The Boggart by Susan Cooper Read Free Book Online

Jessup’s mouth.
    â€œThat was great!” said Jessup indistinctly. He stuffed a piece of bread into his mouth to join the sausage. There was plenty of bread left on the table, but it was sliced bakery bread from the Camerons’ shop, wrapped in plastic, and the Boggart looked at it with disdain. Compared to the wonderful coarse wholemeal bread the MacDevon had baked once a week, this was poor stuff.
    The Boggart made his invisible way around the four plates, investigating. The smell made his mouth water, but there was nothing left that he thought worth eating. Boggarts need neither food nor drink to survive, but they relish certain things that catch their fancy. For centuries the Boggart had preferred the traditional favorites of his kind: oatcakes spread with butter or honey, and fresh cream to drink. A lifetime spent with the MacDevon, however, had broadened his taste to a range of things from fish sticks to ketchup. Once in a while he even enjoyed a dram of good Scotch whisky, which would put him to sleep for almost a week.
    Frustrated and hungry, he was now suddenly furious with the Volniks, and overturned the milk jug on the table just as Jessup was reaching past it for more bread.
    â€œOh, Jessup!” said Maggie mildly. She righted the jug, which had been almost empty, and mopped up a few drops of milk with her paper napkin.
    â€œIt wasn’t me,” said Jessup. He looked uncertainly at the jug. “Was it?”
    â€œYes!” shouted the Boggart crossly, silently at Maggie, but in vain. She patted Jessup on the arm.
    â€œNever mind,” she said benevolently. “We’re all tired. No harm done.”
    The rest of the night went the same way. The Boggart could neither irritate nor aggravate anyone, nor find any way to make trouble. When he stole Maggie’s hairbrush, she merely sighed and decided she must have left it in the car. When he tripped Emily up on her way to the huge four-poster bed she was to share with Jessup, she blamed a frayed rug instead of yelling angrily at her brother. And when the Boggart moaned heartrendingly on the landing in the dead of night, and made beautifully vivid sounds of clanking chains, nobody even noticed. They were all so exhausted from the journey that they remained fast asleep.
    By sunrise the Boggart was exhausted too. He went sullenly back to the library wall and curled up in his hole, muttering curses which instantly vaporized an unfortunate passing mouse, but had no effect on his unwelcome foreign invaders at all.
    W HILE THE B OGGART slept for the next two days, Emily and Jessup fell in love with Port Appin. They grew quickly bored inside the castle, since its rooms were in general small, dark, damp and very cold, and its more interesting tumbledown half was shut off from exploring by heavy beams of wood barring certain doors. So they roamed the beaches, rocks and caves of the mainland, sometimes in the rain, after being dropped by Robert in the boat he had rented from a local fisherman. Now and then Tommy joined them. He came puttering over to the castle regularly with telephone messages for Robert and Maggie, who were deep in long-distance consultation with Mr. Maconochie the Edinburgh lawyer.
    On their fourth day in Castle Keep the sun came out, and the loch was transformed into a breathtaking picture-book place of blue water and sky, soft purple hills, and gleaming wet rocks and sand. Tommy took Emily and Jessup to a point of land facing the island of Lismore, with the bigger island of Mull misty behind it. Seaweed-draped boulders stretched down to the water, and to a scattering of great part-submerged rocks.
    â€œJust stay still,” Tommy said, “and watch.”
    The sun warmed their faces, and the air was full of the soft lapping of the waves, and the distant calling of birds. There was a clean smell of the sea, and the tall rock where they sat was pillowed with green mounds of sea thrift, and pink nodding