to the world, and juggling. Meggie tried to count the coloured balls – four, six, eight. He plucked them out of the air so swiftly that it made her dizzy to watch him. He stood on one leg to catch them, casually, as if he didn’t even have to look. Only when he spotted Meggie did a ball escape his fingers and roll at her feet. Meggie picked it up and threw it back.
‘Where did you learn to do that?’ she asked. ‘It looked – well, wonderful.’
Dustfinger made her a mocking bow. There was that strange smile of his again. ‘It’s how I earn my living,’ he said. ‘With the juggling and a few other things.’
‘How can you earn a living that way?’
‘At markets and fairs. At children’s birthday parties. Did you ever go to one of those fairs where people pretend they’re still living in Medieval times?’
Meggie nodded. Yes, she had once been to a fair like that with Mo. There had been wonderful things there, so strange that they might have come from another world, not just another time. Mo had bought her a box decorated with brightly coloured stones, and a little fish made of shiny green and gold metal, with its mouth wide open and a jingle in its hollow body that rang like a little bell when you shook it. The air had smelled of freshly baked bread, smoke and damp clothes, and Meggie had watched a smith making a sword, and had hidden behind Mo’s back from a woman in witch’s costume.
Dustfinger picked up his juggling balls and put them back in his bag which was standing open on the grass behind him. Meggie went over to it and looked inside. She saw some bottles, some white cotton wool and a carton of milk, but before she could see any more Dustfinger closed the bag.
‘Sorry, trade secrets,’ he said. ‘Your father’s given the book to this Elinor, hasn’t he?’
Meggie shrugged her shoulders.
‘It’s all right, you can tell me. I know anyway. I was listening. He’s mad to leave it here, but what can I do?’ Dustfinger sat down on the deckchair. His rucksack was on the grass next to him, with a bushy tail spilling out of it.
‘I saw Gwin,’ said Meggie.
‘Did you?’ Dustfinger leaned back, closing his eyes. His hair looked even paler in the sunlight. ‘So did I. He’s in the rucksack. It’s the time of day when he sleeps.’
‘I mean I saw him in the book.’ Meggie didn’t take her eyes off Dustfinger’s face as she said this, but it didn’t move a muscle. His thoughts couldn’t be read on his brow, in the same way as she could read Mo’s. Dustfinger’s face was a closed book, and Meggie had the feeling that if anyone tried reading it he would rap their knuckles. ‘He was sitting on a letter,’ she went on. ‘On a capital N. I saw his horns.’
‘Really?’ Dustfinger didn’t even open his eyes. ‘And do you know which of her thousands of shelves that book-mad woman put it on?’
Meggie ignored his question. ‘Why does Gwin look like the animal in the book?’ she asked. ‘Did you really stick those horns on him?’
Dustfinger opened his eyes and blinked up at the sun.
‘Hm, did I?’ he enquired, looking at the sky. A few clouds were drifting over Elinor’s house. The sun disappeared behind one of them, and its shadow fell across the green grass like an ugly mark.
‘Does your father often read aloud to you, Meggie?’ asked Dustfinger.
Meggie looked at him suspiciously. Then she knelt down beside the rucksack and stroked Gwin’s silky tail. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But he taught me to read when I was five.’
‘Ask him why he doesn’t read aloud to you,’ said Dustfinger. ‘And don’t let him put you off with excuses.’
‘What do you mean?’ Meggie straightened up, feeling cross. ‘He doesn’t like reading aloud, that’s all.’
Dustfinger smiled. Leaning out of the deckchair, he put one hand into the rucksack. ‘Ah, that feels like a nice full stomach,’ he commented. ‘I think Gwin had good hunting last night. I hope he’s not been plundering a nest again. Perhaps it’s just Elinor’s rolls and eggs.’ Gwin’s tail twitched back and forth almost like a cat’s.
Meggie looked at the rucksack with distaste. She was glad she couldn’t see Gwin’s muzzle. There might still be blood on it.
Dustfinger leaned back in Elinor’s deckchair. ‘Shall I give you a performance this evening – show you what the bottles, the cotton wool and all the other mysterious things in my bag are for?’ he asked without looking at her. ‘It has to be dark for that, pitch dark. Are you scared to be out of doors in the middle of the night?’
