Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Also by Joan Aiken

Copyright

BONE AND DREAM

Joan Aiken

Illustrated by
Caroline Crossland

CHAPTER ONE

‘YOU’VE GOT CUPBOARDS full of toys at home!’ scolded the woman behind me in the bus. ‘No, we are not going to the toy shop in St Boan. No, you can’t have any more toys!’

‘I want another one! I want a new one!’ howled her son. Tears shot out of him like froth from a bottle when someone has won a football cup.

Then I noticed that the girl on the seat next to me was crying likewise. She wasn’t making any noise about it, but the tears were coming from her eyes just as quickly, running down her cheeks faster than rain down a windowpane.

At that moment the driver made an announcement.

‘Sorry, folks, but we’ve got a flat tyre. Have to stop here ten minutes while Fred and I fix it.’

A groan went up from the passengers as he pulled the single-decker bus into a lay-by. In fact he was lucky to find a lay-by at hand; lays-bys are not so common on steep-banked Cornish lanes. And we, the passengers, were lucky that this one occupied a rare shady spot halfway through a little wood, for the day was blazing May, and the bus was already as hot inside as a microwave.

Most of the passengers climbed out and strolled back and forth on the tarmac while Fred and the driver got to work. It wasn’t possible to sit on the bank, for bluebells and pink campion grew all over it, knee-deep, very pretty. Nobody had the heart to sit down and squash them. But it was a relief to be out of the bus, in the shade of the trees, which were mostly overgrown, tangled rhododendrons, smothered in red-and-white blossoms bigger than pudding-basins. I wondered if this was, or had been, the park of some stately home. There was a warm, damp, juicy smell under all the foliage. I wasn’t sorry to have my arrival in St Boan delayed by twenty minutes.

‘Dear Ned, could you come for a night or so and help us sort out our neighbour, old Tod Menhenitt – it may perhaps be a case for your key,’ my Aunt Lal had written. ‘I’ll tell you more about it when you get here – I don’t phone because you never know who might be listening.’

I wasn’t mad keen to go to St Boan just at that time, for the school tennis tournament was in its early stages and I was hopeful of my chances – also end-of-term exams loomed ahead. But Aunt Lal and I have a kind of pact that we never ask for help unless it is really needed, so I phoned and said I would come for the weekend.

Old Tod was someone they had known for years – Sir Thomas Menhenitt was his real name and he was a poet – in fact quite a famous old gaffer, Poet Laureate of Wessex. He had written reams of poetry, most of which I hadn’t read. But everyone knows that one about the thrush—

‘All I had wanted was to hear him sing,

My presence made him flinch and take to wing . . .’

and the one called Lines found in a Bottle.

I didn’t like him much. Nor did any of his neighbours. And I doubted if he had any time for me at all. I wondered where my key came into the business. It’s a key that a ghostly acquaintance gave me a while ago. We had met on a train, and, by accident, exchanged jackets. Or not by accident, I thought later. He was a boy called Eden who had lived two hundred years before in a village called Wicca Steps which had fallen into the sea. The key was in his jacket pocket and, though it sometimes vanished, it never failed to turn up again and had helped me out of some tight corners. I once read a poem that had a line in it: ‘Hold the high road, and let thy ghost thee lead.’ Eden was that ghost for me, I thought. He always gave me good advice. I could feel the key now, warm, slender and smooth. I rolled it between fingers and thumb.

The girl who sat beside me was not among the strolling passengers in the lay-by; I couldn’t help feeling bothered about her, so I walked up a little rabbit-track that led into the wood and saw her, not far off, sitting on a fallen log. Her shoulders shook; she was still crying.

I went a bit closer and said, ‘Look, I’ll go away if you don’t want to be fussed, but is there anything I can do to help?’

At that she looked up at me forlornly. She was dark-haired, skinny, and quite small; several years younger than me, I guessed. And she was very pale. Crying hadn’t made her face red, as it does with most people.

‘No thank you,’ she said. Her voice was polite and flat. ‘There’s nothing you can do. I have to leave my home because my dad’s new wife doesn’t like me and I don’t like her. I’ve got to live with my elder sister and my grandfather. And I can’t stand him.’

‘That’s really tough,’ I agreed. ‘Will you have to live there always?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Why do you hate him? Is he unkind to you?’

‘No . . . he asks questions in a way I can’t bear. He pokes and pries into what I’m thinking. When I stay in his house I have horrible dreams – I can’t endure it. At least –’ She looked at me doubtfully, began to say something, then changed her mind. ‘I just wish I could stay in this wood for the rest of my life,’ she said bitterly.

‘It would start to rain and you’d get hungry.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

Just the same, she looked about the wood as if she did half intend to stay there. I noticed then that she was cradling two little objects in her right hand.

