Operation Bunny Read online

  Emily knew there was no point in bursting into tears. No one would come. Anyway, she was pretty certain that nothing was broken. She was studying her wounds—a grazed knee and a sore elbow—when she heard a rustling sound from the squirrel box hedge. She looked up to see an enormous, long-haired tortoiseshell cat, pushing his way through the hedge. And this was the strange part: the cat wasn’t on all fours like an ordinary cat. It was standing up.

  Emily wondered if she might have banged her head on the way down because she was sure she heard the cat say in a low, gruff voice, “Are you all right, miss?”

  A talking cat. Just like the fairy tale. It was good to know that her ex-adoptive mother wasn’t right on all matters.

  “Not really,” Emily said. “I have—”

  “Oh, my dear whiskers,” interrupted the cat. “Stay put, and don’t do anything hasty.”

  A talking cat, Emily thought, as he disappeared back through the hedge, is enough to take one’s mind off all sorts of pains.

  Chapter Five

  Emily was still trying to work out whether or not she had imagined the talking cat when an elderly woman appeared beside her.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, what a to-do,” she said, rushing up to Emily and helping her to her feet. “Fidget came to tell me that you had taken a nasty tumble. Anything broken?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Emily, “but thank you very much for asking.”

  “Capital,” said the lady. She had a round, rosy face with white hair that refused to stay pinned up to the top of her head. She looked a little like the fairy godmother in Emily’s storybook. Emily was sure this was Miss String.

  “I expect you know me as ‘the old bat,’” said the lady.

  Emily looked a bit sheepish. “Mrs. Dashwood is not related to me,” she said feebly.

  Miss String laughed. “I know that. And a jolly good thing too, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  By now, Fidget was back again, this time with a builder’s apron tied round him.

  Seeing the puzzled look on Emily’s face, he said, “Stops fur getting on things.”

  Emily pinched herself. Fidget was now helping Miss String to fold the laundry and put it neatly into the basket. As if neatly folding laundry was something they did between them every day.

  “Where do you want me to put this?” asked Fidget in a matter-of-fact way. He was extraordinarily strong for a cat. He picked up the basket with no trouble at all and took it into the kitchen.

  “A tower of strength is my Fidget,” said Miss String. “Oh, Fidget,” she called after him, “don’t forget to put away the ladder too. Where does it go, dear?” she asked Emily.

  “The garage,” Emily managed to mutter.

  “Capital,” replied Miss String. “Now, come along, I have made fairy cakes with red and green sugar icing.”

  Emily was even more flabbergasted. “How did you know that those are my favorite colors?”

  “Just a hunch that Fidget had. His hunches are, more often than not, spot on the trot. Call it animal instinct.”

  Emily followed Miss String into her garden and sat in a chair. She let out a sigh.

  Miss String asked, “Does anything hurt?”

  “Oh no,” said Emily. “It’s just all perfect.”

  “An overrated word,” said Fidget. “Especially with cats of the feminine kind. They are always saying I’m purrrrrfect.”

  “Fidget,” interrupted Miss String. “Manners, please. We have a guest, and that sort of talk isn’t polite.”

  “Sorry,” said Fidget. “No damage done to the little ducks?”

  “None,” said Emily. “If I am the little ducks.”

  “It’s a pet name I’ve made up especially for you.”

  “I’ve never had one of those,” said Emily.

  This magical garden seemed to have little, if anything, to do with the modern world of the Dashwoods. Miss String wore a skirt that ballooned out at the bottom and ankle boots that turned up at the toes.

  Fidget brought out a tea tray with the fairy cakes on it, then sat down in a deck chair next to his mistress, looking very pleased with himself. The fairy cakes were delicious. The red icing tasted of strawberries and cream. The green icing tasted of apple pies.

  “Fidget did the icing,” explained Miss String.

  Emily ate three fairy cakes. This was the best afternoon she could ever remember. Suddenly she heard the sound of the four-wheel-drive on the gravel next door. Daisy and the triplets were home.

  “I have to go,” said Emily, leaping up, brushing the crumbs from her apron, and wiping her mouth.

  “Take it easy, my little ducks,” said Fidget. “Remember, you’ve just had a nasty fall.”

  “You look spick-and-span,” said Miss String, leaning forward and taking Emily’s hand. “If you wouldn’t mind, be a dear and don’t say a word about Fidget, and you know what.”

  “The talking?” said Emily.

  “Spot on the fishcake, my little ducks,” said Fidget.

  “Not a word,” said Emily. “I promise. Anyway, Mrs. Dashwood wouldn’t believe me. She doesn’t believe in talking cats. Or fairies, for that matter.”

  At that, both Miss String and Fidget burst out laughing.

  “More fool her,” said Fidget. “That’s all I can say.”

  * * *

  Emily was home just in time to be ready and waiting at the front door.

  “You look as if you’ve been dragged through a hedge backward,” said Daisy, with Peach on one hip and Plum on the other.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Dashwood,” said Emily.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” shouted Daisy. “Go and get Petal out of her car seat and the shopping from the trunk, then put the kettle on and get their tea ready and…”

  Emily had stopped listening. For the first time ever, she felt happy, certain there was a sunnier life waiting for her over the squirrel box hedge.

