I hung my head. ‘Sorry, Mum.’ But what was Mrs Ermine going to do about it? That was what I wanted to know.
Her lips tightened. ‘Yes, well. Jack, Mrs Ermine has offered to help keep you safe.’
Well, that was a relief, I can tell you!
Mum continued, ‘We’ll tell people she’s employing you to help with a rat infestation in her barns, so you have an excuse to spend some time at her house. But what she’ll really be doing is teaching you how use your Magic, and also to hide from the authorities. You’ll actually be using your talent to help people. The problem is, you’ll have to leave the farm for a while, and it’s nearly harvest time. I don’t know what to do for the best, Jack. What do you think?’
Mrs Ermine interrupted. ‘Should the lad’s father not be asked?’ she suggested.
Mum replied quietly, ‘My husband died in the war. They took him to be a soldier, and he never came back.’
Mrs Ermine looked sympathetic. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said.
‘Well, this is it,’ I thought. I straightened up, took my hand away from my mouth, and faced my mother bravely, knowing that my time had come to leave. I’d been expecting it, though not like this, and at least I wouldn’t have to kill soldiers, like my Dad.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I said. ‘I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d worry, and there wasn’t anything you could do about it. I’ve been practising in the farmyard and the orchard and the barn and places where nobody could see me. But that little girl might have died if I hadn’t saved her. I didn’t even think. I just did it. And I knew someone would see me some time.’
My mother looked as if she wanted to hug me, but was scared to, in case I went bang. ‘But Jack, if you’re not very careful, you’ll just …’
‘I know. That’s why I’ve been using it.’
Mrs Ermine interrupted. ‘I’m afraid, Jack, that although that was the sensible thing to do, you could still have been found out. The government has people who spend their time looking for disturbances in the Magic that show someone’s using it. I guess you’ve been lucky up to now, perhaps because you haven’t drawn on it very much at a time, but they will find you eventually, unless you learn to shield yourself.’
My eyes grew round with wonder. ‘They can do that?’ I said, awed. ‘Wow!’
My mother was impressed in an entirely different way. ‘Oh, Jack! You could have been caught and dragged away any time since you discovered you had the Magic!’ she said. ‘And I never knew! Oh, my darling boy, I don’t think we have a choice. If Mrs Ermine can help keep you safe from the soldiers, I think you’d better go with her!’
I nodded, solemnly, feeling suddenly much more grown up than my years.
‘What will I be doing, if I come with you, Mrs Ermine?’ I asked.
She smiled at me, and her smile reached deep into my heart. Any remaining worries I had about whether she was for real died on the spot.
‘Well, Jack,’ she replied, ‘you’ll be helping people. There are a few others at my house with your talents, who I’ve found before the authorities got them, so you’ll have friends there. We call ourselves The Secret Magicians, because we can’t let people know what we do. It would be too dangerous. Most of what we do is persuading people to look after those who need it most.’
‘Oh, like the dog I fed the first time I used the Magic?’ I asked.
Mum looked sharply at me. ‘Did you make the man drop his pie?’ she asked. ‘I always wondered about that.’
‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I just thought how the dog needed it more than he did, and how great it would be if the dog could finish it, and I made just a little movement like I was jogging his elbow – and he dropped it! That’s when I knew I had the Magic. So I came home and started practising. I can feed the hens with Magic, and pick apples, kill rats; that sort of thing, that no-one really notices.’
My mother didn’t seem to know whether to look appalled at how much I’d been using my talent, or proud that I had been so careful. Her expression shifted back and forth, and she ended up bursting into tears.
‘Oh, Jack!’ she wailed. ‘What are we going to do?’
I looked at her blankly. Why was she crying? I looked at Mrs Ermine, wondering if she knew.
‘It’s been a bit of a shock to your mother,’ she said. ‘Give her a moment to get used to it, will you, Jack?’
So I went over to Mum and put my arms around her. After a moment, she pulled me into a fierce hug that nearly cracked my ribs. Instinctively, I used the Magic to make her loosen her grip a bit. She let go, and grabbed my arms instead, holding them too tight, and looking intently into my face. Her eyes were red and a teardrop trembled on her lashes. ‘You used the Magic on me!’ she gasped.
