For my family.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

1. The Longhouse

2. Kitsa Goes Missing

3. Hidden in the Thatch

4. Jessica Charlotte’s Notebook

5. Family Stuff

6. Pouring the Lead

7. The Day of the Parade

8. The Old Bottle

9. Frederick

10. Patrick

11. Tom

12. Jenny

13. The Fall

14. The Cupboard

15. In the Cashbox

16. The Jewel Case

17. A Sudden Emergency

18. The Sleeping Lady

19. Maria’s Bequest

Epilogue: A Funeral – and After

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

1
The Longhouse

“But Mum, I don’t want to move house again!”

Omri’s mother stared at him with her mouth slightly ajar. She turned away for a moment as if she simply couldn’t think of a thing to say, and then swiftly turned back.

“Omri, you know what, you’re incredible. Ever since we moved here you’ve done nothing but moan. You hated the district, you hated the street, you hated the house—”

“I never said I hated the house! I like the house. I love the garden. Anyway, even if I did hate it, I wouldn’t want to move. All that packing and general hassle last time, it was awful! Why do we have to move again?”

“Listen, darling. You remember the freak storm?”

Omri stared at her. Remember it? Could anyone who’d survived it possibly ever forget it?

“Stupid me, of course you do, I only meant— well, it wrecked the greenhouse—”

“It wrecked my room—”

“The chimney fell off, the roof had to be—”

“But Mum, that was all months ago. It’s all been mended, pretty well.”

“At vast cost,” put in his father, who was sitting at the breakfast-room table writing out a description of their house. It was coming home unexpectedly early and catching his father on the phone to an estate agent that had tipped Omri off that his parents were thinking about selling and moving.

“Yes, and now with a new roof and everything, it’s a good time to sell. Besides, Dad really hates living in town.”

Now it was Omri’s turn to have his mouth hanging open.

“You mean we’re not going to live in London?”

“No. We’re going to live in the country.”

Omri sat up sharply. “The country!” he almost shouted, as dismayed as if his father had announced they were going to live at the bottom of the sea.

“Yes, dear, the country,” said his mother. “That big green place with all the trees - you know, you’ve seen it through the car window when we’ve been racing from one hideous town to another.”

Omri ignored her sarcasm. “Would it be Kent?” His best friend, Patrick, lived in Kent.

“No.”

That put the lid on any thoughts that it might not be so bad.

“But - but - are we just moving because of Dad?”

“Certainly not,” his father said promptly. “We’re also moving because the local high school, which your brothers already go to and which you will, in theory, be starting at in September, is a sink. It’s enough that two of my sons come home two days out of five looking as if they’ve fallen under a bus. It’s enough that Gillon’s marks are in steady decline. I’m not going to compound my mistake by sending you there too.”

But Omri had stopped listening and was halfway to the door.

“Do Adiel and Gillon know?”

“We were going to have a family conference tonight after supper. Only you wrung it out of me,” said his father. “And you don’t have to go telling them straight away—”

But Omri was already charging up the stairs. At the top he burst into the first room he came to, which was Gillon’s.

“We’re going to live in the country!” he exploded.

Gillon, who had jumped up guiltily from his bed (where he’d been lying reading a magazine instead of doing homework) because he thought it was a parent, slumped back again and stared at Omri, stunned.

“The country!” he repeated in exactly the same tone as Omri had used. “We can’t be! What’ll we do there? There’s nothing to do in the country, we’ll be bored out of our minds!”

But Omri had already vanished and was beating on Adiel’s door. Adiel really was doing homework, and had locked his door to keep out intruders.

“Get lost!” he yelled from his desk.

“Ad, listen! Dad’s just told me. We’re going to live in the country!”

There was a pause, then the bolt was drawn, the door opened, and Adiel’s face appeared. He stared at Omri in silence for a few seconds.

“Good,” he said maddeningly, and shut the door in his face.

“Are you crazy?” Omri called through the door. Gillon had come out and was standing next to him.

“He said ‘good’!” Omri told him indignantly.

“Ask him if he’s crazy.”

“I just have!”

“Are you crazy?” Gillon shouted at the top of his voice through the door.

“Boys, stop that row, that’s enough! Come down and we’ll talk about it!” came their father’s irritated voice from the foot of the stairs.

Omri and Gillon trailed down and back into the breakfast room. After a few minutes, Adiel, looking studiedly unconcerned, joined them.

“Now then. Listen first, then blow your tops, okay? This house, due to a fluke in the housing market, is suddenly worth a lot of money.”

“How much?” said Gillon, for whom money was the most important thing in life.

“A lot more than we paid for it. Just because it’s in London and lots of people, whom I can only regard as totally insane, want to live in London.”

“And at the precise moment when we were thinking of selling anyway,” put in their mother eagerly, “something really wonderful has happened. I’ve inherited a lovely house.”

“Inherited? Does that mean we get it for nothing?”

“Yes! Isn’t it incredible?”

“But what’s it like? Have you seen it?”

“Well, er - no, not yet. But it sounds beautiful. Not as big as this one—”

“WHAT!” all the boys - even Adiel - yelled in chorus.

“But that won’t matter,” put in their father quickly, “because we will not be surrounded on all sides by this stinking, overcrowded, crime-ridden city where you can’t snatch a breath of clean air or walk ten yards without being mugged—”

“Lionel, there’s no need to exaggerate, none of us has ever been mugged—”

“—Or at least tripping over litter, and we will live in peace and safety and beauty, in a much nicer, if somewhat smaller, house with much more land, and we’ll have a better life. Now what on this polluted earth, may I ask, is wrong with that?”

Silence. Then Adiel said, “Sounds okay to me. Only where would we go to school?”

Their father and mother gave each other a little married look. Their father cleared his throat and said, “Well. What would you say to boarding?”

He was looking only at Adiel when he said it, and Adiel didn’t flinch. But Gillon gave a great screech and fell off his chair onto the floor, where he lay spread-eagled and twitching.

“Oh, get up,” said his mother, hauling on one arm. “You clown. He didn’t mean you.”

Gillon sat up sharply.

“He didn’t? Why not? Aren’t I good enough to go to boarding school?”

“No,” said Adiel. “At boarding school you’re not only expected to work, you have to keep your room tidy. You’d be kicked out in a week.”

