Chapters 4 & 5 from Lady Josa Pean and the Reading Aloud Book

A children's story I wish I had the time to finish right now... As it stands, I have made it up to chapters 4 & 5 in the adventures of 'Lady Josa Pean and the Reading Aloud Book'...

Chapter 4
The Man with the Muzzle

Years past and were shared between our Reader and Listener Only’s. If you’ll excuse me, I will allow this time to relapse without offering much in the way of detail. (The Author’s Guide to Every Rule That Need Ever Be Known will tell you I am well within my rights to do.) It is not because these times were any less extraordinary than any other in the adventure-riddled lives of Lady Josa Pean and Princess Tambudzai, but simply because they are not necessarily of This Story, and This Time. They belong to That Story, That Other Time. This Story is bound by my solemn promise to a Lady and a Princess to tell it truly… This Story tells the time of a particular adventure and one particularly peculiar book…That Most Mischievous Reading Aloud Book…

Four years had passed since that toddler’s inky cheek and the unexpected appearance of an African doll and Princess, when This Time arrived…
When through the sturdy branches of the family scarlet-blossomed coral tree, the Lady spotted him.
        A wisp of a man, barely there at all.
        Stringy arms and legs met at a skinny in-between, while atop a tired, long face a mop of tufty-soft, sandy coloured hair seemed to sway and drift, like dandelion wishes in an Autumn breeze. It was not that the man was gaunt in his thinness… Or bony and sharp, for that matter, as one might expect... Oddly, in fact, he was quite the opposite. His features seemed softened, almost blurry at their edges, making his thinness more of the invisible variety.
        What Josa Pean saw that day was a walking man of washed-out watercolours, and his thinness was but one barely there aspect of his overall faded person. 
        While it was the man’s nature to pass by unnoticed, his watercolours blending him in, the Lady could not help but be arrested, mid tree-climb, by the trail he led. At the end of a long, smudgy hand, gripped by equally long, smudgy fingers was the beginning of a leather leash. A dog’s leash, or so one would have thought.
      But lo, at the end of this leash was a muzzle and it was not bound to the mouth of any dog. Leashed and leather-caged, the man who was barely there at all trailed behind him a book.
     If you have ever stood by and watched as a cat toyed mercilessly with an injured bird… Or borne witness to a cruel child boasting a once majestic butterfly in a jam jar… Then it is likely you will have a fairly sound appreciation of the pity that gave way in Lady Josa Pean upon the sight of this unfortunate, trapped book. Deftly and swift of foot, the Lady was off, Princess Tambudzai under her arm. Down the tree and across the tarmac, the two went after the man with the muzzle. Feeling himself pulled back by the leash, the faded stranger turned to see a very serious little girl and her equally serious rag-doll staring him down in mute and disapproving tones (for which all women are the world renowned). Clutched by the Lady’s indignant hands was the muzzle-bound book.
     “Excuse me, sir, but you will be glad to know that I have a substantial amount of pocket money saved, and this book will do quite nicely, thank you,”
the Lady announced. “How much would you like for it? I see its cover has been rudely handled by your muzzle and made quite tatty, but I have been well taught not to judge books by their covers and so I will not judge this one by its. This said, I’m sure we could settle on a price that would please us both.”
    “This book is not for sale,” his words, like the sandy coloured hair, drifted wispily from his lips and swayed in the space between them. Although his words refused any sort of exchange for the book, Josa Pean saw the tiredness in his watery eyes and was triumphant. Here was a man too defeated to resist. There would be no need for winning this one, she realised. He had lost the book to the sum of her pocket money before she even asked. Truly defeated men only need true defeating once.
     Entrusting the muzzled book to Princess Tambudzai, the Lady dashed inside, returning only instants later with a couple of coins inside a cotton pouch.


     Placing the pouch inside his shirt pocket, she then slipped the man’s long, smudgy fingers from their barely there hold of the leash, satisfied that theirs had been a fair swap.
      But while Lady Josa Pean had been correct in reading the faded man’s tired eyes, and the defeat that watered them, it was not a parting entirely free of resistance… Marching back to the coral tree, she felt awash with the triumph of anyone who has rescued a bird from the claws of the cat, or a butterfly from the jar of the mean-spirited, to see bird or butterfly soar another day…
         So triumphant was the Lady that she thought nothing of the words of warning the man left swaying in the last and gaping space between them, “There are some books that must needs muzzles, miss…”






Chapter 5
Spiders-Leg Letters and Insects for Eating

Lady Josa Pean smuggled the book to safety down below.

Down below, you might wonder. Why, I thought it was an Up-Climbing house? You would be right in part, for yes, all these years later, the girl still lived and read in the Forswithe house of famous whining willow stairs. But it was an old-fashioned sort of house, to be true. Moreover, it was of the sort so very old-fashioned that they are crammed and cranking with secretive corners, in any nook and every crook.

The young Lady spent most of her time in one of these corners. It was the Underneath Corner of the home that remained in her dead father’s name. But it was also her bedroom. Altogether contrary to her adventuring mother with a love of Big Open Spaces, Josa Pean was a Reader Only in the most natural sense.
And it is the habit of a natural Reader Only to seek out secretive corners wherever they are hiding … Above… or below…. and just sometimes in the middle. Because, well, everybody knows that Secretive Corners were made for Reading. (And let us also not forget Dark and Secretive Corners, made for Torches and Reading Together.)

Her prize in one hand, ragdoll dear in the other, our Reader Only climbed into her favourite corner of the Underneath Corner where she most lived and read. It was a forest-green hammock, but more than that, it was the curling corner in the far corner of the Underneath Corner in which she dreamed her bookish dreams Every Night. (The Lady was never one for beds. They were simply far too open with not nearly enough curves or corners.)

Here, tucked inside her favourite corner, with book and muzzle and doll, Lady Josa Pean undid two small brass buckles on either side.
      It was with some difficulty, no less; for they had almost rusted shut For Good.
      Lucky she got to the book when she did, the Lady remarked inwardly to herself. And again, Triumph tapped on her heart and twinkled in her eyes. Chuffed and well-pleased, she beheld the freed book.
       It was a Big Enough book, though its spine was narrow. A dirty-puddle colour long faded to brown, she imagined its cover as once having been a rich and velvety purple. Holding it close, the girl inhaled its mossy smell. Her hand moved over its outward touch of bark, pausing when it fell upon the Morse-like indent of the Title and its letters. She lingered with her fingers on its silvered dull and spindly trail: Edible Insects of the Gula Gula Swamp. Silvered dull and spindly.
        And while they glistened like the bedazzling and beckoning web, the letters were unmistakably like the spider’s legs. Still For Now, but with quiet intent.