The Borrowers Avenged Page 11

  "What are you going to use those for?" Arrietty asked as he rejoined her.

  "I'm going to wash them in the birdbath and put them over the holes in the nesting boxes."

  "To keep out the drafts?"

  "No, to keep out the wrens and blue tits and goodness knows what else. Field mice for instance..."

  "Why did you hurry me so, across the path? You said all the human beings are out—"

  "You can't take chances. At least, not out of doors: there might be a visitor, or an errand boy, or possibly a postman ... Come on, we've got to climb the ivy. Just follow me."

  Arrietty found that climbing the ivy was almost as much fun as climbing the lookout bush. Peagreen was making for the last of the nesting boxes, the one that was to be his dining room. They went up beside it and, both a little breathless, rested on the slightly sloping lid. Arrietty looked down. "You've got a good view from here of anyone coming along the path."

  "I know," said Peagreen. He slid off the nesting box onto a thick branch of ivy. "Come along. We've got to go sideways now. It's quite easy."

  It took no time at all to reach the sill of the larder window. How clever of Peagreen, thought Arrietty, to have planned all this out! And how proud he looked as he lifted the loose corner of rusty wire, holding it back for her to pass through! He came in beside her, and they stood together on the narrow indoor sill. "Well, this is it!" he said.

  It was a long, narrow room. On one side were wide slate shelves; along the other, a row of wooden bins with sloping lids, rather like the lids of the nesting boxes outside. In fact, Arrietty thought, they were rather like giant nesting boxes, except they were all joined together.

  Peagreen followed the direction of her eyes. "Yes, that's where in the olden days they used to keep the cereals—rice, dried beans, maize for poultry, flour—all those sorts of things. And rock salt in lumps. All the stores that had to be kept dry. You see, that wall backs up to the old kitchen stove in the next room. It's quite warm in those bins. They used to be kept locked, but all the locks are broken now—except this end one just below us. That one they can't unlock. Not that it matters ... Those bins are never used now. It's not like the old days: humans no longer store things in bulk. They just buy what they want when they want it."

  "With money, I suppose?" said Arrietty, wonderingly.

  Peagreen laughed. "Yes, with money."

  "I still don't quite understand money," Arrietty said in a puzzled voice. Then she turned her eyes to the wide slate shelves.

  The upper ones seemed to be stocked mainly with bottled fruits, jams, pickles, ketchups, and bowls of all sizes tied round with cloths; the shelves above were narrower than the main shelf below them, on which many unrecognizable objects were laid out. Unrecognizable, from where she stood, because several of them were shrouded by clean white napkins, others by wire-meshed meat covers. Strings of onions hung down from hooks in the ceiling, as did large bunches of bay and thyme. Between the main shelf and the stone-flagged floor, the space was filled by a honeycombed affair that Peagreen explained later was a wine rack—not for the best wines (those had been kept in the cellars), but for the homemade wines, which the cooks used to make in season: elderflower, dandelion, parsnip, gooseberry, and so on. There were none left now. The door at the far end of the room was held ajar by a weight exactly like the one attached to Peagreen's pulley, except that this one was even larger. What giant scales they must have used in those olden days!

  Peagreen, edging past her, made his way along the sill and stepped down onto the slate shelf, which lay almost flush with it. "You see," he said, putting out a hand to encourage her to follow him, "how easy it is!" It was indeed easy, Arrietty agreed, and what fun it all was!

  "Now," Peagreen went on, "let's see what Mrs. W. has got under these covers..."

  They lifted up the first wire-mesh cover (to Arrietty's surprise, it was quite light) and peered beneath it: two partridges, plucked and dressed for the table. They dropped the cover rather quickly: neither of them liked the smell. Next they lifted the corner of a white napkin: a crusty pie, gleaming and golden. "No good to us," said Peagreen, "unless they've cut into it first." All the same, Arrietty broke off the tiniest edge of pastry; light as a feather it was, and tasted delicious. She was aware suddenly of feeling very hungry: neither she nor her parents had touched the food that Spiller had brought them in the ashtray, and that now seemed a long time ago.

