Back to Blackbrick by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald Read Free Book Online

around. There were millions of things I wanted to tell him—important advice that would make a massive difference to us all, but I couldn’t really think of a way of saying it without sounding like even more of a weirdo than he’d already taken me for. I told him I was sorry for trespassing and that I hadn’t meant to cause any trouble. He said it was nice to meet me, and I said, “Yeah, right, thanks.”
    I started walking toward the gates. But I could feel my heart getting cold because I knew the bizarre chance that I was walking away from. So I stopped walking and I turned. My young granddad was still looking at me.
    â€œListen, maybe I could stay for a little while,” I suggested. “I mean, only for a few days. And maybe we could hang out.”
    He asked me what “hang out” meant, and I told him it meant spending time together, talking and suchlike. And for a while he didn’t say anything, and I thought my chance was going to disappear, so then I did my best to think on my feet.
    I said, “Is there anything that I could help you with, would you say?” It turns out that that’s quite a good question to ask someone who doesn’t trust you yet.
    â€œWell, you know, in actual fact, now that you say it . . . yes. Yes, there is.”
    We were both shivering by then because a wind hadstarted to blow, and it was making the trees shudder, and it was getting harder to hear each other.
    â€œCome with me,” he said.
    I followed him, and his feet were solid and strong and we ran up the driveway, and again I could hear the crunch of his footsteps. They sounded like the beating of someone’s heart.

Chapter 7
    IT’S NOT as though I’d forgotten about my old grandparents and Uncle Ted, and it’s not like I wasn’t worried about how mental they were definitely going to go when they got up the next morning and nobody could find me. Fifteen minutes was well up. The enchanted taxi guy of delight with the brilliant people skills had probably gone ages ago anyway, with the money in his pocket. There was a while there when I thought I probably should’ve run back to tell him I’d gotten a bit delayed. But when you find yourself seventy years or so out of your normal time zone, you’re not necessarily thinking too straight.
    Blackbrick Abbey was like a house, only much, much bigger. It sat at the end of the driveway, looking like it was more or less growing out of the ground. A shiny black door twinkled in a huge stone doorway, and there were steps leading up to it that glinted and flashed. My young granddad walked past the steps and tiptoed along a path that twisted its way around to the back. He kept looking over his shoulder, checking that I was still there. We crept through a small archway, shady and gray. Leaning from the wall, a weak flickering lamp lit the way.
    â€œStay close, move quickly, be quiet.”
    I did stay very close and I did move quickly and I was very quiet. We went in through another door. This one was squeaky and warped. And once we were in, everything smelled of smoke and leather. I followed him down all these ramshackle corridors.
    We walked and walked for ages, and it got warmer the whole time until we were in this big cave of a kitchen. There was a massive table in the middle that at least twenty people could have sat around. There were big jars on counters in rows with labels on them saying FLOUR and SUGAR and OATS and GOOSEBERRY PRESERVES and stuff like that. Tons of wooden spoons stuck out of blue-and-white stripy pots, huge saucepans hung from pegs on the wall, and a load of sacks, full of potatoes, were lined up in one corner on the black stony floor.
    He dragged a couple of chairs beside a gigantic hot stove. He leaned down to a wide bucket and he picked up rocks of coal, and then with an iron bar he lifted a round disc on top of the stove and an orange glow shone out of the hole, and he threw the