After an hour of struggling through thick brambles, the vegetation suddenly thinned and the children could walk more freely under the trees. It was snowing heavily again and they were soaked through, leaving a trail of small puddles in their wake.
Whenever they stopped for a brief rest Storm listened hard. Once through the snow-furred silence she caught the sound of a far-off wolf. She shivered miserably. Could the pipe really be worth all this trouble? As if answering her unspoken thought the pipe glowed around her neck, radiating a warmth across her body. Then the trees began to thin too and Storm realized that they were following a distinct path that coiled around the tree trunks like a piece of ribbon. She broke into a run, reached a small bank, scrambled up and, to her delight, saw a narrow straight road dissecting the woods. She gestured to Aurora to hurry up.
‘A road!’ she said delightedly. ‘It'll take us into Piper's Town.’
Aurora stood on the bank and looked first to the right and then to the left.‘Which way is Piper's Town?’ she asked.
Storm hesitated. She didn't know, but she didn't want Aurora to know that she didn't know.
‘Right,’ she blurted. ‘No, left. I'm sure it's left.’
‘Storm,’ asked Aurora seriously,‘are you certain, or are you bluffing? Do you have a clue where we are?’
Any raised her head from Aurora's shoulder. ‘I know exactly where we are,’ she said triumphantly.
‘Where?’ asked Storm and Aurora eagerly.
‘Lost!’ said Any with supreme confidence, and she put her head back on Aurora's shoulder and went to sleep again.
Aurora sighed. ‘So, which way do we go?’ she asked again, with a glint in her eye that Storm didn't much like. Storm opened her mouth to say right, just as a silver-grey hare shot out from behind a tree, turned left and sped up the middle of the road, its tiny footprints leaving a perfect trail in the snow.
‘Left,’ said Storm firmly. ‘Piper's Town is definitely to the left. I'm quite certain.’
She turned out to be correct. Cold, wet, exhausted and starving hungry, they eventually saw the distant chimneys and spires of the town. Crossing an ancient stone bridge that spanned the wide river, they were soon padding down winding cobbled streets with names such as Cutpurse Way, Bleeding Heart Court and Butchery Lane, past unwelcoming houses with doors and windows shut firmly against the dark night and strangers.
It was eerily silent. Storm could hear her stomach rumbling. She thought longingly of the roaring fire at Eden End and of sitting beside it toasting crumpets and eating them with butter and drizzled honey.
‘Where are we heading?’ whispered Aurora.
‘The town square. There's a derelict church nearby where we can spend the rest of the night,’ said Storm. ‘It won't be warm but at least it will be dry and then in the morning we'll get help.’
At that moment the crooked little lane down which they were walking turned a corner and in front of them was the most astonishing building. Its walls were covered in ginger parkin inlaid with sweets, and towering high above its peppermint roof was a quartet of towers constructed of spun sugar and studded with jellied fruits. But it was the smell that really attracted the children – the air around the gingerbread house was scented with the aroma of freshly baked cinnamon buns, warm chocolate muffins and hot gingerbread with sticky toffee sauce. The children stared at the building open-mouthed and Any held out her arms towards it and said one word: ‘Yummy.’
Storm walked up to the white picket fence that surrounded the garden. As she got closer she realized that it was made from sweet rock and, in the garden beyond, lollipops stood to attention in the flowerbeds. Any leaned down from Storm's arms, licked the fence and said, ‘Peppermint. It tastes of peppermint!’ She fixed her small sharp teeth around the top of a post and took a bite right out of it.
‘Any, dear,’ said Aurora worriedly, ‘I'm not sure it's right to go round eating other people's property.’ But Storm had already walked up the front path of the building and was nibbling at a marzipan and liquorice window ledge. Aurora followed her and broke off a piece from a chocolate window box and put it in her mouth. It was delectable. Any leaned forward and helped herself to a flower made of icing, glacé cherries and angelica. Ravenous, Storm dug her fingers into the gingerbread wall, excavated a large chunk and took a huge bite. It was the most delicious thing she had ever eaten.
The children were so intent on eating that they didn't notice the door of the gingerbread house open and they were startled when a voice suddenly said, ‘Who's been eating my house? Who's been licking my fence? Who's been nibbling at my window box and gobbled it all up?’