I hung my head. ‘Sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean to, but you were hurting me. You still are.’
She loosened her grip just a bit, and looked at Mrs Ermine. ‘Could they find him, just from that little use?’ she asked, clearly alarmed.
Mrs Ermine nodded. ‘If they were looking in this direction, and if I wasn’t shielding him,’ she said.
‘You were? Oh, bless you!’ My mother’s face relaxed its worried look, and she turned back to me. ‘I can see you’re going to find it difficult to hide much longer,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘I know. And I’d much rather go with Mrs Ermine than be taken away by the soldiers.’
‘Me too! We’ll miss you, Jack. Will he be able to come and visit?’ She put her arm around my shoulders, looking back at Mrs Ermine.
She nodded. ‘When he’s learned a bit more control,’ she said. ‘Though he’s pretty good, even now, I have to say. But he needs to know how to shield himself. Right now, as you can see, he’s very vulnerable, but after a week or two, I think it should be safe. And you can always write to each other.’
Mum looked relieved. ‘Thank you!’ she said, a smile starting to appear on her face, for the first time since Mrs Ermine arrived. ‘And does he have to leave tonight?’
‘I think tomorrow would probably be OK,’ said Mrs Ermine. ‘Provided he’s careful. I’ll come for him soon after breakfast, if that’s OK with you?’
Mum nodded. Tears seemed to be welling up inside her again, and I put my arms around her.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I said, knowing there wasn’t anything I could say to make it easier for her.
‘It’s not your fault,’ she replied, hugging me back. ‘Just come back to me safely.’
‘I will. I promise,’ I said.
Please Don’t Tell Anyone About This Story
By David Hensley
Timmy the Tiny Talking Tiger was wondering how he was going to cope with the day. Would he even be able to survive it?
The day had started normally enough. After a storm in the night Timmy had been woken by the birds singing. Most of them had been singing about what a lovely sunny day they expected it to be now that the rain had stopped. Some were commenting how, as a consequence, they expected the bigger, tastier bugs to be flying higher over the sewerage works, and one particularly sweet-voiced little lark was going on about the golden dawn.
Having glanced through the curtains at the dawn, Timmy had gone back to sleep, to be woken again by the smell of cooking. He could smell that the lovely Lady Linda was making his favourite breakfast, scrambled egg with raw minced steak. Being a tiger Timmy loved raw meat, but being a very tiny tiger Timmy found it easier if it was minced. So he bounced down the stairs two at a time and into the kitchen just as Lady Linda was putting it on a plate for him. He jumped onto his chair then up onto the table.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said, as she poured it onto his plate. Preferring raw food, his eggs weren’t cooked, so it was more like an eggy Steak Tartar, yellow and red and runny.
‘You’re welcome as ever, Timmy.’
‘What’s planned for today?’ he asked.
‘Well, my old friend Tina is coming for lunch.’
‘Ohhhhh,’ sighed Timmy. ‘Not Tina from
the television?’
‘Indeed. You know she went to my old school. And she is doing a programme on Where Are They Now? catching up with people who had once been famous. She was having trouble finding people who had genuinely dropped from the limelight, and hadn’t carried on appearing on TV adverts and in gossip magazines, so I said I would help out.’
‘So were you really famous?’
‘Well, I once sang in a band called the Tuesdays that had one hit album and one hit single. It was huge fun, but they dropped me because they thought I was too posh. At first they thought I was pretend posh, like Posh Spice, but then the journalists discovered that we really were posh, as my father was a Duke, like his father and his grand-father, and that we lived in this old castle.’
‘Didn’t they like that? I think it’s wonderful here.’
‘No, the others didn’t think it fitted with the rebellious attitude needed for the band, so they dropped me before it hurt the brand. But it didn’t really work out for them, as none of the others knew much about music, so after that their songs all sounded much the same and the fans drifted away.’
‘That’s really different from all the conservation work you do today.’