Gillon uttered a short word under his breath and slumped back onto the floor. From there he said, “I suppose we couldn’t have a dog.”

“A dog!” exclaimed Omri. “What about Kitsa?” Kitsa was his cat.

“It would eat her,” said Gillon cheerfully. “Bit of a laugh, eh?” He sat up again. “It’d be good, we might get a rottweiler and then it would eat you, too.”

“What we might actually get,” remarked their mother, “is a pony.”

The boys all looked at one another in bewilderment. None of them had ever shown the faintest interest in riding. Only for Omri did the idea of a horse have any associations. But they were very pleasant ones.

He said slowly, “That might be all right. I wouldn’t mind that.”

“Are you crazy? You’ve never even sat on a horse!” said Gillon.

“I’d like to, though,” said Omri.

His vision of ‘the country’ as a barren wilderness devoid of all entertainment blurred a little, and out of the mist rode a familiar figure: an American Indian, seated astride a strong, alert brown pony, with his hand raised in stern greeting. He cocked one buckskin-clad leg over the pony’s neck and slid to the ground, where he stood knee-deep in lush English grass. What was odd was, in Omri’s vision, he was the same size as Omri - well, bigger, obviously, because he was a man. The odd thing about this was that Omri had only ever seen him small. But often in Omri’s night- and day- dreams, he appeared full size.

Now, in the daydream, the Indian made a stirrup of both hands and gestured with his head. Without hesitating, Omri ran up to him, put his left foot in the hands and felt himself lifted. A moment later he was on the pony’s warm back.

It felt terrific. He looked down at the Indian - his friend - and the Indian narrowed his black eyes at him approvingly and gestured with both fists. Omri understood him instantly and echoed that squeezing movement with his legs. The pony started forward…

“What are you grinning at?” asked Adiel, who was watching him. “You’ve got your loopy look.”

Omri hastily banished Little Bull from his mind and rearranged his face into solemn lines. “Nothing, I was just thinking. And where would me and Gillon go to school?”

“Gillon and I,” corrected his father between his teeth for the three thousandth time. “Locally. We’re looking into it now.”

“It’ll be some tinny little country school with eight pupils,” said Gillon.

“Oh, come on, boys, cheer up. It won’t happen till the summer at the very earliest. And meanwhile there’s all the fun of going to see our new place. We’re going this weekend.”

“Is it by the sea?”

“Not far — about six miles.”

Gillon scrambled up. His eyes were on Omri. In them, Omri discerned a brotherly signal: might not be so bad, what d’you think? Omri gave an almost imperceptible nod. His heart felt suddenly, unaccountably light.

*

Visiting the new house was quite a lot of fun, apart from the long car journey, which was obviously hard to take, especially as their parents had recently gone on a health kick and flatly refused to take them to motorway service stops where they insisted you could only buy junk food. They had to wait till they were off the motorway, by which time the pubs had stopped serving lunch and the next meal would be tea. However, by the time they found a tea place they were all so hungry that health was forgotten and they stuffed themselves with tea cakes and scones and thick cream and strawberry jam and flapjacks till they nearly burst. They might as well have had the hamburger-and-chips meal in the first place.

On the way again, Omri asked, “Who did you inherit this house from?”

“Some cousin I never knew existed. An old, old man who died recently without leaving a will. It seems I’m his nearest relative. The lawyers contacted me and said I was to have the house. Bit of luck, eh?”

“Let’s wait till we’ve seen it,” said Gillon, never one to see the bright side until he was forced to.

The house was outside a village in deepest Dorset. It took four hours to get there, and find it. After passing through a mysterious dark tunnel they drew up at last beside a big gate in a lane. There was no sign of the house, which was screened from the road by a high hedge of mixed wild trees and shrubs, not like London hedges, which tended all to be made of the same thing.

They entered through another gate, a small one, and went up a path. The first thing that struck them was how incredibly different it all was from London. The boys could hardly grasp the fact that they were actually going to live in a place like this, surrounded by open countryside, with no other houses in sight. They felt weird about it, as if they were on another planet.

The details in the lawyers’ letter had talked about ‘an acre of land, outbuildings, a paddock, and a small wood running down to a river that borders the property’. They stood on the overgrown lawn and stared round them in wonderment. In the distance were rounded hills, some with trees crowning them, and nearer were sloping fields. It was indeed ‘a big green place with lots of trees’.

“We’re in the Hidden Valley,” murmured their mother. “Isn’t it absolutely magical?”

“How much of all this is ours?” asked Gillon.

“Just this bit, stupid,” said Adiel. “Up to the fence.”

“No,” said their mother, consulting a sort of map the lawyers had sent. “More than that. That big field is ours — that’s the paddock. Down to those trees down there. That’s the river. And there’s more across the lane.”

“More?” The garden at home, which they had considered vast, dwindled by comparison to tablecloth-size.

Their mother led them across the lane to the big gate. Beyond it was a yard with buildings on three sides. One was a big workshop, and their father headed for that like an arrow. Another was three open bays under a corrugated iron roof. A third looked like an old barn and had several doors.

“That’s the pigsty and stable,” their mother said. “Long disused. And a couple of rooms for feed and stuff. And somewhere there are henhouses.”

“Long disused, too, I suppose,” said Adiel.

“No, as a matter of fact, there are hens. Some old party from the village has been coming in to look after them occasionally and collect the eggs. It should be round the back there somewhere.”

The boys belted round behind the pigsty and found about a dozen hens, one of them with five tiny chicks running around squeaking. There was a handsome cockerel, too, who obliged with a regal crow as soon as they appeared.

“Hey, check this out, Dad!” called Adiel, bending over a long box. “Fresh eggs!” He emerged holding two in each hand.

“And fresh chicken!” said Gillon.

“If you can kill them,” said their mother.

“Anyone would kill a chicken to get a roast one,” said Gillon, who’d never killed anything in his life.

“Well, never mind the livestock now. Let’s go and look over the house!” said their mother excitedly. “My very own house! I can’t wait!”

The two-storey house was made of stone, with a thatched roof. It was a funny shape, long and thin, with a sort of bend or wave in the middle.

“It’s a real Dorset longhouse!” enthused their father.

“A longhouse!” Omri almost shouted.

