The Witch of Clatteringshaws

[sawyl]

And so I've finally arrived at The Witch of Clatteringshaws, Joan Aiken's very last Willoughby Chase novel published after her death in 2004. The tone of the book is closer to its immediate predecessor, Midwinter Nightingales, than anything else in the series. From Aiken's afterword it is clear that she was aware of her failing strength and unwilling to risk embarking on a book that might get left unfinished, but that she still wanted to tidy up the last few loose ends of Simon & Dido and their adventures.

Simon, now the king, is extremely keen to try find a way to renounce his throne. Dido, eager to get Simon back, sets off for Clatteringshaws in search of a claimant said to be concealed in the village. On the way past Willoughby Chase she picks up Piers Ivanhoe le Guichet Crackenthrope, a former pupil of Fogrum Hall School who'd been staying with the Greens since surviving the events of Midwinter Nightingale. On their arrival in Scotland the pair find themselves required to work in Mrs McClan's dubious boarding house, where the landlady's principal method of enriching herself seems to involve bumping off her elderly residents, in order to discover whether their hosts' foster son really is in line to inherit the throne of England.

Horrified by the prospect of being married off to an eight foot Finnish princess with a passion for Egyptian antiquities, Simon seizes the chance to head north with his tiny army to confront a force of invading Wends. Instead of fighting Simon agrees to play the Wendish king at Hnefatefl and sees the raiders safely exiled to a valley where they plan to settle down and make cheese. With the intermittent help of the Witch of Clatteringshaws, who just happens to be the cousin of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the long-standing mystery of the last words St Arfish, St Ardust, and St Arling is finally cleared up, an heir is found, Simon gets off the hook, and the story ends with an army singing the songs of Abednego Twite.

While it's nice to have our heroes tales completed, there are a number of jumps in plot — such as the casual resolution of the problem of the invading Wends — that Aiken admits in her afterword were necessary to keep the story short enough to finish:

The end came too quickly, said the editors. Yes, it did, and I apologize. But a speedy end is better than a half-finished story.

Amen to that.