‘Down here, my lord!’ called a voice from the cellar.
‘Why haven’t you lit the lamps, Scrumble?’ bellowed Spittleworth, feeling his way downstairs.
‘Thought it best not to look like anyone was home, sir!’ called Scrumble.
‘Ah,’ said Spittleworth, wincing as he limped downstairs. ‘So you’ve heard, have you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the echoing voice. ‘I imagined you’d be wanting to clear out, my lord?’
‘Yes, Scrumble,’ said Lord Spittleworth, limping towards the distant light of a single candle, ‘I most certainly do.’
He pushed open the door to the cellar where he’d been storing his gold all these years. The butler, whom Spittleworth could only make out dimly in the candlelight, was once again wearing Professor Fraudysham’s costume: the white wig and the thick glasses that shrank his eyes to almost nothing.
‘Thought it might be best if we travel in disguise, sir,’ said Scrumble, holding up old Widow Buttons’s black dress and ginger wig.
‘Good idea,’ said Spittleworth, hastily pulling off his robes and pulling on the costume. ‘Do you have a cold, Scrumble? Your voice sounds strange.’
‘It’s just the dust down here, sir,’ said the butler, moving further from the candlelight. ‘And what will Your Lordship be wanting to do with Lady Eslanda? She’s still locked in the library.’
‘Leave her,’ said Spittleworth, after a moment’s consideration. ‘And serve her right for not marrying me when she had the chance.’
‘Very good, my lord. I’ve loaded up the carriage and a couple of horses with most of the gold. Perhaps Your Lordship could help carry this last trunk?’
‘I hope you weren’t thinking of leaving without me, Scrumble,’ said Spittleworth suspiciously, wondering whether, if he’d arrived ten minutes later, he might have found Scrumble gone.
‘Oh no, my lord,’ Scrumble assured him. ‘I wouldn’t dream of leaving without Your Lordship. Withers the groom will be driving us, sir. He’s ready and waiting in the courtyard.’
‘Excellent,’ said Spittleworth, and together they heaved the last trunk of gold upstairs, through the deserted house and out into the courtyard behind, where Spittleworth’s carriage stood waiting in the darkness. Even the horses had sacks of gold slung over their backs. More gold had been strapped onto the top of the carriage, in cases.
As he and Scrumble heaved the last trunk onto the roof, Spittleworth said:
‘What is that peculiar noise?’
‘I hear nothing, my lord,’ said Scrumble.
‘It is an odd sort of grunting,’ said Spittleworth.
A memory came back to Spittleworth as he stood here in the dark: that of standing in the icy-white fog on the marsh all those years before, and the whimpers of the dog struggling against the brambles in which it was tangled. This was a similar noise, as though some creature were trapped and unable to free itself, and it made Lord Spittleworth quite as nervous as it had last time when, of course, it had been followed by Flapoon firing his blunderbuss and starting both of them onto the path to riches, and the country down the road to ruin.
‘Scrumble, I don’t like that noise.’
‘I don’t expect you do, my lord.’
The moon slid out from behind a cloud and Lord Spittleworth, turning quickly towards his butler, whose voice sounded very different all of a sudden, found himself staring down the barrel of one of his own guns. Scrumble had removed Professor Fraudysham’s wig and glasses, to reveal that he wasn’t the butler at all, but Bert Beamish. And for just a moment, seen by moonlight, the boy looked so like his father that Spittleworth had the crazy notion that Major Beamish had risen from the dead to punish him.
Then he looked wildly around him and saw, through the open door of the carriage, the real Scrumble, gagged and tied up on the floor, which was where the odd whimpering was coming from – and Lady Eslanda sitting there, smiling and holding a second gun. Opening his mouth to ask Withers the groom why he didn’t do something, Spittleworth realised that this wasn’t Withers, but Roderick Roach. (When he’d spotted the two boys galloping up the drive, the real groom had quite rightly sensed trouble, and stealing his favourite of Lord Spittleworth’s horses, had ridden off into the night.)
‘How did you get here so fast?’ was all Spittleworth could think to say.
‘We borrowed some horses from a farmer,’ said Bert.
In fact, Bert and Roderick were much better riders than Spittleworth, so their horses hadn’t gone lame. They’d managed to overtake him and had arrived in plenty of time to free Lady Eslanda, find out where the gold was, tie up Scrumble the butler, and force him to tell them the full story of how Spittleworth had fooled the country, including his own impersonation of Professor Fraudysham and Widow Buttons.
‘Boys, let’s not be hasty,’ said Spittleworth faintly. ‘There’s a lot of gold here. I’ll share it with you!’
‘It isn’t yours to share,’ said Bert. ‘You’re coming back to Chouxville and we’re going to have a proper trial.’
Chapter 64
Cornucopia Again
Once upon a time, there was a tiny country called Cornucopia, which was ruled by a team of newly appointed advisors and a Prime Minister, who at the time of which I write was called Gordon Goodfellow. Prime Minister Goodfellow had been elected by the people of Cornucopia because he was a very honest man, and Cornucopia was a country that had learned the value of truth. There was a country-wide celebration when Prime Minister Goodfellow announced that he was going to marry Lady Eslanda, the kind and brave woman who’d given important evidence against Lord Spittleworth.
The king who’d allowed his happy little kingdom to be driven to ruin and despair stood trial, along with the Chief Advisor and a number of other people who’d benefited from Spittleworth’s lies, including Ma Grunter, Basher John, Cankerby the footman, and Otto Scrumble.
The king simply wept all through his questioning, but Lord Spittleworth answered in a cold, proud voice, and told so many lies, and tried to blame so many other people for his own wickedness, that he made matters far worse for himself than if he’d simply sobbed, like Fred. Both men were imprisoned in the dungeons beneath the palace, with all the other criminals.
I quite understand, by the way, if you wish Bert and Roderick had shot Spittleworth. After all, he’d caused hundreds of other people’s deaths. However, it should comfort you to know that Spittleworth really would have preferred to be dead than to sit in the dungeon all day and night, where he ate plain food and slept between rough sheets, and had to listen for hours on end to Fred crying.
The gold that Spittleworth and Flapoon had stolen was recovered, so that all those people who’d lost their cheese shops and their bakeries, their dairies and their pig farms, their butcher’s shops and their vineyards, could start them back up again, and begin producing the famous Cornucopian food and wine once more.
However, during the long period of Cornucopia’s poverty, many had lost the opportunity to learn how to make cheese, sausages, wine, and pastries. Some of them became librarians, because Lady Eslanda had the excellent idea of turning all the now useless orphanages into libraries, which she helped stock. However, that still left a lot of people without jobs.