The Harriet Bean 3-Book Omnibus Read Online Free PDF Page A

Aunt Veronica showed me which bunk I could have. She pointed out a cupboard where I could keep my shoes and in another cupboard she found me a spare toothbrush and soap dish.
    “I’ll get you some more clothes tomorrow,” she said. “One of the trapeze artists has a daughter just your size. She’ll lend us some clothes while you’re with me. Circus people always share.”
    I looked around the trailer. It seemed to me the ideal place to live and travel. It had everything, or so I thought, until I noticed something strange. All the other trailers in the field were motorized, which meant that they had engines to drive them along. As far as I could make out, there was no space in this trailer for an engine. There was a driver’s seat, steering wheel, and something that looked like a brake. But that was all.
    Aunt Veronica noticed me looking around and she must have guessed what was going through my mind.
    “Come,” she said to me. “Let me show you a secret.”
    She led me to the front of the trailer and opened a trapdoor immediately in front of the driver’s seat.
    “There,” she said. “That’s how it works.”
    I looked down. There, just below the level of the floor, was a large set of pedals, exactly like the pedals of a bicycle. I gasped with surprise.
    “Do you mean to say this trailer is pedal-powered?” I asked disbelievingly.
    “Yes,” said Aunt Veronica. “I find that it keeps my leg muscles in good shape, although sometimes it’s rather hard going on hills.”
    I was completely astounded. Was there no end to the feats of strength of this utterly amazing aunt?
    We got into our bunks, and Aunt Veronica turned the light out.
    “Goodnight, Harriet,” she said into the darkness. “And thank you for finding me.”
    I lay tucked warmly in my bunk, filled with happiness. For a while I listened to the sounds of the circus outside—the stamping of the horses’ feet in their pen as they settled for the night, the growl of a lion as it moved in its sleep. Then I drifted off to sleep myself, to dream that I was as strong as Aunt Veronicaand could do everything, or almost everything, that she could do.
    The next morning we sat and ate our breakfast on the steps of the trailer. The circus people got up very early and were bustling around, attending to the one-hundred-and-one morning tasks of a circus. From my seat on the steps, I watched the lion tamer, no longer wearing his splendid red lion-taming outfit but clad in a pair of scruffy pajamas. He took a large pail of meat to the edge of the lions’ cage and tossed their breakfast in to them.
    Aunt Veronica ate a very large breakfast.
    “I need it to keep my strength up,” she explained, as she dug into her fourteen-egg omelette. Then, when the eggs were finished, she ate seven or eight sausages, and followed them up with ten pieces of toast.
    “We will set off this morning,” she said, wiping her lips on a red-checked napkin she had spread on her lap. “With any luck, we shall meet up with your Aunt Harmonica tonight.”
    “But where is she?” I asked. “Do you know exactly where to find her?”
    Aunt Veronica nodded. “I haven’t seen her for a year or two,” she said. “But I know where she works. There’s an opera house not all that far away. She has a job there.”
    We got up and washed the breakfast dishes and stacked them away. Then Aunt Veronica left for a few minutes to tell the ringmaster that she was taking a vacation. I made my bunk in the trailer and swept the floor.
    When Aunt Veronica came back, I watched in fascination as she settled herself in the driver’s seat of the trailer and opened the trapdoor that exposed the pedals.
    “You sit in the back,” she said. “You’ll get a good view from the window.”
    And with that, she lowered her feet through the trapdoor, took a deep breath, and began to pedal.
    You would never have thought it possible. There we were in a trailer—not a big one, but a trailer nonetheless—and Aunt