Darius Bell and the Crystal Bees by Odo Hirsch

Author:Odo Hirsch [Name, Author]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Junior Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-7426-9443-6
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

The mayor, George Podcock, was a self-made man. His fortune came from haberdashery and underwear, and he liked to call himself the Underpants King. He disliked the Bells for the fact that they had inherited their estate of Bell House and seemed to do very little, as far as he could see, except live there. Yet why this should make him hate the Bells so much was something Darius didn’t understand. There were other self-made men and women, and they didn’t hate the Bells. And there were other people who had inherited things, and Podcock didn’t seem to hate them – or at least not as far as anyone knew. For some reason he had fixed on the Bells as the chief objects of his resentment and he didn’t miss an opportunity to show it. When he had the chance to hurt or humiliate them – as he had when Darius’s father had been required to give the sixth Bell Gift the previous year and hadn’t had the money for anything grand – he didn’t miss that either. Darius really couldn’t see any reason for the resolution against bringing new hives into the city but the mayor’s animosity towards his family.

And now he was walking into the Town Hall with his father on their way to confront him!

His father gave his name to a purple-uniformed usher and told him that they wanted to see the mayor. The usher raised an eyebrow. Everyone at the Town Hall knew about the mayor’s hatred of the Bells.

‘Wait here,’ said the usher, and walked off.

‘Whatever happens,’ said Hector to Darius, ‘remember you’re a Bell. No one can take that name away from you.’

‘Yes, Papa,’ said Darius.

‘That’s more important than anything.’

Darius didn’t reply. His brother Cyrus always said that was the problem, that their father thought the name of Bell – or Arbuthnot-Huntingdon-Castleton-Bell, to state it fully – was the most important thing they had. In Cyrus’s opinion, it was the least important thing, and therefore the most damaging, because their father didn’t realise it.

‘And don’t get angry,’ said Hector, ‘or if you do, don’t show it. Never let them see it. Anger never wins you anything. Dignity, Darius, is the weapon. If a Bell has nothing else, he always has his dignity.’

‘And his name, Papa.’

‘Yes. That’s right. And his name.’

Darius nodded.

Hector gazed at him for a moment. ‘All right. When we get in there, let me do the talking.’

They waited. Hector looked around the lobby. The last time he had been here was almost a year earlier, when he had given the sixth Bell Gift, a much smaller Gift than any of his ancestors had provided. The mayor had done his best to humiliate him, but it was George Podcock who had humiliated himself that day, when his pettiness and mean spirit showed in the things he said in front of a council chamber packed with spectators. Podcock was a vain, arrogant man and there was nothing he hated more than being humiliated in front of others.

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