The Ickabog Read online

  “Make one of the little brats do it,” grunted John. “I ’aven’t ’ad breakfast.”

  Ma Grunter suddenly swung her heavy, silver-handled cane at the boy’s head. Daisy expected to hear a horrible thud of silver on bone, but the boy ducked the cane neatly, as though he’d had a lot of practice, cracked his knuckles again, and said sullenly:

  “Orl right, orl right.”

  He disappeared up some rickety stairs.

  “What’s your name?” said Ma Grunter, turning back to Daisy.

  “Daisy,” said Daisy.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Ma Grunter. “Your name is Jane.”

  Daisy would soon find out that Ma Grunter did the same thing to every single child who arrived in her house. Every girl was rechristened Jane, and every boy was renamed John. The way the child reacted to being given a new name told Ma Grunter exactly what she needed to know about how hard it was going to be to break that child’s spirit.

  Of course, the very tiny children who came to Ma Grunter simply agreed that their name was John or Jane, and quickly forgot that they’d been called anything else. Homeless children and lost children, who could tell that being John or Jane was the price of having a roof over their heads, were also quick to agree to the change.

  But every so often Ma Grunter met a child who wouldn’t accept their new name without a fight, and she knew, before Daisy even opened her mouth, that the girl was going to be one of them. There was a nasty, proud look about the newcomer, and while skinny, she looked strong, standing there in her coveralls with her fists clenched.

  “My name,” said Daisy, “is Daisy Dovetail. I was named after my mother’s favorite flower.”

  “Your mother is dead,” said Ma Grunter, because she always told the children in her care that their parents were dead. It was best if the little wretches didn’t think there was anybody to run away to.

  “That’s true,” said Daisy, her heart hammering very fast. “My mother is dead.”

  “And so is your father,” said Ma Grunter.

  The horrible old woman seemed to swim before Daisy’s eyes. She’d had nothing to eat since the previous lunchtime and had spent a night of terror on Prodd’s wagon. Nevertheless, she said in a cold, clear voice:

  “My father’s alive. I’m Daisy Dovetail, and my father lives in Chouxville.”

  She had to believe her father was still there. She couldn’t let herself doubt it, because if her father was dead, then all light would disappear from the world, forever.

  “No, he isn’t,” said Ma Grunter, raising her cane. “Your father’s as dead as a doornail and your name is Jane.”

  “My name —” began Daisy, but with a sudden whoosh, Ma Grunter’s cane came swinging at her head. Daisy ducked as she’d seen the big boy do, but the cane swung back again, and this time it hit Daisy painfully on the ear, and knocked her sideways.

  “Let’s try that again,” said Ma Grunter. “Repeat after me. ‘My father is dead and my name is Jane.’”

  “I won’t,” shouted Daisy, and before the cane could swing back at her, she’d darted under Ma Grunter’s arm and run off into the house, hoping that the back door might not have bolts on it. In the kitchen she found two skinny, frightened-looking children, a boy and a girl, ladling a dirty green liquid into bowls, and a door with just as many chains and padlocks on it as the other. Daisy turned and ran back to the hall, dodged Ma Grunter and her cane, then sped upstairs, where more thin, pale children were cleaning and making beds with threadbare sheets. Ma Grunter was already climbing the stairs behind her.

  “Say it,” croaked Ma Grunter. “Say, ‘My father is dead and my name is Jane.’”

  “My father’s alive and my name is Daisy!” shouted Daisy, now spotting a hatch in the ceiling that she suspected led to an attic. Snatching a feather duster out of the hand of a scared girl, she poked the hatch open. A rope ladder fell, which Daisy climbed, pulling it up after her and slamming the attic door, so that Ma Grunter and her cane couldn’t reach her. She could hear the old woman cackling below, and ordering a boy to stand guard over the hatch, to make sure Daisy didn’t come out.

  Later, Daisy would discover that the children gave one another extra names, so they knew which John or Jane they were talking about. The big boy now standing guard over the attic hatch was the same one Daisy had seen downstairs. His nickname among the other children was Basher John, for the way he bullied the smaller children. Basher John was by way of being a deputy for Ma Grunter, and now he called up to Daisy, telling her children had died of starvation in that attic and that she’d find their skeletons if she looked hard enough.

