The Jewel Seed Page 6

  “But—but now? Won’t you come back? And be our Una again?”

  “Every springtime I shall come back,” Una began, but Colonel Njm said, “The tasks of the immortals, child, are greater than your humble human affairs. You should be proud that you have been permitted to help the Lady Iduun escape her captors and return to her true sphere. Each year she will reward you with returning spring.”

  A long silence followed. Everybody seemed a little dazed with this idea.

  Then John asked suddenly, “Who was that old girl, Mrs. Wednesday? Why did she keep bobbing up? Why did she want Una’s shirt?”

  The Colonel’s face darkened. A chill wind seemed to sweep through the room.

  “She was once my wife,” Colonel Njm growled. “But—we parted. She is a tool of darkness and a traitor to light. I am glad to think that she has now lost her power for many eternities.”

  “Who are the Winter People?”

  “They are our enemies,” said the Colonel hastily. “We will think no more of them. Accursed race. Their wish is to bring about the Fimbulwinter—the endless winter without hope of spring which would result in the downfall of the immortal gods. But—the Midgard Serpent has routed them for now.”

  “Will it ever—?”

  “We will think no more of them,” repeated the Colonel sternly. “Now, my lady, it is time for us to be gone. The Wanderer must depart on his endless road.”

  He extended a hand, and Una took it. As she stood up, her long, flax-colored hair fell in a shining cascade to her ankles. She wore a white shift of smooth, creaseless material that glistened faintly. She kissed John and Nonnie and, smiling, said, “Give my love to Duessa, Tess, Quad, Quintus, Sexty, Seppy and Tavy.”

  The Colonel, bowing, said, “I thank you, Mrs. Sculpin, for your hospitality.”

  “Oh, Colonel! I’m sure you were a model lodger! And you are welcome again any time. Any time! But, as for your Midgard Pusscat, no! There I do draw the line!”

  The Colonel led Una to the door, where they were seen to shine briefly and then evaporate like steam from a kettle. Outside the kitchen window could be seen the first gleam of the rising sun. Three tremendously loud musical notes, like the sound of a gong, echoed momentarily over the roofs of Rumbury Town, then faded away into the distance and were gone.

  “We shall see them noe more,” said Marcus Magus.

  “Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Sculpin faintly. “I’m sure it’s all too much for me. Dear little Una going off like that. The Goddess of Spring! What next, I’d like to know? And that Colonel Njm—who was he, then?”

  “The Wanderer,” Marcus Magus told her.

  “Who’s he, when he’s at home?”

  “He’s never at home. He is the leader of the Old Gods, forever following his stern line of dutie.”

  “Well, whatever next? I’m off to bed,” said Aunt Daisy, tired at the very thought, and went slowly upstairs. “You two had better get some shut-eye too,” she called back.

  Nonnie could not speak. Her throat was seized up, too tight for tears. The realization that your beloved elder sister has all along been the Goddess of Spring is not something that can be taken in all at once.

  “Listen!” said Marcus Magus. “I can heare voices. Listen!”

  They waited, stock-still, holding their breath, listening. And heard what sounded like a tea party in progress: the clink of cups and saucers, pleasant voices, friendly laughter, silver spoons tinkling against china.

  “Another slice of cake, dear Herr Mozart? More tea?”

  “No, I thank you, Fraulein Austen.”

  “Well, General, this has been so very pleasant—”

  “I am indeed happy, my dear sir, to have made your acquaintance.”

  “I fear it may be some long time before we have the chance to meet again.”

  “Back, now, to our unfinished labors.”

  “I wish you good fortune in the battle, my dear confrere—”

  “And to you, a safe crossing—”

  “Auf wiedersehen, Fraulein Austen!”

  “I shall think of you, dear Herr Mozart, every time that I sit down to the pianoforte.”

  “Crumbs!” said John Sculpin, yawning. “What a queer time of day to choose for a tea party. Must be in some other time zone.”

  As Nonnie, dead tired, sank to sleep in her bed, she thought she heard her sister Una’s voice: “Once upon a time there was a poor shepherd. And he found an opening leading into a mountain glacier, and ventured inside, into a great cave, whose walls gleamed with precious stones. And a lady greeted him, who held in her hand a little bunch of blue flowers …”

  Next day Nonnie found herself a trainee job in a new hairdressing establishment, Miss Tresses, which had just opened in Rumbury High Street.

  And Rumbury Council cleaning trucks had a most difficult time carting away and disposing of four hundred tons of black shoelaces found along the towpath of the Rumbury Canal.

  A Biography of Joan Aiken

  Joan Aiken had a very happy childhood, and her memories centered around her two much-loved homes: a haunted house in the historic town where she was born, and a tiny old cottage in a country village where she grew up. These magical places became the settings for many of her stories, as you will be able to easily imagine if you read on …

  The house where Joan was born in 1924, nearly a hundred years ago, was in the small medieval town of Rye, in the county of Sussex, England—a place of cobbled streets and red-brick houses jostled tightly together on a high little hill rising out of the flat green plain of Romney Marsh. The English Channel was two miles away. Some of Rye’s castle walls and fortified gates still remained from when the village served as a stronghold against French invaders. Jeake’s House, where Joan was born, stood halfway up the steep, cobbled Mermaid Street. It was built in 1689 and was owned by several members of the Jeake family. One of them, Samuel Jeake, was an astrologer and mathematician; a huge leather-bound book written by him once belonged to the Aikens. Samuel Jeake had invented a flying machine, and, trying it out, he boldly leapt off the high wall of the town. Sadly, it did not work, and he crashed down into the tidal mud of the river Rother, which ran around Rye. Joan certainly included that in one of her stories!

