Voyage of the Sparrowhawk Read online

  Lotti, who was sanding the roof, caught Ben’s gasp, followed his line of vision and immediately assumed that Albert Skinner had come to arrest her for stealing Federico, currently asleep with Elsie in Nathan’s workshop but liable to wake up at any moment and give the whole game away. In fact, she had been right when she told Ben that Malachy Campbell wasn’t the sort of person to go to the police. Albert Skinner wasn’t in the least bit interested in Federico. But Lotti had no way of knowing this, and she braced herself for the worst.

  Albert approached. Lotti and Ben assumed wholly unconvincing expressions of innocence.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said Albert, who liked to be civil even when imparting bad news.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ they muttered, and in his mind Ben saw the Sparrowhawk in the hands of a stranger, Elsie in a dog pound, the metal beds of an orphanage dormitory, while Lotti felt her uncle’s slap and imagined Federico in chains …

  ‘I have come to ask you,’ said Albert Skinner, ‘why you are not in school.’

  Later he would remember this moment, when Lotti and Ben’s expression changed from guilt to relief, before descending into protest. He would tell himself that that was the moment when he should have known they were a force to be reckoned with. But the relief, though enormous, was only fleeting and very quickly gave way to a level of protest he had not expected.

  ‘What do you mean, school?’ Lotti cried.

  If Albert was startled by Lotti’s appearance, barefoot and dressed in a pair of rolled-up overalls stolen from Aunt Vera’s jumble pile, he did not let it distract him. ‘School means school,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how else to put it. Everyone knows what school is. Children go to it to learn, until they are fourteen. I am telling you about it because it’s the law.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Lotti. ‘School ends when you’re twelve. My uncle specifically told me so.’

  ‘It’s a new law,’ said Albert. ‘And I am never wrong.’

  ‘But that’s a terrible law!’

  Albert was conscious, as so many people were on first meeting Lotti, of an incipient headache.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you think the law is terrible,’ he said. ‘You can’t change it. I am just here to tell you …’

  He paused. Federico, hearing Lotti’s agitation, was howling in sympathy from Nathan’s workshop.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Albert.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Lotti. ‘I mean, it’s a dog. My dog. He’s ill.’

  ‘Do you want to go to him?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Right.’ Albert hesitated. ‘Well, as I was saying …’

  ‘I can’t go to school.’ Ben, who had been staring at Albert in shocked silence, finally spoke. ‘I have a job. I need the money. I have to repair the Sparrowhawk. For when my brother gets back,’ he added quickly.

  ‘About that,’ said Albert. ‘I was wondering when …’

  ‘I can’t go to school either,’ Lotti cut in firmly. ‘For many reasons, not least because school is hateful. It’s all very well for the government to make these laws, but they don’t have to live them.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to talk to your parents about that,’ said Albert.

  ‘They’re dead,’ snapped Lotti, and was savagely pleased to see Albert flush.

  Ben had been thinking hard. ‘Clara would have said if I had to go to school.’

  ‘Who,’ asked Lotti, ‘is Clara?’

  ‘She’s my neighbour. She lives in the cottage over there, and she came to introduce herself the evening after I moved in. She’s a writer. She would know about school, and she never said a thing about it. Quite the contrary. I told her I was working in the boatyard, and she said that must be nice, and how boats were like fairy tales, or poetry, or something.’

  ‘Well, let’s ask her, then,’ said Lotti.

  ‘It won’t make a slightest difference,’ said Albert, but it was too late. Lotti had slithered off the roof on to the towpath and was marching away towards Clara Primrose’s cottage.

  Ben jumped off the rear deck and went after her. All Albert could do was follow.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Clara was confused. All these months living in solitude, and suddenly her little front garden was crowded with people she hadn’t invited, all talking at the same time; her neighbour Ben and a policeman, and the girl who was always hanging around the Sparrowhawk, who had stolen the chihuahua. Clara didn’t want them here, but how could she get rid of them? In the background, she heard the five o’clock train whistle as it pulled into the station. She had a sudden vision of Max on the train, Max walking from the station, Max arriving while all these people were here quarrelling, when she had waited for him all this time in perfect isolation. Perhaps if she cried they might go away. But Clara, in her former life as a student, had agreed with her friend Kitty that women who cried to get what they wanted were despicable.