They all looked at him curiously.

“Yes… That’s what these long one-room-deep stone houses are called around here.”

The rooms were fairly small, but there were eight main ones altogether — four bedrooms in a row above four little linked living rooms. No corridors. Two flights of stairs, one at each end, so the two middle bedrooms led off the two outer ones. The bathroom had been added in modern times, built out at the back over the kitchen. From every window there were beautiful views.

The garden was neglected and the thatched roof gave Omri’s father pause.

“It’s all very well,” he said, while they all rushed about getting enthusiastic. “I love the place, it’s perfect, that workshop! My dream of a studio! But have you any idea what it costs to rethatch a thatched roof? And we’d have to, almost right away. Look, it’s rotten.” He reached out through one of the tiny windows upstairs and pulled a handful of thatch out of the deep eaves. It was black with age and damp and it had a musty smell.

From below, Omri called in an odd tone, “Come and see this!”

The others went outside and round to the gable end of the house, nearest the road. Up under the sloping thatch was a plaque, inset into the stone. It was engraved in very worn old-fashioned writing. Omri couldn’t read it, but their mother, with difficulty, made it out:

Blessed the man who fearing God buildeth for posterity. LB. 1704

When she’d finished reading, they all stood for a moment. Then Gillon said, “What’s posterity?”

“It means your bottom,” said Adiel.

The older two burst out laughing. Only Omri didn’t — he wasn’t listening.

“Don’t be fatuous, boys,” said their father. “Not ‘posterior’! ‘For posterity’ means ‘for those who’ll come after you’.”

Gillon and Adiel were still choking down their mirth when Omri said quietly, “We’re definitely going to like living here.” They all looked at him.

“How do you know?” said Gillon with a bit of jeer in his voice.

“It’s a longhouse,” said Omri mysteriously. ‘And - LB.”

“What?”

“Someone with the initials LB built this house.”

“Big deal. So what?”

“LBs are lucky for me,” said Omri quietly.

2
Kitsa Goes Missing

They moved in in August.

It hadn’t been so hard, after all, to leave the old house in Hovel Road. Omri had secretly been quite glad to, in the end. After all, his room had been totally wrecked by the Big Storm. For months he’d slept on a mattress on the floor, and done his homework at an ordinary old table, and thought about all his things that the storm had demolished or blown away. His market-bought chest had been destroyed, along with his Japanese table, his desk, his collections, and all his other stuff, his links with childhood. It was time for a new start.

“Dad,” he asked at one stage when they were packing up, “will you have the same bank?”

“A different branch, but yes,” said his father, puzzled. But then he understood. “Ah, your mysterious package that you asked me to have them put in their vaults. Don’t worry, Omri. They’ll keep it safe.”

“But will they move it to the bank near our new house?” Omri persisted anxiously.

“I’ll make sure they do,” said his father.

Omri wrote to Patrick, his friend and the sharer of his greatest secret, on the day before moving day.

Dear Patrick,

We’re moving to the country tomorrow. Wish it was near you but it’s the other way. We’ll be further apart than ever. I’ll write the new address at the end. Keep in touch.

Dad says IT will come to the new place with us, to the new bank. I hope you’re keeping Boone safe. I’m taking Little Bull and Twin Stars with me, and Matron and Fickits. I mean I’m carrying them. I’ll find somewhere safe for them in my new room. I just wanted you to know. I’m taking all my other plastic figures too. Not that we’ll do anything about them.

Hope you’re okay and that your mum has planted a new orchard after the storm. You must come and visit us in the new house. It’s quite fun, lots of old barns and stuff, and there’s hens that the last owner (he died, he was very old, Mum says he was my removed cousin or something) left. Their eggs have very orange yolks, like almost red. A neighbour’s been looking after them and Dad wants to keep them. And there’s a wood and a river and the sea quite close. And Mum says we might have a pony!!

Bye. Omri.

P.S. I’m dreading starting at a new school. It’s the local comp, of course. I went to meet the head, it’s a woman. Her name’s Mrs Everest. She wears a wig that looks just like a big tea cosy.

Two days after the move — two frantic, chaotic days, which followed a frantic, chaotic fortnight packing up — Omri was standing out in the lane that ran alongside their longhouse.

Both his parents and his brothers were indoors trying to make some kind of order in the various rooms, which were still so jammed with a mass of unsorted furniture and crates that you could hardly move around.

The reason Omri wasn’t with them was because he was desperately hunting for Kitsa.

She had come from London in the moving van, in a cat basket. Too near to this (as it turned out) had been a large silk lampshade. When they arrived, the lampshade was found to be in shreds, ripped by Kitsa’s resentful claws, reached through the bars of the cat basket.

The moment Omri had let her out, Omri’s mother, who was at the end of her rope, shouted at her, “You wicked animal, you’ve ruined my best lamp!” and made a swipe at her. Kitsa had fled, and Omri hadn’t seen her since.

“She’ll be back,” his mother — who, when things calmed down, felt awful about her — tried to comfort him. But he was frantic with worry. How could she find her way back when she didn’t know this was now her home?

He had already searched the whole property: the henhouse, the pigsty, the workshop, the barn, as well as the paddock and the wood, which ran down to a little river. He’d called her till he was hoarse.

He was miserable, absolutely miserable. Nobody could cheer him up, though even Gillon tried.

“She’ll come back,” he said. “She’s just giving us a hammering because we moved her.”

Now as Omri stood in the lane and called her, without much hope, up the lane came, not Kitsa, alas, but a red postal van, which stopped at their gate. The postman leant out.

“Mistle Hay Farmhouse?” he asked.

Omri said it was.

“Long time since there were any post for here,” he said. “You moved in, I’spect, bin empty a good while and the old man never got no letters to speak of, real recluse he was. Well, this be for you by looks of it, kid’s writin’.” And he handed Omri a letter. It was addressed to him, and it was from Patrick. Omri read it at once, standing in the lane.

Dear Omri,

Thanks for the letter. I looked on the map. Blimey, you’re a long way off. Too bad. Don’t know when we’ll get a chance to meet. I’ll work on my mum to go on holiday near you but I bet she won’t, she likes going over to Calais on the ferry to shop every chance she gets. Dead boring except the boat trip. She spends every minute in the French supermarket buying stuff we can easily get in Safeway at home. Crazy.

