Journey to the River Sea

Finn made him help with all the chores. Clovis had to keep the hut clean, scrub out the saucepans, and help get the Arabella ready for her journey. Clovis liked the humming birds; he learnt to refill their bottles of sugar water, and he didn’t mind painting the boat – he was used to painting scenery – but cleaning the bilges and burying the kitchen waste was not to his taste at all.

But if Clovis wasn’t very good at rough work, he was absolutely first-class at learning his lines. Every morning and every afternoon, he sat down with the old red notebook in which Finn had written down all that his father had told him about Westwood, and when Finn tested him he found Clovis word-perfect.

‘There isn’t very much,’ Finn had told him at the beginning. ‘Because my father never talked about Westwood if he could help it. And remember, they won’t expect you to know anything – they probably think you’ve been brought up a savage. All the same, if you’re going to stay for a week or two without being found out, it might help you to know a little.’

So Clovis sat by the table in the hut, twisting a curl round his finger, and studied the notebook, and every hour or two Finn came and tested him.

‘What does the front of the house look like?’

‘It was built by Sir John Vanbrugh. There are two wings, an East Wing and a West Wing, and in the middle is a block with six stone columns where the main rooms are.’

‘What about statues?’

‘There’s a statue of Hercules strangling a snake in front of the West Wing and a statue of St George spearing a dragon in front of the East Wing.’

‘Now go through the front door. Think of yourself as coming back to where your father grew up. Think of yourself as Bernard Taverner’s son,’ said Finn – and had to turn his face away as he remembered how good it had been really to be his father’s son, and how much he missed him.

‘You go into a Great Hall which is always cold, with stone flags, and a big oak chest into which Dudley shut your father for a whole night when he was three years old—’ Clovis broke off. ‘Dudley is dead, isn’t he?’

‘Of course he’s dead,’ said Finn impatiently. ‘That’s what all the fuss is about. Go on. Go upstairs.’

‘There’s a Long Gallery with a knight’s armour, very tall, which used to shine in the dark. Once Dudley got in and made it raise its arm and a housemaid fainted. And there’s a picture of a Taverner ancestor who went to the crusade, with the head of a Turk impaled on his lance.’

Clovis sighed. Westwood did not sound cosy.

‘What about Joan?’ Finn went on. ‘Remember she’s your Aunt Joan really. Where was her room?’

‘On the next floor, overlooking the stables. The walls were completely covered with rosettes she’d won for riding – red ones and yellow ones and blue ones, and she had a fox’s tail with dried blood on it nailed above her bed. Only it isn’t called a tail, it’s called a brush.’

‘And what was her nickname?’

‘The Basher. Because she bashed people.’ He looked anxiously at Finn. ‘But she isn’t there now, is she? You promised.’

‘No, of course not. She’s married to a man called Smith and has four daughters.’

But he could see that Clovis was looking far from happy so he flicked over the pages of the notebook to find the few things at Westwood which Bernard had liked.

‘What about the bluebell wood?’

‘It’s on the far side of the lake – not where Joan held his head under the water. On a slope down to the river. There was a pair of woodpeckers nesting there, and a badger sett.’

‘And the garden?’

‘There was a walled kitchen garden and the gardener was nice. He used to let your father pick strawberries, but he had a stammer and Dudley used to imitate him and—’

‘Never mind Dudley,’ said Finn quickly. ‘He’s dead. What about the other servants?’

‘The butler was called Young, but he wasn’t young he was old, with liver spots on his hands and everyone was scared of him. He got a maid sacked for reading the books in the library – the one that helped your father.’

‘And the dining room?’

Clovis rattled through every detail of the dining room. It always cheered him up thinking of English food and English meals.

But as often as he felt brave and forward-looking, Clovis felt scared and told Finn he couldn’t do it.

‘I wish Maia would come,’ he kept saying, which annoyed Finn. Finn wished it too. Till Maia came they would not know what had happened in the museum and whether their plan would work.

But when she did come, the next day, they saw by her face that all was well.

To get away from the Carters, Maia had needed to work hard at her pulmonary spasms. She had had a spasm at breakfast, wheezing and twitching, and another one in the drawing room when she was doing her embroidery. They were good spasms, she thought, but it wasn’t till the third one, just before tea, that Mrs Carter said icily that if her lungs were giving her so much trouble she had better go out.

Since it was raining – the heavy, dark rain that fell so often in the afternoons – she thought Maia might refuse, but she was out of the house in minutes.