A Fight and a Fairy-tale
'In those days Mr Sherlock Holmes still lived in Baker Street, and the Bastables were looking for treasure on Lewisham Road ... there lived in London a girl called Polly Plummer.'
Did the Bastables ever hear of the fight at the lamp-post? Cross-over/missing moment, post-Magician's Nephew.
~:~:~
"Do you remember when we were brigands?" said Dicky from behind the newspaper.
"You really shouldn't have been," said Dora sternly.
"We only caught Albert-no-longer-next-door," Noel put in. "And his uncle said he shouldn't have been out, anyway."
"And he only gave us two shillings," said H.O.
At this letting of the cat out of the bag, Dora sniffed. "And you really shouldn't have taken them."
Wealth, you see, has not changed us. We have not abandoned the close embrace of family ties in pursuit of vain outside amusements – or any of the other rot they talk about in penny novels you get at the railway stations, where the hero suddenly finds a fortune and starts living like a silly twit. Perhaps it was because we found an uncle, not just a fortune. At any rate, the lowering sun at the twilight hour still finds us all – I mean we kids, not Uncle and Father, who are still at the office – awaiting our elders' return in the big front room which is our sort of den-come-ex-nursery.
Its official name is The Children's Room, although Father sometimes calls it the Bear Garden. We older ones do our prep here, and the younger ones play. I had finished my prep. Dora was still doing hers. Dicky said he had finished his.
It is important to trust one's younger brothers and sisters in matters of honesty, so they do not grow up suspicious and sneaking. Also so they may learn for themselves that the Latin master does swing a mean switch when you have not done your prep, and so will never be tempted to take such short-cuts again. At any rate, Dicky was reading yesterday's paper, which Uncle had left out for us in the hall. He removes a sheet now and then, but mostly he trusts us to take no harm from it.
I don't think it was the influence of the paper which caused Dicky to say "Two shillings wasn't very much to him! And it didn't go very far!"
"It should have gone straight back next door!"
It seemed the role of an older brother to pour the calming oil on these troubled waters before they got any stormier. Dora is very highly strung these days, especially when she is preparing her French verbs. I really cannot see why they have to teach girls French verbs. They seem to pick up French fashions without any troubling over grammar at all. Spoiling their sweet natures with past perfect participles is simply a shame.
"Why were you recalling the days of old?" I asked, trying to phrase it in a way which would not ruffle Dora's sensibilities any further.
Dicky cleared his throat dramatically. "The jewellery robbery's in the paper again!"
Apart from Dora, who sniffed and retired behind her grammar again, I do not exaggerate to say that we were all at once agog. The jewellery robbery had been front page news the day before yesterday – that is, on the front page of the day-before-the-day-before-yesterday's paper – and it had happened the day before that. Since then, there had been utter quiet about it, while we and everyone else were left to wonder. A woman, said to be tall, powerful and young – or possibly an escapee from Broadmoor – had abducted a cab containing a respectable old gentleman, robbed a Bond Street jeweller's shop of thousands of pounds of jewellery in broad daylight, and then crashed the cab, attacked a policeman and vanished.
"Have they offered a reward?" Alice asked.
"Five hundred pounds," said Dicky.
Even in our happy present state, in which we are never anything but flush of chink, this sum was exciting.
"We could buy a boat!" H.O. exclaimed.
"Or ponies!"
"Buy a steam engine!"
"An elephant!"
"Go to America!"
"Go 'round the world!"
Dicky remained solidly unexcited. "They think She's gone abroad. She had a foreign appearance."
"That just means she dressed badly," said the French grammar scornfully. "How could she have got away?"
"They think she was in league with the cabbie," Dicky explained. "He's missing too. And his wife. They've traced their house and it's just abandoned. Right in the middle of a wash-day. They say it was a miracle the copper seemed to have gone out by itself, or it would have set the street on fire. They've got a picture of them," he wound up. "Not her. The cabbie and his wife."
"She is the cat's mother," Dora began, but then she gave up being grammatical and came to crowd round with the rest of us to see. An ordinary sort of couple, sitting for a photograph in their best clothes, smiled rather shyly back up at us. The cabbie's wife had a rather ugly hat with artificial cherries on it, but her face was pretty underneath it.
"They look nice," Alice sighed. "Like the railway man and his wife, whom Dicky sent the hamper to. I wish they hadn't done it."
Noel went back to the window seat. "Maybe they didn't," he said dreamily. "Maybe it's not like it seems at all. Like some of the scrapes we got into."
"There's a lot of jewellery gone missing," H.O. pointed out.
"Oh, I'm sure she did it," said Noel. "But maybe the cabbie and his wife didn't." He drew his feet up onto the window seat and hugged his knees. "Perhaps … perhaps she just forced them into it. Or simply stole the cab. And so they've gone away, to get away from her. Far, far away, to some greener place than London. And they'll build a little house, and till the earth and grow food, and have animals. Maybe the animals will become so tame, they'll come to the house door and the cabbie's wife will feed and pet them, like the farmer's wife with the chickens. And their horse will grow young again and they'll live happily ever after and she'll never, never come to bother them again..."
You will think I am talking rot if I say we were spell-bound by his words. So I will just say that both Dora and Alice quite forgot to point out that Noel hadn't taken off his shoes before putting his feet on the cushion. Most of the time these days the girls are like hawks on this matter. They don't seem to understand that a boy has to put his feet somewhere. If it's not 'Put your feet down!' it's 'Hush! Don't put them down so loudly!'
This time, we were all hushed. H.O. broke it with a sad sort of sigh. "That sounds like a fairy-tale."
"Sometimes fairy-tales do happen!" Dora defended unexpectedly. "Look! Here's the cab with Father and Uncle drawing up at the gate!"
~:~:~
A/N: This is, I believe, the world's second Nesbit/Narnia cross-over, and a sort of prequel to the first. But the author of that is too busy with grad school to publish it just yet, so you will all have to make do with this :)