Freja sat at the breakfast table the next morning, a bowl of baked beans turning cold at her elbow. Her tummy was a churning whirlpool of worry. In just one hour, Tobias Appleby would be arriving to fetch her away. Not only would she be separated from Clementine for the first time in her life, but she would also be left all alone with the mysterious Tobias Appleby. She had best be prepared.
Freja chewed thoughtfully on the tip of her pencil. She muttered a few experimental lines in her head, then wrote on a cardboard tag: ‘Freja Peachtree, to be delivered to Myrtle Cottage, Elderberry Lane, Little Coddling, Hampshire.’
She held up the tag, read it out loud three times, then frowned. Names and addresses were important, certainly, and if she was travelling alone by bus or train, it would save her from having to talk to strangers; she could simply hold out the tag and keep her eyes averted. But Tobias would already know both her name and his own address.
She waved the tag thoughtfully in the air and smiled. Hmmm. Tobias may know my name, but he doesn’t know what I look like! I could tie my nametag to someone else and he would never know the difference.
She wondered if she might be able to duck out to one of the local parks and convince an adventurous girl to take her place on the journey south. An adventurous boy might even do the trick . . . if dressed properly.
‘No,’ she said, slapping the tag down onto the table. ‘Clementine might not notice the wrong child leaving, but she would soon notice that I was still here. Besides, I’ve promised to be brave and go to Hampshire.’
She stared out the window for a moment, then wrote on a second tag: ‘ATTENTION! Extremely shy child.’ But as soon as the words were completed, she realised that they were all wrong. ‘Attention!’ was a silly word to use. It demanded the exact opposite of what she was hoping to achieve. What she truly wanted was to be left alone, to escape attention. She sighed and pushed the tag away.
Freja shovelled a spoonful of cold baked beans into her mouth. It felt like she was chewing limpets plucked straight from their shells. She swallowed, shuddered and chomped her teeth three times in disgust.
‘Chomp!’ she yelled. ‘That’s it! That’s sure to keep Tobias Appleby at bay!’ Pressing down hard with her pencil, she wrote on a third tag in dark uppercase letters. Satisfied, she rolled her pencil across the table, pushed back her chair and ran to the coat rack in the hallway. There, she tied the tag to the second toggle on her duffel coat.
‘THIS CHILD BITES!’
Tobias Appleby was three hours late. Freja and Clementine paced back and forth across the living room. They drank two pots of tea and ate their way through an entire packet of chocolate biscuits. Actually, Clementine ate half a chocolate biscuit, Freja ate the rest. They played two games of chess and one game of Chinese chequers. Clementine had just ducked into the kitchen to brew a third pot of tea when a strange sputtering noise caught Freja’s attention. It grew louder and louder and was punctuated with random explosions that sounded like firecrackers being let off to scare old ladies as they crossed the road.
Freja pulled on her duffel coat and ran out the door. A green vintage motorcycle with a sidecar chugged past, black smoke billowing from its exhaust. Without warning, it swerved, lurched up the gutter onto the footpath, crashed through a white picket fence and came to a halt in the flowerbed at the front of Mrs Thompson’s terrace house.
Freja clapped her hand to her mouth. Her eyes boggled as a ceramic fairy’s head rolled across the footpath and toppled into the gutter. She felt an overwhelming urge to laugh.
A tall, thin man wearing an old-fashioned motoring cap and goggles stumbled off the bike. He muttered to his grey-haired passenger in the sidecar, ‘Hmmm. Spot of bother. Must have tuned out for a moment. Didn’t see that jolly curve in the road.’
Freja glanced back along the street. It was as straight as an arrow. She crept down the steps and moved a little closer.
The motorcyclist swiped off his goggles and cap to reveal emerald-green eyes and a mop of curly brown hair that was in great need of a trim. He stared at the broken fence and the squashed violets and tugged nervously at his ears. Freja wondered at the wisdom of this. The ears stuck out a little further than was necessary and although the tugging was probably not the cause of it, it certainly couldn’t help.
Mumbling and sighing, he shrugged off his brown leather riding jacket to reveal a wrinkled sage-green shirt, a misshapen brown vest (inside out), a dark green cardigan worn through at the elbows and a pair of khaki flannel trousers that sagged and bagged like the skin on an elephant’s bottom. The fringed ends of his long beige scarf were covered in thistledown and burrs. He might have been a bird-watcher gone wrong with all those browns and greens and frayed edges . . . or a madman who’d been shut up in a zoo for several years and just escaped via the tiger’s den. He looks rather lovely, thought Freja. Not so very different from Clementine and me when we’re camping out in the wild.
Grabbing the handlebars, the man heaved the motorcycle backward out of the garden and turned it around. The passenger was now in full sight. It was not somebody’s grandpa, as Freja had first thought, but a shaggy grey dog — an Irish wolfhound of prodigious proportions. The hound stared at Freja, yawned, then licked his long pink tongue luxuriously across his nose.
