Fire and Hemlock (18 page)

Guiltily she went up and round to the next joint. The door there was slightly open. Polly slipped through to a short corridor with a blue-gleaming bathroom opening off one side, into a space of scents and silks. There was a real four-poster bed in here, on a white fluffy carpet. The faint shine of the bed’s curtains, the frills at the top and the quilt across it suggested dark-pinkish satin. Polly took her glove off to touch it, and it
was
satin. She put the glove on again, because this room was cold. Or maybe it was the thievish way Polly was feeling. She knew this was Laurel’s room. It was a big dimness, with rosebuds on the walls, a soft rosy carpet under the bed’s white fluffy one, silken chairs. One whole wall was folding cupboards with clothes inside. A second wall had a lot of valuable-looking little pictures hung on it in a pattern. Near the window, instead of the lavish dressing table Polly had expected, there was a curious wooden chest, bent and carved, with silver hairbrushes and pearly-looking combs on it. Above the chest a luminous oval of mirror looked at Polly from the wall.

Polly stood in front of it and looked back at herself in the mirror, surrounded in a dim silver filigree of birds, leaves and animals. The cracks of light from the shutters made the mirror look dark and deep. Polly’s hair blazed white in it, and her face looked shy and wondering, not at all like the face of the trespasser she was. Over her left shoulder, very clearly, she could see one of the photographs in the pattern of little pictures on the far wall. That made her snort with laughter and the face in the mirror grin, remembering the Prefects’ mirror and the face of the Deputy Head.

She turned round to look for the real picture and was rather astonished to see that the wall was too far away for her to pick the little oval photograph out. The pictures seemed just a pattern of blobs from where she stood. She had to go right up to them and search, with her face close to the wall, before she found the right one, near the middle of the pattern. She could still not see it properly. She had to unhook it and carry it into the cracks of light from the window before she could. It was a slightly old-fashioned picture of a mischievously grinning fair-haired boy. Whoever he was, he looked older than Seb, and he was too fair anyway. He was nobody Polly knew. Yet there was a sense of familiarity about the photo, as if the mirror trick had worked and Polly was going to know this boy sometime.

Polly stood holding the little oval picture in both gloved hands, struggling between her superstition and her conscience. She was quite sure she was holding something that was going to be important to her and she was horribly tempted to keep it. On the other hand, it would be stealing if she did. And her conscience went on further and told her that she had already stolen one picture – no, six! – from this house. That jiggery-pokery with the pictures during the funeral, which she had conveniently told herself was a trick Laurel richly deserved, had caused Mr Lynn to go off with six pictures that should have been Laurel’s. Since just one of them had proved valuable enough to pay for a horse, then a car, this made it too serious to be a trick. And to steal another one now would be like victimising Laurel – wronger still.

No. Regretfully Polly crossed the room to hang the photo up again.

Halfway across the room, she heard voices down in the hall. After one moment when she seemed to be dead, Polly came twenty times more alive than normal. Her heart banged a little rapid stutter, like a row of dominoes falling over, and while it did she found she was speeding to the door in long, stealthy steps to look down between the white bars of the banisters. As she went, she heard one of the voices was Mr Lynn’s. It came echoing up quite clearly.

“If you like,” she heard Mr Lynn say. “Though I really don’t see what business it is of yours.”

The relief Polly felt at knowing his voice vanished when she heard the deep, chesty voice that answered. That was Mr Leroy’s. “Come off it, Tom,” this voice said. “Laurel’s interests are mine these days. You must have known Laurel would find out in the end. And you must have known she wouldn’t like it when she did.”

Polly clutched the photo guiltily to her chest and edged forward so that she could see them. They seemed to be standing in the middle of the hall below, side by side rather than face to face, as if they were about to walk into the dining room. The sun must have got round to the French window Polly had left open. A long shaft of light cut through the hall from the living room and fell across both men, so that Polly could see them from the knees up, as if they were floating. It gave both of them a pale, wintry look, particularly Mr Lynn. He did not seem to be enjoying this meeting at all.

“I suggest you put it right by letting us finance you,” said Mr Leroy.

Spots of light from Mr Lynn’s glasses dazzled round the hall as he answered, “Thank you, Morton. But I’ve told you before that I prefer to pay my own way. I’m quite aware of the risk—”

“Risk!” Mr Leroy’s fatal laugh set up a faint, chiming buzz from the Ali Baba vases. “Tom, you haven’t begun to see the risk you run! You’ve made Laurel furious.”

“Can’t Laurel tell me that for herself?” Mr Lynn asked.

“Oh, she will if you want, believe me,” Mr Leroy said. “But I don’t think you’d enjoy it. You’d better let me handle her. If you hadn’t been so secretive about this venture of yours—”

“On purpose,” Mr Lynn said in his mildest way.

“
Of
course,” Mr Leroy agreed. “All right. I admit you’ve stolen a march on us and that I can’t at the moment see how you did it. Now you’ll have to pay the price of your low cunning. If you won’t let us finance you, you’d better agree to come back into the fold. Laurel wants you where she can keep an eye on you after this.”

“I am not,” said Mr Lynn in his most quietly obstinate way, “going to agree to live in Hunsdon House again, for you, or for Laurel, or for anyone else.” He turned into the line of sunlight and walked away into the living room.

Mr Leroy turned and went with him. “Some such arrangement’s got to be made,” he said. Polly watched their two backs moving away, one wide and upright, the other high-shouldered and thin. “We don’t like to make threats,” came from Mr Leroy’s broad back, “but we’re going to keep tabs on you somehow, Tom, and you are going to let us do it. Or do you want trouble for your friends?”