Guiltily the children stopped stuffing bits of house into their mouths and looked up. Looming over them from the top of the stairs by the open front door was a large, plump woman with russet cheeks and eyes like apple pips. Her hair was the colour of treacle with a light dusting of icing sugar. She was wearing an old-fashioned white pinafore apron and a syrup smile, and she was holding her arms wide in a gesture of welcome. Then she descended the steps and Storm got a whiff of her crystallized-violet breath. She beamed at the children.
‘My name is Bee Bumble and I am the matron here at the Ginger House Orphanage for lost, abandoned and foundling children, and you three are very welcome indeed. There's plenty more food inside. Why don't you come in, my little munchkins, where it's warm and safe, and let me look after you and feed you. Oh, my sugar plums. My little cupcakes. Come to Bee Bumble and she'll keep you safe and fat in her Ginger House. Oh, my strawberry shortcakes, my little peppermint drops, my sweet peas, stay with your Big Bee and she'll guarantee you granulated happiness.’ She held out her arms to them.
Storm and Aurora looked at each other. They were half-frozen, soaking wet and completely exhausted and Bee Bumble seemed so very motherly and welcoming. From not too far away came the howl of a wolf. Aurora needed no further prompting.
‘Come on, Storm,’ she said. ‘After all, we are almost orphans,’ and she walked eagerly up the stairs and collapsed into Bee Bumble's arms. For a second Storm hesitated and then followed, holding Any.
‘My poor little pumpkins. You are quite worn out. Time for beddy-byes, I think,’ Bee Bumble said. She bundled them up several flights of stairs to one of the towers and put them straight to bed. Any, tucked into an alcove cot, took an experimental lick of the wallpaper and discovered, much to her delight, that it was liquorice on one side of the bed and chocolate on the other. She smiled dozily, kissed Ted Bear, clutched her starry blanket and fell fast asleep.
‘What a little honey,’ beamed Bee Bumble as she leaned in a motherly fashion over Any's cot. For a strange moment Storm thought the matron was going to take a bite out of the baby rather than just plant a sweet, wet kiss on her forehead. Then Mrs Bumble left, turning out the light.
‘Aurora,’ whispered Storm.
‘I can't talk, Storm. I'm too exhausted. I could sleep for a hundred years.’
Soon Storm could hear the even breathing of both her sisters. She lay awake, fingering the pipe around her neck and looking out through the windows at the stars that shone down coldly and without pity.
In the morning Bee Bumble woke them by murmuring sweet nothings in their ears. She gave each of them a steaming mug of hot milk, scented with honey and nutmeg. ‘Drink every last drop,’ she smiled. ‘It will help you grow big and strong. You all need feeding up.’
The milk was scrumptious; Aurora and Any quickly drained their cups. Storm was only sorry that she clumsily knocked her own mug over when she had only taken a mouthful. Her freshly laundered clothes were by the bed, smelling faintly of candyfloss. Storm felt relieved that she had kept the pipe around her neck. She quickly checked the pockets of her dress: a box of matches, a twist of gunpowder, a half-eaten sweet and a small metal file were still all there.
Then Bee Bumble took the sisters downstairs to the dining room for breakfast and the strangest sight met their eyes. Every surface glittered, as if the entire room had been drenched in precious gems. Brightly coloured boiled sweets, as bright as jewels, studded the gingerbread walls, while the cornices and door surrounds were made of royal icing inlaid with gum drops. The chandeliers were constructed from spun sugar and pear drops and the fireplace mantelpiece from marzipan. A crowd of children were eagerly pulling the sweets from the walls and eating them – it looked as if their mouths were stuffed with rubies, emeralds, amethysts, topaz and sapphires. Everything in the room was covered in a light dusting of sugar and the air was scented with ginger, toffee and cinnamon.
In the centre of the room were four vast trestle tables piled high with more sweet treats. There were pecan pies, treacle tarts and raspberry cream sponges, chocolate
fudge cakes the size of cartwheels, crateloads of blueberry muffins and hazelnut meringues, and slabs of candied nougat, honeycomb and peppermint fudge. Custard- and jam-filled donuts were piled high, as were sticky buns and chocolate brownies. Down the centre of each table were huge glass bowls of more boiled sweets that glistened in the light. On each side of the tables stood five-litre buckets of chocolate-chip, vanilla, and rum-and-raisin ice cream and jugs of steaming-hot chocolate fudge sauce. The centrepiece of the table was five huge swans fashioned from meringues, their necks garlanded with rainbow-coloured sweets and their backs full of trifle and jewel-like sorbets. Every dish had a little flag with a description, like the food at a children's birthday party.
