Gravenhunger (6 page)

His father turned to face him. “Like what exactly?”

Phoenix flushed. “I just want to hang out, that’s all. Get to know the place a bit.”

Rose eyed her cousin across the table.

“In that case I’ll stay too,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to, you know,
miss out
on anything.”

Dr Wainwright looked at them both. “Fair enough. You do whatever you want. But don’t forget what I said to you earlier, Phoenix. No serious exploring without me, OK? Same applies to you, Rose. I don’t want you going any further afield than the garden.”

Rose needled Phoenix with a steely blue gaze.

“Of course not,” she said, her eyes burning into her cousin. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Besides, I’m sure we can find plenty of things to do inside the house.”

Phoenix gritted his teeth.

His cousin had to be the most annoying person on the planet.

Still, she hadn’t grassed on him about where he’d been this afternoon, had she? He’d give her that at least.

He scraped his chair back from the table and began to gather up the bowls and plates.

How could he have been so careless as to lose the silver angel? And just when he should have been concentrating on solving his mother’s mystery too. He could have spent tomorrow getting on with a
really thorough search of the house, for a start. And it wouldn’t have hurt to take a trip down to the village either. There was no knowing what he might find out about the past if he asked around a bit.

Now, though, all that would have to wait.

Until the angel was back in his pocket he couldn’t afford to think about anything else.

In the morning, just as soon as Dad had left for the village, he would retrace every one of his steps until he had found it. And if that meant disobeying his father for a second time … well, that was exactly what he was going to do.

6.
IN MEMORIAM

Rose stood at the attic window and looked out through the grey morning mist.

She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

It didn’t matter how many extra layers she put on, she couldn’t seem to get warm. Everything about Gravenhunger Manor felt damp and cold: the floors, the walls, even the air inside it. And it was the same outside: nothing but mist and drizzle. Over towards the horizon, though, it was different. Beyond the river and the strange-shaped mound she could see sunlight – wonderful, glittering sunlight – spilt like a pool of liquid gold over the distant sea.

She’d been watching her cousin since just after breakfast, and whatever it was he was doing over there, he was certainly taking his time about it.

He’d come sloping round the back of the house the moment Uncle Joel had left for the village. He’d crossed the garden towards the forest, pausing briefly beside the wooden swings and glancing up towards the attic, as if he knew perfectly well that he was being tracked.

Rose had whipped back behind the moth-eaten curtains, but probably not before he had spotted her.

Still, what did it matter?

He had seen her staring at him on the mound yesterday, hadn’t he? It wasn’t going to come as any great surprise that she was watching him again today.

It was hard to be completely certain, what with the rain and the mist and the general murkiness, but it looked very much as if Phoenix was searching for something.

He’d been pacing up and down the mound for nearly an hour now, stopping every so often to focus on one particular area near the edge, his hands spread over his knees, his head bent towards the ground.

Rose sighed.

What was it about this odd-shaped hump of earth that everyone seemed so interested in?

First there’d been the old man on the train, telling her to keep away from it, and now here was Phoenix poring all over it.

Clearly the business about the place being haunted
was just a load of nonsense. But what if there was something at least interesting about Gravenhunger Manor and its grounds? And what if Phoenix knew all about it?

Well, one thing was for sure – he wasn’t going to share any valuable nuggets of information with her. Since their head-to-head in the attic yesterday, they hadn’t uttered a single word to each other.

Rose turned away from the window.

There was nothing more infuriating than being left out of a secret.

She flopped down on the end of her bed, then jerked back upright.

Of course!
The guidebook! Surely the mound would be mentioned in that.

Dragging her rucksack out from underneath the bed, she slid back the zip on the top pocket and drew out the booklet.

Perhaps – just perhaps – she was about to get some answers.

Phoenix checked his watch.

Eleven-thirty already.

A whole hour of trudging up and down in the pouring rain, and so far he had found nothing.

His plan the previous evening had been to retrace
his steps from the house to the mound, starting on the fourth-floor landing just outside the hidden entrance to the attic room. But then it had dawned on him in the middle of the night that the most likely place the little angel would be was where he had tripped and caught his foot in the burrow at the edge of the mound. It made sense to look there first.

He pulled the hood of his waterproof down over his forehead and stared at the ground once more.

He had scoured the area around the burrow again and again, parting the tufts of grass and combing the sandy soil with the tips of his fingers, but there was no sign of the angel. He was going to have to go back to the house soon and dry off before Dad returned from the village. He could always sneak out again later on. A lot later on, if necessary – once it had grown dark and everyone had gone to bed. At least then his
nosy-parker
cousin wouldn’t be watching him out of the window, as she was almost certainly doing right now.

Phoenix made to leave the mound, then froze.

