1st December

My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 
I hope this letter finds you well. It certainly does not leave me very well at all. I am sweaty, tired, and, more importantly, cramped up in the cupboard in the music room with a bassoon poking me in the ear. And why? Why am I shut in a cupboard ? The simple answer is that with the house so full of guests and so ablaze with lights and music and jollity for the Farewell Ball for your father's expedition, it was only private place I could find to write this letter.
 
However, I would hope, your ladyship, that, as your private tutor, I have taught you better than that. I would hope that you would be asking why I, Timothy Hope, find it necessary to climb into a cupboard in the middle of a ball to write you a letter, when I could just walk into the next room and speak to you in person and give Baronet Oxshott the chance to laugh in my face again.
 
But again, why? Why would the Baronet discharge his terrifying laugh at me? I who have done so much to help organise this evening? I who have helped your father Lord Daunt write his speech, I who have helped Professor Cumulus lay out his display of scientific instruments, I who have even, quite despite myself, helped the Baronet himself with his ridiculous illustrated lecture. Why? 

I suspect, my lady, that even upstairs in your dressing room this afternoon, you must have heard the Baronet's tantrum. I suspect most of the next county heard it. I suspect Northern Europe is alive with rumours of mysterious rumblings. We certainly heard it, Professor and Henrietta Cumulus and I. We all rushed to the drawing room to discover that Oxshott had broken the spirit lamp for his magic lantern. Apparently he does this often, being a man of small temper and large hands.
It was Henrietta Cumulus, the Professor's daughter, who suggested using one of the Professor's experimental incandescent electric bulbs for a light. That is a young lady, unlike some, who is not afraid to use the brain she was born with (and who, I might point out, does not require a whole day in which to get ready for a ball). The Professor himself pooh-poohed the idea, pointing out that there was not electrical power in the drawing room to light the thing with. It was then I had my idea.
I often wonder, my lady, just how aware you are of the life of the rest of Ghastington Manor. You often seem blithely unaware of anything outside the gossip of your friend Viscount Fox. But even you must have had some inkling of Professor Cumulus' Remarkable Velocipedal Dynamo. Perhaps not the Dynamo itself but you must have heard the Professor riding his bicycle about the ornamental garden after dark, ringing his bell and shrieking when he rode into rose bushes. The Professor, you see, has been experimenting with a device to power an electric light using the motion of a bicycle, thus allowing him to ride in the dark. Quite where the Professor is intending to go at night, I don't know, but he seems to find it important.

Anyway, you may even have noticed that the shrieking has got less over the last few days. You might even, if you have learned any of the scientific method I have been trying to teach you, be able to deduce that the Professor's Dynamo has worked and that he can now have bright, electrical light wherever he goes. And so, my lady, in case you were wondering (if you ever wonder about the antics of a humble tutor), that was how I came to be seated on a propped bicycle next to the magic lantern, pedaling away like a mad thing trying to keep the Dynamo whirling and the Baronet's bulb alight.
 
And for what? For one of the most dismal displays I have ever sat, let alone pedaled, through. Nothing but a series of photographs, often upside down or badly exposed, of the Baronet standing next to the dead carcass of some poor animal while he regaled us at length with the gruesome details of how he had killed it. Along with some inelegant description of whatever ghastly tropical disease he happened to be suffering from at the time. I have not spent a more disagreeable afternoon since the time I fell into the pig's sty and was not found until tea-time.
 
The fact that the Baronet kept comparing me, unfavourably, to a snorting Warthog or a puffing Gnu did not make the ordeal any more enjoyable, either. And yet you, my lady, appeared go fond it fascinating, hanging on the Baronet's every word. You certainly never displayed anything like as much interest in any of your lessons. Perhaps I might have taught you more if I'd been able to mimic the death rattle of an Okapi quite as convincingly, or explain in such excruciating detail quite how fiddly it is to skin a Panda.
 
I might have at least expected, then, some scrap of gratitude for everything I had done to help bring the lecture off. But perhaps that is too much for a humble private tutor to ask. It certainly seems you think so, for, as we were leaving the drawing room, you found the opportunity to remark upon how exciting and adventuresome the Baronet's life was, especially when compared to the timid and dull life of a private tutor. You continued, my Lady, to explain that while some men would only ever know the world from reading about it, real men go out into the world and, as far as I can tell, kill whatever they find there. Real men of the sort, as you pointed out, that young ladies dream of marrying.
 
And it was then that the Baronet chose to show his gratitude by laughing in my face.
 
I did not like having Baronet Oxshott laughing in my face: it sounded like a gun going off and I could see all his teeth. It was most disconcerting.
 
And that, my lady, is why I am currently crammed into a cupboard in the music room, squatting on a spinet, writing this letter to you. The amazing truth is, my lady, that after all these year of me trying to wedge at least a single scrap of learning onto your beautiful but regretfully still empty head, you have taught me something.
 
You have taught me that I am not the kind of man who hurries off into the wilderness to shoot at things, I am the kind of man who, after being laughed at by someone he has just done his utmost to help, instead of saying something clever or witty in reply, or even challenging that someone to a duel (which I would certainly lose), goes and hides in a cupboard and writes a letter. This letter.
 
I am precisely the kind of man, in fact, that young ladies do not marry. But I am the kind of man, your Ladyship, who can take a long, hard look at himself, and decide that he is going to change, that he is going to be a different kind of man, different to the way he was before, although also hopefully different to the other kind of man who laughed in the previous kind of man's face. The kind of man who decides not to be a timid and humble private tutor but who finishes his letter and goes into the ballroom to ask your ladyship to dance.
 
Yours, with sore legs and an empty dance card
 
Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 

2nd December

My Dear Lady Misericordia
I hope this letter finds you well. I'm sure, however, that it will find you much as my last letter did, given that you are likely to be reading one directly after the other, if, indeed, you read them at all. I am writing in the small hours of the morning and I can hear the music still playing downstairs where you are, no doubt, still dancing and still laughing. About me, probably.
 
As you will know by now - and as you probably knew before - although I may now be the kind of man who might ask you to dance, I am not yet the kind of man you would dance with, partly because you had already agreed to dance with all the eligible young men in the room and your dance card was full but mostly, I suspect, because you didn't want to.
 
Unfortunately for me, and, it turned out, for her, the Duchess of Plaid is the kind of woman who takes pity on a young man without a dance partner. And that is how I found myself launched onto the dancefloor, with her enormous skirts billowing around me and getting under my feet. No wonder the Prime Minister refers to her as 'The Battleship of State Banquets'.
 
As you yourself were quite keen to point out to me, my Lady, I am not someone who goes to balls regularly. Neither am I someone who dances often, or, in fact, at all. Ever.
 
However, as I have often tried to impress upon you, my Lady, there is nothing that can't be solved with a little intelligence and planning. And with a little intelligence and planning, my Lady, I have constructed a device that I am sure could one day make my fortune. Once I have ironed out some of the problems.
 
But then, you have seen some of the problems for yourself and know all too well just how ironed out they have to be.
 
It seemed to me that dancing is largely simply a matter of fitting the right movement of the feet to the rhythm of the music. I could learn all the steps: the key was to know which step went where. All I needed, then, was something to remind me what to do when. But any kind of notebook or reminder would be too obvious, and it would be too easy to lost my place in the music. It had to be something that could keep time, keep me in my place and, above all, keep hidden.
And so I invented my amazing clockwork dancing shoes.

It was simple idea: a clockwork mechanism hidden in the heel of each shoe that would keep time with the music and tap out the dance steps on the sole of my foot. I even included a device whereby I could even adjust it for different dances using little brass disks, marked out for waltzes, foxtrots and polkas. It certainly worked perfectly in the privacy of my attic room when I tried it out late at night.
 
It did not work so well in the ballroom, with Lady Plaid bearing down upon me in full sail.
 
At first all seemed well - under the guise of tying my shoelaces, I was able to wind up the mechanism before the music began and set off, nipping round the dancefloor with my shoes ticking and pinching beneath me, keeping my feet moving in more or less the right direction.
 
But in making the mechanism small enough to fit in my shoe, I had had to reduce the size of the spring, which meant that the music was barely a third through before the clockwork began to wind down. It began to tick slower and slower, gradually getting out of time to the music, and Lady Plaid and I began to lurch back and forth in ever decreasing circles until we ground to a halt in the middle of the floor, everyone else still whirling around us in a heady waltz. Lady Plaid stared at me, aghast, as I muttered something about my shoelace again and bent to surreptitiously wind my feet back up.
 
But, in my panic, I wound them up too tight and, with a sharp squeeze, they sprang to life again, this time stabbing and poking me much harder and faster than before, sending the Duchess and I careening off at a high canter, scattering dancing couples before us like Oxshott's startled antelope.
 
Then, with a loud and sudden ping, the overloaded spring sprang and shot out of my heel, followed by a shower of cogs, pins and the brass disks of foxtrot and waltz, scattering behind us as we wheeled headlong towards the supper room. I'm sure I remember your pink and grinning face flashing past me in our disastrous journey, but I think even you, my Lady, must applaud my presence of mind as I managed to fling Lady Plaid into a passing chair as I stumbled onward, uncontrollable, through the doors and into a table of custards.
 
I didn't see your reaction to my giddy end, my Lady, but I did hear Baronet Oxshott's laugh rattling out like a line of guns as I ran from the room, dripping pudding in a trail up the stairs.
 
I am back in my room, now, my Lady, and have removed my rattling shoes and custardy clothes. I will not be going back downstairs, I think, even though I can hear that your father, Lord Daunt, has started his speech about his expedition - the expedition that this party has been brought together to celebrate.
 
I helped him write the speech and I would dearly love to hear it. But I dare not show my face again, I think. However, sitting up here in my shame, I have made a decision.
 
I may not be able to waltz, I may not be able to shoot dumb animals or mount an expedition, but I shall find a way to prove to you, my Lady, to prove to everyone down there in that ballroom, all listening to Lord Daunt's, my, words about the Arctic wastes he is about to venture into, that Mr Hope can amount to something in this world, can be brave and resourceful and adventurous, can be the kind of man that a young lady might, one day, consider marrying.
 
Yours, desserted but determined
 
Timothy Hope, Esq,
 
Tutor

3rd December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia
 
 
I hope this letter finds you well. I’m not entirely sure that it will, however. I rather suspect that it finds you somewhat unwell, given the hour the party went on to last night. But while you were busy capering around the ballroom and working up a headache and a bad mood for this morning, I, my Lady, have been busy. Busy thinking and busy doing.
 
Which is why I able to greet you with some news that I think will cheer you up. Your wish of many long years has come true: you will find yourself, this morning, without a private tutor.
 
Ring for me, my Lady, and I will not answer, go to the schoolroom and you will find it empty, for I have gone.
 
Ah, but where?
 
I noticed, my Lady, that you were not awake this morning to see your father and his expedition off on their grand departure. You missed an impressive sight, with Professor Cumulus fussing over his endless boxes of equipment as they were piled precariously on top of the coach, Baronet Oxshott wandering about, getting in everyone’s way, shouting at animals and criticizing the grooms while your father, Lord Daunt stood on the driver’s seat and tried in vain to impose some kind of order on the confusion.
 
And everywhere footmen and grooms and porters and stableboys like an overturned ant heap, with equipment and stores, with the wrong boxes and the right pieces of tack, with everyone trying to do everyone else’s job and standing on each other’s feet.
 
Such a confusion in fact, that no one noticed a strange footman with an ill-fitting coat that he had stolen from the laundry and oddly stiff white side-whiskers and beard that he’d actually had to cut from an old periwig of the butler’s. A strange footman who inveigled himself into the troop ferrying equipment back and forth, who made sure that one small carpet bag was included in the luggage and who, as the coach finally got under way, scrambled up behind with the others to join the journey.
 
For that footman, my Lady, had decided, in the few, quiet hours of the night, that he was the kind of man who is no longer just happy reading about life, the kind of man who is ready and willing for challenge and excitement and adventure, the kind of man who would disguise himself as a servant to stow away on an dangerous and incredible expedition to the North Pole.
 
For that footman, my Lady, was me!
 
Yes, I, Timothy Hope, private tutor and scholar, have decided to become an adventurer. I intend to travel in the guise of a footman with your Father to the port where they are embarking for Norway. There I will try and stow away on the ship and remain hidden for the rest of the journey. I trust that when I reveal myself once we have landed, your father will be impressed enough with my endeavor that he will allow to join his expedition.
 
I am writing this now from a hayloft in a coaching inn a day’s journey from Daunt Magna. All of us footmen, supposed and genuine, are huddled together up here as a dreadful storm blows around us, rattling the broken slates and rustling through the hay.
 
It is not the most hospitable place, but it’s a glorious haven compared to what we have been through today. All I can say is that I am glad I am only pretending to be a servant, if this is the sort of thing they have to go through regularly.
 
All of us staff have had to travel on the outside of the coach in the most inclement and abysmal weather as we lumbered through dripping and dismal woods, across desolate and howling moors, up into bleak and foggy mountains. Never a view but it was shrouded in dim mist or obscured by drizzle or empty and bare but for a dead tree and a half-starved crow.
 
Not that one has much of a mind for scenery when one is being rained on, hailed at, blown about and soaked with mud from the road. I cannot imagine a more depressing and trying journey – I truly suspect that this is the more arduous expedition, the progress through wintry, unwelcoming Britain, not the sea-crossing or the great Polar adventure that awaits us.
 
But this was not all. This might have been an unhappy experience, but it took the peculiar genius of Professor Hedley Cumulus to turn it into an extraordinary nightmare.
 
The Professor had insisted that all the baggage be secured to the roof of the coach using elastic ropes of his own devising. This instruction applied, in fact, not only to the luggage but also to us footmen, who also had to be tied to the coach, although only loosely, so we could move about as required.
 
Unfortunately, the elastic properties of this new rope and the loose binding had the most bizarre effect. I was the first to discover it as the coach turned out of the drive of Ghastington Manor and hit a pothole full of muddy rain water. It gave a great jolt and I lost my grip on the roof, falling headfirst into the puddle. Then, before I knew it, the elastic rope, with a loud twang, sprang back, snapping me back up to my place again, my face dripping with mud.
 
At that the other footman began laughing, somewhat unkindly, I thought, one of them laughing so much that he lost his grip and disappeared from view, only to reappear, with a twanging, a moment later, with a bird’s nest caught up in his wig.
 
And so our journey continued. Every so often the coach would give an unexpected bounce or lurch and one or other of the footmen would drop away, only to spring back the next instant with a surprised look on their face and with horse manure in their hair. Or hedge in their coat. Covered with cuts and bruises and bits of England and, in one memorable instant, a startled owl flapping about their ears.
 
As evening drew in and mist began to close in about us, the men would disappear from view entirely into the fog, becoming just distant and vague shapes in the gloom before hurtling back at us with a boing. It was certainly a strange sensation, one moment bumping along on the creaking and rattling coach, the next flying off into the indistinct and silent twilight, taking by surprise an unsuspecting sheep on a ledge high above before being snatched back once more to the noise and confusion.
 
I am beginning to wonder, my Lady, is my decision for adventure was quite such a wise one. As are my companions, I think, as I have to go now to help them draft a petition against the elastic rope.
 
Yours
 
Happily unsecured

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor

 
 

4th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 
 
I hope this letter finds you well. I’m sure it will, relishing, as I’m sure you are, the delights of being without a tutor for the moment. Have you made a bonfire of your books, I wonder, and are you busy unlearning your Latin?
 
I’m sure your friend Viscount Fox will be happy to supply you with plenty of useless knowledge to replace it with, he does seem to know such a lot about nothing of any consequence.
 
I am certainly improving, not least because we have finally reached the North Sea port where your father’s expedition is board its ship for Norway and we will no longer have to be jolted across country by that dreadful coach.
 
Moreover today’s journey was markedly less springy than yesterday, after Lord Daunt persuaded the Professor that he really should stop tying us to the coach with his special elastic rope. Unfortunately, however, although our progress included less bouncing, it did include altogether too much more Oxshott.
 
The Baronet had, apparently, grown bored with riding inside the coach (and, judging from your Father’s expression this morning, the coach had grown tired of him) and so he decided to join us on the roof for today’s journey.
 
