Fire and Hemlock. Diana Wynne Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ Granny said grimly. “And of course I’m very grateful if you kept her from mischief—”

      “She was quite safe, I promise you,” said Mr Lynn.

      Granny went on with her sentence as if Mr Lynn had not spoken. “—Mr Lynn, but what were you up to there? Are you an art dealer?”

      “Oh no,” Mr Lynn said, very flustered. “These pictures are just keepsakes – for pleasure – that old Mrs Perry left me in her Will. I know very little about paintings – I’m a musician really—”

      “What kind of musician?” said Granny.

      “I play the cello,” said Mr Lynn, “with an orchestra.”

      “Which orchestra?” Granny asked inexorably.

      “The British Philharmonic,” said Mr Lynn.

      “So then how did you come to be at this funeral?” Granny demanded.

      “Relation by marriage,” Mr Lynn explained. “I used to be married to Mrs Perry’s daughter – we were divorced earlier this year—”

      “I see,” said Granny. “Well thank you, Mr Lynn. Have you had lunch?” Though Granny said this most unwelcomingly, Polly knew Granny was relenting. She relaxed a little. The way Granny was interrogating Mr Lynn made her most uncomfortable.

      But Mr Lynn remained flustered. “Thank you – no – I’ll get something on the station,” he said. “I have to catch the two-forty.” He managed somehow to haul up one cuff, and craned round the bundle of pictures to look at his watch. “I have to be in London for a concert this evening,” he explained.

      “Then you’d better run,” said Granny. “Or is it Main Road you go from?”

      “No, Miles Cross,” said Mr Lynn. “I must go.” And go he did, nodding at Polly and Nina, murmuring goodbye to Granny, and diving through the house in big strides like a laden ostrich. The front door slammed heavily behind him. Mintchoc came back in through her cat-flap in the back door. Granny turned to Polly.

      “Well, Madam?”

      Polly had hoped the trouble was over. She found it had only begun. Granny was furious. Polly had not known before that Granny could be this angry. She spoke to Polly in sharp, snapping sentences, on and on, about trespassing and silliness and barging in on private funerals, and she said a lot about each thing. But there was one thing she snapped back to in between, most fiercely, over and over again. “Has nobody ever warned you, Polly, never to speak with strange men?”

      This hurt Polly’s feelings particularly. About the tenth time Granny asked it, she protested. “He isn’t a strange man now. I know him quite well!”

      It made no impression on Granny. “He was when you first spoke to him, Polly. Don’t contradict.” Then Polly tried to defend herself by explaining that she’d thought she was following Nina. Nina began making faces at Polly, winking and jerking and twisting her food-filled mouth. Polly had no idea what Nina had told Granny, and she saw she was going to get Nina into trouble as well. She said hurriedly that Mr Lynn had taken her out of the funeral into the garden.

      Granny did indeed shoot Nina a look sharp as a carving knife, which stopped Nina’s jaws munching on the spot, but she only said, “Nina’s got more sense than to walk into people’s houses where she doesn’t belong, I’m glad to see. But this Mr Lynn took you back indoors again, didn’t he? Why? He must have known by then that you didn’t belong.”

      Granny seemed to know it all by instinct. “Yes. I mean, no. I told him,” Polly said. And she knew it had somehow been wrong to go back into the house, even if she had not made it worse by rearranging the pictures.

      She thought of Laurel’s scary eyes, and the way Mr Lynn had been careful not to explain to Laurel who Polly was, and she found she could not quite be honest herself. “He needed me to choose the pictures,” she said. “And he gave me this one for my own.”

      “Let’s see it,” said Granny.

      Polly held the picture up in both hands. She was sure Granny was going to make her take it back to Hunsdon House at once. “I’ve never had a picture of my own before,” she said. Mintchoc, who was a most understanding cat, noticed her distress and came and rubbed consolingly round her legs.

      “Hm,” said Granny, surveying the fire and the smoke and the hemlock plant. “Well, it isn’t an Old Master, I can tell you that. And Mr Lynn gave it you himself? Without you asking? Are you sure?”

      “Yes,” said Polly. This was the truth, after all. “It was instead of a medal for life-saving.”

      “Very well,” Granny said, to Polly’s immense relief. “Keep it if you must. And you’d better get that old dress off you and some lunch inside you before it’s time for tea.”

      Nina was on pudding by the time Polly was ready to eat, and Mintchoc came and stationed herself expectantly between them. Mintchoc had got her name for being frantically fond of mint-chocolate ice cream, which was what Nina had for pudding. But Mintchoc liked cottage pie too.

      “It was a very respectable funeral,” Polly explained as she started on her cottage pie. “Boring really.”

      “Respectable!” Granny said, plucking Mintchoc off the table.

      “And I like Mr Lynn,” Polly said defiantly.

      “Oh, I daresay there’s no harm in him,” Granny admitted. “But you don’t go in that house again, Polly. What kind of respectable people choose to get buried on Hallowe’en?”

      “Perhaps they didn’t know the date?” Nina suggested.

      Granny snorted.

      Later that day Granny and Nina had helped Polly bang a picture hook into the wall and hang the picture above Polly’s bed, where she could see it when she lay down to sleep. It had hung there ever since. Polly remembered staring at it while Nina clamoured to be told about her adventures. Polly did not want to tell Nina. It was private. Besides, she was busy trying to make out whether the shapes in the smoke were really four running people or only people-shaped lumps of hedge. She put Nina off with vague answers and, long before Nina was satisfied, Polly fell asleep. She dreamed that the Chinese horse from one of Mr Lynn’s other pictures had somehow got into her photograph and was trampling and rearing behind the fire and the smoke.

       3 Abide you there a little spaceAnd I will show you marvels three

       THOMAS THE RHYMER

      Polly forgot to take the picture home with her when she went back from Granny’s. Granny did not remind her. Thinking about it nine years later, Polly wondered if it was not really because Granny disapproved of Mr Lynn giving it to her. On the other hand, it could have been that Granny knew, as well as Polly did, that home was not a Fire and Hemlock sort of place.

      Home had bright, СКАЧАТЬ