Storm, Aurora and Any were open-mouthed in disbelief. Bee Bumble took the opportunity to pop an iced shortbread and a macaroon into each of the girls’ mouths. Storm choked. She was so dazzled by what she saw that it made her eyes hurt. She was also appalled, not by the cornucopia of sugar – after all, she was sometimes partial to a peppermint cream herself – but by the sight of the children, who were attacking these vast sugar mountains with the eagerness of animals who had been kept without food for a month. There were dozens of them, and in complete silence they were gobbling the cakes and hunting down the brightly coloured sweets. Their eyes were glassy.
Bee Bumble pushed Storm and Aurora in the direction of the trestle tables. Any, who had the sweetest tooth, stretched out her arms longingly towards this Aladdin's cave of sparkling sugar and immediately began sifting the bowls for red sweets, like a miner searching for a rubies in the dirt. Storm held back. Peering under a table, she saw a pair of plump twins. One was fast asleep, her face and arms streaked with chocolate and sticky with hundreds and thousands. The other held her sister's head in her lap and was stroking her face gently. Storm opened her mouth to say hello just as Bee Bumble prodded her in the ribs with a surprisingly long, bony finger.
‘You're much too thin, my little cupcake. You need fattening up. Eat!’ It sounded more like an order than a request and Storm decided that now was probably not a good moment to ask for a plate of broccoli. Instead, she nibbled politely at a peanut-butter cookie. It was delicious, and each mouthful made her feel pleasantly sleepy, as if every aspect of her life now had rounded edges, not sharp ones. Absentmindedly she helped herself to another. Satisfied, Bee Bumble headed towards the kitchen to whip up half a dozen devil's food cakes and a death by chocolate gateau.
Sleepily, Storm looked about for Aurora and found her happily munching a chocolate éclair on the floor. She smiled up at Storm. ‘Oh Storm, I feel so happy. It's safe and warm here and Mrs Bumble is so lovely. Let's stay for ever.’ And before Storm could answer she had fallen into a doze and was snoring gently like a very pretty Chihuahua. Storm felt pleasantly snoozy herself. She looked around the room: all the children were either asleep or staring vacantly into space with smiles on their faces. Except for one. Storm could hear a stifled sob from beneath the table. It was one of the twins. Tears were falling down her pale face as she held her sleeping sister. Storm crouched down and crawled under the table to join them, ‘Hello,’ she said.‘My name's Storm. Who are you?’
The twin stopped sniffling and said,‘I am Arwen and my sister's Aisling.’ She burst into tears again and sobbed, ‘Aisling isn't well. She never wakes up properly. She just eats and sleeps and sleeps and eats. I want to leave here, but she won't listen to me. We always agreed on everything. Now she's changed.’
‘Maybe she's just tired,’ said Storm sympathetically. ‘How long have you been here at the orphanage, Arwen?’
‘We're not orphans,’ said Arwen indignantly. ‘We've got parents. But then the men with wolves came and we were brought here.’ She looked utterly miserable. ‘We came two days ago. I know because it was the day I had an upset tummy, so I didn't eat anything. And I've been so worried about Aisling that I haven't been able to eat since.’
Storm looked thoughtful for a moment, remembering their own encounter with the wolves. It all seemed so long ago. Then she smiled at Arwen and said in a very grown-up voice,‘Well, there you are. You're feeling low because you haven't eaten anything. You must. Those peanutbutter cookies are delicious, you know, although a little too sweet. Here, try some.’
Arwen took a cookie and nibbled at the edge. Within seconds she was gulping it down and reaching for more.
‘Goodness, you were hungry,’ laughed Storm, but she was talking to herself. Arwen had fallen asleep. Storm considered her for a moment with a puzzled look on her face. Then she crawled back out from under the table and wandered through the hall to the front door. She wanted to get a look at the outside of the building in daylight. She wondered how the spun sugar towers could so miraculously stay up. Why didn't they melt in the rain?
She had just begun to pull open the heavy front door when a sugary voice behind her said,‘Where do you think you're going, my little chocolate drop?’ It was Bee Bumble. Storm spun round.