Mr Leroy’s voice faded as they went into the living room. Mr Lynn’s voice came from in there. He sounded angry now, but what he said was drowned in a burst of Mr Leroy’s laughter, as if Mr Lynn’s anger was truly a joke. Then there was silence. And more silence. The house felt empty again.

But it
can’t
be empty! Polly thought. They’ve gone in there, and Mr Leroy will see the shutter and the window open, and then my footprints, and he’ll know I’m still inside somewhere.

She felt cold to the very centre of her spine. Her hands shook as they held the oval photograph. When Mr Leroy found her, she did not think Mr Lynn would be able to do much to help her. From what she had heard, he seemed to be hard pressed to help himself. She backed away, very gently and quietly, through the open door and into Laurel’s bedroom, back to the edge of the fluffy white carpet the bed stood on. If she hid under the bed, it would take a thorough search to find her.

But she stood there instead, listening and thinking. There really was not a sound from downstairs. Nothing but thick, dead stillness. She began almost to wonder if Mr Leroy and Mr Lynn had been there at all. There was only her banging heart to tell her that they had been. That, and her anger. Her anger seemed to have been growing all this time, underneath her fear, until it was large enough to hide the fear completely. She thought of Laurel and Mr Leroy in the audience on television, watching Mr Lynn. As if they owned him! Polly thought. They don’t. They can’t. Nobody owns anyone like that!

She laid the photograph carefully down on the satin quilt of the bed and went across to the pattern of little oval pictures hanging on the wall. Taking one out had left a rather obvious gap in the middle of the pattern. But there were, as Polly thought she had remembered, a number of spare hooks sticking out of the wall round the pictures. Evidently Laurel liked to spread the pictures about and arrange them into different patterns from time to time.

Quite carefully and calmly Polly unhooked pictures and rehung them in new places to make another, wider-spaced pattern so that it would not show that one was missing. I might as well do something useful while I’m waiting for Mr Leroy to find me, she told herself. And I’m wearing gloves, like a good criminal should. It was lucky that all the pictures had the same kind of oval gold frame. Not all of them were photographs, by any means. Quite a number were tiny paintings of a face or a full-length person. Two were black shapes of people cut out of paper, and some were probably charcoal drawings. Polly arranged them with real artistry. There was one miniature painting of a young man in old-fashioned clothes, including a cloak thrown back across one shoulder, that Polly thought was much the nicest. He was leaning against a tree holding a sort of banjo, and his face looked nice. She would have liked to put him in the middle. But since the photograph of the fair boy had come from there, Polly sensibly replaced it with a photograph as like it as she could find, of another fair boy who was only slightly more old-fashioned. She left the paintings round the edges, where they had been before. It looked good when she had finished – almost the same. She went and picked up the stolen photo, zipped it carefully into her anorak pocket, and walked softly out of the room and down the stairs, telling herself she was going to her doom.

She did not quite believe she was, even as she went. The house felt so empty. Downstairs, she knew it was empty. The sun had left the open shutter, and the hall and the living room were dim, and as deserted as they were dim. Polly let herself out through the window and pulled the shutter closed. She pulled the window shut and heard the click as it latched itself. It would not open when she tried it. She walked down the steps, between NOW and HERE on the vases, and back across her line of footprints. They had spread wide and green in the sun, but they were the only set of footprints. Mr Leroy and Mr Lynn had not come or gone this way. The puzzling thing was that they did not seem to have used the front door or the side door either. When Polly peered at these doors from the bushes, she could not see any prints on the frosty gravel, nor any tire marks on the drive. She did not see another living creature until she met Mintchoc sitting on the wall in front of Granny’s house.

Feeling very guilty for a number of reasons, Polly bought Mr Lynn a copy of
The Three Musketeers
for Christmas and got Granny to help her pack it up. Granny’s parcels were works of art made of closely woven string and brown paper. “Well, it’s bound to be late and I daresay he’s a bit old for it, but they say it’s the thought that counts,” Granny said as they came back from posting it.

“Why are you always like that about Mr Lynn?” said Polly.

“Like what?” said Granny.

“Sort of sarcastic,” said Polly. “Why don’t you like him?”

Granny shrugged. “Oh, I expect he’s well enough, in himself. I just have my reservations about the company he keeps.”

Since Polly knew exactly what Granny meant about the Leroy Perrys, she did not say any more. She just went quietly back to the paper chains she was making.

Dad stayed with them over Christmas, to Polly’s delight. “Mind you,” Granny said, “I said I wouldn’t take sides and I’m not. But I think this is fair.”

“Fair!” Dad said angrily. “I’ve a good mind to get a court order!” He told Polly rather grimly that Mum and David Bragge had gone away together for Christmas. But most of the time he was just as Polly remembered him from over a year ago, laughing and making silly jokes with Granny and Polly. Polly forgot the new wrinkles round his eyes and the grey threads in his curls and romped with him as if she were five years old. There was only one five-year-old thing she refused to do. “Play Let’s Pretend now,” Dad said pleadingly, several times.

“No,” said Polly. “I’ve gone off it.”

“Why?” asked Dad, but Polly did not know.

“Don’t pester her, Reg,” said Granny.

Polly did not dare show Dad or Granny – particularly Granny – her stolen photograph. She looked at it secretly when she went to bed each night, under her
Fire and Hemlock
picture. Looking back on that Christmas, Polly was rather surprised at the way she thought a great deal about both her pictures, and scarcely at all about that meeting she had overheard between Mr Leroy and Mr Lynn. That was so queer, somehow, that she had to push it to one side of her mind. Instead, she stared at the fire and the mysterious figures behind the hemlock.