Arabel's Raven Read online

  Arabel's Raven

  Joan Aiken

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  Illustrated by Quentin Blake

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  * * *

  An Odyssey Classic

  Harcourt, Inc.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego London

  * * *

  Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974 by Joan Aiken and renewed

  2003 by John Sebastian Brown and Elizabeth Delano Charlaff

  Illustrations copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974 by Quentin Blake

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed

  to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1974

  First Odyssey Classics edition 2007

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Aiken, Joan, 1924–2004.

  Arabel's raven/by Joan Aiken; illustrated by Quentin Blake.

  v. cm.

  Summary: Presents three previously published works

  about a pet raven named Mortimer, who talks, eats everything

  in sight, and causes all sorts of trouble.

  Contents: Arabel's raven—The bread bin—The escaped black mamba

  and other things. [1. Ravens—Fiction. 2. Birds as pets—Fiction.

  3. Humorous stories.] I. Blake, Quentin, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.A2695Arb 2007

  [Fic]—dc22 2006102553

  ISBN 978-0-15-206094-7

  Text set in Bodoni

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  A C E G H F D B

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  Contents

  Arabel's Raven 1

  The Bread Bin 55

  The Escaped Black Mamba and Other Things 103

  Arabel's Raven

  On a stormy night in March, not long ago, a respectable taxi driver named Ebenezer Jones found himself driving home, very late, through the somewhat wild and sinister district of London known as Rumbury Town. Mr. Jones had left Rumbury Tube Station behind him, and was passing the long, desolate piece of land called Rumbury Waste, when, in the street not far ahead, he observed a large, dark, upright object. It was rather smaller than a coal scuttle, but bigger than a quart cider bottle, and it was moving slowly from one side of the street to the other.

  Mr. Jones had approached to within about twenty yards of this object when a motorcycle with two riders shot by him, going at a reckless pace and cutting in very close. Mr. Jones braked sharply, looking in his rearview mirror. When he looked forward again he saw that the motorcycle must have struck the upright object in passing, for it was now lying on its side, just ahead of his front wheels.

  He brought his taxi to a halt.

  "Not but what I daresay I'm being foolish," he thought. "There's plenty in this part of town that's best left alone. But you can't see something like that happen without stopping to have a look."

  He got out of his cab.

  What he found in the road was a large black bird, almost two feet long, with a hairy fringe around its beak. At first he thought it was dead. At his approach, however, it slightly opened one eye, then shut it again.

  "Poor thing; it's probably stunned," thought Mr. Jones.

  His horoscope in the Hackney Drivers' Herald that morning had said: "Due to your skill a life will be saved today." Mr. Jones had been worrying slightly, as he drove homeward, because up till now he had not, so far as he knew, saved any lives that day, except by avoiding pedestrians however recklessly they walked into the road without looking.

  "This'll be the life I'm due to save," he thought, "must be, for it's five to midnight now." And he went back to his cab for the bottle of brandy and teaspoon he always carried in the toolbox in case lady passengers turned faint.

  It is not so easy as you might believe to give brandy to a large bird lying unconscious in the street. After five minutes there was a good deal of brandy on the cobblestones, and some up Mr. Jones's sleeve, and some in his shoes, but he could not be sure that any had actually gone down the bird's throat. The difficulty was that he needed at least three hands: one to hold the bottle, and one to hold the spoon, and one to hold the bird's beak open. If he prized open the beak with the handle of the teaspoon, it was sure to shut again before he had time to reverse the spoon and tip in some brandy.

  A hand fell on his shoulder.

  "Just what do you think you're doing?" inquired one of two policemen (they always traveled in pairs through Rumbury Town) who had left their van and were standing over him.

  The other policeman sniffed in a disapproving manner.

  Mr. Jones straightened slowly.

  "I was just giving some brandy to this rook," he explained. He was rather embarrassed, because he had spilled such a lot of the brandy.

  "Rook? That's no rook," said the officer who had sniffed. "That's a raven. Look at its hairy beak."

  "Whatever it is, it's stunned," said Mr. Jones. "A motorcycle hit it."

  "Ah," said the second officer, "that'll have been one of the pair who just pinched thirty thousand quid from Lloyds Bank in the High Street. It's the Cash-and-Carat boys—the ones who've done a lot of burglaries around here lately. Did you see which way they went?"

  "No," said Mr. Jones, tipping up the raven's head, "but they'll have a dent on their motorcycle. Could one of you hold the bottle for me?"

  "You don't want to give him brandy. Hot sweet tea's what you want to give him."

  "That's right," said the other policeman. "And an ice pack under the back of his neck."

  "Burn feathers in front of his beak."

  "Slap his hands."

  "Undo his shoelaces."

  "Put him in the fridge."

  "He hasn't got any shoelaces," said Mr. Jones, not best pleased at all this advice. "If you aren't going to hold the bottle, why don't you go on and catch the blokes that knocked him over?"

  "Oh, they'll be well away by now. Besides, they carry guns. We'll go back to the station," said the first policeman. "And you'd best not stay here, giving intoxicating liquor to a bird, or we might have to take you in for loitering in a suspicious manner."

