“Hathaway,” said Howard.
“That little coward!” Shine said, strutting about so that her chins shook. “No, we weren’t. Don’t put me off, or I’ll really lose my temper! Stand up, both of you!”
They scrambled hurriedly to their feet. Shine strutted at them with her hands on her hips. She was mountainous. Howard and Awful backed away.
Then, at the moment when Howard was sure that Shine was going to do something awful to them, the door to the yard swung open beside him. Torquil shoved aside the yellow-robed man and marched in. Awful stared. Torquil, this time, was dressed like an Egyptian pharaoh, in a slender white robe and a wide metallic-looking wig that was stuck behind both ears. Gems flashed from the big circular golden collar across his shoulders, and from the golden crown like a knotted snake that he wore over the wig. He had painted his eyes with black and green and gold, so that they looked twice as big as they should.
“Oh, good grief! Now it’s you!” said Shine. “I shall take up good works if this goes on. What do you want? A pyramid?”
“I’ve just met Archer,” Torquil said breathlessly. He seemed very excited. His painted eyes flashed in what little light there was left.
“Then you could have done me a favor by keeping Archer talking,” said Shine. “I’m trying to rob one of his banks.”
“No, no!” Torquil said. “I’ve just had the most perfect, marvelous idea. It’s about Archer. You know he’s—” His large outlined eyes peered from Shine to Howard to Awful. “I wish you’d have more light in here. Who’s this listening?”
Shine flapped her hand in a resigned way. A dusty little light came on overhead, and they all blinked at one another. Shine was fatter even than Howard had thought.
“Lucky I asked!” said Torquil. “I can’t tell you in front of him. He’s limpet boy Sykes. And I think she’s his sister. Send them home or something. This is too good to wait, Shine! It’s an idea right up your street!”
“Send them home!” exclaimed Shine. “Who are you ordering about? Little brother, you’ve let that crown of yours go to your head. I’ve had word out for these two for ten days, and I’m not going to lose them now that I’ve got them.”
Torquil twirled the golden scepter in his hand impatiently. “Do something with them, or I shan’t tell you. Do you, or do you not, want to have Archer at your mercy? I can always go to Dillian.” He smoothed his white pleated robe and turned to the door.
“Oh, all right,” growled Shine. “The gang has been promised it anyway.” She snapped her fingers. The door swung wide open. “Hind!” she shouted. “Ginger Hind! You can have these two for half an hour. Don’t kill them, though. I need them. Here you are.”
Howard and Awful found themselves helplessly stumbling forward into the yard. It was almost dark out there now, lit greenish orange by the signs in the streets beyond. The meditating people were gray lumps along the walls. Hind’s gang members were dark outlines, frighteningly many of them, galloping eagerly toward Howard and Awful. Nobody wasted time on words. Hind’s gang grabbed. Howard put his head down and charged for the passage to the street. Beside him, Awful made her worst scream and charged, too, with her arms and legs going like windmills.
It was hopeless, of course. Awful’s screams cut off in the first second, and down she went under a pile of bodies. Howard went down two seconds later. As everyone piled on top of him, Howard had a lurid glimpse of one of them looking tall as a house, all legs, and long arms dangling huge fists, and no head to speak of. He shut his eyes and fought.
And felt Hind’s gang scrambling off him instead of on. Someone gave a panic-stricken squeal. There was the dull, cracking thump of heads’ being brought together. This was followed by frantically running feet and a sense of clear space around him. Howard opened his eyes unbelievingly and looked up at two legs, towering away into darkness.
“Told you not to go near Shine,” said the Goon.
Howard scrambled sheepishly to his feet. Awful bounced up and wrapped her arms around the Goon’s nearest leg.
“Leave off!” said the Goon. He grasped each of them by an arm and ran them across the yard to the passage. Howard glanced back as they went and saw that the meditators had moved at last. They were standing in a scared-looking huddle against the far wall.
“I knew you’d come!” Awful gasped as they pounded down the passage. “I saw Torquil wink!”
