Fire and Hemlock. Diana Wynne Jones

he said, and went back to talking to the person he had turned away from.

      “Thanks,” Mr Lynn said to his back, and towed Polly on across the hall.

      They had reached the foot of the jointed staircase when the servitor politely stopped them. “I beg your pardon, sir. Will you or the little girl be staying for lunch?”

      “I don’t—” Mr Lynn began. He stopped and looked down at Polly, rather dismayed. He had obviously forgotten she was not supposed to be there. “No,” he said. “We’ll be leaving almost at once, thank you.”

      The servitor said, “Thank you, sir,” and went away.

      Polly did not blame Mr Lynn for not doing what the laughing man had told him to do. “Who was that man?” she whispered as they went up the stairs.

      “One of the caterers, I think,” said Mr Lynn.

      “No, silly! The one with black poached eyes,” Polly whispered.

      That made Mr Lynn utter a yelp of laughter, guiltily cut short. “Oh, him? That’s Seb’s father, Morton Leroy. He and Laurel are probably going to get married. The pictures are in here.”

      Polly had hoped that they would be going right up the stairs, round all the joints, so that she would have a chance to investigate the upstairs of Hunsdon House. But the room Mr Lynn went into was off a half-landing, only one short flight up. It was a small, bare place. There were marks on the carpet where furniture had stood for a long time and then been taken away. The pictures were leaning against the walls to left and right, in stacks.

      “Some of these, as I remember, were very nice,” Mr Lynn said. “Suppose we lean all the ones we think are worth taking against the wall under the window, and then consider which to take. I was told I could have six.”

      As soon as they started looking at the pictures, Polly discovered that the ones leaning on the left-hand wall were by far the most interesting. She left Mr Lynn to sort through the ones on the other side of the room, and knelt facing the left wall, using her chin and stomach to prop the front pictures on while she leafed over the ones behind like the pages of a heavy book. She found a green, sunlit picture of old-fashioned people having a picnic in a wood, in a pile that was otherwise only saints with cracked gold paint on their halos. The next pile had a strange, tilted view of a fairground, a lovely Chinese picture of a horse, and some sad pink-and-blue Harlequins beside the sea. Polly put all these against the end wall at once. The one on top of the third pile she liked too. It was a swirly modern painting of people playing violins. Underneath that was a big blue-green picture of a fire at dusk where smoke was beginning to wreathe round the vast skeleton of a plant like cow parsley in front. Polly exclaimed with delight at it.

      Meanwhile, Mr Lynn was saying, “I don’t remember half these pictures. Take a look at this. Dismal, isn’t it?”

      Polly swivelled round to be shown a long brownish picture, more like a drawing, of a mermaid carrying a dead-looking man underwater. “It’s awful,” she said. “They’ve got silly faces. And the man’s body is too long.”

      “I agree,” said Mr Lynn, “though I think I may take it as a curiosity. Explain how you got into this house by mistake.”

      Polly got up and carefully carried the violin picture and the smoke picture to the end wall. “Nina started it,” she said. “But I got just as silly.” And she told him about the High Priestesses, and how they had climbed out of Granny’s garden into all the others. “Then we had to hide behind some sheets on the washing line,” she was saying, when she saw Mr Lynn stand up and, in a flurried sort of way, brush at the knees of his suit.

      “Oh hello, Laurel,” he said.

      The lady Polly had mistaken for Nina was standing in the doorway. Seen this close, she struck Polly as plump and quite pretty, and her black clothes were obviously very expensive. Her hair was rather strange, light and floating, of a colour that could have been grey or no colour at all. Polly somehow knew from all this, and most of all from a powerful sort of sweetness about this lady, that she was the one who had inherited almost everything in the house. And from the stiff way Mr Lynn was standing there, she also knew that Laurel was the ex-wife he had talked about. She just could not think how she had taken her for Nina.

      “Tom, didn’t you know I’d been asking for you?” Laurel said. Then before Mr Lynn could do more than begin to shake his head – he was going to lie about that, Polly noticed with interest – Laurel’s eyes went first to the pictures and then to Polly. Polly jumped as the eyes met hers. They were as light as Laurel’s hair, but with black rings in the lightness, which made them almost seem like a tunnel Polly was looking down. They had no more feeling than a tunnel, either, in spite of the sweet look on Laurel’s face.

      “When you choose your pictures, Tom,” Laurel said, looking at Polly, “don’t forget that the ones you can have are the ones over there.” Light caught colours from her rings as her hand pointed briefly to the right-hand wall. “The ones against the other wall are all too valuable to go out of the family,” she said.

      Then she turned round and went out onto the landing, somehow taking Mr Lynn out there along with her. They half shut the door. Polly stood by the window and heard snatches of the things they said beyond the door. First came Laurel’s sweet, light voice saying “…all asking who the child is, Tom.” To which Mr Lynn’s voice muttered something about “…in charge of her… couldn’t just leave her…” She could tell Laurel did not like this, because she seemed pleased when Mr Lynn added “…away shortly. I’ve a train to catch.” One thing was clear: Mr Lynn was very carefully not telling Laurel who Polly was or how she got there.

      Polly leaned against the window, looking down at the cars on the gravel, and considered. She was scared. She had thought it would be all right to come back into the house if Mr Lynn asked her to. Now she knew it was not. Mr Lynn was having to be artful and vague in order to cover it up. Laurel was frightening. Polly could hear her arguing with Mr Lynn now, out on the landing, her voice all little angry tinkles, like ice cubes in a drink. “Tom, whether you like it or not, you are!” And a bit later: “Because I tell you to, of course!” And later still: “I know you always were a fool, but that doesn’t let you off!”

      Listening, Polly began to feel angry as well as scared. Laurel was a real bully, for all her voice was so sweet. Polly went over to the pictures on the other side of the room, the ones Mr Lynn was allowed to have. Sure enough, as she had expected, they were nothing like as good as the ones on the left-hand side. Most of them were terrible. Since the argument was still going on, outside on the landing, Polly tiptoed back to the pictures she had leaned against the wall by the window. Back and forth she tiptoed, putting all the good, interesting pictures she had already chosen into the stacks against the right-hand wall, and a few, not so terrible, to lean on the wall by the window, to look as if they had been chosen.

      Then, to make things look the same as before, she took terrible pictures from the right-hand wall to the left-hand stacks. They ended up a complete mixture. When Mr Lynn came back into the room, Polly was kneeling virtuously by the right-hand wall, taking her mind off her evil deed by studying a picture called The Vigil, of a young knight praying at an altar.

      “Do you think he’s a trainee-hero?” she asked Mr Lynn.

      “Oh no. Put that back,” he said. “Don’t you think it’s soppy?”

      “It is a bit,” Polly agreed cheerfully, and watched Mr Lynn choose pictures through her hair while she slowly put The Vigil back.

      That was how she got Fire and Hemlock, of course. When he sorted through the doctored stacks, Mr Lynn picked out every one of the pictures Polly had chosen. “I didn’t know this would be here!” he said, and, “Oh, I remember this one!” He was particularly pleased by the swirly one of the violins. When he came to the picture of the fire at dusk, he smiled and said, “This photograph seems to haunt me. It used to hang over my bed when I lived here. I always liked the way the shape of that hemlock echoes the shape of that tree in the hedge. Here,” he said, and put it in Polly’s hands. “You have