  The ceiling of Ma Grunter’s attic was so low that Daisy had to crouch. It was also very dirty, but there was a small hole in the roof through which a shaft of sunlight fell. Daisy wriggled over to this and put her eye to it. Now she could see the skyline of Jeroboam. Unlike Chouxville, where the buildings were mostly sugar white, this was a city of dark gray stone. Two men were reeling along the street below, bellowing a popular drinking song.

  “I drank a single bottle and the Ickabog’s a lie,

  I drank another bottle, and I thought I heard it sigh,

  And now I’ve drunk another, I can see it slinking by.

  The Ickabog is coming, so let’s drink before we die!”

  Daisy sat with her eye pressed against the spy hole for an hour, until Ma Grunter came and banged on the hatch with her cane.

  “What is your name?”

  “Daisy Dovetail!” bellowed Daisy.

  And every hour afterward, the question came, and the answer remained the same.

  However, as the hours wore by, Daisy began to feel light-headed with hunger. Every time she shouted “Daisy Dovetail” back at Ma Grunter, her voice was weaker. At last, she saw through her spy hole in the attic that it was becoming dark. She was very thirsty now, and she had to face the fact that, if she kept refusing to say her name was Jane, there really might be a skeleton in the attic for Basher John to frighten other children with.

  So the next time Ma Grunter banged on the attic hatch with her cane and asked what Daisy’s name was, she answered, “Jane.”

  “And is your father alive?” asked Ma Grunter.

  Daisy crossed her fingers and said:

  “No.”

  “Very good,” said Ma Grunter, pulling open the hatch, so that the rope ladder fell down. “Come down here, Jane.”

  When Daisy was standing beside her again, the old lady cuffed her around the ear.

  “That’s for being a nasty, lying, filthy little brat. Now go and drink your soup, wash up the bowl, then get to bed.”

  Daisy gulped down a small bowl of cabbage soup, which was the nastiest thing she’d ever eaten, washed the bowl in the greasy barrel that Ma Grunter kept for doing dishes, then went back upstairs. There was a spare mattress on the floor of the girls’ bedroom, so she crept inside while all the other girls watched her, and got under the threadbare blanket, fully dressed, because the room was very cold.

  Daisy found herself looking into the kind blue eyes of a girl her own age, with a gaunt face.

  “You lasted much longer than most,” whispered the girl. She had an accent Daisy had never heard before. Later, Daisy would learn that the girl was a Marshlander.

  “What’s your name?” Daisy whispered. “Your real name?”

  The girl considered Daisy with those huge, forget-me-not eyes.

  “We’re not allowed to say.”

  “I promise I won’t tell,” whispered Daisy.

  The girl stared at her. Just when Daisy thought she wasn’t going to answer, the girl whispered:

  “Martha.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Martha,” whispered Daisy. “I’m Daisy Dovetail and my father’s still alive.”

  Every girl was rechristened Jane, and every boy was renamed John.

  By Kinza, Age 9

  Back in Chouxville, Spittleworth made sure the story was circulated that the Dovetail family had packed up in
the middle of the night and moved to the neighboring country of Pluritania. Daisy’s former teacher told her old classmates, and Cankerby the footman informed all the palace servants.

  After he got home from school that day, Bert went and lay on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. He was thinking back to the days when he’d been a small, plump boy whom the other children called “Butterball,” and how Daisy had always stuck up for him. He remembered their long-ago fight in the palace courtyard, and the expression on Daisy’s face when he’d accidentally knocked her Hopes-of-Heaven to the ground on her birthday.

  Then Bert considered the way he spent his break times these days. At first, Bert had sort of liked being friends with Roderick Roach, because Roderick used to bully him and he was glad he’d stopped, but if he was truly honest with himself, Bert didn’t really enjoy the same things that Roderick did: for instance, trying to hit stray dogs with catapults, or finding live frogs to hide in the girls’ satchels. In fact, the more he remembered the fun he used to have with Daisy, the more he thought about how his face ached from fake smiling at the end of a day with Roderick, and the more Bert regretted that he’d never tried to repair his and Daisy’s friendship. But it was too late, now. Daisy was gone forever: gone to Pluritania.