A shape was drifting towards him, a shape which seemed at first glance to be no more than a rogue patch of mist, blown this way and that by the buffeting wind, but as he stared harder seemed to take on the form of a human silhouette.

So he hadn’t been seeing things yesterday
…

For a moment he just stood there, his brain
screaming at him to run – but his legs felt like jelly.

Now the shape was coming closer…and suddenly he was scrambling down the side of the mound, not knowing what it was that he was running from, knowing only that he had to get away…

Halfway to the embankment he glanced back.

The silhouette was still there, flitting over the surface, its outline pale and blurred … but very definitely human.

Phoenix raced on towards the river.

At the crest of the embankment he paused, bent double from a stitch in his side and gasping for breath.

He blinked.

Directly below him something bright was scudding down the river … something silvery-white…

Dropping to his knees, he craned forward, but already he could see that the brightness was nothing but the foaming water itself, taunting and teasing him with the illusion of a thousand silvery angels.

How could he have been so stupid? If the angel had dropped out while he was crossing the tree-trunk bridge, he was hardly going to find it floating on the surface of the river, was he? It would be lying at the bottom, unreachable amongst the weeds and the mud and the rocks.

He twisted round and lowered himself over the
edge of the embankment, his view of the mound slowly slipping from view.

On its flattened top the strange silhouette had become eerily still…

…as if it was watching his every movement.

Rose ran up the narrow staircase to the attic.

Lunchtime had been a total nightmare.

Apart from one remark Uncle Joel had made about the brilliant sunshine down in the village that morning, no one had said a thing.

They had sat round the kitchen table in silence, and if it hadn’t been for the chimney sweep arriving, Rose reckoned they would have stayed there all afternoon, their moods darkening by the minute.

It wasn’t what she was used to, that was for sure. You could barely get a word in edgeways at home, what with Mum and Dad rabbiting on about this, that and the other. Here at Gravenhunger Manor it was a miracle if her cousin and uncle managed to exchange more than a few words.

Still, she’d managed to escape at last.

Uncle Joel was getting on with some more work and the chimney sweep had disappeared into the drawing room with a collection of peculiar-looking brushes, muttering to himself about the weather.

Where Phoenix had gone, she wasn’t sure.

For a moment she wondered whether he might have dared to go straight back over to the mound. But there was no sign of him out of the window. And in any case, the rain was getting worse by the minute. No one in their right mind would be out there in that.

Rose sprawled on top of her bed and opened the guidebook. She’d only managed a quick look through before lunch, and so far she’d found no information about the mound at all.

She flicked past the list of tourist attractions … past the map of the seafront … past the names and addresses of places to stay…

And then she paused.

Near the back, tucked away in the corner of the page, was something she’d missed: a small photo of the mound – and beneath it, a couple of lines of text.

She pressed the pages flat and started to read.

She snapped the book shut.

So much for thinking there might be something interesting about the mound. It was just an ancient
hump of earth, that was all. The inhabitants of Gravenhunger obviously led such boring lives they had to invent stupid ghost stories to keep themselves amused … and the old man she’d met on the train was no exception.

As for Phoenix, well, she was no closer to understanding her cousin’s odd behaviour than she had been before she’d opened the guidebook. Even if he’d read something similar and got it into his head that the mound was haunted, it didn’t explain what he’d been doing walking up and down all over it.

Rose sighed.

This whole holiday had been a terrible mistake. The weather was atrocious, her uncle was working all the time and she and Phoenix weren’t even on speaking terms. At least if they’d been talking they could have been listening to music or playing a board game together. True, she could think of better ways of spending what was supposed to be a glorious summer. But it would be a definite improvement on sitting around all by herself.

Perhaps it was time to put yesterday behind them.

Perhaps it was time to call a bit of a truce.

Snatches of conversation were drifting up through the floorboards into his bedroom, and Phoenix didn’t
like the sound of what he was hearing.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” the chimney sweep was saying. “I’ve been sweeping that chimney for nearly three hours now and I can’t get the blasted thing working for love nor money.”

“I thought it was just me,” Phoenix heard his father reply. “I spent ages trying to light a fire yesterday and all I got was a huge cloud of smoke and a great big mess. I really am getting pretty fed up with this place, and the awful weather isn’t helping. I’m about ready to ditch the whole thing and head home.”

Phoenix sat down on the four-poster bed, his heart clenching.

Leave? Already? Without the silver angel? And before he’d had a chance to find out what had happened here?

“It’s certainly got a climate of its own,” agreed the sweep. “I’m not one for village gossip myself, but they do say it does nothing but rain up here.”

There was a clattering of poles and brushes, then the sound of footsteps as the two men left the drawing room and went out into the hallway.