The Little Broomstick

  About the Author

  Mary Stewart is the author of The Crystal Cave, Thornyhold, Rose Cottage and many other novels which make her one of the most widely read novelists in the world. The Little Broomstick is the first of three books for younger readers and the film rights were sold to Walt Disney. It is followed by Ludo and the Star Horse and A Walk in Wolf Wood.

  Lady Stewart is married to the Emeritus Professor of Geology of Edinburgh University. She and her husband have retired from Edinburgh and now live in the West Highlands of Scotland.

  Other children's books by Mary Stewart:

  Ludo and the Star Horse

  A Walk in Wolf Wood

  MARY STEWART

  The Little Broomstick

  A division of Hodder Headline Limited

  Text copyright 1971 Mary Stewart

  First published in Great Britain in 1971

  by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

  The right of Mary Stewart to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  10 987654321

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A Catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0340 79658 8

  To Troy, my resident familiar,

  and Johnny, the cat who came in from the cold

  CHAPTER ONE

  Poor Mary Sat A-Weeping…

  Even her name was plain. Mary Smith. Nothing could have been more depressing, she thought; to be plain, to be ten, and to be alone, staring out of her bedroom window on a grey autumn day, and to be called Mary Smith.

  She was the only plain one in the family. Jenny had lovely long hair that really was the colour of gold, and everyone said Jeremy was handsome; they were older than Mary, cleverer, more attractive in every way. Moreover, they were twins, and had each other, while Mary, who was five years their junior, might as well (she thought dejectedly) have been an only child. Not that she grudged anything to them; it had always seemed to her natural that they should get things that she could not have. As now…

  When the news had come that Daddy would have to go to America for a month towards the end of the summer holidays, and wanted Mummy to go with him, it had at first all seemed to work out beautifully.

  Jenny and Jeremy went off to stay with one of Jeremy's school friends who had a farm in Yorkshire, and Mary was to go to Mummy's sister, Aunt Sue, who had three children aged eleven, eight, and four, and who lived within an hour's car ride of the sea.

  But then, on the very day that Jenny and Jeremy had left, came the letter from Aunt Sue, saying that Uncle Gil and the two elder children were down with flu, and that consequently Aunt Sue did not feel able to risk having Mary, quite apart from all the extra work she herself was having to do…

  So there it was. And once more the twins had got the best of it. Mary didn't grudge them the harvesting, the tractors, even the share they would have in the two elderly farm ponies; but she did think that at the very worst she might have been allowed to go and catch the flu. At least she would have been having it in company.

  To Mary, sitting alone by the window on that grey autumn afternoon, flu seemed a very desirable thing indeed. She forgot about temperatures, aching bones, bed; she even forgot how tiresome Timothy, aged four, could be–and indeed was, most of the time.

  She only saw in her mind's eye the lovely time they would all have had together getting better, with books and games and plenty of talk and fun. She brooded over the picture, and for the fiftieth time wished to goodness she had managed to get to Aunt Sue's and catch the flu before the letter came that had sent her mother frantically to the telephone, and resulted in Mary's being bundled off–rather apologetically–to stay with Great-Aunt Charlotte in the quiet old house in the country.

  Nothing, thought Mary, nothing could ever happen here. If only it had been time to go to school–even school would have been better than this…

  And she scowled out of the window at the garden where the falling leaves were rustling into a pattern on the lawn.

  Great-Aunt Charlotte, who was old, kind, and very deaf, lived in a rambling red-brick house deep in Shropshire, where a mile or so of woods and cherry orchards stretched between the garden and the main road. The orchards had once belonged to the house, but now were worked by a local firm of market gardeners, who kept the gates locked, and one wasn't supposed to go into the orchards at all. Half of the house had been let, too; the people who lived there were away on holiday, and somehow it made the place seem even lonelier and more isolated to see the shutters up, and the door–the old side-door of the Manor–blankly shut and fastened all day. The village of Redmanor, with its handful of houses clustered round the church and the post-office, was a full mile away. You got there by a narrow road that was little more than a country lane; Mary had sometimes walked that way, and had never met anyone on the road yet.

  In the Manor itself, Great-Aunt Charlotte lived alone, save for an elderly friend and companion, Miss Marjoribanks (pronounced Marshbanks), an elderly Scottish housekeeper called Mrs McLeod (pronounced Macloud), and an elderly Pekingese called K'ung Fu-tsze (pronounced Confucius). To be sure, there was Mrs Banks and her daughter Nancy, who came in to clean, and there was Zebedee, the old man who did the garden, but all the same, it was not a very exciting prospect for Miss Mary Smith, aged ten, and rather shy.

  Miss Mary Smith was critically examining her tongue in the bedroom mirror.

  It looked very healthy. And she felt fine.

  She put it in, sighed, then put it out again at her reflection, and went downstairs to find something to do.

  Miss Marjoribanks was in the drawing-room, sorting embroidery silks on the wide window seat.

  There was a rather poor fire in the grate, and in front of this sat Confucius, sulking a little and digesting his lunch. Great-Aunt Charlotte was sitting in her wing chair to one side of the fire, presumably also digesting her lunch, but looking a great deal more pleasant about it than Confucius. She was asleep.

