Dubious Deeds Read online

  It was just as Jones spat out the word ‘it’ that a chimney (shaped like a giant barley sugar, apparently) fell from the roof of Awful End and landed on Eddie’s father, Mr Dickens, with a fairly dreadful ‘CRUNCH’.

  Episode 3

  Flat Out

  In which fate, in the form of a chimney, deals a blow to poor Mr Dickens

  I once wrote a book called Heir of Mystery and in it is a picture of a man, named Vern De Vere, lying under a large sign that fell off the wall of an army recruiting office and landed on top of him. You couldn’t tell that it was Mr De Vere because all that was sticking out from under the sign were his arms and legs.

  As you can see, this would have been very similar to the sight that faced Mr Dickens’s relatives as they looked down on the poor man trapped under the chimney stack.

  Unlike Mr De Vere, who didn’t survive his tragic accident, Mr Dickens was alive and, if not exactly well, at least groaning. Mrs Dickens thought she heard her husband mutter ‘I’ll get you for this, Ardagh!’ but put it down to the ramblings of a seriously injured man. It made no sense at all.

  It was Eddie who suggested that they lift the large chunk of stone off his father. The others were busy gawping. With the help of Ex-Private Drabb (who’d been ‘volunteered’ to be beaten in that year’s beating the bounds), Eddie lifted up the chimney and dropped it to one side. It made quite a thud when it hit the driveway.

  Ex-Private Drabb looked surprisingly muscular for a man of his age, for he was, to borrow my mother’s phrase, ‘no spring chicken’. This was misleading. Those weren’t really broad shoulders, a large chest and muscles bulging under his clothing; he had various cushions stuffed in there to act as padding. Padding against what? Being beaten with a stuffed stoat at regular intervals, that’s what.

  I think there’s a saying along the lines of ‘one man’s misfortune is another man’s fortune’ and if there isn’t there should be. Poor old Mr Dickens being flattened by one of Awful End’s numerous chimneys may have been rather bad luck for Mr Dickens, but was excellent news for Ex-Private Drabb. Beating the bounds of the Awful End estate would be postponed or, if luck was really on his side, maybe even cancelled altogether.

  The chimney removed, Mrs Dickens threw herself to the gravelly ground and cradled her husband in her marmalade-stained lap. ‘Speak to me!’ she pleaded.

  ‘Father!’ Eddie cried. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Damn and confound it!’ said Mad Uncle Jack, looking up at the roof. ‘More repairs!’

  ‘Get up, lazybones,’ said Even Madder Aunt Maud prodding Mr Dickens with the tip of her now-closed umbrella (which made a change from using the tip of Malcolm’s nose).

  ‘Father!’ Eddie repeated.

  ‘Why can’t I be in a book about nice fluffy bunnies where not much happens?’ groaned Mr Dickens.

  ‘Mad!’ said Even Madder Aunt Maud. ‘He’s gone quite mad. We’ll have to have him shot.’

  ‘Fwumbblewww,’ said Mrs Dickens, who’d now filled her mouth with gravel to calm her nerves.

  ‘I’ll fetch Dawkins,’ said Ex-Private Drabb, scuttling off into the house.

  ‘Roof tiles are expensive enough,’ muttered MUJ, ‘but a whole replacement chimney?’

  ‘Hmmmm,’ said Fandango Jones, who’d produced a notebook from his pocket and was writing notes and drawing angles and lines and diagrams with a stubby pencil. ‘Most interesting.’

  ‘We must get a stonemason!’ said Mad Uncle Jack.

  ‘We must get sandwiches!’ said Even Madder Aunt Maud.

  ‘We must get the police!’ spat Mr Jones, the engineer, having completed some complicated calculations in his head.

  ‘We must get a DOCTOR!’ shouted Eddie.

  That shut them all up.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mad Uncle Jack, looking down at Eddie’s father as though he’d forgotten he was lying there. ‘We must send Dawkins to fetch Doctor Humple at once.’

  ‘And have him bring sandwiches!’ Even Madder Aunt Maud added. ‘And what fillings would my little Malcolm like?’ she asked the stuffed stoat. It said nothing, giving her a glassy stare. No surprises there, then.