  ‘Better to be very, very haughty,’ Kitty had said.

  Clara pushed her glasses back up her nose.

  ‘I have no idea what you are all doing here,’ she announced, as grandly as you can in a jumper worn back to front, and a moth-eaten one at that. ‘But I’d be much obliged if you would leave.’

  Albert, shouting above Lotti in a not very dignified attempt to be heard, informed her that children had to go to school.

  ‘But what does that have to do with me?’ asked Clara.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Albert, whose headache was getting worse.

  ‘Tell him the law’s wrong,’ ordered Lotti.

  ‘What law?’

  ‘The law that says they have to remain in education until they are fourteen,’ grumbled Albert Skinner.

  ‘Is there such a law?’

  ‘You see?’ Albert turned to Lotti. ‘She doesn’t know.’

  He felt triumphant, and at the same time also a little ashamed of being so pleased at having proved a child wrong, but both feelings turned to aggravation as he realised Lotti didn’t look the least bit defeated.

  ‘Remain in education until they’re fourteen,’ she repeated. ‘That is what you said, isn’t it?’

  Albert wrinkled his brow. She was up to something, he could tell, but what?

  ‘What I mean,’ Lotti continued, ‘is could someone educate us at home? Or at their home? Or even on a boat? Someone who knew what they were doing, like a tutor?’

  ‘I suppose they could, yes.’

  ‘Someone like Miss Clara, who is a writer and so must be very educated?’

  Ben gazed at Lotti in wonder. Clara Primrose stared at her aghast. Albert Skinner scratched his head.

  ‘Someone like Miss Clara. Yes, I suppose she could.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be a teacher!’ protested Clara.

  Lotti turned to face her. Albert, foreseeing another battle, decided to beat a retreat while his dignity was still salvageable, and announced that he would return soon.

  As he walked away, he was conscious of an uncomfortable feeling that he had been outplayed.

  When it came to Ben and Lotti, it was a feeling he was going to have to get used to.

  *

  The little crowd, minus Albert but including the dogs whom Ben had let out of the Sparrowhawk, were making their way into the cottage, and Clara was feeling even more confused.

  ‘I don’t want to be a teacher,’ she repeated. ‘I’m a writer. I need peace, quiet. I need solitude. I want you to go.’

  Ben, never one to willingly cause trouble, glanced uneasily at Lotti. Lotti, unconcerned, bounced on one of the two sagging armchairs by the fire.

  ‘You have a lot of books.’ She picked up a volume of poetry from the floor and spelled out the author’s name. ‘G-O-E-T-H-E. Goaty! Goat?’

  ‘It’s pronounced G-E-R-T-E-R. It’s poetry. It’s German.’

  ‘German?’ Ben was outraged.

  ‘I didn’t know Germans had poetry,’ said Lotti.

  ‘Well, they do, beautiful poetry.’ Clara flushed, and resisted
the urge to throw a book at Lotti’s head.

  ‘But why are you reading German poetry?’ demanded Ben. ‘When we have just fought a war against them?’

  ‘Poetry has no frontiers,’ Clara informed him frostily.

  Ben sniffed, unconvinced. Lotti put down the Goethe and picked up another volume. ‘Is this one German too? Look, it’s got your name in the title. Für Clara. For Clara?’

  ‘Give me that!’ Clara snatched the book from Lotti’s hand.

  ‘You should tell my uncle about Germans and poetry. He thinks all foreigners are savages. Including me, because I’m half French. Will you teach us German poetry?’

  ‘Not German,’ said Ben decisively.

  ‘Not anything!’ cried Clara.

  ‘But it’s the perfect solution!’ said Lotti.

  ‘Solution to what?’ asked Clara, practically shrieking.

  ‘Your uncle would never let you have lessons with me anyway,’ said Ben, ignoring Clara. ‘He’s too posh.’

  ‘He’s mean though too, and I bet Miss Clara wouldn’t cost as much as school. No offence, Miss Clara.’

  The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour, and Clara felt suddenly exhausted. It took ten minutes to walk here from the station, twenty at the most if the bridge was open and you had to go the long way. Max wasn’t going to come tonight. She sank into the armchair opposite Lotti’s and closed her eyes.