  Mary tiptoed across to the window seat.

  She sat down quietly.

  She watched Miss Marjoribanks disentangle a length of puce silk from a skein of soft rust-red. The colours were horrible together. Miss Marjoribanks twisted and shook and tugged, and finally cheated by cutting both silks with the embroidery scissors. She began to wind them on little twists of newspaper.

  Mary opened her mouth to whisper an offer of help.

  Immediately Miss Marjoribanks fixed her with a faded pale blue eye. 'Sssh!' she hissed. 'You'll wake Confucius!' She moved the box of silks a little further away from Mary. 'And Confucius,' she added as an afterthought, 'will wake your great-aunt.'

  'But–' began Mary.

  'Sssh!' said Miss Marjoribanks.

  Mary tiptoed out of the drawing-room, and took at least two and a half minutes to close the door without a sound.

  She found Mrs McLeod in the kitchen, making an upside-down cake. She was standing at the big scrubbed table, beating something in a yellow bowl.

  She hardly seemed to notice Mary's shy entry; she was talking to herself, apparently in a foreign language. Or it could–thought Mary suddenly, looking from Mrs McLeod's gaunt face and skinny arms to the pan that simmered on the stove–it could be
a spell.

  'Twa o' floor,' muttered Mrs McLeod, beating vigorously, 'an' B.P., a wee puckle o'salt, shoogar aye, that's a'.'

  'What are you making?' asked Mary.

  Mrs McLeod jumped, so that the wooden spoon clattered against the basin, and on the table the tins of salt and baking powder and sugar rattled.

  'Maircy me!' she exclaimed. 'Ye fair startled me, lassie! I niver haird ye come in! What wad ye be wanting noo?'

  She resumed her beating of the mixture, and her eye went back to the page of a battered recipe book which was in front of her, propped against a bowl of eggs.

  'Time was,' she said, 'when I could mind the lot without looking. But no' ony mair. Twa oz melted bu'er–'

  'I wondered if I could help?' said Mary, edging a little nearer. 'I sometimes help Mummy bake at home, you know. She gives me a bit of pastry and I–'

  'Nay, then,' said the housekeeper, but not unkindly.

  'I'm no' making paste the day. Only this for the denner, and it's a verra compulcated thing at that.

  Can ye no' rin oot and play in the gairden? It's no' cauld for all it's grey.'

  She ran a floury finger down the page of the book, and frowned at the recipe again.

  'Bu'er,' she said. 'And yin an' a half eggs well beaten. Half an egg …Did ye ever hear the like o' that?'

  The white half or the yellow half?' asked Mary, peering at the book.

  But at this moment something spat and sizzled on the stove, and the housekeeper, dropping her spoon, darted across the kitchen and grabbed a pan from the burner.

  Til be burnin' the apricots next,' she said. 'Now rin awa, lassie, and play in the gairden; if you talk to me here I'll spoil the cake! I canna dae twa things at yince.'

  Mary went slowly out, through the scullery, to the back door.

  Mrs Banks's daughter Nancy was taking down washing off the line. She was a big plump girl with round red arms and bright brown eyes. She smiled at Mary over an armful of pillow-cases, and greeted her in her soft Shropshire voice.

  'Can I help hang the clothes out?' asked Mary, picking up two fallen clothes-pegs and dropping them with the others in the pocket of Nancy's apron.

  Nancy laughed. 'They be dry mostly,' she said in her lilting voice. 'Mother and I be ironing now.'

  She pulled the prop from under the line, and it swung down within reach. She unpegged the last two sheets, and dropped the pegs into her pocket, just as her mother's voice, lifted shrilly, came from the wash-house.

  'Nancy! Fetch them sheets now, do!'

  'I'm coming, Ma!' called Nancy, and with another smile at Mary she vanished through the wash-house door.

  If Mary had not been searching for Zebedee, the gardener, it is probable that she would never have seen him, for, like all good gardeners, he seemed to be not a person, but merely a part of the landscape.

  In his faded jacket and battered old hat, with string knotted round the knees of his trousers, he looked like something that had been left lying about in the potting-shed; under the shadow of the awful old hat his cheekbones were plantpot-red, and the backs of his gnarled old hands, where the veins and bones were all a-tangle, could have been twisted out of the same yellow raffia he used to tie up the chrysanthemums.

  Which is what he was doing when at last Mary found him.

  A shaft of autumn sunshine had parted the grey overcast sky, and was gilding the trees and the fallen leaves that rustled as she walked across the Jawn. In front of a tall hedge of cypress the chrysanthemums nodded heads of bronze and copper and sulphur-yellow, while from them and from the earth and dead leaves and the tangle of bright nasturtiums round their roots, came the sad, beautiful smell of autumn.

  Zebedee, pausing for a moment in his work, peered at her through the flowers with bright old eyes, like a robin, but he said nothing. The tousled heads of the chrysanthemums nodded as he pulled the raffia round the stems and knotted it. He bent down again and vanished behind the flowers. Mary stood at the edge of the lawn, and spoke hesitatingly.

  'Can I help tie them up too?'