  Under another cover were the appetizing remains of a roast sirloin of beef. Arrietty ate up several small crispy bits that had fallen onto the dish. They then found a large piece of Cheddar cheese on a cheese board behind the sirloin. It looked deliciously moist and crumbly. Arrietty and Peagreen ate up the crumbs, carefully putting back the piece of buttered muslin with which it had been covered. There was a glass jar of celery, crisp and scraped clean of its fibers. They broke off a little piece of this. Arrietty began to feel appeased. They bypassed the ham bone, although quite a lot of ham still adhered to it, but were tempted by a wire tray of freshly baked rock cakes, gleaming here and there with currants. "We can't interfere much with cakes," Peagreen advised her. "There are exactly a dozen. She would be sure to wonder." So they each dug out a currant and passed on to a row of small glass jars. They contained something pinkish and were topped with melted butter. "Her potted meat," said

  Peagreen. "She sells it round the village, and very good it is. But we can't touch these either, now the butter's hardened. Have you seen enough now?"

  "What's in that brown bowl?" asked Arrietty, standing on tiptoe, but even then the sides were too high for her to see into it.

  "Eggs," said Peagreen, "but they're no good to us either: you can't climb about carrying raw eggs." He was making his way back among the various dishes towards the latticed window. "Come on, I'll show you the way to climb down."

  Arrietty, following him, asked rather fearfully, "Down to the floor?"

  "Yes, we can go back by the old kitchen. And there's something else I want to show you."

  It was easy work climbing down the wine rack: a swift slide down on the wooden uprights, a short rest on the edge of the curved hole made to house each bottle, another slide or two, and then they were on the floor. Climbing up might be harder, Arrietty thought to herself, but Peagreen showed her a dusty length of knotted rope attached to a nail below the lip of the shelf. Under the shadow of the window sill, it had been hardly visible against the dark wood. "You keep your feet to the uprights where they're built against the wall and sort of walk, and you're up in a minute. Rather like rock climbing, but a lot easier..."

  Arrietty remembered Pod's injunctions: "A human bean could move that," she pointed out (she was still determined to call them beans).

  "They could, but they don't," said Peagreen. "They hardly ever look lower than the food shelves, except when they sweep the floor. And that's not often." He was crossing the flagstones towards the locked bin that stood nearest the window. "This is the thing I wanted to show you." He went up to the corner where the front of the bin joined the whitewashed wall. Arrietty came beside him. It was a dark corner, still in the shadow of the window sill above. "It's this," said Pea-green, putting out a hand; and Arrietty saw that there was a crack in the plaster at floor level where the wood was joined to the wall. "It's always been there," said Peagreen, "but I widened it a bit: you can just slide through." He proceeded to do so. "Come on," he called from inside the bin, his voice sounding curiously hollow. It was a bit of a squash, but she managed to creep in after him. If by scraping away some of the wall plaster he had widened the crack, he had not widened it very much.

  Inside, it was very dark. She was aware of an empty, imprisoning vastness and a clean, half-familiar smell. But it was warm. "Come and feel this back wall," said Peagreen. She followed him and laid her hands on the smooth, unseen surface. "It is warm, isn't it?" said Peagreen in a whisper. "She keeps a good fire up."

  "What did they store in here?" asked Arrietty. She also spoke in a whisper—somet
hing to do with the enclosure and vastness of the unseen space about them.

  "Soap," said Peagreen, "kitchen soap. In the old days they used to make their own. Long soft blocks of it. They stored it in here to dry out. There's still a block of it there in a corner. Hard as nails, it is now. I'll show you later, when I get a bit of candle..."

  "What are you going to use this place for?" asked Arrietty, after a moment.

  "To keep warm in winter. I've got all summer to fix it up a bit. I'll get in a stock of candle ends, and food will be no problem. If I can get hold of more paper, I'll most likely get on with my book."

  Arrietty was becoming more and more impressed. So he wrote poems, he painted pictures, and now he was writing a book! "What's it about, your book?" she asked after a moment.

  "Well," he said carelessly, "I suppose it's a sort of history of the Overmantels. After all, they've been in this house longer than any set of human beings have. Generation after generation, they've seen all the changes..."

