And, as everyone in Soot Town agreed, a delightful and compassionate pink-flushed widow.
The cause of the late Mr Reckitt’s end is unknown. It is enough to know that he is dead and that the couple had no children.
Mrs Reckitt said it herself, often, with crocodile tears in her crocodile eyes. Her orphanage therefore became that happy collision of chance and charity, allowing her the family denied her by fate.
Orphans were collected from near and far and hospitably housed in the large villa paid for by subscription from Soot Town.
That Christmas the house was full of children. Orphans were the core business, but certain parents, having obligations elsewhere, from time to time boarded their offspring with Mrs Reckitt. The fees were considerable, but, as she said herself, remark the service.
Visitors to the Villa of Glory, as Mrs Reckitt liked to call her establishment, were regularly impressed by the cheerful, bright parlour where the girls did their sewing in front of a warm fire.
In the garden stood a workshop where the boys made and mended useful objects. There was a schoolroom, an allotment, a lily pond and two dormitories. Each little metal bedstead had a warm quilt on top and a button-eyed bear perched on the nightstand.
And Christmas – ah, well, Christmas. ’Tis the season to be jolly.
That morning the children were decorating the Christmas tree. It stood in the hall, a gift from the lumber-yard on the edge of town. Strong men had cut it down and put it upright again. Its lower branches were deep as a forest. Its feathery top was far away like a green bird.
The children, in their brown overalls, stood looking at the tree. Mrs Reckitt looked at the children.
‘Any child who breaks a glass bauble will be locked in the coal house without dinner,’ said Mrs Reckitt. ‘And why is the ladder too short to reach the top of the tree? Do I keep you idle boys to sit in woodwork classes learning to make ladders that are too short?’
Reginald put up his hand. ‘Please, Mrs Reckitt, it isn’t safe to make a stepladder taller than this one. A stepladder is an A-frame, Mrs Reckitt, yes, and . . . ’
Mrs Reckitt’s pink face was deepening towards red. She came forward and regarded Reginald through her pearl eye-glass. Reginald realised that Mrs Reckitt didn’t blink. ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘if that is the tallest ladder you can make, you will have to balance a chair on top of the ladder, and then you shall balance yourself on top of the chair, and you will PUT the FAIRY on top of the tree. Do you hear me?’
It was impossible not to hear her. The children were silent. The chair was fetched. Reginald could hardly lift it. Maud stepped forward. ‘Please, Mrs Reckitt, Reginald can’t climb the ladder with the chair. He has a twisted foot.’
Mrs Reckitt looked down at Reginald’s heavy black boot. ‘If there is one thing I dislike more than orphans, it is crippled orphans,’ she said, inspecting Reginald as though she might be considering eating him. ‘Ronald, are you a crippled orphan or an orphaned cripple? HA HA HA HA HA.’
Then she turned to Maud. ‘Very well, Mavis. I see you are the smallest child we have here – failure to thrive is always disappointing, but in this case useful. Climb the tree.’
Maud looked at the tree stretching upwards towards the ornate plasterwork ceiling. The topmost top of the tree was directly underneath the chin of a cherub.
‘Up you go, straight up the middle, and place this fairy at the top.’ Mrs Reckitt got out the fairy. She was made of cloth with raffia hair. ‘Carry her between your teeth. Like this.’ There was a terrified and disbelieving OOH and AAH sound from the orphans as Mrs Reckitt put the hapless fairy in her mouth. Holding it there, she carried on talking without any difficulty. ‘In my day orphans climbed chimneys twenty times higher than this silly tree, and it never did them any harm.’ She removed the fairy from her mouth – its presence had reminded her that she was hungry. ‘It is time for my mid-morning sausage roll. When I return this fairy had better be on the top of the tree. And mind what I said: if you break one single, solitary glass bauble, it’s the coal hole for you!’
Mrs Reckitt swept off towards her sausage roll. Reginald put the cloth fairy between Maud’s teeth.
Maud realised that she had to get to the centre of the tree and climb up the trunk. The tree smelled of resin and winter. The lower branches were so thick that it was like being inside her own private forest. The world was green. Maud couldn’t see the other children any more. She was lost in the wood like Gretel.