  ‘Perfect solution to what?’ she asked.

  ‘Ben has his job,’ explained Lotti. ‘And I have a problem with my dog Federico.’

  ‘The dog you have stolen.’ Clara opened her eyes and, seeing Lotti’s expression of terror, felt sorry that she had spoken. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t say anything.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Lotti, sounding more subdued, ‘when my uncle hears about this law, he’ll send me away. He’s much too much of a snob to let me go to the Barton school. So you see, a tutor’s the only way. It’s worth a try. Honestly, even if it weren’t for Federico, I couldn’t bear boarding school again.’

  ‘They shut her in the coal cellar,’ said Ben. ‘All night.’

  Clara, remembering her own miserable school days, pressed her lips together.

  ‘Will you teach us?’ All of Lotti’s bravado was gone now, and she was almost pleading. ‘I promise I’ll be good. I would actually like to learn. I had this idea yesterday that I could be an animal doctor. I took a thorn out of Federico’s foot and he looked at me with these big, grateful eyes – he has such beautiful eyes – and I thought imagine doing this all the time! I’d need a proper education for that, wouldn’t I? What would you like to be, Ben, if you had time for an education and you could be or do anything you wanted? Like Miss Clara being a writer and me being an animal doctor, what would you …’

  ‘I’d build bridges.’ The answer came from nowhere, but as soon as he said it Ben knew it was true. ‘And boats. Like Mr Brunel, the engineer. Nathan took us to Bristol once, to see the suspension bridge he built there over the gorge, and it was …’

  He trailed off. Words couldn’t do justice to how Ben had felt, the first time he saw Mr Brunel’s bridge suspended two hundred and forty-five feet above the Clifton gorge.

  Lotti smiled. ‘That would be a good thing for you, Ben.’

  A moment’s quiet settled over the room, and Clara was reminded of the first time she had seen these two, sitting together on the roof of the Sparrowhawk, and the feeling she had had then that anything was possible. Max would like these two, she thought. I like them.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was the morning after the encounter with Clara and Albert Skinner. Hubert Netherbury sat in Lotti’s papa’s chair in the Barton Lacey study, a map spread out before him on the desk. His face, as he observed his niece standing on the fine Persian rug before him, was irritated. His wife had informed him at breakfast that Lady Clarion went to Scotland every year, and couldn’t believe the Netherburys had never been. Hubert must plan a holiday immediately, Vera had said, and never mind the cost. He had been in the middle of doing this when Lotti knocked on the door, and he did not like to be interrupted.

  ‘I don’t understand what you need a tutor for,’ he grumbled, when she had explained what she wanted.

  Lotti, quaking inside, couldn’t quite meet her uncle’s eye, but she did manage to keep her voice steady.

  ‘To teach me,’ she said. ‘And also, because of the law.’

  ‘What law?’

  Lotti had prepared her story in advance. All she needed now was the courage to tell it.

  ‘There’s this lady I met at the library …’

  ‘What lady?’

  ‘A tutor.’

  ‘A female tutor?’ Hubert Netherbury looked appalled.

  ‘I went to the library to change my book,’ Lotti ploughed on. ‘It was a Dickens novel, Oliver Twist, and the tutor likes Dickens too so she asked had I read Great Expectations, and I said yes, we read it at school, and she said oh what school is that, then? And I said it used to be St Margaret’s Academy for Girls but I had to leave, and she said where do you go now and I said I was Making Myself Useful at Home and she said, but how old are you, my dear? Don’t you know that a new law was introduced last year which says you must be in education until you are fourteen?’

  Uncle Hubert made a spluttering sound. Lotti secretly began to enjoy herself.

  ‘I said no, I must tell my uncle and aunt! But I’m afraid they won’t want me to go away again because I am So Very Useful to My Aunt, and then she said well I am busy in the mornings but if your aunt can spare you in the afternoons I can give you lessons and prepare you for the School Certificate – apparently, this is quite an acceptable alternative to school – and of course much, much cheaper – and so I said …’

  ‘Enough!’ howled Uncle Hubert.

