by Polly Crosby
POLLY CROSBY lives in Norfolk with her husband and son, and her very loud and much-loved Oriental rescue cat, Dali. To find out more about Polly’s writing, please visit pollycrosby.com. Polly can also be found on Twitter as @WriterPolly.
The Illustrated Child
Polly Crosby
ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020
Copyright © Polly Crosby 2020
Polly Crosby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780008358426
Version 2020-10-19
Note to Readers
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008358402
To Matt and Sebastian
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Part Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Part Three
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
Prologue
You probably know me: I’m the Kemp Treasure Girl. Maybe you had the books as a child. Perhaps your dad read them to you in those wilting hours of sleep where books become dreams and dreams become books. Did you look for the treasure, digging in your garden, unsure of what you were searching for?
Mine was an unusual infamy for one so young. Not an all-encompassing, celebrity fame, but one that flattened me into two dimensions and picked out the colour of my eyes and my dress. One that stopped people in the street and made their necks crane back round to gaze at me.
The version of me in the books was my friend. She was always there for me, sharing in my adventures, appearing at the lifting of a page. But children grow up, and as I grew taller and wiser, Romilly Kemp in the book stayed young and innocent, a sickly-sweet imposter who wore my dress and suckled at my father’s love, leeching it away until there was barely any left for me at all.
But then I made a real friend. Someone I could trust: someone who knew intimately my deepest, darkest thoughts even if I dare not acknowledge them myself.
But the beginnings of a friendship are like the beginning of a book: you never know how they will turn out until the very end.
Part One
One
Braër was an ancient farmhouse. A month of living there had still not unearthed a fraction of its secrets.
As I ran from the house, tugging on unfamiliar wellies, I stared up at its mossy roof and dirty walls. Dad told me that it had probably once been called Brother Farm, but time and the soft Suffolk accent had changed it.
The house itself was long and low and surrounded on three sides by a moat clogged with cowpats and slime. In the middle of the water was an old fountain, and perched atop it was a gargoyle with a sinister, winking face. It ogled me as I ran past, its eyes bulbous and staring.
On the south side of the house, down an overgrown path, stretched a bumpy meadow filled with sagging grass. It was the perfect base for my newly invented invisible army, and the edge of my territory. I could go there on my own, making pretend campfires and having sword fights with prickly bushes, knowing that I was safe, even though I could barely see the house above the long, scratchy grass.
As I set off down the path towards my camp, a sharp whistle brought me back. Dad was stooped in the back door, his huge shoulders nearly touching the frame on either side. Something small and snow-like was curled up in his open palm.
‘What is it?’
‘I wanted to draw one, so I thought, why not?’ he said, planting the tiny kitten into my eager arms, and suddenly it was mine. ‘It’s a Siamese,’ he said, wiping his hands on his trousers, leaving a snail’s trail of white fur on the corduroy.
‘Is it a girl or boy?’ I asked, trying to look through the fur at the correct place.
‘A boy.’ Dad crouched down, looking at me as I hugged the kitten. Briefly he reached forward and touched my cheek, and I leant into the roughness of his hand.
‘Yes,’ he said to himself, his voice a growl of love, ‘it’s that look in your eyes, right there that I want to capture.’ He straightened up, his knees creaking. ‘I’m going to need to paint him. And you, of course. I have an idea…’ he trailed off. Frowning at me, he turned on his heel and entered the house, leaving the kitten and I alone.
I examined his bony body. He was small and soft, and smelt of wee and sawdust. He had pale creamy fur tinged with chocolate brown at each edge. As I was studying him, he uncurled himself, tipping off my arms, towards the moat below us. I caught him by the tail just in time, tucking him back safely into the crook of my arm. He opened his eyes for the first time and stared at me with big, red-blue irises. He was hot and slightly sticky-damp in my hands, and I loved him immediately.
I balanced him on my shoulder and made my way up the two flights of stairs to my bedroom, filling the kitten in on the minutiae of our lives.
‘Dad lost his university job ages ago, and he’s been trying to work out what to do with himself ever since,’ I said, tickling him under his chin as I ran up the second staircase; the tiny, windy one that Dad was forever tripping up on. ‘He says we’ve moved here so he can paint instead of teach art. It’s the summer holidays, and I’m going to be nine soon, and Dad says he might have to give me
a painting instead of a real present for my birthday, but that’s OK because his paintings are like stories made real. He says someone has to make some money, or we’ll be living on bread crusts and moat water, so I thought I might sell some stuff outside the house. I found some nice pebbles and I tried to paint them, but I’m not very good at painting. So I wrote poems on them instead, but I’m not very good at poems either, so I dropped them in the moat. Here, this is us.’
