Kingsholt Read Free Page B

is our Tammy.’
    Dark and dusty, thought Chloe as she stepped inside the cottage. An old-fashioned iron stove stood inside the wide chimney place. It had two doors side by side, one for the oven, the other for the fire. Wood ash filtered down onto the stone floorand over the rag rug that spread, discoloured and dull, before the hearth. Tammy knelt down, opened the door of the oven and poked at the jacket potatoes with a sharp knife.
    She’ll never be my friend, thought Chloe.
    Nimbus took off his boots and stretched out on a ragged couch that was covered with a dirty tartan rug. ‘Got some for
her
then?’
    ‘Plenty of jackets,’ said Tammy. ‘They’re good and ready.’ She grinned and waved the knife at Chloe. ‘We don’t use these things, see? We use these.’ She held up her small red-nailed hands.
    ‘Fingers and newspaper,’ said Nimbus. ‘That’s when you really taste the food. Like taters?’
    Chloe nodded.
    ‘Gina and the baby won’t be back from the market yet. We might as well begin.’
    Tammy took hold of a dirty cloth and pulled an iron tray out of the small oven. They all sat on the floor and held the potatoes in napkins of newspaper. It’s a
truthful
way of life, thought Chloe, not bothering about knives and forks. No thick butter or creamy milk, just potatoes and a glass of water.
    They ate in silence, until Nimbus wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spoke in a slow voice. ‘So you’ve inherited Kingsholt, is that right?’
    ‘My Dad has. I don’t want it, I never did. It’s big and ugly.’
    Nimbus crashed his free fist onto the ground. ‘It’s a palace,’ he said fiercely, ‘and by any rights it should be ours. Your Uncle George killed our Rosie and left us nothing. We have nothing. NOTHING.
I
can’t work now I’m not in the circus.’
    Chloe had never seen his eyes flash like that, black, angry eyes.
    ‘He used to be a hypnotist and a trapeze artiste,’ said Tammy, nodding at her father. ‘That was before he hurt his foot.’ She looked up proudly. ‘I’ve seen him walk the sky. Until he fell.’
    Chloe whistled. It was all Dad could do to crawl into the car.She peered down at Nimbus’s feet, then at one of the big dusty boots lined with newspaper.
    ‘I was lucky not to be dead,’ he said. Then, after a while, ‘Enjoying it?’
    Chloe nodded and wiped her mouth with her hand as he had done.
    Nimbus finished eating, screwed up the newspaper into a ball and threw it into the stove. A fierce orange flame shot up.
    ‘Tammy would like you around, wouldn’t you, Tammy? Reading or no reading.’
    ‘Instead of Rosie?’ asked Tammy, both eyes blank.
    Nimbus ignored her and smiled at Chloe. ‘When you come up here I’ll teach you —’ He broke off and brought more logs for the fire.
    ‘We keep it going all the year round,’ he said, shoving on another log and carelessly raking the ash, ‘no matter how hot it be. This is a cold cottage at the best of times.’ He looked intently at Chloe. ‘It’s in the stones, my dear, and in the history.’
    ‘How do you mean?’ said Chloe.

Chapter Four
    It was two weeks later when Nimbus told Chloe all about the cottage. She had often met him in the valley but had never gone back to the pest house on the hill. There was something about it that made her afraid.
    ‘Come on up,’ said Nimbus on a day when she was feeling very isolated. ‘Tammy’s wondering why she never sees you. She gets out of sorts, does our Tammy, without her sister or her mother.’ Loneliness was something Chloe understood, so this time she went up to the cottage and Nimbus took her inside. No one else was in the room.
    ‘It’s called the pest house,’ he said, ‘and that’s what it was.’ He pointed to the rough wall on the right of the window. ‘In the very old part over there – that’s where them with the plague were left to die.’
    Chloe looked at the dark corner of the room. Shadows and cobwebs flapped from the ceiling, and on the