‘I just want to get a better look at the outside of the building,’ she said pleasantly.
‘Of course you do, my barley sugar, and why not? You're very welcome to go outside any time you wish. But I think I heard your baby sister calling for you. The poor little muffin sounded quite distressed. I think you'd better go to her.’
Storm ran off to look for Any, and was surprised to find her fast asleep and in no distress whatsoever. Puzzled, she trailed back to the front door, but although she could see no lock, it would no longer budge. She wondered briefly if there was another exit, but then she spotted a fresh tray of peanut-butter cookies cooling on a window ledge and decided exploring could wait until later.
The rest of the day passed in a haze. Breakfast turned into lunch and lunch into supper – each meal as sugary as the last. Aurora and Any helped themselves with gusto but Storm began to feel an increasingly nagging anxiety. She had always preferred savoury foods to sweet ones, and the surfeit of sugar so early in the morning had made her feel queasy. She had barely managed to eat a thing since breakfast.
In between eating, the orphanage children dozed or sat around listlessly until, straight after supper, Bee Bumble shooed them to their rooms and into bed with an accompanying litany of sweet nothings and kisses that were like sharp little nips or bites.
Storm felt far from tired. She lay awake listening to her sisters snuffling in their sleep, and worried. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but she knew there was something terribly wrong at the Ginger House and that she and her sisters should leave the orphanage as soon as possible. The pipe glowed warm about her neck and, brushing it with her fingers, Storm felt her mind clear. She leaped out of bed and shook Aurora and Any awake. It took several attempts before her sisters opened their eyes. They blinked at her stupidly.
‘Come on! We must leave as quickly as we can,’ whispered Storm. ‘We've got to get out of here. Something's not right!’
‘Get out? Why would we want to do that? It's nice here. I don't want to go back out into the cold, frightening woods and be chased by wolves again,’ said Aurora dozily.
‘Neither do I,’ piped Any. ‘I like it here. I'm going to stay. It's like living in a sweet shop,’ and she put her thumb in her mouth and closed her eyes.
‘Aurora,Any, what on earth is wrong with you?’ Storm said angrily.‘We've got to leave. This place is no better than a prison!’
Aurora smiled sleepily. ‘Don't be silly, Storm, we can walk out any time we want. There are no locks on the door. Mrs Bumble and I sat together on the front steps earlier when she was giving me her recipe for orange almond cake. You wouldn't believe it, Storm. It hasn't got any flour in it at all. She is a quite astonishing cook. I could learn such a lot from her.’ And with that she turned over, curled up in a ball and fell back to sleep.
Storm slumped back onto her own bed. She suddenly felt very tired and weak. The pipe burned around her neck. What had happened to her sisters? They were not themselves. For a moment she wondered whether she should just walk down the stairs and out of the Ginger House, but she knew that she could never bring herself to leave them behind. The three of them together. For ever and for always. If she could not persuade them to leave, then she had no choice but to stay too.
It was then that Storm heard a slight scuffling noise. It was coming from the opening to a large liquorice pipe up near the ceiling. Storm had seen similar holes high up in every room of the orphanage and realized they were designed to waft a constant sweet aroma of baking into the air. She had even considered climbing into one to see if it might lead outside, but Bee Bumble always seemed to appear just as she was considering how to scale the wall. Apparently someone else had managed it though, because a single green eye was now shining luminously out of the darkness.
Storm sat bolt upright, scared and curious. She didn't know if the eye belonged to a human or an animal. But then a soft, sad voice said wistfully, ‘Your sister. She's the gentlest, most beautiful girl in the world.’
Storm threw back the covers and went eagerly to the wall beneath the pipe. The voice sounded vaguely familiar. ‘Don't I know you from somewhere?’ asked Storm. She thought she heard distant movement from somewhere in the house. She stood on tiptoe and called: ‘Can you help us? Can you help us get out … ?’ Outside the room there was the sound of footsteps, and the eye vanished back into darkness.
‘Please …’ whispered Storm urgently.
Heavy footfalls sounded from behind the door, the eye glittered briefly back into view and the disembodied voice said hurriedly, ‘Whatever you do, don't eat the food!’
Storm leaped back into bed and pulled the cover over her head just as the door swung open. Bee Bumble stood on the threshold. She eyed the children intently for a few moments and then, convinced they were fast asleep, she left.
