Dream a Little Dream (The Silver Trilogy) (F) (4 page)

I could easily trump that. “
My
big sister is called Persephone Porter-Peregrin. And she didn’t talk to me at all after she’d dragged me off to the first classroom. But I guess that wasn’t so bad, because her hobby seems to be wrinkling up her nose.”

“Funny sort of names, like racehorses,” said Lottie. She didn’t say anything about having Taylor Lautner for a hobby—she’d hung up a poster of him herself the year before last. On the inside of her wardrobe. She said it was because wolves are so cute.

In spite of the tartan curtains with gold thread running through them, and the china ballerinas everywhere, it was quite comfortable in the kitchen of the strange apartment. Late summer rain was beating against the window, and the air was full of the comforting smell of vanilla and chocolate. Lottie had been baking our favorite cookies: vanilla crescents made to her grandmother’s recipe. Along with the vanilla crescents, we were drinking hot cocoa with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles on top. Lottie had also given us towels to rub our hair dry after the rain had drenched it. The full charge of loving care, butter, and sugar really did cheer us up for the time being. Lottie obviously felt sorrier for us than she liked to admit. Normally it was against her principles to bake Christmas cookies before December, and she was very strict about the traditional Christmas stuff. Too bad if anyone so much as hummed “Silent Night” in June. Lottie was having none of that. It brought bad luck, or so she said.

For some time we were happy enough filling our faces with cookies and doing a running commentary on imaginary horse races: “Persephone Porter-Peregrin instantly takes the lead on the inside. She’s won almost all the derbies here at Ascot this year. She leaves her rival Vanilla Crescent behind her right away.… But what’s this? Daisy Dawn, starting number five, comes up to the front—this is thrilling—on the straight she’s neck and neck with Persephone and—yes! You wouldn’t believe it! The outsider Daisy Dawn wins by a nose!”

“It’s not as if vanilla crescents were Christmas biscuits like gingerbread, strictly speaking,” Lottie was muttering in German, more to herself than us. Way back when she first came to us, Papa had insisted on a German au pair so that we’d learn to speak his mother tongue better. That was because when he spoke German to us himself, we were inclined to reply either not at all or in English (well, I was; at the time Mia couldn’t say anything except “dadadada”), and that was not his idea of a proper bilingual upbringing. As Lottie could speak hardly any English at all at that time, we always had to do our best to speak German to her, and Papa was delighted.

“So you can eat them all the year round.” Lottie was still rather afraid that Baby Jesus might bear her a grudge over those vanilla crescents. “But only in exceptional cases, of course.”

“We’re very, very exceptional cases,” Mia assured her. “Two kids in a one-parent family, no home and no hope, totally lost and strangers in this big city.”

I’m afraid she wasn’t exaggerating all that much. We’d found our way home only with the help of some friendly passersby and a nice bus driver. As we didn’t remember the number of the building where we were to live for the time being, and all the buildings around here looked the same, we’d probably still have been wandering around in the pouring rain, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, if Buttercup hadn’t been standing at the first-floor window barking like crazy. Now the clever dog was lying on the corner bench in the kitchen with her head on my lap, hoping that a vanilla crescent would find its way into her mouth by some miraculous means.

“It’s a fact—you two don’t have an easy time,” said Lottie, sighing deeply, and just for a moment I had a guilty conscience. To make Lottie feel better, we could have told her that it really hadn’t been too bad at school. Our first day at school in London had gone a lot better than, for instance, our first day in Berkeley, California, where a girl gang had threatened to force my head into the toilet. (It had only been threats on the first day; on the fifth day they actually did it. That was also the day when I signed up to learn kung fu.) Today’s first day hadn’t been at all like that or like various other memorable first days at assorted new schools. Apart from Persephone and Shaving Fun Ken, none of the Frognal Academy students had struck me as unpleasant, and even the teachers seemed to be okay. I didn’t have the feeling that I wouldn’t be able to keep up in any subject, the French teacher had praised my good accent, the classrooms were bright and pleasant, and even school lunch had been quite good. The girl who sat next to me in French had taken over from Persephone, entirely unasked, in showing me around, took me to the cafeteria at midday, and introduced me to her friends. I learned from them that the mushy peas were better avoided and that the Autumn Ball would be cool because after the stuffy, official part of it there was going to be a band playing that unfortunately I’d never heard of before. Anyway, as first days at a new school go, mine had been pretty good. Mia’s too.

