Fire and Hemlock. Diana Wynne Jones

a bit – you do, Polly thought, when everyone stares – and finally sat down near the door, a few seats along from Polly.

      The important man flipped a large paper open with a rattle. A document, Polly thought. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I have your attention, I shall read the Will.”

      Oh dear, Polly thought. The dream feeling went away at once, and the ice in her drink rattled as she realised where she was and what she had done. This was Hunsdon House, where she and Nina had seen the hearse. Someone had died here and she had gatecrashed the funeral. And because she was dressed up in a black dress, no one had realised that she should not be here. She wondered what they would do to her when they did. Meanwhile she sat, trying not to shake the ice in her glass, listening to the lawyer’s voice reading out what she was sure were all sorts of private bequests – from the Last Will and Testament of Mrs Mabel Tatiana Leroy Perry, being of a sound mind et cetera – which Polly was sure she should not be hearing at all.

      As the lawyer’s voice droned on, Polly became more and more certain she was listening to private things. She could feel the way each item made sort of waves among the silent listeners, waves of annoyance, anger and deep disgust, and one or two spurts of quite savage joy. The disgust seemed to be because so many things went to “my daughter Mrs Eudora Mabel Lorelei Perry Lynn”. Even when things went to other people, such as “my cousin Morton Perry Leroy” or “my niece Mrs Silvia Nuala Leroy Perry”, the Will seemed to change its mind every so often and give them to Mrs Perry Lynn instead. The joy was on the rare occasions when someone different, like Robert Goodman Leroy Perry or Sebastian Ralph Perry Leroy, actually got something.

      Polly began to wonder if it might even be against the law for her to be listening to these things. She tried not to listen – and this was not difficult, because most of it was very boring – but she became steadily more unhappy.

      She wished she dared creep away. She was quite near the door. It would have been easy if only that man hadn’t chosen to sit down just beyond her, right beside the door. She looked to see if she still might slip out, and looked at the same moment as the man looked at her, evidently wondering about her. Polly hastily turned her head to the front again and pretended to listen to the Will, but she could feel him still looking. The ice in her drink melted. The Will went on to an intensely boring bit about “a Trust shall be set up”. Beside the door, the man stood up. Polly’s head turned, without her meaning it to, as if it were on strings, and he was still looking at her, right at her. The eyes behind the glasses met hers and sort of dragged, and he nodded his head away sideways towards the door. “Come on out of that,” said the look. “Please,” it added, with a sort of polite, questioning stillness.

      It was a fair cop. Polly nodded too. Carefully she put the melted orange drink down on the chair beside hers and slid to the floor. He was now holding out his hand to take hers and make sure she didn’t get away. Feeling fated, Polly put her hand into his. It was a big hand, a huge one, and folded hers quite out of sight under its row of long fingers. It pulled, and they both went softly out of the door into the hall with the jointed staircase.

      “Didn’t you want your drink?” the man asked as the lawyer’s voice faded to a rise and fall in the distance.

      Polly shook her head. Her voice seemed to have gone away. There was an archway opening off the hall. In the room through the archway she could see the servitor setting wineglasses out on a big, polished dinner table. Polly wanted to shout to him to come and explain that he had let her into the funeral, but she could not utter a sound. The big hand holding hers was pulling her along, into the passage she had come in by. Polly, as she went with it, cast her eyes round the hall for a last look at its grandeurs. Wistfully she thought of herself jumping into one of the Ali Baba vases and staying there hidden until everyone had gone away. But as she thought it, she was already in the side passage with the door standing open on the gusty trees at the end of it. The lawyer’s voice was out of hearing now.

      “Will you be warm enough outside in that dress?” the man holding her hand asked politely.

      His politeness seemed to deserve an answer. Polly’s voice came back. “Yes thank you,” she replied sadly. “I’ve got my real clothes on underneath.”

      “Very wise,” said the man. “Then we can go into the garden.” They stepped out of the door, where the wind wrapped Polly’s black dress round her legs and flapped her hair sideways. It could not do much with the man’s hair, which was smoothed across his head in an elderly style, so it stood it up in colourless hanks and rattled the jacket of his dark suit. He shivered. Polly hoped he would send her off and go straight indoors again. But he obviously meant to see her properly off the premises. He turned to the right with her. The wind hurled itself at their faces. “This is better,” said the man. “I wish I could have thought of a way to get that poor boy Seb out of it too. I could see he was as bored as you were. But he didn’t have the sense to sit near the door.”

      Polly turned and looked up at him in astonishment. He smiled down at her. Polly gave him a hasty smile in return, hoping he would think she was shy, and turned her face back to the wind to think about this. So the man thought she really was part of the funeral. He was just meaning to be kind. “It was boring, wasn’t it?” she said.

      “Terribly,” he said, and let go of her hand.

      Polly ought to have run off then. And she would have, she thought, remembering it all nine years later, if she had simply thought he was just being kind. But the way he spoke told her that he had found the funeral far more utterly boring than she had. She remembered the way the lady she had mistaken for Nina had spoken to him, and the way the other guests had looked at him while he was walking about looking for a seat. She realised he had sat down on purpose near the door, and she knew – perhaps without quite understanding it – that if she ran away, it would mean he had to go back into the funeral again. She was his excuse for coming out of it.

      So she stayed. She had to lean on the wind to keep beside him while they walked under some ragged, nearly finished roses and the wind blew white petals across them.

      “What’s your name?” he asked.

      “Polly.”

      “Polly what?”

      “Polly Whittacker,” she said without thinking. Then of course she realised that the right name for the funeral should have been Leroy or Perry, or Perry Leroy, or Leroy Perry, like the people who got the bequests in the Will, and had to cover it up. “I’m only adopted, you know. I come from the other branch of the family really.”

      “I thought you might,” he said, “with that hair of yours.”

      “And what part of the family are you?” Polly said, quickly and artificially, to distract him from asking more. She took a piece of her blowing hair and bit it anxiously.

      “Oh, no part really,” he said, ducking his head under a clawing rose. “The dead lady is the mother of my ex-wife, so I felt I ought to come. But I’m the odd man out, here.” Polly relaxed. He was distracted. He said, “My name’s Thomas Lynn.”

      “Both parts surname?” Polly asked doubtfully. “Everyone’s so double-barrelled in there.”

      That made him give a little crow of laughter, which he swallowed hastily down, as if he were ashamed of laughing at a funeral. “No, no. Just the second part.”

      “Mr Lynn, then,” said Polly. She let her hair blow round her face as they walked down some sunken steps, and studied him. Long hair had its uses. He was tall and thin and walked in a way that stooped his round, colourless head between his shoulders, making his head look smaller than it really was – though some of that could have been distance: he was so tall that his head was a long way off from Polly. Like a very tall tortoise, Polly thought. The glasses added to the tortoise look. It was an amiable, vague face they sat on. Polly decided Mr Lynn was nice.

      “Mr Lynn,” she asked, “what do you like doing most?”

      The tortoise head swung towards her in surprise. “I was just going to ask you that!”

      “Snap!”