Awakening (Hyddenworld Quartet 2) by Horwood William

Author:Horwood, William [Horwood, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780230761018
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

Together, all as one, as a family they held fast to the boy and his pa and led them safe to shore, clacketing down the planks back to shore with happiness.

‘This be him,’ said the boy, and Stort watched as Barklice shook so many hands he lost count, ‘this be my pa!’

‘Be it true you’m the Master Verderer of Brum?’ cried out one.

‘Well, I suppose, if you put it that way, I do bear that title but—’

‘And you know all sorts of folk, low and high, high and low?’

‘Quite a few, yes, but I don’t know . . .’

‘Like Lord Festive?’

‘Festoon,’ said Barklice, ‘yes, I certainly know him in more than a passing way but . . . I would like . . . I mean . . . I ought . . .’

The boy had hold of Barklice’s hand and pulled him towards the woman Stort had noticed before.

‘Be it true, Mister Barklice sir, that Brum is as big as a city ought to be?’ called another.

‘That’s true but really . . . I can answer your questions later . . . but you see I’d very much like to know . . . my . . . my son’s name.’

The boy reached the woman and pulled Barklice towards her.

‘Pa, meet Ma,’ he said.

And the woman, bilgylike, warm as toast, good as a plate of stewed tomatoes on a misty morn, laughing, put her arms around Barklice and whispered, ‘Ask him yourself !’

So Barklice looked at the boy and knelt down so they were one and the same and said, ‘Tell me your name.’

‘Bratfire,’ said the boy, ‘and I’ve learnt hyddening better than most but they say you’ll teach me a trick or two.’

‘I will.’

‘And is it true, Ma says it is but no one else thinks it so, that . . . that . . .’

‘What?’

‘That you know the most famous hydden of them all?’

‘Well, I’m not sure who—’

‘That you’ve talked to him, like we are now . . .’

‘I may well have done but . . . who . . . ah! You mean Master Brief. Well, of course . . .’

Bratfire shook his head rather impatiently.

‘Pa,’ he asked rather severely, ‘tell us one and all, here and now, if it be true or not that my pa actually knows and has talked to, maybe even shaken the hand of, the famous Mister Stort?’

Barklice looked astonished. Then a slow smile came over his face, the firelight dancing in his eyes.

‘You mean the famous Mister Bedwyn Stort?’

‘Yes.’

‘The one who rescued Lord Festoon?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘The one who speaks so many languages that sometimes he forgets to speak his own clearly?’

‘He’m the one we’ve heard of.’

‘The inventor of . . . of all sorts of things?’

‘Well, do you or no?’

Barklice laughed, really laughed, for the first time in days, perhaps in a certain way for the first time in years, if ever.

‘If your mother says I do then of course I do, because she’s always right and never tells a lie!’ he said, tempted suddenly to tell a slight one himself.

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