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

delighted all over again and said I’d get to show them round, so I had to explain I didn’t know my way round anything except some of the servants’ part. For instance I’d never once, in all the time I’d been at Theston, gone through the front door where we went in now to pay for our tickets.
    Doing these trips we’d split up, once we were in, because Tom and Mercury wanted to go through them room by room and bit by bit, with Tom making sketches of anything that caught their eye, such as curtain fastenings or the finger-plates on the doors. I’d wander around and see what there was to see, and take a look at any books I could get close enough to, though you weren’t supposed to touch anything and most of it was the sort of stuff you can buy by the yard to look good on shelves. Then I’d find the tea room and read the couple of books I’d have brought with me, just for this. Eight or nine cups of tea I’d have drunk, very likely, by the time Tom and Mercury came to look for me.
    I didn’t suppose Theston would be much different, apart from the kitchen and maybe the library. Everything else was going to be as new to me as it would have been in any other house. I was right about that, and not just for that reason. It didn’t feel like Theston Manor at all, because it was all so light . No blackout, and the sun shining in through the great tall windows, and chandeliers blazing away, and new electrics in all the dark corners.
    I bought the guidebook and started on the grand downstairs rooms. They’d got them looking pretty well the way they would have been a hundred years ago, with a posh dinner laid out on a huge polished table in the dining room, and in what they called the saloon, which was all done up with white peacocks—Tom and Mercury were going to go mad about it, I guessed—newspapers on the tables with headlines about the siege of Mafeking, and the sort of books people might have been reading around then. They’d got Love and Mr. Lewisham by H. G. Wells—that’s the fellow who wrote The Time Machine —which was the same year as Mafeking, only this was the third edition, which wasn’t till the year after. Then there was the morning room, with tea laid out on a big brass tray, and cakes on little stands and so on, and then there was the library.
    I wasn’t expecting much. I’d only seen it those few times, remember, all under dust sheets and newspapers. They’d got it to rights now, of course, and very handsome it looked with the books up the three walls, apart from the fireplace, and the windows opposite with the tall mirrors between—they’d got the blotches out of them too, somehow. And the desk could have been the very one I’d been hiding under to read Ivanhoe when Miss van Deering had found me, but the reading lamp on it was different, an old brass one with a green shade. One side of the fireplace there was a big leather sofa, with a winged armchair to match on the other side. They could have been the same ones too, to judge by the white hummocks they’d made under their dust sheets.
    Next to the armchair was a black oak stool. I didn’t remember that at all—no reason why I should, they’d have shoved it under one of the other dust sheets—but … I don’t know. I must have stood staring at it a good couple of minutes as if I expected it to tell me something, until I shook myself out of that and took a look at the books.
    The Waverley novels were gone from stack C, of course, but it was too high up for me to make out what they’d put up there instead. But some of the others were ones I could remember helping Kitty clean, and it was nice to see them still there, though I don’t suppose anyone had actually read any of them from that day to this.
    Then I went and stared at the stool a bit more—I couldn’t help it—and pulled myself away and went to look at the