  While Bert was lying on his bed, Mrs. Beamish sat alone in the kitchen. She felt almost as bad as her son.

  Ever since she’d done it, Mrs. Beamish had regretted telling the scullery maid what Mr. Dovetail had said about the Ickabog not being real. She’d been so angry at the suggestion that her husband might have fallen off his horse she hadn’t realized she was reporting treason, until the words were out of her mouth and it was too late to call them back. She really hadn’t wanted to get such an old friend into trouble, so she’d begged the scullery maid to forget what she’d said, and Mabel had agreed.

  Relieved, Mrs. Beamish had turned around to take a large batch of Maidens’ Dreams out of the oven, then spotted Cankerby the footman skulking in the corner. Cankerby was known to everyone who worked at the palace as a sneak and a tattletale. He had a knack of arriving noiselessly in rooms, and peeping unnoticed through keyholes. Mrs. Beamish didn’t dare ask Cankerby how long he’d been standing there, but now, sitting alone at her own kitchen table, a terrible fear gripped her heart. Had news of Mr. Dovetail’s treason been carried by Cankerby to Lord Spittleworth? Was it possible that Mr. Dovetail had gone, not to Pluritania, but to prison?

  The longer she thought about it, the more frightened she became, until finally, Mrs. Beamish called out to Bert that she was going for an evening stroll, and hurried from the house.

  There were still children playing in the streets, and Mrs. Beamish wound her way in and out of them until she reached the small cottage that lay between the City-Within-The-City gates and the graveyard. The windows were dark and the workshop locked up, but when Mrs. Beamish gave the front door a gentle push, it opened.

  All the furniture was gone, right down to the pictures on the walls. Mrs. Beamish let out a long, slow sigh of relief. If they’d slung Mr. Dovetail in jail, they’d hardly have put all his furniture in there with him. It really did look as though he’d packed up and taken Daisy off to Pluritania. Mrs. Beamish felt a little easier in her mind as she walked back through the City-Within-The-City.

  Some little girls were jumping rope in the road up ahead, chanting a rhyme now repeated in playgrounds all over the kingdom.

  “Ickabog, Ickabog, he’ll get you if you stop,

  Ickabog, Ickabog, so skip until you flop,

  Never look back if you feel squeamish,

  ’Cause he’s caught a soldier called Major —”

  One of the little girls turning the rope for her friend spotted Mrs. Beamish, let out a squeal, and dropped her end. The other little girls turned too, and, seeing the pastry chef, all of them turned red. One let out a terrified giggle and another burst into tears.

  “It’s all right, girls,” said Mrs. Beamish, trying to smile. “It doesn’t matter.”

  The children remained quite still as she passed them, until suddenly Mrs. Beamish turned to look again at the girl who’d dropped the end of the skipping rope.

  “Where,” asked Mrs. Beamish, “did you get that dress?”

  The scarlet-faced little girl looked down at it, then back up at Mrs. Beamish.

  “My daddy gave it to me, missus,” said the girl. “When he come home from work yesterday. And he gave my brother a bandalore.”

  After staring at the dress for a few more seconds, Mrs. Beamish turned slowly away and walked on home. She told herself she must be mistaken, but she was sure she could remember Daisy Dovetail wearing a beautiful little dress exactly like that — sunshine yellow, with daisies embroidered around the neck and cuffs — back when her mother was alive, and made all Daisy’s clothes.

  A month passed. Deep in the dungeons, Mr. Dovetail worked in a kind of frenzy. He had to finish the monstrous wooden foot, so he could see Daisy again. He’d forced himself to believe that Spittleworth would keep his word, and let him leave the dungeon after he’d completed his task, even though a voice in his head kept saying, “They’ll never let you go after this. Never.”