Quite how he could enjoy himself so much being shuddered and lurched along on top of all that teetering luggage, I cannot imagine, but certainly seemed to, trying to get us all to join him in a Swahili sing-a-long, thumping out the beat on a box of china that had begun to rattle ominously and laughing at us when we lost our grip and almost fell off.
 
But while Oxshott might have been enjoying himself, no one else was, mostly because his position on top of the coach put him in a prime position to spot any wildlife in the surrounding countryside. And for the Baronet, as I’m sure you know well, to see any animal is to wish to kill it.
 
“A grouse!” is what began it, not long after we had started out, “Guns! Now! Stop the bally coach! Guns!”
 
And he leapt forward, grabbing the reins from the coachman and hauling us to a stop. He then turns and started unloading baggage, passing us all boxes and packages as he searched for his shotguns in the luggage.
 
“What’s going on?” demanded Lord Daunt, “Oxshott, what the devil are you playing at?”
 
“Guns,” replied Oxshott, brandishing one, gleefully, “Grouse!”
 
Lord Daunt turned an interesting colour: “You men, get that baggage back on the coach immediately! Oxshott sit down and stop behaving like a demmed fool! Coachman, drive on!”
 
“Grouse!” bellowed Oxshott, almost plaintively, if one can bellow plaintively.
 
“Oxshott, sit down!” roared Lord Daunt. And Oxshott slumped down next to the driver, his shotgun cradled sulkily between his knees.
 
His sulk was soon forgotten however, when half an hour later:
 
“Rabbit!” and the coach juddered to a halt again.
 
“Oxshott, sit down!” and once more we rattled off.
 
“Deer!”
 
“Oxshott!”
 
“Sheep!”
 
“Oxshott!”
 
“Man with hat!”
 
“Oxshott, do that one more time and I swear I will shoot you with your own demmed gun!”
 
It was then, as Professor Cumulus tried to persuade Lord Daunt not to start diminished the numbers of their expedition before they had even begun, that something occurred to me.
 
“I’ve got it!... Your Lorship, sir, I beg your pardon, sir, if I may” I said, remembering my disguise, “I may have an idea.”
 
Without the Professor’s elastic rope it would never have worked, of course, so perhaps it was a good thing he had brought it along, after all.
 
I and the other footmen quickly rigged up a crude catapult with the elastic rope, attached to the roof of the coach. With this we could then fling out pieces of the broken dinner service that Oxshott had been thumping on earlier, creating a sort of clay pigeon for the Baronet to shoot away at to his hearts content.
 
And so, once again, we were finally on the move, bouncing down from the mountains, through steep valleys and small villages towards the sea, to the sound of a constant cry of:
 
“Pull!” and the bang of a shot gun as we flung bits of broken plate at passing farms and Oxshott blasted away merrily at the countryside as it jolted past, startling crows, breaking windows and generally covering England with shattered china.
 
But he has been happy, and we have finally arrived here in the port where our ship is waiting for us, ready to take us away on our extraordinary adventure.
 
Yours
 
With ringing ears and crockery in my hair

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 
 
 

5th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. I’m sure that it will, since I have had your letter and now know how much fun you and your friend Viscount Fox have had, laughing at my exploits round the tea table. I am so pleased to be so entertaining. I’m sure you deliberately sent the letter under my name to your father’s hotel in the hope of having me discovered in some amusing manner.

Fortunately, since I am acting as a footman, I was able to intercept the letter before anyone else could see it. But I must admit, my Lady, that despite whatever mischief was meant by it and whatever scorn you and your friends pour out on me with your tea, I was grateful to have your letter and, more importantly, to you for having otherwise kept my presence here a secret. 

I will be eternally your servant, my Lady, and I may, perhaps, hope that this indicates the beginning of some affection from you for me.

I, meanwhile, really ought to be very well indeed. I have always understood sea air to be ‘bracing’, whatever that means – it sounds unpleasantly medical to me – and many people, Baronet Oxshott included, have recommended physical work to me as a way of staying healthy.

I, however, am instead sore, sick, wind-chapped, rope burnt and so tired I can barely lift my pen. Is this what being healthy is like? I am glad I have been so unhealthy all my life.

What’s more, from your letter onwards, today has been a constant threat of being unveiled and exploded as an impostor and so having all my plans of adventure snatched from me.

My first fright was meeting the Professor’s new helper. At Ghastington, of course, his daughter is always at hand to help him, but he has refused to bring her along on this expedition given the possible dangers and has instead engaged a young lad called Harry, who has already been about in the port preparing for our party.

The lad seems bright and helpful, but I was immediately struck by the awful feeling that I had met him somewhere before – and that although I could not quite place him, that he knew me immediately. He spent the morning suppressing a smile every time he looked at me, which made me extremely uneasy. He claimed later that he was laughing at my whiskers which at least put my mind at rest, even if it wasn’t entirely flattering.

All this was dismissed from my mind, however, when it came to loading the ship. We were loading not just with the luggage from the coach but also with the mountains of supplies, accoutrements and geegaws that Lord Daunt and Professor Cumulus have been buying up in preparation. Mountains of stuff, and only footmen there to run endlessly back and forth, fetching box and baggage, one after the other, trying to fit them all into the tiny hold.

Oxshott, on the other hand, despite all his claims for hard work being good for you, had spent the morning lounging on the quayside, teaching a seagull he had made friends with to fetch things for him. He learnt quickly, too, swooping down and snatching up whatever Oxshott pointed out to him, much to the delight of the fishermen gathered round.

The Baronet called the seagull Walter, after, I understand, Raleigh, and he certainly had that old seadog’s piratical instincts, although whether the great Elizabethan navigator had a particular mania for stealing people’s hats, I don’t know.

The moment he spotted mine, at least, this Walter the seagull couldn’t resist it. I was just struggling up the gangplank with yet another case of the Professor’s scientific equipment when Walter swooped down on me, seizing hold of my hat in his beak and made off with it.

Which might not have been so bad if, in all the sweat and fuss of loading the ship, my wig and false whiskers hadn’t become more attached to the hat than they were to my face, so that, when Walter took off, so did my beard.

I dropped the case I was carrying with a crash and hopped after him, flailing at him as he struggled to get aloft, the hat and wig thrashing about beneath him like some strange hairy jellyfish. Already the Professor was rushing up at the sound of the crash and Lord Daunt was shouting questions from the bridge of the ship – if either of them saw me without my wig, they’d recognise me for sure! My adventure would be over before it had even begun!

With one last desperate leap I snatched down the hat and seagull all together just as his Lordship and Professor Cumulus arrived on deck to find out what all the fuss was. They stopped and stared at me, my beard askew, my hat streaked with bird droppings and Walter the seagull flapping angrily round my head, still trying to take off.

“You, man,” started Lord Daunt and then stopped, evidently not quite having the words for the occasion, “Stop that and put that down. Up. Wherever it belongs. You, seagull, leave his hat alone. Get on with your work. Both of you. Idiots.” And he turned on his heel and stalked away.

The Professor peered at me, curious and then nodded to himself.

“Herring gull,” he muttered and turned his attention to checking his instruments.

I finally shook Walter free, but I suspect that finding that my beard and hair came with my hat had proved too exciting for him for he never quite gave up, even after I tied everything to my head with a piece of string, much to Oxshott’s amusement.

But the boat is loaded now, my Lady, and Walter has finally left me for the night, as has everyone else. So, as soon as I have finished this letter, I am going to sneak out onto the boat, into a covered lifeboat and there stow away on the great expedition to the North Pole!

Yours

Seagulled but not defeated

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 

6th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 
 
I hope this letter finds you well. It certainly leaves me feeling quite the opposite. Very, very opposite indeed. In fact opposite and, a little too frequently, upside down.
 
I don’t know, my Lady, what image you might have in mind when you think of stowing away on board a ship. If you had read any of the books I set you to read then you might have rather a romantic idea of it, a notion that it is a suitable activity for otherwise idle young people who wish to have reasonably exciting adventures with pirates and be home in time for tea.
 
I must tell you now, my Lady, that this is bunkum. Dangerous and terrible bunkum. It is, in fact wholly and utterly ghastly.
 
For a start it appears to me that lifeboats are deliberately designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. I can only assume that this is to give a crew an incentive to keep their ship afloat for as long as possible so they don’t have to ride in the beastly things.
 
They are certainly constructed in such a way that no matter how you try to sleep in one, at least three bits of it will be sticking into you at any one time. Three painful bits, with splinters in.
 
They are not adequately insulated, either, which can be a serious drawback when crossing the North Sea in winter. And neither, I regret to inform you, is the tarpaulin covering completely waterproof round the edges. Not just splintered but cold and also wet, then, too.
 
Most of all... One thing I had noticed in all the sea stories I read was that often the stowaways did not adequately prepare for their journey. Most particularly, they often did not take food with them and then almost always got caught when they had to sneak out to try and steal some from the ship’s galley.
 
I was not going to be caught out by such a simple failing, and so, before slipping aboard your father’s ship and into the covered lifeboat, I filled my pockets with enough bread and cheese to keep myself sustained on the journey.
 
This was a mistake. When wet and cold, bread and cheese will combine to make a slippery and unpleasant mush that is even less enjoyable to sleep on than a pointy boat.
 
Moreover I did not need bread and cheese. I did not need any food. I could not have eaten caviar and foie gras had it been offered to me. In fact just thinking about it would have made me violently ill. Even breathing made me ill.
 
All I needed was for the boat to stop rocking.
 
It didn’t though, ever, not for one moment. Instead it rocked and heaved and sloshed and rolled and I heaved and sloshed with it.
 
We set out under a grey sky, on a choppy sea, and the further we got from land the darker the sky became and the higher the sea rose: great rolling slate waves like the backs of whales, that the ship reared up on and then smashed down with a sickening drop.
 
All day and all night the sea heaped itself up beneath us and the rain squalled and the wind buffeted and my little lifeboat leaked and swung and thumped against the ship and then leaked some more.
 
Never stowaway, my Lady, or, if you must, stowaway somewhere nice, in first class, with servants and clean bathroom.
 
At one point in the night I had what, in my nauseous delirium, I thought was a brilliant idea. The lifeboat was held over the side of the ship by a pair of joints that allowed it to swing back and forth. A small adjustment to those joints should allow the boat to swing more freely, meaning that even while the ship yawed and lurched beneath it, the boat would stay steady: the rocking would stop!
 
The rocking did not stop. The rocking got worse. In the dark, in the middle of a storm, in my feverish state, whatever adjustments I made to the joints just made it swing even more violently back and forth. Often now swinging completely upside down, so that I had to hang onto the bottom of the boat in desperation to stop from plummeting into the raging sea below, while the tarpaulin flapped and the mushed bread and cheese flew around my head.
 
I’m not sure whether it was this unaccountable swinging of the lifeboat or my howling and wailing that alerted the crew that something strange was going on aboard their ship.
 
They got it into their heads that a grampus had got on board and Oxshott pretty quickly applied himself to finding and shooting this thing whatever it was. He gathered a small force and they ventured out into the stormy night to face whatever was lurking out in the darkness.
 
They soon traced my cries to the lifeboat and Oxshott whipped off the tarpaulin just as a particularly strong wave flung me out onto the deck in the glaring flash of a lightning blast.
 
God alone knows what I looked like, drenched in sea water, weeping with illness, spattered about wet food, but it took Oxshott three laps of the deck, pursuing me with a boathook, before he could be persuaded that I was anything human, let alone that it was I, the humble private tutor in whose face he had laughed just days before.
 
Lord Daunt has sent me below to get cleaned up and to try and get over the worst of my sickness, and I have to say I’m feeling a little better already, although the ship still rocks, along with my stomach.
 
But I shall have to face him in the morning, and I am very much afraid there will be no adventure now for Mr Timothy Hope.
 
Yours,
 
In trepidation and nausea
 
Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 
P.S. We never did find out what a grampus was. Although I pity any that Oxshott comes across.
 
 

7th December

 My dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. If it doesn’t yet, then I’m sure it will improve your mood considerably, because I have some news for you that I think you will like.

You, my Lady, no longer have a private tutor, not even one absent without leave.

Your father, Lord Daunt, has fired me and I have been obliged to leave my post immediately, with no notice and with no pay. And so you, my Lady, as a consequence, have no Latin, no History, no Geography, no books and no slate, you are free to be as illiterate and trivial a savage as ever populated an English drawing room.

I flatter myself that you may even in the midst of your joy spare a small thought for your poor tutor, left without gainful employment and no hope of any further. Flatter is perhaps the wrong word. I delude myself.

But you need worry not, my Lady, if you ever were, for no sooner did your father sack me than he employed me again: as an extra hand on his expedition!

Yes: I am now an official member. A tutor no more, I am, from today, an adventurer!

My first official task being: to clean the remaining bits of bread and cheese out of the lifeboat. It is a sort of punishment for what your father calls my ‘pleasingly uncharacteristic foolishness and idiocy’, which I think is a sort of compliment.

But the weather has calmed, the ship rocks barely noticeably and I am explorer: I am feeling considerably better today, as you might imagine.

Even the reappearance of Walter the seagull has not dampened my good mood, in fact he has even been helping me by gobbling up most of what was left of the mushed up food.

In the meantime I have been helping Professor Cumulus and Harry in an experiment. The Professor has an idea that power could be generated from the movement of the waves, just as the wind drives windmills, and we were trying to construct a mechanism to test his theory.

One thing I must admit is that, outside of the confines of his laboratory and Ghastington, out here in the world, the Professor’s absent-mindedness is quite something to behold. At home it appeared an eccentricity, here it is a positive danger to life and limb.

For example, we were busy lowering buckets over the side of the boat to see how they rose and fell on the waves, when the Cumulus’ hat blew off and landed in the sea. Before we knew what he was doing, the Professor swung a leg out over the side of the ship and prepared to jump down into the waves.

Without hesitation Harry and I caught hold of him and held him fast.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, “My hat’s down there...”

“Professor,” I said, “You can’t...”

“Why not? It’s only a couple of steps away, I’ll be just a minute.”

“You can’t swim,” said Harry.

“It’s the ocean, Professor,” I protested, “You’ll drown.”

“Oh yes, oh goodness,” the Professor smiled sheepishly and shook his head, “I had forgotten, the ocean, of course, one can’t walk on that, can one?”

And to think that it is this man’s genius that we are following all the way to the North Pole. But it cannot be denied, the Professor is a brilliant man, even if that brilliance shines a little too bright for him to see plainly, sometimes. And I’m sure that Lord Daunt, your father, would not have mounted this expedition without good cause. 

Even if both of them are being exceptionally secretive about what we are actually going in search of. I am sure they have a goal in mind, but if you ask either of them all you get is a stern glare from one and gleeful little grin from the other.

All in all though, you can see that we are very lucky to have Harry with us, since he sticks to Professor Cumulus like glue and ensures that he doesn’t do anything too hazardous.

We may have got off on the wrong foot, but now that I am no longer having to pretend to be a footman, Harry and I are getting on famously. He is proving to be not just an admirable watchdog for the Professor, but also an able assistant and quite the promising young scientist in his own right.

I am still trying to place where I might have met him before, as he is tantalisingly familiar. I suppose I must have seen him about Ghastington Manor during the preparations for the expedition, but I wish I could put my finger on it. Still, I am sure he is going to prove a useful member of our party.

I wish I could say the same thing about Baronet Oxshott, but since he has spent the whole day just practising with a harpoon that he found in the hold, with an constant, monotonous grunting and splashing as he threw it over and over again at nothing in particular, I cannot quite bring myself to.

No, that is unfair: he did a least get Walter the seagull to fetch the Professor’s hat back for him, even if Walter then refused to return it, but took to eating it instead.

But I must go now, my Lady, night is drawing in and with it the weather. The boat is starting to rock again and I think I am going to have to go and lie down and moan to myself for a bit.

Yours,

Adventurously (if a little queasily) 

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 

8th December

My dear Lady Misericordia,
 
 
I hope this letter finds you well. It certainly leaves me a good deal better and, more importantly, a good deal steadier, given that we are now finally on dry land and the world has ceased to rock quite so much.
 
Yes: we have finally arrived in Norway, and our expedition can at last begin in earnest, although I must say our adventure has already started with what we went through to get here.
 
