“Archer settled in?” the Goon asked morbidly.
“There’s going to be another row,” said Howard.
The Goon blenched. “Front door then,” he said.
But no one sneaked off that easily with Awful in the house. As the Goon tore open the front door and they stood on the brink of Hathaway’s moat, with Archer’s Rolls parked on the other side of it, the back door slammed, and Awful whizzed down the passage to the moat. “You’re not going without me,” she said. Howard supposed he should be thankful that she only said it, instead of yelling it.
“Come on then,” said the Goon. He slid himself along the front of the house and picked Awful up by her elbows as before. Because Archer’s Rolls was parked exactly at the edge of the moat, even the Goon had to jump down into the moat first in order to get around it. Howard waded through the yellow mud at the bottom and climbed out beyond the car. Ginger Hind began to lope meaningfully toward him across the tarry heaps and holes. Howard leaned on the hood of the Rolls. Come on then, he thought. There’s only one of you.
The Goon stood in the moat, dangling Awful, and looked up at the car. “Let his tires down?” he suggested.
“No,” said Awful. “Hurry up before Ginger Hind gets Howard.”
The Goon dumped Awful on the road and climbed out, sighing. Ginger Hind, when he saw the Goon rising length by length out of the moat, stopped in his tracks and kicked a red cone over in annoyance.
Howard was annoyed, too. He had lost a chance to get rid of Ginger Hind. “Don’t you even go home to eat?” he said to him. All he got was a black-eyed glare. Ginger Hind stuffed his hands into his pockets and followed them, down Zed Alley and across the Poly forecourt. Here Howard saw that the skeleton building of girders was now in scaffolding, making an outline sketch of the Egyptian temple building he had seen in the drawing at lunchtime.
Ginger Hind prowled after them all the way to the museum yard. There he stared in surprise as Howard actually turned toward the door marked “Entrance.” To most people, Howard included, the museum yard was just a way through to the lanes below the cathedral.
The Goon hung back. “Want to go in?” he said. He seemed as surprised as Ginger Hind.
“I need to for a school project,” Howard said, for Ginger Hind’s benefit. He did not want Shine to know he was looking for Hathaway.
Ginger Hind gave him a look of deep contempt. The Goon hitched himself against one of the stone lions outside the museum and folded his long arms. “Don’t like museums,” he said. “Old stuff. Bones and bits of jug. Too clean. Should all be on a rubbish heap.”
So they went in without the Goon and also, to Howard’s relief, without Ginger Hind, who either shared the Goon’s opinion of museums or, more likely, did not dare go past the Goon to follow Howard and Awful. Howard thought: I shall have to get that Hind menace on his own again before long. Awful laughed, much too loud for the hushed, bricky atmosphere of the museum. “The Goon hates museums!” she said. “He said such a lot. Shall we go to the Egypt bit and look at Torquils?”
“We’ll see.” Howard went up to the attendant standing under a notice saying “SAXON EXHIBITION THIS WAY.”
Awful skipped along behind him. “Saxons are boring,” she said. “They burned cakes and talked about Jesus.”
“Excuse me,” Howard said to the attendant. “Could I speak to Mr. Hathaway, please?”
The attendant looked at his watch. He did not seem to be in the least surprised to be asked. Howard’s heart began bumping. “Yes, I think so,” the attendant said. “He usually arranges to see people around now. Is it both of you?”
“Yes, please,” said Howard. His heart seemed to beat in his ears as loud as Torquil’s drums because he had got it right!
The attendant said, “This way then,” and took them around the corner, through the dark canvas corridors of the Saxon exhibition. They passed beautifully lighted displays of coins and buckles and pieces of jug, which made Howard think of the Goon, and some skeletons that had been dug up under the Town Hall, which Awful spared a moment to look at. One had an old spear shaft sticking through its ribs, which impressed her rather. They turned right past a Saxon king in full dress, looking very magnificent and lofty as if he had not known the first thing about burning cakes, and came out around the back into a dusty space full of cases of dead butterflies. The attendant pointed to a white door beyond the butterflies. “In there. Give three knocks, and go through.” And he went away and left them to do it.
