The Tale of Applebeck Orchard (24 page)

T
H
un
K
!

For a very long moment, Bosworth could only lie there, flat on his back, trying to get his breath, feeling the hard hammering of his heart as he looked into blackness, the thickest, darkest, murkiest, most sinister blackness he had ever seen. He had hit bottom. Or at least, what he thought was bottom.

But perhaps it wasn’t
the
bottom, he thought, in a muzzy sort of way. Perhaps he had only fallen onto a ledge, and if he moved or tried to roll over, he might roll straight off and down, and heaven only knew how FAR down it was to the real bottom. He tried to put out his right paw to feel for the edge. But the paw was pinned under him, and it hurt. The pain was like fire, running up his wrist, to his elbow. Broken, probably. Oh, dear. A broken leg. That complicated things. It complicated things a very great deal.

He took a deep breath, lifted his left paw, and wiggled it. Well, good. At least that one wasn’t broken. He reached out as far as he could, feeling flat earth, earth covered with inches of dust. He sneezed. He might be lying on a ledge, but at least it wasn’t a narrow one. He kept reaching, kept feeling, and then he felt something else. It was a heap of something, a pile of old clothing, perhaps, or an old fur coat that somebody had tossed into his pit.

He patted it. Yes, fur, that was what it was. It was something furry, and dry, very dry, and dusty. And there was a stick of some kind lying across the heap.

But it wasn’t exactly a stick, was it? No. Bosworth felt it with his paw. It was . . . It was a cane. A cane with a curiously carved head.

Bosworth had found Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin.

And that was when the bleak reality of his situation struck him. He squeezed his eyes shut and sucked in his breath, trying to quiet his hammering heart. Bosworth had found himself in some prickly patches, especially back in the days when—footloose and fancy-free—he had roamed the world. But this was the most terrible, most grave, most potentially deadly difficulty he had ever fallen into, never mind the pun. Here he lay in pitch blackness, one foreleg broken, at the bottom of a very deep pit in an unused corridor in a forgotten corner of his very large house, beside his deceased great-great-uncle, who had perished many years before. No one knew where he was—not Parsley nor Primrose nor Hyacinth nor any of the others. It was entirely possible that he could suffer poor Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin’s fate, and no one would ever be the wiser.

If that was what happened, our badger would not be very happy about it, of course. But animals have rather a different view of death than we do. The Thirteenth Rule of Thumb reminds every badger that animals are prone to accidents and that there are many traps and snares in this world. One must be prepared to depart from this life (when it is time) in the same way that one arrives in it, without fuss or fanfare, with all one’s business in good order. Unfortunately, however, Bosworth’s business was not quite in good order, for he had not yet named anyone to wear the Badger Badge of Authority when he was gone.

Bosworth’s eyes popped wide open against the darkness. He had heard the words as clearly as if . . . as if they had come from the pile of fur and bones that lay within arm’s reach.

“And why not? I ask you,”
came the voice again, a little louder and testier.
“Why have you put off doing the most important thing a wearer of the Badge ought to do? I tell you, boy, I am very disappointed in you.”

This time, Bosworth was sure. He was in the presence of the spirit of Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin, who had himself been a wearer of the Badge and had every right to chastise him. The Fourteenth Rule of Thumb came into his mind, and he shivered. Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin had crossed the bridge to the Back of Beyond, but his spirit lingered behind. He, Bosworth, was in the company of one of his watchful elders.

In the company of watchful elders. Of course! That was why he was here. Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin had arranged events in such a way that Bosworth would tumble into the very same pit where the elder badger had lost his life! But why go to all that trouble? Surely, as a spirit, Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin could talk to Bosworth whenever and wherever he chose. He did not need to engineer a twenty-foot drop to tell Bosworth to get on with the business of naming his successor.

Cradling his injured foreleg, Bosworth pulled himself into a sitting position. Of course Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin could talk to him—and perhaps he had. Perhaps it had been
his
voice that had been nagging at the back of Bosworth’s mind these past few weeks!