  Chapter Six

  By the time the triplets were two and a half, Daisy Dashwood had found them a theatrical agent.

  “Talent like theirs,” Daisy told Ronald, “mustn’t be wasted.”

  At three years old, Peach, Petal, and Plum were earning good money as little models in TV commercials.

  Meanwhile, Emily was left to slowly drown in piles of housework. Her ex-adoptive-mother-slash-employer would set Emily little tests, leaving a small piece of paper under a lamp stand or a kettle, just to make sure Emily had cleaned all the surfaces properly. If Daisy found any of the pieces of paper in the evening, Emily was sent to bed without supper.

  Emily’s work was never up to scratch.

  “I mean,” Daisy complained to Ronald, “I leave her lists of things to do, and they’re never done.”

  “Can she read, Smoochikins?” asked Ronald.

  “How should I know?” said Daisy. “She should be able to by now. She’s eight years old.”

  “Have you taught her?”

  “Don’t be daft, Ronald. When would I have time for that?”

  * * *

  Three days after Emily first met Miss String and her talking cat, they came to her rescue. Emily had so much wanted to see them again, but she had never found time to slip through the hedge. They turned up one morning shortly after Daisy and the triplets had left for a day’s filming.

  “Frazzle my whiskers,” said Fidget, as he stared at the kitchen sink piled ceiling-high with dirty pots and pans.

  The kitchen table looked as if a bomb had fallen. It was covered in broken eggshells, toast fingers, butter, jam, and cereal.

  “It was the triplets’ breakfast,” said Emily. “I’m about to clean it up.”

  “What else needs doing, dear?” asked Miss String kindly.

  Emily showed her Daisy’s unreadable list. Miss String read it out loud.

  Clean kitchen.

  Scrub pans.

  Sort out fridge.

  Scrub floor.

  Dust the lounge and the study.

  “Oh,” said
Emily. “That’s what it says. I couldn’t make head or tail of it.”

  “She has the most dreadful writing,” said Miss String.

  “The trouble is, I can’t read or write,” said Emily. “I’m trying to teach myself, but it isn’t really working. That’s the morning list. And this is the afternoon one.”

  “Ironing,” read Miss String. “How much ironing?”

  Emily opened the door to the laundry room and showed them three huge baskets, each filled with a small mountain of crinkled clothes.

  “Are you supposed to do all this by the end of the day?” said Miss String.

  “Yes.”

  “Buddleia, buddleia, and buddleia again,” said Miss String.

  “What does that mean?” asked Emily.

  “It doesn’t mean anything other than a bush that butterflies like, but the word has a good ring to it when one is cross,” said Miss String. “And cross I am. How dare Mrs. Dashwood make you her slave! Come on, Fidget. All paws and hands on deck.”

  Miss String and Fidget whirled round the rooms so fast that Emily felt quite giddy. In less time than she thought possible, the house was spick-and-span.

  “Thank you,” said Emily, when the whirling had come to a stop and the house sparkled and gleamed. “Oh, thank you so much. This afternoon I can do the ironing.”

  “Buddleia to all that,” said Miss String. “Buddleia and bindweed.”

  “Ironing while listening to cricket on the radio,” said Fidget, “happens to be my favorite pastime. Apart from, that is, a good kipper and a good kip. One being a fish and the other a sleep. Now, why don’t you two pad off and leave it to me? I am the cat’s whisker of the ironing board.”

  “Capital idea, Fidget. Come along, Emily,” Miss String said, taking Emily’s hand. “I am going to teach you to read and write.”

  “You mean lessons?” said Emily, stunned. She turned back to see that Fidget had already started to sort the clothes. “Can you read, Fidget?”

  “I could, once,” he said, only half listening. “I lost interest when I was turned into a moggy. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

  “You were human? Who turned you into a cat?”

  “Now, now,” said Miss String. “Enough of that, Fidget.”

  * * *

  That day was the start of Emily’s education. In the morning she would wait for Daisy and the triplets to leave, then wait a little bit longer just in case Daisy had forgotten anything, which she nearly always had. Once the coast was clear, Fidget and Miss String would pop round to lick the house into shape. In no time at all, the three of them had worked out a routine that meant Emily had nearly all day for her lessons. It was the first time in Emily’s life that she could remember being happy. Happy, she thought, as in ever after.

  Daisy Dashwood no longer had any complaints about Emily’s housekeeping.

  “All this home education is paying off,” said Daisy, and sneezed. “I told you she would teach herself.” She sneezed again.

  “Smoochikins,” said Ronald, “are you all right?”

  Daisy sneezed a third time.

  “You only sneeze,” said Ronald, “when you are around cats.”

  “We don’t have a cat,” said Daisy, sneezing again and again.

  Chapter Seven

  Within a year, Emily could read, write, do math, and speak fluent French and German. Plus another strange language that Miss String called Old English.

  “It may not be needed,” she said, “but you never know, these days.”

  Of the many stories Miss String told Emily, the ones Emily liked best of all had to do with a very strange shop.

