The Boggart by Susan Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

suit looked impractical next to everyone else’s heavy sweaters and jeans. They had a coal fire glowing in the big fireplace of the main room, but the castle was still cold.
    Mr. Maconochie had arrived that morning, after driving from his law office in Edinburgh. He must have left very early, for he had been telling them how beautiful the hills had looked with the sun rising over them. He had sounded as excited and surprised as a small boy let unexpectedly out of school. Emily decided that she liked him; he was the kind of person who would understand how she had felt when she looked into the eyes of the seals.
    Like the Volniks, Mr. Maconochie had never seen Castle Keep before. It was his senior partner who had been Mr. MacDevon’s lawyer and written his will, and the partner had been dead for ten years. Maggie, who enjoyed talking to people about themselves, discovered over a welcoming cup of tea that Mr. Maconochie was a peaceable bachelor in his sixties, living with a great many books and pictures and a housekeeper in his house in Edinburgh, where he ran the remaining law practice and dreamed vainly of fly-fishing and long walks over the hills. He seemed as reluctant to have them sell the castle as they were themselves.
    â€œPerhaps the National Trust for Scotland . . .” Mr. Maconochie’s voice trailed away, and he shook his head. “No, alas. They couldn’t afford to take the place without an endowment to keep it up.”
    â€œEndowment?” Emily said.
    â€œMoney,” Robert said gloomily. “The thing we’re all short of.”
    Mr. Maconochie said with regret, “I’m afraid you are right. There seems no alternative to putting it on the market.”
    Maggie put some more coal on the fire. Tommy had shown them a cellar full of coal in an obscure corner of the castle; his father had seen a barge unload the coal years before, and said that two men had been occupied for a week shoveling it into the cellar. There was still enough left for half a lifetime.
    â€œThere are some beautiful bits of furniture,” Maggie said. “Would it be all right for me to ship them home and sell them in Toronto?”
    Mr. Maconochie said formally, “It’s your furniture, Mrs. Volnik, yours and your husband’s. You may do anything with it that you wish.”
    Maggie sat down cross-legged by the fire, and pushed her long hair out of her eyes. She smiled at him. “But you think it should really stay in Scotland?”
    The lawyer laughed — though rather sadly, Emily thought. He said, “Scotland has been sending men and women to Canada for more than two hundred years — it’s no crime to send a little furniture after them.”
    There was a knock at the door, and Tommy came in. The door creaked and groaned as he pushed it open. “I was looking for Jessup,” he said.
    Emily jumped up. “He’s in the library. Can we show Mr. Maconochie the books, Mom?”
    So it was a troop of all of them that brought voices and footsteps into the dim-lit library, where Jessup was sitting beside a paraffin lamp reading a big book about Scottish railways, and filling the air incongruously with a blast of rap music from his pocket radio.
    The Boggart was pressed far back into his high refuge above the shelves, curled in a ball like an animal trying to hibernate. The beat of the music was like a physical pain that he could not escape, and he had been growing more and more resentful and angry. But there was no way out: Jessup had shut the door behind him when he came in, and a boggart may not pass through a closed door that has an iron lock in it, whether or not the key has been turned. The invasion of five more people, with their tromping feet and their cries and exclamations, was too much for the Boggart, and he uncoiled like a breaking spring and shot out of his hole — and, finding the door open, out into the corridor.
    The door facing him at the end