The Silver Moth

Carol Lefevre

Description

A sequel to the timeless magical classic The Little White Horse
Maria Merryweather returns to Moonacre Manor with her granddaughter Rose to escape the horrors of the first world war bombings in London.

The magical qualities of Moonacre Valley are rediscovered as Rose meets Wrolf, who is more lion than dog, and sees the little white horse, an entrancing unicorn. Rose soon discovers that the Merryweathers’ old foes, the de Noir clan, are once more spreading darkness and fear through the Valley under the influence of Hugo de Noir. With the help of her new friend, Devin, and a variety of animal companions can Rose uncover the mystery of the Silver Moth aeroplane, rescue a young woman and her baby, and help an unexpected kindred spirit, William de Noir?

Beautiful, thrilling, and magical, The Silver Moth, returns to the fantasy world of the bestselling timeless classic The Little White Horse.

Sujets

• Juvenilee Fiction
• Magic
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 23 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782643654
• Langue: English

Extrait

“The world of the white horse shines out all the brighter against the dark backdrop of war. What a pleasure to return to Moonacre and find a new Moon Princess. Set during the events of the First World War, an escape into the wonderful world of rose gardens, ruins, dark forests and gypsy encampments is all the more necessary. A treat for new and old fans of Goudge’s story. Carol Lefevre clearly knows and loves the original and has brought many of the same elements into her own weaving of the tale, but adding a real-world level that gives Moonacre new appeal.”
Julia Golding, author of The Diamond of Drury Lane
It was under the white moon that I saw him,
The little white horse, with neck arched high in pride.
Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse

