Fire and Hemlock Read online

It made Polly feel like a queen. She put out a somewhat grubby hand and took a glass of orangeade. There was ice in it and a slice of real orange. “Thank you,” she said in a stately, queenlike way.

  “Turn left through that door, miss,” the servitor said.

  Polly did as he said. She had a feeling she was supposed to. True, underneath she had a faint feeling that this couldn’t be quite right, but there did not seem to be anything she could do about it. Holding the clinking glass against her chest, Polly walked like a queen in her black dress into a big, carpeted room. It was dingy in the gusty light of the autumn day, and full of comfortable armchairs lined up in not very regular rows. A number of people were standing about holding wineglasses and talking in murmurs. They were all in dark clothes and looked very respectable, and every one of them was grown up. None of them paid any attention to Polly at all.

  Nina was not there. Polly had not really expected her to be. It was clear Nina had vanished the way people do in dreams. She saw the woman she had mistaken for Nina – it was the split skirt and the black dress which had caused the mistake – standing outlined against the dim green garden beyond the windows, talking to a high-shouldered man with glasses. Everything was very hushed and elderly. “And I shan’t look on it very kindly if you do,” Polly heard the woman say to the man. It was a polite murmur, but it sounded like one of Nina’s threats, only a good deal less friendly.

  More people came in behind Polly. She moved over out of their way and sat on one of the back row of chairs, which were hard and upright, still carefully holding her orangeade. She sat and watched the room fill with murmuring, dreamlike people in dark clothes. There was one other child now. He was in a grey suit and looked as respectable as the rest, and he was rather old too – at least fourteen, Polly thought. He did not notice Polly. Nobody did, except the man with glasses. Polly could see the glasses flashing at her uncertainly as the lady talked to him.

  Then a new stage seemed to start. A busy, important man swept through the room and sat down in a chair facing all the others. All the rest sat down too, in a quiet, quick way, turning their heads to make sure there was a chair there before they sat. The room was all rustling while they arranged themselves, and one set of quick footsteps as the high-shouldered man walked about looking for a place. Everyone looked at him crossly. He hunched a bit – you do, Polly thought, when everyone stares – and finally sat down near the door, a few seats along from Polly.

  The important man flipped a large paper open with a rattle. A document, Polly thought. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I have your attention, I shall read the Will.”

  Oh dear, Polly thought. The dream feeling went away at once, and the ice in her drink rattled as she realised where she was and what she had done. This was Hunsdon House, where she and Nina had seen the hearse. Someone had died here and she had gatecrashed the funeral. And because she was dressed up in a black dress, no one had realised that she should not be here. She wondered what they would do to her when they did. Meanwhile she sat, trying not to shake the ice in her glass, listening to the lawyer’s voice reading out what she was sure were all sorts of private bequests – from the Last Will and Testament of Mrs Mabel Tatiana Leroy Perry, being of a sound mind et cetera – which Polly was sure she should not be hearing at all.

  As the lawyer’s voice droned on, Polly became more and more certain she was listening to private things. She could feel the way each item made sort of waves among the silent listeners, waves of annoyance, anger and deep disgust, and one or two spurts of quite savage joy. The disgust seemed to be because so many things went to “my daughter Mrs Eudora Mabel Lorelei Perry Lynn”. Even when things went to other people, such as “my cousin Morton Perry Leroy” or “my niece Mrs Silvia Nuala Leroy Perry”, the Will seemed to change its mind every so often and give them to Mrs Perry Lynn instead. The joy was on the rare occasions when someone different, like Robert Goodman Leroy Perry or Sebastian Ralph Perry Leroy, actually got something.

  Polly began to wonder if it might even be against the law for her to be listening to these things. She tried not to listen – and this was not difficult, because most of it was very boring – but she became steadily more unhappy.

