Praise for The Good Thieves
‘A n amazing adventure story, told with sparkling style
and sleight of hand’
Jacqueline Wilson
‘A total showstopper of a story. Rundell’s finest yet’
Emma Carroll
‘A new Katherine Rundell book is always an event,
but this is another triumph and then some. A wick-
edly exciting heist with heart’
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
‘Likely to be the best children’s book you’ll read this
year’
The Times
‘Captivating … every inch of it is a delight’
Sunday Times
Praise for The Explorer
‘A wildly exciting adventure … One of our most tal-
ented writers for children’
Observer
‘Katherine Rundell is now unarguably in the first rank’
Philip Pullman
9781526624802_txt_print.indb 1 4/22/20 4:04 PM
‘Reading this delicious book is like eating electricity’
Sunday Times, Children’s Book of the Year
‘One of the most captivating books of the year’
Spectator
‘A n adventure story to die for … What a discovery’
The Times
‘I cannot imagine the child who wouldn’t be delighted
by it’
Independent
Praise for The Wolf Wilder
‘A triumph! Exciting, moving, highly original, fierce,
completely convincing’
Philip Pullman
‘The most exciting new children’s novel for a decade’
Independent
‘The kind of novel that reminds you why books are
worth reading and life is worth living’
Lauren St John
‘A Fabergé egg of a novel –rich, bright and perfect’
Robin Stevens
9781526624802_txt_print.indb 2 4/22/20 4:04 PM
9781526624802_txt_print.indb 3 4/22/20 4:04 PM
Books by Katherine Rundell
The Girl Savage
Rooftoppers
The Wolf Wilder
The Explorer
The Good Thieves
For younger readers
One Christmas Wish
For adult readers
Why You Should Read Children’s Books,
Even Though You Are So Old and Wise
9781526624802_txt_print.indb 4 4/22/20 4:04 PM
K AT H E R I N E
RUNDELL
Illustrated
by
M A R I E -A L I C E HA R EL
9781526624802_front_app.indd 5 4/23/20 6:43 PM
BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP, UK
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN’S BOOKS and the Diana logo
are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Faber and Faber Limited
This edition published in Great Britain in 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Text copyright © Katherine Rundell, 2013
Illustrations copyright © Marie-Alice Harel, 2020
Introduction copyright © Katherine Rundell, 2020
Katherine Rundell and Marie-Alice Harel have asserted their rights under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as
Author and Illustrator of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: PB: 978-1-5266-2480-2; eBook: 978-1-5266-2479-6
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Typeset by Westchester Publishing Services
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters
9781526624802_txt_print.indb 6 4/22/20 4:04 PM
To my brother, with love
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introduction
T he idea for Rooftoppers came, without warning,
while I was on a rooftop. When I was twenty-one
I became a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford,
which was founded in 1438: a building with tall
towers and some very stern-looking gargoyles. I have
always loved to climb – trees and rocks and occasion-
ally drainpipes – and when I first arrived there, I
found out about a secret trapdoor that could take you,
with a jump and a scramble, up on to the roof. I was
up there climbing among the gargoyles one night (it
had to be dark, as it’s technically very illegal) when I
found a dusty old beer bottle in the corner by the
parapet. It made me wonder: what if somebody had
viii
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been living up here, close to the sky, and we didn’t
know?
That’s how it began: with a what if. So many stories
have a what if at their core: What if you had a scar on
your forehead and had to save the world from an evil
wizard? What if you went through a wardrobe and on
the other side there was unfathomable beauty – and
snow, and a witch, and a lion? What then? What
would happen next? What if there really were people
living up on the rooftop of an old college? What if
there were people living secret rooftop lives all over
the world? What if?
I have always loved being up high; I love aero-
planes, and mountains, and flying on the flying
trapeze. I’ve always been shy, and I love the idea of
seeing the world when it can’t see you. When I was
younger, I taught myself to walk on a tightrope – I
find the feeling of focus and balance and height it
brings a miraculous thing. I practised for many years
(breaking only a couple of toes in the process) and
can now walk a wire backwards and forwards, and in
high-heeled shoes. (This is not, alas, a particularly
ix
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useful skill in the real world.) So I knew I wanted
Rooftoppers to have a tightrope-
walking boy in it:
somebody who made it look as if gravity didn’t apply
to him.
Most of all, I wanted Rooftoppers to be about reck-
lessly, riotously brave people – b
ecause I think, both
in real life and fiction, they do us all a service: there is
so much optimism and hope in their daring that it
spreads out into the world around them. I wanted to
write a book about children’s brilliance and boldness,
about children who charge across the rooftops of
Paris, leaping and somersaulting, searching, hunt-
ing. I wanted to write an adventure story that would
make the children who read it want to go on an adven-
ture: a book that would say we should never ignore a
possible.
Katherine Rundell, March 2020
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chapter one
O n the morning of its first birthday, a baby was
found floating in a cello case in the middle of the
English Channel.
It was the only living thing for miles. Just the baby,
and some dining-room chairs, and the tip of a ship dis-
appearing into the ocean. There had been music in
the dining hall, and it was music so loud and so good
that nobody had noticed the water flooding in over the
carpet. The violins went on sawing for some time after
the screaming had begun. Sometimes the shriek of a
passenger would duet with a high C.
The baby was found wrapped for warmth in the
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musical score of a Beethoven symphony. It had drifted
almost a mile from the ship, and was the last to be
rescued. The man who lifted it into the rescue boat
was a fellow passenger, and a scholar. It is a scholar’s
job to notice things. He noticed that it was a girl, with
hair the colour of lightning, and the smile of a shy
person.
