came to, bigger and bigger, like a giant water lily leaf. Before anyone could blink, it was too big for the pond and lay across it, curling and uncurling its edges. The monstrous lime-green face on it glared. It opened a giant chocolate-coloured mouth to show raspberry-red teeth. A huge voice from it roared, “SILENCE! PICK UP THOSE WRAPPINGS!”

The teacher screamed and ran away. The children all stood where they were, staring uncertainly. “It’s just a TV stunt,” one of them said. “Take no notice.”

Robert grinned. His little finger and his thumb tipped, ever so slightly.

“IS THAT SO?” roared the lime-green Mr Lolly. And it rose out of the pond, huger than ever, dripping water, and grabbed for the nearest children with torn, wet, green paper hands. Most of them backed away.
Most of them looked quite frightened, but there were one or two who began laughing scornfully.

“Kick it in the teeth,” a boy said. “It’s only paper.”

Robert’s face bunched up and his lower lip came out. His thumb twitched sharply, twice. All the rest of the paper strewn over the paths and the hedges and the flower-beds flew into the air and gathered into two large rustling clots. Next second, a raspberry-coloured Mr Lolly and a chocolate-coloured one were stalking across the hedges towards the boy. The expressions on their vast faces were of pure hatred. Heather was not surprised when the boy turned and ran. And once he was running, all the other children panicked as well and ran after him, crashing through the little hedges, trampling on the flower-beds and pushing one another to get away from the three gigantic figures stalking after them.