Tanglewreck (3 page)

‘When are we coming back?’ asked Silver. She loved the house and she hated the thought of leaving it. The house was her friend. The house felt alive. Since her parents had disappeared, it was the house that had looked after her, not Mrs Rokabye.

‘Such an ungrateful girl!’ said Mrs Rokabye, keeping her voice light, her fists clenched with fury under the table. ‘Here I am, doing my best to win influence with important people
like Mr Darkwater, just so that you can have a holiday like other children, and do you say thank you? Not you! You ask when you are coming home.’

‘Well, I need to know so that I can pack my suitcase,’ said Silver evenly. She knew better than to fight Mrs Rokabye.

‘Ah, well, indeed,’ said Mrs Rokabye, mollified. ‘Then take whatever you like, but only a small bag.’

‘How many pairs of knickers?’

‘Two,’ said Mrs Rokabye.

By now, Mrs Rokabye had been pleasant for a whole hour, and she had smiled through most of that hour, and she had spent the morning cooking instead of lying in bed reading Murder Mysteries, and she had given away some of her chocolate, and the whole business had exhausted her. She decided to go and lie down and take a pill. She told Silver to wash the dishes, and then she disappeared up the stairs.

As soon as she had left the room, Silver ran over to the Chocolate Cabinet because Mrs Rokabye had left the padlock off.

‘1603,’ said Silver, reading the lined-up numbers. ‘Now I can get in here whenever I like.’

She grabbed a couple of extra chocolate bars, and hid them in her jeans. Then, hearing Mrs Rokabye returning, she turned away and ran to the sink.

Mrs Rokabye swept into the kitchen like a hailstorm and went straight to the Chocolate Cabinet and locked it.

‘Do your packing in good time tonight,’ she said. ‘I will
leave you ham sandwiches and milk for supper, and I want you in the hall, washed and dressed by seven o’clock tomorrow morning. A taxi will take us to the station. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Mrs Rokabye,’ said Silver, without turning round.

That afternoon Silver went to talk to the house.

The house was very quiet but she knew it was listening to her. She often talked to the house, but she preferred to do it in her special place. It was a room where nobody had ever been but her.

It was triangular room with triangular windows on three sides, and a strange old window in the sloping roof. Silver called it the Sky Window, because all you could see through it were the clouds floating by.

When Silver sat in the special room, she felt like a bee in a hive.

She sat in it today, cross-legged, making a triangle of her body, and closing her eyes so that she could listen to the house. It was here that she knew the house was alive, and it was here that the house spoke to her – not with words, but she understood what it was saying.

‘What will happen to me in London?’ she said.

For a minute the house was silent, then she saw a red light flooding the window in front of her, and colouring the thick wide floorboards red, and her legs and hands red, and the front of her sweatshirt, right up to her neck, but not her face.

‘Danger,’ the house was saying. ‘Danger.’

‘Then I won’t go,’ said Silver. ‘I’ll hide in you and she’ll never find us again.’

The house said nothing.

‘Do I have to go?’ said Silver, who knew the answer in the pit of her stomach.

‘Yes,’ said the house.

And for the first time in her life Silver realised that sometimes you have to do something difficult and dangerous, something you don’t want to do at all, and that you have to do it because something more important depends on you.

‘Will I find the Timekeeper?’ she said, but the house didn’t answer.

‘Will I come back here one day?’

‘Yes,’ said the house, ‘one day.’

Silver sat on the floor as the long shadows of the afternoon filled the room.

What did she know? She knew that something had happened to her parents. She knew that Mrs Rokabye and Abel Darkwater were in league against her, and against Tanglewreck too, and there was the thing called the Timekeeper, but she didn’t know exactly what it was, or why a watch could be so important.

She knew that in the world beyond the house very strange things were happening to Time. She took all her knows and her don’t knows and asked the house what she should do.

And then, without waiting for an answer, she suddenly stood up, because the house had already given her its answer.

And that is how Silver and Mrs Rokabye caught the 8:05 from Manchester Piccadilly to London King’s Cross, leaving the great house watching behind its hedges of beech and yew.

Mrs Rokabye was in high spirits on the train, even though she had left Bigamist behind.