Think of night-time with a speaking voice. Or think
how moonlight might talk, or think of ink, if ink had
vocal cords. Give those things a narrow aristocratic
face with hooked eyebrows, and long arms and legs,
and that is what the baby saw as she was lifted out
of her cello case and up into safety. His name was
Charles Maxim, and he determined, as he held her in
his large hands –at arm’s length, as he would a leaky
flowerpot –that he would keep her.
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The baby was almost certainly one year old. They
knew this because of the red rosette pinned to her
front, which read, ‘1!’
‘Or rather,’ said Charles Maxim, ‘the child is either
one year old, or she has come first in a competition. I
believe babies are rarely keen participants in competi-
tive sport. Shall we therefore assume it is the former?’
The girl held on to his earlobe with a grubby finger
and thumb. ‘Happy birthday, my child,’ he said.
Charles did not only give the baby a birthday. He
also gave her a name. He chose Sophie, on that first
day, on the grounds that nobody could possibly object
to it. ‘Your day has been dramatic and extraordinary
enough, child,’ he said. ‘It might be best to have the
most ordinary name available. You can be Mary, or
Betty, or Sophie. Or, at a stretch, Mildred. Your choice.’
Sophie had smiled when he said ‘Sophie’, so Sophie it
was. Then he fetched his coat, and folded her up in
it, and took her home in a carriage. It rained a little,
but it did not worry either of them. Charles did not
generally notice the weather, and Sophie had already
survived a lot of water that day.
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Charles had never really known a child before. He
told Sophie as much on the way home: ‘I do, I’m afraid,
understand books far more readily than I understand
people. Books are so easy to get along with.’ The car-
riage ride took four hours; Charles held Sophie on the
very edge of his knee, and told her about himself, as
though she were an acquaintance at a tea party. He was
thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke Eng-
lish to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds.
He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and
ride a horse at the same time. ‘But I will be more
careful,’ he said, ‘now that there is you, little cello
child.’ Charles’s home was beautiful, but it was not
safe; it was all staircases and slippery floorboards and
sharp corners. ‘I’ll buy some smaller chairs,’ he said.
‘And we’ll have thick red carpets! Although –how does
one go about acquiring carpets? I don’t suppose you
know, Sophie?’
Unsurprisingly, Sophie did not answer. She was too
young to talk; and she was asleep.
She woke when they drew up in a street smelling
of trees and horse dung. Sophie loved the house at first
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sight. The bricks were painted the brightest white in
London, and shone even in the dark. The basement
was used to store the overflow of books and paintings
and several brands of spiders; and the roof belonged
to the birds. Charles lived in the space in between.
At home, after a hot bath in front of the stove,
Sophie looked very white and fragile. Charles had not
known that a baby was so terrifyingly tiny a thing. She
felt too small in his arms. He was almost relieved when
there was a knock at the door; he laid Sophie down
carefully on a chair, with a Shakespearean play as a
booster seat, and went up the stairs two at a time.
When he returned, he was accompanied by a large
grey-haired woman; Hamlet was slightly damp, and
Sophie was looking embarrassed. Charles scooped her
up, and set her down –hesitating first over an umbrella
stand in a corner, and then the top of the stove –inside
the sink. He smiled, and his eyebrows and eyes smiled
too. ‘Please don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We all have accidents,
Sophie.’ Then he bowed at the woman. ‘Let me intro-
duce you. Sophie, this is Miss Eliot, from the National
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Childcare Agency. Miss Eliot, this is Sophie, from the
ocean.’
The woman sighed –an official sort of sigh, it would
have sounded, from Sophie’s place in the sink –and
frowned, and pulled clean clothes from a parcel. ‘Give
her to me.’
Charles took the clothes from her. ‘I took this child
from the sea, madam.’ Sophie watched, with large
eyes. ‘She has nobody to keep her safe. Whether I like
it or not, she is my responsibility.’
‘Not forever.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The child is your ward. She is not your daughter.’
This was the sort of woman who spoke in italics. You
would be willing to lay bets that her hobby was organ-
ising people. ‘This is a temporary arrangement.’
‘I beg to differ,’ said Charles. ‘But we can fight about
that later. The child is cold.’ He handed the vest to
Sophie, who sucked on it. He took it back and put it
on for her. Then he hefted her in his arms, as though
about to guess her weight at a fair, and looked at her
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closely. ‘You see? She seems a very intelligent baby.’
Sophie’s fingers, he saw, were long and thin, and clever.
‘A nd she has hair the colour of lightning. How could
you possibly resist her?’
‘I’ll have to come round, to check on her, and I really
don’t have the time to spare. A man can’t do this kind
of thing alone.’
‘Certainly, please do come,’ said Charles –and he
added, as if he couldn’t stop himself, ‘if you feel that
you absolutely can’t stay away. I will endeavour to be
grateful. But this child is my responsibility. Do you
understand?’
‘But it’s a child! You’re a man!’
‘Your powers of observation are formidable,’ said
Charles. ‘You are a credit to your optician.’
‘But what are you going to do with her?’
Charles looked bewildered. ‘I am going to love her.
That should be enough, if the poetry I’ve read is
anything to go by.’ Charles handed Sophie a red apple;
then took it back, and rubbed it on his sleeve until he
could see his face in it. He said, ‘I am sure the secrets
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of childcare, dark and mysterious though they no doubt
are, are not impenetrable.’
Charles set the baby on his knee, handed her the
apple, and began to read out loud to her from A Mid-
summer Night’s Dream.
It was not, perhaps, the perfect way to begin a new
life, but it showed potential.
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