I pushed open the three-foot-high door that marked the entrance to my vast bedroom.
The kitten perked up as we climbed through into the huge, bright space. It was the shape of a tent, one of those old-fashioned tents – a huge triangle. And it felt like a tent too: when it was windy outside, the air caught beneath all the beams and vibrated until you felt like there was nothing but thin canvas between you and the sky.
When Dad had first shown me my room, I spent the entire day in there, not daring to believe all this space belonged to me. There were dustsheets over the furniture, and in the corner, a pretty parasol leant against the wall as if the young lady it had belonged to had left it there only moments before. The first time I opened it, it showered dust all around me, and I walked the length of the room, holding it above my head in a sedate manner, pretending I was as posh as its previous owner.
I tipped the kitten onto the bed, and studied him. ‘You look like someone important,’ I said, ‘and important people have long names. How about Captain Montgomery of the Second Regiment?’ Montgomery seemed satisfied with his name, and curled up happily on the quilt.
On that first night his mews pierced my dreams. He wrapped his pulsing little body about my head on the pillow, and I found him in my dreams too, popping into existence in the middle of a sweet shop, then a flowery meadow, the little bell on his collar rattling shrilly, announcing his arrival and preceding his loud meow.
On waking the next morning, he followed me round the house, and Dad soon joined us, stooping to sketch us whenever we stopped, wiping his dark hair out of his eyes and grasping his stubby pencil, his knees creaking as he crouched down to get a better angle of us.
Dad’s love of drawing had always been a part of him, but since we had moved to Braër it had become an obsession. His fingers, when they stroked the fringe from my face late at night, had the sharp tang of pencil lead on them, and the skin of his face had echoes of paint and pastel, especially under his eyes, where he had rubbed them so often in frustration. I had the feeling that moving to such a ramshackle house had made Dad start to go ramshackle too. His jumpers, once smart, had started to become holey and smattered with the baked bean juice that he sipped straight from the tin.
It was only by the end of the second day of kitten ownership that I managed to shake Dad off, creeping back to hide in my bedroom, the little cat on my shoulder. I shut the door quietly so as not to let Dad know where we had gone. I needed to show Montgomery something secret. In the middle of my bedroom, concealed beneath my bed, was a special floorboard. Below it, in the small dark vacuum, were my favourite things: a musty snail’s shell, a rusty bolt with a star-shaped end that I’d brought from our old house, and my most treasured possession: a shiny yellow coin that I had found three days ago in the middle of the meadow, which might or might not be real gold. It had a funny-shaped man’s head on one side, and he was wearing a crown a bit like Jesus. I put the coin between my teeth and bit down on it like I’d seen pirates do, but my tooth, which was a bit wobbly, shot with pain. I spat the coin back into the hole and sat, tonguing the tooth so that it spun-danced in my mouth. Montgomery, growing disinterested, squatted nearby, releasing a flurry of wee that trickled into the cracks between the floorboards.
Later, in the slumbering twilight hours of my bedtime, when my tired mouth could no longer accommodate the syllables of my new kitten’s name, Montgomery was condensed down to Monty, and then just Mont. I held him close and inhaled his buttery smell.
I lay back, eyes half closed, listening hard for the battalion of soldiers that left the meadow at night to keep their march on the stairs. Their marching tonight was soft, as if their feet were clad in slippers. They condensed into one soldier, a bearded, paint-covered soldier that melted into the form of my dad as he sat on the edge of my bed.
‘Sorry for hiding,’ I mumbled, turning my cheek so it nestled into the soft corduroy of his leg. I felt his hand on my head. It was big and heavy. I liked it.
‘Your hair is awfully tangled; it feels like a bird’s nest.’
‘I’d quite like a bird to nest in my hair.’
‘Then we shall leave it be. What story shall I tell you tonight, daughter-mine?’
‘The one about the Rabian Nights.’
Dad’s stories were full of colour even though he never had any pictures to go with them. You could smell the hot, spicy night air and the sweating horses as they galloped across the sand. Mont jumped from my neck and landed with a soft thud on the bed. As he began the story, Dad ran a hairy finger along the length of Monty’s tiny spine, exploring the kitten’s bones as he spoke of strange fruits and spiky plants, turbaned men and glittering jewels. I closed my eyes and I was there, a bearded man with tattooed skin and dark eyes swooping in at me amidst a cloud of fragrant air.
