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“You must know that it is expressly forbidden for anyone, I mean anyone, to come in or go out through the south gates.”

“Yes I do, but—”

“And you stand here with the audacity to tell me that you intend to defy that regulation?”

“You don't understand,” I said desperately, and he agreed. I rubbed the key in my hand as if it was a magic thing that could rescue me from this uncomfortable situation. But that only made things worse, because George Corpormore suddenly fixed his little eyes on the key, and his nostrils flared with a fresh rage.

“Give. Me. That. Key. That's not your key. Tell me where you got it.”

I knew then that no matter what I said, he wasn't going to believe me.

You can't see power, and you can't touch it, but it is everywhere. And the person who happens to have most of it is usually the one who thinks he's entitled to decide what happens next. His sharp hands poked at my shoulders, and he jostled me against the stable wall, shouting into my face. Bits of spit landed on my eyelids and my forehead, which was pretty disgusting. I closed my fist around the key and held it as high in the air as I could, and Corporamore kept reaching up, roughly trying to wrestle it away from me. I could hear Ross and Somerville going mental, fretting and snorting, and I knew from the sound of them that they were on my side.

“Listen to me,” he grunted, as if there were some other option available to me at the time. “You weasel.”

If the whole situation hadn't been so tense, I might have started to laugh.

“Relax,” I said to him.

“I have no intention of relaxing until you give me back the thing that belongs to me.”

And I was pinned up against the wall and his nose was approximately one millimeter from my face.

“Okay,” I said. “Let go of me, will you, and I'll give it back to you. I should have given it to you ages ago, because, well, because it's yours.”

He loosened his grip and then he let go completely, and I knew I was going to have to stay pretty sharp. I was shivering and my heart was hammering away like a million drums, and I could feel pints of blood galloping around in my head. But the whole time I was doing my best to be calm on the outside. I held the key out to him, and he was all confident and smug.

The sun was starting to rise, and under it the key twinkled and little bits of light shot out. And he was grinning for a second as he reached over to take it from me. I barely had time to see that smile disappear from his spiky face, because right then is when I ducked. I closed my fist tight again and I slipped past him and darted through the arch, a bit like a weasel, actually.

I ripped past the Abbey and down by the black pine trees. I scrambled along the gravel, falling to my knees a couple of times but getting up again and keeping going. The thuds of footsteps were very close behind, and someone was shouting, “Stop, Cosmo, stop.” It really was Kevin this time, and because of that I did stop.

“Where were you, Kev?” I panted. “You were supposed to meet me at the stables. Why didn't you come?” A blast of unexpected wind hit my face like a slap. I could see Corporamore's shadow catching up, and there was no more time. I got up and I ran again. I ran for my life.

Running fast isn't only a sign of fear. It's also a sign of hope, which is the thing that keeps you going. I was running for my granddad and his dignity, and for the choices that I thought he still had. And for a few seconds there, I thought I was going to make it.

But then Kevin's arms clutched around my knees. He pulled me to the ground, and all the energy escaped from my body.

“Let me go! What the . . .?”

“Cosmo, give up. You can't keep running. You've got to give him the key. You don't know what he's like. He'll pursue you forever.” He went on a bit more about how this was in my best interests and how he was saving me from myself.

Corporamore was standing behind us with his hands on his hips, his mouth a tiny angry straight white line.

“Honestly, trust me, Cosmo,” Kevin whispered. “It'll be better if you give it to him now. It'll save you a hell of a fight.”

I lay on the cold gravel, and Corporamore strode over. “Thank you, Kevin, my boy. Glad you had the sense to put a stop to this fellow's gallop.”

Corporamore pincered open my fist with his spiky hands
and plucked out the key, the way someone might pull a twisted nail from the shoe of a horse.

“I'll take that, you gurrier,” he grunted.

My self-respect had disappeared by then, and quietly I started to beg. “Please, Lord Corporamore. Please. You've got to let me have it back.”

“Not on your Nellie,” he said, which was one of the things people used to say in those days. He smiled, threw the key up into the air, and caught it. And still I tried to change his mind. “I have to see my granddad again. I need that key. It's the only way I know to get back. I'm sorry. Please. Please . . . give it back to me.”

I was pretty ashamed of the way I was acting, but I didn't know what else to do. I was embarrassed that Kevin was watching me lose all my dignity like that.

Corporamore looked at Kevin and pointed at me. “If there's one more incident involving this boy, so help me God, I'll . . . I'll . . .” He started walking back to the Abbey so that we couldn't hear what horrible thing God would help him to do if I broke the Abbey's precious rules again.

I don't know how much time went by after that, but suddenly Mrs. Kelly was there, hurrying over to the scene of my pathetic collapse, saying, “Oh, for pity's sake!”