  Nowadays we know that we shouldn’t move people when they’ve been injured, until the professionals arrive. Back in those days, it was thought that you’d be better off lying on a bed or a couch or something more comfortable than a gravel driveway if you’d just been hit by a chimney. In fact, in Old Roxbee’s Book of Common Household Ailments, under ‘Injuries Incurred Upon Being Hit By A Fallen Chimney’ it states:

  In order to assist the poor unfortunate struck by said chimney, remove him to a comfortable spot and tenderly apply a bread poultice to the affected area, offering gentle words of encouragement throughout the treatment. If the patient’s life appears to be in serious danger, do not feel it your duty to inform him, but simply offer a soothing, ‘There, there,’ whilst patting his hand with your own.

  The advice, of course, applied equally well to ‘shes’ as ‘hes’, but it was usually only men who got a mention in such books of the time, except in sections particularly devoted to women, dealing with such matters as ‘Upon Being Upset by a Fellow Guest at a Ladies’ Luncheon Party’, ‘Upon Having An Attack of the Vapours’ and ‘Upon Being Confronted by a Particularly Unpleasant Shade of Pink Without Sufficient Warning’.

  Fortunately for Eddie’s father, there wasn’t a copy of Old Roxbee’s Book of Common Household Ailments to be found in Awful End, or he’d probably have suffered more pain and indignity than being carried to a chaise longue in the withdrawing room, which would, no doubt, have involved covering him from head to toe – because his ‘affected area’ was just about everywhere – in porridge, it being the closest thing to a poultice they’d have to hand. Having said that, as you’ll discover, the Dickenses had their own ideas.

  It was whilst Dawkins and Ex-Private Drabb were doing the carrying that there was a nasty clicking sound and Dawkins’s back locked in position. His back locking in position meant that Dawkins could no longer stand up straight and certainly was in no position to ride a horse into town to fetch Dr Humple. Which is how Eddie came to volunteer to take the pony and trap … and, dear reader, how he came to have a terrible accident of his own.

  The pony which was pulling the trap (more than a cart but less than a carriage) that Eddie was sitting in hadn’t belonged to the Dickens family for very long. His name was Horsey and he’d been given to Eddie’s father by the Thackerys who’d been their nearest neighbours when they’d lived in their previous house (since burnt to the ground). The Thackerys – not to be confused with the Thackerays, of whom the famous author William Makepeace Thackeray was one – were fairly regular visitors to Awful End, though they did their best to stay out of the way of Mad Uncle Jack and Even Madder Aunt Maud. It was Laudanum and Florinda they’d come to see. (‘Mr and Mrs Dickens’ to you and me. Or ‘mother and father’ to Eddie.) Hey! Wait a minute. I think this is the very first time in five books that I’ve actually told you Eddie’s parents’ first names. I hope it was worth the wait.

  Jonas Thackery and his wife Emily had eight children, the youngest (Joy) being just a few years old and the oldest (Thomas) being older than his mother, for legal reasons. (It had something to do with inheritance and taxes.) The Thackerys loved animals and the children were forever looking after birds with broken wings or rabbits with a slight limp, even if it meant injuring them in the first place.

  They were never more happy than when they were nursing a pig back to health or informing a goat that her kid would make a full recovery. They’d gained quite a reputation locally when Mrs Thackery had managed to nurse an injured racehorse named Forward Motion (in italics) back to health when the usual prescription was shooting them. The cure had involved the use of a great deal of something called ‘rubbing alcohol’ and a variety of different herbs. Mrs Thackery was drunk for weeks and her breath stank of ragwort, but the horse made a full recovery.

  At the very first race Forward Mot
ion (in italics) ran in after his miraculous cure, he was so full of energy that he galloped straight into the stands and trampled several race-goers to death. Fortunately for the Thackerys, the race-goers were from abroad and, not being British, the tragedy didn’t merit more than a few lines in the national newspapers. The only Thackery who didn’t like animals one tiny bit (except on his plate with at least two vegetables) was David Thackery, who was about Eddie’s age. When he grew up, he wanted to be a man of the cloth. Despite what it may sound like, ‘a man of the cloth’ isn’t a window cleaner or even a tailor but another name for a churchman. His ultimate aim was to be an archbishop (or, perhaps, a saint), but he’d be happy starting off as a rector or a vicar or something like that.