The door was marked “CURATOR” in plain black letters. Howard and Awful tiptoed past the cases of butterflies. Howard raised his hand to knock.
“Are you scared?” asked Awful.
“No,” lied Howard.
“Nor am I then,” said Awful.
Howard knocked. Three times. Then he turned the handle and opened the door. There was a dreadful, birdlike, squawking noise and a lot of flapping. He nearly shut it again.
“Funny,” said Awful. “That sounded like a chicken.” She pushed the door open out of Howard’s hands and went in to see. Howard followed.
Chapter Eleven
It was a chicken. They found themselves out of doors, in a walled space with cobbles in the ground, which seemed to be a sort of farmyard. The evening seemed to have turned much milder and warmer, and this was bringing out a strong smell of manure. There were hens all over the place, running toward a girl of about Howard’s age who was scattering corn for them. One of them had got in the way of the door in its hurry. As Howard shut the door behind him, a man came out of the doorway to the right, leading a horse. When he saw Awful and Howard, he stopped, grinned, and called something to the girl. He had such a thick accent that they could not understand a word. But the girl understood. She looked up and bit her lip in order not to laugh.
“Can I be of help to you?” she asked. She had an accent, too, and her voice wobbled with laughter.
They had a right to laugh! Howard thought indignantly. The girl had a long dress on and a silly little cap sitting on her hair. The man was actually wearing a smock, like a joke yokel. He supposed they were actors, hired for another display like the Saxon one, but he did not see why they should have a joke at his expense. “We—er—we’d like to see Hathaway, please,” he said as politely as he could. It came out a little curt.
“Come with me,” the girl said. She shot a grin at the man and dumped the corn out of her apron in a heap on the cobbles. Leaving the hens to squawk and squabble over it, she led the way to another arched doorway in the opposite wall. She made rather heavy going of it because she had clogs on.
There was a garden beyond the wall, a very well-kept garden made mostly of trees or shrubs trained and clipped around neat paths. It was not surprising it was so neat, Howard thought, as the girl led them through. There were so many people at work on it. Men with shears kept bobbing up from behind hedges to stare at them. Two girls in long skirts came running with rakes to rake a path, and they stared, too. And small boys kept popping up everywhere, giggling. Under a tree that had been trained into a sort of roof, two men were sitting writing with quill pens. One of them was Hathaway’s polite messenger. He recognized them. The dismay which came over his face was almost comic.
“I—I trust your father keeps well?” he said.
“It’s all right,” said Awful. “He isn’t here.”
“God be praised!” said the messenger. He really meant it.
Awful was biting her lip, too, as they came to the house. It ran along one side of the garden, and it was big. It puzzled Howard because, in a way, it was like Dillian’s house, made of red bricks in a thoroughly old-fashioned style. It had a great many diamond-paned windows and brick battlements along the top, in a way that ought to have been old. But it shone with newness. The thick oak of the open door was yellow with newness.
A lady dashed out of the door, saying, “What’s this, Anne?” At least when Howard really thought about what she said, he knew it was “What is’t, Nan?” but he could n
ot quite bring himself to believe it. The lady was wearing a cap which covered more of her hair than the girl’s and made her face look too narrow, and she had on a long, rather beautiful dress of greenish brocade. Howard kept trying to tell himself, uneasily, that she was just dressed up like this for a museum display.
“They’re for Father,” the girl said in a very much stronger accent. She gave the lady a droll look. “Our strangest yet, think you not?”
“Hush, Anne,” said the lady. “Will told me on’t.” And she said to Howard and Awful, “Welcome to Abbey House. Please to follow me. I will bring you where Hathaway is.”
As soon as the lady took them into the house, Howard knew it was not a museum display. He knew, even before they went past some diamond-paned windows that looked out from the other side of the house. There he found himself looking out at the cathedral. One end of it was covered in rather insecure-looking wooden scaffolding, and workmen in strange clothes were climbing up and down long ladders rebuilding the west end, which Howard knew had been added around the reign of Henry VIII. All the people going past on this side of the house were dressed like the people in the garden. But this just confirmed what Howard knew. The house inside was real. He could see it was. The boy’s hoop thrown on the floor, the silk cloak tossed over the new yellow oak of the banister, the thick stools, and the leather jug someone had tried to jam out of sight in a corner—all were there because people were really using them. When the Goon said Hathaway lived in the past, he had meant exactly that.