  "I can't just leave the bird here in the road," said Mr. Jones.

  "Take it with you, then."

  "Can't you take it to the station?"

  "Not likely," said the second policeman. "No facilities for ravens there."

  They stood with folded arms, watching, while Mr. Jones slowly picked up the bird (it weighed about as much as a fox terrier) and put it in his taxi. And they were still watching (he saw them in his rearview mirror) as he started up and drove off.

  So that was how Mr. Jones happened to take the raven back with him to Number Six, Rainwater Crescent, London N.W. 3½, on a windy March night.

  When he got home, nobody was up, which was not surprising, since it was after midnight.

  He would have liked to wake his daughter, Arabel, who was fond of birds and animals. But since she was quite young—not yet school age—he thought he had better not. And he knew he must not wake his wife, Martha, who had to be at work, at Round & Round, the record shop in the High Street, at nine in the morning.

  He laid the raven on the kitchen floor, opened the window to give it air, put on the kettle for
hot sweet tea, and, while he had the match lighted, burned a feather duster under the raven's beak. Nothing happened, except that the smoke made Mr. Jones cough. And he saw no way of slapping the raven's hands or undoing its shoelaces, so he took some ice cubes and a jug of milk from the fridge. He left the fridge door open because his hands were full, and anyway, it would slowly swing shut by itself.

  With great care he slid a little row of ice cubes under the back of the raven's neck.

  The kettle boiled and he made the tea: a spoonful for each person and one for the pot, three in all. He also spread himself a slice of bread and fish spread because he didn't see why he shouldn't have a little something as well as the bird. He poured out a cup of tea for himself and an eggcupful for the raven, putting plenty of sugar in both.

  But when he turned around, eggcup in hand, the raven was gone.

  "Bless me," Mr. Jones said. "There's ingratitude for you! After all my trouble! I suppose he flew out the window; those ice cubes certainly did the trick quick. I wonder if it would be a good notion to carry some ice cubes with me in the cab? I could put them in a vacuum flask—might be better than brandy if lady passengers turn faint..."

  Thinking these thoughts he finished his tea (and the raven's; no sense in leaving it to get cold), turned out the light, and went to bed.

  In the middle of the night he thought, "Did I put the milk back in the fridge?"

  And he thought, "No, I didn't."

  And he thought, "I ought to get up and put it away."

  And he thought, "It's a cold night, the milk's not going to turn between now and breakfast. Besides, Thursday tomorrow, it's my early day."

  So he rolled over and went to sleep.

  Every Thursday Mr. Jones drove the local fishmonger, Mr. Finney, over to Colchester to buy oysters at five in the morning. So, next day, up he got, off he went. Made himself a cup of tea, finished the milk in the jug, never looked in the fridge.

  An hour after he had gone (which was still very early), Mrs. Jones got up in her turn and put on the kettle. Finding the milk jug empty she went yawning to the fridge and pulled the door open, failing to notice that it had been prevented from shutting properly by the handle of a burnt feather duster which had fallen against the hinge. But she noticed what was inside the fridge all right. She let out a shriek that brought Arabel running downstairs.

  Arabel was little and fair. She had gray eyes and at the moment she was wearing a white nightdress that made her look like a lampshade with two feet sticking out from the bottom. One of the feet had a blue sock on.

  "What's the matter, Ma?" she said.

  "There's a great awful bird in the fridge!" sobbed Mrs. Jones. "And it's eaten all the cheese and a black currant tart and five pints of milk and a bowl of drippings and a pound of sausages. All that's left is the lettuce."

  "Then we'll have lettuce for breakfast," said Arabel. But Mrs. Jones said she didn't fancy lettuce that had spent the night in the fridge with a great awful bird.

  "And how are we going to get it out of there?"

  "The lettuce?"

  "The bird !" said Mrs. Jones, switching off the kettle and pouring hot water into a pot without any tea in it.

  Arabel opened the fridge door, which had swung shut. There sat the bird, among the empty milk bottles, but he was a lot bigger than they were. There was a certain amount of wreckage around him—torn foil, and cheese wrappings, and milk splashes, and bits of pastry, and crumbs of drippings, and rejected lettuce leaves. It was like Rumbury Waste after a Sunday picnic.

  Arabel looked at the raven, and he looked back at her.

  "His name's Mortimer," she said.

  "No it's not, no it's not!" cried Mrs. Jones, taking a loaf from the bread bin and absentmindedly running the tap over it. "We said you could have a hamster when you were five, or a puppy or a kitten when you were six, and of course call it what you wish. Oh my stars, look at that creature's toenails, if nails they can be called, but not a bird like that, a great hairy awful thing eating us out of house and home, as big as a fire extinguisher and all the color of a charcoal biscuit—"

  But Arabel was looking at the raven and he was looking back at her.

  "His name's Mortimer," she said. And she put both arms around the raven, not an easy thing to do, all jammed in among the milk bottles as he was, and lifted him out.

  "He's very heavy," she said, and set him down on the kitchen floor.