‘Of course not!’ said Meggie, offended, although really she was not at all happy to be out in the dark. ‘But first, tell me why you stuck those horns on Gwin! And tell me what you know about the book.’
Dustfinger folded his arms behind his head. ‘Oh, I know a lot about that book,’ he said. ‘And perhaps I’ll tell you some time, but first the two of us have a date. Here at eleven o’clock tonight. OK?’
Meggie looked up at a blackbird singing its heart out on Elinor’s rooftop. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Eleven o’clock tonight.’ Then she went back to the house.
Elinor had suggested that Mo set up his workshop next door to the library. There was a little room where she kept her collection of old books about animals and plants (for there seemed to be no kind of book that Elinor didn’t collect). She kept this collection on shelves of pale, honey-coloured wood. On some of the shelves the books were propping up glass display cases of beetles pinned to cardboard, which only made Meggie dislike Elinor all the more. By the only window was a handsome table with turned legs, but it was barely half as long as the one Mo had in his workshop at home. Perhaps that was why he was swearing quietly to himself when Meggie put her head round the door.
‘Look at this table!’ he said. ‘You could sort a stamp collection on it but not bind books. This whole room is too small. Where am I going to put the press and my tools? Last time I worked up in the attics, but now they’re filled with crates of books too.’
Meggie stroked the spines of the books crammed close together on the shelves. ‘Just tell her you need a bigger table.’ Carefully, she took a book off the shelf. It contained pictures of the strangest of insects: beetles with horns, beetles with probosces, one even had a proper nose. Meggie passed her forefinger over the pastel-coloured pictures. ‘Mo, why haven’t you ever read aloud to me?’
Her father turned round so abruptly that the book almost fell from her hand. ‘Why do you ask me that? You’ve been talking to Dustfinger, haven’t you? What did he tell you?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ Meggie herself didn’t know why she was lying. She put the beetle book back in its place. It felt almost as if someone were spinning a very fine web around the two of them, a web of secrets and lies closing in on them all the time. ‘I think it’s a good question, though,’ she said as she took out another book. It was called Masters of Disguise. The creatures in it looked like live twigs or dry leaves.
Mo turned his back to her again. He began laying out his implements on the table, even though it was too small: his folding tool on the left, then the round-headed hammer he used to tap the spines of books into shape, the sharp paper-knife … He usually whistled under his breath as he worked, but now he was perfectly quiet. Meggie sensed that his thoughts were far away. But where?
Finally, he sat on the side of the table and looked at her. ‘I just don’t like reading aloud,’ he said, as if it was the most uninteresting subject in the world. ‘You know I don’t. That’s all.’
‘But why not? I mean, you make up stories. You tell wonderful stories. You can do all the voices, and make it exciting and then funny …’
Mo crossed his arms over his chest as if hiding behind them.
‘You could read me Tom Sawyer,’ suggested Meggie ‘or How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin.’ That was one of Mo’s favourite stories. When she was smaller they sometimes played at having crumbs in their clothes, like the crumbs in the rhino’s skin.
‘Yes, an excellent story,’ murmured Mo, turning his back to her again. He picked up the folder in which he kept his endpapers and leafed absent-mindedly through them. ‘Every book should begin with attractive endpapers,’ he had once told Meggie. ‘Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it’s like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it’s pulled aside and the show begins.’
‘Meggie, I really do have to work now,’ he said without turning round. ‘The sooner I’m through with Elinor’s books the sooner we can go home again.’
Meggie put the book about creatures who were masters of disguise back in its place. ‘Suppose he didn’t stick the horns on?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Gwin’s horns. Suppose Dustfinger didn’t stick them on?’ ‘Well, he did.’ Mo drew a chair up to the table that was not long enough for him. ‘By the way, Elinor’s gone shopping. If you feel faint with hunger before she gets back, just make yourself a couple of pancakes, OK?’
‘OK,’ murmured Meggie. For a moment she wondered whether to tell him about her date with Dustfinger that night, but then she decided against it. ‘Do you think I can take some of these books to my room?’ she asked instead.
‘I’m sure you can. So long as they don’t disappear into your box.’
‘Like that book thief you once told me about?’ Meggie put three books under her left arm and four under her right arm. ‘How many was it he stole? Thirty thousand?’
‘Forty thousand,’ said Mo. ‘But at least he didn’t kill the owners.’
