Joan Aiken’s pacing may have bobbled in some of her later books, but it’s full speed ahead in The Witch of Clatteringshaws, which she raced to get done with the literal deadline of her own encroaching demise.

She has a lot of loose ends to wrap up in this book, chief among them the question of who will be the next King of England. Simon is currently saddled with the job, but he doesn’t want it, because all he wants to do is live a quiet life communing with animals and painting, and also he would like to marry Dido who has very definitively stated that she is unwilling to be queen.

It’s not entirely clear to me if she’d like to marry Simon, but she’s a good bro who doesn’t want to see Simon stuck on the throne, so she heads off to the north to chase up the only lead they’ve got on a possible alternative king. Apparently there’s an Aelfric somewhere up in Caledonia with a claim to the throne?

Spoilers: we never find Aelfric. From beginning to end we have no idea who this man is. Like the thought speech, which was so important in the Is books and never appears again, this one of many loose ends Joan has decided she doesn’t have time to bother with. As she finished this book a scant four months before her death, that’s fair enough.

Instead, Dido finds a Dickensian old person’s home (and let’s pause to admire Aiken’s breadth of Dickensian vision: Dickensian orphanages, Dickensian schools, Dickensian mines, apparently Dickensian mills in Midnight Is a Place which we haven’t read yet, and now Dickensian retirement homes). And at this home there is a boy, an orphan foundling who has been raised as a drudge, even though he arrived at the door wrapped in a cloth emblazoned with a golden crown…

( Spoilers )