‘Yes, which is why Tina thought it would make a good story. She’s bringing a cameraman so they can film me here for an authentic feel.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Timmy under his breath.
Timmy could be very brave, and was extraordinarily talented. He could understand and speak all the languages of people and birds and animals. But, like many people, he was afraid of being found out. He really didn’t want to be famous, or for people to know where he lived. The people in the neighbouring village of Bodium knew him and Lady Linda of course, but they knew to keep his existence very quiet so that they weren’t swamped with inquisitive tourists. Timmy had sympathy for that of course, but he was also afraid of three very powerful people. All of whom knew that he existed, and wanted to capture him for their own ends.
The first was the famous Zookeeper, Dr Dick Davis of the Zoological Society of London. He had met Timmy, and Timmy had met him. He wanted to meet Timmy again, but that was the last thing that Timmy wanted. When Timmy had first arrived in England, Dr Davis had insisted that Timmy should be confined to the zoo, and kept him locked up without even showing him to the other zookeepers. Dr Davis wanted to become even more famous for finding such a remarkable creature. He knew that Timmy would become a media sensation. Fortunately Timmy had managed to escape, with the help of some of the other animals, before he could be put on public display.
Shortly afterwards Dr Davis was speaking at an important international conference on conservation for Zookeepers. He was talking about rare species and couldn’t resist mentioning his latest discovery – a very tiny tiger that could talk. He put up a photo of Timmy, but they all just laughed and laughed and laughed. They thought that the photo was a tabby kitten that had been photoshopped. At first Dr Davis had been very embarrassed, and tried to convince them, but they all laughed all the more, so in the end he played along with them, and pretended that it was just a joke. But he swore to himself that he would track Timmy down, and capture him, so he could present the real live animal, and see who was laughing then. Even if Timmy refused to speak, they would be able to see that he was indeed a genuinely tiny tiger, unlike anything they has seen before.
The second was the Head of MI6, Dame Madeleine Sharp. Timmy actually liked her, as she was clever and witty, and she’d been a real spy, like James Bond. Timmy loved the James Bond movies. He was so impressed that she had the real job that Dame Judy Dench played in the films. He was also impressed that she had actually met the Queen. Timmy loved meeting interesting people, and dreamed of one day meeting the Queen. Timmy had met Dame Sharp through Lady Linda, and had even done a job for her – pretending to be a kitten during a G8 Summit, listening in to the Russians. This was so successful that Dame Sharp wanted to bring Timmy in full-time, and wanted to keep his existence entirely secret. Timmy didn’t want to disappear forever, so had persuaded Lady Linda to tell Dame Sharp that he found it much too scary, and couldn’t face doing it again. However, this wasn’t entirely true. And he suspected that Dame Sharp, being so sharp, suspected it too.
The third powerful person that Timmy was scared of was the most powerful of them all: the President of India. Whenever Timmy met people who were actually from India he was always keen of news from home. Were the tiger sanctuaries safe? Had the poachers been kept in jail? Timmy spoke Hindi and Bengali and Punjabi and several other Indian languages. He was always listening for people fresh from India, but most of the Indian speakers he heard had lived here for generations, and had no firsthand knowledge of the villages and the jungles. He also knew that he had to be careful of people from India. The local Indian police had become aware of him when he helped to catch the poachers who had killed his parents. This was very interesting gossip, and so reached the local civil servants, who passed their reports up through the ranks of the sprawling Indian Civil Service. Without any photos or film to verify the story they wouldn’t make it public and risk being laughed at, but he knew that if he became a celebrity the Indian Government would claim him for their own.
The President of India had recently visited Britain, and made a point on television that all of the cultural icons that had been plundered from India by the old Imperial powers should be returned. And, he had added with a glint in his eye, extremely rare animals originating from India. If they could get him back to India Timmy knew that he would never be free again, and would be put on show like some freak from a nineteenth century circus.
So, here he was enjoying a quiet, private life in the countryside, when a film crew was coming for lunch. Even if they weren’t zookeepers or secret agents, if he was seen on television any one of his pursuers might see him and find out.