We sailed from a bright calm day into a dark and stormy night. The sea was mountainous, one moment pitching the ship into dank, green troughs, surrounded by great churning walls of water with the fish blinking down at us through the curling waves and the next flinging us right up to the sky on the peak of a watery mountain with only endless ocean far below us.

Finally, as dawn began to break around the clouds, we saw the coast and the port. But just when we were almost safe ashore, the land itself became our worst enemy, as the heaving sea tried to throw our ship up onto the stone jetty round the harbour - it was all our Captain could do to stop us being smashed to pieces and all drowned in the terrifying storm.

The Professor was beside himself - but not because we were about to be crashed to damp smithereens - oh no, he was worried because we were going to miss the train that he had specially chartered to take us from the port into the far North of the country - and if we missed that, then our expedition was over before it had ever begun.

We had to make it to shore as soon as possible, but the Captain was adamant: if we got any closer to the harbour, we were done for. As we stood debating this problem, clinging to the the railings of the fo'c'sle for dear life, shouting to be heard over the raging tempest, I became aware of a commotion below us on deck.
"Let go of me, man! I'm going to give that dashed sea-monster a hiding!"

It was Baronet Oxshott, being wrestled away from the lurching side of the ship by two of the crew. For a moment I thought (a little cheerfully, I must admit) that he was trying to throw himself in, but then I noticed the great harpoon in his hands, attached to a long length of rope. And there, in the water below him, the flick of a shark's tail - a massive shark's tail, that could only be attached to one end of a massive shark - the other end of which could only be full of massive shark's teeth.

"I'm going to skewer the bounder and bring its head home for Lady Misericordia!" he bellowed. Although I don't think it was really polite of him to bring your name into it.

It was then that the idea struck me.

"Could you hit the shark in this storm, Oxshott?" I shouted.

"Of course I could, you bally fool!" he shot back, "I could hit you, too - go on, try and dodge!"

"What about the jetty? Could you hit that?" I continued, ignoring his taunts.

"I should bally think so! Watch this!" And without warning he turned and threw the harpoon, which shot out over the water like a steel lightning bolt and with a thud buried its head between the stones of the jetty.

"Quick!" I shouted, "Secure that line! Captain keep the boat as steady as you can - you men, start bringing up our supplies - you, bring another length of rope..."

They all stared at me as if I had gone mad, but the Professor, a gleam in his eye, saw what I had planned and quickly joined in.

"Do as he says, its our only chance!"

"Oxshott," I continued, "Could you climb along that rope to the jetty?"

"In this weather, with that beast down there?" And the shark showed us his fin again.

"I know," I said, "I wouldn't dare, either."

"Then I would," shouted Oxshott, "Out of my way," and he flung himself across the deck and out onto the rope, dangling by his arms only feet about the raging water.

The boat heaved up and down and back and forth, the wind buffetted him and the waves snatched at his feet, but still Oxshott pulled himself hand over hand along the rope, slowly getting closer and closer to the dry land ahead.

He was almost upon the harpoon, sticking out from the rocks of the harbour, and was reaching out his hand for it, when out of the boiling water beneath came roaring the shark, its terrible mouth gaping wide enough to swallow a hansom cab, its stark white teeth like a row of knives in a cutler's window.

And without pausing Oxshott turned and punched the shark square on the nose.

The beast seemed to pause for a moment and then dropped back into the water, stunned, and Oxshott swung himself neatly up onto the jetty.

Then, following my instructions and with Oxshott's grudging assistance, we created a simple pulley system that allowed us to haul our supplies from the boat to the shore and, while we were doing this, Harry managed to knock up a bosun's chair, on which we were all pulled, one after another, across the yawning, horrfying gap, to dry land.

I must confess I kept my eyes closed the whole time, finding the splashing and roaring of the waves quite frightening enough, but was quite terrified to open them only to find myself staring straight into the mouth of the shark.

"Ha ha!" shouted the shark, "That made him jump!"

I realised that it wasn't the shark talking, after all, but Baronet Oxshott, who had hauled the poor thing up from the water and was now dragging it about the pier, scaring people with it and enjoying himself immensely.

Professor Cumulus and Harry were both very congratulatory, however, and I am pleased to report that even your father tapped me on the shoulder and commented on my resourcefulness. Although he did point out that it was rather undermined my asking for my mother all the way across from the ship.

But we are, at last, ashore, on steady legs and ready to begin our journey into the Arctic North.
 
Yours,
 
Still dreaming of teeth
 
Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 
 

9th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 
 
I hope this letter finds you well. Its lucky that you have Viscount Fox there with you to make such funny jokes about schools of fish devouring their teachers. I'm not sure that he's quite as funny as he seems to think he is. I'd like to see him hanging on for dear life over the briney deep while a shark snaps at his feet.

And I'm sure Baronet Oxshott will be delighted that you thought him terribly brave and daring. I will be sure to tell him. At some point. I'm sure I won't forget.

Anyway, Oxshott is not popular with the rest of us at the moment, ever since we had to leave town in something of a hurry. Fortunately your father was able to use his Parliamentary debating skills and, more importantly, his ducal gold, to persuade the train driver to leave several hours early, otherwise we might have been in serious trouble.

The port we landed in was a small town huddled down by the shore at the end of a valley, surrounded by majestic and awesome mountains, rearing up into forest and snow all around - what the locals call a fjord. It seemed like such a wild place, these few wooden buildings amidst this great and overpowering scenery, but it was a bustling and homely little town, just the place to complete our stocks and prepare for our journey into the north.

Until, that is, the argument about the shark.

As I mentioned in my last letter, the Baronet was determined to preserve the head of the shark he killed so that he could give to you as a present. He said that it was the kind of present that only he could give, and I could only agree with him that no one else was ever likely to give you a fish head as a gift.

This did not go down well and the Baronet threatened to send you my head instead.

Anyway, Oxshott went to summon the cook of the inn we were staying in and tried to explain to him with shouting and hand waving what he wanted done with the beast. I offered to help translate, since I have already picked up a smattering of Norwegian, but Oxshott offered to have my tongue in a sandwich, so I left him to it.

The cook, frightened and confused by Oxshott's yelling and gesturing, gathered the rest of the staff of the inn around him, then passers-by join the crowd, and neighbours started popping out of their doors to see what the commotion was, until almost the whole town came running to join the growing throng.

After much muttered and frantic debate the cook and the Town Mayor apparently came to a decision, bowed to Oxshott and shook his hand, mustered some strong men and carted the enormous dead fish away.

We got on with collecting our provisions and preparing the specially commissioned train which was to take us inland, away to the North.

Finally lunchtime came and the Mayor reappeared, along with a delegation of elders, who ushered us all to a long, low building that could only be the town hall. There we discovered all the townspeople, all sitting down, ready to eat, with a top table set exclusively for us as guests of honour.

We were, of course, touched and delighted by this and took out places. There followed a number of speeches from various people I can only assume were important locals and from members of our group, including his Lordship, your father, and the Professor. Of we couldn't understand them and they couldn't understand us, but everyone seemed jolly pleased with themselves and, more importantly, with the prospect of lunch.

At last the cook from the inn came out, once again with the group of strong men who had carried off the shark, but this time carrying a huge cooking pot. The pot was set down in front of our table and, with a proud flourish, the cook lifted the lid.

We all stood up to peer inside, only to see a hearty looking stew, full of vegetables and bubbling away heartily. We raised our hands to applaud the chef, but, as one, we froze in mid clap as, out of the broth, bobbed the boiled and gleaming teeth of the shark.

Dripping pieces of carrot and herb, the head of the fish rose up through the steam, turning a single reproachful eye on us before dropping back out of sight beneath the potatoes.

We stood and stared at the pot with our hands still raised, barely sure of what we had just seen.

Then Oxshott went berserk.

Picking up his chair, he flung it at the cook's head, who only just ducked in time, and it smashed into the table behind him, upsetting plates and cups all over the people sitting there. Oxshott heaved at our table, turning it upside down in front of him, scattering knives and forks everywhere. And then he was over it and leaping at the cook with his hands outstreched, a howl on his lips and a murderous gleam in his eye.

Before we knew what was happening, the men who had brought in the cauldron had leapt to the cook's defence, and then the people hit by the chair and then everyone else, the whole town, their hospitality rejected, their dining room upset and their cook assaulted, descended on Oxshott in one great pile.

Thinking fast, his Lordship grabbed me and together, with Harry's help, we dragged Oxshott from the mayhem and beat a hasty retreat through an open window and made for the train station as fast as we could.

Oxshott was not to be denied, however, and as the town ran for the exit to follow us, he ran round the rear of the building, in through the kitchen door and grabbed hold of the pot before anyone had spotted him.

While his Lordship persuaded the driver with large amounts of money, we all boarded the train and were treated to the sight of Oxshott staggering up the main street, dragging the great cooking pot behind, the shark's head swishing about inside, stew slopping around in his wake as the townspeople came swarming up behind him, waving spoons and forks in a threatening manner.

At the last moment he climbed onto the platform, threw the pot into the luggage van and hurled himself on after it as we huffed our way out of the town, the curses and shouts of the outraged townspeople following after us as a goodbye.

Oxshott, still smelling strongly of fish stew, has been confined to the luggage van in disgrace ever since, but he is quite happy in there, cleaning turnips out of his shark's head and getting it ready for preservation.

Yours,

A little tired of fish suppers

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 
 

10th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 
 
I hope this letter finds you well. We haven't had any post since we boarded the train, but I think I am safe in assuming that you have been having a lovely time gathered round the card table with Viscount Fox and not crammed into a luggage cart with a poached shark. Which is what I have been doing.
 
Yes, I'm afraid Baronet Oxshott is still determined to bring the shark's head for you. I'm not sure what for: perhaps as a reminder to never go on holiday with him. Anyway, the Professor has become interested in how what remains of the shark could be preserved and, as a consequence, has roped both Harry and I into helping him and Oxshott with their experiments.
 
Sadly, given that Lord Daunt will permit neither Oxshot or his shark out of the rear carriage, partly because of Oxshott's behaviour over the soup and partly just because of the smell, we have had to join him in there.

I have to say that when I decided that I was going to have an adventure, I did not imagine that adventure to consist of sitting in a freezing, rattling, rickety railway van with a pungent dead fish, watching a member of the English aristocracy trying to stuff its head with straw and cleaning his fingernails on its teeth.

And that was before the Professor decided to try and pickle the shark meat and Harry and I had to spend a day splashing each other with various foul concoctions until we felt quite sick.

Which is why I jumped at the Norwegian engineer's suggestion. He pointed out to me, that on hunting trips he and his friends would bury their catch in the snow, using the cold to keep it fresh. It seemed a perfectly sensible idea... at first.

It was having both Oxshott and the Professor talking at me at the same time. It bewildered me and made me agree to things I shouldn't have, things like being tied to the roof of the moving train while holding a smelly, headless shark in the air.

The Professor was convinced that having cold air rushing over the shark would dry it as well as freeze it but while I, certainly, froze, it did nothing to dry out my nose, which has been running every since.

As for the shark, we shall never know, as my hands got so numb with the cold that I dropped it and it bounced away from the rumbling train, down a ravine, there to lie in the quiet, untouched snow and really confuse whoever finds it.

For all that, though, there was something rather wonderful about lying there, on top of the swaying, chuntering train, especially without the shark, the cool, clean air rushing past.

The sky above was an endless, peaceful blue, with the steam from the engine billowing out about us and only perfect little white clouds pufifng gently by above, while all around great, snow-capped mountains reared past, austere and rugged, one after the other, their sides wrapped up in shaggy, dark green fir forests.

The air here is so clear that it seems to magnify everything, to make everything so close and exact - a distant tree bending out over the sheer drop of a cliff-face, a pinnacle of snow rearing out of the woods, I felt like I could just reach out and touch them.

And then Oxshott started shouting about his shark and I was allowed to come down again and get warm in restaurant car.

But more important than the Professor's experiments and Oxshott's sea-life is that we have at last crossed the Arctic Circle: North is no longer a direction - it is where we are!

We all got together last night in the saloon car to celebrate. To you, my Lady, a cramped railway carriage, lumbering through a freezing night at the top of the world probably does not seem like a very likely place for a party, but with a little effort great things can be achieved. A little effort and, as it turns out, rather too much Norwegian strong drink.

The Norwegians, it turns out, know a thing or two about parties in strange places and were able to contribute more than a little spirit, of all possible kinds. 

The Norwegians and, in fact, Oxshott, who decided that he wanted a ceremony to match the one he underwent when he crossed the equator for the first time.

The Professor and Lord Daunt were excused - the Professor because he has crossed the Arctic Circle before, apparently, and your father because no one dared ask him - but the rest of us were made to sit in a bucket of snow and pay homage to the Professor in the guise of the great Polar Bear. It probably all seems terribly silly to you, but I must say that the Professor does a tolerably good bear.

And so, my Lady, a little giddy from my encounter with Professor Bear and a rather squashed and overenthusiastic jig with Harry and a lot giddy from the Norwegian spirit, I am going to crawl into my bed and dream of mountains and reindeer and polar bears and the incomparable, magical Arctic!

Yours,

Gradually thawing out

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 
 

11th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. I had just laid down my pen and sealed my last letter to you, prior to going for yet another supper of fish, when the train came to a sudden and screeching stop.

I ran to the window, determined to discover what the trouble was, and it wasn't hard to find out. A great snowdrift had come roaring down the mountain in an avalanche and covered the the tracks ahead in deep and uncrossable snow.

We were stuck in this remote pass until we could dig ourselves free, which might take hours, if not days. Oxshott was allowed out of the luggage van and, with the rest of us, handed a shovel. We would all have to start digging.

We quickly fell into a rhythm. Although the work was warm, the snow and the night were immensely cold and I soon found that I needed to warm my feet and hands to keep the dreadful frost at bay. I joined the driver in the cab of the engine and he set about making us a jug of coffee, grabbing a handful of snow and stuffing it into a kettle which he placed on the coals where it quickly started to steam.

I stared at it in wonder. How could I have been so stupid? Stomping about out there in the cold when here was an easy and, more importantly, warm way to get rid of snow?

"Stop, everyone, stop digging!" I ran out into the drift waving my arms, "Professor, we have steel pipes in the van, don't we, for taking ice cores? Oxshott, you've got those metal canisters for storing your specimens! Quick, you men, fetch them all!"

"Stop mucking about and get digging, you shirker," shouted Oxshott, but Harry intervened.

"I see what he means," he shouted, "I've got some solder, too, we'll need that!"

"Have you two lost your wits?" asked Lord Daunt.

"No, your Lordship," I rejoined, "We've found them."

I was rather pleased with that remark and was careful to note it down for further use.

With the help of the driver and the engineer, Harry and I started work, using the heat of the fire in the engine to shape and join the steel pipes.

"We'll join them to the boiler, you see," I explained, "Then we can shoot the steam from the engine in front of us as we travel, using the heat to melt the snow out of our way."

"Brilliant, lad!" cried the Professor and slapped me on the back, but no sooner had he spoken than we all froze in our tracks, and not because of the cold.

For down out of the starlit darkness, from somewhere high up among the black trees that thronged the desolate mountain, came the low, bloodchilling howl of a wolf. And then another, and another - a whole, hungry pack, crying up at the night.

"Well," said Lord Daunt, "Let's get a move on with it, shall we? It might be a good idea to get out of here before breakfast. Their breakfast, I mean."

We struggled with the hot steel in the numbing cold, all the while watching with one eye on the woods as dark shapes came flitting down over the snow, circling closer and closer to the train.

Then, one after the other, yellow eyes sprang to life in the darkness around us, and we could hear them, panting and growling to one another and they made little darting runs into our circle of light, their white fangs flashing in the lamps.

We were almost ready - the engineer had a head of steam up, the wheels were squealing at the brakes. I only had one more pipe to fix into place. Oxshott was standing on the front of the train, holding the pipe, and I was kneeling on top, when out of the shadows came a growl and a great, hurtling thing, a whirlwind of fur and claws and teeth, dropping down on us from the top of the snowdrift.

"Turn the on the steam!" I shouted, and the engineer released the valve. With a shriek the engine jolted forward, knocking us from the tank, blasting the yelping wolf flying with a great cloud of billowing steam.