And Bosworth had ignored him. Well, not exactly
ignored
, perhaps, but he hadn’t moved very speedily to get something done. Suppose Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin had nagged and nagged and kept on nagging, until he realized that Bosworth was not really
listening
? Suppose he decided, then, that the only way to make his great-great-nephew come face-to-face with the decision he had to make was to put him into an entirely helpless position, flat on his back at the bottom of a very deep, very dark pit, with a broken foreleg.

Bosworth was covered with chagrin. He could see now that he had dragged his feet, held his fire, delayed, deferred, procrastinated, and postponed. Unforgivably, he had put off doing the most important thing a holder of the Badge ought to do, his last, his most important task. If he died here beside Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin—and he very well might, since no one knew where he was—there would be no one to carry on the work. There would be no one to take responsibility. What would happen to The Brockery, and all the animals in it? What would happen to the
History
? The
Genealogy
?

At this thought, Bosworth began to feel deeply ashamed of himself, which I perfectly understand. Don’t you? Just imagine for a moment how you would feel if you were lying with a broken arm at the bottom of a pit filled with the darkest, heaviest blackness you had ever experienced, in the company of a long-dead relative who was reminding you of something you were supposed to do that you had failed to do, something so urgent, so important, that the continuing life and health of your family depended on it.

I know how I should feel. I should feel dreadful. I should feel frightened, of course, and panicked. In fact, I should feel terrified. And I would most likely start screaming.

Afterward, Bosworth said he wasn’t screaming, exactly.
“I was calling out,”
he explained, when it came to telling this part of the story.
“I was shouting, just in case there might be anyone nearby who could hear me and come and fetch me out of that hole.”

But to tell the plain, unvarnished truth, Bosworth was screaming. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was bellowing at the top of his lungs, and there is no shame in saying so, none at all. Indeed, I think it was a very good thing that our badger did bellow, for if he had not made such a very great commotion, he might not have been heard.

But I am happy to tell you that he was heard.

Hyacinth heard him, and this is how it happened.

When she could get no answer to her own shouts for directions to Room 428, Hyacinth had gone back to the main living area to fetch a large torch. And because she had an intuition (a
female
intuition?) that something very unpleasant had happened to her uncle Bosworth, she also fetched with her Parsley’s nephews, who had dropped in for a brief visit. These young badgers—Paolo and Pedro were their professional names, although they had been born Tom and Dick—were trapeze artists. They starred in a traveling circus called ALEXANDER AND WILLIAM’S CIRCUS, on its way to Carlisle for an upcoming series of performances.

There were a great many small circuses in those days, and they traveled all over the country in their gaily painted caravans, bringing exotic entertainments to rural people. Miss Potter herself wrote about this particular circus in her book
The Fairy Caravan
, noting that it featured a “pigmy” elephant (that was Paddy Pig with a moss-stuffed black stocking for a trunk and a howdah made of a bright-colored tea caddy), a dormouse named Xarifa, Jane Ferret (no relative to Fritz), and Tuppenny, a long-haired guinea pig. She neglected to mention the badger trapeze artists, I’m sorry to say. But she did tell all about the clever caravan, which was no doubt just like the ones she had seen touring the Land Between the Lakes. She described it as a tiny four-wheeled caravan, painted yellow and red. It had windows with muslin curtains, just like a house, and outside steps up to the back door, and a chimney on the roof. All the animals could be invisible at will, because they carried fern seed in their pockets. (If you want to know what happened when the pony lost his fern seed, you will have to read Miss Potter’s book.)

Now, Paolo and Pedro were muscular, agile, and entirely fearless young badgers, especially when it came to ropes. In fact, they were exactly the sort of fellows one would want to take on a rescue mission, and it was a very good thing that they just happened to drop in the very afternoon that they were needed.

It was also a good thing that Bosworth went on shouting (or screaming or bellowing or roaring or whatever you want to call it), because it was the sound of his cries that guided Hyacinth and his rescuers—and not a moment too soon, either, for he had shouted himself hoarse and was beginning to run out of steam. Another ten minutes, and I doubt that he would have been able to summon so much as a whimper. And then of course, it would have been Bosworth and Benjamin, together for eternity.

