Emily Feather and the Enchanted Door (2 page)

Emily and her best friend Rachel wandered home from school in the sun. Emily's house wasn't far, and Rachel and her mum only lived in the next road. Now they were in Year Five, they were allowed to walk by themselves, although of course they had to bring Robin too. He was ahead of them somewhere, so he could jump out and roar. He was having that sort of a day. Depending on how slowly they walked, they sometimes met Lark and Lory on the way back, as the secondary school was closer to home than Emily and Robin's school.

“I'm glad you're coming back to ours for a bit,” Emily said happily. “It seems like we haven't hung around together properly for ages.”

Rachel sighed. “I know. I can't believe I had to spend the whole weekend doing dance exams. My hair still aches, you know. It's been up in a bun for
days
.”

“Awww. It's OK. We've got cake, that'll help. I made flapjacks yesterday. I warn you, though, the house is a tip. Mum and Dad were both working all weekend and no one did any tidying up. Me and Lark and Lory and Robin watched two DVDs last night, and I don't think any of us cleared up the popcorn Robin tipped all over the floor. Dad might have got rid of it, if he's finished the bit of book he was stuck on.”

“You're so lucky,” Rachel sighed, and Emily looked round at her in surprise. Rachel's mum and dad were divorced, and she was their only child. Rachel had a gorgeous, huge bedroom at her mum's flat, and her dad was always taking her away with him on work trips to cool places. Her mum and dad gave her pretty much anything she asked for. Just occasionally, Emily thought how nice it would be to have her parents all to herself, like Rachel did. Not all that often though. She loved her mad, loud sisters, and Robin made her laugh.

“You are! I'd love to have sisters like Lark and Lory to watch films with.” Rachel leaned close and whispered, “I wouldn't even mind Robin sometimes.” She laughed at Emily's disbelieving face. “At least there'd be someone else around! I just always end up watching TV on my own at home. Mum works so much.”

“I suppose,” Emily said doubtfully. She didn't want to agree too hard, in case she upset Rachel. She hadn't thought about it before, but even though Rachel's bedroom was gorgeous, she'd hate being mostly alone in that perfect, tidy flat. (Rachel's mum had a cleaner in twice a week, and she even tidied Rachel's room for her.) It was lovely there, but when Emily had sleepovers with Rachel, she worried about making a mess – sweet wrappers looked a lot worse on Rachel's immaculate cream carpet than they did on her own creaky wooden bedroom floor. She put one arm round Rachel's shoulders. “At least you don't have big sisters teasing you all the time. And Robin pretended to drop a spider on me at the weekend. I was really cross with him.”

“Uuugh…” Rachel shuddered. Then she said suddenly, “Is there a sort of bird called an Emily?”

Emily stared at her – it was such a weird question, totally out of the blue. “No … I don't think so. Why?”

“Well, because I wondered if you all had bird names. Lark and Robin are definitely birds, and I'm pretty sure Lory is too. An exotic one. A bit like a parrot. My granddad used to have one, I think.”

“Oh…” Emily frowned. It was an odd thought. “I don't think Emily means all that much. I asked Mum once and she said it was just a Latin name.”

“Huh.” Rachel sighed. “That's good, though. If your name means something, you have to live up to it, don't you? Do you know what Rachel means?”

Emily shook her head. “Someone in the Bible?”

“Sheep. Honestly, I'm named after a sheep.”

“It doesn't mean that,” Emily sniggered.

“It does, I looked it up.” Rachel shook her head disgustedly. “Actually, I don't think my mum knew that, she just called me it after my grandma, but I think she should have made an effort, don't you? And don't tell anyone!”

Emily shook her head, still giggling. “I promise.”

“Are you two coming?” Robin stomped up to them, looking impatient. “I can't cross the road without you, remember? I want to get home.”

Emily looked at Rachel and raised her eyebrows, and Rachel shrugged.

“Mmm. OK. Maybe I'm only jealous of your sisters.”

 

After the things she and Rachel had talked about on the way home, Emily looked carefully at her house as they went through the front gate. She didn't usually; it was just her house, the house on the corner. Messy, a little bit shabby, and surrounded by garden. She was used to it.

The front gate creaked as they pushed it open, she noticed. Did it always? It was a nice noise, sort of friendly. The front garden was tiny, more like a bit of the big back garden that had squeezed round to the front to cover up the wheelie bins. The house itself was tall and thin – even taller because of the odd little turret that jutted out of the attic in one corner, like someone had borrowed a bit of a castle and randomly stuck it on to an oldish but otherwise normal-looking house.

Everyone always assumed that the attic was Emily's dad's writing room, because of the turret – the little pointy witch's hat of a tower looked exactly right for her dad's sort of books. They were all about warriors and dragons and orcs and that sort of thing. But actually, it was Emily's room, and there was a window seat running round the inside of the turret that Emily kept all her bears on. Which wasn't quite so dramatic.

The green front door had a brass mermaid door knocker that sent a hollow thumping through the house when anyone banged it. The mermaid generally looked bad-tempered, Emily thought, but then people hit her against the door all the time, so it was only to be expected.

The stained-glass panels sent jewel-coloured streaks up and down the walls of the hallway as Robin flung the door open. He was gone, dropping his bag and kicking off his shoes before he made for the kitchen. Emily and Rachel followed him.

“Are there any of those flapjacks you made yesterday left?” Robin asked hopefully, looking round the kitchen and sniffing like a questing hound.

Emily pulled the tin out of one of the cupboards and handed it to him. “Leave some for us,” she said quickly, as he started to pile flapjacks on to one hand.