As the steam jetted forward the snow about us began to melt, running down and almost immediately freezing once again into a solid sheet of ice. The train began to edge forward, the drift dissolving away in front of it, but as I tried to get up to board the engine once more, I slipped on the ice, and as I tried to regain my footing, slipped again, and I went sliding this way and that, barely able to keep my balance.

As the train started to shudder past, something hit forcibly from behind, sending me skidding away from the cab - a wolf! Caught on the ice sheet it, too, started sliding, unable to keep its legs in order, scrabbling past me, snapping and growling as it slid around.

Then another, and another, until I was careening about on the ice alongside the accelerating train with four wolves, all of them flailing about, legs flying, jaws snapping, the five of us caught up in some ungainly ballet swerving and bumping and growling and yelling.

And then something grabbed hold of my collar. At first I thought it must be one of the wolves and struggled to free myself, but I heard Harry's clear, high voice saying:

"Don't throw yourself about so much! Grab my hand!"

I tried to turn towards him, but my feet slipped out from underneath me and one of the wolves came spinning towards me, seizing hold of my coat in its teeth as it passed, pulling me away from the train. Suddenly, out of the darkness, Baronet Oxshott came swinging down from the roof of the train and grabbed me, pulling me with him into the interior of the train, complete with the wolf, still hanging onto my coat and growling.

With an oath, Oxshott sprang forward, teeth bared, and punched it squarely on the nose. It dropped soundlessly to the floor and he hauled it up by the scruff of the neck, dangling it over me as I lay sprawled on the floor.

"Bite's worse than its bark," he joked and shook, rattling the teeth at me, "Make a nice pair with the shark, don't you think?" And he stumped off happily to his luggage van, dragging the wolf behind him.

With the snowdrift melting away from before us, forming shining, frozen walls on either side of us and the rest of the wolf pack slipping and sliding about behind us, the train began to pick up speed and we were safely back on our way.

Everyone was very complimentary about my snow clearing device, especially the driver and the engineer, but I must confess I was too tired and bewildered from my strange ice dancing with wolves to really take it all in.

I have now retired to my berth with a mug of hot cocoa prepared by Harry from his own personal stock, who was kind enough to say that he was very impressed with both my invention and my bravery. He really is a delightful young man and a credit to the Professor's daughter's taste in hiring him to join us. I am still convinced that I recognise him from somewhere, although he is insistent that we have never met before.

Anyway, we have now cleared the avalanche and I can safely settle down to sleep as we steam away under the mountains off up into the North.

Yours,

Your dogged (or should that be wolfed?) explorer

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor 
 

12th December

   My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. You certainly do seem to be having a jolly time at the tea table with Viscount Fox while we are away. I know that I have not always been approving of your friendship with that young man - but I must say he can be very clever at times. 

His remark that you repeat about it being difficult to tell which is the more dangerous wild animal, the shark, the wolf or Baronet Oxshott, is very witty and observant. Tell him well done from me.

Of course you are right that it was very brave and kind of Oxshott to save me from that wolf, but that doesn't excuse him hanging its mounted head outside of my cabin on the train so that it gave me a shock everytime I went out to the restaurant car.

Anyway, Oxshott has had to pack his heads away now because our train has gone as far as it can and I woke up this morning to discover that we were already deep into the Finnmark, the far North of Norway.

But you told me in your last letter that now you didn't have a tutor any more, you didn't need any more geography lessons - so perhaps what happened next will interest you more. For there, waiting for us as we disembarked from the train, were drawn up sleighs: genuine reindeer-drawn sleighs.

The Professor had, evidentially, made arrangements with a tribe of local Lapplanders, or Sami, as I discovered they are properly called. They were to convey us by sleigh to their camp, where they would furnish us with a guide and we would pursue our journey onwards by dog sled.

But, those sleighs! I would try and describe to you just how cunningly and pleasingly they were made, how well they ran, how comfortable and excellently sprung they were, but I suspect that might sound a little too much like a lesson for you. And, anyway, none of that can describe the sheer delight of that journey.

The clear, keen air in your face, the huffing and snorting of the reindeer, their breath steaming out behind them, rime forming on their antlers. The jingling of the tiny bells on their harness ringing in time to the crunch of the snow under the runners. The joyous red and blue clothes of our Sami guides against the limitless and untouched white horizon. The bright, distant sun high, high over head in an endless and perfect blue sky, sparkling and flashing on the untouched ice.

It was a journey out of a childhood dream, and quite one of the most wonderful experiences of my life.

There was only one small fly in the ointment. The boy Harry and I shared a sleigh with some of the scientific equipment and we managed to have a completely unneccessary and foolish argument for no reason at all.

We were revelling in the simple joy of our sleigh ride, when I happened to remark that I thought that you, my Lady, would also enjoy it immensely. To my surprise the lad turned suddenly bad tempered and said, rather fiercely, that he suspected that you would probably only "complain about the cold, and the smell of the deer, and the brightness of the sun and a thousand other things and would probably be happier stuck inside some drawing room somewhere playing cards with a load of gossips."

Well, I can assure you that I reprimanded the fellow in the strongest possible terms, reminding him that it was not his place to speak such of a lady, and anyway that he was quite mistaken. At this he simply pulled his cap down over his eyes (he never seems to take the silly thing off) and fell into a sulk.

Quite an inexplicable outburst and one which left me hurt, for your sake, and rather confused. How the young man could have got such an impression, I cannot guess. I must admit, as must you, my Lady, that you are not unacquainted with the drawing room and the card table, but how he can know anything about it, I don't know. Besides, who could not enjoy such a pastime as a sleigh ride?

But we should not dwell on such things - especially not when the wonders of today were not limited to reindeer.

We arrived at the Sami encampment quite safely and quickly found them to be the most friendly and welcoming of hosts, more than happy to share everything they had with us and feed us sumptuously, even if that supper was, I strongly suspect, of reindeer meat. I daren't ask as it was delicious and I was starving hungry and was afraid that if I knew for sure it was a reindeer, I might not be able to eat it...

Far more exciting was the prospect of sleeping in Sami tents, right there out on the snow. A real teepee made from reindeer hides, set out, under the freezing stars. True, the tent might have smelt a bit of the animals it was made out of, and the stars might have been a little too freezing, but surely this is the true stuff of adventure, the intrepid life of the outdoors?

But the true wonder was waiting for us in the middle of the night. I was awoken in the dead of night by a icy breeze: the tent flap was open and Harry was sitting, looking out, silhouetted against an unearthly, wavering green glow. I hissed at him to close the flap, but he just turned and beckoned to me, with an urgency that made me scramble upright in my sleeping bag (it was cold) and hop over to where he stood.

And what a sight greeted me: high up in the sky, stretching endlessly above the distant mountains, was a tenuous, ghostly curtain of green fire, that flowed across the heavens in an eeriely silent wave: the Northern Lights! The Aurora Borealis itself!

I have never seen anything so strange, so bewitching and haunting, my Lady, saving yourself, of course. Now a series of flickering, electric ripples that burned across the stars, now a drawn bow of fire, whispering over our heads, now great curtains and walls of light, stretching up into the night, lighting up and disappearing again in a bewildering dance.

In the pale light I could see that the camp was full of upturned faces, all watching the display in a rapt silence, even Professor Cumulus, although he couldn't quite repress the occasional squeak of excitement. But then:

"What the deuce are you all doing? Why have I been woken up? It's the middle of the demmed night!" Oxshott came blundering out of his tent into the snow and pointed wildly into the sky, "What on earth is that?"

The Sami all leapt up, all waving at and admonishing him, trying to keep him quiet, but this only excited him more.

"They're attacking!" he shouted, gleefully, "Get to the sleighs, your Lordship! Gun! My gun!"

And he was off, shouting for his gun, pursued by the Sami, all waving their hands and whispering at him. It was a peculiar scene, the shouting man chased round and round the group of tents by the silent horde all under the electric and dancing sky.

It took a good half an hour to sort everyone out. It turned out that the Sami believe that one should always remain quiet in the presence of the Northern Light and should always be careful not to make fun or insult them.

They were afraid, I think, that Oxshott might anger the lights in some way and so were desperate to quiet him down. They weren't to know that they were only going to make him louder.

In the end everyone was calmed down and returned to their beds, although I could still hear Oxshott grumbling in the darkness, and we settled down to dream of the strange wonders of the Arctic.

Yours,

entranced and amazed

Timothy Hope, Esq
 

13th December

 My dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. We, meanwhile, have had the most alarming and eventful day.

We awoke to find the morning already windy and grey - clouds were massing on the horizon, slate grey and heavy, growing rapidly into a storm front - and as we tried to start packing our equipment, the storm came sliding in, casting everything into shadow, and the wind began to stir up the tree tops, creaking and slashing them together.

Then the storm broke upon us, a great whirling, whipping snowstorm and in moment the world was nothing but a solid maelstrom of white, and great wall of snowy wind that tore through the encampment with unstoppable fury.

We blundered about in the blizzard, trying to secure everything we had brought with us, not least the reindeer, before stumbling into the tents and collapsing into a exhausted heap while the tempest battered the canvas around us and howled louder than any of us could shout.

There was nothing for it but to wait the storm out. Slowly the thudding of the wind grew less, as the snow built up round the tent, creating a wall against the fury. We huddled together to keep warm and shared out hot drinks from our flasks, and dried meat from the Sami.

Eventually the storm passed and we dug ourselves out of the piled snow with picks, shovels and hands.

In the wake of the blizzard the whole landscape had been recreated anew, all marks and traces of human traffic vanished, the wood beside us buried under snow. And the reindeer gone.

At first we assumed that they must have taken shelter in the wood, as the Sami were sure that they would not have moved far in the storm, but they were not there, nor were they anywhere to be seen in the empty expanse of the valley around us.

And as the clouds cleared from the sky, the sun once more became dazzling, so that it was hard to make out anything in the distance. What's more, the camp was in a small dip or bowl under the trees, so that we had to climb up through the powdery freshly fallen snow, making each step and arduous haul.

As the Sami spread out in search of their animals, I set about checking the equipment that we had so hastily stowed before the storm and as I secured a tarpaulin that was flapping in the falling wind, an idea came to me.

I pulled the tarpaulin from the sleigh and dug out a quantity of stout, heavy rope and then I went in search of Harry.

I must say this in favour of the lad, no matter what our disagreements of earlier, he agreed to my plan eagerly.

Together we secured the tarpaulin to a rude frame constructed from parts of our packs and then made it fast to the rope. Then Harry tied the rope firmly round his own waist, folding the tarpaulin around him and, with me on the other end of the rope, began to climb the nearest tree.

It was, I must admit, a good thing that Oxshott was nearby and heard my shouting in time, otherwise Harry might have been lost forever to the endless Arctic skies.

The wind was a good deal stronger above the trees than we had supposed and the moment Harry unfurled the tarpaulin, it snapped open wide in the wind and he was hauled upwards on our man-sized kite, up, up into the air.

Caught by surprise as I was trying to secure the rope to a sleigh, I was pulled off my feet by the force, pulled helter skelter along the ground, face first, spluttering out cries for help between mouthfuls of snow.

All of a sudden I was pulled up short against an immoveable object: Oxshott, who had grabbed hold of the rope and was hauling at the giant kite, like a boy in the park.

"Wait, wait," shouted Harry against the wind, "Don't pull me down yet, I can see something."

I scrambled up and tied the rope off around a tree and then returned to the crowd that was now gathering around Oxshott as he tried the control the kite with Harry dangling below it, as it twisted to and fro in the wind.

"Bring him down this instant!" bellowed Lord Daunt, stamping down through the snow.

"Not yet, not yet!" shouted Harry, "Just stop it spinning, I need to get my bearings!"

Oxshott strained every muscle, pulling the kite up into the wind.

"There they are! There they are! I can see the reindeer, away to the east!" and with one hand hold his cap on Harry pointed out over the snow into the blinding distance.

With an answering shout the Sami were off in pursuit and the rest of us leapt upon the rope, all heaving with Oxshott until Harry was safely back on terra firma.

"That was the single most terrifying and exciting thing I have ever done!"

"That," said Lord Daunt, "Was the single most courageous and idiotic thing I have ever seen. I suppose that was your idea, Hope?"

"It was, sir," I said, for I must admit I was rather proud of it.

Lord Daunt then proceded to let me know just how idiotic he thought it was and just how little he thought I had to be proud of. I must admit I was glad when the Sami returned with the reindeer and interrupted his tirade as, as far as I could tell, he had every intention of going on all night.

The Sami were, it seemed, still having trouble with one bull reindeer, who was evidently the one who had led the herd off during the storm and was now very determined not to be brought back into camp.

As they approached the tents he broke away from the other animals and, snorting and pawing at the ground, came hurtling at us through the encampment, tossing his great sweeping antlers this way and that.

Without a second's hesitation, Oxshott stepped into his path and seized him by the antlers, bringing him to a dead stop. For a moment the animal was caught by surprise but then it shook itself and tossed its great head, straining against Oxshott's grip. With that the Baronet let go with one hand and neatly punched the reindeer on the nose.

The poor creature staggered backwards and, knowing what was likely to happen next now that his blood was up, I rushed forward to grab Oxshott before he could finish it. He shook me off into the snow as if I was barely there, but within moments the Sami had hold of him, hauling him back away from the reindeer and he struggled against them.

"Oxshott, stop playing the bally idiot!" roared Lord Daunt, "We've had enough stupidity for one day. You've given that poor reindeer a red nose, leave the bally thing alone!"

Reluctantly, and with a fierce look for the both the reindeer and me, Baronet Oxshott shrugged off the Sami and stomped away through the snow.

It was not long after this that our guide, a cheerful and weather-beaten Finn called Jaakko, who insists we call him Jim, at last arrived with the dog sleds that are to be our transport further north. The dogs were a boisterous, noisy pack, full of life and energy, who look more than eager to be ready to start tomorrow morning.

Finally, just as we were packing everything for the night, preparing for an early departure in the morning, Oxshott returned in the company of two of the Sami and in a slightly improved mood. It turned out that the three of them had gone fishing, making a hole in the ice of a nearby lake and dropping their lines through it into the water beneath.

Oxshott had managed to catch a single, small fish, and he proudly removed its head, waggling it at me on the end of his finger like a puppet, explaining how he was going to have to make an extra small plaque to mount it on.

I am growing, much against my instincts, a little worried about Baronet Oxshott.

Anyway, I shall close now, so that I can send this letter back with one of the Sami in the morning. The wind is blowing once more, flapping the skins of the tent back and forth but Oxshott and the Sami are singing songs at each other over the noise. Outside the reindeer are ruminating and the dogs barking and whining to each other and the snow is hissing against the trees and it is all a curious, comforting sound - I do believe I am becoming quite the adventurer after all.

Yours,

Your kite-flying and sleigh-riding

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor

PS Jim tells me that polar bears have been spotted coming much further south than usual this season. Imagine if we actually see one!
 

14th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. Now we have gone beyond the reach of the postal service, I will simply have to imagine how you are getting along.

So, I imagine you sitting in the drawing room, with your Pekinese lap dog Knife curled up at your feet, a blazing fire in the grate and tea being served. You are not, I think, hurtling across the freezing ice behind a pack of yelling dogs with nothing but wind-dried herring to chew on.

I, however, am.

I have to say, I'm afraid, that travel by dog-sled is not nearly as delightful as travel by reindeer sleigh. For one thing, these are not friendly English dogs - but then neither is your dog Knife, who has earned his name by shredding the cuffs of at least three pairs of my trousers.

Also, the weather has changed. For the last day the sky has been overcast, one great expanse of monotone cloud, and I cannot describe the dullness that settles in the heart at this endless, rattling travel over a white ground, under a grey sky towards an ever retreating horizon of black mountains.

Fortunately I have been sharing a sled with Professor Cumulus, who has provided many cheerful hours of rambling conversation on all subjects under the sun. Except one: where we are going and why. Although he has been very complimentary about my contribution to our venture so far and continually drops dark hints that I may be very useful in some way, he still refuses to be drawn on what, exactly, we are doing here.

I gather, from some of what he says, that he believes that he is on the track of some new fuel or energy source that will revolutionise modern industry, but, when I question him further, however delicately, he simply grins, impishly, and changes the subject.

