London Pride Read Free Page B

because nobody had ever queried her mother when she said such a thing. ‘Why don’t you take Stinko?’ she suggested. ‘He’d like it.’
    â€˜Give over!’ Sam mocked. ‘He’ll be in bed, same as all the others. We’ll be the only ones up that time a’ night. Are you game?’
    They had argued her into a corner. What could she say? She blinked at them in the strong sunlight. ‘I don’t think I want to.’
    Her answer aggravated them. That wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Nor what they expected, because she was renowned for being a sport and good for a dare. Look at the way she’d balanced along the wall that time. Oh no! She was to come with them, that’s what. It wouldn’t be half so much fun without a girl to frighten. They turned their combined powers upon her at once.
    â€˜What sort of answer d’you call that?’ Sam said scornfully.
    â€˜She’s scared,’ Fred said, thrusting his bullet head at her. ‘She’s nothing but an old scaredy-cat.’
    She defended herself at once. ‘No I ain’t.’
    â€˜You are!’
    â€˜I ain’t!’
    â€˜If you don’t come with us,’ Sam said, ‘you’re a scaredy-cat. Proven.’
    Faced with such crushing logic there was nothing she could do but agree to join them. She couldn’t admit to being a coward, and specially not today. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Only …’
    But they’d taken her agreement and were already walking away with it.
    â€˜Ten o’clock sharp,’ Fred called back to her. ‘By the Bloody Tower.’
    She stood where she was in the sunlight, turning the pebble round and round in her fingers, calm and still even though her heart was throbbing with alarm at what she’d agreed to do. A ghost hunt. She
couldn’t
go on a ghost hunt. What if they actually saw one? It made her blood run cold even to think of it. Imagine being touched by a ghost. And what if it had no head? She’d heard enough about them to know that lots of ghosts were people who’d been beheaded. Imagine seeing a ghost walking towards you, ready to touch you, and
with no head
. Oh, she
couldn’t
go. She just couldn’t. But how was she going to get out of it, now she’d given her word?
    â€˜What did they want?’ Megan said, shadowing up beside her.
    â€˜Nothing much,’ Peggy said. But then as Megan continued to look curious and she felt she had to offer some sort of explanation, she added, ‘Just if I was staying up for the Keys.’
    â€˜Did you tell ’em you was?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Peggy said, thinking, if only I hadn’t.
    â€˜Lucky you!’ Megan said with some envy. ‘I wish it was me.’
    â€˜Your go,’ Peggy said, handing her the pebble. Their conversation was making her feel uncomfortable, keeping thoughts of the ghost hunt prickling in her mind when she would rather have been cheering herself up by thinking about something else. As Megan went hopping through the squares with her skirts and apron swinging, she looked back across the cobbles at the Green, where two ravens were strutting and a Yeoman Warder was lecturing a party of elderly ladies.
    The White Tower rose confidently before her on its high green mound, its rough stonework as yellow as sand and the dressed stone at every corner a quite dazzling white in the sunshine, battlemented, solid and dependable. It made her think of her father. I’ll tell Dad, she thought. I’ll tell Dad at teatime. I’ll drop a sort of hint and then he’llsay I mustn’t go. That was the answer to the Bully boys.
    But it was easier planned than done.
    For a start there was a ritual to a birthday tea that couldn’t be interrupted, and certainly not by stories about a ghost hunt. Mum’s meat pie had to be properly admired before it was eaten with the customary green salad and chips and