Cresswell Moondial

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32291-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

A new edition of the much-loved classic story of time travel, ghosts and friendship. Even before she came to Belton, Minty Cane had known that she was a witch, or something very like it . . . Minty is the kind of girl who notices things. Pockets of cold air on a stairway. Cries on the wind. Ghosts. On night-time jaunts from the house where she's staying while her mother recovers from an accident, Minty stumbles upon a moondial which takes her back in time. She finds Tom, a sickly kitchen boy, and Sarah, a girl with a birthmark who is only allowed out at night because her family think she has the mark of the devil . . . Can Minty save her friends, or will she get stuck in the past . . .? 'Fresh and entertaining.'Publishers Weekly 'Carefully wrought and evanescent as a ghost story should be, this will be enjoyed by any admirer of Tom's Midnight Garden.'Kirkus

Helen Cresswell

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cresswell, Helen

Leseproben

ONE

Even before she came to Belton, Minty Cane had known that she was a witch, or something very like it. She had known since she was tiny, for instance, about the pocket of cold air on the landing of the back stairs. (Though she could not have known that a man had hanged himself there.) She knew, too, that she shared her bedroom. She had woken at night to see shadowy presences gliding across the floor. She had never spoken to them, merely watched, sensing that they were on some silent business of their own. At other times she had seen blurred faces hovering over her, and pale hands floating like blossoms in the dark. There had been invisible footsteps, breathings.

She did not talk about these things for the simple reason that they did not strike her as remarkable. Their appearance was as commonplace to her as that of the milkman. The only difference was that the milkman did not cause her spine to prickle. When she was younger she had once or twice mentioned a dark visitor to her mother, who had talked vaguely of car headlights casting strange shadows, and curtains blowing in the wind.

During the past year Minty had also occasionally heard her father’s voice and that, she knew, was remarkable, because he was dead.

Now she and her mother were living in a different, smaller house, and her mother was working full time at the hospital. Minty came home from school and found the house empty. The weekends, once oases, were now deserts.

‘And when it comes to the summer holidays, we shall have to do something about you,’ her mother said.

‘What?’ demanded Minty. ‘Post me off somewhere, like a parcel?’

‘That’s an idea,’ said Kate. ‘Registered, of course.’

‘Wonder what it’d cost,’ Minty said. ‘What stamp you’d have to put on me? And where would you stick it? On my forehead?’

‘I’m still trying to think where to post you to,’ Kate said.

In the end it was decided that Minty should spend the holidays in the village of Belton, and stay with Kate’s godmother, Mrs Bowyer.

‘You’ll like that,’ Kate told her, and Minty agreed that she probably would.

Mrs Bowyer lived in an old stone cottage right opposite Belton House, which was golden and beautiful and had once belonged to Lord Brownlow. Now it was owned by the National Trust, and was open to visitors from April to October.

‘I’ll get in free, I expect,’ said Minty, ‘whenever I want to, with Aunt Mary working at the House, and that.’

Once Mrs Bowyer had been in the service of the Brownlows, like her mother before her. Now she helped out at the House sometimes, in the summer.

‘What I’m dying to see,’ said Minty, ‘is that secret tunnel.’

‘Not exactly secret,’ Kate told her. ‘Just hidden.’

‘Same thing,’ said Minty, knowing full well that it was not. ‘And those little red frogs!’

‘I’m not sure I believe in them,’ said Kate. ‘I never heard of such a thing! Frogs aren’t red, in the first place.’

‘Mud-coloured,’ Minty said. ‘Khaki.’

‘And right next to the kitchens! Ugh!’ Kate shuddered. ‘I couldn’t fancy to eat a thing!’

A tunnel ran from Belton House under a courtyard to the kitchens. According to Aunt Mary it was infested, at certain times of the year, with a plague of frogs. Only they were no ordinary frogs. They were red, a sort of dull, plant-pot red.

The night before Minty was due to go to Belton she thought she had changed her mind, and said so.

‘I’d be all right here, Mum,’ she said. ‘And what about you? You’ll be lonely.’

Sometimes her mother cried at night. Minty had heard her, sobbing softly and hopelessly. Left alone, she might cry every night, for six long weeks.

‘I shan’t have time,’ said Kate firmly.’ You’ll enjoy it there, Minty.’

‘What about Aunt Mary? I’ve never stopped with her before. Only gone to tea.’

‘I stopped with her, when I was little.’

‘Different thing,’ Minty told her. ‘What’ll I do all day?’

‘Well, you’ll give Aunt Mary a hand, I hope, for a start. And then …’ she paused. ‘I don’t know … I always thought of Belton as a … happening sort of place.’