  To drive out fear, Mr. Dovetail started singing the national anthem, over and over again:

  “Coooorn-ucopia, give praises to the king,

  Coooorn-ucopia, lift up your voice and sing …”

  His constant singing annoyed the other prisoners even more than the sound of his chisel and hammer. The now thin and ragged Captain Goodfellow begged him to stop, but Mr. Dovetail paid no attention. He’d become a little delirious. He had a confused idea that if he showed himself a faithful subject of the king, Spittleworth might think him less of a danger, and release him. So the carpenter’s cell rang with the banging and scraping of his tools and the national anthem, and slowly but surely, a monstrous clawed foot took shape, with a long handle out of the top, so that a man on horseback could press it deep into soft ground.

  When at last the wooden foot was finished, Spittleworth, Flapoon, and Major Roach came down into the dungeons to inspect it.

  “Yes,” said Spittleworth slowly, examining the foot from every angle. “Very good indeed. What do you think, Roach?”

  “I think that’ll do very nicely, my lord,” replied the major.

  “You’ve done well, Dovetail,” Spittleworth told the carpenter. “I’ll tell the warder to give you extra rations tonight.”

  “But you said I’d go free when I finished,” said Mr. Dovetail, falling to his knees, pale and exhausted. “Please, my lord. Please. I have to see my daughter … please.”

  Mr. Dovetail reached for Lord Spittleworth’s bony hand, but Spittleworth snatched it back.

  “Don’t touch me, traitor. You should be grateful I didn’t have you put to death. I may yet, if this foot doesn’t do the trick — so if I were you, I’d pray my plan works.”

  He had to finish the monstrous wooden foot, so he could see Daisy again.

  By Brooke, Age 11

  That night, under cover of darkness, a party of horsemen dressed all in black rode out from Chouxville, headed by Major Roach. Hidden beneath a large bit of sacking on a wagon in their midst was the gigantic wooden foot, with its carved scales and long, sharp claws.

  At last they reached the outskirts of Baronstown. Now the riders — members of the Ickabog Defense Brigade whom Spittleworth had chosen for the job — slipped from their horses and covered the animals’ hooves with sacking to muffle the noise and the shape of their prints. Then they lifted the giant foot off the wagon, remounted, and carried it between them to the house where Tubby Tenderloin the butcher lived with his wife, which was luckily a little distance from its neighbors.

  Several of the soldiers now tied up their horses, stole up to Tubby’s back door, and forced entry, while the rest pressed the giant foot into the mud around his back gate.

  Five minutes after the soldiers arrived, they carried Tubby and his wife, who had no children, out of their h
ouse, bound and gagged, then threw them onto the wagon. I may as well tell you now that Tubby and his wife were about to be killed, their bodies buried in the woods, in exactly the way Private Prodd had been supposed to dispose of Daisy. Spittleworth only kept alive those people for whom he had a use: Mr. Dovetail might need to repair the Ickabog foot if it got damaged, and Captain Goodfellow and his friends might need to be dragged out again someday, to repeat their lies about the Ickabog. Spittleworth couldn’t imagine ever needing a treasonous sausagemaker, though, so he’d ordered his murder. As for poor Mrs. Tenderloin, Spittleworth barely considered her at all, but I’d like you to know that she was a very kind person, who babysat her friends’ children and sang in the local choir.

  Once the Tenderloins had been taken away, the remaining soldiers entered the house and smashed up the furniture as though a giant creature had wrecked it, while the rest of the men broke down the back fence and pressed the giant foot into the soft soil around Tubby’s chicken coop, so that it appeared the prowling monster had also attacked the birds. One of the soldiers even stripped off his socks and boots, and made bare footprints on the soft earth, as though Tubby had rushed outside to protect his chickens. Finally, the same man cut off the head of one of the hens and made sure plenty of blood and feathers was spread around, before breaking down the side of the coop to allow the rest of the chickens to escape.

  After pressing the giant foot many more times onto the mud outside Tubby’s house, so the monster appeared to have run away onto solid ground, the soldiers heaved Mr. Dovetail’s creation back onto the wagon beside the soon-to-be-murdered butcher and his wife, remounted their horses, and disappeared into the night.

  When Mr. and Mrs. Tenderloin’s neighbors woke up the next day and found chickens all over the road, they hurried to tell Tubby his birds had escaped. Imagine the neighbors’ horror when they found the enormous footprints, the blood and the feathers, the broken-down back door, and no sign of either husband or wife.