  Arrietty was silent again, her hands on the warm wall. She was thinking hard. "Who's going to read your book?" she asked at last. "I mean, so few borrowers can read or write."

  "That's true," admitted Peagreen glumly. "I suppose it depended on where you were brought up. In the old days, in a house like this, the human children had tutors and governesses and lesson books: the borrowers soon picked things up. My grandfather knew Greek and Latin. Up to a point..." he added, as though determined to be truthful. Then he seemed to cheer up a little. "But you never know—there might be someone."

  Arrietty seemed less sure. "A human bean I once knew," she said slowly, "said we were dying out. That the whole race

  of borrowers was dying out." She was thinking of the boy at Firbank.

  Peagreen was silent for a moment, and then he said quietly, "That may be so." Suddenly he seemed to throw such thoughts aside. "But anyway, we're here now! Come on—I'll take you back through the old kitchen."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Once through the larder door, Arrietty stood still and looked about her. Peagreen came beside her and, in a protective kind of way, slid a hand under her elbow. Before them stretched a stone-flagged passage ending in what looked like an outside door. Beside this, a wooden staircase rose up, with bare, scrubbed treads, under which there seemed to be some kind of built-in cupboard. "Those stairs lead up to their bedroom," Peagreen whispered, "and other rooms beyond." Why were they still whispering? Because, thought Arrietty, they both felt themselves to be in some alien part of the house, a part in which the dreaded human beings lived out their mysterious existence.

  Along the left-hand side of the passage hung a row of bells on coiled steel springs and, beyond them, some kind of cabinet. She knew what these were. Many a time at Firbank she had heard such bells rung to summon Mrs. Driver.

  On the opposite side, facing the bells, were several doors, all closed. Immediately beside them, on their right, another door stood ajar, and opposite it, on their left, a matching door, which had no latch and was secured, Arrietty noticed, by a loop of wire fixed to a nail in the upright.

  "What's in there?" she asked.

  "It's the old game larder," Peagreen told her. "They don't use it now."

  "Can I look in?" She had seen that, in spite of the loop of wire, the door was not quite closed.

  "If you like," said Peagreen.

  She tiptoed up and peered through the crack, and then she slipped inside. Peagreen followed.

  It was a vast, shadowy jumble of a place, lit by a grimy window just below the ceiling, from which, she saw, hung row upon row of hooks. And something else: it looked like a longish log hung, slightly on a slope, on two chains suspended on very stout hooks.

  "What's that?" she asked.

  "For hanging venison. You could hang a whole deer on that—with the legs hanging down each side."

  "A whole deer! Whatever for?"

  "To eat—as soon as it got a bit smelly." He thought a moment. "Or perhaps they hung it the other way up with the four legs tied together. I don't really know: it was all before my time, you see. I only know they had a zinc bath underneath to catch the blood."

  "How horrible!"

  Peagreen shrugged. "They were horrible," he said.

  Arrietty shuddered and, turning her eyes away from the deer sling, glanced at several rows of musty antlers that hung against the wall. More dead deer, she supposed, used as hooks for hanging other game. She turned then to examine the jumble of objects on the floor: broken garden chairs, stained dressers, half-used pots of paint or whitewash, an ancient kitchen stove that had lost a leg and slanted drunkenly to one side, old stone hot-water bottles, two paint-splashed stepladders—one tall, one short—the top part of a grandfather clock, various bags that seemed to contain tools, battered tins, cardboard boxes...

  "What a mess," she said to Peagreen.

  "A useful mess," he replied.

  She could see that. Her father would find it a gold mine. "Are these the paints you use for your pictures?"

  "No." Peagreen laughed, but he sounded rather scornful. "There was an artist chappie staying here, left behind a lot of half-used tubes. And," he added, "quite a decent roll of canvas. We better get on now; we said we wouldn't be long..."