“All right! They're only little,” Robin protested. “I'm really hungry. School lunch was pasta with glue, again. I just ate the garlic bread.”

There were so few flapjacks left after he'd raided them that Emily and Rachel decided it was simpler just to take the rest of the tin upstairs, with a couple of bananas to go with them.

The stairs were probably the main difference from Rachel's flat, Emily thought to herself as they went up to her room. She couldn't imagine living all on one floor. Stairs were nice. They were good for sulking on when Robin was being a pain, and they were a very useful place to leave things that you needed to put away and just hadn't quite got round to taking up to your room yet. Plus they were a good place for all the random paintings and odd old mirrors that her parents had collected over the years.

A lot of the paintings were ancient ones that Mum said had come from her parents' house. They were so dark, Emily could hardly see what was in most of them – just a shadowy figure here and there, or a pale, ghostly face shining out of the dirt and thick, treacly varnish. There were framed school photos dotted in and out of them, and pictures that Lark and Lory and Emily and Robin had drawn over the years, but most of the paintings and mirrors had heavy wooden frames, carved with curls and scrolls, that were far more interesting than the murky images they held.

Emily's favourite was an enormous mirror that stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, just before the little, rickety flight that led up to her room, which had been the attic once.

The mirror was on the wall between Lark's room and Lory's, and it looked ancient. It had a gold frame, like a garland of flowers twirled around the glass, and so carefully carved that you could see the stalks of all the flowers, and catch glimpses of tiny birds and mice lurking behind them. Little touches of faded paint brightened the petals and the birds' feathers, and Emily loved it. It was a flattering mirror, too. Something about the light pouring in from the big window on the landing made the reflections glow with a softness that was like candlelight – like the light that the mirror had been made for. There were still candle holders nestled in the woodwork of the frame, with old stubs of candles in them. They made Emily feel that she ought to have her hair arranged in bunches of ringlets and wear long dresses with frilly petticoats.

Emily peered into the mirror as she and Rachel went past, scrunching up her wavy hair into a sort of topknot and expecting to see a Victorian version of herself staring back at her. Instead, she only saw herself, pink from sitting in the sun at lunchtime, her ponytail gone crooked. Emily made a face at herself as she tried to pull her ponytail straight.

Emily glanced round at Lark's door, and Lory's on the other side of the mirror. They reminded her that she and Rachel had better hurry up. Her sisters would be back soon, and they would be after a sugar boost too. Lark's door looked a soft sage green today – it was a trick of the light on the landing; both her sisters' rooms had doors that seemed to change colour. Lark's could be anything from bright emerald to grey, and Lory's went from creamy yellow to scarlet depending on which way you looked at it, and how hot a day it was. Today it was a burning sunset orange.

Robin's door was always the same sky blue, but it moved. It didn't really, of course; Emily knew that. It just seemed to, because of the shadows. She'd seen his door in between Lark's room and Lory's once, and her favourite mirror had been inside his room, hanging over his bed. That had been in the middle of the night, though, when she'd come down to go to the loo, so she'd probably been dreaming.

But it was that sort of house. Emily was used to it, but it did surprise people sometimes. Rachel was standing on the landing looking confused right now.

Emily pushed her gently in the direction of the little flight of stairs that led up to her attic bedroom. “Come on, I'm starving…”

Rachel blinked at her gratefully, and they hurried up the stairs together. Emily could hear thumping steps behind them, and she glanced back down to see Gruff following her, his huge grey wiry muzzle twitching hopefully. “Oh, all right. You can have a bit. But just a little bit. I'm hungry too, and I made them!”

Emily's door never seemed to change colour. It was purple, and it was always exactly where she wanted it to be. She adored her bedroom. She knew that when she was little, she'd had a tiny little bedroom that opened off her parents' room, on the floor below Lark and Lory. But somehow she couldn't remember sleeping anywhere else. It wasn't a massive bedroom – but it was Emily's, and no one else's. In a big family (especially a big family with two bossy older sisters and a little brother who could charm the birds out of the trees if he could be bothered to make the effort), that was something special. Her bed was tucked into the corner behind the door, and then there was room for a chest of drawers and not a lot else in the main part of the room – but there was the turret too. It bulged out of the end of the room, round, and not all that big. Dusty beams held up the pointy roof part, and Emily hung things off them sometimes – little strings of bells, and sparkly baubles and snowflakes at Christmas.

It was the windows that made it special, though. The glass in them was wavy – there was no other way to describe it. It was old, old glass, her dad had told her. Probably the original glass from when the house was built, nearly two hundred years before. It was greenish, and thick, and it rattled in the wind and let the cold draughts in, but Emily didn't mind. When she sat at her table in the turret and stared out of those windows, the glass made it look as though she was gazing at forests, and palaces with turrets like hers – not the houses on the other side of the street. Emily sat on the cushioned bench around the windows watching, and dreamed, or sometimes she drew, stretching pieces of paper out across her table and trying to catch the shadowy fairy-tale places that she saw sideways through the glass. Her dad had framed one of the drawings, and he kept it on the wall in his tiny study. Emily's mum said she was too imaginative, which Emily thought was very unfair, because obviously Emily's drawing had come from her; she drew all the time. But she'd only said it after Emily's teacher had sent home a note about unsatisfactory homework. Her mum and dad had been quite upset. They weren't used to notes from school. Lark and Lory and Robin were all brilliantly clever. Emily wasn't stupid, but she was a lot better at cooking and drawing than she was at things like maths.

Now if the homework was something that really needed concentrating on, Emily did it on the other side of the table, sitting on the bench seat and looking away from the windows. It didn't work very well, though. She could still see the glass out of the corners of her eyes, and she could feel the stories going on behind her.