Howard had got used to this idea by the time the lady threw open a pale oak door and said, “Hathaway, here are strange guests again!” So the sight of Dad’s typewriter wrapped in chains and lying on the table in that room was almost shocking. It looked thoroughly out of place, even though the room was evidently a study, too.
Hathaway was sitting with his elbows on the table, staring gloomily at the typewriter, but when he saw Howard and Awful, he sat up and turned his chair around. Color came into his rather pale face. “Bess!” he said to the lady. And the two of them began to talk so rapidly in the strong accent of the past that neither Howard nor Awful could catch one word in ten. They looked at Hathaway while he talked. His eyes were greenish, and he was fair like Dillian, though like many fair men, the neat little beard he wore was gingerish. He was quite the smallest of any of the family they had so far seen, almost normal size, in fact, probably only a few inches taller than Howard. Altogether he had a narrow, thin, frail look, which seemed to fit well with the padded brocade clothes he wore.
The rapid talk ended with the lady’s saying, “I’ll look to’t,” and blowing Hathaway a kiss as she went out. Hathaway turned eagerly to Howard and Awful. “Is it possible you come to me from your father?” he said. He was speaking in a way they could understand, but Howard could see it was not the way he usually spoke.
“No,” he said, “Sorry. We came off our own bat.”
Hathaway looked guarded at that. “Enterprising,” he said. “Why?”
“To ask you things, of course. Stupid,” Awful said.
Hathaway smiled. Awful scowled back. That seemed to amuse Hathaway. “See here, little madam,” he said. “Your father sent my secretary home in tears. It is I who should scowl at you.”
“Dad had a lot to put up with,” Howard explained quickly. “He’d had Archer and Torquil already that morning. And Dillian had pinched his words.”
Hathaway’s greenish eyes lifted to examine Howard. “I know that,” he said. “I do keep in touch to that extent. So what have you come to ask me?”
“Stop digging up our road, you beast!” Awful said in her most outspoken way. It sounded to Howard as if she were getting ready to behave as badly as she had with Miss Potter. But when he looked, he saw that Awful liked Hathaway. She was talking to him the way she talked to Dad. She was expecting Hathaway to understand. Howard thought it was lucky that Hathaway did not happen to have a paunch, or Awful would have been making rude remarks about it before long.
Hathaway did understand Awful perfectly, Howard was glad to see. He kept a straight face and asked innocently, “And what is wrong with your road?”
“There’s a moat outside our house,” Awful said truculently.
Hathaway’s straight face became amused and slightly guilty.
“All right,” Howard said. “I suppose it is funny! But along with all the rest, it just isn’t anymore! And what about the men who keep having to dig it up and fill it in?” He was, he realized, talking to Hathaway as he would talk to Dad, too. He went on hurriedly, trying to sound more polite. “But what I really came about was Dad’s two thousand words.” Hathaway nodded, because he knew that. “Obvious, isn’t it?” said Howard. “Now look …” It was no good. He forgot to be polite again. Quite suddenly he found himself as eloquent as Quentin and walked up and down the room, shouting things about Dillian, cursing Torquil and Shine, complaining about Archer, explaining about Quentin and Mum, and generally going on about Hind’s gang, the music, the electricity, the borrowed food, and the roadworks.
Awful stood holding the edge of the table, watching him wonderingly. Hathaway leaned his bearded chin on his hand and listened with what seemed to be amused, dry attention. After a moment, however, when he saw Howard was not going to stop quickly, he reached to a shelf behind him and fetched down an hourglass, which he turned sand side up and stood on the table. Then he went back to listening. Howard did not know if the hourglass was Hathaway’s idea of a joke, but he did not let it put him off. He had a lot to say. And it was such a relief to tell it to someone who understood. Hathaway understood. Through the look of dry attention, other looks kept flickering: faint guilt, sympathy, dislike of Shine and Dillian, annoyance at Archer, and even some humorous admiration for the way the Sykes family had been coping.
