Instead, the lady’s pledge would vow to fashion petticoats into sails for rafts, or bravely brandish parasols as weapons, or learn how to throw a fan so that it could knock a bandit down from fifty feet away. There was plenty of stuff, Stella was sure, that she could think of for the lady’s pledge, which would be far more useful than collar-pressing and moustache-grooming.
‘Here is your explorer’s cloak,’ President Fogg said, handing Stella a smaller version of Felix’s pale blue one, complete with a tiny polar bear stitched onto the front. ‘And your explorer’s bag.’ He handed her a blue satchel, also emblazoned with the club’s polar bear motif. Then they shook hands and Felix said they must go or they would miss the ship.
Stella felt a great blazing glow of happiness as she slipped the warm explorer’s cloak around her shoulders and followed Felix out to the waiting sleigh. Once settled inside, with the door closed and the brisk clip-clop of the unicorns’ hooves filling the air, Stella lost no time in exploring the contents of her explorer’s bag.
She was a little disappointed to find that it mostly contained moustache wax and beard oil, along with various other ointments, salves and unguents, and a folding pocket moustache comb that was quite a handsome object, but regardless, not much good to Stella.
‘Don’t worry about that stuff,’ Felix said when Stella complained about it. ‘It’s all quite useless. We’ll sort you out with proper supplies once we’re back on the ship.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next couple of days on the Bold Adventurer seemed to race by in a flash. As soon as the ship set sail, Felix was crippled with sea sickness once again, leaving Stella more or less to her own devices. She spent a fair amount of her time with Shay, helping him to look after the wolves, yaks and unicorns, or watching him practise with his boomerang – a fantastic object that Stella coveted most ardently. Shay would stand on deck, Koa at his heels, and throw it out to sea and, somehow, it always came back to his waiting hand. Stella asked if she could try but Shay told her, apologetically, that it took a lot of practice to get it right and, if she were to throw it away from the ship, the odds were that it would fall into the waves and never be seen again.
On the morning of the third day, Felix was finally well enough to get out of bed without being in immediate danger of needing a bucket.
‘What have you been up to the last couple of days?’ he quizzed Stella, whilst standing in front of the mirror to carefully straighten his bow tie. ‘I’ve hardly seen you.’
‘Well, you could hardly expect me to sit around listening to you groaning all day,’ she replied. ‘It would be enough to drive anyone round the twist.’
‘Be that as it may,’ Felix replied. ‘You might have checked in with me from time to time.’
‘I did check in, but every time I came back you were asleep. Or in the bathroom. Or lying with your head under the pillow making that moaning sound.’
Felix bent down to rummage under the bunk for his missing shoe, and Stella distinctly heard him mutter something about travelling by dirigible next time.
‘I’ve always wanted to travel by dirigible,’ Stella said.
‘Here it is.’ Felix straightened up with the missing shoe. ‘Come on. Let’s go and have some breakfast.’
Stella didn’t see her friend, Beanie, until a few days into the voyage, when his uncle finally forced him to take a break from reading and made him go up on deck for some fresh air. Beanie was studying to be a medic, and was so intensely interested in the subject that he could easily sit and read one of his textbooks for hours and hours. His uncle, Professor Benedict Boscombe Smith, wasn’t too keen on reading, however, and felt that the best way to learn was by doing (even if you weren’t completely sure what you were actually supposed to be doing). He was a booming, boisterous man, who, unfortunately, seemed to expect everyone else to be as booming and boisterous as he was. Stella had once heard him complaining about his nephew on a visit to Felix.
‘He’s just not like other children,’ he’d said. ‘He won’t let anyone hug him, not even his mother. No doubt it’s the elf blood in him, giving him all these strange ideas and fancies and whimsies. You saw the way he fussed over those carrots at the dinner table, lining them up in size-order before he ate them. It’s not normal.’
‘My dear Benedict, I’m sure I have no idea what “normal” even means. And does it really matter how the boy chooses to eat his carrots in the grand scheme of things?’ Felix asked.
‘It’s how he got that ridiculous nickname, you know,’ Professor Smith went on, as if Felix hadn’t spoken. ‘He loves jellybeans – goes nuts over them – so his mother puts a packet in his lunchbox every day. But, rather than just eating them, he separates the beans into colour groups first. It’s the most ridiculous thing you ever saw, and now they all call him Beanie.’
‘Well, there are worse things they could call him. Besides, I think you’re really placing too much importance on—’
‘Plus he has this crackbrained idea that he’s going to be the first explorer to reach the other side of the Black Ice Bridge,’ Professor Smith said. ‘Even though everyone knows it can’t be done. Every explorer who’s ever attempted it, including the boy’s own father, has vanished without a trace. It’s his mother’s fault – elves will have these strange ideas – but she’s
