Alice-Miranda in the Alps by Jacqueline Harvey Page B

snowmobile.
    â€˜No, sir, leave it to me. I’ll look after him,’ Dolly said, bustling forward. ‘You go and enjoy your afternoon on the slopes.’
    â€˜I’ll come with you,’ Shilly offered.
    Dolly shook her head. ‘He doesn’t need both of us. I’ll make sure he’s okay, then head straight back to the hotel.’
    â€˜Excuse me, how far away is the hospital?’ Cecelia asked the track marshal.
    â€˜Only a few minutes,’ the man replied. ‘Faster if they put the siren on.’
    â€˜And is it far from Fanger’s Palace Hotel?’
    â€˜Not even a minute,’ the man said.
    â€˜Thank you.’ Cecelia smiled at him. ‘Well, at least Cyril doesn’t have to be taken down the mountain.’
    Dolly headed over to the waiting ambulance and climbed into the back with Cyril. He had been given some strong medication to relieve the pain and was now telling Dolly a long story about how he used to race billycarts with his brother as a boy.

Nina took the key from the small timber cupboard in the kitchen where every key for every lock in their rambling old house was neatly lined up, labelled and hanging on a hook. Labelling had been one of her mother’s obsessions, which was just as well as her father wouldn’t have had the first clue where anything was without it. She raced downstairs and through the red velvet curtain that partitioned the museum from the rest of the house. Nina unlockedthe wide timber door, making sure to leave it open. Her father would not be home for a while yet.
    The girl walked among the cabinets with their strange and wonderful workings. Most of the instruments in the museum were so rare that they didn’t exist anywhere else in the world. She stopped in front of her favourite piece.
    Nina thought back to the time when she was just five years old, visiting the market fair in Basel with her grandfather. She had been so excited to take the long journey by train, to wander past the colourful stalls and exotic foods. She remembered rounding the corner and seeing it for the very first time. A timber-and-glass case with miniature musicians – men and women dressed in once-fine clothes, monkeys with tarnished cymbals and ballerinas in moth-eaten tutus, their faces dull and grimy from the spectre of time. The sounds it made were terrible too. She had blocked her ears at the ghastly clash of percussion and organ pipes. She hadn’t known why they had travelled so far until that very case was delivered to their door several weeks later.
    For months Nina watched her grandfather work on it, first pulling the whole thing apart, then painstakingly putting it back together until,finally, it was perfect. Her mother had sewn new clothes for the figurines so they were once again suitably attired. The spinning ballerinas with bright eyes and rosy cheeks stood alongside monkeys with plush fur and gleaming cymbals. Nina’s father had looked in on the pair’s progress from time to time but he knew nothing of the inner workings of such contraptions. Sebastien Ebersold spent his days outdoors on the mountainside unlike Nina’s grandfather, who had been a watchmaker – a man who understood the precision required to restore such splendid creations.
    The unveiling had been spectacular. Her grandfather, wearing his lucky black hat, had called the family down one evening after dinner. Nina had leapt about all over the place as excited as the day she’d first spotted the cabinet in the market.
    â€˜Is it ready, Opa?’ she’d said. ‘Is it really ready?’
    â€˜I think so.’ He’d smiled at her, then walked around to the side of the cabinet and pulled the handle.
    It had begun slowly as though the figurines were awakening from a deep, enchanted sleep. The tempo gradually quickened and the men, women, ballerinas and monkeys were soon twirling and prancing and strumming and plucking as the tune took