  David Thackery was always quick to point out that animals didn’t have souls and couldn’t go to heaven, so wouldn’t his parents and siblings be better off caring for less fortunate people rather than wasting their time with silly-old-animals? This would usually cause his mother to burst into tears and to bury her face in the nearest furry patient.

  Whenever Mr and Mrs Thackery came to visit the Dickens at Awful End, they always brought one or other of their children with them and at least one animal. On the occasion that they’d brought Horsey as a present, they’d also brought David. Whilst Laudanum and Florinda Dickens and Jonas and Emily Thackery went inside for tea, Eddie and David were instructed to ‘take the air’. (They didn’t have to take it anywhere except inside their lungs. It was a way of telling them to go outside.)

  ‘Show Edmund what we’ve brought the family this time, dearest,’ Mrs Thackery had instructed her son.

  Eddie had been delighted with Horsey, but time spent with David was always a different matter. And now Eddie and Horsey were heading for Dr Humple, and that terrible, terrible accident I already mentioned. The suspense is killing me.

  Episode 4

  A Crash after the Crunch

  In which Eddie Dickens doesn’t know he is

  Eddie’s biggest problem at that precise moment was that he didn’t know that he was. Eddie Dickens, that is. All he knew for sure was that he was lying face down in a gorse bush and that his head hurt. Quite a lot of him hurt, in fact. Gorse bushes are renowned for their prickles and a good percentage of prickles from this particular bush were sticking into him. Now Eddie knew what it would feel like to be a hedgehog who’d absentmindedly put his coat on inside out.

  Eddie managed to struggle free of the bush, tearing much of his clothing, and some of his skin, in the process. Upright and dizzy, he looked around. ‘Who am I?’ he wondered, and only then did he wonder where he was.

  Eddie’s left knee hurt even more than his head and he found it difficult to scramble up the grassy bank to the road but, whoever he might turn out to be, he knew that he couldn’t lie around in a gorse bush in a ditch all day.

  Eddie didn’t know what to expect as he climbed the bank but, one thing’s for certain, it wasn’t a bright red dragon carrying a basket of fruit. But that’s exactly what he did see.

  The dragon smiled. ‘Apple?’ it asked, though I somehow wish it had said ‘banana’.

  Eddie collapsed to the ground unconscious.

  Time passed. Eddie opened his eyes. He was staring up at a ceiling; and what a ceiling.

  Where on Earth was he? Lying in the middle of a cathedral or something? How had he got there? He tried to sit up. His head swam. He felt all woo-oo-oo-oozy and he was disoriented, which means the same as ‘disorientated’ but is shorter.

  ‘Wozzgowinnon?’ he slurred.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Rest, my child,’ said a kindly voice.

  ‘Hooamma? Wurramma?’ he asked, which may sound a bit like the way some of the Scottish folk spoke in the first book in these Further Adventures, but actually meant ‘Who am I? Where am I?’, which were both perfectly reasonable questions under the circumstances.

  ‘Rest now, questions later,’ said the man – yes it was definitely a man – with the kindly voice.

  Eddie looked at him. The man was no oil-painting. He looked quite frightening, in fact; his face half in shadow beneath some kind of hood. He looked sinister. He had a very, very large nose which was very, very warty, and he had three peg-like teeth overhanging his lower lip. Then there were his clothes. He appeared to be wearing a light brown sack. But the man’s voice soothed Eddie. He felt safe, somehow. Eddie groaned and lay back down again. He’d just remembered the bright red dragon.

  ‘I must have been seeing things,’ he groaned.

  The bright red dragon peered over the man’s shoulder. ‘How is the boyo?’ it asked.

  Eddie fainted again. It seemed the most logical thing to do.