  They slid out sideways. As they stood once again in the passage, Peagreen pointed out the various doors: "That one, right at the end, used to be called the tradesmen's entrance. It's the one the Whitlaces use now—the front door is hardly ever opened. That door beside the foot of the stairs was to the servants' hall, but the Whitlaces use it as their sitting room. The next one along was the butler's pantry, next to that is the one that leads to the cellar steps, and this one here"—he crossed the passage to the door opposite the old game larder—"is the old kitchen."

  As Arrietty had noticed when she first saw it, this door stood slightly ajar. "What would happen if they closed it?" she asked as she followed in Peagreen's wake. "I mean, if you

  wanted to get to the larder by way of the old kitchen?"

  He paused. "It wouldn't make any difference," he said. "You can see how cracked and worn these stones are—after years and years of cooks and kitchenmaids trotting backwards and forwards to the larders. Wainscot just took out a cracked piece of paving from below the door. Say the door's shut; you can crawl underneath it. A bit inconvenient at times—it depends on what you're carrying."

  And Arrietty, looking down, could see the missing piece of stone had left a small pit.

  They were in the kitchen now, a room almost as dark and gloomy as the game larder, lit only by a long, narrow window set high in a far wall. The floor seemed to go on and on, the stone flags patched up here and there with dingy-looking concrete. Immediately on her right, as she stood just within the doorway, she saw the great black stove. It seemed to be a slightly newer model of the one discarded in the game larder, except in this case the surface gleamed and shone and gave out a heartening warmth. Beside it, on a roughly made table covered with oilcloth, stood an earthen jar filled with wooden spoons. On one end of the stove stood a large copper stockpot. It too was polished and gleaming. A faint wisp of steam escaped from under the lid and, with it, a savory smell.

  "It's better really," Peagreen was saying, "to go round this kitchen keeping close to the walls. But as the human beings are out and, perhaps, your family is waiting, do you think you could face the open floor?"

  Arrietty looked across the vast expanse, where, she realized, there was no hope of cover. Almost opposite, in the far distance, it seemed, she saw the outline of a door. "If you think it's all right," she said uncertainly. Peagreen, she remembered, could not walk very quickly.

  "Then come on," he said, "let's chance it for once. It takes an age if you have to stick to the walls."

  It seemed a longish walk anyway, and Arrietty had to fight an almost overwhelming instinct to run, in order to match her steps to Peagreen's. Never in her whole life had she felt so exposed as she did on this journey across the vast, empty k
itchen, where only the stove and the wooden table created a kind of warm oasis.

  When at last they approached the far door, she could make out some patches of cloth hanging loosely on its surface. Green baize? Yes, that was it: it was (or might have been) a padded baize door like the one she remembered at Firbank. Yes, now she could see the rusty brass studs that once had secured the padding. Did all old houses have them, she wondered, to keep out the noise and smells from the kitchen? But, on this particular door, the baize was stained and moth-eaten, and some of it hung in tatters. She also noticed, as they drew closer, that the door swung slightly in the draft.

  Arrietty stopped sharply in her tracks. She gripped Peagreen's arm. From somewhere far behind them, she had heard a sound, the fiddling of a key in a lock. Peagreen had heard it too. Both stood rigid as they caught the mutter of voices. A far door slammed to, and footsteps echoed loudly in the flagstone passage. Another door opened, and the footsteps died away.

  "It's all right," breathed Peagreen. "They've gone into the annex. Come on! We'd better hurry—"

  They had barely taken three paces when, once again, they froze. This time they heard the voice more clearly as the footsteps clattered out again. It was a woman's voice, calling back to someone, "...must just take a look at my stew." And the footsteps came hurrying nearer.

  Like a shot thing, Peagreen dropped to the floor, pulling Arrietty with him. "Don't move," he breathed in her ear, as they lay there prostrate. "Not a muscle!"

  Arrietty's heart was beating wildly. She heard the scrape of wood across the flagstones. The kitchen door, through which they had sidled, had been flung open more widely. Then the footsteps paused. It was a sudden, startled pause. They had been seen.

  There were a few moments of complete silence before the footsteps began cautiously to approach them. A thought flew through Arrietty's mind as she lay there, rigid with terror, beside Peagreen: "Mrs. W. had seen something, but in this dim light and at that distance, she could not quite make out what it was..."