I’ve been thinking. I wish you hadn’t put IT in the bank. I know why you did, but still. Every time I look at Boone, I get lonely for him and wonder how he’s getting on. I sometimes imagine I’m in Texas, or that Boone comes back here and I talk to him. Don’t laugh, YOU PILLOCK. I bet you feel the same about Little Bull.

Guess what, my aunt came to visit and brought Emma. (Tamsin was at summer ski-camp - yeah!) It was great. We talked and talked about Them. She’d brought Ruby Lou and we played with them and pretended they were alive, only we had to stop cos Em started crying. She’s okay though really. She said the same as me, that she wished you hadn’t put IT in the bank. She said you should have asked us first.

You couldn’t change your mind, could you?

Good luck with your new school and the Tea Cosy. Maybe she’s bald underneath it. You’ll have to try to make it fall off and see. My school’s a real toilet. See ya.

Patrick.

P.S. Em and Tamsin are still at the old school. Em told me Mr Johnson fell off his bicycle into some prickly bushes. She says he’s never been the same since the day of the storm. Keeps talking to himself, there’s a rumour he’s gone a bit irregular.

This letter at least took Omri’s mind off Kitsa for a while. After reading it, he went up to his room.

He’d chosen one of the ‘inner’ bedrooms so that he would be the one who had to pass through Gillon’s room to get to the stairs, and not the other way round. It was not a perfect arrangement, but better than Gillon having right-of-way through his room. He’d made Gillon - who had been desperate for the outside bedroom - promise always to knock, if he did need to come in, which was unlikely. Omri was a very private person. He planned to put a bolt on the door, like his old room had.

His new bed was up, and his new desk. They were both pinewood. He’d decided to put up loads of shelves, or rather ask his dad to. His dad, however, was overwhelmed with work.

“Time you learned to put up shelves for yourself,” he’d said shortly, on Day One.

“Okay! Can I borrow your drill?”

“No.”

“So how can I—”

“Oh, I’ll do it eventually! Give me a chance, I’m up to my neck!”

Meanwhile, Omri made do with some planks he found - that was one great thing about this place, there was so much junk lying about — laid across piles of bricks. He cleaned them all first and the shelves looked quite good. Since losing all his stuff in the storm he’d collected a few new books and some other bits and pieces, and these he arranged on the new shelves.

He looked at the top shelf and thought how good IT would look, standing right in the middle, with its new coat of white paint and new mirror in the door…

No. He mustn’t be tempted. He’d made up his mind. No more of that. He’d promised himself. He must stick to what he’d decided. He fingered a small neat parcel in his jeans pocket. Where to put it? Where would be a really safe place?

“Ah!” he exclaimed aloud.

He took four more bricks, and turned them so the indented sides faced each other. Then he opened the packet, put Little Bull and Twin Stars and the baby, and the pony, between two of the bricks, lying down in the little hollow, and on the other side, between the other two bricks, he laid Sergeant Fickits and Matron. He felt there was something faintly scandalous about them lying side by side like that, but after all, they were plastic. Wherever they were in their real lives, they wouldn’t know, and the main thing was for them to be safe from discovery. He laid another plank-shelf across the top.

Suddenly he stiffened, raising his head. He thought he heard— he rushed to the narrow window and leant out, calling. But no. It must have been another cat.

*

It took about three weeks to settle in. Omri and Gillon started school in the local comprehensive. They could get there in ten minutes on their bikes through the country lanes. It was a far cry from Gillon’s predicted ‘tinny country school with eight pupils’; it had over a thousand, and felt strange at first. Mrs Everest (whom Omri called Tea Cosy but the other kids called Peaky) turned out to be all right - strict, but okay. Nobody could get her wig to fall off, and rumour had it it was glued on. Omri’s form teacher was a middle-aged man called John Butcher. Obviously he didn’t need a nickname.

Adiel set off for boarding school, a big one outside Bristol. He had all his things in a trunk, rather like Omri’s old chest only made of metal. They wouldn’t see him again till half-term. Omri missed him and didn’t miss him. Even when he missed him, he didn’t miss him half as much as he missed Kitsa.

He was sure now she would never come back. He tried to resign himself, to think of her being free, enjoying the naturalness of her new life, but the trouble was, she wasn’t used to the country and when he let himself think about it, he didn’t see how she would manage. She’d never hunted in her life, beyond a halfhearted pounce at the odd bird - and the time she’d nearly killed Boone, of course, but that was just a fluke.

And there was worse. They hadn’t been there a week before a fox got into the henhouse and killed three of their hens. If it could do that, it could surely kill a little town cat. Thoughts of her nagged him like an aching tooth he kept biting on to see if it still hurt.

One evening at supper — meals were only just stopping being picnics — Omri’s father said, “Oh, by the way, Omri. I was talking to the bank manager today. Your mysterious package has arrived at the local branch and is in the safe.”

Gillon looked up. He hadn’t heard anything about the package till now. “What’s this?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Omri quickly, and signalled his father, who caught on at once and refused to say any more.

Gillon, however, wouldn’t leave it alone.

“What package? What was Dad talking about?”

“Oh, mind your own business!” Omri yelled at last.

That was it for the moment, but the next day at school, Gillon found Omri in the playground and said cockily, “I know what your mystery package is.”

“You do not.”

“I do. It’s your cupboard, isn’t it?”

Omri felt the blood rush to his head. He gaped at Gillon.

“Your face! Did you think I didn’t know?”

“Know… what?” Omri half gasped.

“That you’re hooked on it. But putting it in the bank? Pretending it’s valuable? Get real. The bank’s only for really valuable things, like jewellery or gold.”

Omri bit his tongue and said nothing. He kicked the turf and stared at the toe of his trainer.

“If I told Dad what it was—”

“Tell him if you like.”

“If I told him, he’d go straight away and get it out. It’s using up space. The bank safe isn’t for toys.”

“You gave it to me. You should be pleased I like it.”

“Yeah, but — the bank — it’s just stupid.” They stood for a moment, staring out across the acres of green, so huge, so different from the hemmed-in tarmac playground in town. “There’s nothing special about it. Is there?”

“It’s special to me. It was smashed up in the storm, and I mended it. I don’t want anything else to happen to it.