“Made a mistake if you did,” said the Goon. They shot out through the door into the street. “Down here,” said the Goon. “Your mum’s with the car.” He ran them down the sidewalk and around the corner. There, sure enough, was their car, with one of its doors ready open and Catriona looking anxiously over her shoulder as they came. The Goon rammed Howard and Awful into the back seat and doubled himself double quick into the front one. The door slammed. “Go quick,” said the Goon. “Shine farms all this part.”
Catriona drove off so fast that the tires actually squealed. “I have been so worried!” she said. “Don’t ever do that again! What were you doing anyway?”
“Looking for Hathaway,” Howard said rather sulkily.
“Won’t be here,” said the Goon. “Lives in the past. Told you.”
“And I think you might thank the Goon,” Catriona said as they screamed past the Town Hall. “He was the one who knew where to go.”
“Thanks,” Howard said, and meant it. He turned anxiously to Awful. He was afraid she might still be under Shine’s spell.
Awful swore she was not. “I don’t want to be under someone,” she said indignantly. “I want to be the top one. And Shine was horrible, fat and horrible! But Torquil’s funny. I wanted to laugh, the way he was dressed up. And he did wink, I know he did!”
They had to walk from the corner because of Hathaway’s roadworks, but home, when they reached it, was once more pleasantly warm and brightly lit. Quentin was frying borrowed fish fingers over the gas. He was as relieved to see them as Catriona had been. Howard thought that he had never properly appreciated before ordinary things like light and heat and parents and fish fingers.
“Archer’s left the power on?” he said.
“Yes. He’ll be trying something else, I expect,” said Quentin. “Torquil, however, is still charming our ears from the cellar and the telly. And Hathaway has only packed up for the night.”
Hathaway, thought Howard. “Dad, where would you live if you lived in the past?”
“Atlantis,” said Quentin. “Oh, I see what you mean. In an antiques shop, I suppose.”
Chapter Ten
On Friday morning Hathaway’s men woke them all at dawn again, drilling a large ditch all the way along the front of the house. The Goon groaned, clutched the pillow tied around his head, and rolled over, so that his legs overflowed from filling Howard’s floor onto the landing outside. Fifi hopped over them as she went downstairs, singing.
Fifi must have come in very late the night before, but she was as bright as a button. When Howard stumbled down to breakfast, she was bustling about, looking pink and pretty. “Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea!” she caroled. She always sang hymns when she was happy.
“Oh, don’t you start!” Quentin grumbled. “Torquil’s quite enough.”
The Goon sighed, hard enough to blow cornflakes about.
When Howard and Awful left to go to school, they found they had to do a long jump in order to leave the house. Hathaway’s ditch began at the bottom of the front doorstep. It was rather longer than the width of the house, and it was about seven feet wide. All of Hathaway’s men were down in it, drilling and digging busily through layers of tar and yellow mud.
Howard wondered how Mum had managed to get out. He himself leaped across, using his violin for balance. Awful’s legs were too short for her to jump. But the Goon solved that by grasping both of Awful’s elbows and striding across with her dangling in front of him. The Goon’s legs were the only ones in the neighborhood long enough to step over the ditch. The postman solved the matter anoth
er way. He borrowed a fishing rod from number 11. As Howard picked himself and his violin out of the road, the postman was standing beside him, dangling a packet of letters toward the front door.
“Post!” he shouted, unreeling the line.
Quentin came to the front door in his dressing gown to get the letters. “They say an Englishman’s home is his castle!” he bawled above the drilling. “Now we have a moat to prove it!”
As Quentin went in and the postman went back to number 11 to return the fishing rod, one of the men in the moat beckoned to Howard. “I remembered,” he shouted. “Hathaway. Shakespeare’s wife. She was called Anne Hathaway.”
“Thanks,” yelled Howard. He was acutely disappointed. He realized, as he and Awful set off to school with the Goon, that he had really been hoping the man knew about Hathaway.