  She wished she dared creep away. She was quite near the door. It would have been easy if only that man hadn’t chosen to sit down just beyond her, right beside the door. She looked to see if she still might slip out, and looked at the same moment as the man looked at her, evidently wondering about her. Polly hastily turned her head to the front again and pretended to listen to the Will, but she could feel him still looking. The ice in her drink melted. The Will went on to an intensely boring bit about “a Trust shall be set up”. Beside the door, the man stood up. Polly’s head turned, without her meaning it to, as if it were on strings, and he was still looking at her, right at her. The eyes behind the glasses met hers and sort of dragged, and he nodded his head away sideways towards the door. “Come on out of that,” said the look. “Please,” it added, with a sort of polite, questioning stillness.

  It was a fair cop. Polly nodded too. Carefully she put the melted orange drink down on the chair beside hers and slid to the floor. He was now holding out his hand to take hers and make sure she didn’t get away. Feeling fated, Polly put her hand into his. It was a big hand, a huge one, and folded hers quite out of sight under its row of long fingers. It pulled, and they both went softly out of the door into the hall with the jointed staircase.

  “Didn’t you want your drink?” the man asked as the lawyer’s voice faded to a rise and fall in the distance.

  Polly shook her head. Her voice seemed to have gone away. There was an archway opening off the hall. In the room through the archway she could see the servitor setting wineglasses out on a big, polished dinner table. Polly wanted to shout to him to come and explain that he had let her into the funeral, but she could not utter a sound. The big hand holding hers was pulling her along, into the passage she had come in by. Polly, as she went with it, cast her eyes round the hall for a last look at its grandeurs. Wistfully she thought of herself jumping into one of the Ali Baba vases and staying there hidden until everyone had gone away. But as she thought it, she was already in the side passage with the door standing open on the gusty trees at the end of it. The lawyer’s voice was out of hearing now.

  “Will you be warm enough outside in that dress?” the man holding her hand asked politely.

  His politeness seemed to deserve an answer. Polly’s voice came back. “Yes thank you,” she replied sadly. “I’ve got my real clothes on underneath.”

  “Very wise,” said the man. “Then we can go into the garden.” They stepped out of the door, where the wind wrapped Polly’s black dress round her legs and flapped her hair sideways. It could not do much with the man’s hair, which was smoothed across his head in an elderly style, so it stood it up in colourless hanks and rattled the jacket of his dark suit. He shivered. Polly hoped he would send her off and go straight indoors again. But he obviously meant to see her properly off the premises. He turned to the right with her. The wind hurled itself at their faces. “This is better,” said the man. “I wish I could have thought of a way to get that poor boy Seb out of it too. I could see he was as bored as you were. But he didn’t have the sense to sit near the door.”

  Polly turned and looked up at him in astonishment. He smiled down at her. Polly gave him a hasty smile in return, hoping he would think she was shy, and turned her face back to the wind to think about this. So the man thought she really was part of the funeral. He was just meaning to be kind. “It was boring, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “Terribly,” he said, and let go of her hand.

  Polly ought to have run off then. And she would have, she thought, remembering it all nine years later, if she had simply thought he was just being kind. But the way he spoke told her that he had found the funeral far more utterly boring than she had. She remembered the way the lady she had mistaken for Nina had spoken to him, and the way the other guests h
ad looked at him while he was walking about looking for a seat. She realised he had sat down on purpose near the door, and she knew – perhaps without quite understanding it – that if she ran away, it would mean he had to go back into the funeral again. She was his excuse for coming out of it.

  So she stayed. She had to lean on the wind to keep beside him while they walked under some ragged, nearly finished roses and the wind blew white petals across them.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Polly.”

  “Polly what?”

  “Polly Whittacker,” she said without thinking. Then of course she realised that the right name for the funeral should have been Leroy or Perry, or Perry Leroy, or Leroy Perry, like the people who got the bequests in the Will, and had to cover it up. “I’m only adopted, you know. I come from the other branch of the family really.”

  “I thought you might,” he said, “with that hair of yours.”

  “And what part of the family are you?” Polly said, quickly and artificially, to distract him from asking more. She took a piece of her blowing hair and bit it anxiously.