Freja giggled.
The man gave a start, seeming to notice her for the first time. ‘Hello there, old chap!’
Freja blushed.
Holding out a gloved hand, the man said, ‘Tobias Appleby at your service.’
‘You’re Tobias Appleby?’ gasped Freja.
‘I am indeed!’ the man cried.
Curiosity outweighing her shyness, Freja moved a little closer and presented her hand. ‘I’m . . . I’m Freja Peachtree.’
‘Freja Peachtree!’ Tobias smiled and shook her hand with such enthusiasm that her teeth rattled. ‘Freja Peachtree! The delightful daughter of Clementine Peachtree! Well, well, well. Fancy seeing you here!’ He rubbed his jaw and shook his head as though truly astonished.
The dog whined and flopped his chin on the seat of the motorcycle.
‘But you were coming here especially to fetch me,’ whispered Freja. ‘Weren’t you?’
Tobias frowned and then, suddenly, his eyebrows and arms shot upward. ‘Yes! I was coming to fetch you! Which is why I am here, killing fairies and trampling gardens! Well, the killing and trampling were not part of the plan, but I am pretty certain that I was here to fetch something . . . and if my memory serves me right, that something was a spiffing lass. You, in fact!’
They stared at one another for a minute or two, both blushing and awkward. Freja searched her mind for something sensible to say, but the best she could come up with was, ‘I’m ten.’
‘Marvellous!’ cried Tobias. ‘I used to be ten!’
Another long pause ensued.
The dog sneezed.
‘Is he yours?’ asked Freja.
‘Absolutely!’ said Tobias. ‘This is Finnegan. He’s just a puppy, really. Ten months old.’
The sidecar, built to fit a goodly-sized man, seemed barely to contain the puppy.
Tobias, noticing the tag on Freja’s duffel coat, leaned forward and squinted. ‘THIS CHILD BITES,’ he read aloud.
Freja blushed once more. She would not have written such a label had she realised what a fine fellow Tobias was. She’d already managed to exchange a few awkward but friendly words. He’d even called her ‘spiffing’! But now her stupid tag was going to ruin it all. Such a kind fellow would not want to associate with a girl who, were the label to be trusted, might at any minute bare her fangs and lunge at his throat like a rabid wolf.
I’ve messed things up again, thought Freja. I’m hopeless with people. She hung her head and kicked at a shard of fairy wing.
Tobias stood up straight and considered the words for a moment. ‘THIS CHILD BITES,’ he repeated, then nodded his approval. ‘Well, that’s jolly useful! Always good to have fair warning. And I dare say you would only bite when truly pressed. You don’t look the type to run around snapping and snarling and biting willy-nilly. You appear thoroughly charming.’
Freja looked up hopefully.
Tobias continued. ‘In fact, we should all come with warnings dangling from our toggles. Finnegan should probably have one that says, “THIS PUPPY LICKS.” He’s a habitual licker. Shows no restraint when it comes to his nose or the floor . . . or my nose for that matter. And I should most definitely come with a tag that says, “THIS MAN DAYDREAMS,” for I’m a dreadful daydreamer. I’m often staring into space, stumbling into babbling brooks and leaving pots of soup on the stove until they boil dry.’
A smile twitched at the edges of Freja’s mouth.
‘Truly!’ Tobias declared. ‘It’s because of my daydreaming that I’m so terribly late in arriving. I was so busy holding a conversation with an imaginary mountain goat that I missed the turn-off to London. It wasn’t until I passed a sign saying, “Welcome to Biggleswade” that I realised my mistake. We did an extremely rushed U-turn on the village green, didn’t we, Finnegan? Scared the feathers off a rather large duck, I’m afraid.’
Finnegan grinned and dribbled.
‘Yes, yes!’ Tobias chuckled, running his hand through his tangled curls. ‘There was also that embarrassing incident with the mud flying up from the rear wheel and splattering all over that poor woman. I remember, Finnegan. But, in my defence, it was a complete accident . . . and I called out a hearty apology over my shoulder as we zoomed away . . . and mud washes off, doesn’t it? It’s not as though it was beetroot juice or indelible ink.’
‘Tobias!’ Clementine was standing on the front steps.
‘Clementine!’ bellowed Tobias. He flung his long, gangly arms wide with joy and slapped Finnegan on the side of the head. Accidentally, of course, but that was little consolation for the poor hound.
Tobias bounded up the steps two at a time and threw himself at Clementine.
And as their arms wrapped around each other and their faces pressed cheek to cheek, Freja couldn’t help noticing how happy, truly and deeply happy, Clementine appeared. Complete. As though she had just found something precious that had been missing for a long, long time.