Hind’s gang was loitering in Park Street. They followed behind at a very safe distance from the Goon. To Awful’s delight, the ginger-haired boy had a black eye. But Howard was not sure he liked the venomous way that eye looked at him. Shine was obviously still after them, but it rather looked as if Ginger Hind were after Howard on his own account, too.
Howard did not let that bother him. He spent most of that day thinking about how to find Hathaway. He was determined to find him. Or her. It was always possible that Hathaway would turn out to be another sister, like Shine. Anyway, Hathaway was the one who could solve all their problems. Since Hathaway was the one Dad had been sending the words to, then Hathaway knew a way to get rid of the other brothers and sisters. So the thing to do was to find him (or her) and get around her (or him). It might not be easy. The others were not easy to get around. On the other hand, Howard thought, he hadn’t really made an effort to be nice to any of them so far.
At lunchtime Howard’s thoughts carried him to the school library, where the second year had set up a project on the town. There was a map, and models, and drawings, and careful pages of history. And more careful pages about industry and new buildings. Howard looked at it all. It was the first time he had found the project remotely interesting. Someone had even done a drawing of what the new building at the Poly would be like. An Egyptian temple, Howard thought, and he grinned, thinking of Torquil.
He looked most carefully at the map. Pleasant Hill and all those parts to the west must belong to Dillian. Torquil must begin at the shopping precinct and stretch eastward to the disco, down and then up again to the cathedral. Archer must have the center of town, the High Street, the Town Hall, and out as far as Upper Park Street to the west. In fact, Archer had to have most of the middle, except for the old bit by the cathedral where Shine and Torquil seemed to overlap. Give Shine everything southeast from there, and where did that leave Venturus? Erskine had to have out to the east, where the sewage farm was. So that left Venturus with the new housing estate to the south. But Venturus must have all the schools and the Poly as well. And Erskine’s drains and Archer’s power must crisscross the whole town. In fact, they seemed to overlap everywhere, particularly in the center, leaving nowhere at all for Hathaway.
Howard gave that up and looked for the sewage farm instead. There it was, right at the eastern edge of the map, beyond the part marked “Industry.” Who ran industry? Beside the sewage farm, Howard read “Site of old Castle.” That was a disappointment. Howard remembered Archer’s saying that only Erskine could go out that far. So even if Hathaway had wanted to live beside a sewage plant, he probably couldn’t. Howard gave up that idea and turned his attention back inside the black line of “Old City Boundary” and to the center, where the whole family overlapped.
Here there was an irregular shape which said “Site of Old Abbey.” It took in some of the park, a piece of the Poly, the library, the museum, and the cathedral. But to Howard’s relief, it stopped short of the winding lanes of Shine Town. It looked as if he would not need to go there again. “Somewhere there, I bet,” he said, and went off to orchestra practice, rather pleased with himself.
Somehow Howard had half expected Torquil to turn up again. But there was no sign of him. Howard scraped and sawed, more or less along with the rest of the orchestra and almost in time to Mr. Caldwick’s baton, and went on thinking how to find Hathaway. Torquil had to farm the cathedral, of course, because of the organ and the choir. Count that out. Even so, the rest of the “Site of Old Abbey” was awfully near Torquil and Shine and not so far away from Archer’s bank. Would Hathaway want that if he were a recluse?
But there was this about families, Howard thought, obediently turning to the orchestra’s next piece of music. Families might hate one another, but something nevertheless made them stick together. Look at the things Dad always said about Auntie Mildred. Yet Auntie Mildred always came for Christmas. Mum would say dryly, “Well, blood is thicker than water.”
That made Howard think about yesterday. Had Torquil really winked at Awful, as Awful swore he had? The way Torquil’s eyes had been marked out in paint, Awful could hardly have made a mistake. And there had been first Dillian, then Torquil, and then the Goon had turned up. And the Goon was from Archer. Torquil had just met Archer. What was going on? Oh, I give up! Howard thought, and tried to take off instead in his favorite spaceship for Proxima Centauri. But even there he had no peace. He found he was wondering irritably why Archer didn’t build a spaceship instead of spying on Dad. It was such a waste of all that technology.