The interviewer was going to be the very smart Tina Barlow. Timmy had seen her on television, and so knew she was genuine. But he suspected that, as a talented investigative journalist, she might be sniffing around for a more newsworthy story than just a Where Are They Now? piece on the least famous of the Tuesdays. He was also quite interested to see her in the flesh, so he told Lady Linda that he would adopt his usual disguise as a kitten, so he could hide in plain sight.
And so it was that when she arrived Timmy was hidden in his usual place in Lady Linda’s orange Hermès Birkin handbag.
He couldn’t see out without popping his head up and potentially attracting attention, so he stayed hidden at first and just listened.
‘Oh Tina, how lovely to see you! You are looking great! I can’t believe that we haven’t seen each other for so long!’
‘You are looking good yourself too, and the garden is looking divine. This must be the least military looking castle in Britain.’
‘Well, it is one of the smallest – it probably wasn’t tall enough to get in the army. Do come in and have some tea.’
‘I’ve brought Rupert Kumar the cameraman with me. He is just getting his equipment from the car.’
‘Oh come in – I’ll leave the door open for him so he doesn’t have to jump the moat.’
‘Well I think he’s ex-Army, so he might actually be able to do that, but probably not carrying his cameras and lights.’
Ex-Army thought Timmy. This could be suspicious. And a Kumar. Could be a spy for the British or Indian government. So he buried himself further under Lady Linda’s handkerchiefs and gloves.
‘I thought we could sit here in the drawing room,’ said Lady Linda. ‘There is plenty of light from the French windows and a view into the walled garden.’
‘Perfect,’ said Tina. ‘Rupert darling, we are in here. Come and get set up.’
‘And do have a cup of tea first,’ offered Lady Linda, carefully putting her handbag under her Louis XV armchair.
Timmy cautiously peeped out, but from under the chair he could only see their feet and ankles. Rupert the cameraman was politely taking his shoes off, a
nd put them quite nearby. They looked very posh, and as he put them down Timmy could see that they were from Lobb, the most expensive shoemaker in London. He had seen a documentary about them, and knew that they made shoes by hand for the Prince of Wales. Not the sort of shoes he expected the average cameraman to be wearing.
‘Let’s get it over with then,’ said Lady Linda.
Tina duly asked her various questions about the past, reminding younger viewers that Lady Linda had been really famous for a few weeks one summer, and that while her band-mates still appeared on occasional adverts for supermarkets, she had devoted herself to conservation.
‘And so, coming forward to today, how is your conservation work going? I understand that you’ve been working in India?’
‘Yes indeed. The Indian Government is doing a lot today to protect the rare species, but they have limited resources and still get problems with poachers.’
‘And finally, is there any truth in the rumour that you smuggled a tiger back into the UK and have been keeping it here at your home?’
‘Oh no,’ Lady Linda laughed, ‘tigers are magnificent, large wild animals. I would never want to see a full-grown tiger live anywhere other than its natural habitat. And how on earth do you imagine that anyone could smuggle one, let alone keep one in their home? All I have here is a very big dog and this tiny kitten!’
And with that, to Timmy’s surprise, she reached into her handbag and plucked him out. He curled up on her outstretched hand, covering his face with his paws. The camera swung round towards him, but as it did, she gently dropped him back into the handbag.
‘As you saw, far too tiny even for a tiger cub. I’ve been back in England for more than six months, and a six-month-old tiger cub weighs over fifteen kilograms. I certainly couldn’t carry one of those in my handbag!’
Tina laughed and made her closing remarks to camera. Lady Linda offered her and Rupert some more tea. Tina said she must be off, but would love to see the garden before she left. Rupert said that he would clear up and put the things in the car, So Lady Linda and Tina headed out to the garden in the inner courtyard of the castle.
The moment they were out of the room Rupert strode over to chair with a towel in his hand. Timmy hid deeper in Lady Linda’s bag, hoping to stay out of sight and out of mind, but Rupert reached straight into it, wrapped Timmy tightly in the towel then plucked him out and pushed him hard down into his own bag.