I simply cannot imagine what he is about: of course there may be untold minerals hidden away in this great icy expanse, but even if we could find them, how one would go about extracting and transporting them in this vast wilderness is beyond my skill.

But a greater challenge might still lay ahead of us, even before we reach that mystery: that being the challenge of staying alive long enough to get there - especially with the Professor in charge of the expedition.

You must understand, my Lady, I do not wish to be unkind about Hedley Cumulus - he is, without doubt, a great and brilliant man - in his field. I merely wish to insist that his field, no matter what he might claim, is not dog-sled driving, and that he should never be allowed in one as long as he, or at least as long as I, live.

Our sleds, you see, were all in one long caravan, rushing across the snow, with Jim, our Finnish guide, driving the leading sled, and each pack of dogs coming after him in single file, diligently following his path.

The Professor, however, got it into his head that by watching Jim ahead of us, he had quite perfectly figured out the principles of sled driving and, finding a long whip tucked in under our seat, decided to put his new skills to the test.

Before I could stop him, he had stood up and cracked the whip loudly over the heads of the dogs. The whip then snapped back towards him, wrapping round him in tight coils, and slapping him round the face. By then, however, it had done its work and the dogs leapt forward, bucking the sled and pitching the Professor overboard into the snow, arms and legs completely bound up.

I, on the other hand, was still in my seat, which was not, sadly, the best place to be, as the dogs lurched away from Jim's safe path and went bolting off across the snow, barking and yelping at each other as they went. I heard Jim shout something at me as we bounced past, but I was far too busy hanging on for dear life to pay any attention to what he was saying.

Then I noticed the traces that held the dogs to the sled - if I could get hold of them, I could, perhaps, slow the dogs up, as the reins of a carriage can slow a horse - not that I had ever driven a carriage before, let alone a dog sled - but I had to do something.

But even as I reached forward, there came a terrible grinding and rending and the snow beneath my sled suddenly dropped away, opening up a great hole right below me.

A crevasse! The snow had just been a shallow bridge over a a chasm of ice and rock, and the weight of my sled had broken it. Under me, jagged and glittering walls of ice dropped away into an terrible inky, freezing depth.

What was worse was that at the sound of the collapse, the dogs had stopped running, and the sled was now teetering on the edge of the drop, with only their strength keeping it - and me - from plunging down into the cold dark.

At any other time the sight of those walls of ice, shading from the white of snow at the top, down through a deep, clear, translucent blue, into the impenetrable shadow below, might have been captivating: but that was the view from above - the view from the bottom, I suspected, would be very different indeed.

I instinctively stood up to try to jump to safety but, feeling me move, the closest dog turned round, tail wagging, and started towards me. The sled gave a lurch back into the crevasse and I dropped into my seat with a yell. The dog stopped and looked at me, puzzled.

I yelled again. He cocked an ear and gave me a look that told me he thought I might be dimwitted. I waved my hands. And then yelled again for good measure. The dog looked at me and then at his fellows. The sled gave another creak and shifted a little, a small shower of snow crumbling down into the gloom beneath.

On some unspoken agreement between the dogs turned back, set their shoulders to the traces and heaved. The sled shivered and dug into the edge of the precipice. I stopped yelling and waving and contented myself with hanging on. They heaved again and this time the sled strained and then juddered forward, up onto the snow. 

They pulled forward, those splendid dogs, and the sled came after them, up, up out of the crevasse and up again into the air. I am afraid, my Lady, that I have never been that friendly with dogs, especially, as you have pointed out before, with your companion Knife, but I can say that I have never been happier to see a pack of dogs as I was when I jumped form that sled onto the good, solid snow and they all crowded round, tongues flagging, barking and panting as they welcomed me back to safety.

The Professor, I must say, I was less pleased to see, when we were finally reunited, although he seemed rather surprised that I had taken what had happened quite so badly and that I insisted on him swapping sleds so that I could ride with Harry instead.

Indeed, the Professor was so taken with his exploits that, once we had made camp, he spent the whole evening interrupting everyone by 'practising' with the whip, wounding himself several times, breaking two cups and flicking Oxshott's dinner out of his hands in the process.

Eventually Jim, our guide, hid the whip and told the Professor it had been eaten by a reindeer, which at least diverted him into an enquiry into the digestion of Arctic ruminants and gave us a break from the unpredictable whistle and crack of the thing, which had had us on edge all evening.

But now I must go and have my supper before Oxshott steals it - I believe I have earnt it today.

Yours,

Safely back on firm ground

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 

15th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. I wonder, of course, when I might ever get to send you this letter, now that we have gone beyond the postal service even of Norway, and not just the postal service, either. We are also now beyond grocers, butchers, farmers, vegetable patches and even berry bushes. We are beyond, in fact, food.

I am, in case you had not guessed,  starving hungry. We are on what your father likes to call 'Expedition Rations'. 'A feast' compared to what he had to live on during the Indian Mutiny, apparently, and he did not seem at all swayed when I pointed out that the only thing likely to make Jim, our guide, and the dogs rise in rebellion against us were the Expedition Rations themselves.

'Be prepared, Hope, always my motto, be prepared, like the scouts,' is what he said, and then he repeated his joke.

Your father came up with his joke when we were on the train, after my encounter with the wolves, which appeared to strike him as terribly entertaining, and ever since then has repeated it at every opportunity. He appears to find it funnier and funnier every time he repeats it.

This is his Lordship's joke:

'Better to travel with Hope, than to arrive,' and then he laughs away to himself, under his breath.

He is quite wrong about it getting funnier. Entirely the opposite, in fact.

Anyway, 'Expedition Rations' it is, which means, as far as I can tell, just enough to whet the appetite but nowhere near enough to feel actually fed. And after all my excitement yesterday, I especially needed nourishment, but no special favour was given, not to me, and not to Baronet Oxshott, even after he had lost most of his dinner to the Professor's whip practice.

So hungry to bed it was for all of us, which might go some way to explaining happened during the night.

I am sharing a tent with Harry, and we talked for a little while, speculating on where our journey might be taking us. Eventually we both dropped off to sleep and I dreamt happily of Latin lessons until I suddenly found myself being shaken awake by Harry.

"Mr Hope, there's something up!" Indeed there was - the camp was alive with shouting and bellowing.

We leapt from our sleeping bags and out into the snow (we all sleep fully clothed here, what with the cold, and Harry even keeps his cap on in bed, I have discovered) and there, in the dying firelight, came upon the most spectacular tableau.

There in the centre of the camp, surrounded by the dogs, all snarling and barking, was Baronet Oxshott, in nothing but his red flannel underclothes, and, facing him, a huge Polar Bear!

It was quite the most enormous creature I have ever seen, a great powerful mountain of white fur, that lumbered to and fro round the fire, confused and annoyed by the lights and the noise. Oxshott was holding a frying pan in one hand and there, in it, four rashers of half-cooked bacon.

He had obviously been cooking a midnight snack for himself and the smell had attracted the bear!

Oxshott was now holding the frying pan as far away from the bear as he could, not daring to take his eyes off the huge animal as it sniffed and snuffed at him, trying to discover which was the tasty, tempting smelling bit of him and which was the hairy, shouting bit.

Oxshott edged backwards round the fire, pan first, and the bear edged after him, torn between the strange threat of the flames and the smell of the bacon.

Lord Daunt stuck his head out of his tent, took one look at the situation and bellowed:

"Oxshott!"

The bear swung round at the noise and, with a surprised "Bear!", his Lordship ducked back inside. And at that moment, Oxshott, taking advantage of the distraction leapt from the fire, making for his own tent. But the bear was quicker: with surprising speed for such a large animal, it wheeled around, the great head lunged forward at the bacon and, without thinking, Oxshott punched it squarely on the nose!

Taken completely by surprise the bear reared back, its massive paws, like soup plates with claws on, flailing around, and then it turned and lolloped off into the night.

"Blighter was trying to steal my bacon," explained Oxshott, gruffly.

"My bacon," pointed out Lord Daunt, re-emerging, "It was trying to steal the bacon you had stolen from my supplies."

"Dashed hungry," mumbled Oxshott

"So was he," interjected the Professor, "The world's largest land predator, the Polar Bear - needs a lot of meat, I should imagine."

"Must be hungry, yes," said Jim, our Finnish guide, "Never this far south, only when has hungry."

"Largest, is he?" Oxshott gazed off into the darkness where the bear, "Big head, wasn't it?"

"Well, if you've quite finished larking about, Oxshott," said Lord Daunt, who was evidently still upset about the bacon, "Perhaps we can all get back to bed, busy day tomorrow."

"Dashed well will be," said Oxshott, mysteriously, and dived back into his tent.

"Fool," muttered Lord Daunt, "And the rest of you," and he too disappeared back inside.

Harry and I returned to our tent, to discuss Oxshott, Polar Bears and, happily, oatcakes, a secret supply of which Harry has generous offered to share with me. Splendid chap. Now, perhaps, my gnawing hunger sated, I might be able to see.

Yours,

Covered in crumbs and quite exhausted

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 

16th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. We have had yet another day of excitement, I'm afraid. I can't help feeling that this adventure has a little too much adventure in it for my liking.

When we awoke this morning, all was peaceful. Too peaceful - the dogs had gone. And so had Oxshott.

Jim the Finn told us that he had woken up in the early dawn to discover Oxshott untying all the dogs. Before he had been able to do anything, Oxshott had run off, the dogs running after him in a pack.

"He goes hunting, he said," Jim shook his head, confused, "But nothing there is to hunt here. Nothing."

"What's the bally fool playing at now?" scowled Lord Daunt.

"The polar bear," said Harry, "He's gone after the polar bear!"

Indeed he had, but he didn't get very far. He stumped back into camp when we were still eating breakfast, managing to look both cross and shamefaced all at once.

"Dogs ran away. Lost the scent," he said, and sat down, sulkily, "Move dashed fast, those bears."

"Run away?" Lord Daunt was aghast, "What do you mean, run away? You've lost the dogs?"

"Don't think they liked the bear," said Oxshott.

"Very sensible of them," said the Professor, fiddling with the little camping stove he was using to fix his porridge.

"This is true, they are not liking the bear, these dogs," said Jim despondently, "They will run far away. They will not come back."

"Not come back?" roared Lord Daunt, "You mean this bally idiot has lost the dogs and they won't be coming back! How are we going to continue our journey now?"

I couldn't take my eyes off the Professor's camping stove.

"I think, my Lord," I said, "I might have an idea."

It was Harry who had the truly clever idea, however. My plan was to use the Professor's camping stove (and a couple of others we had packed) to create small steam engines - we certainly had enough snow to keep them supplied with steam. We could then use those engines to power the sleds across the snow.

The problem was: how? Wheels were useless on the powdery snow and ski's would just slide and give us enough grip to push forward. Which was when Harry had his really very ingenious idea.

Harry and I quickly set about building the steam engines, while the rest of the party spent a couple of hours hammering nails through the long leather straps we had been using to secure our supplies onto the sleds, Oxshott complaining bitterly all the while.

Once they were done, though, we could use the straps as tracks, the nails digging into the snow as they whizzed round, driving the sleds along.

We had one slight hiccup, though, when it came to actually joining the tracks to the engines, as we had no drive belts to pass the spinning of the engine to the wheel that turned the tracks. It was here that Harry once more came to the rescue with, strangely enough, a couple of pairs of ladies' stockings. 

He always keeps some around, apparently, because they are extraordinarily useful. We laughed and ribbed him somewhat but he is quite right - he showed me how to use one as a fine filter and also that they made exceptionally strong and elastic bindings. And, most importantly, they made excellent drive belts. 

He really is a most inventive and resourceful young man. The Professor has promised us both jobs with him when we return and I look forward to working with Harry immensely.

And so, with our engines fitted, we were soon off, chugging over the great white expanse, our little engines huffing and rattling away as we kept them happily supplied with fresh snow.

The weather was starting to clear and we set out once more under a perfect bright blue sky, sending up our own little white clouds as we went along.

Jim in particular was very taken by my 'snow-steam-train', as he called it, and whooped and laughed as he shovelled snow, much to the annoyance of Oxshott, who was travelling on his sled.

I am, I must admit, becoming worried about Oxshott. He is hardly a friend of mine, but he seems so sad and bad-tempered that it is hard not to feel a little sorry for him. I'm not sure whether it's your father's harsh words that have upset him so much, or the escape of the polar bear.

Given how angry your father is with him, after all, there seems little point in him capturing all these trophies to send home to you - I cannot now believe your father would ever let him marry you, he has disgraced himself so much.

But then, I am not wholly sure that he is collecting all these heads for you. I mean, I am sure he will present them to you (whether you want them or not) but I think he would be collecting them anyway - it has become an obsession with him, a mania.

Tonight, as we were setting up camp, for example, I heard him bark with delight and then shout at me to:

"Stand still, you blighter!"

Before I knew what he was doing, he bounded over and, with a delicacy I wouldn't have expected from him, flicked something away from my cheek. A mosquito!

Oxshott had flicked it on the proboscis with his nail and stunned the thing. He now bent down and gingerly picked it up from the snow.

"Need a specially small plaque for this little swine," he said, beaming at me. I assumed he was joking, but he bore the tiny thing away cupped in his hand like it was a precious jewel.

Later, while we were eating supper, he was feverishly at work on something, whittling away at some tiny bit of wood in his lap, barely paying attention to his food (which was something of a relief, I must admit, as our meal times previously had been accompanied by a constant stream of complaint from Oxshott about both the quantity and quality of our Expedition Rations).

Then, after our meal, he gathered us all round the fire and showed us what he had made: a tiny wooden shield lay in the centre of his palm and, in the middle of it, a barely visible speck - the head of mosquito, carefully removed and mounted on the plaque. Beneath in miniscule and careful letters: 'Mosquito. Arctic Circle.'

Lord Daunt just clucked his tongue and retreated to his tent, but Harry and I tried to be as encouraging as possible. I don't think Oxshott was interested in what we thought, though. He remained perfectly happy with his evening's work and returned to his tent with his little plaque, singing drinking songs under his breath.

We are going to bed ourselves now. The Professor assures us that we only have to cross the mountains to reach our final destination. So near and yet so far!

Yours,

In hope that the polar bear does not come back again

Timothy Hope

PS Jim, our Finn, is to leave us tomorrow - I believe the Professor wants to keep knowledge of our destination as secret as possible. I shall give Jim my letters to bring back with him.
 

17th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. If it finds you at all. I have no doubt that you will see me long before your ever see this letter, but I feel I ought to continue writing, to record our adventures.

I wonder what you are doing today? I know the Christmas Ball will be approaching, but I cannot believe that you would waste time with a thing like that with your Father, Baronet Oxshott and your tutor (whatever you think of him) lost somewhere out in the Arctic Circle on a mission of mystery and danger.

Your thoughts, I know, will be with us, and that cheers me considerably.

We, on the other hand, have now truly travelled beyond civilisation and beyond, even, wilderness. Jim, our guide, tells me that no one has ever been in this country before and I can believe him. We have reached, finally, the Unknown.

On the Professor's maps, this place is just a blank white space, partly because no one has ever been here to map it and partly, I suspect, because this is simply a blank white place. Snow covers everything. Even the trees are half invisible, only the bottom of the branches showing a dark green under their layer of snow. Above us even the mountains show only their steepest parts in dark stone, where the snow has slid off in great avalanches.

The Professor, however, becomes happier and happier the further we go. He is positively enjoying the cloak of secrecy he has drawn about this adventure. He refuses even to let me draw the simplest map to plot our journey, so keen is he that no one else should know of our whereabouts. 

His only regret is, apparently, that he could not bring his daughter with him. Harry asked him why he didn't bring her and he looked astonished.

"First priniciples, my boy, think it through logically," he has a tendency to lecture, "She is my daughter, ergo, she is a woman - there, you see? Science tells us a female could not take the strain of a mission such as this - the mental strain alone would be too much for their nervous systems, let alone the physical challenge. Its simply obvious."

"But, Professor," protested Harry, "Women are no strangers to mental strain - do you not think that sitting at home, wondering how, where her father is, is not placing immense mental strain on your daughter?"

But the Professor would hear none of it. I must say, althought I lean towards the Professor's opinion, I rather admire Harry for his independence of thought, liberty of spirit and willingness to argue for what he believes.