‘No, that was the Spanish monk whose name I’ve forgotten.’ Meggie went over to the door and opened it with her toe. ‘Dustfinger says Capricorn would kill you to get hold of that book.’ She tried to make her voice sound casual. ‘Would he, Mo?’
‘Meggie!’ Mo turned round with the paper-knife, pretending to point it at her threateningly. ‘Go and lie in the sun or bury your pretty nose in those books, but please let me get some work done. And tell Dustfinger I shall carve him into very thin slices with this knife if he goes on telling you such nonsense.’
‘That wasn’t a proper answer!’ said Meggie, making her way out into the passage with an armful of books.
Once in her room, she spread the books out on the huge bed and began to read. She read about beetles who moved into empty snail-shells as we might move into an empty house, about frogs shaped like leaves and caterpillars with brightly coloured spines on their backs, white-bearded monkeys, stripy anteaters, and cats that dig in the ground for sweet potatoes. There seemed to be everything here, every creature Meggie could imagine, and even more that she could never have dreamed existed at all. But none of Elinor’s clever books said a word about martens with horns.
6
Fire and Stars
So along they came with dancing bears, dogs and goats, monkeys and marmots, walking the tightrope, turning somersaults both backwards and forwards, throwing daggers and knives and suffering no injury when they fell on their points and blades, swallowing fire and chewing stones, doing tricks with magic goblets and chains under cover of cloak and hat, making puppets fence with each other, trilling like nightingales, screaming like peacocks, calling like deer, wrestling and dancing to the sound of the double flute …
Herzt,
Book of Minstrelsy
The day passed slowly. Meggie saw Mo only in the afternoon, when Elinor came back from doing her shopping and half an hour later gave them spaghetti with some kind of ready-made sauce. ‘I’m afraid I’ve no patience with toiling over a stove,’ she said as she put the dishes on the table. ‘Perhaps our friend with the furry animal can cook?’
Dustfinger merely shrugged his shoulders apologetically. ‘Sorry, I’m no use to you that way.’
‘Mo cooks very well,’ said Meggie, stirring the thin, watery sauce into her spaghetti.
‘Mo’s here to restore my books, not to cook for us,’ replied Elinor sharply. ‘What about you, though?’
Meggie shrugged. ‘I can make pancakes,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you get some cookery books? You have books of every other kind. I’m sure you’d find cookery books a help.’
Elinor didn’t even deign to reply to this suggestion.
‘And by the way, there’s a rule for night-time,’ she said, when they had all been eating in silence for a while. ‘I won’t have candlelight in my house. Fire makes me nervous. It’s far too greedy for paper.’
Meggie gulped. She felt caught in the act, for of course she had brought candles with her. They were on her bedside table upstairs, where Elinor must have seen them. However, Elinor was looking not at Meggie but at Dustfinger, who was playing with a box of matches.
‘I hope you’ll take that rule to heart,’ she said to him. ‘Since we’re obviously going to have the pleasure of your company for another night.’
‘Yes, if I may impose on your hospitality a little longer. I’ll be off first thing in the morning, I promise.’ Dustfinger was still holding the matches. He didn’t seem bothered by Elinor’s distrustful gaze. ‘I’d say someone here has the wrong idea about fire,’ he added. ‘It bites like a fierce little animal, admittedly, but you can tame it.’ And with these words he took a match out of the box, struck it, and popped the flame into his open mouth.
Meggie held her breath as his lips closed around the burning matchstick. Dustfinger opened his mouth again, took out the spent match, smiled and left it on his empty plate.
‘You see, Elinor?’ he said. ‘It didn’t bite me. It’s easier to tame than a kitten and almost as easy as a dog.’
Elinor just wrinkled her nose, but Meggie was so amazed that she could hardly take her eyes off Dustfinger’s scarred face. She looked at Mo. The little trick with the burning match didn’t seem to have surprised him. He shot a warning glance at Dustfinger, who meekly put the box of matches away in his trouser pocket.
‘But of course I’ll keep the no-candles rule,’ he was quick to say. ‘That’s no problem. Really.’
Elinor nodded. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘And one more thing: if you go out again as soon as it’s dark this evening, the way you did last night, you’d better not be back too late, because I switch the burglar alarm on at nine-thirty on the dot.’
