Authors: Michael Morpurgo
Black Queen
Contents
Chapter One: Matey Goes Missing
Chapter Five: Sometimes It’s Hard to Be a Woman
Chapter Six: Genius, Pure Genius
About the Book
The ‘Black Queen’ is what Billy calls his shadowy next-door neighbour. She always wears a black cloak and a wide-brimmed black hat. She lurks about her garden, alone except for her black cat. Scarily for Billy, the Black Queen befriends him and asks him to look after her cat while she’s away. Billy can’t resist the opportunity to peek inside her house. There are chessboards scattered everywhere. Who is the Black Queen and what sort of game is she playing? Billy thinks he knows …
For dear Léa
Chapter One
Matey Goes Missing
OF ALL THE
houses in all the streets, we have to move into Number 23, Victoria Gardens. Number 24 would have been fine; but no, we had to end up in Number 23, right next door to Number 22, and trouble, real trouble.
To begin with everything seemed perfect. On the outside Number 23 may have looked a bit old, a bit ramshackle; but as my mother said the day we moved in – and we all agreed – it was a house just made for us, a dream house.
For
the first time in my life I didn’t have to share a room with Rula – my little sister, six and sweet sometimes. We now had all the space we hadn’t had back in the fourth-floor flat we’d come from. My father had his own den for his train set. (He’s crazy about trains.) And we could leave the chess set out safely, in mid-game. (We all love chess in our family, even Rula.) My mother too had her own room at the top of the house for her painting. (She’s crazy about painting, and reading – she loves reading.) We even had a basement room for Gran, so she could have some peace and quiet when she came to stay. But, best of all, we had a garden, a great big garden with a huge apple tree you could climb into, a goldfish pond with three goldfish, and a garden shed.
This garden shed at once became my own private hideaway, good for skulking in or sulking in, good for just being
alone.
Rula hated the place. (I made sure she did. I told her there were spiders in there, and there were too, lots of them, and all of them huge and horrible and hairy.) So she always left me alone in my shed, which was what I wanted. I was really happy. I had a new house, almost like a new life, and the whole summer holidays stretching away in front of me. And Rula was happy too. She had Matey.
Matey was Rula’s oversized lop-eared grey rabbit with a white bobtail, and she was completely besotted with him. As for Matey, he must have thought he had arrived in bunny paradise. Back in the flat he had been stuck inside his smelly old hutch in the utility room, next to the washing machine. He’d never even seen grass before, only carpets. Now he had the entire garden to roam in. He could nibble all the grass he wanted, dig holes in the flower beds and hop about like proper rabbits do. Rula would spend all her time in the garden hopping about on all fours with Matey. It takes all sorts, I suppose. Anyway, she was hopping happy; the whole house was happy – until the morning, a week or so after we had moved in, when Matey disappeared.
The two of them were playing out in the garden as usual, when Rula came running in for a drink. When she went back out again Matey just wasn’t there. He had gone, vanished into thin air. We searched the garden first, then the house, from top to bottom, every nook and cranny. He was nowhere. Rula kept wailing over and over again: “I’ll never see him again. I know I won’t.”
Nothing and no-one could stop her crying.
I decided I would go out into the garden again to have one last look, and my father came with me. That was when he discovered the hole under the fence right at the bottom of the garden behind my shed. It looked as if it had been freshly dug. We scrambled up and looked over the fence towards the garden of Number 24 to see if Matey had gone that way. Mrs Watson – we’d met her the day we moved in – was outside in her fluffy green slippers hanging out her washing. No, she said, taking the clothes pegs out of her mouth, no, she hadn’t seen a rabbit, but she’d certainly tell us if she did.