Dad leant forward and kissed me, first on my forehead, and then on the little mole on my cheek. He left me dozing quietly, my mind on flying carpets and dancing snakes. When he had gone, I opened my eyes and scooped Monty up, wrapping him round my head like a turban, his tail covering my face. My finger inched its way under the floppy skin of his belly to stroke the soft bump of the mole on my cheek, and the light beyond Monty’s fur flickered out as my eyelids closed.
Two
‘It’s done in oil paint. I thought I might sell it,’ Dad said, his hand gently stroking the thick swirls of the painting he had unearthed from one of the bedrooms, as if he could manipulate the long-hardened brush strokes. ‘This is where we are now,’ he said, pointing to a tiny line of black far up at the top left of the painting.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the roof of Braër House.’
‘And are we in that house, too?’
‘A version of us is,’ he answered, putting me down on the floor.
‘Is it the version where Mum still lives with us?’
Dad stared at the little roof in the painting.
‘Is there a painting like this one in that Braër?’ I continued, unperturbed.
‘Yes,’ he said finally.
‘And which version of me is looking at it?’
‘The version that doesn’t ask so many questions.’
I wondered if there was a version of me that didn’t ask questions at all. It must be a very boring one.
‘How old is Braër?’ I asked.
‘Oh, hundreds of years old. Many, many families have lived here before us. Probably families with children at some point, too.’
I nodded, thinking of a doll I had found in a tattered cardboard box on our first day here. It was missing its hair, and its head and all of its limbs were lying in a mangled heap. I wondered who had taken it apart. They might be grown up now: a famous surgeon, or someone who solved murders by studying dismembered bodies.
Dad’s stomach gave a sonorous rumble. ‘It must be lunchtime,’ he said, patting his belly affectionately and looking around for a clock.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, catching sight of Monty as he trotted past the door.
I left Dad studying the painting, and wandered into the dining room to look for the kitten. The day before I had found a really useful hiding place behind the dining table. The wall down near the floor was crumbly and appeared to be made of hair. Thinking of dead bodies and mummified cats, I had pulled at the hair, hoping for at least a fossilised baby. Instead, a great lump of wall came partly away. I had put my hand in the hole and felt around. The ground inside the wall felt all rough and cold. When I pulled my arm out, my hand and sleeve were black. I had since discovered an old bottle of nail var
nish in the upstairs bathroom. It smelt of pear drops and made my eyes water. I was on the hunt for a good hiding place for it. Forgetting Monty, I got down on my knees and inspected the hole again. It was blacker than I remembered. If I screwed my eyes up I could almost see spiders in it, tumbling about, spinning their sticky webs.
Disappointed, I carried my little bottle outside instead. It had rained in the night, and everything sang with the drip of water. I looked out over the straggly remains of the ornamental yews bordering the herb garden, and felt especially small and alone in such a grand space. It was a huge house for just Dad and me, and I glanced back inside, wondering whether to call out to him, to ask if he’d like to come and play. But Dad, I knew, was busy, and so I stepped gingerly forward, into the unknown.
The unknown, it turned out, was wild and wet, and my trainers soon became woven in soaking grass stems. I swept through the garden, admiring my new green shoes, and stopped briefly to gaze into the moat.
I could sense the gargoyle watching me from the top of the fountain even before I looked at him. He was small and crouched like a monkey, perched in the middle of the moat on the fountain’s broken remains. I studied the mischievous leer on his face, trying to decide if he was friend or foe.
When we had arrived, a month before, we had unloaded our suitcases into the garden and sat on the bank, dipping our weary feet in the cool of the moat.
‘Don’t ever go in the moat without me, Romilly. Do you understand?’ Dad had said, his toes sifting the pondweed that coated the surface. ‘Water can be very dangerous.’
I had nodded solemnly. But now, a month later, and much more worldly wise, I crouched down by the water’s edge. The moat didn’t look dangerous; there were no crashing waves or sucking whirlpools, only the quiet drip, drip of water leaking from the gargoyle’s broken mouth. I had a sudden, strange feeling that Dad would know if I disobeyed him, that the peculiar creature could spring to life and whisper secrets to him. I turned away from the moat, picking my way instead over to the cart shed, where the remnants of roof tiles littered the ground.