“And did you put the key with it?”

Now Omri visibly jumped. “What key?”

“The one you locked the cupboard with when you were playing with it. The one with the red ribbon that Mum used to wear on a chain.”

Omri felt winded. He couldn’t think what to say, and every second he didn’t turn it all off with some careless remark made it more obvious to Gillon that he’d stumbled on a really important secret. He was staring at Omri now with an ever more beady look of interest and excitement.

“I know there’s more to that cupboard than you’re telling,” he said at last. “I’m sorry I laughed about the bank. Maybe it really is valuable. I wish you’d tell me.”

There was a long silence. Then Omri suddenly shouted, “Well, I’m not going to!”

Turning, he ran fast towards the hedge at the far side of the playground. It was about a hundred yards away. When he got there, panting, he sat down on the grass in a hidden place. Gillon hadn’t followed him.

Omri put his head on his knees. He was shaking. Something terrible had almost happened. He’d had a strong urge to tell Gillon. He had wanted to tell him. Gillon of all people, who made fun of him, who could never in a million years keep such a secret to himself. What had come over him? Why had he had to run away fast to stop himself from blurting it out?

He didn’t understand this feeling. It felt more like loneliness than anything else. People did really crazy things when they were lonely. But how could he be? He had his family, he was making new friends at school… Of course he missed Patrick… and Emma… and what he thought about as ‘the old world’. But that wasn’t it.

It couldn’t be old Kits, could it? You couldn’t miss a cat so badly that it made you weak and apt to do stupid things, blurt out a vital secret just to share it with someone?

He’d have to watch himself.

He heard the bell in the distance. He got up slowly and walked back to the school, saying over and over again, “Never. Never. Never. Never must I tell.”

3
Hidden in the Thatch

Omri’s father lost little time in getting the re-thatching of the roof underway.

He had been making enquiries among neighbours and people in their local village and pretty soon some men arrived in a beaten-up old car to inspect and measure the roof and talk money. A very great deal of it. That evening Omri saw his mother carrying a large tumbler of brown liquid across the lane to the big workshop his father had adopted as a painting studio.

“Is that whisky, Mum?” asked Omri with interest. (The cowboy, Boone, had been a great whisky drinker, but his father wasn’t.)

“Yes,” said his mother somewhat grimly. “Your father has had a shock. Alcohol was invented for times like this.”

“How much of a shock?”

“Fifteen thousand pounds’ worth,” she replied.

“Blimey! Just for a bit of straw?”

“Just for a bit of straw.”

But it wasn’t only for that, of course. Thatching was a skilled craft, and not many people still knew how to do it properly. And it wasn’t straw. It was reeds, and the right sort only came from a particular place in France, because in Britain the reed beds were protected and couldn’t be used. The work would take about four weeks. And they had to do it at once because it couldn’t be done in winter - the whole of the old roof had to come off.

“Like when the storm blew our other roof off!” said Omri the next day at tea when all this was being gone into.

“Dad, it’s going to be so cold!” said Gillon.

But their father said tersely, “We’ll all have to be terribly brave about that, won’t we, Gillon?”

“Lucky old Ad, safe and snug at school,” muttered Gillon, who certainly hadn’t shown any envy for his older brother so far.

“Look out of the window, boys,” said their mother suddenly. “We’ve got visitors.”

They went to the window. On the lawn were three large magpies, gleaming black and white in the sun, strutting about and pecking at something that lay in the long grass.

Omri had a moment of absolute horror. He knew magpies were scavenger birds — he’d seen them pecking at the remains of one of the fox-killed hens. What could be lying there, dead?

He rushed out of the house, his heart in his throat. The birds flapped unconcernedly away just as he reached them. Hardly able to bear his apprehension, Omri parted the grass and looked at the corpse.

It was a half-grown rabbit without a head.

The others, belatedly realizing what Omri had feared, trailed out after him.

“It’s not her, is it?” called his mother.

“It’s a dead rabbit,” said Omri.

“Yuck,” said Gillon. “Those magpies have eaten half of it.”

Their father bent down to look at it more closely.

“I don’t think the magpies killed it,” he said. “Too big for them. It would take a fox to kill that, and why would he have left it half eaten? Looks more like a cat’s work to me.”

Omri gazed at the dead half-rabbit with entirely new eyes.

“You mean - a cat could kill a thing that size? You mean maybe Kitsa could have hunted it?”

“It’s possible,” he said.

Omri’s heart did an upward lurch. The hope he had abandoned rushed back, painfully, like the blood coming back into a numbed limb.

“But if she’s around, why doesn’t she come home?”

“Maybe she’s gone feral,” said his father.

“Gone feral? What’s that?”

“Wild. Cats do. Mainly tomcats, but queens do as well sometimes, when they’re moved. I bet she’s around, Omri. Keep your eyes open for her, and keep putting out her milk.”

Omri put not milk but clotted cream out for her that night. In the morning it was gone.

“Probably a hedgehog,” said Gillon.

Omri wanted to hit him, but he felt too relieved. There was hope, after all.

The thatchers arrived to begin work, and chaos came again to the just-organized-after-moving household.

The garden, the hedge, the border of the lane, and all the paths vanished under masses of mouldy old thatch as the thatching team tore it off the roof beams. There was no point in clearing most of it till the job was done, but Omri was told to keep the route from the lane gate to the front of the house cleared. He did this after school. Every day for the first week it had to be done again. It was absolutely amazing how much old thatch there was - enough to make three or four haystacks. It kept piling up all around the house.

The thatchers expected regular cups of tea, and when the weather turned really hot at the end of September, relays of beer. They got chatty. In breaks, they sat out on the thatch-littered lawn and discussed their craft with anyone in the family who would join them.

One afternoon after school, Omri was drifting past and heard one of them say, “We ent found that oul’ bottle yet. Last chaps hid it thorough, seemingly.”

He paused. “What old bottle?”

The men grinned. “Don’ ee know about the thatchers’ bottle?”

“No?”

“We were tellin’ your dad. Right int’rested, he be. Wants to see un when we find un.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s like this here, see. Every time a roof gets thatched, which is about every thirty year, the thatchers all writes their names on a paper—”

“On’y in the olden days they’m put a cross instead—”

“And any details as is relevant to the job, and puts it in a bottle, along with the papers from the thatchers as done the last job, and the one afore that. And they hides it in the thatch, for the next ones to find, thirty year on.”