  “Oh, no part really,” he said, ducking his head under a clawing rose. “The dead lady is the mother of my ex-wife, so I felt I ought to come. But I’m the odd man out, here.” Polly relaxed. He was distracted. He said, “My name’s Thomas Lynn.”

  “Both parts surname?” Polly asked doubtfully. “Everyone’s so double-barrelled in there.”

  That made him give a little crow of laughter, which he swallowed hastily down, as if he were ashamed of laughing at a funeral. “No, no. Just the second part.”

  “Mr Lynn, then,” said Polly. She let her hair blow round her face as they walked down some sunken steps, and studied him. Long hair had its uses. He was tall and thin and walked in a way that stooped his round, colourless head between his shoulders, making his head look smaller than it really was – though some of that could have been distance: he was so tall that his head was a long way off from Polly. Like a very tall tortoise, Polly thought. The glasses added to the tortoise look. It was an amiable, vague face they sat on. Polly decided Mr Lynn was nice.

  “Mr Lynn,” she asked, “what do you like doing most?”

  The tortoise head swung towards her in surprise. “I was just going to ask you that!”

  “Snap!” said Polly, and laughed up at him. She knew, of course, by this time, that she was starting to flirt with Mr Lynn. Mum would have given Polly one of her long, heavy stares if she had been there. But, as Polly told herself, she did have to distract Mr Lynn from thinking too deeply about her connection with the funeral, and she did think Mr Lynn was nice anyway. Polly never flirted with anyone unless she liked them. So, as they edged their way between two vast grey hedges of uncut lavender, she said, “What I like best – apart from running and shouting and jokes and fighting – is being things.”

  “Being things?” Mr Lynn asked. “Like what?” He sounded wistful and mystified.

  “Making things like heroes up with other people, then being them,” Polly explained. The tortoise head turned to her politely. She could tell he did not understand. It was on the tip of her tongue to show him what she meant by telling him how she had arrived at the funeral by being a High Priestess with the police after her. But she dared not say that. “I’ll show you,” she said instead. “Pretend you’re not really you at all. In real life you’re really something quite different.”

  “What am I?” Mr Lynn said obligingly.

  It would have been better if he had been like Nina and said he would not be friends unless she told him. Without any prodding, Polly’s invention went dead on her. She could only think of the most ordinary things.

  “You keep an ironmonger’s shop,” she said rather desperately. To make this seem better, she added, “A very good ironmonger’s shop in a very nice town. And your name is really Thomas Piper. That’s because of your name – Tom, Tom, the piper’s son – you know.”

  Mr Lynn smiled. “Oddly enough, my father used to play the flute professionally. Yes. I sell nails and dustbins and hearth-brushes. What else?”

  “Hot-water bottles and spades and buckets,” said Polly. “Every morning you go out and hang them round your door, and stack wheelbarrows and watering cans on the pavement.”

  “Where passers-by can bark their shins on them. I see,” said Mr Lynn. “And what else? Am I happy in my work?”

  “Not quite happy,” Polly said. He was playing up so well that her imagination began to work properly. Down between the lavender bushes, the wind was cut off and she felt much calmer. “You’re a bit bored, but that doesn’t matter, because keeping the shop is only what everyone thinks you do. Really you’re secretly a hero, a very strong one who’s immortal—”

  “Immortal?” Mr Lynn said, startled.

  “Well nearly,” said Polly. “You’d live for hundreds of years if someone doesn’t kill you in one of your battles. Your name is really – um – Tan Coul and I’m your assistant.”

  “Are you my assistant in the shop as well, or just when I’m being a hero?” asked Mr Lynn.

  “No, I’m me,” said Polly. “I’m a learner hero. I come with you whenever you go out on a job.”

  “Then you’ll have to live within call,” Mr Lynn pointed out. “Where is this shop of mine? Here in Middleton? It had better be, so that I can pick you up easily when a job comes up.”

  “No, it’s in Stow-on-the-Water,” Polly said decidedly. Pretending was like that. Things seemed to make themselves up, once you got going.