At the station she ignored all the newspapers with their headlines about Time Traps and Time Tornadoes and the future of the world. Instead, she bought all the glossy magazines about the lives of film stars and celebrities. Like most people she longed to be a film star herself, though it was difficult to imagine what parts she could play, except for nasty aunts with odious pets.

She sat with a bucket of sweets on her bony knees, and she gave Silver four caramels, then she remembered she was a nice kind lady that day, and fished out another eight of the hard centres she didn’t like.

‘What a blessing to be away from that awful house!’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘I sometimes think it is listening to me, ha ha ha.’

‘It is listening to you,’ said Silver. ‘Tanglewreck is alive.’

‘Children are the most ridiculous things ever invented,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘Houses do not have ears.’

‘My father said that Tanglewreck has listened to everything for four hundred years, and that the house never forgets. Even if you talk to yourself the house can hear you,’ said Silver.

Mrs Rokabye did not like the sound of this at all. Suppose the house had overheard her conversation with Abel Darkwater? Suppose the house knew that she was intending to cheat Silver out of her inheritance and sell Tanglewreck to a developer who wanted to build Executive Homes on the site?

No! No! No! A house is a house is a house. The sooner a bulldozer came and flattened it the better. Mrs Rokabye’s eyes darted about as she thought these thoughts and her big teeth crunched her chocolate peanuts.
Calm down
, she said to herself,
first things first
. First the Timekeeper and all the money she would get from Abel Darkwater, and after that the horrible house. She had a Plan; all clever people had a Plan. She would follow her Plan step by step and not let this unsettling child distract her. Tanglewreck was an old ugly house, and anything else was a silly superstition.

‘I don’t know why you like that house as much as you do,’ said Mrs Rokabye, sighing, ‘but however much you like it, it is not alive.’

The ticket collector came and clipped their tickets. ‘Delays at Macclesfield,’ he said, and went on down the train.

Mrs Rokabye buried herself in her star-studded magazine. She had decided to ignore Silver until they reached King’s Cross.

‘I’ll tell you about Tanglewreck,’ said Silver, ignoring Mrs Rokabye ignoring her. ‘Then you’ll know why it’s special.’

Silver had told this story to herself many times before,
when she was on her own, which, since her parents had died, was always.

‘There was a field,’ said Silver, ‘and the field was empty, but some said they saw a house there long before it was built; a shimmering house, made of fog, and standing in birch trees.’

‘What nonsense you talk!’ said Mrs Rokabye, glancing up from her magazine, but Silver was repeating word for word just what her father had told her.

‘In 1588 the first stones of the house were laid, but although it was a fine house, it was a wild place and no one wanted to live there, and so the house waited.

‘In those days, in the days of Queen Elizabeth the First, our family, the Rivers, were called Rovers, and because they were wanted for crimes in England, they stole a ship and put out to sea –’

‘That’s right!’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘What a disgrace to be descended from pirates!’

But Silver wasn’t listening to Mrs Rokabye; it was her father’s voice she could hear now, reassuring and low, in the days when she had sat on his knee in his study, with the fire blazing, listening to stories about Tanglewreck …

‘It is true, Silver, that the Rovers were pirates, but they were successful pirates, and in those days, England and Spain were enemies, and so when the Rovers finally limped back into Deptford with a broken ship and a hull groaning with stolen Spanish treasure, they begged the Queen for an Official Pardon and a Quiet Life
.

‘Queen Elizabeth liked treasure, and she didn’t like Spaniards, and so she graciously agreed to take three-quarters of the pearls, each the size of a baby’s head, and half the bars of silver, each one the length of a man’s leg
.

‘Roger Rover was knighted Sir Roger, for his services to the Treasury, and, for the sake of his new status and his new wife, he changed the family name to River, and River it has been ever since.’

‘And now there is no heir to Tanglewreck, is there?’ said Mrs Rokabye, her eyes gleaming. When her eyes gleamed she looked just like Bigamist, and Silver half expected her to chew on a carrot.