“That way,” put in another, “there’s a link, see, from one generation of thatchers to the next, down the line, maybe ‘undreds a years. This ’ouse now, it’s been standin’ not far short o’ three ’undred year, wouldn’t ee say, John?”

“Since 1704,” said Omri eagerly. “The plaque says.”

“Arh, the plaque, well, there you are then. Musta bin - let’s see - between seven and nine thatchin’s in that time, maybe more, so it’ll be a ruddy big oul’ bottle, I reckon, when we do find un.” They all laughed and drank down their lager.

Omri was intrigued about the bottle, and so was his father.

“A real link with the past,” he kept saying. “If they find it I’m going to make photocopies of all the papers, to keep, before they add their one and hide the bottle again.”

“Can we keep the old bottle, Dad?”

“No. They use the same one till it gets broken. That’s the custom. I love old country customs. I respect them. A real link with the past!”

“Yeah, Dad, you said that,” said Gillon, who found the whole thing a total turn-off.

That night Omri lay awake in his new room, under the denuded roof and bare eaves, with the window open.

The milk dish had been empty again this morning, and he’d wanted to keep watch all night, but of course his mother wouldn’t let him. It was hard to fall asleep anyway. He was so used to traffic going past all night, and London streetlamps lighting the room, he still wasn’t quite used to the darkness and quiet of the country.

Not that it was dark tonight. There was a full moon. It bathed the surrounding hills, fields, and woods, and shone down through a little tear in the roofers’ tarpaulin over his head. It was a bit like his old room where he’d slept on a platform under a skylight. It had felt like sleeping out under the sky.

Suddenly he sat up. He’d heard a cry. It sounded just like the cry of a cat in distress!

Without thinking, he jumped up and rushed through Gillon’s room (which he had to pass through to get to the stairs), and fumbled his way down and out into the soft-scented, unfamiliar, mildly scary country night, full of rustlings and creature noises that you never heard in London.

In bare feet and by the clear light of the moon, he kicked through the fallen thatch, crossed the sloping lawn, let himself out through a little picket gate, and started pushing through the overgrown grass in the paddock, calling softly, “Kitsa! Kitsa, come on, Kits!” and making shwsh-a-wisha noises that used to bring her running. His feet were stung with stinging nettles and pricked with thistles, but he kept going until he stepped in an old cowpat - that was too much!

“Bloody country!” he exploded, and turned back, but not before he’d had a long listen. He couldn’t hear her now. It must have been a bird or something. He scraped his foot on the damp grass to clean it. Then he picked his way back towards the front door.

It occurred to him, just as he was about to go in, to have a look to see if the milk had been drunk yet. Instead of walking in the front door and out again at the back, because of his mucky foot he decided to walk round the outside to the kitchen door, which he did, treading on layers of old thatch all the way. And while he was passing under the plaque on the gable end, he nearly twisted his ankle stepping on something lumpy and hard.

It didn’t feel like a stone, so he fumbled about in the thatch to see what it was — maybe it was ‘the oul’ bottle’! It would be fun if he could be the one to find it, not the thatchers at all!

The rotted reeds had all matted together and must have fallen off the roof in a clump, instead of in thousands of loose bits like most of it. It felt disgusting to his groping fingers, and the smell of mustiness and rot — which pervaded the whole house — was very strong. Yet in the middle of it was undoubtedly something solid.

He fished it out. It wasn’t a bottle, old or otherwise. It was an oblong package wrapped in blackened, disintegrating cloth and tied with thick string that came apart at his first tentative tug.

He dropped the string on the path and moved back to the front of the house, into full moonlight. The bit of cloth was thick and heavy, like canvas. Omri carefully unwrapped it. His heart was beating very hard for some reason. He was suddenly terribly excited. What could this possibly be, that someone had hidden in the thatch perhaps as much as thirty years ago?

Inside the wrapping was a small black metal cashbox with a curved brass handle. It had a slot in the top to put coins in, but this was sealed with some lumpy hard stuff. It was very firmly locked. Separate from it was another, flat package that had lain under the box inside the cloth.

When Omri unfolded this second piece of canvas, he found a thick notebook inside. It had a leather cover with metal corners, and it was full of writing.

Unluckily, Gillon woke up as Omri was creeping through his room to get back to his own, and got a fright.

“Who’s there! Who’s there!” he yelled right out loud. Next minute their father had come crashing through Omri’s room from the parents’ room beyond that.

He switched on the light and Omri stood revealed. He thrust his find up his pyjama jacket and in the sudden blaze of light on everyone’s sleepy eyes, nobody saw him do it.

“Omri! What do you think you’re doing at this hour?”

“I — I thought I heard Kitsa crying.”

“Blasted cat! She’s all right! Go to bed.”

“I’m just going. Sorry. Sorry, Gilly.”

Gillon, still half asleep, mumbled something and rolled over. The light went out and Omri followed his father into his own room. His father then went through the other side into his bedroom. Omri shut both doors. Privacy — there wasn’t any. He was going to have to do something about this.

Trembling with excitement, he lay down on the bed and waited till everything was quiet. The pattern of moonlight had altered as the moon began to set. He got up and sat in its beam and set the cashbox on the floor. He opened the notebook.

On the first page were a few words in the most beautiful delicate handwriting. He could just about read them, although the ink had faded to a pale brown.

Account of My Life, and of a Wonder Unacceptable to the Rational Mind. To be hidden until a time when Minds in my Family may be more Open.

There was a name. A three-word name. In the wan light of the setting moon Omri could hardly read it till he carried the notebook to the window.

The name was Jessica Charlotte Driscoll. And there was a date. August 21st, 1950.

August the twenty-first! Another sign — another coincidence, like the LB on the plaque! August 21st was Omri’s birthday.

Jessica Charlotte Driscoll.

The name Driscoll meant nothing to Omri. Nor did Jessica. But Charlotte! Charlotte was the name that Lottie was short for. And Lottie had been Omri’s mother’s mother’s name.