  "So I should think, considering he's got a pound of sausages, a bowl of drippings, five pints of milk, half a pound of New Zealand cheddar, and a black currant tart inside him," said Mrs. Jones. "I'll open the window. Perhaps he'll fly out."

  She opened the window. But Mortimer did not fly out. He was busy examining everything in the kitchen very thoroughly. He tapped the table legs with his beak—they were metal and clinked. Then he took everything out of the garbage bin—a pound of peanut shells, two Pepsi cans, and some jam tart cases. He particularly liked the jam tart cases, which he pushed under the linoleum. Then he walked over to the fireplace—it was an old-fashioned kitchen—and began chipping out the mortar from between the bricks. Mrs. Jones had been gazing at the raven as if she were under a spell, but when he began on the fireplace, she said, "Don't let him do that!"

  "Mortimer," said Arabel, "we'd like you not to do that, please."

  Mortimer turned his head right around on its black feathery neck and gave Arabel a thoughtful, considering look. Then he made his first remark, which was a deep croak, hoarse and rasping: "Kaarrk."

  It said, plain as words: "Well, all right, I won't do it this time, but I make no promise that I won't do it some time. And I think you are being unreasonable."

  "Wouldn't you like to see the rest of the house, Mortimer?" said Arabel. And she held open the kitchen door. Mortimer walked—he never hopped—very slowly through, into the hall and looked at the stairs. They seemed to interest him greatly. He began going up them hand over hand—or, rather, beak over claw.

  When he was halfway up, the telephone rang. It stood on the windowsill at the foot of the stairs, and Mortimer watched as Mrs. Jones came to answer it.

  Mr. Jones was ringing from Colchester to ask if his wife wanted any oysters.

  "Oysters!" she said. "That bird you left in the fridge has eaten sausages, cheese, drippings, black currant tart, drunk five pints of milk, now he's chewing the stairs, and you ask if I want oysters? Perhaps I should feed him caviar as well?"

  "Bird I left in the fridge?" Mr. Jones was puzzled.

  "What bird, Martha?"

  "That great black crow, or whatever it is. Arabel calls it Mortimer and she's leading it all over the house, and now it's taken all the spools of thread from my sewing drawer and is pushing them under the doormat."

  "Not it, Ma. He. Mortimer," said Arabel, going to open the front door and take the letters from the mailman. But Mortimer got there first and received the letters in his beak.

  The mailman was so startled that he dropped his whole sack of mail in a puddle and gasped, "Nevermore will I stay later than half past ten at the Oddfellows Ball or touch a drop stronger than Caribbean lemon, nevermore!"

  "Nevermore," said Mortimer, pushing two bills and a postcard under the doormat. Then he retrieved the postcard again by spearing it clean through the middle. Mrs. Jones let out a wail.

  "Arabel, will you come in out of the street in your nightie! Look what that bird's done, chewing up the gas bill. Nevermore, indeed! I should just about say it was nevermore. No, I don't want any oysters, which bring me out in raised red irritations and hiccups as you know, Ebenezer Jones, and always have, and please shut the front door, and stop that bird from pushing all those plastic flowers under the stair carpet."

  Mr. Jones could make nothing of all this, so he hung up. Five minutes later the telephone rang again. This time it was Mrs. Jones's sister Brenda, to ask if Martha would like to come to a bingo drive that evening, but Mortimer got there first; he picked up the receiver with his claw, exactly as he had se
en Mrs. Jones do, delivered a loud clicking noise into it—click—and said, "Nevermore!"

  Then he replaced the receiver.

  "My lord!" Brenda said to her husband. "Ben and Martha must have had a terrible quarrel; he answered the phone and he didn't sound a bit like himself!"

  Meanwhile, Mortimer had climbed upstairs and was in the bathroom trying the faucets; it took him less than five minutes to work out how to turn them on. He liked to watch the cold water running, but the hot, with its clouds of steam, for some reason annoyed him, and he began throwing things at the hot faucets: bits of soap, sponges, nail brushes, facecloths.

  They choked up the plughole and presently there was a flood.

  "Mortimer, I think you'd better not stay in the bathroom," Arabel said.

  Mortimer was good at giving people black looks; now he gave Arabel one. But she had a red wagon, which had once been filled with wooden building blocks. The blocks had long ago been scattered and lost, but the wagon was in good repair.

  "Mortimer, wouldn't you like a ride in this red wagon?"

  Mortimer thought he would. He climbed into the wagon and stood there, waiting.

  When Mrs. Jones discovered Arabel pulling Mortimer along in the wagon she nearly had a fit.

  "It's not bad enough that you've adopted that big, ugly, sulky bird, but you have to pull him along in a wagon? Don't his legs work? Why can't he walk, may I ask?"

  "He doesn't feel like walking just now," Arabel said.

  "Of course! And I suppose he's forgotten how to fly?"

  "I like pulling him in the wagon," Arabel said, and she pulled him into the garden. Presently Mrs. Jones went off to work at Round & Round, the record shop, and Granny came in to look after Arabel. All Granny ever did was sit and knit. She didn't mind answering the phone, but every time it rang Mortimer got there first, picked up the receiver, and said, "Nevermore!"