Just at that moment the bus driver let out a shout to tell us we could get back on board. I crooked a hand under the girl’s elbow to hoist her to her feet, and saw that the two things she held were two tiny toys that looked as if they had come out of a Christmas cracker – a very grand, expensive cracker. They were a tiny hand-mirror, the round glass in it about the size of my thumb-nail, and a little silver hand-bell, the right size for mice.

Catching my eye on the toys, the girl frowned, and slid them back into her pocket.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked, as we strolled back to the road.

‘Jonquil Greenwater.’

‘Cor!’

‘I hate the name Jonquil,’ she said defensively. ‘Mum always called me Jon or Jonnie. Her name was Chrysanthemum, but Dad called her Chrys. And my elder sister is Fuchsia. She housekeeps for Grandfather. The names were all his idea.’

The name Fuchsia rang a bell. Not many people are called that. Aunt Lal had mentioned it.

‘Who – what is your grandfather’s name?’

‘Sir Thomas Menhenitt. He writes poetry. That’s all he does. He was knighted for services to literature.’ Her voice was flat.

‘Then I’ve met him,’ I said. ‘He’s a neighbour of my Aunt Lal, Mrs Carne.’

‘Oh! Is Mrs Carne your aunt? She’s lovely, isn’t she? She gave me –’ But Jonquil thought better of what she had been going to say, and stuck her hand deeper into her pocket.

Once back on the bus, we could not go on talking with such ease. We had said too much already, or not enough. And the little boy behind us was still howling that he wanted to go to the toy shop, and his mother was still telling him no. And it was only a ten-minute ride from there to St Boan.

While we were pulling into the cramped bus yard halfway down the steep hill into the little harbour town, I said hurriedly, ‘Look: I know my Aunt Lal will want to help you in any way she can. And so will I. Don’t forget! My name is Ned Thorne.’

Jonquil said, ‘There’s nothing anyone can do, really. But thank you.’

I let her go ahead of me and saw her met by a tall, sulky-looking girl of nineteen or twenty with close-set dark eyes and pouting red lips. The two sisters greeted each other without any particular signs of affection. I waited until they had gone off up the hill before making my own way to Aunt Lal and Uncle Adam’s house down near the harbour.

CHAPTER TWO

‘SO WHAT’S UP with old Menhenitt?’ I asked over tea and saffron buns bought from a bakery – Aunt Lal never went into the kitchen except to feed Nibs the cat.

‘Well, you know he has written about a dozen books of poems and is in line to be the next Poet Laureate of England – or, anyway, his name has been mentioned.’

‘Do you like him, Aunt Lal?’ I asked, for her tone had been very dry, like Jonquil’s.

‘No, not a lot . . . he’s not interested in anything but himself and his own feelings. Still, I think probably all poets are like that. I expect they have to be, to keep turning out poetry from their insides – like spiders spewing out spiderwebs. And I must admit his poems are good, they are the real stuff, if you like poetry,’ Aunt Lal said, nodding towards the row of slim books on the shelf by the fireplace. ‘Your uncle thinks so, too.’

My Uncle Adam had a book shop. That was how the two men had got to know each other, Sir Thomas dropping in to ask for the works of other poets. ‘Checking up on the competition,’ Aunt Lal said.

‘So what’s wrong with him?’

‘He has lost a poem?’

‘Lost a poem?’

I was startled to death. First, it seemed a trifle to make such a fuss about. Second, why should I be expected to find it.

‘He’s growing very old,’ Aunt Lal said. ‘Ninety next birthday. Old and absent-minded, he loses things all the time – his glasses, his hearing-aid, his favourite pen, his false teeth, his snuff-box, his notebook. And he has lost the beginning of this poem, he told your uncle, and he needs to find it or he can’t get on with the rest of it. And he is worried about dying before he has completed it and about dying before he has received all the honours he thinks he deserves. He’s in a very upset state.’

I thought about losing the start of the poem. ‘I suppose it would be like losing a springboard.’

‘Another thing,’ Aunt Lal sounded even more disapproving. ‘He hasn’t got a Muse at the moment.’

‘A Muse?’

‘Old Tod,’ said Aunt Lal, ‘always likes to have what he calls a discipula or Muse who sits and listens to him while he tries out lines and phrases, and writes them down, and – I suppose – they make suggestions of their own – as if he can’t manage on his own without a shove from somebody else. He’s had three of these Muses in the past – that I know of, at least – their names were Merlwyn Evans and Tilda Sowerby and Rose Mayfield. By and by, of course, he gets tired of them; or they run out of suggestions, or they grow bored with hanging around him.’

‘It does sound strange,’ I agreed, thinking of poor Jonquil. Was that what she was in for? ‘Did he have them all together or one at a time?’

‘Oh, one at a time, spread over eight or nine years. But the really creepy thing is,’ Aunt Lal said, leaning forward and fixing her blazing blue eyes on mine, ‘the really creepy thing is what happened to them afterwards.’