  “That’s awkward,” Mr Lynn said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Polly agreed. “If you like, I’ll come and work in your shop and pretend to be your real-life assistant too. Say when I found out where you lived, I journeyed miles from Middleton to be near you.”

  “Better,” said Mr Lynn. “You also pretended to be older than you are, in order not to be sent to school. But that sort of thing can easily be done by the right kind of trainee-hero, I’m sure. What’s your name when we’re out on a job?”

  “Hero,” said Polly. “It is a real name,” she protested, as the tortoise head swung down to look at her. “It’s a lady in my book that I read every night. Someone swam the sea all the time to visit her.”

  “I know,” said Mr Lynn. “I was just surprised that you did.”

  “And it’s a sort of joke,” Polly explained. “I know a lot about heroes, because of my book.”

  “I see you do,” said Mr Lynn, smiling rather. “But there are still a lot of things we need to settle. For instance—”

  As he spoke, they pushed out from between the grey hedges into a small lawn with an empty sunken pool in it. A brown bird flew away, low across the grass as they came, making a set of sharp, shrieking cries. The wind gusted over, rolling the dry leaves in the concrete bottom of the pool, and a ray of sun followed the wind, travelling swiftly over the lawn.

  “For instance,” said Mr Lynn, and stopped.

  The sun reached the dry pool. For just a flickering part of a second, some trick of light filled the pool deep with transparent water. The sun made bright, curved wrinkles on the bottom, and the leaves, Polly could have sworn, instead of rolling on the bottom were, just for an instant, floating, green and growing. Then the sunbeam travelled on, and there was just a dry oblong of concrete again. Mr Lynn saw it too. Polly could tell from the way he stopped talking.

  “Heroes do see things like that,” she said, in case he was alarmed.

  “I suppose they do,” he agreed thoughtfully. “True. They must, since we both are. But, tell me, what happens when the call comes to do a job? I’m in the shop, selling nails. We each snatch up a saw – or I suppose an axe would be better – and we rush out. Where do we go? What do we do?”

  They walked past the pool while Polly considered. “We go to kill giants and dragons and things,” she said.

  “Where? Up the road in the supermarket?” Mr Lynn asked.

  Polly could tell he thought poorly o
f her answer. “Yes, if you like, if you’re so clever!” she snapped at him, just as if he were Nina. “I know we’re that kind of heroes – I know we’re not the kind that conquers mad scientists – but I don’t know it all. You do some of it, if you know so much! You were just pretending not to know about being things – weren’t you?”

  “Not altogether,” Mr Lynn said, politely holding a wet lump of evergreen bush aside for Polly. “It’s years since I did any. Beside you, I’m the learner. I’d really much prefer to be a trainee-hero too. Couldn’t I be? You could happen to be there when I kill my first giant – and perhaps it could be thanks to you that I didn’t get squashed flat by him.”

  “If you like,” Polly agreed graciously. He was so humble that she felt quite mean to have snapped.

  “Thank you,” he said, just as if she had granted a real favour. “That brings me to another question. Do I know about my secret life as a hero while I’m being an ironmonger? Or not?”

  “You didn’t at first,” Polly said, thinking it out. “You were awfully surprised and thought you were having visions or something. But you got used to it quite quickly.”

  “Though at first I blundered about, utterly bewildered,” Mr Lynn agreed. “We both had to learn as we went on. Yes, that’s how it must have been. Now, what about my life selling hardware in Stow-on-the-Water? Do I live alone?”

  “No, I live there too, when I get there,” said Polly. “But of course there’s your wife, Edna—”

  “No there isn’t,” Mr Lynn said. He said it quietly and calmly, as if someone had asked him if there was any butter and he had opened the fridge and found none. But Polly could tell he meant it absolutely.

  “Well – there has to be,” she argued. “There’s someone – I know her name’s Edna – who bosses you round, and makes your life a misery, and thinks you’re stupid, and doesn’t allow you enough money, and makes you do all the work—”

  “My landlady,” said Mr Lynn.

  “No,” said Polly.

  “Sister, then,” said Mr Lynn. “How about a sister?”