The tree was scratchy and the pine needles were well-named. Soon her hands and feet were bleeding and big red marks criss-crossed her face. She daren’t open her eyes or look up. She was getting cold and her face was wet. She had the strange sensation that it was snowing inside the tree.
Up she went. She was thinking about her mother, who had died when Maud was a baby. Her father had given her to an aunt, the aunt had given her to a cousin, the cousin had given her to a neighbour, the neighbour had given her to a rag-and-bone man. The rag-and-bone man, collecting old clothes and broken pans in Soot Town, had sold her for a drink at the Baby in Half. The landlord had never seen such a small child. He thought she might live in a bottle on the bar, next to a stuffed owl. Good for business.
But Maud had other plans and she ran away. She was caught stealing eggs to eat, taken to prison and rescued by one of those well-meaning old gentlemen who imagine that all a child needs is bread and butter and discipline.
At Reckitt’s Academy for Orphans, Foundlings and Minors in Need of Temporary Office, there was discipline. And occasionally bread and butter. But there was not play. And there was not hope. And there was not warmth. And there was not love.
Maud was nine when she came here.
‘Stunted,’ said Mrs Reckitt when she inspected her for the first time. ‘Useful for drains and retrieving small objects from gratings.’
Maud was given very little food – but she was a skilled thief and usually managed to get extra rations for herself and some of the other children.
The MINTOs (Minors in Need of Temporary Office) had plenty of good food – steamed sponge, dumplings, egg custard and so on. They had nice beds and nice bears, and their accommodation and bill of fare was offered as the standard. In truth, it was far from it. Parents of MINTOs paid handsomely to abandon their offspring for sudden necessary trips to Monte Carlo or urgent visits to dying wealthy relatives.
Mrs Reckitt depended on repeat business and glowing reports. And so the orphans and foundlings who had no parents, rich or poor, lit fires, blacked boots, combed hair, swept, dusted, mopped and polished, while the MINTOs, who were as selfish as the adults who had raised them, imagined all this to be their due.
Today, on Christmas Day, the MINTOs had their own dining room and Santa Claus. Lavish presents from neglectful parents were waiting to be piled under the tree.
The orphans and foundlings queued up later to take the discarded wrapping paper and string so that they could draw pictures or play cat’s cradle.
Maud had reached the top of the tree. Her head suddenly popped up beneath the fat plaster cherub. The children far below cheered. Maud looked down; that was a mistake. She looked down just in time to see Mrs Reckitt returning from her appointment with the sausage roll.
Hands on hips, Mrs Reckitt bawled, ‘MARGARET! THE FAIRY, IF YOU PLEASE!’
Maud took the fairy’s arm out of her mouth, then secured the snap-clip sewn into the fairy’s back onto the topmost branch. Maud was as red and green as Christmas, what with her hands all bloody, and pine needles sticking out of her body like a hedgehog.
She was wondering how to get down when the branch under her left foot snapped. CRACK!
There’s Maud, tumbling, swinging, catching, falling, dropping, scraping, sliding, bumping, catching, missing, down and down through the dark green tunnel of the tree until she lands safe, on her bottom, on the piles of straw baled up at t
he base for the Nativity.
There was no harm done.
All the children clapped and cheered.
‘SILENCE!’ shouted Mrs Reckitt. She walked over and grabbed Maud by her arm, pulling her out of the straw. ‘Ow, ow, ow!’ cried Mrs Reckitt. ‘Wretched child, you are stuck through with needles – look what you have done to me!’
But before Mrs Reckitt could further catalogue her woes, she saw what she saw, and what she saw was a glass bauble broken on the floor. Her fat eyes gleamed. ‘What did I say? WHAT did I SAY?’ She tried to bend down and pick up the broken bauble but her corset would not allow it.
‘Hand me that bauble!’ she shouted.
Trembling, Maud picked up the broken glass, cutting her hands further, but as she did so she realised that inside the bauble was a tiny silver frog. She managed to conceal it.