‘Why, what happened?’

‘Merlwyn got killed in a French train crash. Tilda was on that Indonesian ferry that sank – her parents had jobs out there, she was visiting them in the holidays. And poor little Rose is in the hospital here, she has leukaemia and isn’t expected to last the year out.’

‘Good heavens.’

‘Their deaths are obviously nothing to do with old Tod, he’s not to blame – and yet – and yet –’

‘And yet you can’t help feeling there must be some connection.’

Aunt Lal had once had a curse laid on her by her cousin, who was dead now, so it was to be expected that she would find connections where other people might not. And I had never known her to be wrong. I felt more and more anxious about poor Jonquil, obliged to go and live in the house of this old blood-sucker.

I told Aunt Lal about our meeting on the bus, and she listened with close attention.

‘Jonquil Greenwater! Yes, of course I know her. She had quality, that girl.’ Aunt Lal said thoughtfully.

‘She had something in her hand that she seemed to treasure.’

‘What was that?’

‘Two little things that look as if they came out of a cracker – a hand-mirror and a bell.’

‘Good heavens.’ Aunt Lal stared thoughtfully out of the window at the rocky point where waves were crashing in clouds of spray. ‘I gave her those. It was last Christmas – just after her mother died. She was staying with her grandfather then. Desperately unhappy. I gave her a set of nineteenth century crackers that somebody had brought into the shop . . . Sometimes objects have more value than one realises.’

I felt the warm metal stalk of Eden’s key in my pocket. How angry I had been when I first found it there, left by mistake, as I thought at the time.

‘Jonquil seems to dread going to live with her grandfather.’

‘And well she might. By the time those three silly girls had dangled round him . . . No, poor things, they weren’t silly to start with but he seemed to drain the sense from them – hope, original thought, whatever, when he got tired of them the poor lasses had become as dull as boot polish. If that were to happen to Jonquil it would be a terrible waste. I always thought she might become a writer herself.’

‘How can I help her?’ I had a lot of faith in my Aunt Lal.

‘Just now, I can’t guess. But I can see that she is in danger. And those tiny toys . . . may not help. Jonquil is another name for narcissus – that’s not good.’

‘Why? What on earth has narcissus got to do with it?’

‘Narcissus gazed at his own reflection till he hypnotized himself, fell into the pool and drowned. A mirror’s not the best thing for that girl. There is a pool in old Menhenitt’s garden,’ she added inconsequentially, ‘but luckily it isn’t deep. Well, we had better go and see him and you had better find that wretched poem and get him started writing. I told him that you were the best finder I knew – until it is found he will be in his most dodgy, irritable state of mind.’

We set off up the hill.

Dudeney Lodge, where Sir Thomas Menhenitt lived, was a big ugly mansion which he had built on the edge of the town forty years ago when he began to be rich and famous. It was red brick, with fake timbering and lots of pointed gables and a monkey-puzzle tree. I had been there various times with Aunt Lal, collecting money for the lifeboat. And that was quite enough, I thought, the last time.

‘Why didn’t the other grand-daughter, Fuchsia – why didn’t he turn her into his Muse?’ I asked as we climbed the steep hill.

‘Oh, Fuchsia – she’s so dim and disagreeable, no one would want her for a Muse. But I daresay she makes an excellent housekeeper.’

I felt more and more sorry for poor Jonquil – no, Jon. She preferred to be called Jon.

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN WE PASSED through the elaborate gate of Dudeney Lodge and along its gravel path, we saw that the poet was in the garden at the side of the house, reclining in an antique cane chair under a voluminous tartan rug. I remembered that, on the former occasions when I had met him, I had thought he looked exactly like a seal. (Seals come into St Boan harbour sometimes and hang about.) Fat in the middle, smooth all over, and tapered at each end. He was bald and whiskery like a seal too. But seals have good-natured expressions, and Sir Thomas did not. His large brown eyes looked impatient, as if we were a necessary nuisance, like the plumber come to deal with a blocked drain.

‘Ah yes, ah yes, of course, this is the young gentleman who has a talent for finding lost treasures. I hope, I devoutly hope, that he will be able to exercise his talent in my favour.’

I said politely that I hoped so too, and asked what the lost poem looked like, and where he thought I should begin searching for it.

‘Written in ink, my boy, on the back of an envelope, as are most of my offerings to the Muse. And it may be anywhere, anywhere in the house or garden …’ He waved a hand. It wore a great ring with a dark-red stone, a ruby I supposed.

‘You did wonder, Granda, if it might be in the safe,’ said Fuchsia, who stood behind her grandfather’s shoulder, eyeing us in a baleful way, as if the plumber and his mate had brought along a nasty infectious case of smallpox between them.

‘Ah yes, ah yes, the safe. No doubt it would be a rational place to begin the search. But we are not concerned with rationality. The Muse, when her talons grip us, may select the most obscure, out-of-the-way locations for her disclosures – is that not so, Jonquil?’