So we really ought to have told Lottie all that, but it was nice to have her so sympathetic and concerned for us—especially as the day wasn’t over yet. The worst still lay ahead of us: dinner at Ernest’s place, when we were going to meet his son and daughter. They were seventeen-year-old twins, and if you believed what Ernest said about them, they were models of talent and virtue. I hated them already.

Lottie seemed to be thinking of this dinner date as well. “I’ve hung up your red velvet skirt and white shirt for this evening, Mia. And I ironed your mother’s blue tea dress for you, Liv.”

“Why not go the whole hog and make it the little black dress with fake gemstones all over it?” I said sarcastically.

“Yes, worn with kid gloves and all,” agreed Mia. “Oh, come on, this is only a stupid dinner. On a perfectly ordinary Monday. I’m wearing my jeans.”

“You’re doing no such thing,” said Lottie. “I want you two showing yourselves in your best light.”

“What, in Mom’s blue tea dress? What are you wearing, then, Lottie—your Sunday-best dirndl?” Mia and I giggled.

Lottie looked majestic. She wasn’t taking jokes about traditional dirndl skirts and dresses any more than she’d have us go against Christmas customs. “I would, because you can never go wrong in a dirndl. But I’m staying here with Buttercup.”

“What? You’re making us go on our own?” cried Mia.

Lottie didn’t say anything.

“Oh, I see—Mr. Spencer hasn’t invited you,” I concluded after working it out, and I suddenly had a sinking feeling inside me.

Mia widened her eyes indignantly. “That stupid, snobby…”

Lottie immediately began defending Ernest. “It wouldn’t be the right thing to do. After all, you don’t take the nanny to a … a
family occasion
like this.”

“But you’re part of our family!” Mia was crumbling up a vanilla crescent, and Buttercup hopefully raised her head. “Talk about arrogance!”

“No, that’s not it at all,” Lottie contradicted her. “Mr. Spencer’s behavior toward me is always perfectly correct. He’s very nice, a real gentleman, and I’m sure his feelings for your mother are genuine and honorable. He really did his best to find a solution when it turned out that the cottage wouldn’t do. We wouldn’t have found this apartment without his help, and you’d never have been accepted by the Frognal Academy—it’s said to have a waiting list miles long. So you’d better start liking him.” She looked sternly at us. “And you’ll dress properly this evening.”

The trouble was, Lottie couldn’t look stern any more sucessfully than Buttercup could look ferocious. They both had such cute brown eyes. I loved Lottie so much at that moment, I could have burst with it.

“Okay,” I said. “If you’ll lend me your dirndl.”

Mia had a fit of giggles. “Yes, you can never go wrong in Lottie’s dirndl.”

“I didn’t say you can’t go wrong in
my
dirndl, I said in
a
dirndl.” Lottie turned up her nose, threw back her brown curly hair (it looked just like Buttercup’s), and went on in her native German. “I don’t want to disillusion you, my loves, but you simply don’t have enough on your hips to look good in a dirndl, understand?”

I wanted to laugh, but somehow it just turned into a funny snort. “Oh, Lottie, I do love you!” I said, much more seriously than I meant to.

5

I’D EXPECTED ERNEST SPENCER
to live in a bigger, more showy sort of house, and I was almost disappointed when the taxi stopped outside a comparatively ordinary sort of brick building in Redington Road. Traditional-style sash windows with white frames, several gables and bow windows, hidden behind tall hedges and walls, like most of the houses here. It had stopped raining, and the evening sun was bathing everything in golden light.

“It looks very pretty,” whispered Mia in surprise as we followed Mom up the paved path to the front door, past flowering hydrangeas and box trees clipped into globe shapes.

“So do you,” I whispered back. She did; she looked good enough to eat, with the cute braids on which Lottie had insisted, in exchange for the jeans that Mom, much to Lottie’s displeasure, had said we could wear. Probably, for one thing, because she wanted to wear her freshly ironed blue dress herself.

Mom had pressed the doorbell, and we heard three melodious notes inside the house. “Please be
nice
, you two! And try to behave yourselves.”