  *

  ‘He said yes!’ yelled Lotti, running towards the Sparrowhawk that afternoon. ‘Ben, my uncle said yes! I can learn with you and Clara! I don’t have to go away to school!’ Lotti twirled, flapping the skirt of her mended sailor suit, then drew a squashed wax-paper packet from her satchel. ‘I convinced him! Me! Uncle Hubert! Put the kettle on, Sally gave me cake!’

  They drank their tea side by side on the tiny foredeck, legs dangling over the water.

  ‘How d’you convince him, then?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Just told him the truth.’ Lotti grinned and broke a piece of cake in two for the dogs.

  ‘Lotti!’

  ‘All right, maybe not the exact truth. I didn’t mention Constable Skinner, or you. And he hasn’t completely agreed. He wants to meet Clara – we’ll have to make sure she looks respectable – and if he likes her, he’s agreed to a trial period. He and Aunt Vera are going on some ghastly holiday to Scotland at the end of May. I’ve got until then to show him I can be good. Actually, not good. I have to be exemplary.’ Lotti puffed out her chest, curling her lip in imitation of her uncle – ‘And I mean EXEMPLARY, young lady, or I shall send you away to a school where they whip you with stinging nettles before breakfast and the only food is cold worm porridge.’

  Ben began to laugh. Lotti shoved him with her shoulder.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and tell Miss Clara!’

  *

  Two days later, Clara, dressed in a pre-war suit and stockings that almost matched, went for her interview at Barton Lacey, where she passed Hubert Netherbury’s respectability test. Hubert Netherbury offered her shockingly low wages, which she accepted because she felt sorry for his niece.

  Everybody enjoyed the first lesson with Clara, including Clara herself. Its content was determined by what books she had found in the public library, its structure involved a great deal of student participation and its general atmosphere was one of loud, talkative chaos.

  ‘Here is a book about British kings and queens,’ Clara informed them when they arrived at her cottage. ‘Please read it.’

  ‘But it’s huge,’ Ben protested.<
br />
  ‘I’m sure you will rise to the challenge.’

  ‘And there’s two of us and only one book.’

  ‘You read the first half, and I’ll read the second,’ Lotti suggested. ‘And we can tell each other what happens.’

  ‘Excellent problem-solving, Lotti!’ said Clara. ‘Now, here is a famous French poem. It’s one of my favourites. It’s about rain falling on the rooftops of a town, and the poet feels like it’s raining in his heart.’

  ‘It sounds miserable,’ said Ben.

  ‘It’s actually rather beautiful,’ Lotti told him. ‘Papa used to recite it whenever it rained.’

  ‘Good, Lotti, then you can teach it to Ben. Right, I also found a book about the digestive system of cows. You’ll need to know about these things, if you want to be a vet. I thought you could copy out these diagrams. And look, Ben, here’s a book on famous bridges. You copy those. And then I suppose we’d better do some mathematics, although I’m not so good at mathematics.’

  ‘I am,’ said Ben.

  ‘That’s wonderful!’ Clara looked relieved. ‘Nil desperandum, as Sister used to say at the hospital – do not despair! Oh, lordy, we have to do Latin too …’

  ‘We did loads of Latin at St Margaret’s, miss.’

  ‘Lotti, please call me Clara! Miss makes me sound ancient, and I’m only twenty-three.’

  ‘We did loads of Latin at St Margaret’s, Clara. I’m actually really good at it. I can teach it!’

  The class had been, Clara said with a smile as she let them out just before the five o’clock train, extremely democratic.

  ‘Which is a word derived from the Ancient Greek – demos, meaning the common people, and kratos, meaning rule.’

  ‘Meaning,’ Lotti expanded joyfully when she and Ben parted at the Sparrowhawk, ‘that we are in charge! And did you notice, Ben, how pretty Clara looked when she smiled? Almost like she was really young!’

  *

  Yes, everyone enjoyed lessons with Clara, and over the next few weeks it seemed that this new way of life might last. Ben and Lotti worked hard at their lessons, at the boatyard, at Being Useful and Exemplary, at repairing the Sparrowhawk. Clara, busy and no longer lonely, smiled more and more often. Federico put on weight and his coat grew glossy. Elsie, for reasons no one could understand, took to sleeping most of the day.