Receiving no reply to his question, Sir Thomas repeated it in a louder and somewhat irritable tone: ‘Is it not so, Jonquil, my dear?’ And then, with a glance up at Aunt Lal, he said smiling, ‘Jonquil here is the latest version of my dear familiar little goddess of Poesy. And only just in time, I may say: I had been growing quite voiceless and forlorn. But now all is well again. That is, when my unfinished work has been located, all shall be otherwise. Ah, Mrs Carne, writing poetry is a perilous vocation! It is like being pursued all the time by a devouring beast of prey! You must flee for your very life to keep ahead of the monster, you may have to throw it honey-cakes to appease it, you dare not stop for one moment to take breath, you dare not waste time turning to scan the creature’s fearsome dimensions. But now, thanked be Fortune, I have a new accessory, a new Sibyl.’

Aghast, I looked in the direction of the old boy’s self-satisfied glance, and saw that what I had taken for a lump in the folds of his tartan rug was in fact Jonquil – Jon – huddled, sitting on the grass beside her grandfather. She did not meet my eye. She wore a curious blank look, the look that people sometimes put on when they are trying to ignore a bad pain.

I said hastily, ‘I’ll start hunting for the poem, sir. I’ll try the house first.’

The safe, I thought, must be in the house, and that would be the obvious place to start. Given the fact that I had a key.

I walked into the house, with Fuchsia following close behind me, as if she wanted to make sure that I did not pinch the spoons. But after she had invigilated me through three or four rooms we heard an angry shout from Sir Thomas in his cane chair:

‘Fuchsia! I must not be left! I need my beef tea – I need my toast!’

With an impatient sigh, Fuchsia made for the kitchen, and soon I saw her carry out a tray. Through the window I also observed that Aunt Lal had sat down beside the old boy and was engaging him in talk.

I went on prowling about the house. It was a queer mixture. The downstairs rooms were most ostentatiously elegant – posh – I felt they had been furnished to impress visitors, not for real use or comfort. Gilded, spidery-shaped chairs covered in grey-green shiny brocade, heavy satin curtains, dozens of small, boring, lavishly framed pictures with lights over them, walls covered in very fancy, textured paper, grey-green to match the chairs and curtains. It was like a tropical swamp. And all hospital-clean. Somebody must spend hours every day polishing and dusting. Could it be Fuchsia?

Upstairs was different, much more untidy and humbly furnished. Visitors not expected up there, perhaps.

But the link between upstairs and downstairs was books. And papers. Piled everywhere – knee-high on the stairs, toppling piles on window-sills, on chairs, tables, beds, or just on the floor. And sheets of paper – typed, scribbled, printed, in folders, envelopes, wallets, held by rubber bands, paperclips, bulldog clips, or just weighed down by bricks and lumps of granite.

I was impressed. A selfish monster the old man might be, but there was no question that he had given his whole life to the pursuit of poetry – or poetry pursued him – the evidence was here, plain to see.

And where to find his wretched poem? I felt like the person in a folk tale, ordered by the witch to sort out a whole room full of feathers by nightfall. And yet, somehow, I had a queer certainty that the poem was not in the house.

Avoiding the attic floor – it seemed utterly unlikely that Sir Thomas ever made his way up that last steep flight of stairs – I went down and re-entered his ground-floor study. This at least was fairly tidy – in case of newspaper photographers, perhaps – gold-lettered leather-bound editions of his best-known works lined the shelves, the books and documents were in tidy heaps. A steel-and-leather wheelchair stood in a corner.

Jonquil came wandering in, with Aunt Lal close behind.

‘Tod doesn’t like to be watched while he eats his toast,’ Aunt Lal murmured to me, ‘because he has lost his false teeth.’

‘There they are, in that bowl on the mantelpiece.’

The dentures were made of gold.

‘Queen Alexandra gave them to him – he told me he always had tooth trouble, even when he was a boy.’ Aunt Lal picked up the bowl. ‘This dish is Ming – probably worth thousands.’ Then she turned to Jonquil, who was standing like a zombie, with her eyes fixed on nothing at all. ‘Dearie,’ she said quietly, ‘it’s time you came back. You must not stay in that place too long – Ned, can you find the bell? And ring it?’

I gently lifted Jonquil’s hand from her pocket and found, as I had expected, that she was still clutching the two little objects, the hand-mirror for butterflies, the dinner-bell for mice.

I slipped the bell from her unresisting clasp and shook it. It gave out a minute, silvery tingle, the noise that might be made by a flake of snow alighting on one of Santa’s sleigh-bells.

Jonquil frowned at the sound, then drew in a deep breath and rubbed her hands over her face. She let out a little whimpering moan.

‘Oh!’ she sighed. ‘Why did you fetch me back? It is so much better there!’