‘Ah, then I was in luck yesterday evening.’ Dustfinger slipped some spaghetti into his bag. Elinor didn’t notice, but Meggie did. ‘Yes, I do enjoy walking at night. The world’s more to my liking then, not so loud, not so fast, not so crowded and a good deal more mysterious. But I wasn’t planning to walk this evening. I have other plans for tonight, and I’ll have to ask you to switch this wonderful system of yours on a bit later than usual.’
‘Oh, indeed. And why, may I ask?’
Dustfinger winked at Meggie. ‘Well, I’ve promised to put on a little show for this young lady,’ he said. ‘It begins about an hour before midnight.’
‘Oh yes?’ Elinor dabbed some sauce off her lips with her napkin. ‘A little show. Why not in daylight? After all, the young lady’s only twelve years old. She should be in bed at eight o’clock.’
Meggie tightened her lips. She hadn’t been to bed as early as eight since her fifth birthday, but she wasn’t going to the trouble of explaining that to Elinor. Instead, she admired the casual way Dustfinger reacted to Elinor’s hostile gaze.
‘Ah, but you see the tricks I want to show Meggie wouldn’t look so good by day,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. ‘I’m afraid I need the black cloak of night. Why don’t you come and watch too? Then you’ll understand why it all has to be done in the dark.’
‘Go on, accept his offer, Elinor!’ said Mo. ‘You’ll enjoy the show. And then perhaps you won’t think fire’s so sinister.’
‘It’s not that I think it’s sinister. I don’t like it, that’s all,’ remarked Elinor, unmoved.
‘He can juggle!’ Meggie burst out. ‘With eight balls.’
‘Eleven,’ Dustfinger corrected her. ‘But juggling is more of a daylight skill.’
Elinor retrieved a string of spaghetti from the tablecloth and glanced first at Meggie and then at Mo. She looked cross. ‘Oh, very well. I don’t want to be a spoilsport,’ she said. ‘I shall go to bed with a book at nine-thirty as usual and put the alarm on first, but when Meggie tells me she’s going out for this private performance I’ll switch it off again for an hour. Will that be time enough?’
‘Ample time,’ said Dustfinger, bowing so low to her that the tip of his nose collided with the rim of his plate.
Meggie bit back her laughter.
It was five to eleven when she knocked at Elinor’s bedroom door.
‘Come in!’ she heard Elinor call, and when she put her head round the door she saw her aunt sitting up in bed, poring over a catalogue as thick as a telephone directory. ‘Oh, too expensive, too expensive!’ she murmured. ‘Take my advice, Meggie: never develop a passion you can’t afford. It’ll eat your heart away like a bookworm. Take this book here, for instance.’ Elinor tapped her finger on the left-hand page of her catalogue so hard that it wouldn’t have surprised Meggie if she had bored a hole in it. ‘What a fine edition – and in such good condition too! I’ve been wanting it for fifteen years, but it just costs too much money. Far too much.’
Sighing, she closed her catalogue, dropped it on the rug and swung her legs out of bed. To Meggie’s surprise, she was wearing a long, flowered nightdress. She looked younger in it, almost like a girl who has woken up one morning to find her face wrinkled. ‘Ah, well, you’ll probably never be as crazy as I am!’ she muttered, putting a thick pair of socks on her bare feet. ‘Your father’s not inclined to be crazy, and your mother never was either. Quite the opposite – I never knew anyone with a cooler head. My father, on the other hand, was at least as mad as me. I inherited over half my books from him, and what good did they do him? Did they keep him alive? Far from it. He died of a stroke at a book auction. Isn’t that ridiculous?’
With the best will in the world, Meggie didn’t know what to say to that. ‘My mother?’ she asked, instead. ‘Did you know her well?’
Elinor snorted as if she had asked a silly question. ‘Of course I did. It was here that your father met her. Didn’t he ever tell you?’
Meggie shook her head. ‘He doesn’t talk about her much.’ ‘Well, probably better not. Why probe old wounds? And you’re not particularly like her. She painted that sign on the library door. Come on, then, or you’ll miss this show of yours.’
Meggie followed Elinor down the unlit corridor. For a moment she had the odd feeling that her mother might step out of one of the many doors, smiling at her. There was hardly a light on in the whole vast house, and once or twice Meggie bumped her knee on a chair or a little table that she hadn’t seen in the gloom. ‘Why is it so dark everywhere here?’ she