Rose Cottage by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online

CONVERSATION. I remembered my own childish surprise that Aunt Betsy had dared to speak as she did sometimes with the Unseen Guest sitting right there and taking in every word.
    I lifted the text down.
    ‘You can’t see it,’ Gran had said. ‘It’s tiny, no more than a tin box built into the wall, and it’s papered over.’
    It wasn’t papered over. Someone had cut cleanly along the edges of the door, removing both plaster and paper, and there, stark against the small pink roses and faded grey trellis of the wallpaper, was Gran’s safe, just a small metal box cemented into the brickwork, with a keyhole showing, but no key.
    I must have stood there for some minutes, staring blankly, before it occurred to me to try to open the metal door. I did not waste time looking for the key, which, as Gran had told me after much thought, might be in any of the drawers or vases or other hiding places in the kitchen or anywhere else. I found a table knife and inserted it, with some difficulty, into the crack by the lock, and tried levering the door open. It would not budge.
    So, it was still locked. In some relief I stood back. Perhaps after all the safe hadn’t been broken into: it must be quite a few years since this paper had been pasted on, and it was possible that Gran herself had cut it back to put some later treasure into hiding, and then had forgotten about it, as she had forgotten the whereabouts of the key.
    The key. I peered into the vases on the sideboard. The first one appeared to hold nothing but two hairpins, a halfpenny, and a dead moth. The other was a quarter full of papers, and the assorted small rubbish of years. Well, later would have to do. No point in starting to worry tonight. I hung the text back in its place, and – the first really important action of every homecoming – went and put the kettle on.

6

    I finished my tea, put away the iron ration of food that I had brought to last me till morning, then, spreading a sheet of newspaper on the table, I tipped out the contents of the second vase.
    A clutter of papers, a couple of clothes pegs, a toffee rather past its best, three safety pins and a thimble, and that was all. No key.
    The sideboard drawers next, with the same result. No key.
    I looked around me. The table drawer. The big cupboard in the alcove to the right of the fireplace. Two more vases on the mantelpiece, and a hundred other places where a tiny key might lie hidden. And then there were the back premises and the bedrooms.
    It would have to wait. I had, in any case, a strong suspicion that Gran had taken the key with her to Strathbeg, and forgotten all about it. It was just the sort of thing she would have tucked away in some pocket of the enormous holdall she called her handbag, that heldeverything from her purse and essential papers like ration book and identity card, along with her pills and her spectacles and her knitting and her prayer book, and other necessities of her life.
    I picked up my own holdall and opened the door in the wall opposite the fireplace, which gave on the steep, enclosed staircase. My steps rapped, echoing, on bare boards. At the top was a small landing where Gran’s beloved clock stood; a miniature long-case, the kind they called a grandmother clock. I remembered its gentle chime punctuating the long days of childhood. I would set it going, I thought, before I went to bed.
    My room had certainly shrunk. Two steps from the door to the foot of the iron bedstead that stood against one wall. Three from the bedside to the window sunk in the alcove under the slope of the ceiling. It was hard to believe that I had shared it with my mother. It had been her room until Aunt Betsy came to stay, after which I had moved in with her, while Gran, giving Aunt Betsy the larger of the two front rooms, had taken over my little room at the back.
    I dumped the bag and went to the window. I had to stoop to see out. There was a stool in the alcove, and I knelt on that and pushed the window