The Lion Tamer’s Daughter by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online

Mercury
    Now, you’ll have gathered I’m not the sort to have much by way of friends, but the last few years I seem to have taken up with a couple of young men called Tom and Mercury. (Yes, Mercury. His real name’s Mike, but only Tom’s allowed to call him that.) They drop in and check that I’m all right, and I’m glad they’re around. I’d never have picked them for friends, mind you, not to look at. Tom’s all right, apart from doing his hair in a pigtail with a fancy ribbon. He wears a tie, and suspenders to keep his trousers up, which even I’ve stopped doing. But Mercury’s wild—leathers, and not just black biker leathers, either—green and silver and purple, and draped with chains. And he wears a pearl in his nose and earrings down to his shoulders. But he’s a sweet, gentle person, and I don’t know anyone I’d sooner turn to if I was in trouble.
    By way of a living they do up rooms for rich people. It’s Tom who designs the rooms, while Mercury looks after the business, but they let the rich people think it’s the other way round, so they feel they’re getting something wild and interesting, like Mercury. Sometimes, if it’s a fine day, they go off and look at old houses that are open to the public, see if they can pick up any ideas for their business, and like as not they’ll drop by my shop and ask me if I want to come along too, which mostly I do. I shut up shop and we all three get into the front seat of Tom’s old Mercedes and off we go, with me in the middle between them. We’ll have the roof down and the heater turned right up and the stereo playing the sort of pop you heard when I was as young as them. It makes a change, so it’s probably good for me, and it’s very kind of them to think of it.
    They make a game of it, not telling me where we’re going, teasing me, but there’s no malice in it. I get about England quite a bit, going to book sales, but with my eyes I’ve never learned to drive, so I use trains and taxis mostly, which means I don’t recognize roads for the most part. It was like that the day I’m going to tell you about. We’d left London as if we’d been going to Oxford, I noticed, but after that Mercury started telling me about some crazy rich people they’d been doing a job for, and next time I bothered to look we could have been anywhere in England, almost. I didn’t mind. Then, an hour or so later it must have been, we were all three singing along with a bit of music, driving on a middling kind of road up a long hill with a wood on one side and fields and a couple of cottages on the other, and I knew exactly where I was. It was like when you’ve napped off in your chair and you didn’t mean to, and suddenly you jolt out of your dream and find where you are. Day after day, six days a week, for three years and over, I’d biked up this road on my way back from Mr. Glister’s.
    I gave myself a couple of moments to recover and then, teasing them back for once, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, I said, “I see we’re going to Theston Manor. I didn’t know it was open.”
    I can’t ever tell what’s going to amuse them. Usually it’s something I don’t see what’s funny about at all, but this time they laughed like kids, they were that delighted. And then we were turning in at the drive and apart from the National Trust notice boards it was just the same, with its lodges either side looking as if somebody hadn’t made up his mind whether he wanted pint-sized castles or public toilets. Tom and Mercury thought I must have read the name off one of the brown road signs you get around show places, and I’d been holding out on them to spring it on them when I did—no, I don’t know why they thought that was funny—but when I told them I’d lived here most of the war they were