So it was one very relieved badger, as you can imagine, who looked up and saw a flickering beacon of light—a beacon of hope—many feet above his head. It was Hyacinth’s torch.

“Hullo up there!”
he croaked.
“I’m here. Down here! Very far down,”
he added to himself.
“I doubt you’ll be able to get me out.”

Hyacinth leant over the edge.
“Uncle!”
she cried anxiously.
“Uncle Bosworth, are you all right?”

“More or less,”
Bosworth called.
“Can somebody fetch a rope?”
He tried to move.
“Or Parsley’s laundry basket, p’rhaps? My right foreleg appears to be broken. I don’t think I can climb a

rope.”
To be truthful, he wasn’t sure he could manage to get into Parsley’s laundry basket, either.

“Don’t worry, Uncle,”
Hyacinth shouted in a comforting voice.
“Pedro’s gone for a rope. Someone will be down to get you very soon.”

And someone was. He proved to be an extremely strong and agile badger, who came paw-over-paw down a rope, which was secured at the top end by another extremely strong badger. A moment later, a second rope came down, with Parsley’s large wicker laundry basket fastened to the business end. There was some difficulty getting Bosworth into the basket—his foreleg hurt him very much, of course—and he was really too big for the basket.

But once he was in, hauling him out of the pit was duck soup, as the Americans say. After all, Paolo and Pedro were used to handling ropes and swings and the like, and they brought up the basket with a minimum of swaying and bumping against the sides of the pit, although the ascent made Bosworth feel quite airsick. Once he was safely out of the pit, the circus performers took turns carrying Bosworth on their backs through the labyrinth of passages, back to the main part of The Brockery. Getting back wasn’t difficult at all, either, because Hyacinth (clever lass!) had taken the precaution of mapping their route as they went along. Please remember that the next time you’re about to enter a badger sett. Making a map is infinitely better than finding yourself lost.

With the aid of Hyacinth’s map, the rescue crew returned safely, and it was no more than half an hour after his rescue that Bosworth was sitting in his rocking chair beside the kitchen fire, his feet soaking in a wooden tub of hot water and Epsom salts, his poor injured foreleg expertly splinted by Parsley and wrapped with a poultice of boneset leaves, to speed healing. There was a glass of restorative nettle beer at his left elbow, and a plate of fresh, hot scones, slathered with lavender honey and freshly churned butter, at his right. The talk, of course, was all about how Bosworth had managed to fall into the pit and what he found at the bottom (the details of which you have already heard), and how other animals might be prevented from getting lost and falling into it.

And all the while, Bosworth kept his eye on the handsome trophy he had brought back with him—well, not a trophy, exactly, but certainly a reminder of his grueling and very nearly fatal experience, letting him know that there was something he needed urgently to do. It was Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin’s cane, cut from a length of the stur diest oak, polished to a deep, rich gleam, and topped with a head that was carved into a crown-like shape, so that the whole affair looked rather like a scepter.

And Bosworth was ready to do it—more than ready, in fact. He was tired of procrastinating, postponing, deferring, and delaying. He didn’t give a hoot what the professor thought, and whilst he wished fervently that Thorn would come back, he was confident that Hyacinth was the very best choice of a badger to wear the Badge. As far as he was concerned, she had already passed the most significant test, expressed in the Fifteenth Rule of Thumb:
It is well to keep one’s head when one is confronted with catastrophe, calamity, or cataclysm. Losing one’s head never solves anything.
And also in the Sixteenth:
The prudent badger assesses the situation, determines a course of action, and speedily gathers the appropriate resources. Such badgers should be called upon for leadership whenever the clan is in need of help.

Hyacinth had kept her head, had brought help, and a torch and ropes and a map, and had gotten them all back safely.

“It’s time,”
Great-Great-Uncle Benjamin whispered, at the back of his mind.