‘Child,’ said Aunt Lal, ‘it is dangerous to stay there too long, you must not go there too often – not without at least leaving the bell in somebody else’s care. You need an ally, a sponsor.’

‘But there is nobody! Nobody I can trust.’

‘You can trust me. Or Ned here. Leave the bell with him.’

‘You won’t ring it too soon?’ Jonquil looked at me pleadingly. She seemed to understand Lal without any explanations of where there was.

I noticed that her eyes were the grey-green of daffodil leaves.

‘It is awful here,’ she told me. ‘Agony! Like living tied over an ants’ nest. There is a sharp pain all the time inside my head – worse than pushing against sharp ends of wire.’

Lal gave me a firm, admonishing look, took the Chinese bowl with the gold teeth in it and went back to the garden.

‘Tell me a bit about there,’ I said to Jon. ‘The place that you go to.’

‘It is the most beautiful place in the universe … I can get there, you see, by looking in my little glass.’

She showed me the tiny mirror in the palm of her hand. I took it from her gingerly and looked into it. All I could see was the reflection of one of my own eyes – grey and misty. But as I went on looking the grey mistiness seemed to flicker and dissolve. Hastily I handed the mirror back to its owner.

‘What is the place like?’

‘A huge orchard. All kinds of fruit trees in blossom. I just wish I could stay there for ever.’

‘But Aunt Lal says that it is dangerous.’

‘But – don’t you see – while I am there I can’t hear the questions that Grandfather is asking. I can’t hear what he says. Something else answers for me – tells him what he wants to know.’

‘If you went there too often – stayed too long – you might never come back at all.’

‘I don’t see that that would matter.’

Fuchsia came back into the house with the empty Bovril mug and toast plate. She gave me a glance of exasperation.

‘Well! You don’t seem to be making much progress. I told you, the likeliest place would be the safe. Granda keeps all his most valuable manuscripts there.’

‘Where is the safe, then. I haven’t come across it yet.’

‘It’s in the garden – in case the house should catch fire.’

Fuchsia pointed out through the study window towards a small summerhouse building that stood in front of lilac trees at the top of the lawn which ran uphill quite steeply.

‘Does the safe have a key? Or is it a combination lock?’

Fuchsia said sourly, ‘It has a key. But Granda lost that weeks ago.’

I walked out of the house and up across the grass to the top of the garden. Jonquil started slowly after me, but a shout from the cane chair halted her.

‘Jonquil! Come back to me! I need you! I don’t like being left! In fact I can’t stand it!’

Very reluctantly she turned and went back to him.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE LITTLE BUILDING, which had four pillars across an open front, protected a teak garden table, and on the table was a cast-iron safe, about the size of a gas cooker. It was painted dull green, panelled with gold.

As I had expected, my key opened it easily. Inside, the safe was stuffed, almost to the roof, with a mass of scribbled handwritten sheets of paper.

No doubt they would be worth a fortune to collectors.

And the old boy’s envelope was there, lying right on top. Three verses written in a crabbed, elderly hand.

I picked up the envelope and read the verses:

‘To me the history of my bone

is dream

and has no influence on what I do

small wonder that I am is

what I seem

before some voice gave wilderness

a name

to where I stand is no great

way to go

to me the history of my bone

is dream

and yet the legend has a hungry

theme

coiling around the pounce from

how to who

small wonder that I am is

what I seem –’

I read the verses twice, but could not make much sense of them, simple though they were. But they made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, as if something behind me were shifting its balance, getting ready to swoop and bite.

I glanced round nervously and shut the safe door, leaving it unlocked. Just before I did so a small grey lizard shot out from among the crumpled papers and scurried off among the lilac bushes.

The lilac flowers were pink and white and their scent was very strong.

I carried the envelope down to the old boy, passing a small pool with a trickle of water running into it. Three goldfish swam restlessly round and round in the pool.

‘Aha! Aha! I see that you have run to ground my wayward verses. Good, good, that is capital!’

The old boy held out his hand for the envelope and read the lines on it with a look of great satisfaction. ‘Yes, yes, I can proceed from here. What do you think of them, Jonquil, my dear? Succinct, are they not? I shall dictate the following stanzas to you. Make ready with pen and paper.’

Jonquil had resumed her position on the grass at his feet. She held a notebook and ball-point. She looked up at him and said in a toneless voice:

‘A villanelle. Very interesting.’

Old Tod nodded. ‘Quite right, quite right, you clever little monkey! Ah, they teach you verse forms at your school, do they? As I grow older I confess I tend more and more to these formal uses.’

Fuchsia came out and said, ‘Granda, it is time you moved indoors.’ And to me she said, ‘Your aunt has gone home. She left you a message to say that she would be late for supper as she had a visit to make on the way.’

‘I’ll be off, then.’ I waited for thanks but none came. I said, ‘Would you like Sir Thomas’s chair put under cover? It is going to rain tonight.’