Mrs Reckitt ordered Maud into the coal house for the rest of the day. Then, shuffling out of the wings in his customary white coat and rubber gloves, came Dr Scowl, her lieutenant responsible for child welfare. He regretted to say that it was not possible to place Maud in the coal hole; there were four children lumped in there already.
Mrs Reckitt looked unhappy.
‘May I suggest outdoors, madam?’ said Dr Scowl. ‘It is bracing and healthful for a child to be outdoors. We may be sure that the careless young person can reflect upon her delinquency without the distractions of coal. The other day the children imprisoned in the coal house, for the purposes of moral improvement, were using lumps of coal to build castles. Imagine that!’
Mrs Reckitt imagined it. When she had done imagining it, she turned to Maud. ‘You! Outside! No coat, scarf or gloves. Goodbye.’
Reginald limped forward. ‘Please, Mrs Reckitt, I’ll go outside. Maud climbed the tree for my sake.’
There was little Mrs Reckitt liked less than human kindness. She regarded Reginald down the long, unevolved lifetimes of her reptile brain. Why eat one child when two are available?
‘In that case, Rodney, you may join Marigold in the garden. Fresh air! I am too kind – but it is Christmas Day.’
There was a gasp from the gathered orphans. Mrs Reckitt swept round her skirts to face them.
‘And one single, solitary, stray, sad little slipped-out word from any other meaningless orphan – and you will ALL spend Christmas outdoors. Do you hear?’
The orphans did not have parents but they did have ears. They heard. The hall was silent.
Then . . .
‘DING DONG! MERRILY ON HIGH,
IN HEAV’N THE BELLS ARE RINGING;
DING DONG! VERILY THE SKY
IS RIV’N WITH ANGEL SINGING . . . ’
‘The carol singers of Soot Town!’ cried Mrs Reckitt, who, like all unfeeling people, was sentimental. ‘I must welcome them in for hot punch and melted jelly babies.’
To the front door she went, face flushed redder than any berry, heart colder than the snow that swept through the door. The lanterns were lit and the sound of singing filled the hall. The air was beeswax and green spruce and brandy and cloves and sugar and wine, and the tree shone.
Outside in the garden the pond was frozen solid. Reginald and Maud ran round and round to keep warm, but Dr Scowl saw them through the drawing-room window, where he was warming his sizable bottom at the sizable fire. Running looked too much like a game and too little like a punishment, so he yelled at them to stand still.
Maud’s grey overall was thin and her dress was thinner. Reginald wore grey shorts and the regulation mustard-yellow jacket made of felt. Soon the children began to turn blue.
It was then that they heard a tapping beneath the ice on the pond. Yes, it was quite clear. TAP TAP TAP.
They wondered what this could be, and momentarily forgot their chilliness.
‘Over there!’ said Reginald. ‘Look!’
Leaving a trail of prints the size of a saucer where he sat between leaps, hopped a large frog.
Silver. Not bright. Unpolished. His eyes, though, were bright as silver stars and steady in their unblinking gaze.
‘Greetings, children,’ said the Silver Frog. ‘My own children are trapped under the ice.’
TAP TAP TAP.
‘Who has imprisoned them?’ said Reginald.
‘In the past,’ said the Silver Frog, ‘the gardener always put a log in the pond in the winter. At a slant. Lying through the water and against the bank. This made a bridge and we frogs could come and go, hiding under the ice to keep warm, returning to land to feed. But now no one considers us.’
‘No one considers us either,’ said Maud. ‘All the orphans here are trapped under the ice of Mrs Reckitt’s heart but, though we can never escape, we will help you if we can.’
The Silver Frog listened, and his eyes, which were always moist, because, after all, he was a frog, grew wet. Amphibians don’t cry. But it was Christmas.
‘We can smash the ice to bits!’ shouted Reginald. ‘I can stamp on it with my twisted foot! Look, the boot has an iron sole.’
The Silver Frog shook his body. (A frog cannot shake his head.) ‘Too dangerous. You will fall in and drown. No, there is another way. She has the answer in her pocket.’