The end of school put an end to Howard’s thoughts. The Goon was waiting outside, looming beside Awful. Ginger Hind was waiting, too, across the street, all on his own, glaring at Howard from his black eye and his good one. Hind was getting to be a real problem, Howard thought, though at least he was on his own now. He followed them all the way back home, watched them jump Hathaway’s moat, and went on standing there, glowering. But Upper Park Street looked unusually empty all the same. There was no one there from Dillian. Torquil had not sent any kind of band today. And Ginger Hind seemed to have been deserted by the rest of his gang. Could it be, Howard wondered, that some of them were getting tired of pestering them?
In the kitchen Quentin sat staring. A letter lay in front of him, on the purple heart on the table.
“Been like that all day,” said the Goon.
“Take a look at that letter!” said Fifi. She was making tea, all dressed up as if she were going to a party. “Mr. Sykes wouldn’t go to the Poly. I had to ring up and say he was ill.”
Howard picked up the letter which seemed to have had such a startling effect on his father. Quentin did not seem to notice. The letter was from the city treasurer. Howard read it.
Dear Mr. Sykes,
It has come to our attention that we have not been in receipt of any remittance from you in respect of taxes since April 1970. The sum at present outstanding, with due allowance for the various increases in the city tax and for the compound interest charged on all sums overdue over the thirteen-year period, is now £23,000.56 ½. We hope you will see your way to an early remittance of the said sum before we are forced to put the matter in legal hands.
Yrs. faithfully,
C. Wiggins
City Treasurer
“Dad!” Howard exclaimed. “You never owe twenty-three thousand pounds!”
“Plus fifty-six and a half pence,” Quentin said. “Don’t forget that.” He turned around and looked guiltily up at Howard. “Don’t tell your mother. That was why I was doing the words all these years. Mountjoy said they would be instead of paying taxes. I was a fool to believe him, wasn’t I?”
“How will you pay?” said Howard.
“Sell this house,” said his father. “Go away. Leave me. I’m a broken man.”
Howard took the borrowed peanut butter sandwich Fifi handed him and went into the hall. He paused there to find some shredded old tissues in his pockets and stuff some in both ears. Then he went into the front room. The television was thundering out olde tyme dance music today. Howard could feel the Gay Gordons vibrating the floor and see the blankets over it quivering. He moved the blan
kets and had a careful look at Hathaway’s letter.
It was real parchment. When Howard touched it, he knew it was a kind of leather, not plastic or paper. The red wax looked old and cracked. And the writing had faded a lot, even under the blankets, to a dark brown. It could have been written with one of those square pens used at school in art for lettering. But it could just as possibly have been done with a quill pen. Howard nodded. He put back the blanket and went out into the hall again.
The Goon was standing dejectedly in the middle of it. “Archer’s come for Fifi,” he said dismally.
Howard took the tissue out of his ears and opened the kitchen door. Archer was standing behind Quentin’s chair, reading the letter. He was wearing a suit for once and looked as smart as Fifi did. “Did Shine rob one of your banks last night?” Howard asked him.
Archer turned around, laughing. No one could have looked nicer. “No way!” he said. “The vaults are all booby-trapped. The boys who tried are in hospital.” Then he turned to Quentin. “This letter has absolutely nothing to do with me,” he said. “I swear.” Howard thought Archer was telling the truth. He was quite serious and not trying to seem nice. Quentin groaned. Archer said, thinking, “Hathaway farms records and archives. It could be him.”
“Or it could even be C. Wiggins on his own,” Quentin said miserably.
Catriona came in through the back door as he said it. “What’s happened now?” she said. She gave Archer a weary, freezing look.
Howard shut the door hastily. It made him feel bad to see how thin and pale Mum had got this last week. And there was going to be another row. His parents would wait till Archer was gone, and then they would start shouting again. He could see it in both their faces. He turned to the Goon. “Will you come with me to the museum?”