All the more so, given the Professor's actions this morning, which have made me wonder, a little, at what kind of errand he has led us on.

We have arrived in the foothills of a great mountain range that sweeps around us in a wide, jagged curve. We must cross this mountain range, says the Professor, to reach our goal.

To this end, he had Jim lead us into a narrow valley running down from the peaks above, at the bottom of which was a small river. It was at the river bank that he unveiled his great surprise. For, packed away in our supplies were two collapsible boats. With these, the Professor declared, we could easily travel along the river, over the mountains.

We stood and stared at the Professor, beaming at his boats, and I felt I had to point out one or two minor flaws in his plan.

"But Professor," I said, "This river flows down from the mountains - that means we would have to travel up river, against the stream, up, probably, steep, white water rapids and even waterfalls. Also, and more importantly from a water travel point of view, the river is frozen quite solid."

The poor Professor looked so disconsolate at this that I almost regretted having said anything. Harry, in particular, looked daggers at me. But there was nothing for it, the river was nothing more than a curving sweep of thick white ice, and the boats were useless.

"Could your steam sleds climb it?" asked Lord Daunt.

"Some of it, perhaps," I ventured, "But much of it would be too steep, I fear, and they would be awfully heavy to carry."

"Well, this is a bally fine mess you've gotten us into, Professor," growled Oxshott.

"It's no good just standing around and complaining, you great oaf," snapped Harry, "I don't see you having having any bright ideas to get us out."

Oxshott stiffened at this. but before he could do anything rash, I spotted something else among the Professor's supplies.

"The Baronet might not have any bright ideas, but I think I might," I said, "Professor, those crates labelled 'Atmospheric Conditions Measuring Balloons' - what's in them?"

What was in them was, unsurprisingly, Atmospheric Conditions Measuring Balloons: enormous silvery balloons made of some resilient, rubbery material of the Professor's own devising, extremely strong but extremely light, along with cannisters of a powerful lifting gas, again of the Professor's concoction.

The balloons were designed to lift scientific devices high into the atmosphere to measure weather conditions - and if they could carry all that equipment, could they also carry us?

Harry and I soon discovered that all the balloons together would be able to lift one of the boats, just big enough for all of us to ride in, and with room only for enough supplies to see us over the mountains - enough to reach our goal, if the Professor is to be believed.

There was no time to debate, however, since the weather was still fine and clear and, knowing from the episode with the Sami how quickly a storm can blow up in these Arctic wastes, we knew we ought to take advantage of it while we could.

And so we tethered the balloons to the boat, raising the small sail to take advantage of what wind there was, and clambered aboard. Then we loosed the ropes and the boat began to rise slowly into the air, drifting forward on the breeze, up towards the mountains.

We waved goodbye to the frankly astonished Jim, who would return to civilisation on one of the steam sleds. And as he disappeared behind into a single dark dot on the snowy wastes, and then we were in among the mountains themselves.

But I must go, now, as the wind is rocking the boat and we must all look to its balance

Yours

Floating over the top of the world

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 

18th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. We are back on the ground again after our extraordinary ballooning adventure and, while I might be glad to have, if not firm, at least snowy, earth under my feet again, I would not have missed that experience for anything.

Oh! What a strange, eerie, silent journey that was, bobbing along between the great walls of ice and stone that reared around us. I had become so used to the constant hiss and crunch of snow under sleigh and sled and boot that the peculiar quiet of the floating canoe was bewildering. The only sounds were the occasional  creak and squeak of the ropes and balloons, or the groaning and cracking of the mountains themselves.

We barely talked ourselves, so intent were we on the balance of the boat in its constant swaying and on the passing grandeur. And what grandeur it was: there we sailed, right between the topmost peaks and crags of the mountains, sheer drops of black granite and great sky fields of untouched snow drifts, where no foot would ever stand, no eye would ever see, except ours.

The magnificent desolation held us spellbound, bewitched by the awful, harsh beauty. I can see how men might strive to be the first to set foot on an unconquered peak, or some unexplored land, but how more extraordinary was this - to see this hidden, unimagined wilderness and to drift past, like a cloud, and leave it behind, still untouched, lonely and pure.

The wind blew up into a high pass between two lofty peaks, leaving us to float down between them into a long, cavernous valley that wound between steep cliffs, the wind now gusting us along, up towards a high plateau, a wide and windswept valley hidden away in the heavens.

And as the wind bore us up towards the valley opening it brought with it an astonishing sound from behind us, the first noise we had heard for some hours: a rhythmic, happy honking.

We all craned round at the noise and there, coming up the valley behind us, was a ragged 'V' of geese, gliding up on the wind, calling to each other as they travelled.

I cannot describe to you how welcome the sound of those geese was after the terrible silence of the mountains: a merry, animal sound and it cheered us all immensely.

Most cheered of all was Baronett Oxshott, who began to swing round in his seat to try and get a good look at them. Then he tried to stand, sending the boat swaying and lurching as we all clutched desperately at the sides.

"Come here, you blighters!" He was shouting, "Come closer, where I can get at you!" And he flailed his great fists out at them, and the boat rocked under him.

At a particularly violent swing, the boat jumped and Harry lost his grip, stumbling sideways, half over the edge. I grabbed hold of him, hanging onto him for dear life, trying desperately to pull him back inside.

"For God's sake, Oxshott!" bellowed Lord Daunt, "You'll have us all over!"

But Oxshott wasn't listening. As the geese passed overhead, squawking defiantly at the Baronet, he suddenly snatched his shotgun from under his seat and reared up, swinging the gun up at them.

"Oxshott!" I shouted, seeing what was about to happen, "No!"

But I was too late, the shot rang out, the boat shuddered and with a great bang, a balloon burst.

For a moment the whole world seemed to stand still, and then the boat dropped suddenly, pitching Harry back again into my lap.

"Oxshott!" roared Lord Daunt, and the boat, listing, began to plunge downwards, "Oxshott!"

"Dashed..." Oxshott stood, swaying for a moment, unable to take in what he had done, and then: "Must lighten the load..." And before anyone could do anything, he leapt over the side of the vessel and was gone.

With Oxshott gone our makeshift craft lifted a little, and began to swing sideways. Lord Daunt grabbed the nearest object to him and threw it over the side, trying to keep us in the air. Before any of the rest of could help, however, the boat suddenly pitched up and jolted forward: it had hit the snow! We had reached the plateau!

The sudden movement knocked Lord Daunt off his feet and he went over the side, into a snow drift. The boat lifted again and began to skim across the snow, buoyed up by the balloons. Harry, the Professor and I scrambled to bring in the sail and release the balloons, letting them float up and away into the empty sky as the boat slid to a final, gentle stop.

Harry and I quickly ran back, as fast as we could through the deep drifts, to try and find Lord Daunt. Fortunately he had had a soft landing in the snow and was already trying to retrieve the stove he had thrown overboard as we were dropping.

"What about Oxshott?" I asked.

"Stove's more important than that lunatic," snapped back his Lordship, "Although I suppose we could always trying burning him for warmth."

"But we can't have been far above the ground when he jumped," I pointed out, "He may well have survived."

His Lordship sighed.

"Very well, then, I suppose we ought to go and look, I daresay my daughter would never forgive if I didn't, although God knows why I should worry about that empty-headed chit's opinions."

"Well now, my Lord," I said began, "I'm not sure..."

"Oh, no reflection on your tutoring, Hope, old chap - you did the best you could: it would take a stubborn man with a strong arm to teach that child anything - someone like Oxshott, I suppose - although I can tell you now, the stable boy has a better chance of marrying my daughter than that bally oaf after today's performance."

I must have betrayed my emotions on hearing this statement, because his Lordship continued.

"For goodness' sake, Hope, my dashed daughter may be too good for the likes of Oxshott, but she's nowhere near good enough for you: you need a wife with sense and wit, not some preening ninny like Misericordia... Aha! Good Lord - look at this..."

We had come across a deep snow drift with a great hole let into it: a hole exactly the size and shape of a falling Baronet.

"This must be where the idiot landed," said Lord Daunt, and we peered down into the hole. It was empty.

"The idiot has gone."

We stood and gazed around at the featureless white of the valley floor where it stetched out to the wall of encircling mountains. Nothing moved. There was no sign of life.

"Quite gone," continued his Lordship, "Ah, well." And he turned and began walking back towards the boat, and Harry and I followed him.

Back at the boat we discovered that the Professor had unpacked some of his equipment, including a sextant and a telescope and was now doing a delighted little jig in the snow.

"We're here!" he shouted to us, "We're here!"

"We're where?" demanded Lord Daunt.

"Here! Right where I said we would be!" and the Professor thrust the telescope into his hands, "Look over there, below that mountain in the middle."

Lord Daunt took the telescope sceptically, but as he gazed through it, I heard him gasp.

"Is that it? Are you sure, Professor?"

"It must be, it matches all the measurements, all the predictions."

"Then we've done it, Hedley, old man, we've done it, just as you said we would," and Lord Daunt shook the Professor warmly by the hand.

"Its too far off to get there today, we'll have to camp here tonight," continued his Lordship.

"And then tomorrow..." said the Professor.

"Tomorrow, we shall see," said his Lordship.

"Can I have a look, Professor?" I asked, burning with curiosity.

"Oh, of course, dear boy, of course, can't hurt, have a look," and the Professor handed me the telescope as he and his Lordship stamped off to begind setting up camp.

I scanned the horizon in vain, trying to see what had delighted them so, but it was Harry that found it in the end. Far across the other side of the valley, nestled in under the lowering mountains, was a glow, a light that could only have come from a fire or many lamps, and, climbing up from it, up into the darkening night air, was a single, curling strand of smoke.

It could only mean one thing: a house, a settlement! But whose, out here? And why were we going to it? What did it mean?

Well, tomorrow, I suppose, as his Lordship said, we shall see

Yours

In trepidation and mystery

Timothy Hope

PS I do hope you can forgive your father for his harsh words, he was terribly cross with Oxshott, after all.
 

19th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 
 
I hope this letter finds you well. I do hope that you have recovered from your exertions at the Christmas Ball in the no doubt entertaining company of Viscount Fox.
 
I am, of course, delighted that you were able to put aside your worries and concerns about your father and his friends, the dangers they were facing, the unexpected peril that could destroy them at any moment, and, for just one night, enjoy yourself in a lovely, heated ballroom, with plenty of fruit punch and inconsequential gossip.
 
You will have guessed by now, my Lady, that I am being sarcastic. I really do think it is terribly heartless of you, at the very moment that the Baronet Oxshott was throwing himself to his doom on the top of the world, as your father and I were plummeting from the sky towards an icy fate, that you were busy worrying about what Sir Charles said to Captain Wentworth and who was marked down for your next waltz.
 
I am afraid, my Lady, that I am suddenly not all that sorry that I included your father's less than charitable remarks in my last letter.
 
But, ah! My last letter. Surely this mystery at least will have gathered your attention. You must have had that letter by now, but how? And how is it that I, lost in a remote valley high up amidst the Arctic mountains, can have had your letter about the Christmas Ball? Surely the penny post does not extend that far?
 
Well, my Lady, I must confess that the answers to some of these questions are still a mystery to me, but thereby hangs a tale.
 
If you have had my last letter by now, then you will know that we had found ourselves marooned on a snowy plateau in the mountains, as far beyond human civilisation as the most deserted island on the ocean. Or was it? For, in the distance, were the lights and chimney smoke that could only mean human habitation, and while the Professor and Lord Daunt, you father, might know what those signs meant, I and the Professor's assistant Harry were only left with another puzzle: who, or what, could live in such a desolate place?
 
We camped for the night and set out next morning for this mysterious house. Fortunately the skis had been one of the items we had brought with us in our balloon journey through the mountains, although they are not easy things to master, at all. Well, not easy for me. Harry picked the whole thing up very quickly, though, and was able to help when I struggled. Which was often, I'm afraid to say.
 
How odd it is that, while I knew nothing of our goal or the reasons behind our adventure, I could simply enjoy the travelling - the wonder of the sleigh ride or the strangeness of the balloon borne boat, but the moment we had a purpose in sight - the house, growing ever so slowly closer ahead - the journey immediately became exhausting and interminable.
 
We struggled on, that is, the others skied and I struggled, across the featureless white plain, our destination under the distant mountains never seeming to grow any closer, above us the bare, cloudless sky, below us the bare, endless snow.
 
Here ought to have been adventure - at the top of the world, on the verge of some great mystery - but here was only incredible boredom and nuisance.
 
Slowly, however, our goal began to make itself clear before us. Not a single house, it turned out, but a homestead, a collection of buildings: houses, barns, stables, all with lights burning merrily in the windows and fires lit within.
 
There was something immediately cheerful about the place, more than just the delight of finding civilisation again, out here in the wilderness. There was something immediately human about the buildings, something welcoming and warm and any worries I might have had about what we were about to discover there disappeared entirely, although I could not and still cannot quite put my finger on why.
 

As we finally approached the main gate, extravagantly decorated with carved reindeer heads, a small figure came bustling out of a nearby building, running up towards us through the snow. At first I thought it must be a child, from the size of it, but when I saw the face under the red, fur-lined hood, I realised that it was, in fact, a full grown but very small man.
 
His features were something like the Sami, but with a twist something else that I couldn't put a finger on and a look in his eye as if he were laughing at something that we would never understand.
 
He drew himself up under the gate and bowed to us. The Professor stepped forward and tried a greeting in Sami that he had learned from the reindeer herders. To our great astonishment the little man replied in broken English, his voice clear in the still air.
 
"Well coming to the Youlutonty, hearty journey-makers! I am Tom, you may come well in and take hearth."
 
We followed him through the gates and into a small square, ringed about with many buildings and dwellings, many of them bearing signs above the door that suggested that they might be shops or businesses of some kind.
 
Lights burned in all the houses and at every window faces peered out at us, fascinated by the strange new-comers.
 
Tom led us to a large building on the far side of the square, almost immediately evident as an inn or hostel, where we were ushered into low-ceilinged room where a huge table groaned under a great feast laid out, apparently, for us.
 
"They must have seen us arrive, yesterday," whispered Harry, "To be so prepared."
 
Tom motioned for us to make ourselves at home, but the Professor and Lord Daunt would hear none of it. They immediately started bombarding Tom with questions:
 
"What is this place? How do you live here? Where did all this food come from? Who is in charge here? When can we meet him?"
 
Questions poor Tom's English was not quite up to answering. And not just his English, either, I suspected. There was something in his careful confusion that made me think he was deliberately not telling them something, was keeping something back. They were willing to feed us and give us shelter, it seemed, but not to offer us anything beyond that.

But no matter how curious we might be, or how strange and wondrous the place we found ourselves in was, there was nothing so guaranteed to capture our attention and evoke our wonder than a feast, not after all our exertions and traveling, not after 'Expedition Rations'.

Tom was happy, I think, to watch us fall to with such gusto - and not just because he was a good and generous host, either, I'm sure, but also because mouths that are full of mince pies cannot ask questions.

And yet, I must admit, still the questions came to mind: how were there mince pies, for one? Mince pies out here, beyond the reach of mankind and his orchards and pastry cooks and steam trains and grocer? Mince pies and glazed hams, devils on horseback and hot punch? What unseen hands were cooking these things - for we saw no one but Tom, who fetched and carried on his own - where did they get their ingredients, where did they cook up their feast? 

What was this place, beyond the end of beyond and above the top of the world, that could feast us so splendidly?

But no answer was coming from Tom, and so Harry and I fell to discussing the matter between ourselves as the Professor and Lord Daunt badgered our host and the fire flickered away in the grate, illuminating the carvings that covered every surface in the room.

Carvings that, in the firelight, seemed to move and dance: reindeer cantered, faces winked and grinned, forests waved in the wind and the clouds flew. And, well fed, tired and warm, sleep crept up on us.

The Professor is already snoring and his Lordship stares at the fire, unspeaking. Harry sleeps in his chair beside me and even I can feel my head growing heavy as I write these words - and yet one final question remains: Tom has promised to post this letter for me... but where, and how?

But this mystery is for tomorrow...

Yours,

Finally off Expedition Rations
 
Timothy Hope, Esq
 

20th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 

I hope this letter finds you well. It certainly leaves me quite rested, excited but still heartily mystified.