She told us how Lord Corporamore had just been in the kitchen, ranting and calling me a young guttersnipe, talking about how I had the cheek to sneak around with keys that didn't belong to me and the nerve to do things that were
forbidden. But she wasn't angry with me. Somehow I could hear in the tone of her voice that she was on my side, which felt like a tiny consolation prize in the middle of the exit strategy that had gone so wrong.

“This lad is distraught,” Mrs. Kelly said to Kevin as if I weren't there at all. “This lad needs compassion and assistance. A fellow in his condition must not be hunted down like an animal just because he has a blessed key.”

Kevin coaxed me into a standing position. “I'll never get back. I'll never get back now,” I said under my breath. “There's someone who needs me, and I don't know if I'll ever see him again.”

“There, there,” said Mrs. Kelly. “Try not to be upsetting yourself.” She patted me lightly on the hand, and even though that's a pretty useless thing to do, still it felt a bit nice.

“There's no going back, Cosmo. I know it's hard, but that's the way it is,” Kevin said.

And Mrs. Kelly added, “You know, when you have a bit of time to think about it properly, it's just as well. Now then, I put the kettle on a little while ago, and there are some scones in the oven. I'd be very glad if you joined me for some breakfast.”

I liked the sound of scones straight from the oven. And all of us reckoned we could definitely do with a cup of tea.

I went down to the horses again that night, and I think they were very glad to see I hadn't gone. I tried singing the song
that my mum used to sing to me, the one that I used to whisper to John, but my voice kept cracking at the edges, so I stopped. I told them that nothing was any good, that I was stuck, but obviously they couldn't really help me. Because they were, you know, horses.

I'm sure there are people who would say I should have fought harder. Maybe I should have been a bit cleverer, a bit braver. Perhaps I should have been raging with Kevin for being the one who stopped me, but it's hard to be raging with someone who thinks he's doing his best for you, even if he has made a massive mistake. Maybe I should have stood up to George Corporamore. I sometimes think I should have tried to make things clearer to everyone. But if you weren't there at the time, it's difficult to explain.

I thought about Kevin's and Mrs. Kelly's advice about putting upsetting thoughts right out of my head and getting on with it—it seemed to be a popular theory in those days. And as a matter of fact, sometimes it's quite good advice to take.

Chapter 16

SO THAT'S more or less how I ended up staying at Blackbrick. It might be kind of hard to believe, but eventually I forgot about the present, which was pretty disloyal of me really, but partly, to be perfectly honest about it, it was also kind of great.

The trees on the driveway were as green and black and thick as ever, but the ones by the stables became bare branches as winter crept up on Blackbrick Abbey, making everything colder than the stones.

Mrs. Kelly always had a massive list of jobs for us to do, mainly cleaning and polishing. They were the kinds of jobs that took ages because of all the big rooms with millions of chairs and tables, cabinets and ornaments, candleholders and picture frames and things like that, all of which were sitting targets for the dust that it was our job to get rid of.

It's good to have a lot of stuff to do, though—that's one of the things I learned. It keeps your mind focused, and it makes it a good bit easier to sleep at night. But as busy as we were all morning with our cleaning chores, and all evening helping in the kitchen with dinner—something great
happened most afternoons at Blackbrick. And what happened was that a delicious kind of silence would settle on the house and the whole place seemed to swell with strange feelings of freedom and possibility. The three o'clock bell would chime in the hallway and Mrs. Kelly would head off with a steaming teapot to her quarters, and nobody would see her again until she bustled into the kitchen much later to get started on dinner.

It's those afternoons and how they belonged to us that I remember best. The three of us got used to galloping around the hidden corners of Blackbrick. Somerville and Ross got faster and fitter, and they were proud and strong and fun to hang out with.

I can sometimes smell the Blackbrick wind in my face still, and hear Kevin's laugh and see Maggie's very pale cheeks turning red in the cold air. We never cared if it rained, even though Maggie's hair would stick to her face and our noses would go numb, and when we were finished, we'd have to rub down the horses with dry rags, and then run back into the house shivering and dripping and cursing the cold. There were brilliant bright days too, when the sun was a giant splash of gladness, showing off the cold crisp sky, clear and perfect. Maggie and Kevin were brave, and they were young. If you'd seen them the way they used to be, you could never imagine either of them ever being delicate or afraid or old or forgetful or anything like that.

We developed this special way of whispering into the
horses' ears, which made them run really, really fast. And when they did that, we sometimes felt we were going to tumble off their backs, possibly killing ourselves. But we never did fall, and gradually we realized that we never would.

After a while hanging out with Kevin and Maggie became an ordinary, everyday kind of a thing to do.