  There was a very ghostly feeling about Jeake’s House, which Joan described as follows: “[Its smell was] a delicious blend of aged black timbers, escaping gas, damp plaster, and mildew; I can remember the exact feel of the brass front-door knob turning gently in one’s hand, the shape of the square black banister post, and the look of the leaded windows with their small panes.”

  Just as clearly, Joan remembered the stories she first heard at the house, which were read aloud by her mother and her older brother and sister, John and Jane: “First there was Peter Rabbit, and then The Just-So Stories, fairly milk-and-honey stuff; then Pinocchio, rustling with assassins, evil plots, death, moonlight, and irony; then Uncle Remus, told in a mysterious dialect, full of wild characters, with the wicked Br’er Fox.” No wonder this house haunted her memories!

  When Joan was five, her father, the American poet Conrad Aiken, returned to the United States, and her mother, Jessie, married an English poet. Along with her mother and new stepfather, Joan went to live near the rolling green hills of Sussex Downs, five miles away from the closest town. John and Jane were sent away to boarding school, but for the next six years, until the age of twelve, Joan was homeschooled by her mother.

  This new home was a different kind of paradise for Joan. Now she could roam the wild garden, climb trees, and explore the little village of Sutton, which had no “sidewalks”—as her Canadian mother called them—just one road with grass banks and little scuffed paths along the top where children had made tracks of their own. Sutton had one tiny store, which sold everything from bread to postage stamps. A four-minute walk from the shop was a forge, where the blacksmith, Mr. Budd
, worked at his roaring bellows or clanged shoes onto the great, fringed feet of farm horses. In those days, a carter would go into the town once a week with his pony and trap and bring back goods for the village families. Joan’s household did not have a radio or a car—or even electricity! Water was pumped by hand from a well, and at night they lit oil lamps and candles. Much of their food came from the garden’s vegetable patch and fruit bushes; milk and cream or meat came from farms nearby. Even the poorer families in the area had help in their houses, and a village girl called Lily came to Joan’s to scrub and wash dishes. When she had finished her work, she sometimes took Joan to climb the slopes of the Downs, half a mile away, or pick cowslips and kingcups in the marshy meadow behind Lily’s mother’s cottage. Sometimes, Joan and Lily would walk two miles in the summer heat to a shallow pond where they could bathe.

  Jessie quickly taught Joan how to read, and gave her lessons in French, Latin, English, history, arithmetic, geography, and even Spanish and German. With no school friends to play with, books became Joan’s friends—she read everything in the house! First, she went through the novels from Jessie’s Canadian childhood: Little Women and the Katy series. Then, she read all of the fairy tales, The Jungle Book with its stories about Mowgli, and the books her older brother and sister left behind. When these ran out, she moved on to ghost stories or books about history, such as stories about the Three Musketeers and the Princes in the Tower. Joan’s mother would read longer works aloud before they had radio or television; this was their main entertainment. Every night at bedtime, or when the family went on picnics, or as they sat stringing beans for supper, Joan would be listening to stories, so it was not surprising that she soon started writing some of her own. She saved up her pocket money and bought herself a notebook at the village shop, then set to work writing exciting tales with titles like “The Haunted Cupboard” or “Her Husband Was a Demon.” She was so proud of them that she kept those pages for the rest of her life.

  It wasn’t until several years later that Joan had the company of a baby brother, David, and as soon as he was old enough, it was Joan who took him exploring on the Downs, and told him stories to cheer him along as he began to tire on the way home. Some of these short tales were published in her very first book many years later, such as “The Parrot Pirate Princess,” which she gave to David as a birthday present. Joan used to say that it was only by racking her brain to answer her little brother’s constant question of “What happened next?” that she learned how to write the exciting fiction she is known for today.

  I was lucky enough as Joan’s daughter to have many more of those stories told to me as she was writing them quite a number of years later. Then I was the one asking “And what happened next?” When the tales were finished, she would type them out and send them away to her publishers, and I would enjoy the excitement of seeing them come back as printed books with pictures, just as you are able to see these stories today on your own screens—wouldn’t it have amazed Joan to imagine that all those years ago?

  —Lizza Aiken, 2015

  Joan’s birthplace, the little town of Rye, England. This is a page from the picture timeline on the Joan Aiken website.

  Joan, age two, with her mother, Jessie, in the garden of Joan’s birthplace, the Jeake’s House, in 1926.

  Mermaid Street in Rye. They didn’t have many cars in those days!

  Some of Joan’s first picture books.

  Some of the stories were quite scary. Joan loved this one in which Pinocchio meets some robbers in the woods.

  Joan’s mother, Jessie, married again and the family moves to a small village. This is another page from the Joan Aiken website.

  The small cottage where Joan’s family lived. It was called Farrs.

  Joan’s family could only reach the nearest town of Petworth by horse and cart.

  Mr. Budd, the blacksmith, shoes carthorses in the village smithy.

  May Day in the village was a grand day. The little girl (at left) in a long coat is Joan watching the May Queen’s procession go by.

  Joan’s first notebook, where she wrote her stories. She kept it all her life!

  One of Joan’s early poems and a drawing of her cat Teglees.

  Joan (upper right), age ten, with her big brother and sister, John and Jane; her mother, Jessie; and her younger brother, David, who loved to listen to her stories.

  Where Joan and David took walks, up on the Sussex Downs.

  When she was older, Joan would go back to Rye to visit her father over the holidays, before she went away to school. Like Joan, he loved cats, and one year the family cat had kittens!

  All images courtesy of the Joan Aiken Estate.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1977 by Elizabeth Delano Charlaff for the Joan Aiken Estate

  Illustrations copyright © 1997 by Peter Bailey

  Cover design by Jesse Hayes

  978-1-5040-2093-0

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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