She gave me a surprised, not particularly grateful look, but answered, ‘Oh yes. All right. Fold it and put it in the summerhouse with the safe.’

‘And whatever you do, young man,’ Sir Thomas said fussily, ‘do not pass the fence beyond the lilac shrubbery, for there is a most dangerous tract of bog on the hillside. It is known as St Boan’s Mire and during the past century three people at least have lost their lives in its treacherous embrace. I have written several poems about it,’ he added, as if that increased its importance and menace.

‘I’m sure the boy knows all about the bog, Granda,’ said Fuchsia sharply. ‘Give me your arm now.’ She handed him two heavy walking-sticks with curved arm-rests.

As Fuchsia helped him indoors, Jonquil trailing along behind like a sleep-walker, I heard the old poet say, ‘Yes, yes, it is high time I was indoors. The garden grows chill when the sun has passed its zenith. And I have a curious delusion – although the place is very silent, and lonely in fact when you girls are not beside me – I have a notion that there are eyes watching me from the shrubbery – eyes – of what kind I do not know – I wish indeed that they would come forth and display themselves. Or do I wish it? Jonquil!’

He addressed Jonquil sharply, but she seemed deep in thought and took no notice.

‘Jonquil!’

‘Jonquil!’ said her sister sharply. ‘Answer when Granda speaks to you!’

Chilled with apprehension I pulled out the little silver bell, which I had kept, and I rang it. The result was immediate. Jonquil pulled herself together and answered, ‘Yes, Grandfather?’

‘Aha, aha, you little minx!’ he rallied her playfully. ‘You were far, far away – were you not? Now. I wonder where you had got to? Let me hazard a guess! Is it a place where your old grandfather might follow? I have a notion that it might be so – that I might venture after you! What would you say to that? Eh? Eh?’

They passed into the house.

Horrified, sick with misgiving, I manhandled the cane chair into the shelter, and bolted for home.

CHAPTER FIVE

AT SUPPER – WHICH, as always, was cooked by Uncle Adam – Lal told me that she had been to visit little Rose Mayfield in hospital.

‘She is dying, poor child. She has only a few days to go, now. She is under heavy sedation most of the time, and even in her clear intervals she wanders a great deal. Recites scraps of poetry, cries a little, and says she wishes “Grandy” would come to see her – but she knows that he is too busy to be bothered. She said one thing several times that struck me.’

‘What was that?’

‘She said, over and over, “I used to think I would be sure to meet him again later in the wonderful place.” “Where is that wonderful place, Rosie?” I asked her. “Oh,” she said, “it is all fruit trees, apple and pear and plum and peach – the trees are so green and the fruits are so red, it is like one of his best poems. But, lately, I have been frightened when I go there. A bad thing has got in. It isn’t safe there any more.”’

‘What kind of bad thing, did she say?’

‘No, when I asked that question she became very restless and started crying and rolling her head from side to side and the sister in charge came and gave her a tranquilliser. It would have been heartless to ask any more questions. The last thing she said was, “I don’t go there any more. I can’t go there any more.”’

I told Aunt Lal about Jonquil’s there, and she said, ‘It sounds like the same place that Rose visited. You must keep a very careful eye on Jonquil, Ned, she is in very great danger.’

‘But how can I? I have to go home to Abbot’s Yarn – and even when I am here, I am not close to her – not even in the same house – and she slips off to that paradise place of hers so easily, she’s probably there now.’

And I can’t blame her for doing so, I thought. If I had that bossy old tyrant beside me, day in day out, I would bolt off down any escape route that offered – and never mind the chances of getting back safely.

But if he were to follow?

Then I remembered my strange feeling at the top of the garden, by the lilac thicket – the feeling of somebody, something, close at hand, something hostile – and the sliding scurry of the little grey lizard as it escaped from among the manuscripts. I felt I knew what Aunt Lal meant by danger though I could not have put it into words.

But then Aunt Lal said something that really froze my blood.

She said, ‘The old ideas of Paradise, I wonder if they were folk memories, pre-Ice Age memories, of Eve’s apple orchard with dinosaurs crawling about under the fruit trees.’

‘When you say that Jonquil is in danger, Aunt Lal – do you mean real physical danger? Or the risk of being stuck for ever in a sort of no-man’s land in her own mind?’

‘Either. Both,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘And that’s why you have to monitor her, Ned. Did you know,’ she added parenthetically, ‘that Monitor Lizards are called that because they are supposed to be highly aware of crocodiles and let out a warning if ever one is in the neighbourhood? Mind you, I wouldn’t care to be in the neighbourhood of either of them . . .’

