The Ickabog(64)
“Boys, let’s not be hasty,” said Spittleworth faintly. “There’s a lot of gold here. I’ll share it with you!”
“It isn’t yours to share,” said Bert. “You’re coming back to Chouxville and we’re going to have a proper trial.”
Once upon a time, there was a tiny country called Cornucopia, which was ruled by a team of newly appointed advisors and a prime minister, who at the time of which I write was called Gordon Goodfellow. Prime Minister Goodfellow had been elected by the people of Cornucopia because he was a very honest man, and Cornucopia was a country that had learned the value of truth. There was a countrywide celebration when Prime Minister Goodfellow announced that he was going to marry Lady Eslanda, the kind and brave woman who’d given important evidence against Lord Spittleworth.
The king who’d allowed his happy little kingdom to be driven to ruin and despair stood trial, along with the Chief Advisor and a number of other people who’d benefited from Spittleworth’s lies, including Ma Grunter, Basher John, Cankerby the footman, and Otto Scrumble.
The king simply wept all through his questioning, but Lord Spittleworth answered in a cold, proud voice, and told so many lies, and tried to blame so many other people for his own wickedness, that he made matters far worse for himself than if he’d simply sobbed, like Fred. Both men were imprisoned in the dungeons beneath the palace, with all the other criminals.
I quite understand, by the way, if you wish Bert and Roderick had shot Spittleworth. After all, he’d caused hundreds of other people’s deaths. However, it should comfort you to know that Spittleworth really would have preferred to be dead than to sit in the dungeon all day and night, where he ate plain food and slept between rough sheets, and had to listen for hours on end to Fred crying.
The gold that Spittleworth and Flapoon had stolen was recovered, so that all those people who’d lost their cheese shops and their bakeries, their dairies and their pig farms, their butcher’s shops and their vineyards, could start them back up again, and begin producing the famous Cornucopian food and wine once more.
However, during the long period of Cornucopia’s poverty, many had lost the opportunity to learn how to make cheese, sausages, wine, and pastries. Some of them became librarians, because Lady Eslanda had the excellent idea of turning all the now-useless orphanages into libraries, which she helped stock. However, that still left a lot of people without jobs.
And that is how the fifth great city of Cornucopia came into being. Its name was Ickaby, and it lay between Kurdsburg and Jeroboam, on the banks of the river Fluma.
When the second-born Ickaboggle heard of the problem of people who’d never learned a trade, it suggested timidly that it might teach them how to farm mushrooms, which was something it understood very well. So successful did the mushroom growers become that a prosperous town sprang up around them.
You might think you don’t like mushrooms, but I promise, if you tasted the creamy mushroom soups of Ickaby, you’d love them for the rest of your life. Kurdsburg and Baronstown developed new recipes that included Ickaby mushrooms. In fact, shortly before Prime Minister Goodfellow married Lady Eslanda, the King of Pluritania offered Goodfellow the choice of any of his daughters’ hands for a year’s supply of Cornucopian pork and mushroom sausages. Prime Minister Goodfellow sent the sausages as a gift, along with an invitation to the Goodfellows’ wedding, and Lady Eslanda added a note suggesting that King Porfirio might want to stop offering people his daughters in exchange for food, and let them choose their own husbands.
Ickaby was an unusual city, though, because unlike Chouxville, Kurdsburg, Baronstown, and Jeroboam, it was famous for three products instead of one.
Firstly, there were the mushrooms, every single one of them as beautiful as a pearl.
Secondly, there were the glorious silver salmon and trout which fishermen caught in the river Fluma — and you might like to know that a statue of the old lady who studied the fish of the Fluma stood proudly in one of Ickaby’s squares.
Thirdly, Ickaby produced wool.
You see, it was decided by Prime Minister Goodfellow that the few Marshlanders who’d survived the long period of hunger deserved better pastures for their sheep than could be found in the north. Well, when the Marshlanders were given a few lush fields on the bank of the Fluma, they showed what they could really do. The wool of Cornucopia was the softest, silkiest wool in the world, and the sweaters and socks and scarves it produced were more beautiful and comfortable than could be found anywhere else. The sheep farm of Hetty Hopkins and her family produced excellent wool, but I’d have to say that the finest garments of all were spun from the wool of Roderick and Martha Roach, who had a thriving farm just outside Ickaby. Yes, Roderick and Martha got married, and I’m pleased to say they were very happy, had five children, and that Roderick began to speak with a slight Marshlander accent.
Two other people got married, as well. I’m delighted to tell you that on leaving the dungeon, and though no longer forced to live next to each other, those old friends Mrs. Beamish and Mr. Dovetail found that they couldn’t do without each other. So with Bert as best man, and Daisy as chief bridesmaid, the carpenter and the pastry chef were married, and Bert and Daisy, who’d felt like brother and sister for so long, now truly were. Mrs. Beamish opened her own splendid pastry shop in the heart of Chouxville where, in addition to Fairies’ Cradles, Maidens’ Dreams, Dukes’ Delights, Folderol Fancies, and Hopes-of-Heaven, she produced Ickapuffs, which were the lightest, fluffiest pastries you could possibly imagine, all covered with a delicate dusting of peppermint chocolate shavings, which gave them the appearance of being covered in marsh weed.