For Rafael
A uthor’s N ote
M y early childhood was spent in Outback Australia, a parched and often forbidding landscape that is as different from England’s soft green West Country as can possibly be imagined. The houses we lived in were functional, and plain, and there were few luxuries. Playmates, too, were scarce, so books became my best friends.
As soon as I read The Little White Horse , the book and I became inseparable. For in it Elizabeth Goudge had conjured another world for me, one in which houses and food and clothing were never utilitarian but were transformed by her pen into a kind of poetry. As a solitary child, pets were also my valued companions, and I was quick to cherish her enchanted animal characters.
But perhaps the thing that sealed the book as my dearest childhood possession was the exquisite bedroom Elizabeth Goudge created in it for the orphaned Maria Merryweather . I don’t know how many times I read the chapter in which Maria is introduced to her tower room, with its child-sized door, its vaulted ceiling that culminates in a sickle moon and stars, but it worked deep magic on me, so that when I came to make writing of my own, I found that I, too, loved creating places that would be special enough to linger in a reader’s memory.
One day some years ago, I was out walking near where I live, when from the corner of my eye I glimpsed an old-fashioned house with a lovely tower room rising above its roofline. The thought came at once that it was “Maria’s room” and I found myself wishing that there had been a sequel to The Little White Horse . For even as an adult I could imagine the pleasure of returning to Moonacre Manor. By the time I had finished my walk, I had resolved to write the sequel myself.
It took some time to be granted permission to do so by the trustees of Elizabeth Goudge’s Estate, and I am most grateful to them for allowing me to build something new on the beautiful foundations laid down in the original book. Other people helped me along the way, and I owe thanks to Isobel Dixon and Tom Witcomb for early feedback on the manuscript, and to Georgia Glover for liaising with the Estate. Alison Flett provided expert advice on Miss Nightingale’s Scottish dialogue. For an eyewitness account of the Zeppelin that fell in flames over London in October 1916 I am indebted to Michael MacDonagh’s book In London During the Great War: The Diary of a Journalist .
Writing The Silver Moth has been a rare pleasure. I hope that fans of Elizabeth Goudge will delight in returning to a treasured place, while those who do not yet know her work will find their way to it through this sequel.
C ast of C haracters
Maria Merryweather
In 1916, the widowed Maria is eighty-five
Jasper
Maria’s King Charles spaniel
Mary Rose Marlowe
Maria’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter, the new Moon Princess
Lavinia Nightingale
Rose’s governess
Richard Marlowe
Rose’s father, a doctor
Kitty Marlowe
Rose’s mother, a volunteer at Charing Cross Hospital, London
Devin
A boy who lives in one of the gypsy caravans on the outskirts of Silverydew
Esmé de Fontenelle
Devin’s aunt, and housekeeper at Moonacre
Josefina
A monkey
Wrolf
The canine guardian of the Merryweathers
Mulders
Moonacre’s gardener, chauffer, and general servant
Young Parson
The current parson of St. Mary’s Church, Silverydew
Sir William de Noir
Ailing head of the de Noir clan
Hugo de Noir
Grandson of William, twin brother of Richard
Richard de Noir
Brother of Hugo, a World War I flying ace
Felix Martens
Belgian designer of the Silver Moth
Gabrielle Martens
Wife of Felix
Frieda
Felix and Gabrielle’s baby daughter
The ten children of Maria Merryweather and her late husband, Robin
Benjamin, Marguerite, Agnes and Lily (twins), Max, Loveday, Lyle, Reginald, Harriet, and Katherine (Kitty), who was born much later than the others and is Rose’s mother
C hapter O ne
1
T he war was more than two years old on the night Rose saw the Zeppelin. She had gone to bed early with a sore throat and woken in the dark, fumbling for her handkerchief. It was close to midnight, yet there were voices in the square below. Later she would wish that she had never pulled aside the curtain and peered out, for beyond the dark rooftops, pinned in the grip of three separate searchlights, was the giant cigar-shaped German airship.
Zeppelins prowled the London sky after dark, loaded with bombs and poisoned food. Nothing could touch them, for they flew beyond the reach of guns. Rose tried not to think about them, but now, kneeling on her bed, she could see one from her window. It was turning this way and that, fighting to slip away into the sheltering darkness. But the searchlights held it, and Rose sensed in the craft’s small nudging movements the terror of its occupants.
Next came the whine of a fighter plane, and then three blue flares went up, a signal to the gunners on the ground to cease firing. The plane flew in underneath the airship.
Someone shouted from the square below, “Oh! She’s hit!”
The Zeppelin’s nose tilted upwards, and then its body twisted. There were cheers as a ruddy glow began at the airship’s middle, and from further away came the roar of an unseen crowd. The wounded Zeppelin hung in the sky like a giant lantern, but within seconds the glow had spread and it was filled with flames. The searchlights went out, and Rose watched as it tipped vertically and drifted – a floating inferno. Unable to look away, she followed the Zeppelin’s fiery progress until it plummeted behind a distant building. Wild cheers erupted from the square, and again that swelling roar. Rose knew she should be cheering along with them, but she felt as if she might vomit.
She leaned her forehead against the cold window glass. The sky was dark once more, but Rose still saw the path of the airship’s passage. When she turned from the window, sparks spiralled in the corner of her room above the dolls’ house.
Clammy with fright, she stumbled from her bedroom into the passageway. Fifteen steps along the old Turkish runner and she had reached her parents’ door. As her fingers found the doorknob, a torrent of weeping erupted from inside. Her mother was in there crying, such harsh sounds of grief as Rose had never imagined could come from her soft pink mouth. Her father’s voice rose and fell, a consoling murmur. Rose’s first thought was that they too had seen the burning Zeppelin. But no – her mother was crying about Papa going away to France, and Rose knew that she was not meant to hear.
Unable to enter, or to return to her own room, she sank down onto the runner and wrapped her arms around her knees. Despite the war, it had seemed to Rose that their house was, and always would be, safe, but now she was not so sure. She sat for a long time in the cold passageway, and when at last her mother’s weeping subsided Rose crept away to her own bed. There, under the covers, she shed hot silent tears. Flames and sparks. Sparks and flames. It was hours before she fell back to sleep.
In the morning Rose’s first thought was that she’d had a terrible dream. Her head ached, but as she pulled back her curtains she knew that she really had seen a Zeppelin fall from the sky in flames. Its crew must have jumped or been burned alive. Rose had overheard her father and Uncle Clement discussing this gruesome choice one evening over glasses of brandy.
“Jump or burn, burn or jump. What would you do?”
“Jumping would be the least painful,” her father had said.
Her uncle agreed. “At least it would be over quickly.”
Today they were going to Uncle Clement and Aunt Hattie’s house for lunch. It would be the last family gathering before Rose’s father left to work in a field hospital in France, and her aunts Agnes and Lily went with their children to Scotland. They were leaving London because of the hateful war, and who knew when she and her cousins would all be together again.
Rose was dabbing at her eyelids with a cloth soaked in witch hazel, when from downstairs came the tinkle of the breakfast bell. On such a morning, this ordinary sound was almost as comforting as a cup of cocoa and a plate of hot buttered toast, until Rose remembered that the telephone had rung before daylight. It meant her father had been summoned to some medical emergency, and she badly wanted to tell him about the Zeppelin.
The dining room was dark and chilly. Rose peered at her puffy eyelids in the sideboard mirror: the witch hazel had not helped. She released the blind to let more light into the room, then sat in her usual chair and studied the pattern of birds on the deep-blue wallpaper. To her amazement they were the same as they had been yesterday morning, and all the mornings of her life that she could remember – tiny heads tilted, clawed feet still clinging to twigs of the blue-branched trees. With a shiver she wondered whether the Zeppelin had dropped its bombs before it fell, shredding some unknown family’s dining room wallpaper, shattering chairs and tables, and flinging debris into the street. As she unrolled her napkin, sparks snapped and swirled above the sideboard.
When Kitty Marlowe appeared, Rose took in at a glance her mother’s pale c