“You mean we’re not to throw our food about the way we usually do, belch, and tell improper jokes?” I blew a strand of hair away from my face. Lottie would have braided my hair too, but I had deliberately spent so long in the bathroom that there wasn’t enough time for it. “Honestly, Mom, if any of us has to be warned to be on our best behavior, it’s you!”

“Exactly!
We
have perfect manners. Good evening, sir.” Mia bobbed a curtsy to a large stone statue beside the front door, a mixture of eagle (head down to rib cage) and lion (the rest of him), and rather stout into the bargain. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Mia Silver, this is my sister Olivia Silver, and the one with the heavy frown looking more like a wicked stepmother is our real mom, Professor Ann Matthews. May I ask whom I have the honor of addressing?”

“This is Frightful Freddy, also known as Fat Freddy.” The front door had been opened, without a sound, by a tall boy a little older than me, wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt and jeans. I heaved a sigh of relief. Thank goodness Mom had put the silly tea dress on herself; I’d have felt totally ridiculous in it.

“My grandparents gave him to my parents as a wedding present,” said the boy, patting Frightful Freddy’s beak. “Years ago, Dad wanted to move him to the far corner of the garden, but he weighs about a ton.”

“Hello, Grayson!” Mom kissed the boy on both cheeks and then pointed to us. “These are my two mousies, Mia and Liv.”

Mia and I hated being called mousies. It was as if Mom was letting everyone know that our front teeth were a little too large, which was possibly true.

Grayson smiled at us. “Hi. Good to meet you.”

“I bet,” I muttered under my breath.

“You have lipstick on your cheek,” said Mia.

Mom sighed, and Grayson looked a bit baffled. I couldn’t help noticing that he looked very like his father if you took no notice of his hair. The same broad shoulders, the same self-confident bearing, the same noncommittal politician’s smile. That was probably why he seemed so familiar to me. Admittedly he didn’t have ears as enormous as Ernest’s, but they might yet catch up with his father’s. I’d once read that ears and noses are the only parts of the body to go on growing into old age.

Mom walked energetically past Grayson, as if she knew her way around the house very well. There was nothing we could do but follow her. Only, we stopped in the corridor, at a loss, because she had disappeared.

Grayson closed the door behind us and passed the back of his hand over his cheeks. In fact, Mia had invented the lipstick bit.

“Is there at least something delicious to eat?” asked Mia, after we had stared at each other awkwardly for a couple of seconds.

“I think so,” said Grayson, smiling again. I’ve no idea how he managed it. I couldn’t bring myself to smile back, anyway. Stupid show-off. “Mrs. Dimbleby has left quails on a baking tray ready to go into the oven.”

Exactly what we might have expected! “Mrs. Dimbleby?” I repeated. “I assume she’s your cook? And Mr. Dimbleby will be your gardener, I’m sure.”

“She’s our cook and housekeeper.” Grayson was still smiling, but from the way he looked at me (one eyebrow slightly raised), I could tell that he’d registered my ironic undertone. Incidentally, he hadn’t inherited Ernest’s blue eyes. His were light brown, a striking contrast with his fair hair. “As far as I know, Mr. Dimbleby sells insurance. Dad does the gardening himself—he says it’s relaxing.” The eyebrow went a little farther up. “And I hear that you girls have a nanny. Is that right?”

“Well, we…” Bloody hell. Luckily Ernest interrupted us, with Mom clinging to his arm as if it were a life preserver. Just like yesterday he was beaming at us as if we were the best things he’d ever seen.

“Good, Grayson’s already taken your coats. Welcome to the Casa Spencer. Come along through. Florence is waiting with the starters.”

Neither Grayson nor Mia and I explained that we didn’t have any coats with us. (How could we, when our fall and winter clothes were still in the moving company’s crates somewhere?) Mom cast us a last warning glance before we followed her and Ernest in silence through a double door into the living and dining room. It was a pretty place, with wooden floorboards, windows down to floor level, an open hearth, white sofas with embroidered cushions, a piano, and a large dining table from which there was a lovely view of the garden. It looked spacious but not enormously large, and surprisingly … well,
comfortable.
I’d never in my life have thought of Ernest having such unstylish sofas, getting on in years a bit, with covers torn at the edges and brightly colored cushions that didn’t match. There was even an amusing fur cushion in the shape of a ginger cat. The cushion stretched as we passed it.