Wild Robert. Diana Wynne Jones

age eating ice lollies and dropping the wrappers on the gravel path. “They wouldn’t dare do that at home!” Heather muttered, and she took care to pass them in the distance. She went on into the walled garden, where Mr McManus usually was. Since things were so horrible anyway, she thought she might as well ask him for a tomato.

      The walled garden, for some reason, was always the place where the elderly couples went. Heather passed one set, where the lady was saying, “See, Harry. This one is the old thornless rose.” Then there was another foursome, where a man was lecturing the other three about pruning roses. And a third pair, where the lady was hooting, “That is simply not the way to plant roses! If the gardener here was mine, I’d soon tell him where to get off!”

      She was sure Mr McManus could hear this lady from the corner where he was working. When Heather found him, he was raking a seedbed as if it were the throat of an old lady.

      “Get you gone!” he said to Heather.

      “I only wanted to ask—” Heather began.

      “Laying down the law, tramping my lawns, messing up my paths with packets and papers and gum,” said Mr McManus. “Screaming, asking things—”

      “I hate tourists too,” said Heather. “There’s no need to take it out on me.”

      “Leaving bottles and tins,” said Mr McManus. “You’re worse than all the rest. Get you gone!”

      This was so unfair that all Heather could think of to do was to stump away through the nearest door, with her mouth pressed tight, hoping Mr McManus would tread on a rake and get concussion. She turned the corner into the ruined temple. Usually, nobody found the way there. But today was a bad day. Some very large and grown-up teenagers had found the temple and they were romping there among the pillars and the green mounds. Heather slithered on past, skirting a fallen statue where a pair of the teenagers were kissing, and plunged into the woods behind the temple.

      She only knew one other place that was likely to be private. This was the peculiar little mound right on the edge of the Castlemaine grounds. When Heather and her parents had first moved to Castlemaine, Mum had been very excited about this mound. She said it was surely an ancient Bronze Age burial mound. Then Heather had gone to school in the village and met Janine. Janine told Heather that it was the grave of a man from the olden days who had been accused of doing witchcraft. He was called Wild Robert and everyone in the village knew about him. They said there was a box of treasure buried with him. This made Heather as excited as Mum. She went to Dad and suggested they hunted for the treasure.

      Dad smiled kindly, in the way he had, and looked at the old maps of Castlemaine. “Sorry to disappoint you both,” he said to Heather and Mum. “You know what that mound really is? It’s an ice-house. They used to keep ice in a sort of cave inside the mound, so that the Tollers and Franceys could have ice-cream in summer. I dare say if we dug in it, we’d find the cave still there.”

      After that, the mound seemed rather dull. Mum forgot about it and Heather only went there at times like today, when there seemed to be tourists everywhere else.

      Or was it dull? she wondered as she walked towards it. It was hidden in a mass of yew trees. Heather’s feet made almost no sound as she ploughed through the soft piles of yellow needles. And there was something about the light that filtered through the dark black-green of the needles overhead. It made everything look sort of smoky. The mound itself reared up into this smokiness, bald and covered with yew needles. Not dull, Heather thought. More as if this is not a nice place to be.

      She climbed the mound and sat down. She opened her book. But it was too dark under the yew trees to read.

      Somehow, this was the last straw. Heather banged the soft earth with her fist. “Oh, bother it all!” she cried out. “Wild Robert, I just wish you were really under there. You could come out and deal with the tourists and teach Mr McManus some manners!”

      The sun came out overhead. That seemed to make the mist under the trees smokier than ever. The smell of it was strange, like earth and spices. It rolled over Heather in waves. Out of it, a voice said, “Did somebody call?”

Chapter Two

      “Did somebody call?” the voice said again. It was a husky voice. Heather thought it must be one of the teenage boys from the temple. She did not answer. But the voice said, “Didn’t somebody call?”

      “Well – sort of,” Heather said. “I was just talking really.”

      There was a noise somewhere below that sounded like someone crawling through undergrowth. Heather stood up nervously. She was fairly sure the person had mistaken her for one of his friends. Unless she ran away quickly, it was going to be very awkward. But she could not see where he was and she did not want to run straight into him. She stood where she was, looking anxiously round into the smoky mist. And the person took her by surprise by standing up in front of her to dust yew-needles off his tight black clothes.

      “There. So, here I am,” he said cheerfully.

      He was not one of the ones by the temple. He was the oldest kind of teenager, or perhaps even a young man. Heather was never quite sure when people changed over from one to the other. He was very good-looking. He had fairish, wavy hair that came to his shoulders and huge dark eyes set a little slanting in his smooth dark face – in fact, he was so good-looking that it made up for his not being very tall. He was only a head higher than Heather. She thought, from his clothes, that he must have come here on a motorcycle, although he had a big white collar spread over the shoulders of his black jacket, which puzzled her a little.

      “Did you come to see round the house, or are you just exploring?” she asked him politely.

      The young man laughed. “No, sweetheart, I came because you called. It is always so. The words Bishop Henry laid on me were never so heavy that I could not hear my name when it was said.”

      “I – I beg your pardon?” said Heather.

      “What date is it?” the young man asked.

      “Er – nineteen eighty-nine,” said Heather. She was beginning to feel alarmed. Either the young man was mad, or something very odd had happened.

      The young man seemed even more alarmed. He stared at her, and she could see he had gone pale by the black way his eyes stood out in his face. “No!” he said. “Oh, no! Then that makes three hundred and fifty years shut in the mound!” He put his hand on Heather’s arm appealingly. “Tell me not that so much time has passed.”

      His hand felt – strange. It was chilly, but it was warm too, and it somehow fizzed against Heather’s bare arm so that all the hairs stood up round the place he touched. Heather backed away. The feel of his hand, even more than what he said, made her fairly sure he was not mad, and even surer that something very odd indeed had happened. “Who are you?” she said.

      The young man laughed again, in the bright way people laugh when their feelings are hurt. “My name is Robert Toller,” he said.

      “Wild Robert?” Heather said from behind both hands, which had somehow leapt to cover her mouth. “The one who – who was supposed to do witchcraft?”

      Robert Toller looked definitely hurt now. “And so I can,” he said. “Why else should my half-brother call a bishop to put me down? They knew I had studied the magic arts and were persuaded I meant to take their heritage from them – though I meant them nothing but kindness.” He looked more hurt than ever for a moment. Then a thought