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18.1: A LITTLE BIRD (part 1)

In which there is a good smell and a number of explosions.

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Rupert picked himself up. He wobbled. Having legs stuffed with wool was really not conducive to the upright position. Juggalug seemed to agree with this, as he promptly stuck out a paw and knocked Rupert over again.

Rupert made a series of gestures with his little woollen arms, which communicated an angry message too obscene to be translated here. Juggalug peeped in a way that sounded suspiciously like a giggle. Rupert waved his arms about some more.

"Will you two stop squabbling?" Harriet said irritably. Seeing as this little pantomime was happening on her shoulders, she was finding it quite distracting. Not that, on the face of it, she had much to be distracted from. She was trudging down a long, straight track away from Pinwick. She had been doing this for several hours-long enough that the sun had risen over the horizon, tingeing the surrounding hills with gold-and her legs were aching. But she kept going. She didn't know how long those dolls would manage to keep Minola Caw occupied; for all she knew the witchy godmother was on her trail this very minute. (For the reader's information: she wasn't. The dolls of Pinwick had proven very resourceful, and Minola Caw was at that moment trussed up in one of the cells of Pinwick Gaol, a woollen rose stuffed in her mouth and proving a very effective gag.) Harriet, unfortunately, did not know this-and so she kept on trudging.

Harriet was not happy. She was tired, for a start, and that certainly didn't help. But what was worse was that she could not think of a plan. From the moment she had seen what Minola Caw had done to Rupert, Harriet had been wracking her brains to think of some way to de-doll him. Her first thought had been to find the other Miss Caw, who was of course practised at turning non-humanoid things into humanoid things and vice versa. But Miss Caw was all the way back in Barthane, and Harriet had absolutely no idea how far or in exactly which direction she and Rupert had flown on that horrible broom. 'Roughly north' was all she knew for certain, as the day had been brighter here and the night shorter. The sun was already climbing its way up into the sky, whereas at home it would have only just have been peeping over the horizon. She then thought that she might find another witch, but she was (understandably) nervous about dealing with witches after what had happened. She thought about warlocks, but according to Miss Caw that was another dead-and, apparently, explosive-end. No, she just couldn't think of anything.

"But maybe I could come up with something if you two would just-stop-that!" Harriet snapped, glaring at Rupert and Juggalug. Juggalug, with a smug smile on his face, fluttered over to her right shoulder and perched there. Rupert, who had just been knocked over for the umpteenth time, threw up his arms and wobbled along to her left ear, where he stood hanging on to her earlobe.

"Oh, don't sulk, Rupert. Please," Harriet implored. "You're just making me feel worse."

Rupert shrugged his shoulders in a way that seemed to say: You think you're having a bad time?

Harriet gave up. Talking to Rupert at the moment was very much a one-way conversation. When whatever spell Minola Caw had put on her berry-bushes had worn off and Rupert had finally woken up, there had been a difficult time when Harriet had been patiently trying to explain what had happened and Rupert had been hysterically finding out what it was like to be a doll. This mostly involved waving his arms a lot-as most things in the doll lifestyle seemed to.

Harriet sighed. If only she had a pencil and paper, Rupert could at least write to her. As it was, she could work out some of what his gestures meant, but not many. This made coming up with a plan all the harder.