The Dragonfly Pool

“When you first came back from Bergania,” he said presently, “Matteo consulted me about the prince. I explained that I could give him a scholarship but only if he came here with the consent of his guardian. I could not shelter the boy as a runaway. And it seems that this consent will not be given.”

“It has to be given. It has to,” said Tally. “It’s not fair to keep him there like a prisoner. It’s a dictatorship like Hitler and we’re all fighting that. That’s what Delderton is supposed to be about, fighting injustice.”

“Yes,” agreed Daley, “that is what the school is about, certainly—among other things.”

But he felt very tired.

“I told him what it was like here,” Tally went on. “That it’s a place where you can find out who you are. I told him about the river and about Clemmy moving the snails and Matteo finding the otter cub. And about the play—it’s going to be good . . . and oh, everything. And it’s wrong not to let him come. It’s simply wrong.”

When she had gone Daley sat for a while, looking out at the courtyard while Tally’s words went on sounding in his head.

I told him it was a place where you can find out who you are, she had said—and it was as though she had given him back the vision he had had when he first came to Delderton. He had spent ten years making a place where children could be themselves. And suddenly he found that he had come to a decision, and he carried the letters to the parents over to the wastepaper basket and tipped them in.

He and his children would stay.

It was getting too cold to meet on the steps of the pet hut, so the children sat inside on upturned wooden boxes while they discussed Karil’s future. It made life difficult for Augusta, who had to wear a gauze face mask, but she was used to being uncomfortable.

“Someone should blow up the duke,” said Tod, who had reverted to anarchism again.

But Julia, who was sensible about everything except her mother, said that she saw what Daley meant.

“A school can’t just kidnap a pupil,” she said, and Barney, who was convinced that the tree frog was very intelligent and was trying to train it to walk up and down its ladder, said he thought that Karil might have to arrange his own escape.

Tally, however, was deaf to common sense.

“People said we couldn’t get to Bergania with the Flurry Dance but we did, and it looked as though we couldn’t get Karil away from those thugs but we did. So we can do this if we have to. It’s meant that Karil should be here. I knew it straightaway.”

In the staff room Magda, who had grown very fond of the prince on the journey, wondered about his Uncle Fritz, the minister of culture. “Isn’t an uncle an important relative, too?” she asked Matteo. “Perhaps he could do something.”

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with him—and von Arkel, too. They got out of Bergania, but no one knows where they are now. And I don’t know how long I’ll be here—I’ve had another letter from the War Office and things are moving.”

But Tally listened to nobody who told her that Karil might not come. If she could, she would have told the badgers and the foxes that the prince was on his way. And so, with less than three weeks to go till the Christmas holidays, she concentrated on the play.

To everyone’s surprise Tally did not want to act—she wanted to help with the lighting and the production, but she had no desire to take a part, which Julia thought was a bit much: “When you do nothing but nag me.”

But Tally said that was different. “Karil may want to act though. He could be the king of the Underworld perhaps.”

“He won’t want to be the king of anything, not even Hades,” said Borro. “I’ll bet my last sixpence on that.”

“And anyway, he may not be any good,” said Verity.

But the next thing was to get word to Karil—and now Tally wrote a letter to Kenny, who had taken over his father’s vegetable round and was driving Primrose through the London streets.

Kenny was a good friend; he had never failed her yet.

It was a particularly cold winter, the winter of 1939. Coming back for the Christmas holidays, Tally found the aunts bundled into cardigans, looking like koala bears and huddled over the oil stove in the kitchen. In her father’s surgery a single bar of the electric fire stopped the patients from turning blue before they got to the doctor. Aunt Hester had to bandage the pipes in the bathroom to stop them from freezing—but Tally and Maybelle and Kenny went skating on the frozen pond.

The Russians had invaded Finland, where the temperature was minus forty degrees and the soldiers fought on skis. A German patriot had thrown a bomb at Hitler but it missed him, which was a shame. Skirmishes on the Western Front suggested that the war was beginning to gather pace.