However, the jewels that were left were quite enough to pay for everything.
The suddenness with which all the ring-magic was undone was such a shock to everyone concerned that they now almost doubt that any magic ever happened.
But it is certain that Lord Yalding married the French governess and that a plain gold ring was used in the ceremony, and this, if you come to think of it, could be no other than the magic ring, turned, by that last wish, into a charm to keep him and his wife together for ever.
Also, if all this story is nonsense and a make-up—if Gerald and Jimmy and Kathleen and Mabel have merely imposed on my trusting nature by a pack of unlikely inventions, how do you account for the paragraph which appeared in the evening papers the day after the magic of the moon-rising?“MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF A
WELL-KNOWN CITY MAN,”
it said, and then went on to say how a gentleman, well known and much respected in financial circles, had vanished, leaving no trace.
“Mr. U. W Ugli,” the papers continued, “had remained late, working at his office as was his occasional habit. The office door was found locked, and on its being broken open the clothes of the unfortunate gentleman were found in a heap on the floor, together with an umbrella, a walking stick, a golf club, and, curiously enough, a feather brush, such as housemaids use for dusting. Of his body, however, there was no trace. The police are stated to have a clue.”
If they have, they have kept it to themselves. But I do not think they can have a clue, because, of course, that respected gentleman was the Ugly-Wugly who became real when, in search of a really good hotel, he got into the Hall of Granted Wishes. And if none of this story ever happened, how is it that those four children are such friends with Lord and Lady Yalding, and stay at The Towers almost every holidays?
It is all very well for all of them to pretend that the whole of this story is my own invention: facts are facts, and you can’t explain them away.
ENDNOTES
Five Children and It
1 (p. 3) To John Bland: The “five children” of the novel are loosely based on Nesbit’s own. John Bland (“The Lamb”) was Nesbit’s fifth, born when the others were already in their teens. See the introduction (p. xxii) for an account of the circumstances surrounding his birth.
2 (p. 20) if you had three wishes given you, and have despised the old man and his wife in the black-pudding story: In this version of the fairy tale of “the three wishes,” a man who dislikes his wife’s cooking wishes for a helping of black pudding, to which she reacts by wishing the pudding on his nose. This requires the man to use the third and final wish to undo the effects of the second. See the introduction for a discussion of the significance of this fairy tale, which exists in many versions around the world.
3 (p. 84) “What was it Sir Philip Sidney said when the soldier wouldn’t stand him a drink?”: Like those of Shakespeare, the sonnets of soldier and statesman Philip Sidney (1554-1586) are considered among the finest of the Elizabethan age. In this passage, Cyril inverts a line attributed to Sidney: Wounded and dying on the battlefield, Sidney supposedly handed his water bottle to another wounded soldier with the words “Thy need is greater than mine.”
4 (p. 107) he began boldly enough, with a sentence straight out of Ralph de Courcy; or, The Boy Crusader: Ralph de Courcy is a character in A March on London: Being a Story of Wat Tyler’s Insurrection (1897), by the prolific G.A. (GeorgeAlfred) Henty (1832-1902). Known as “the boys’ own historian,” he wrote more than one hundred historical novels featuring young men who learn manly virtues in the heat of significant historical conflicts. The Boy Crusader may be a reference to his Winning His Spurs: A Tale of the Crusades (1882), which was republished the following year as The Boy Knight, Who Won His Spurs Fighting with King Richard of England: A Tale of the Crusaders.
5 (p. 142) One gentleman ... offered Robert, in an obliging whisper, ten pounds a week to appear at the Crystal Palace: A huge iron and glass building, the Crystal Palace, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton (1801-1865), originally housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was subsequently moved to Sydenham Hill, overlooking London, and expanded; over the years its spectacular exhibits drew many thousands of visitors, including Nesbit and her family. It was destroyed by fire in 1936.
6 (p. 144) “Robert and I are dressed the same. We’ll manage somehow, like Sydney Carton did”: At the end of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Sydney Carton contrives an elaborate self-sacrificial plan to rescue his condemned look-alike, Charles Darnay, from a French prison by switching places with him.
7 (p. 182) “I wish Martha to forget about the diamond ring, and mother to forget about the keeper cleaning the windows.” “It’s like ‘Brass Bottle’,” said Jane: Nesbit is acknowledging the influence of The Brass Bottle (1900), a fantasy novel by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), who wrote under the pseudonym F. Anstey. In this novel, a modern architect buys an antique brass bottle and discovers that it contains a genie. The latter’s beneficence is so excessive that it backfires at every turn, and the exasperated architect ends up wishing it to “kindly obliterate all recollection of yourself and the brass bottle from the minds of every human being who has had anything to do with you or it” (see The Brass Bottle, London: Penguin, 1946, p. 218).
The Enchanted Castle
1 (p. 193) assuming a gentle, pleading expression, resembling that of the late little Lord Fauntleroy—who must, by the way, be quite old now, and an awful prig: A novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) was immensely popular in its time. The book’s title character later came to epitomize (somewhat unfairly) a certain type of overdressed and insufferably polite young man.
2 (p. 205) Beyond the rose garden was a yew hedge with an arch cut in it, and it was the beginning of a maze like the one in Hampton Court: The renowned hedge maze at Hampton Court, a former royal palace in an outer borough of London, was planted for William of Orange between 1689 and 1695.
3 (p. 225) “I was playing at Fair Rosamond first, and then I heard you talking in the maze”: Rosamond, or Rosamund, Clifford (c.1140-c.1176) was a mistress of Henry II (1133-1189). According to one legend, she was hidden in the labyrinthine bower of a secret garden, but was tracked down and killed by Henry’s jealous wife, Eleanor of Aquitane (c.1 122-1204). In one version of the story, it is the equivalent of Ariadne’s thread that enables the Queen and her henchman to penetrate the maze.
4 (p. 240) “Like La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and he does not want to be found in future ages alone and palely loitering in the middle of sedge and things”: John Keats’s 1819 ballad describes an encounter between a man and an enchanted beauty who has left him, like others before him, in a forlorn state. Gerald’s reference to being found alone in the sedge recalls the last lines of the first and final stanzas: “Alone and palely loitering? / The sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing.”