That night I had horrendous dreams, dreams set in shadowy, scented orchards, among trees cascading with pink or white blossoms which ought to have been beautiful but were not, because of some outsize creatures sliding with frightening agility through the flower-laden branches, never quite visible, but audible because they hissed – was it one creature or were there several of them? And I was vainly hunting for little Jonquil and not daring to call her name aloud because someone, some thing, might hear me, and anyway her name was an unlucky one . . .

The moment I woke I thought of poor Rose Mayfield saying, ‘A bad thing has got in.’

And at breakfast Aunt Lal told me that Mrs Mayfield had telephoned to tell her that Rose had died in the night.

‘I suppose I had better go up later and tell the old boy,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose anyone else will. People in St Boan are too scared of him. You had better come along too, Ned; it will give you a chance to talk to Jonquil.’

Glumly I agreed, though I was not at all keen to meet Sir Thomas again.

But he, we found, was in the throes of completing his poem, limping to and fro in his study (for the night’s rain still hung on, it was a soaking, foggy day, the sea masked from view, the lighthouse letting out its wail every four minutes). As we entered the house we heard the old boy declaiming words and lines with triumphant energy and then, with equal energy, calling for them to be deleted, struck out, thrown into the waste-bin:

‘Displaced, we roam the forest,

and we climb

unroped by sleep, the marathon

of snow –

‘No, no, that will not do, strike out marathon, that will not do at all. Skeleton is better, take that down – unroped by sleep, the skeleton of snow – that gives the alliteration, do you not see, Jonquil, my dear?’

‘Perhaps you are right,’ came in Jonquil’s flat lifeless voice.

‘Of course I am right!

‘unroped by sleep, the skeleton

of snow,

to me the history of my bone

is dream.

‘Yes, yes, that works, that marches! Set it down, set it down!’

We had a glimpse of them through the open French window as we walked to the main door of the house. But Fuchsia, who met us in the front hall, told Aunt Lal fiercely that it was quite out of the question to talk to Sir Thomas just then.

‘No one is allowed to trouble him when he is at work.’

‘Well, perhaps you will be good enough to tell him – when he is quite at liberty,’ said Aunt Lal, and I wondered if Fuchsia recognised the frightful scorn in her voice, ‘that Rose Mayfield died last night and the funeral will be next Thursday.’

‘Oh, Granda won’t want to go to that. He never goes to funerals.’

‘No, I daresay not,’ snapped Aunt Lal.

The booming voice came from the study:

‘late by my burglar’s key

re-enter home

make saurian snatch long

lifetimes overdue

small wonder that I am is

what I seem.

‘No – wait – strike out saurian. That does not fit. Savage. It should be savage snatch -’

We heard a faint cry of distress from the study.

‘Oh, now what?’ cried Aunt Lal and, despite Fuchsia’s efforts to stop her, she swept through the door.

I paused an instant to pull the little silver bell from my pocket and shake it energetically. Fuchsia stared at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, then ran into the study.

I had felt – even with the wall between us – the choking, suffocating gasp of Jonquil’s terror.

‘Where is Granda?’ I heard Fuchsia’s furious, frantic voice through the doorway. ‘Jonquil! Where has Granda gone?’

The reply came slowly, after a gap of several minutes. But when it came it was in Jon’s own voice – not the flat, mechanical tone of her trance.

‘He – he went out through the window. He went up the garden . . . with them. With the others.’

‘He went? But he can’t walk by himself – he can’t walk any distance. How did he go? Who went with him?’

‘He went,’ Jonquil repeated. And she added. ‘He was taken.’

‘Taken?’

‘They came for him,’ said Jonquil. And then she fainted, flat out on the floor.

CHAPTER SIX

AUNT LAL AND I lifted Jonquil on to the sofa, rubbed her hands, called her name. She did not stir.

‘Ring the bell again,’ said Aunt Lal. I rang it but, though she moaned a little, she did not rouse.

‘I’m going to get her away from here,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘I’ll take her home in his wheel-chair.’

‘But shouldn’t we help Fuchsia look for him? He may need the chair himself,’ I said doubtfully.

In fact at this moment Fuchsia came bursting back in, crying, ‘You must help me! You must help me look for him! I’ve hunted up as far as the summerhouse. Where can he be?’

‘Ned, you had better go and help Fuchsia,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘You are a good finder. I’ll take Jonquil to our house and get a doctor.’

‘Oh, never mind her! She’ll be all right,’ cried Fuchsia distractedly, but in spite of her protests we shifted Jonquil into the wheelchair – she was very light – and Aunt Lal took her out of the house.

Then I followed Fuchsia into the garden.

The rain had ended – but only just – large drops were hanging from all the leaves. Heavy dank fog filled the air, which had a strong smell of juicy dark greenery, cut grass, and the rotten thick scent of lilacs and azaleas that have finished blooming and turned brown. Birds were flitting in and out of the bushes with nervous cries.