I was awoken in the early hours of the morning with a gentle shake from Harry. The fire was burning low in the grate, but the room was still warm, even as the first glimmerings of dawn were showing in the window.

I was about to ask why he had felt it necessary to wake me when Harry held up a hand, indicating I should listen.

And there it was, somewhere in the distance, a happy noise of breakfast, of crockery and cutlery banging and ringing, of cheerful voices singing as they worked. Somewhere in this strange place something was going on: how could we resist?

Our room was quiet and Tom, our host, was nowhere to be seen. Harry beckoned me over to a door tucked behind the fireplace that Tom had bustled in and out of the evening before, bearing food and drink from some kitchen beyond.

We tried the handle. Locked. What was it that they were so desperate to keep from us? Surely some clue to the mystery that had dogged us since our adventure began: what this place was, what our whole expedition was for.

Which was when Harry surprised me once again. This time by digging out of a pocket a lady's hair pin, which he deftly slid into the keyhole of the door and jiggled around inside, listen intently to the noises it made as it danced over the workings of the lock. And then with a click and a clunk, the handle turned and the door stood open before us.
 
Ahead was a bare, warm passageway leading to a long, low room, almost entirely taken up with a long, low table at which were set twenty or thirty bowls of steaming porridge. Welcoming though the room was, it was empty. No singing here.
 
Beyond that was a cavernous kitchen, where ovens roared and pans bubbled, where a cloud of flour still hung on the air and ladle steamed gently on a bench, but no one stirred, because the kitchen, too, was deserted.
 
So, too, was the bake house beyond, pungent with the smell of gingerbread, and the small square beyond that, where the snow was churned up with footprints, but no feet stood now.
 
Empty though all these places were, there was a sense that the moment before we had turned the corner and opened the door, they had been bustling, hectic with life. Whoever had been there had fled moments before us, and now hid somewhere just out of sight, watching us pass.
 
Eventually we came to a wide set of double doors that led through into a vast, brightly lit hall, filled with long lines of tables and benches. And on each table: machinery. Lathes, saws, screws, wood carving and metal working, every kind of tool and device was laid out here. And at every place was a piece of work, something half made, or almost assembled, and all of them toys.
 
Here a nutcracker soldier, his stiff jaw not yet hinged on, there a spring wound ballerina, beneath her tutu still only bare metal where her mechanism showed. Here a solid little wooden reindeer on wheels, there the delicate cut-out of a paper doll, surrounded by the patterns of her costumes.
 
And here a clockwork train and there a little, tin putt-putt boat. Do you know them? I had one as a child and delighted in it - you place a candle in a small metal boat and it heats up a tiny boiler to make steam, driving the boat forward. Seeing one again brought me up short and I stared at it, and the train at the work bench next to it.
 
"Harry," I said, "I think I've just had an idea."
 
It probably seems like a silly thing, but it's easy to get carried away even with silly things and Harry and I soon lost all sense of what we were about and the whole mystery that surrounded us, so excited were we in our little project to make the clockwork train steam driven instead.
 
It was relatively easy to remove all the clockwork and put in a watertight boiler and transfer the candle heating mechanism from the boat, but we had a tricky time with the pistons, a problem Harry solved with the innards of a brass fountain pen that he found on a nearby table.
 
We were so absorbed that it wasn't until we had filled the boiler and prepared the candle that we realised that all the workers who must have fled this workshop at our approach had stealthily reappeared, creeping out of the shadows to surround us, watching our every move with eager attention.
 
Slightly unnerved by their watchful silence, we set the train on the ground and waited, with bated breath, for the candle to heat the water. And slowly, with a clear 'putt-putt-putt' in the stillness of the hall, the wheels began to turn and the little engine began to steam across the floor.
 
Although no one made a single noise, the wave of delight that spread through the crowd around us was as evident as if they had all started applauding. Like Tom, they were all much smaller than us, making me wonder whether we had stumbled upon some tribe of Arctic pygmies, but as the train trundled across the stone flags, I felt a heavy hand descend upon my shoulder and turned to find myself looking up at the largest man I had ever seen.
 
And I mean, in all senses, large. He seemed almost a foot taller than me and was considerably wider, although, perhaps because of his height, he appeared more exaggerated than actually fat. His head was surrounded by a great cloud of white hair and a vast white beard tumbled down over his massive expanse of green Sami-style coat.
 
But even in that first glance, his character seemed as large as his frame. Of a man that size I might have easily been afraid, but his face was so wide and so open, his eyes sparkled so with some suppressed laugh, his smile beamed out such a huge happiness and welcome that I could never be afraid of this man, not in my whole life.
 
He seized me by both shoulders and shook me up and down, joyously.
 
"Marvellous work, young man, marvellous! And you, young..." and he paused for a moment and smiled to himself, "My boy!" and he shook Harry vigorously by the hand.
 
"Steam trains! A capital idea! Of course, it'll need tidying up before we can let the children at it, but its marvellous, a veritable marvel. Nilka."
 
He said the last word and stuck out his hand again. I took it automatically, without knowing what he meant, so caught up was I by the force of his personality.
 
"No! Silly old man. In English. What would it be? Klaus? Nick? Nicholas! That's it! Nicholas." Ah! It was his name. He pumped at my hand, happily, "And your are Timothy and, I think, Harry - is that right?"
 
"Harry, yes," stammered Harry, apparently just as confused as I was.
 
"Capital, marvellous. Wonderful! Just what we need here, this time of year: brains! Craft! You all will, of course, stay for supper. Talk the fellows through the steam train, will you - he needs topping up, I think. Wonderful to meet you, Timothy and you... Harry. See you at supper!"
 
And he swept from the room in a great cloud of the little people, who all scurried in his wake, suddenly chattering in a language I did not recognise. This could only be the man in charge, I realised, our host, who must hold in his keeping the secret for which the Professor had led us here, to this extraordinary factory hidden out in the endless wild.
 
I had no time to speculate further, for we were quickly surrounded by more of the tiny workers, and in particular and cunning looking old man who introduced himself as Alf, or something that sounded like Alf, and who began to turn over our little engine in his clever little hands, asking us questions in his broken English.
 
And so, for the rest of the day Harry and I have been huddled over a bench in the workroom, with Alf and an ever-changing crowd of willing observers and helpers, refining the steam-driven engine and making it safe for children's play.

I have barely had time to snatch to pen these few words - and I haven't even had time to thank you for your kind letter bringing me so keenly up to date on all the doings at Ghastington - how terribly far away it all seems now.

But I must go, Alf has more questions about the train

Yours

Busy yet puzzled

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 
 

21st December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 

I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing this very early in the morning, so I have not yet had any post from you, but I wanted to share the strange events of last night with you while they were still fresh in my mind. Tom says he cannot deliver this letter until later, however, and that you will not get it until tomorrow.

I am still mystified as to how it can be delivered at all, to be frank with you - this place is still a complete puzzle - even as I worked all yesterday, I still could not keep my thoughts from this enigma that surrounded us, now that we were so very close to its heart.
 
For here was a workshop for crafting toys - not things necessary for survival in this wilderness, but things for entertainment, for children's play. And many of them, for this was not the only workshop, apparently. And yet how could they possibly get these things to the outside world from here? Consider the trouble we had had getting here. Now imagine taking that journey again and again, bearing cargo and supplies.
 
And here we come to the problem of the letters, for, soon after out meeting with Nicholas, they were brought to us by one of his many helpers and we were given to understand that we could, easily, send and receive mail from anywhere to anywhere, if we had anything we wished to send.
 
At first I thought that perhaps our host had some kind of wireless telegraph, allowing him communication instantaneously around the world, but no, here in my hand was your letter, on your paper in your very own handwriting, even down to the three whole pages detailing the dress that you wore to the ball (which, as Harry pointed out, could have been summarised in just three words: 'Pink, with ribbons').
 
So he must be bringing the letters in and sending them out. But how? I had seen only the customary reindeer and sleigh outside, and that would not get him very far in this remote valley. He must have some extraordinary means of transport or communication hidden away somewhere that would allow such miracles. I began to see why the Professor was so interested.
 
And I was right in my guesses, too, it seemed, for as Harry and I were eventually led through into supper, we came in at the tail end of something the Professor was saying to Nicholas.
 
"...but imagine the possibilities... A world where people can travel to distant lands in only hours - imagine what we might learn about other people and their cultures, how that will destroy all the barriers that distance and ignorance put up between men and put an end to hate and suspicion between nations! Imagine a world where men can talk to each other across the globe, have the knowledge of the world at their fingertips, know all the news and all the secrets, imagine what a race of scientists we will be then, what will we not be able to do!"
 
"Perhaps," said our host genially, "Or perhaps all that knowledge will drive men mad, have you thought of that? Have you thought that perhaps people will be people, whatever toys they have?"
 
"Just think of what it will mean for trade," persisted Lord Daunt, "Goods from every country under the sun, available whenever you want them."
 
"And when you have everything you want," countered Nicholas, "What will you do then? Could it be that what you really want is precisely what you can't have?"
 
"But..." said the Professor.
 
"Now, a moment," said Lord Daunt.
 
"Besides," continued Nicholas, "It isn't mine to give and would be useless to anyone else, anyway. So, enough of that: time for supper!" And he said it with such gentle finality and heartiness that the Professor and his Lordship stopped pestering him and followed him meekly to the table. But I could see that they weren't going to give up on their dreams so easily.
 
This time we were eating in a large room, set off, by an arch, from a vast dining hall with high, painted ceiling, ringed about with a gallery, the whole place filled to the rafters with the workers from Nicholas' homestead, all eating and drinking happily. We were evidently seated at the top table, along with Tom and Alf and three other workers who, hung on every word Nicholas uttered.
 
We had eaten our soup and were just setting into a fish that I think must have been carp (and hoping, in my case, that we might have some meat soon), when a whisper began to travel the length of the dining hall, up the tables and through the arch to Nicholas' chair.
 
He listened to the waiter, who had to stand on tiptoes to reach his master's ear, even with Nicholas sitting down, and then turned to us.
 
"Gentlemen a... gentlemen, I'm afraid we have a difficulty. Someone has entered the house where you left your belongings and has been rifling through them. My friends are rightly appalled, as they know nothing of crime here. They believe the person responsible is still somewhere in Joulutontti," I knew by now that that was his name for his home here, "Could it be someone of your party? Did you have another with you?"
 
"Oxshott," muttered Lord Daunt, "It must be." And he stood up from the table, "Come on, if we're quick..."
 
And we followed him out of the door, Nicholas and his friends coming in our wake.
 
We came out into the central square of the homestead, the air clear and cold and the stars bright above us. Just across the square was the main gate we had entered by and, even as we watched, a shadow detached itself from under the eaves of a nearby house and ran across the open space towards the gate.
 
"Oxshott!" bellowed Lord Daunt.
 
The figure stopped in gate and turned.
 
"Oxshott, stop there!"
 
At the sound of the shout a light came on and caught Oxshott in its glare, frozen there on the edge of the night. With a gasp the crowd of workers around us drew back. And he was a fearsome sight.
 
His clothes were ragged and torn, standing out in great bunches of fur and cloth. His dark hair and beard were matted and and flecked about with ice. Standing there, shaggy and wreathed in mist from his own breath he looked like the exact opposite of our host, dark and angry and wild.
 
"Shells," he said, "For the gun," and he shook a box of ammunition and waved the shotgun, which he still carried, at us.
 
"Bear's here, you know," he said, "Polar Bear. I've seen it, at night. It's here again. Going to get it this time..." and then he stopped and gasped as he caught sight of Nicholas. "You!"
 
"Me?" said Nicholas.
 
"You! Where is it? The train, where is it? Why did it never come? Why did you not bring it?"
 
"I think you know, don't you, Roderick?" said Nicholas, and there was a tone in his voice that I had not heard before, some thing hard and stern.
 
"It wasn't my fault!" shouted Oxshott, "I didn't mean to push her so hard! I didn't know she'd fall off!"
 
"It was very bad, all the same," said Nicholas, and at the word 'bad' the crowd around us shuddered.
 
"How dare you! How dare you!" roared Oxshott, "You, you..." he stopped and a terrible, twisted smile spread over his lips, "You: what a trophy that would be, eh? Your head, just above the fireplace: that would be something, wouldn't it? That would be quite something!"
 
"Oxshott, what are you saying?" I couldn't stop myself, "What do you mean?"
 
"I mean his head," he snapped back, "It's mine. I'll be back for it. Tomorrow. I'll be back and I'll have his head for my wall!"
 
And with that he turned and bounded out of the light and off into the darkness.
 
I need hardly tell you that our meal was not quite as cheerful as it might have been after that.
 
The Professor and Lord Daunt are convinced that Oxshott is quite mad and will simply disappear into the wilds never to be heard of again and Nicholas seems curiously undisturbed by his threat, and also about the bear, which he did admit often comes sniffing round the homestead, attracted by the smell of food.
 
Harry and I, on the other hand, are sure that Oxshott meant every word he said. And we are equally sure that even if no one else is going to do anything about it, we must, at least, try to protect our host. We spent the rest of the meal putting our heads together with Alf and Tom and I think tomorrow is going to be a very busy day.
 
Yours
 
In worry and anxiousness
 
Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 
 
 

22nd December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 

I hope you are well. I'm afraid that I simply haven't had time to read your last letter, as fascinating as your drawing of Millicent's ringlets appeared, for we have been terribly busy here.

I shouldn't think you will have yet had the letter I sent this morning, about our strange night-time encounter with Oxshott. I must admit that I slept very badly last night. I had become accustomed to sharing a tent with Harry and to suddenly find myself in a foreign bedroom, all on my own, knowing that there was a murderous madman on the prowl outside, did not put me into the most serene state of mind.
 
However badly I slept, there was no time for tiredness today. If Oxshott genuinely intends to attack Joulutontti tonight then it is our duty to everything we can to stop him. While Lord Daunt and the Professor may not believe that the threat is genuine, they have promised, of course, to help if anything does happen.
 
It was up to Harry and I, then, to prepare any defences we thought might help stop Oxshott in his crazed career.  We had already been promised what help we might need by Alf and the other workers who were ready to do anything that might keep their master safe.
 
Nicholas, our host, however, had other ideas.
 
"Absolutely not, oh no, not all, no time, no time at all."
 
"No time?" I wondered. I had just outlined some of my plans to him over breakfast and he was evidently appalled.
 
"Quite, no time at all. Almost there, you know, and not a man to spare, not one. Toys, that's what we need and lots of them."
 
"But, sir!"
 
"Nicholas."
 
"But, Nicholas, I am sure Oxshott means every word he says. We need to be ready for him."
 
"No, no. We need to be making toys, not playing at soldiers. We can worry about your friend later."
 
Harry started to object, but a light had dawned in my mind.
 
"It may be, sir, that we can do both."
 
"Aha! I recognise that face!" Nicholas began to laugh, "We're in real trouble now, Harry, he's got an idea! Oh dear, yes, we're in trouble now. You carry on, young Timothy, you'll be alright."
 
And he strode from the room, chuckling to himself.

Harry, at least, seemed to take the threat of Oxshott as seriously as I did, and was quite willing and ready to help devise a plan of action.

I already had some thoughts, but we started by making a proper tour of Joulutontti, to see the lie of the land. What an extraordinary place this is. We still have no real clues as to what we are doing here, or, indeed, as to what anyone is doing here, and despite having a free run of the place for the past two days, I am still completely bewildered.

One thing is for certain, Joulutontti has no real defences. Although there is the big ceremonial gate through which we first arrived and Oxshott last left, there are no real walls around the place, and hundreds of doors, windows, alleyways and gates, none of which are ever guarded or locked and all of which would be perfectly impossible to defend.

The place itself like a whole village, almost a little town, all jumbled up into one motley collection of buildings. Although there are several large manufactories, like the one that Harry and I created our steam train in, these stand in the middle of a cheerful chaos of houses, lofts, workshops, studios, stores and shops, all leaning together and squeezing apart, with rickety walkways slung between windows and doors let into walls wherever they can be put.

And all these places are absolutely teeming with people, families of carpenters, hot and busy forges, attics of seamstresses and basements of chemical inventors. Everywhere we went we found extraordinary craftsmen and women, working away diligently, and, most of all, cheerfully.

