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

rest of the house. The other rooms were just as grand. There was a ballroom, even. But they didn’t mean anything special to me. They’d done the office, where Miss van Deering used to be during the day, to look like the kind of room you could have used to run the estate from, so there wasn’t anything there that reminded me of her.
    That was all the rooms on the ground floor, so I went on down to the kitchen. This was a good bit more different than what I remembered. For a start they’d taken out the Aga my grandmother had used to cook on, and put in a big old black range instead. And the room was fresh-painted and a lot cleaner, and they were making out someone was cooking for twenty and more in the house, and servants too, so they’d got the huge scrubbed deal table all covered with doings instead of the corner my grandmother had for just her and me and Miss van Deering. The kitchen didn’t do anything for me, much, make me feel strange or sad or bothered I mean. It was just a place I’d spent a good deal of time in when I was a kid.
    They’d turned the servants’ hall into the tea room so they’d taken out the old bookcase. I was sorry about that. I think I could have told you the story in each and every one of those books, after all those years. I wasn’t ready for tea yet, so I explored back the other way along the corridor past the kitchen and found they’d barred the old back stairs off with one of those ropes, so I went back to the kitchen and found the lady who was there to keep an eye on things and told her about me living in Theston during the war and how I’d gone up those stairs every night to go to bed and would it be all right if I did it now? She was really interested and took me along and unhooked the rope for me, so up I went, twisting to and fro on the steep wooden flights, seeing it all by daylight, which I’d never done before because of the blackout, till I got to the red baize door we’d used to get through for the last bit. It was still there.
    Now the next part is slightly complicated, but I’ll try and make it clear. The door was right bang on the stairs, where they twisted back to carry on up. You pushed it, and there was a little landing to give it room to open, and then three more stairs ahead of you and then a short corridor. If you went along there and turned right you came out onto the gallery above the main hall (which I told you about before) and if you turned left you got to some of the grand bedrooms, but my grandmother and me never used to do either of those, because the stairs to the next floor went up from an opening in the left side of this short corridor.
    There was a light on the back stairs, with its switch that side of the door, and a light on these other stairs with its switch just up round the corner. The door was on a spring, so you couldn’t leave it open, with the back stair light still on for you to see by while you went up the three steps and got the other light on before you went back and turned the first one off. You had to do it in the dark. Instead of banisters there was a bit of rope fastened to the wall by those last three steps.
    Now, if you’d asked me about all this anytime between then and now I could have told you, because I remembered it perfectly well. I could have told you too that I’d never liked doing it, and how some nights my grandmother would find me still there when she was coming up to bed after the news, with the smell of her red-currant wine on her breath, and tell me I was a stupid great baby minding a bit of darkness. I don’t know whether it was worse in summer, when there was just enough light coming from somewhere in spite of the blackout for you to make out this dark sort of cave in the left-hand wall where anything might be lurking, or in winter when it was pitch, pitch black and you simply knew it was there. I don’t think I was more than ordinarily afraid of