  The chrysanthemums shook again, and a ball of raffia flew out towards her.

  She picked it up, and took a doubtful step forward.

  Zebedee's awful old hat reappeared suddenly three clumps farther down the border, behind an enormous scarlet dahlia; his back was towards her, and his hands rustled busily down among the leaves.

  Mary glanced again at the ball of raffia, decided that it must be an invitation to help, and, pushing aside the Michaelmas daisies and the big, flaring dahlias, made her way to the back of the border among the chrysanthemums.

  She began slowly, carefully, to knot the raffia to the stakes, and then to thread it round the stems of the plants so that the leaves would not be crushed.

  Old Zebedee had vanished again, but–as if it were his familiar spirit–a robin flew out of the cypress hedge and perched on a dahlia-stake, watching her with the same old bright eyes.

  The shaft of sunlight moved slowly through the coloured tangle of flowers and fading leaves. The Virginia creeper on the walls of the Manor glinted richly like silk tapestry, and the tall chimneys, catching the late sun, glowed warmly against the pewter-dark sky behind them.

  Then Mary, pulling the raffia too tightly, broke the stem of a chrysanthemum.

  It was a tall plant, perhaps the tallest and finest of all, and it went with a snap that almost echoed in the still air. The huge amber-gold mop of blossom hung dismally, dragging on the earth and rotting leaves.

  Mary stared in dismay.

  And suddenly, as suddenly as he had vanished, old Zebedee appeared at her elbow, surveying the wreck of his prize with disgust and anger.

  'I ought'a known better,' he said bitterly, and his voice, like the rest of him, was part of the garden. It was thin and wheezy but queerly musical, like the wind in the eaves. 'I ought'a known better. Childer and dogs be no manner of use to a garden. You best let be.'

  'I'm sorry,' said Mary dolefully, and, handing him back his raffia-ball, she turned disconsolately away.

  She found a gap in the cypress hedge, and a wicket gate giving on a path that wound away from the garden into the surrounding woods.

  This she followed, aimlessly, with her loneliness pressing harder and harder upon her as she went on through the greenish shadow, her feet noiseless upon the damp carpet of brown and yellow leaves. To one side a young oak thrust a fistful of acorns over the path, with the last pale leaves fluttering round them, ready to fall. In a cup made by the crotch of a beech-root stood a pool of black water, where a thistle-puff floated. Above this, like a roof, jutted the orange fans of some big fungus, and pallid toadstools crowded together in damp bunches among the moss and mud and rotting twigs.

  Everywhere was damp, and decay, and the end of summer.

  Mary stopped, and the silence of the dying woods hung heavily round her. An acorn, falling from its cup on to the mosses, made, in that stillness, a tap loud enough to make you jump.

  Then suddenly, neat and quiet and graceful as a dancer, there strolled into the middle of the path a small black cat.

  He was completely black from ears to tail-tip; his toes were black, and his whiskers, and the aristocratic eyebrow-hairs that stood above his green, green eyes.

  He stood in the very middle of the path, and he looked at Mary. Then his mouth opened to show a triangle of pink tongue and very white teeth, and he made a remark.

  Probably a very ordinary remark, thought Mary, like 'How do you do?' or 'Nice day, isn't it?' But the cat obviously expected an answer, so she said: 'How do you do? My name's Mary Smith. What's yours?'

  The cat made no reply. There were more important things, obviously, to do. He turned his back on Mary, with his tail held politely in the air, and walked away down the path, deeper into the wood. But he walked, not as if he were leaving her, but as if he wanted her to follow him.

  Mary, delighted to have found a companion where she least expected, followed, but without attempting to touch the cat
. He obviously knew exactly where he was going, and just as obviously he had something important to do, so to stroke him as you might have stroked an ordinary cat would have seemed insulting.

  And presently the cat turned aside from the path, slipped under a hanging huddle of snowberries, and leaped on to a fallen branch of oak. He balanced there, looking back at Mary as with some difficulty she pushed past the snowberry bush.

  She approached the oak branch. The cat did not move, but watched her closely.

  Then she gave an exclamation of surprise and pleasure. For there in the hidden corner behind the snowberries, growing in the shelter of the fallen bough, was a little clump of flowers such as she had never seen before.

  The leaves, set in stiff rosettes, were of a curious bluish-green, mottled like frogs, and above them on slender stems hung the flowers, clusters of graceful purple bells, whose throats were streaked with silver, and whose pistils, like long tongues, thrust out of the freaked throats in stabs of bright gold.

  Mary knelt down on the fallen branch and gazed at the flowers, while beside her sat the little black cat waving his black tail, and watching her out of his green, green eyes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Things That Go Bump In The Night…

  The little cat, dignified as ever, was still with Mary when at length she came back to the house, bearing in one hand a single stem of the strange purple flower that she had found in the wood.

  She went through the back way. The wash-house door was shut, which meant presumably that Mrs Banks and Nancy had gone back to their home in the village. But old Zebedee was in the scullery, sitting on a box, with an ancient, crusted-looking pail gripped between his knees. This was full of some thick steaming mess, at which he pounded fiercely with a stick. He still had on his awful old hat.