never sneaked on a soul in her life, and she wasn’t about to sneak on herself.
Josie came to the rescue. “Did you say anything? After you saw them, I mean.”
She hadn’t, not then at least. And when she finally brought it up, as a shrill accusation hurled half in anger and half in self-defence, Mummy had reacted by slapping her face. Not once but twice and as hard as she could. One second afterwards — and maybe it was seeing the expression of surprise and shock on Maggie’s face because Mummy had never hit her in her life — she’d cried out like she’d been struck herself, grabbed Maggie to her, and hugged her so fiercely Maggie felt her breath leave. But still, they hadn’t talked about any of it. “It’s my business, Maggie,” Mummy had said fi rmly.
Fine, Maggie thought. And my business is mine.
But it wasn’t, really. Mummy wouldn’t let it be. She had brought the sludgy tea to Maggie’s bedroom every morning for a fortnight after their row. She had stood and made sure Maggie drank every drop. To her protestations, she said, “I know what’s best.” To her whimpers when the pain cramped through her stomach, she said, “It will pass, Maggie.” And she wiped her brow with a cool, soft cloth.
Maggie studied the inky shadows in her bedroom and listened again, concentrating in order to discern the sound of footsteps from the wind jostling an old plastic bottle against the gravel outside. She hadn’t turned on any of the lights upstairs, and she crept to the window and peered out into the night, feeling secure in the knowledge that she could see without being seen. Below her in the courtyard, shadows from the east wing of Cotes Hall made great caves of dark. Cast from the mansion’s gables, they loomed like open pits and offered more than ample protection for anyone wishing to hide himself. She squinted at them one by one, trying to distinguish whether a hulking form against a far wall was only a yew bush in need of clipping or a prowler trying the window. She couldn’t tell. She wished Mummy and Mr. Shepherd would return.
She’d never minded being left alone in the past, but early on after their arrival in Lancashire, she’d developed a dislike of staying in the cottage by herself, either day or night. Perhaps it was baby-stuff to feel that way, but the minute Mummy drove off with Mr. Shepherd, the minute she slipped into the Opel to go off on her own, or headed in the direction of the footpath, or went into the oak wood on a search for plants, Maggie felt the walls start inching close about her. She was uniquely aware of being by herself on the grounds of Cotes Hall, and while Polly Yarkin lived just at the far end of the drive, it was nearly a mile away and no matter how she screamed and shouted, if she ever needed Polly’s help for any reason, she wouldn’t hear.
It didn’t matter to Maggie that she knew where Mummy kept her pistol. Even if she had used it before for target practice — which she never had — she couldn’t imagine actually pointing it at anyone, let alone pulling the trigger. So instead, when she was by herself, she burrowed into her bedroom like a mole. If it was night, she kept the lights off and waited for the sound of a returning car or of Mummy’s key scraping in the locked front door. And while she waited, she listened to Punkin’s soft feline snores rising like steady puffs of auditory smoke from the centre of her bed. With her vision fixed on the small birch bookcase atop of which lumpy old Bozo the elephant presided among the other stuffed animals with comforting grace, she clutched her scrapbook to her chest. She thought about her father.
He existed in fantasy, Eddie Spence, dead before he was thirty, his body twisted along with the wreckage of his racing car in Monte Carlo. He was the hero of an untold story Mummy had hinted at a single time, saying, “Daddy died in a car crash, darling” and “Please, Maggie. I can’t speak of it to anyone,” with her eyes filled with tears when Maggie tried to ask more. Maggie often tried to conjure up his face from her memory, but she failed in the effort. So what there was of Daddy she held in her arms: the pictures of formula-one race cars she clipped and collected, placing them into her Important Events Book along with careful notations about every Grand Prix.
She plopped onto the bed, and Punkin stirred. He raised his head, yawned, and then pricked his ears. They turned like radar in the direction of the window, and he rose in a single, lissome movement and leapt silently from the bed to the sill. There, he hunkered, his tail making restless, tapping movements as it circled round his front paws.
From the bed, Maggie watched him surveying the courtyard much as she had done, his eyes blinking slowly as his tail continued to tap in silence. She knew from studying up on the subject in his kitten-days that cats are hypersensitive to changes in the environment, so she rested more easily in the knowledge that Punkin would tell her the very moment there was anything outside that she ought to fear.
An old lime tree stood just beyond the window, and its branches creaked. Maggie listened hard. Twigs scratched in vibrato against the glass. Something rasped on the old tree’s furrowed bark. It was only the wind, Maggie told herself, but even as she thought this, Punkin gave the signal that something wasn’t right. He rose with an arching back.
Maggie’s heart thumped jerkily. Punkin launched himself from the window-sill and landed on the rag rug. He was through the door in a streak of orange locomotion before Maggie had time to realise that someone must have climbed the tree.
And then it was too late. She heard the soft thud of a body landing on the slate roof of the cottage. The quiet tread of footsteps followed. Then came the sound of gentle rapping on the glass.
This last made no sense. As far as she knew, housebreakers didn’t announce themselves. Unless, of course, they were trying to see if anyone was at home. But even then, it seemed more sensible to think that they’d just knock on the door or ring the front bell and wait for an answer.
She wanted to shout, You’ve got the wrong place, whoever you are, you want the Hall, don’t you? But instead she lowered her scrapbook to the floor next to the bed and slid along the wall into the deeper shadows. Her palms felt itchy. Her stomach rolled. She wanted more than anything to call out for her mummy, but that would be of less than no use. A moment later she was glad of the fact.
“Maggie? Are you there?” she heard him call softly. “Open up, will you? I’m freezing my bum off.”
Nick! Maggie dashed across the room. She could see him, crouched on the slope of roof just outside the dormer window, grinning at her, his silky black hair brushing against his cheeks like soft bird’s wings. She fumbled with the lock. Nick, Nick, she thought. But just as she was about to fling up the sash, she heard Mummy saying, “I don’t want you alone with Nick Ware again. Is that clear, Margaret Jane? No more of that. It’s over.” Her fi ngers failed her.
“Maggie!” Nick whispered. “Let me in! It’s cold.”
She’d given her word. Mummy had been driven close to tears during their row, and the sight of her eyes red-rimmed and full over Maggie’s behaviour and Maggie’s stinging words had wrung the promise from her without a thought of what it would really mean to give it.
“I can’t,” she said.
“What?”
“Nick, Mummy isn’t home. She’s gone into the village with Mr. Shepherd. I promised her—”
He was grinning more widely. “Great. Excellent. Come on, Mag. Let me in.”
She swallowed past a raw spot in her throat. “I can’t. I can’t see you alone. I promised.”
“Why?”
“Because…Nick, you know.”
His hand was against the window glass, and he dropped it to his side. “But I just wanted to show you…Oh what the hell.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Forget it. Never mind.”
“Nick, tell me.”
He turned his head away. He wore his hair bobbed, overlong on the top the way the rest of the boys did, but it never looked trendy on him. It looked right, as if he’d been the style’s inventor.
“Nick.”
“Just a letter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”
“A letter? From who?”
“It isn’t important.”
“But if you’ve come all this way—” Then she remembered. “Nick, you’ve not heard from Lester Piggott? Is that it? Has he answered your letter?” It was hard to believe. But Nick wrote to jockeys as a matter of course, always adding to his collection of letters. He’d heard from Pat Eddery, Graham Starkey, Eddie Hide. But Lester Piggott was a plum, to be sure.
She flung up the sash. The cold wind gusted like a cloud into the room.