  “Back in the days long ago,” said Miss String, “there was a shop run by the fairy folk.”

  “What was it called?” Emily asked.

  “Wings & Co.,” replied Miss String. “It sold potions and lotions, but that was more by the by. Most people who visited the shop came because they needed the help of the fairies.”

  “What sort of help?” said Emily, feeling a tingle of excitement.

  “In solving riddles,” said Miss String. “Finding things that were lost. Untangling a mystery or two.”

  “That’s just the kind of thing I would like to do,” said Emily. “What sort of mysteries were they?”

  Miss String would say nothing more about the fairies. But she did tell Emily about the shop.

  “It was built on four long iron legs that bent at the knees; each leg had three griffin’s talons at the bottom with steel claws—”

  “Why did it have legs?” Emily asked.

  “Simple,” said Miss String. “So it could walk from town to town. When it came to a place it liked, its dragon feet would dig deep into the earth so that the shop wouldn’t blow away in the wind and rain.”

  Emily wondered if there were other buildings that could do the same thing or if this shop was the only one in the world. She never managed to ask the question, for there was so much more to the shop than its legs.

  “The shop had another secret,” said Miss String.

  “Oh—what?” asked Emily.

  “The upstairs rooms could twist and turn themselves around and inside out. Very handy if, for instance, an unwanted highwayman came calling, for no matter how many doors he might open and close trying to get out, he wouldn’t be able to unless the shop let him go.”

  “Wow, that is real magic,” said Emily. “Who built the shop?”

  “It was designed by one of the most famous magicians of his day and built by the Queen’s own master builder.”

  At the time Miss String first told Emily the story of the shop, they were studying the glorious Queen Elizabeth I, who, according to Miss String, was the first and last “Faerie Queene” of England.

  Miss String had a treasure to go with every period they studied, from the Vikings onward. Now they had reached the Tudors. All the treasures from those days were hidden in the attic, in a heavy, painted oak chest. Fidget had to bring it down. He was none too pleased.

  “Do you think this is wise?” he asked Miss String. “It’s making my fur itch already.”

  “Perhaps you need the flea treatment again?”

  If a cat could look cross, Fidget managed it.

  “There is not one flea on me. Personally, I would kipper this period of history, and you know why.”

  “Why?” asked Emily.

  “Because that’s when I was turned into a cat.”

  “Enough,” said Miss String.

  “Still,” mumbled Fidget. “I think it’s best to let sleeping keys lie.” Seeing that Miss String wasn’t listening, Fidget said, “Tea?”

  “Oh, yes please,” said Emily.

  “Faerie cakes?” he said very pointedly to Miss String, as if he meant something else altogether.

  “Capital,” replied Miss String, opening the heavy lid of the chest. “Just the ticket.”

  Inside, wrapped carefully in tissue paper, was a lace ruff. It had been worn, so Miss String said, by an ancient ancestor of hers. There was also a pair of dainty embroidered gloves. Whoever owned them had had very small hands indeed. But what caught Emily’s attention more than the lace ruff or the flattened suede gloves was a tiny bunch of golden keys, each key elaborately carved. There were seventeen in all, held together on a large golden ring.

  “Best not to touch them, dear,” said Miss String. “They can give one a very nasty scratch if they have a mind to.”

  Too late. Emily had already picked up the keys.

  Then something wondrous happened.

  To her amazement, the tiny keys each sprouted one leg, and on the end of each leg was a laced-up boot. The keys all stood up together, rather gingerly at first. Emily was half expecting to hear them talk, for they seemed very excited, jumping up and down, falling over and scrabbling to their feet, only to repeat the whole exercise. Emily soon realized the reason for this was that their bootlaces were all knotted together.

  Gently she lifted the tiny bunch of keys onto a table.
>
  Miss String hadn’t said a word.

  Emily sat down and patiently untied and retied the tiny bootlaces. The keys were delighted at being freed and stood up and bowed to Emily. Emily was thrilled. This was real magic, just like in her fairy book.

  Fidget entered the room, whereupon the keys, still bunched together on the golden ring, made a mad dash for the end of the table. Emily saved them from a nasty fall by putting them down on the floor. Here they ran, skipped, and hopped around the room before coming back to her, bowing, then dashing merrily away again.

  “Blow my whiskers off!” said Fidget, nearly dropping the tea tray.

  “Are they a toy?” asked Emily.

  “Oh no, dear,” said Miss String.

  “What are they, then?”

  “Keys,” said Fidget.

  “That’s right,” said Miss String, her voice a bit on the shaky side. “They belonged to the magician who designed the shop I told you about. He put a spell on them so only he could use them, but I’m sorry to say he was killed by a witch. Since then, no fairy, elf, or goblin has been able to break the spell and become Keeper of the Keys. You … er … you seem to have done the trick.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, as Miss String and Fidget watched Emily make her way back through the hedge to the Dashwoods’ house, Fidget said, “I had a feeling all along that she was special.”

  “Yes,” said Miss String. “So did I. Do you think Harpella heard the keys running about?”

  “I hope not. But she has ears that can hear a butterfly fart,” said Fidget. He went down on all fours. The keys were shining shyly under the desk.