“What happened?” Matt asked.
“You’ve been ill. Nothing very serious. Pneumonia. A touch of pleurisy. But it’s all behind you now.”
“You gave me something to drink…” Matt tried to remember, even though he didn’t want to. The very thought of what had happened repulsed him. “There was a snake,” he said.
“A snake? What are you talking about? You’ve been having bad dreams, Matthew. I would imagine it comes from watching too much television.”
“I’m hungry,” Matt said.
“I expect you are. You haven’t eaten for three days.”
“Three days!”
“That’s how long you were unconscious.” She got up and shuffled over to the door. “I’ll bring you up some tea,” she said. “You can rest tomorrow but after that I want you up on your feet. The fresh air will do you good. And anyway, it’s time you began work.”
She took one last look at him, nodded to herself and closed the door.
Two days later Matt stood in the pigsty with stinking mud and filth reaching almost up to his knees. Mrs Deverill had spoken of fresh air but the stench here was so bad, he could barely breathe. Noah had provided him with boots and gloves but he had no other protective clothes. His jeans and shirt were soon dripping with black slime. The disinfectant he had been given burned his throat and made his eyes water.
He reached down with the spade and scooped up another bucketful of muck. It would be lunch soon and he was looking forward to it. Mrs Deverill was, despite everything, a good cook. When Matt had been living with Gwenda Davis, all his meals had come out of the deep freeze straight into the microwave. He preferred the food here: home-baked bread, rich stews and fruit pies with thick pastry crusts.
He had changed. He knew that something had happened to him during his illness, even if he had no idea what it was. It was as if a switch had been thrown inside him. He couldn’t explain it but he felt stronger and more confident than ever before.
And that was good because he had already decided. He was going to run away. He still found it incredible that the LEAF Project could have sent him to this godforsaken place and made him the slave of a grim, unsmiling woman. Matt disliked Mrs Deverill, but it was Noah, the farmhand, who really made his skin crawl. Noah was usually out in the fields, bouncing along in an ancient tractor that belched black smoke. But when he was close, he couldn’t keep his eyes off Matt. He was always leering at him, as if he knew something that Matt didn’t. Matt wondered if he was brain-damaged. He didn’t seem to be quite human.
Matt didn’t care what happened to him but he knew he couldn’t stay at Hive Hall. Not for a year. Not even for another week. He had no money but he was sure he would be able to find some if he looked hard enough. Then he would either hitch-hike or take a train to London. He would lose himself in the capital, and although he’d heard plenty of horror stories, he was sure that somehow he would be able to survive. In just two years he would be sixteen and independent. Never again would any adult tell him what he had to do.
Mrs Deverill appeared at the door of the farmhouse and called out to him. Matt wasn’t wearing his watch but guessed it must be one o’clock. She was always punctual. He threw down the spade and climbed out of the sty. In the distance, Noah appeared, carrying two buckets of animal feed. He never ate in the farmhouse. He had a room on the upper floor of the barn and that was where he cooked, slept and presumably washed – although not often, as he smelled worse than the pigs.
Matt took off his boots outside the front door, then went into the kitchen and washed his hands in the sink. Mrs Deverill was already serving vegetable soup. There was bread, butter and cheese on the table. Asmodeus was sitting on the sideboard and Matt shivered. He disliked the cat even more than he disliked Noah – and it wasn’t just because of the jagged scar on his hand. Like Noah, the cat was always watching him. It had a way of appearing out of nowhere. Matt would turn his head and there it would be… in the branch of a tree, on a windowsill or a chair, always with its ugly, yellow eyes fixed on him. Normally he would ignore it, but if he came close, the cat would arch its back and hiss.
“Out of the kitchen, please, Asmodeus,” Mrs Deverill said. The cat understood her perfectly. It leapt out of a window and was gone.
Matt sat down and began to eat.
“There’s something I want you to do for me this afternoon, Matthew,” Mrs Deverill said.
“I’m cleaning the pigs.”
“I know what you’re doing. One day you’ll learn that being rude to people who are older and wiser than you won’t do you any good. In fact, I have a task for you which you might enjoy. I’d like you to collect something for me from the chemist in Lesser Malling.”
“What do you want me to pick up?”
“It’s a package, addressed to me. You can go there after lunch.” She held a spoonful of soup to her lips. Steam rose up in front of her unsmiling face. “There’s an old bicycle in the barn you can use. It belonged to my husband.”
“You were married?” That was news to Matt. He couldn’t imagine anyone sharing their life with this woman.
“For a short time.”
“What happened to your husband?”
“Young people shouldn’t ask questions. It’s not good for them. However…” She sighed and lowered the spoon. “Henry disappeared. That was his name. Henry Lutterworth. We’d only been married a few months when he went for a walk in the wood and never came back. It’s possible that he simply got lost and starved to death. Let that be a lesson to you, Matthew. The woods are very thick around here, and you can easily get swallowed up. It’s quite likely that he stumbled into a bog. That’s my guess. It would have been a very unpleasant way to die. He’d have tried to swim, but of course the more he struggled, the faster he’d have gone down, and the water and the mud would have risen up over his nostrils, and that would have been the end of him.”
Matt wondered if she was telling him the truth. Or was she just trying to frighten him?
“If his name was Lutterworth, how come you call yourself Deverill?” he asked.
“I prefer my own name. The name of my ancestors. There have always been Deverills in Lesser Malling. Married or unmarried, we keep our own name.” She sniffed. “Henry left me Hive Hall in his will,” she explained. “We used to have bees but they all went away. They often do that, when their owner dies. I inherited all his money. But the point of all this is, my dear, that if I were you, I’d steer well clear of the wood.”
“I’ll do that,” Matt said.
“Remember now. The chemist. Just tell them it’s for me.”
After lunch, Matt crossed the farmyard and went into the barn. He found the bicycle parked behind an old plough. It obviously hadn’t been used for years. But he pulled it out, oiled the chain, pumped up the tyres, and a few minutes later he was able to pedal out of the farm. It felt good, passing through the rusting gates. He was still doing chores for Mrs Deverill. But anything was better than the pigs.
As he went, a car came the other way and for a moment it seemed they were going to collide. The car was a black Jaguar with tinted windows. Everything happened so quickly that Matt didn’t even see who was driving. He jerked the handlebars and the bike veered up a bank of nettles before curving back on to the lane. He came to a halt and twisted round. The Jaguar had driven into the farm. He saw the red glow of its brake lights but then it disappeared behind the farmhouse. He was tempted to go back. It was the only modern car he had seen since he had come to Hive Hall and he wondered if it had come on account of him. Could it be someone from London, from the social services? He hesitated, then continued on his way. This was the first time he had left the farm – his first taste of freedom. He wasn’t going back yet.
It was a mile to the village. Matt quickly arrived at the broken sign where the five roads met. The wood was all around him and he was glad that Mrs Deverill had shown him which road to take, as they all looked the same. No cars passed. Nothing moved. Matt had never felt more alone as he pedalled on. The last part of the road was uphill and he had to work to get the bike to the top. Despite the oil, he could hear it groaning beneath him. But ahead of him he could see the outer buildings of Lesser Malling and before long he pulled into the village square.
Mrs Deverill had already warned him that there wasn’t much to Lesser Malling and she was certainly right. The village was small and self-contained with a dull, half-dilapidated church, a pub called The Goat and two rows of shops and houses facing each other across an empty, cobbled area. A war memorial stood in the middle, a slab of grey stone engraved with twenty or thirty names. All of the shops looked fifty years out of date. One sold sweets,
