Rags To Riches: Her Duty To Please. Michelle Douglas

a child’s hand as they walked to the church, which was small and old, smelling of damp, flowers and age and, to Araminta’s mind, rather bleak. They sat right at the front in a high-backed pew with narrow seats and hassocks. The boys sat between them, standing on the hassocks to sing the hymns and then sitting through a lengthy sermon.

      Of course, Araminta understood very little of the service, although some of the hymn tunes were the same, but the sermon, preached by an elderly dominee with a flowing beard, sounded as though it was threatening them with severe punishments in the hereafter; she was relieved when it ended with a splendid rolling period of unintelligible words and they all sang a hymn.

      It was a tune she knew, but the words in the hymn book the doctor had thoughtfully provided her with were beyond her understanding. The boys sang lustily, as did the doctor, in a deep rumbling voice, and since they were singing so loudly, she hummed the tune to herself. It was the next best thing.

      Back at the house, the doctor asked Bas to bring coffee into the drawing room.

      ‘I shall be leaving in a few minutes,’ he told Araminta. ‘I expect you intend to take a walk before lunch, but in the afternoon Bas will drive you to Steijner’s toy shop. They have an exhibition of toys there today and I have tickets. And next door there is a café where you may have your tea. Bas will come for you at about five o’clock. If you want him earlier, telephone the house.’

      The boys were delighted, and so was Araminta, although she didn’t allow it to show. The day had been nicely taken care of and the boys were going to enjoy themselves. She had no doubt that she would too.

      The doctor stooped to kiss the boys. ‘Have fun,’ he told them, and to Araminta, ‘Enjoy your afternoon, Miss Pomfrey. I leave the boys in your safe hands.’

      It was only after he had gone that she realised that she hadn’t much money—perhaps not enough to pay for their tea. She need not have worried. The boys showed her the notes their uncle had given to them to spend and a moment later, Bas, coming to collect the coffee cups, told her quietly that there was an envelope for her in the doctor’s study if she would be good enough to fetch it.

      There was, in her opinion, enough money in it to float a ship. She counted it carefully, determined to account for every cent of it, and went back to collect the boys ready for their walk.

      They decided against going to one of the parks but instead they walked to one of the squares, the ‘neude’, and so into the Oudegracht, where there was the fourteenth-century house in which the Treaty of Utrecht had been signed. They admired the patrician house at some length, until Araminta said, ‘Are we very far from your uncle’s house? We should be getting back.’

      They chorused reassurance. ‘Look, Mintie, we just go back to the neude and Vredeburg Square, and it’s only a little way then.’

      She had been there the day before, spending hours looking at the windows of the shopping centre. The doctor’s house was only a short distance from the Singel, the moat which surrounded the old city—much of its length was lined with attractive promenades backed by impressive houses.

      ‘By the time we go home I shall know quite a lot about Utrecht,’ she told the boys. ‘Now, let’s go back to the house and have lunch; we don’t want to miss one moment of the exhibition…’

      Steijner’s toy shop was vast, housed in a narrow building, several storeys high, each floor reached by a narrow, steep staircase. The front shop was large and opened out into another smaller room which extended, long and narrow, as far as a blank wall. Both rooms were lined with shelves packed with toys of every description, and arranged down their centres were the larger exhibits: miniature motor cars, dolls’ houses, minute bicycles, magnificent model boats.

      The place was crowded with children, tugging the grown-ups to and fro, and it was some time before Araminta and the boys managed to climb the first flight of stairs to the floor above. The rooms here were mostly given over to dolls, more dolls’ houses and miniature kitchens and furniture, so they stayed only for a few minutes and then, together with a great many other people, made their way to the next floor.

      This was very much more to the boy’s liking—more cars and bikes, kites of every kind, skates, trumpets and drums, puppets and toy animals. Araminta, with the beginnings of a headache, suggested hopefully that they might go and have their tea and wait for Bas in the café. More and more people were filling the shop, the narrow stairs were packed, but the children were reluctant to move from the displays they fancied.

      ‘There’s camping stuff on the next floor,’ said Peter, and he tugged at her hand. ‘Could we just have a look—a quick peep?’ He looked so appealing and since Paul had joined him, raising an excited face to her, she gave in. ‘All right. But we won’t stay too long, mind.’

      The last flight of stairs was very narrow and steep, and the room it led to was low-ceilinged and narrow, with a slit window set in the gable. But it was well lit and the array of camping equipment was impressive. There were only a handful of people there and before long they had gone back down the staircase, leaving the boys alone to examine the tents and camping equipment to their hearts’ content.

      They must have a tent, they told Araminta excitedly, they would ask Uncle Marcus to buy them one. ‘We could live in it in the garden, Mintie. You’d come too, of course.’

      They went round and round, trying to decide which tent was the one they liked best. They were still longing to have one and arguing about it when Araminta looked at her watch.

      ‘Time for tea, my dears,’ she told them. ‘We mustn’t keep Bas waiting.’

      It was another five minutes before she could prise them away and start down the stairs in single file. Peter was in front and he stopped on the last stair.

      ‘The door’s shut,’ he said.

      Araminta reached over. ‘Well, we’ll just turn the handle.’

      Only there wasn’t a handle, only an old-fashioned lock with no key. She changed places with Peter and gave the door a good push. Nothing happened; the door could have been rock. She told the boys to sit on the stairs and knocked hard. There was no reply, nor did anyone answer her ‘hello’. The place was quiet, though when she looked at her watch she wondered why. The exhibition was due to close at five o’clock and it was fifteen minutes to that hour. All the same, surely someone would tour the building and make sure that everyone had left. She shouted, uneasily aware of the thickness of the door.

      ‘What an adventure!’ she said bracingly. ‘Let’s all shout…’

      Which brought no result whatever.

      ‘Well, we’d better go back to the room. Someone will come presently; it’s not quite time for people to have to leave yet.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact voice and hoped that the boys would believe her.

      Back upstairs again, she went to the narrow window. The glass was thick and, although it had once opened, it had been long since sealed up. She looked around for something suitable to break it, picked up a tent peg and, urged on by the boys, who were revelling in the whole thing, began to bash the glass.

      It didn’t break easily, and only some of it fell into the street below, but anyone passing or standing nearby could have seen it. She shouted hopefully, unaware that there was no one there. The doctor’s second car, another Jaguar, was standing close by, but Bas had gone into the café to see if they were there.

      Of course, they weren’t; he went to the toy shop, where the doors were being locked.

      ‘Everyone has left,’ he was told, and when he asked why they had closed a quarter of an hour sooner than expected, he was told that an electrical fault had been found and it was necessary to turn off the current.

      ‘But no one’s inside,’ he was assured by the owner, who was unaware that the assistant who had checked the place hadn’t bothered to go to the top room but had locked the door and gone home.

      They could have gone back to the house, thought Bas. Miss Pomfrey was a sensible young