  *

  Now, I’m such a quiet narrator that you’ve probably forgotten all about me, so I hope that it doesn’t come as too much of a shock if I stop the action, introduce myself – Hello, reader dearest, I’m the very lovely Philip Ardagh, remember? – and tell you a little bit about where Eddie-who’s-forgotten-that-he-is-Eddie had ended up. He was in the vast medieval pile of Lamberley Monastery. The monastery was originally built in the year 1074 by Abbot Grynge (‘Abbot’ being his job title rather than a first name). Of course, he didn’t do any of the actual building himself. He was an abbot, not a stonemason or a general dogsbody/gopher/serf/fetcher-and-carrier. He had other people to do all the hard work for him. He was a distant relative of a guy named Bishop Odo who, in turn, was the half-brother of William the Conqueror. And William the Conqueror (once he’d conquered) became King William I of England. This meant that Odo could do pretty much what he wanted to do – until, that is, William threw him in jail in 1082 for plotting against him – and so, as a member of Odo’s family, Abbot Grynge would get a lot of favours, too.

  People weren’t going to argue with Grynge because he could either say: ‘I’m going to get my distant cousin’s half-brother’s army on to you’, or ‘I’ll get the Pope on to you.’ Either way, Abbot Grynge was not a man to be messed with.

  According to the Lamberley Chronicles (written by monks some two hundred years later), ‘he was a man of great humbleness and consideration’. According to a piece of graffiti scratched into the monastery stonework in 1089, Grynge was ‘a fatty’. What is known for sure, though, is that Abbot Grynge refused to listen to advice not to build his brand-spanking-new monastery where he did. There are a number of bogs, quagmires, marshes and areas of generally ‘soft ground’ in the vicinity (see Dreadful Acts), and Grynge’s monastery was built on one of them. Within twenty years or so of the final tile being placed on the roof, the whole thing began to sink. It started at one end, so the whole building had a slight tilt to it, like a ship listing in heavy seas. The result was that if the monks prayed on their knees on the slippery stone floor of the chapel, they found themselves sliding towards the altar like pucks in an ice hockey game. Within a hundred years, the ground floor had become the basement.

  By a strange quirk of fate – or, possibly, because God works in mysterious ways – it was the fact that Lamberley Monastery was built in such a stupid place and suffered the consequences that led to it still standing (even if at a funny angle and partially underground) in Eddie’s time. In 1535, another king (Henry VIII) had fallen out with the Pope and decided to get rid of all the monasteries, taking all the land and riches for himself.

  According to local tradition, when King Henry’s men turned up at Lamberley and saw the funny tilted building in the squishy ground, they assumed that it was already abandoned so didn’t bother to destroy it and throw out the monks (who were probably hiding on the floor with all the lights out), and went on their way. The monks just went on living there.

  Monks from different orders follow different rules. Two of the most common monastic orders in England – before Henry VIII kicked them out – were the Franciscans and Benedictines. Franciscan monks followed the way of life as laid down by a chap called St Francis of Assisi and Benedictines followed the rules of St Benedict of Nosin. The monks at La
mberley were of the lesser-known Bertian order, founded by Ethelbert the Funny in about 828 AD. Ethelbert the Funny was brother of Ethelbert the Forked-Beard and Ethelbert the Lazy; though why their parents called them all Ethelbert escapes me. Perhaps it was a family tradition – there’s no record of their father’s name – or perhaps the Ethelberts’ parents were completely lacking in imagination.

  There is a theory that, because in those days the majority of children died before reaching adulthood, their parents expected at least two Ethelberts to die anyway and for them to be left with just the one. The Lamberley Chronicles (which I’ve already mentioned, I’m sure) state that Ethelbert the Lazy died in adulthood, when he couldn’t be bothered to get out of the way of a rampaging sheep (which, in turn, dislodged a human-squashingly-large boulder), and that Ethelbert the Forked-Beard later shaved off his beard and became Ethelbert the Clean-Shaven. But, for obvious reasons, it’s Ethelbert the Funny with whom the chronicles are most interested.

  This particular Ethelbert was given the nickname ‘the Funny’ on the basis of one joke which, sad to say, isn’t even the remotest bit funny by today’s standards. Life can be like that. Once Ethelbert was outside his family hovel picking vegetables from a three-foot square strip of soil – remember that: three-foot square – which he’d carefully destoned, sieved, composted and weeded, when the local baron’s henchman appeared in the lane, leading a large horse. The henchman wandered over to Ethelbert. The horse, which must have been bored and had its mind on other things, stepped on Ethelbert’s feet with one of its huge iron-shod hooves.