Indeed, what a happy place it is, with everyone dashing to and fro, shouting and laughing, rushing up and down stairs and ladders, in and out of storerooms and toolsheds, almost all of them singing some snatch of song or other as they work, and all of them doing one thing and one thing and one thing only: making toys.

Yes, the whole place, with all its workers and tools is dedicated, for what reason I cannot guess, to the sole and peculiar practice of making toys.

Amazing and delightful toys, it must be said, toys, indeed, the like of which for inventiveness, for craft, for sheer and unalloyed joy, I have never seen, but nonetheless toys and only toys.

Which, when facing an attack by a seasoned and cunning hunter as Baronet Oxshott, suddenly didn't seem quite as wonderful as it might.

In the only weapons we could really lay our hands on, in the whole place, was Lord Daunt's pistol and my penknife. All we had else were toys. Which is where my idea comes in:  what about all those toys?
 
Toy soldiers, toy horses, toy cannons, toy balloons, toy popguns, toy bows and toy arrows. An awful lot of toys that could, perhaps, with a little ingenuity and cunning, be made to work as weapons too.
 
And so Harry and I set to work. It was an odd task to be undertaking in that merry place, guided by Alf and Tom, stooping through the low rooms, searching out these wonderful things and turning them into weapons of war. But every time I found myself getting distracted by a jack-in-the-box or regretting this terrible state of affairs, I simply reminded myself that if we failed, Oxshott may well carry out murder of the most awful kind. We simply must not fail.
 
So we put clockwork in the tin soldiers and sharpened their bayonets, we used the steam from the model trains to power pea shooters mounted on their boilers, we dipped the sucker tips of toy arrows in itching powder, we took everything we could lay our hands on and wracked our brains as to how to use it to stop Oxshott.

I know, my Lady, that you think much of the Baronet, that, in fact, he is more than just the sort of man that young ladies like to marry - he is the sort of man that you would like to marry, whatever your father thinks. But I am sure that even you must agree that we must do everything we can to stop him in this outrage.

And I want you to know, my Lady, that, in truth, I am just a nervous schoolteacher and I do not think that I will be able to stop the Baronet, not really. He is strong and cunning and angry and very, very hairy and I don't think our toys are going to help much, but we cannot let him abuse our host like this, whatever his reasons.

I suppose I just want you to understand that I am doing, I hope, no more than common decency and the rules of hospitality require and that I am being, in my own small way, a little brave, I think.

Yours

In haste and trembling

Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor
 
 

23rd December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,

I hope this letter finds you well. I hope that you will at least be happy that I have evidently survived the night more or less intact.

But, oh, what a night! Was it really only those few hours ago? The whole thing seems already like some fantastic dream, a strange and wonderful fairy tale that could not, surely, have happened to me.
 
 
We worked like fiends all day yesterday, Harry and Alf and Tom and I. But work as we might, we could not hold back the hands of the clock. The day seemed to pass too quickly and we soon found ourselves gathering what we had created into the dining hall as everyone else gathered for supper.
 
Nicholas greeted us with amusement.
 
"Stop all that fussing and come and have something to eat, you two, you must be famished," he ushered us to our seats, although I, for one, was feeling so nervous about what the night might bring, that I could barely think of food.
 
"I do like these clockwork soldiers," he knelt down between the tables and wound one up, letting it march along the flagstones as the people around him watched, "Simply marvellous, have you seen these, your Lordship?"
 
Soon both he and Lord Daunt were on their hands and knees among the eating workers, arranging their soldiers into ranks and preparing their artillery.
 
"I say, Hope," offered Daunt from under a chair, "These steam powered peashooter things are really quite a thing." His head popped up from behind a table, "Imagine one full size - an armoured engine with a steam-powered gun, quite a thing, eh? Quite a thing. Smart thinking, lad, smart thinking." And he disappeared once again.
 
Harry and I watched them open-mouthed, unable to understand how anyone could play so happily with toys knowing that the madman Oxshott could attack us at any moment. And, indeed, before Nicholas or his Lordship  could even try any small skirmishes, a terrified worker came rushing into the room and ran to Nicholas to whisper in his ear.
 
"Ah," he said, straightening up, "Apparently someone has broken into the stables. I think perhaps your friend has come to visit us again. I don't suppose you'd like to see what he wants?"
 
"No, I wouldn't," I said, "I already know! Quick, everyone: to your places!"
 
At this all the assembled workers jumped up and, following orders from Alf and Tom, cleared the long tables away to either side of the hall, upending them to make shields of the table tops, lining a passage down the middle of the room with wooden walls, as more of them clambered up the columns to the galleries that overhung three sides of the room.
 
As the tables went Daunt's and Nicholas' toy armies were revealed - two wings of clockwork soldiers, steam driven artillery and tin cavalry drawn up in serried ranks, facing the doors. And in the middle knelt Nicholas, still arranging horsemen into a V formation, ready for the charge.
 
Harry and I had swept the cutlery and place settings from our top table and turned it over in the archway that led to Nicholas's smaller dining room, sealing off the room as a last line of defence. I leant over the barrier and called  to our host.
 
"Nicholas! Back here, behind the table - it'll be the safest place!"
 
"But I'll miss the battle," he replied, smiling, and then gestured to Alf, "One moment, please."
 
He whispered something to the little man who nodded and scurried away out of the room carrying a plate of food. Soon, however, I felt a breeze of cold air that must mean a door had been opened somewhere - thank goodness! At least he was taking the danger seriously enough to prepare an escape route.
 
Nicholas showed no signs of wanting to escape, though, as he continued shuffling toy soldiers about on the floor. All else was silent apart from the clicking as he wound up the clockwork. The workers, hidden behind their wooden walls, held their breath, waiting, listening for whatever was coming.
 
And it was coming, we could hear it - at first nothing more than a dim, far off banging and crashing, but gradually the sound came nearer. Something heavy and careless was coming blundering through Joulutontti and it was singing as it came.
 
At first I thought it was just a roaring, howling noise, but gradually I began to make out words, if not really quite a tune. Words bellowed with a ghastly cheerfulness, the same refrain, repeated over and over again.
 
"All I want for Christmas is his two front teeth, his two front teeth, his two front teeth. All I want for Christmas is his two front teeth, his two front teeth, his two front teeth..."
 
And then with a resounding rattle and boom, the doors to the dining hall burst open and there, monstrous in the flaring light, stood Oxshott.
 
If possible he looked even more wild than he had the previous evening. His hair and beard were now rimed with frost, so that a jagged crown of icicles stuck out around his head, glittering. The fur lining of his clothes stuck out all over, making him look like some wooly wild man of the mountains. Steam rose of him in the warm room, wreathing him in a mist that moved with him, curling about his legs, making him seem to appear in a puff of smoke, like an evil magician in a pantomime.
 
He stopped in the doorway, appearing not to notice the walls of wood or the toy army, having eyes only for Nicholas as the old man knelt in the middle of the room.
 
"You!" Oxshott roared, "I've changed my mind! I don't want a train set anymore! I want your head!" and with that, he leapt forward into the room.
 
"Nicholas!" I shouted and, without thinking, clambered over the table top and fell into the dining hall, scrambling towards our new friend, desperate to pull him back to safety.
 
Behind me, fortunately, I heard Harry, with much greater presence of mind than I, shout out: "Open fire!" and at that our allies swing into action.
 
Down from the galleries all around us dropped a storm of paper planes, all tipped with the sharp points from compass sets, all swooping down towards Oxshott in a great white flurry. For a moment he disappeared in a rustling cloak of paper, but then, with a thunderous yell, he shook them all off, leaving himself spotted about with little red dots of pin pricks.
 
Then a great shower of arrows sprang up from behind the tables, curving over our heads at him, covering him, with each hit, in a light dusting of itching powder. But this only made him more angry, and he flicked them away,  roaring and shaking his head wildly.
 
Finally Nicholas released the steam driven cannons around him and they puffed forward, popping out hard peas that rattled off the ice that sheathed Oxshott with a sound like gravel on glass. Growling he waded forward as the clockwork soldiers stabbed at his ankles, kicking out left and right and sending tin horses and riders scattering across the flagstones.
 
As Oxshott advanced, I finally got hold of Nicholas' coat and tried to drag him back, away from the lunatic, but the man must have been rooted to the spot with fear, as he wouldn't budge. There was nothing for it and I quickly scrambled in front of him, shielding him with my body, as Oxshott, snorting out steam like an engine, came stomping up to us.
 
"Out of my way, teacher!" he roared, his face savage and contorted.
 
"Never," I gulped.
 
Oxshott's face twisted into a smile.
 
"A brave teacher! Well, I never. That'll make an interesting head for my collection!" and with that he slapped me across the face with the back of his hand, sending me sprawling back against Nicholas' broad chest.
 
Then he reached behind him and pulled out from his belt a long, keen machete that sparkled with ice all along it's blade.
 
"Lift your chin up, man!" he yelled, "I want to try and do this in one blow!"
 
"You'll have to go through me first!" shouted a voice and, to my horror, Harry leapt over the table wall and bounded in between us, glaring at Oxshott in defiance.
 
Oxshott laughed in his face.
 
"You think I'd worry about killing a boy?" he snarled.
 
"Perhaps not," said Harry, "But what about... a woman?" And with that he swept off his cap and down fell a great glowing sweep of red hair. And in that moment I realised where I had seen Harry before: Harry wasn't Harry at all, she was Henrietta, Professor Cumulus' daughter!
 
Oxshott reeled back in surprise. In fact, I think everyone did. I certainly heard Lord Daunt gasp and the Professor himself shout out in fright. But I had no time to think about them. I had just had one of the realisations that I spoke about earlier and, without a moments hesitation, sprang forward, catching hold of Henrietta, the marvellous, brave Henrietta, and pushing her behind me.
 
Oxshott shook his head and gathered himself.
 
"Teachers, schoolgirls, none of you can stop me!" he snarled, "Nothing can stop me now!" And he roared like a bear.
 
No, no, he didn't. He stood, frozen to the spot and something else roared again, like a bear. Just like a bear. Just like, in fact, the gigantic polar bear that reared up behind him in the doorway, snuffing the air. Then it dropped to all fours again with a thump that rocked the room and roared once more.
 
Oxshott swung round, a crazed look in his eye, but before he could raise his machete, the bear, with an off hand, careless movement, swung out with one massive paw and punched him neatly on the nose.
 
The Baronet went flying sideways, bouncing off an upturned table and collapsing, headlong, among the ruins of the defeated tin army on the floor.
 
The bear sniffed at him, curiously, but then turned its head as someone whistled from the corridor behind it, and there was Alf, carrying a steaming pot of stew. The bear turned with astonishing adroitness and shambled after him as Alf led the way out of the room.
 
A sudden silence flooded the room after the tempest of the battle, the only noise the ticking of fallen soldiers and the hissing of crushed artillery.
 
And in that silence, Baronet Oxshott raised his bloodied head and said:
 
"Hallo, I'm Roderick. Is that your steam engine? I've always wanted one of them. Can I have a go?"
 
And I felt a small, friendly, womanly hand slip into mine and welcome head of red hair on my shoulder as the room burst into thunderous applause.

Everyone has gone to bed now, but my mind is still all to much of a whirl - and my nose throbs something fierce where Oxshott hit it. What an extraordinary, wild night we have had, but how many mysteries still remain: how did Henrietta manage to pull off such a brilliant disguise right under our noses, why has the Professor brought us here, what peculiar plan is our host carrying out, and who, exactly, is the wonderful Nicholas?

But for all my confusion, I have been working and thinking hard for the last two days and fighting for my life for the last two hours and I think, perhaps, I ought to try and rest a little.

Yours

Exhausted by still breathing
 
 
 

24th December

 My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 
I hope this letter finds you well. I genuinely, really do. I hope both you and Viscount Fox are well and happy and I wish you both congratulations on your engagement.
 
Perhaps once upon a time the news of your wedding in your last letter might have upset me, but I have realised that I can now echo the spirit, if not the actual content of your father's words when he heard the news:
 
"I should have known. Those two deserve each other."
 
In fact I have realised a good many things in the last day, some startling and simply startlingly obvious. I have realised, for example, that the man I have been calling Alf, is not really called Alf. I have realised why the Professor has brought us here. I have realised, finally, exactly who our host is, although I hardly believe it. I have realised... well, I am getting ahead of myself, rather.
 
I expect you realised about Nicholas some time ago, my Lady. Harry says she knew the moment we arrived (Henrietta has decided that she still likes the name 'Harry' even though she has dropped her disguise), so I can only assume that women's intuition is far superior to plodding male reasoning.

It certainly explains Oxshott's peculiar obsession with him, at least. It seems that, as one might have guessed, the Baronet was not the nicest of children and Nicholas had, on several occasions, to miss out on his stocking on account of his awful behaviour, and Oxshott had held a grudge ever since.

Not any longer, however: after the blow on the head from the Polar Bear, Roderick is a changed man - quite a pleasure to have around, in fact, although he does have a tendency to get under ones feet while one is trying to work - pushing his toy train around and making puffing noises.

Which brings us to the reason behind our whole expedition here.

Perhaps you have guessed that as well. It makes perfect sense, of course, once you accept that our host really is who he says he is and I'm afraid, after what I have seen and heard today, I am going to have to accept that, no matter how silly it seems.

Although how the Professor ever convinced your father of the fact, I cannot even conceive. Perhaps even someone as stern as Lord Daunt never quite stops believing it, somewhere in his heart, and, indeed, if you could have seen him today, helping to organise the loading of the sleigh, I do not think you would have recognised him. 

If I was to mention the words 'laughing' and 'singing' in conjunction with your father, for example, I think you would place them in a list of 'things he disapproves of' not 'things he might do on a regular basis with a giddy cheerfulness'. Not to mention 'doing a little dance' and 'slapping a private tutor on the back in a friendly manner'.

Both he and the Professor have been quite enchanted with the sleigh, of course, which is, after all, why we have come all this way. Apparently, the Professor believed that whatever it is that allows Nicholas to get letters from every child in the world without fail and then to visit them all, all in one night, could completely change modern communication and transport.

He would be right, of course, except that Nicholas insists that whatever it is only works for him and will not, cannot, be sold, loaned or used for anything other than what he already uses it for.

Your father, I think, has accepted that, but the Professor still seems reluctant to give up on his dream and keeps following everyone round, trying to take things apart and examine them and generally getting in the way.

Which is unfortunate, since Oxshott's shenanigans had already set us back on our timetable and we had a lot of toys to repair and restore ready for Nicholas' big night tonight.
 
You'll also probably have noticed how I said 'our timetable' there. The truth is, I won't be returning with your father and Professor Cumulus when Nicholas brings them back to you. Nicholas has offered Henrietta and I a place working with him and I'm pleased to say we have accepted.
 
And I'm even more pleased to say that that's not the only offer that Henrietta has accepted today. So that now I have congratulated you on your engagement, you can congratulate me on mine. Henrietta Hope has rather a lovely ring to it, don't you think.

Which is the most important thing I have realised, I think. While I, for all my adventures, will never be the kind of man that a young lady like you would marry, you, my Lady, are not the kind of wife a man like me would ever want, or, indeed, need.

But I find that I must, of all things, thankyou, my Lady, for your unkindness. If it had not been for your cruel words at the ball, at the very beginning of this expedition, I would never set out to discover what kind of man I was, and I would never have found out.

And I would never have discovered the most exciting adventure of all: life here at the North Pole with Mrs Harry Hope.
 
Anyway, I don't really have time to write much more, as I have to go and persuade Roderick to let me have to toy train he is playing with so that we can put it in his stocking for the morning - Nicholas seems to have decided that he can have it now.
 
And there are, of course, reindeer to be harnessed, lists of names to be checked, packages to be packaged and toys to be wrapped and a thousand and one things to do and prepare, tonight of all nights.
 
Yours
 
from Lapland on Christmas Eve,
 
Timothy Hope, Esq, no longer a Tutor
 
 
PS 'Tom' isn't his name at all, its a title, apparently: 'Tomte' in their language. And 'Alf' is just how they pronounce 'Elf' but I expect you had guessed that.
 
PPS And a very Merry Christmas to you all!