Big Change for Stuart (30 page)

‘Stuart!'

April was standing at the back fence, pointing at her watch and then holding up a dog biscuit.

‘TEN MINUTES!' shouted Stuart through the window. ‘I WANT SOMETHING TO EAT FIRST.'

‘OK.'

Stuart glanced at Clifford's postcard again, and then, for the second time, picked up the tissue-wrapped coin. Quickly, before he could lose his nerve, he unwrapped it.

A small metal disc fell out, bounced on the table top and then rolled to a stop.

Relief and disappointment mingled inside him, and he found himself laughing.

It
wasn't
a coin.

It had a hole punched through it and a name etched in capitals across both sides. A short name. A short name for a short dog.

Stuart ran to the back door and wrenched it open.

‘Chips!' he shouted.

And Chips came running.

THE END

Stuart Horten was small for his age – the smallest boy in his year at school – and both his parents were very tall, which meant that when he stood next to them he looked about the size of an ant.

As well as being tall, and quite old (especially his father), his parents were extremely clever people. But clever people aren't always sensible. A sensible person would never give a child a name that could be written down as
S. Horten
. A sensible person would realize that anyone called S. Horten would instantly be nicknamed ‘Shorten', even by their friends. And Stuart had quite a lot of friends. He also had a bike with eight gears, a garden with a tree house and a large and muddy pond. Life was pretty good.

* * *

Anyway, this whole story – this unexpected, strange, dangerous story of Great-Uncle Tony's lost legacy – began when Stuart's mother was offered a new job. She was a doctor (not the sort who stitches up bleeding wounds, but the sort who peers down a microscope) and the new job was in a hospital a hundred miles from home, which was too far for her to travel to every day.

‘I suppose I could live away during the week,' she said, ‘but I'd hate it. I'd miss you both too much.'

So that was that, thought Stuart.

Life went on as normal for a day or two, and then Stuart's father, who was a writer (not of films or of best-selling books, but of difficult crosswords), came up with an awful suggestion. ‘We could rent this house out for a year,' he said quite casually to Stuart's mother, as if leaving the village in which Stuart had lived for his whole life was something quite minor. ‘We could move closer to your new hospital, and see if we like it.'

‘
I
won't like it,' said Stuart.

His father took out a road map of England and
began to trace his finger northward. ‘Well I never,' he said, his finger halting at a black smudge. He shook his head wonderingly. ‘I hadn't realized that the hospital was so close to Beeton. That's the town where I was born – I haven't been back in well over forty years. We could go and live there. It's quite pleasant.'

‘Oh, now that would be interesting for Stuart,' said his mother.

‘No it wouldn't,' said Stuart.

They didn't listen to him. At the end of the school year, they packed up and moved to Beeton, taking Stuart with them, and though they were clever people, being clever isn't the same as being sensible. A sensible person would know that if you
had
to move house, then the worst possible time to move would be at the start of the summer holidays. Because when you arrived at the new house you wouldn't know any other children, and you'd have no chance to meet any until school started again in the autumn.

And – to make it worse – the new house (20 Beech Road) was small and boring and looked just like all
the other houses in the road, and in the next road, and in the road after that. It was nowhere near an adventure playground or a swimming pool. There was no front garden, and the back garden consisted of a square of grass surrounded by a fence that was slightly too high for Stuart to see over.

On the first day after the move, Stuart shoved his clothes and games into cupboards, and flattened out the giant cardboard boxes into which they'd been packed.

On the second day, there was nothing to do. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Which is why, when his father said, ‘Ah, there you are. I was just thinking of going for a brief perambulation. Would you like to come too?' Stuart answered, ‘Oh all right, then.'

By ‘brief perambulation', his father meant a short walk. That was the way he talked
all the time
, and he always spoke in a loud, clear voice, so that people in the street turned and stared at him.

Normally Stuart would rather have poured cold gravy over himself than go for a walk with his father.
Instead, on this dullest of days he accompanied him out of the front door and went left along Beech Road, right along Oak Avenue and left into Chestnut Close.

‘When I was a youngster,' his father told him as they walked, ‘there weren't any houses in this part of Beeton at all. This whole area was sylvan.'

‘What's sylvan mean?' asked Stuart.

‘Wooded. And there was a stream running through the middle of it.'

‘Did you light fires?'

‘Beg pardon?' said his father, who was so much taller than Stuart that he sometimes had to bend almost in half in order to hear him.

Stuart raised his voice. ‘
Did you light fires?
Did you dam the stream? Did you make a swing?'

His father shook his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘I was never very keen on that sort of thing. I was too busy inventing crosswords.'

They walked in silence along Hawthorn Avenue.

‘Aha!' said his father as they passed an ancient red telephone box and turned the corner into a street of shops. ‘Now this is the older bit of the
town. I seem to remember that the entrance to the family business used to be just along here.' He halted at a narrow side turning, but there was nothing to see apart from a pair of high-tech metal gates, firmly shut. ‘It's long gone, of course,' said his father. ‘Though the name's still discernible.' He pointed to a cast-iron arch that curved above the gates. A scattering of painted letters was just about visible.

H RT 'S M RAC L US ECH N SMS

‘Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms,' said Stuart after a lot of thought. He turned to his father. ‘What sort of mechanisms?'

‘Locks and safes, originally, and then the business diversified into coin-operated machinery. Though by the time the factory was conflagrated by an incendiary I believe it was making armaments.'

‘By the time it was what by a what?'

‘Burned down by a firebomb. In nineteen forty, during the Second World War, one fell on the factory when my father was away one night. My
uncle Tony had been left in charge, but the fire took hold and the building was destroyed.'

‘Fifty years ago,' said Stuart. ‘Almost exactly …' Beside the steel gates were an intercom and a labelled buzzer that he had to stand on tiptoe to read:
Tricks of the Trade. Goods entrance
.

‘So what happened after the fire?' he asked.

His father, whose normal expression was one of mild happiness, looked suddenly serious, and he started walking again. It was a while before he spoke. ‘It was all rather sad,' he said. ‘I suppose it marked the end of the family. My father tried to start the business again, without success, and after a few years he moved away from Beeton. He blamed my uncle Tony for the fire, you see, because Tony had never really been interested in the factory at all, he was an ent—' Stuart's father stopped dead. ‘Good
lord
!' he said, staring ahead.

Stuart followed the direction of his gaze and saw a tall, shabby house, its garden overgrown, its windows boarded up, and its roof a patchwork of cracked and missing slates.

‘That's Uncle Tony's house!' said his father.
‘The probate dispute must never have been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties concerned.'

Stuart simply ignored this last sentence. ‘What's an “Ent”?' he asked. ‘You said he was an “Ent”.'

‘An entertainer,' answered his father. ‘A prestidigitator.'

‘A what?'

‘A magician. He used to do conjuring tricks on stage.'

‘A
magician
?' Stuart repeated. ‘You had an uncle who was a
magician
? But you never told me that.'

‘Oh, didn't I?' said his dad vaguely. ‘Well, I know very little about him. And I suppose it didn't occur to me that you'd be interested.'

Stuart rolled his eyes in exasperation and walked up to the gate. It was encased in ivy, held tightly shut by the curling stems. ‘Number six,' he said, running his finger over the brass number that was half hidden by the leaves. ‘So what sort of tricks did he do?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘And what was he like?'

‘I don't remember him at all, I'm afraid. I was very young when he disappeared.'