The garden felt strange – as if a heavy threat had just lifted, as if pressure had been withdrawn, as if something awful had gone away, but not very far. I noticed a couple of slow-worms slip across the path, and a hedgehog trot nervously past – shy creatures which normally would stay out of view. What had disturbed them?

Fuchsia didn’t notice them. She was clenching her hands, beating her fists together, wailing. ‘It’s so strange! He never goes up the garden without his two sticks – or with me pushing him in his wheelchair —’

We crossed the wet grass, passed the summerhouse with the safe, and went on to the lilac grove. Something rustled among the bushes. I hoped that it was only birds. A little path wound through the middle of the grove.

‘He must be in there . . .’ shivered Fuchsia. ‘You go first.’

I didn’t like going first. Not at all. I was remembering my dream too clearly. I looked up, half expecting to see some great scaly body about to drop on me from among the leaves.

But then – as often, in anxious moments – I thought of my friend Eden. In my mind’s ear I thought I could hear his calm voice. ‘It’s all right, mate – they’ve gone. And they’ve taken old Boss-bones with them. You won’t see him again.’

Hugely relieved, I slid my hand into my pocket and felt Eden’s key, warm and slender. But where was the tiny silver bell? ‘She won’t be wanting that, mate. Better she never had it.’ ‘Will she be all right? Will she get better?’ ‘It’ll take a while. But she’s a tough kid – she’ll make her own fortune out of it later on.’ ‘Thanks, Eden!’ ‘No sweat!’ he told me cheerfully, and then we were beyond the wet, claustrophobic, narrow path and looking over a wrought-iron gate at a saddleshaped tract of hillside, green and quaking, which was plainly bogland. St Boan Mire.

‘He couldn’t have gone there,’ said Fuchsia fearfully. ‘Besides, the gate is padlocked.’

‘Yes.’

But I could see that the bog had recently been disturbed; the part nearest to us heaved and bubbled much more than the farther reaches.

‘Let’s go back,’ urged Fuchsia nervously. ‘He can’t possibly be here. And this place scares me to death.’

We went back. And when we got to the summerhouse I said, ‘I’d like to look into the safe again.’

‘Why? Granda can’t be in there.’

‘Just in case – in case he left a message.’

‘A message? Are you crazy?’

But he had. When the warm key had opened the safe for the second time, we found old Tod’s gold teeth in there on top of the manuscripts, weighing down the last verse of his poem. Also a hand. Bones only. The right hand of a skeleton, centuries done for. But it wore Sir Thomas’s ruby ring.

The handwriting was his own:

‘Crunch on the spine, take

counsel of the tomb

quick, cancel me, and dead

I’ll enter you

to me the history of my bone

is dream

small wonder that I am is

what I seem.’

And he had signed it, J. Thomas Menhenitt, with the date, in a grand flourish, before they carried him off.

The three goldfish had vanished from the pool when we went back across the garden. Perhaps a seagull had got them.

‘I won’t come into the house, if you don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’ll go home and see how Jonquil is getting on . . .’

‘But what shall I do?’ demanded Fuchsia.

‘Tell the police. Let them hunt for him.’

So she did that, but of course they never found him. They came later on to ask Jonquil if she remembered how Sir Thomas had left his study, and in what company. But her memory was clean gone. She had not the slightest recollection. ‘And just as well,’ said Aunt Lal.

The fog was lifting as I got back to Aunt Lal’s house, and the lighthouse let out its last howl as I opened the door. Jonquil was just walking.

‘I had such a queer dream,’ she said.

‘About dinosaurs?’ suggested Aunt Lal.

‘Dinosaurs? No, why should I dream about them? No, it was about a boy I never met in my life, but he said he was a friend of Ned’s. We had a long talk. He said I’d better go home and learn to get on with my stepmother. We were walking along beside the harbour and he told me to throw my tiny looking-glass into the water. He said it had served its purpose and might do more harm than good if I kept it. The queer thing is, it has gone; I thought it was in my pocket, but it isn’t.’

‘My key has gone too,’ I said. ‘But you never know, it may come back.’

‘He said his name was Eden. Have you really got a friend called Eden?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘He’s the best friend I have.’

*

So Jonquil went home, changed her name to Joanna, and made friends with her stepmother. Fuchsia published the last collection of her grandfather’s poems, and the book was a great success. In fact several people wrote to The Times suggesting that the old man ought to be buried in Westminster Abbey in Poets’ Corner.

But they couldn’t do that because his body was never found.

His house has been turned into a museum, but I never visit it.

In the St Boan Series

IN THUNDER’S POCKET

THE SONG OF MAT AND BEN

BONE AND DREAM
AN RHCB DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 44812 061 1

Published in Great Britain by RHCB Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
A Random House Group Company

This ebook edition published 2011

Copyright © Aiken, Joan 2002

Copyright illustrations © 2002 Caroline Crossland

First Published in Great Britain

Red Fox 2002

The right of Joan Aiken to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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