‘Happening?’

‘Mmm. I don’t quite know how to put it. But when I was little and stopped there, I had that front bedroom, you know, opposite the walls. And over the top of the wall I could see the roof of the orangery, and the church tower, and bits of the garden …’

‘Well? What about it?’

‘It’s so long ago now … but I do remember having a feeling – it sounds daft, I know – a feeling that there was something happening … more to it all than met the eye.’

This, coming from Kate, was surprising.

‘Ghosts, you mean? Haunted?’

‘That kind of thing, but – well, more real, somehow. I don’t know. I don’t really remember. I never actually saw anything.’

‘But I shall,’ Minty told herself. ‘If there is anything there, I shall know.’

‘And, of course, I was only a child.’

‘What do you mean only a child?’ demanded Minty. ‘I feel like a member of the human race to me!’

‘You’re not going for a million years, Minty,’ her mother was saying, done with memories. ‘And I shall pop out whenever I can, and see you.’

‘Visit the prisoner, you mean?’

Minty was only saying this. She had changed her mind again about going to Belton. She had changed it the moment her mother had started talking about ‘happenings’.

They drove there the day after school finished.

‘What a pretty house!’ Kate murmured as they drew up.

‘Not bad,’ agreed Minty. She liked the way the garden was right on the edge of the countryside. Only a hedge divided the short grass from the long.

Aunt Mary was already at the front door as they went up the path. Minty dutifully kissed her cheek, powdery and faintly scented.

‘If you haven’t grown another three inches!’ she exclaimed.

‘Five centimetres,’ Minty corrected. She had always been the tallest in her class, and when she was younger used to try holding her breath to stop herself growing. Whether this had actually worked she did not know, but she was now only the fifth tallest in the class, and not so touchy about it.

‘Just in time for elevenses,’ Aunt Mary said, and led the way to her sitting room, that smelled so strongly of the garden that it might have been part of it. It smelled of warm grass and roses.

Minty, happily scoffing scones, remembered what a good cook Aunt Mary was. After months of makeshift meals straight from a tin or the freezer, the food here would be something to look forward to. Half guiltily she checked the thought, which seemed disloyal to her mother. Kate had enjoyed cooking in the old days. Now she no longer had the time, and even when she had was often too tired. Nowadays, a really good meal was a treat, what Kate called a ‘feast’.

‘Come on, let’s have a feast tonight,’ she would say. ‘What’s on the menu? Roast guinea fowl … peacock pie … octopus soup …’

Minty turned her attention to the others.

‘She can always come across with me,’ Aunt Mary was saying.

‘Across where, Aunt Mary?’

‘To the House,’ Kate told her. ‘Your aunt helps out in the shop some afternoons.’

‘I like to be over there,’ said Aunt Mary. ‘Though it isn’t the same as the old days, of course. All those people! Any Tom, Dick or Harry who can pay at the gate. Enough to make the Brownlows turn in their graves.’

‘I’ve never quite understood how people can turn in their graves,’ Minty remarked. ‘Coffins aren’t very wide. Or is it the whole coffin that turns? No, can’t be. There’s soil all round it.’

Aunt Mary looked startled, but was not to be deflected from her theme.

‘Term times are the worst, of course,’ she went on. ‘Coachload upon coachload of children. You’d wonder where they all came from.’

Her eye rested on Minty, now into her fourth scone.

‘Not that I’ve anything against children,’ she said. ‘Dear little things …’ she added vaguely and insincerely.

Minty choked.

‘Not me,’ she thought. She wondered if she were beginning to change her mind again about staying.

‘I’ve put her in the same room as you used to have, Kate,’ Aunt Mary said.

‘Oh, she’ll like that! Shall I take her up and get her unpacked?’

‘You remember where it is? Door facing you at the top of the stairs.’

Halfway up her voice called after them.

‘Do tell her to take care with the bedspread, Kate. It’s my memory patchwork!’

Inside the room Kate went straight to the window.

‘Oh – the view! Just as I remember it!’

Minty wondered why she should be so surprised.

‘Views don’t move,’ she thought. ‘Not fields, or houses, or churches. Especially churches.’

‘Isn’t it lovely!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘Don’t you think so, Minty?’

‘Yes, lovely,’ agreed Minty, not really looking. It was her view, and she would look at it in her own time. Instead, her gaze went round the room.

There seemed to be a lot of pictures, for a bedroom. Most of them were paintings or photographs of Belton itself. This struck Minty as boring, considering that the real thing was straight across the road. There were some old brown photographs of ladies in starched uniforms, standing so stiffly to attention that they...