The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood by Susan Wittig Albert Read Free Book Online Page A

commotion in the hallway outside his rooms, and a loud shrieking and wailing.
    Startled, he opened his door and put out his head. “What’s happened?” he inquired anxiously. “What’s wrong?”
    “There’s been a murder!” a rat shouted, tearing at his ears and running in frenzied circles. “A foul, filthy, fiendish murder! Oh, it’s too horrible, too hideous for words!”
    A shiver started between Ridley’s ears and quivered all the way down to the tip of his tail. “A murder, you say?” he whispered. “Who was murdered?”
    “Rollo,” the rat cried. “Our wonderful, hospitable host! He was killed by a vicious cat when he went to fetch a bun from the kitchen, not five minutes ago. Oh, horrors, oh, woe! Oh, dear, departed Rollo!”
    “Oh, really,” murmured Ridley.
    Now, we all know that we are supposed to forgive our enemies, even those who have kept us awake until all hours and offered to punch us in the nose when we complained, and to be sorry when something bad has happened to them.
    But I am afraid that Ridley was not so sorry as he ought to have been. Instead, hiding a rattish sort of smile, he went back into his apartment, shut the door, and danced a jig of pure delight.

4
    At Sawrey School
    The village of Sawrey is made up of twin hamlets, the two separated (or joined, if you will) by a lush green meadow with Wilfin Beck threaded like a long silver ribbon through the middle. The hamlet nearest the market town of Hawkshead (some three miles to the northwest) is called Near Sawrey, logically enough, whilst the hamlet a half-mile farther along the road to the east, closer to the ferry crossing over Lake Windermere, is called Far Sawrey. Near Sawrey, its inhabitants have always judged, is the more important because that’s where the Tower Bank Arms is located, and the smithy and joiner and bakery. It is also where the Justice of the Peace lives, and John Braithwaite, the village constable. Those who live in Far Sawrey, on the other hand, consider that hamlet to be the more important, because they possess St. Peter’s Church, and the vicarage, and the Sawrey Hotel, and Sawrey School. (Both hamlets boast a post office and a shop, so these are generally left out of the calculation.)
    Miss Margaret Nash, the new headmistress at Sawrey School, was one of the fortunate people who lived in Near Sawrey and worked in Far Sawrey, and thought this arrangement gave her the best of all possible worlds. At half past three on Wednesday afternoon, as she stood at the school door and watched as her jubilant charges skipped out of the school yard, the girls in companionable pairs and trios, the boys leaping and shouting from sheer joy, she thought again how singularly fortunate she was to live in such a beautiful place and to have work that gave her such an enormous sense of satisfaction. She had been appointed head teacher upon the retirement of Miss Myrtle Crabbe, although Margaret herself had at one point given up hope of having the position. If it had not been for Miss Potter’s discovery that Margaret’s chief competitor for the post was a sham and a fraud, she was sure she would not have had it.
    But all’s well that ends well, Margaret reminded herself cheerfully. She picked up Jane Jackson’s blue hair ribbon, Tommy Tyson’s grimy sweater (recognizable by the hole in the elbow), and an arithmetic exercise paper with Willie Adams’s name printed crookedly at the top. She placed all three articles prominently on the Lost and Found shelf, where their careless owners might see and claim them. Then she picked up the broom and applied it industriously to the patch of dried mud in front of the boot-box.
    Things could not have turned out better, she thought happily, as she finished her sweeping and replaced the broom in the teachers’ pantry. The members of the school board (which included the vicar and Captain Woodcock) were entirely supportive. Margaret’s junior pupils were all that she might have wished in