‘My father made me the heir,’ said Silver, looking straight at Mrs Rokabye. ‘He said it was time that the old house had a girl to look after it. That’s why he called me Silver, as a reminder of the treasure that began it all. Oh, and because he said I was like his favourite pirate.’

‘What pirate?’ said Mrs Rokabye suspiciously.

‘The one in
Treasure Island
. Long John Silver.’

‘Never read it,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who never read anything except celebrity magazines and Murder Mysteries.

‘I brought it with me,’ said Silver. ‘Here it is, and there’s a picture of Long John Silver on the cover. It’s really good. You can read it to me if you like.’

‘No thank you,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who would rather have lain face down under the floorboards than done anything to please Silver.

‘I’ll read it by myself, then,’ said Silver, who was used to doing most things by herself.

She wrapped herself deep into her old duffle coat and opened the book, but before she could begin, a strange thing happened. The ticket collector came back and said, ‘Delays at Macclesfield.’

‘You told us that already,’ said Silver, ‘and we have gone past Macclesfield.’

But they hadn’t, because the train had got jammed in Time.

‘What do you mean, we are jammed in Time?’ demanded Mrs Rokabye. ‘I have paid for my ticket, two tickets, as it happens.’

The guard shrugged. ‘Nothing I can do about it. Happens here a lot lately. The train can’t go forward until Time goes forward. Simple as that.’

‘But have we gone backwards?’ asked Mrs Rokabye.

‘No,’ said the guard, ‘and praise the Heavens for that or I’d have to get out of bed all over again. We haven’t gone backwards, but we haven’t gone forwards either, which for a train is a misfortune.’

‘I should say it is!’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘So how long do we wait?’

‘Until your watch starts again,’ said the guard. ‘You will notice that your watch stopped ten minutes ago.’

‘Ridiculous!’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘Something should be done.’

Silver looked out of the window. Everything seemed
normal, except that the train was at a standstill and so was the little wristwatch her father had given her. He would know what to do, if only he were here, and then she wondered if he too had got jammed in Time somewhere. After all, he had been on a train, and none of them had ever been found, even though there had been a funeral. Perhaps if she could find the Timekeeper …

‘Are we getting older while we’re sitting here?’ Silver asked the guard.

‘I don’t think so,’ said the guard. ‘You will be older when you get to your next birthday, but if Time stands still, you won’t get there and so you won’t be any older.’

‘Well, what if we stayed on the train for the rest of our lives?’ asked Silver.

‘Impossible,’ said the guard. ‘Time or no time, the buffet closes at six o’clock, and that’s that.’

‘I want to get off the train!’ shouted Mrs Rokabye suddenly. ‘I shall get off the train and on to a bus.’

‘Sorry, ma’am, it’s against company policy to let anyone off the train while it’s in a Time Trap. We do not know what is happening out there, and we can’t be responsible for your safety. If you leave the train you might be stuck on this section of track for ever.’

‘FOR EVER??’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘Outside Macclesfield for ever?’

‘Regrettably, yes,’ said the guard.

Silver was fidgeting with her hands in her pockets and
wishing she had a hard-boiled egg to eat, when she felt something sharp at the bottom of the torn lining in her old duffle coat. She felt round the edges of it with her fingers, and she realised it was the pin or whatever it was that she had found on the floor of the cellar the day she had been shovelling coal for Abel Darkwater.

Maybe if I point it towards London, we’ll get there quicker
, she thought, and she turned the pointed arrow tip South, and closed her eyes and concentrated as hard as she could.

Nothing happened. Nothing happened at all, in fact that was just the point; the nothingness of what was happening was so intense that it was like waiting for a thunderstorm to break. And then it did.

Silver opened her eyes just as Mrs Rokabye’s sweets and magazines came flying past her ear.

‘Hold on!’ shouted the guard, as the train roared forward.

It was like being in a rocket. Silver felt herself forced back against her seat, and she heard a noise like something whirling round her head. She held on tightly, as the other people in the carriage screamed with panic. Mrs Rokabye was lying across the table in a dead faint.

Silver was scared but she tried to notice what was really happening, and what was happening was that the hands on her watch were going round and round faster and faster, and everything outside the train had gone dark. Then there was a terrific thud, and she heard announcements coming over the tannoy system.