But the moment the thought crossed his mind that this could be that Charlotte - his grandmother - he banished it instantly. That was impossible. His grandmother had died in the bombing of London in World War Two, when his own mother was only a few months old. By 1950 she would have been dead for eight years.

Anyway, even though this house had been owned by some distant cousin, any connection between it and his grandmother was impossible. She had lived in south London all her short life. His mother had told Omri that the only place his grandmother’d ever visited out of London was Frinton, a seaside place where her sailor husband had taken her on their honeymoon.

No, all right. So this Charlotte wasn’t a relative.

Or was she? She must have been living here before the elderly cousin who had recently died. If she’d been a relative of his, she might also be a relative of Omri’s.

Omri dared not switch the light on and start to read the notebook because there weren’t curtains yet, and his parents would be sure to see the light through their window. He had to compose his soul in patience till the morning. He slept uneasily with the notebook under his pillow and the cashbox - the cashbox! what could be in there? - hidden under the bed.

A Wonder Unacceptable to the Rational Mind…

Omri knew a bit about that. ‘There’s real magic in this world…’ Even Patrick knew it now. Patrick the practical, the doubter, the one who’d once tried to pretend none of it had happened. They’d had proof enough to convince anyone. A little bathroom cabinet that, when you locked it with a special key, became a magic box that brought plastic toy figures to life. And more than that — they were not just ‘living dolls’, but real people, magicked from their lives in the past.

Little Bull had been the first, and, for Omri, would always be the most special - an Iroquois Indian from the late eighteenth century, coming from a village in what was now the state of New York. Then had come others: Tommy, the soldier-medic, who’d later been killed; Boone the cowboy (he was really Patrick’s special pal), and Twin Stars, Little Bull’s wife, and her baby who had been born while she was with them. Matron, the strict but staunch nurse from a London hospital of the 1940s. And Corporal - now Sergeant - Fickits, the Royal Marine who had helped them defeat the skinhead gang who had broken into Omri’s old house…

They were so real! So much a part of Omri’s life… It was hard to keep his vow to do without them, to eschew the magic. But he must. Because it could be dangerous. The storm that had wrecked half of England had been brought by them, with the key. People had been killed… in the present, and in the past. It was frightening. It was too much to handle.

And now — A Wonder Unacceptable to the Rational Mind…

Omri gave a little shiver, half fear, half excitement, and slept. He dreamed of riding with Little Bull through the hills and forests of his homeland. Awake and asleep, he often dreamed of him, but this was particularly vivid and the ride was magical and wonderful. It seemed as if Little Bull were teaching him to ride, and at the same time, as if they were searching for something. Some treasure.

He meant to wake up early — at dawn — and read the notebook, but of course he slept in. There was no time, none at all. He hid the notebook behind some books and went down to breakfast.

At the table he asked, as casually as he could, “Mum, what relative of ours exactly was the old man who owned this house?”

“Ah. Now you’re asking…” She paused with the cereal package poised, her brow wrinkling. “Let me see. Well, his name was Frederick, which is a bit of a family name on my side. He was a bachelor. And very old indeed — about eighty-five. I think he was — wait for it — my grandmother’s younger sister’s son. Yes, that’s it, I remember now. I never knew him or had any connection with him.”

“What was his last name?” asked Omri, frowning.

“An Irish name — it’s slipped my mind for the moment.”

“How come you didn’t know him if he was your cousin?”

“Well, that’s a story. My grandmother, who brought me up after Mummy died, didn’t see her sister for some reason, though when I was little she talked about her sometimes, in a - a sort of head-shaking way, as if she loved her a lot but felt she shouldn’t. Of course I found that intriguing and asked lots of questions about her, but my granny just said, ‘Well, we were sisters, but I have to say it: she was no better than she should be’.”

“What does that mean?”

“She had a Past. You weren’t supposed to have a Past in those days. Something scandalous to do with men…”

Omri digested this. Then he asked slowly, “Could she have been living here — your granny’s sister?”

His mother looked at him. “She was supposed to have gone abroad… But what an intriguing idea, Omri! I never thought of that. Maybe old Frederick inherited this house from his mother, who was my wicked great-aunt Jessica Charlotte!”

Omri put down his spoon. There was some saying he’d always thought very silly, about a goose walking over your grave. But suddenly he understood it because the bumpy flesh all over his arms had the chill feeling of death.

“Was she really wicked?” he asked after a moment.

“I’ve no idea. She was some kind of actress back around the time of the First World War. Going on the stage in those days was considered fairly wicked by some people. But I’m sure there was more to it than that. Now darling, enough questions, it’s ten to nine. Go.”

Omri didn’t think about Kitsa more than half a dozen times that day. Nor did he give too much attention to lessons, and the Butcher had occasion to send him to the Tea Cosy, who gave him what-for without too much care for his feelings and added injury to insult with a detention. Murphy’s law in action, he thought furiously. If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible time. He was absolutely dying to get home.

By the time the Butcher let him go and he had raced home through the lanes on his bike (narrowly avoiding being run down by a tractor — well, better than a London bus!) he couldn’t possibly be bothered to clear the last of the thatch from the path properly. He just kicked it aside as he forged up the path and raced to his room.

He shut both doors and put some spare bricks against them so they wouldn’t open easily. Then he extracted the thick notebook from behind his books and opened it with hands that were not quite steady.

He read the words on the flyleaf again.

Account of My Life, and of a Wonder Unacceptable to the Rational Mind. To be hidden until a time when Minds in my Family may be more Open.

Jessica Charlotte Driscoll.

August 21st, 1950.

He turned the page and began to read the fine, beautifully formed handwriting.

4
Jessica Charlotte’s Notebook

I write this on my deathbed.

Since I have not seen or heard anything from Maria for nearly half a lifetime I cannot be sure she has not gone before me — though I have my own reason for believing she will outlive me by many years… Still, sooner or later we must come face to face on the Other Side. Much as I have missed and longed for her, I am in no great hurry to meet her there. Strange but true: I fear God in His Almighty Power less than I fear facing my sister Maria.

I am still at heart an artiste. So I write this account as a kind of rehearsal of what I shall say to her - and Him. I shall excuse nothing, omit nothing, extenuate nothing. When I look now into the glass on the front of the wondrous Cabinet Frederick made with such anger in his heart (which sits on the table by my bedside), I see, not my face, but Death’s. It tells me sternly that ‘naught now availeth’ but scrupulous Truth.