“And today was the last straw for Dad,” Howard was concluding when the door beside him opened. The girl who had been feeding the chickens came around it with a tray, swiveling on one clogged foot because she had the tray balanced on her knee in order to open the door. Howard knew how easy it is to drop everything when you do that. Since he was beside the door, he took the tray away from her.
“I thank you,” she said, and bobbed a sort of curtsy. Then she took back the tray firmly and carried it to the table. There were mugs and a jug and a wooden plate of cakes on it. The girl made a great business of pushing aside the hourglass and the typewriter to set them out, so that she could take a great many quick, sharp looks at Awful and at Howard.
“And why are you acting as servant?” Hathaway said to her, seeing it. “My daughter Anne,” he said to Howard and Awful. “Nan, you are in luck today with your spying on my people from the future. Here are Howard and Anthea, who could be your own descendants.”
This made Howard feel very odd. Anne laughed and tossed her capped head. “And not princes!” she said. “There’s been a sad falling off in my line. I intend marrying a king. All my offspring shall be royalty.”
“We came in disguise,” Awful invented. “We left our crowns at home.”
“Then that explains all,” Anne said, not believing a word. “Wear them next time, and I shall wear mine.” Hathaway made her a little shooing motion. “I’ll not pour the wine?” Anne asked, pleadingly. Hathaway shook his head. Anne clumped out of the room, casting regretful, curious glances over her shoulder.
“She does what she’s told!” Awful exclaimed in surprise.
“Not very often,” said Hathaway. “I think she didn’t want to let me down in front of you. Sit down. Have some wine.”
“Her name isn’t really Anne Hathaway!” Howard said as he pulled a heavy stool over to the table.
Hathaway shook his head. “No. The name I use here is Moneypenny. She is Anne Moneypenny.”
“But Moneypenny’s Mum’s old name!” Awful said, rather feeling that Hathaway had stolen it. And Howard felt odder than ever. He knew now that the thing that had made him so sure that Bess was dressed up for a museum display w
as that Bess was really quite like Catriona to look at.
Hathaway laughed as he poured wine into the mugs. “I remember it was. I think it may have some bearing on all this.” He pushed the mugs toward them. “Have some spiced wine while I check.” He turned around toward his bookshelf.
“Don’t drink too much,” Howard warned Awful while Hathaway’s back was turned. There had been a terrible time last Christmas when Awful got at Dad’s Christmas whiskey.
There was no danger of that. Awful took one sip and was nearly sick. She hated spices. When Hathaway turned back, holding a large book bound in pale grayish leather, Awful’s face was twisted into a mixture of disgust—because of the taste—and accusation—because it was all Howard’s fault—and disappointment—because she had wanted to like the wine. “Oh, dear!” said Hathaway. “We have to drink wine or beer here because the water’s not clean. Take a cake instead.”
But Awful did not like the cakes either. They were very dry, with seeds in. Howard was not sure he liked them much himself. Hathaway, as he leafed through the book, pushed Awful’s mug aside in order to turn the wooden dish of cakes around. “Try the ones this side,” he murmured. “You may like them better. Here we are—Anne’s marriage, William’s descent.” The green eyes looked at Howard over the edge of the book rather apologetically. “I haven’t looked at the records of my own children before,” he said. “Ever since I found that Anne will marry a man called Sykes and move away from town, I have preferred not to know.”
“Sykes!” said Howard. He took another cake to steady himself. This cake was much nicer, with no seeds and a taste of chocolate.
“Yes,” Hathaway said rather sadly. “But whether he is your ancestor, I have no means of knowing. I am confined to this town, as you know, and my records can be of only this town. But Will’s descent may throw some light.” He ran his finger down the page. “Will stays and becomes a wealthy man. There are Moneypennys the whole way down to your day. Moneypenny girls married with the Mountjoys, the Caldwicks, a Wiggins here—most local families. Here is one in the nineteenth century marrying a Hind—”