Maud fiddled around in her overall pocket. There was a bit of bacon rind she had saved from breakfast, and something hard, like a pebble. Maud fished it out. It was the tiny silver frog she had found inside the broken bauble.
‘Yes,’ said the Silver Frog, ‘that is the Croak.’
‘The Croak?’
‘The Croak is the Queen of Frogs. No one has ever seen her in the skin and bone, or web and slime, but no one doubts that she watches over us. That solid silver frog is her sacred image. Now, do as I tell you to do and place it on the surface of the pond.’
Maud had little confidence that an inch-scale silver frog could do much good in this frozen world, but she did as she was asked, and slid the frog onto the smooth ice.
Nothing happened. Maud shivered.
‘This is never going to work,’ said Reginald. ‘Why don’t I just smash it all up?’
‘Behold,’ said the Silver Frog and, as it was Christmas, ‘behold’, though ornate, was acceptable.
A dark patch was spreading under the little tiny miniature weight of frogness. The dark patch bubbled. There was a sigh and a crack. The surface of the pond was wet and crazed.
‘It’s melting!’ said Reginald, who had forgotten to shiver.
And it was. And, as the melting melted, the little frog slid ahead of the breaking ice, and where the frog slid the ice cracked, and the soft water spread over the hard surface.
And if this was not remarkable enough, something more remarkable happened next. The surface of the pond was alive with identical silver frogs.
‘They are tiny!’ said Reginald.
‘They are new,’ said the Silver Frog. ‘Like the moon.’
The children looked up. The moon looked down, bladed and beautiful and silver.
‘I’m not cold now,’ said Reginald.
And neither was Maud.
The Silver Frog said, ‘My friends, you have helped my children; now my children shall help you. Come along but tread carefully!’
Maud and Reginald followed the Silver Frog, and all the tiny frogs flowed round their feet like a river. The moon lit them up and the children seemed to be carried on a silver stream towards the house.
Through the long windows into the dining room the children could see the final touches being laid to the table for the Christmas feast. How beautiful it looked: red candles and red crackers, damask tablecloth and napkins. Maud knew all about the tablecloth and napkins; she had ironed them with a flat iron heated on the range. It had taken her four hours.
‘In we go!’ ordered the Silver Frog, and magically the tiny frogs streamed through the glass and suddenly the children were inside too.
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‘Glass is ruled by the moon,’ said the Silver Frog as though this explained everything.
Once inside, two tiny frogs climbed into every cracker. Twenty-four tiny frogs dropped themselves into the bottom of the crystal water glasses. There was a beautiful trifle in a glass bowl in the centre of the table. The trifle was decorated with tiny silver beads that were soon replaced by tiny silver frogs.
‘Now, then, my dear little froglinos and froglinas, scatter yourself like balls of mercury wherever you please and be sure to cause trouble from the moment you hear the first scream.’
‘What will you do?’ asked Maud.
‘I have a particular task but that is not yet. In the meantime, Maud, you and a dozen froglissimos – the fastest I have – will hide behind the Christmas tree in the hall. They will know what to do – and they will do it to Dr Scowl.
‘Reginald! Under the table with you – crouching, frog-style – and be sure to tie together the gentlemen’s bootlaces, and when the ladies take off their shoes – as ladies always do when their feet are out of sight – move the shoes from one to another so that no one has a matching pair. Do you understand?’
The children nodded.
‘Excellent!’ said the Silver Frog. ‘And now help yourselves to that ham on the sideboard. We have a little time.’
The great and the good of Soot Town were arriving in the hall, as carriages with steaming horses queued for their place at the steps, by now lit up with flares.
Dr Scowl had put off his white coat and rubber gloves and stood resplendently stuffed into white tie and tails.
Mrs Reckitt was wearing an evening gown that had taken its inspiration from a large pink blancmange. Around her shoulders lay a pink fox-fur that fastened itself by means of its fox-teeth to its fox-tail.
‘Such an interesting clasp!’ said Lady Fleas, putting her finger to it. ‘Ow! I declare I am bleeding!’