My Little People would speak for me, if they could. They’ve seen the best in me. With them, at least, I’ve dealt honestly and kindly. I have not shown them my accursed jealousy and spite.

But they must Go Back, pursue their own lives and make their own accounting at last. Though I still bring them sometimes, when I’m lonely and afraid, to comfort and distract me, they can’t help me now. Even though Jenny weeps (tears that are as small as points of starlight) when I tell her I’m dying. She weeps for herself, also… What will become of her? I can’t send her back now.

I don’t deserve the Wonder that has been my consolation at the end of my misspent life.

When Omri reached this point in the notebook, he found his heart was beating so hard and his breath had been caught in his lungs without breathing out for so long that he had to stop.

He swallowed, shut his eyes so he couldn’t read the delicate brown writing, and breathed in and out several times until his heartbeats slowed. He felt dizzy, confused. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his face. The ‘wondrous Cabinet’ in which she could see her face in a ‘glass’! The Little People from another time! Was this real? Was he really reading about IT — his own cupboard? Was it conceivable that this great-great-aunt of his had had it in this very house, over thirty years ago?

To rehearse my story, I must tell it all, from the beginning. And then I must do what I must do, and Maria will know my guilty secret.

Maria, my beautiful elder sister… Everything came to her, without her even trying. Our parents’ favour. The admiration of friends and relations. The chances in life that make all the difference. And the love of a man. In that, too, she was ahead of me. Her love was honest and true.

I hated her at times.

There, it’s out. My jealous spirit infected me like a virus. I wanted to be her, and I was not, so I hated her for her beauty, and for the way she attracted love. And for being good.

Everyone praised her goodness. Was it all true? Was she really, deeply, better than I? Had she been me - little, plump, plain, mocked, ignored, where she was tall and graceful and clever - would she have been so moral then?

Who can tell?

When she was barely sixteen her suitors were already crowding our house. I remember them, callow young men, bringing her presents, fawning on her, while I silently watched… But I didn’t stay silent! Oh, no!

After they’d gone, I would mimic them. Mercilessly! I would force Maria to laugh at their antics even when she had thought she admired them.

“Oh, stop, Jessie, stop!” she’d cry, weeping with laughter. “You are a demon, you’ve caught him exactly with his funny walk and his lisp. Oh, stop it, I will never be able to look at him again!”

She was my first audience. Those were my moments of fulfilment when I forgot my plainness and began to be an actress.

But there was something else about me, and this I kept to myself. I knew things. I knew she was not going to marry any of these. I knew what would be. Oh, not everything! But certain flashes of future knowledge came to me, even as a child.

I had a dream, I had it over and over again, of myself standing in a building that was half lit and half dark. I stood high, and many people faced me from below, and I could do as I pleased with them — make them laugh or cry or sing or cheer, at my will. It was a theatre of course, but I didn’t know it then — how could I? I had never seen one. My father thought a theatre was the devil’s own den.

But as I grew up, I learnt about the world. Actors were not ‘respectable’ but they were much talked of… and I found out the meaning of my dream, and I knew my destiny.

When I told our father I was going on the stage for a living, he told me - and meant it - that he would rather see me dead in my coffin. He refused to consider it. I was punished for dreaming of it.

To actually do it meant leaving home, enduring disgrace, being cast out, abandoning all that was familiar and safe… It meant being poor, living alone, begging for jobs, mixing with every sort of person. Yet I did it. I am still proud of that. It took a lot of courage. Somehow I achieved my ambition, and my father — though he never forgave me — at least noticed me and came to know that I was not the little nobody-and-nothing he had always thought me.

And Maria stood by me. Not openly, of course, but secretly.

It was the first time she had ever deceived our parents or gone against her ‘good’ character. But she loved me and she visited me. No one knew. But it counted.

When my chance came and I did my first ‘turn’ on the stage of the Hackney Empire music hall, she was there in the stalls. What courage! We both had to be brave that night. I remember her, sitting alone — well, unescorted, at a time when women didn’t go anywhere without a man — in her big hat and her pretty furs, laughing aloud as she used to laugh in our bedroom when I mocked her suitors, and she gave me confidence, more than the rest of the laughter.

Because I knew that if I were not truly funny, she would not have laughed. She was my sister, but she wouldn’t pretend — she wanted me to give up and come home and be her poor little second-rate sister again. She wanted my talent to be for her alone.

A debt was owed for those acts of loyalty and courage. How did you repay her, Jessica Charlotte?

And that wasn’t all. When my Frederick was going to be born I had to go away to hide my shame, and I couldn’t work, and was destitute.

It was then I came to this house for the first time. It was still a farmhouse then and the farmer’s wife was a relative of my young man. I will not name him… I have forgotten him! He wasn’t worthy to be remembered! But he made her take me in (it was the last thing he ever did for me) and Frederick was born here, here in this very room in this old house in the Hidden Valley — how rightly named! I was hiding at last, ashamed at last, I who had stood brazenly on a stage for men to look at, and sworn that I would never be ashamed. I was ashamed of my child, of my own son.

Perhaps Fred felt it, even then, and that was why he never loved or forgave me.

Maria, though she couldn’t come so far from home without arousing our parent’s suspicion, wrote to me secretly and sent me money. She understood by now about love, for she was in love with Matthew Darren. I was to meet him in time, and she would say, her face all a blaze of love: “Well? Can you mock him, can you turn me off him?” and I had to say “No”. He was above my mockery and my mimicry…

I never saw a woman so fond as she was of him. But there was a long delay before they could be married because he was working in India, and our father would not allow her to go out there to that tropical climate that he said would kill her. The Old Queen was dead, and her son fat Edward too, before they were wed at last, and a year later Lottie was born.

Little Lottie. My sweet, adorable niece. My little girl whom I wronged. There can be no forgiveness!

I am crying… Let me rest. I can write no more for the present.

5
Family Stuff

“Gilly.”

“Oh, what?”

“Sorry to interrupt. What are you doing anyway?”

“Homework,” said Gillon virtuously.

“You’re not - are you really?”

“If I don’t I’m seriously stitched up. It’s last week’s. Pit Bull’ll tear me to pieces.”

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