“I’m here,” Roddy said sleepily from behind me. “What are you two little beasts doing screaming on the doorstep at this hour of the morning?”
“Roddy, this huge Indian boy is hurting us!” Isadora whined.
“You probably deserve it,” Roddy retorted. “Why are you here? Did Judith bring you?”
One twin promptly went sweet and gentle, and the other crisply efficient. “My dear,” the gentle one said sadly, “Judith has vanished. So has Heppy.”
“We begged a lift from Mrs. Simpson,” stated the efficient one. “We are so resourceful.”
Then they did it the other way round. I felt as if my eyes were crossing.
Roddy sighed. “You’d better let them in,” she said to me. “I’ve been afraid this might have happened.”
I let go of the Izzys willingly. They immediately twinkled in past me on tiptoes, wafting their arms this way and that like ballet dancers.
“What have you done with your dog?” Grundo boomed at them as they wafted past him.
“With the vicar,” an Izzy said over her shoulder, wafting. “Food,” she added, in tones of deep longing.
“She wanted to keep us, too,” said the other, “but we slipped away. Kitchen,” she added yearningly.
They broke into a gallop and rushed to the kitchen. By the time we got there, they had found every packet of cereal in the place and were busily pouring vast heaps of breakfast food into bowls, along with all the milk there was. Puffed rice had gone all over the floor, and they had upset my coffee in it. I dourly got a cloth and mopped it all up, while Grundo put the kettle on again.
“We’d better have toast,” Roddy said irritably. “It’s no good expecting any sense out of those two until they’ve fed their horrible little faces.”
She was very pale, with blue patches under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept, and she seemed tenser than ever. I did wish she was not so tense all the time. That is the unexpected trouble with love affairs, I thought as I made more coffee. You can fancy a girl like mad, but more than just the look of her comes into it. You find yourself having to allow for her personality, too. At five-thirty in the morning.
“They’re your cousins, are they?” I said, nodding at the Izzys as they guzzled.
“Yes,” she said. “Dora’s sister’s twins. They’re awful.”
At least she had the sense to see that, I thought. None of that blood being thicker than water nonsense with Roddy. It seemed to be one thing we had in common, even if it wasn’t much of a basis for a love affair. I was rather surprised, as I put the coffee on the table as far away from the Izzys as possible, that I still meant to have a love affair. It was not as if I’d had any encouragement.
Around this point Toby put his sleepy face into the kitchen, saw the Izzys, and went pale. “Oh, no!” he said. “Not them now! I’m going to see to the goat.” And he went.
Grundo chuckled. “A hundred percent vote against,” he said. “Here’s some toast, and you’re to eat it, Roddy.”
“Did I say I wouldn’t?” she snapped.
“No,” he grunted. “You looked at it.” He waited until Roddy had taken a mouthful and turned to the Izzys. “Now, tell us. How did Heppy and Judith vanish? When?”
Isadora looked up from filling her bowl for the fourth time. “We need more milk and some toast first.”
“You’ve had all the milk,” I said.
“Then our lips are sealed,” said Ilsabil.
“No, they are not,” Roddy said. “One of you is to make some toast while the other talks.” She took a large bite of toast. “Or fleas,” she said with her mouth full.
The Izzys exchanged gentle, angelic looks. “We don’t understand,” said Ilsabil, “why you aren’t nice to us.”
“None of you responds to our great charm,” said Isadora.
“What great charm?” I said. “If you want people to be nice to you, you have to be nice to them. Are you going to tell us what happened or shall I bang your heads together?”
They stared at me haughtily. After a bit Ilsabil flounced up and made sulky efforts to cut bread.
“We don’t really know,” Isadora said, quite as sulky. “It was just before supper, and we were in the garden. Heppy and Judith were being boring, making a fuss about trying to talk to the Regalia, so we stayed outside. And we thought we heard a horse whinny inside the house. And Heppy shouted a bit, but she does that a lot. We thought she was shouting at the Regalia again, so we took no notice....”