Fire and Hemlock

“Didn’t you want your drink?” the man asked as the lawyer’s voice faded to a rise and fall in the distance.

Polly shook her head. Her voice seemed to have gone away. There was an archway opening off the hall. In the room through the archway she could see the servitor setting wineglasses out on a big, polished dinner table. Polly wanted to shout to him to come and explain that he had let her into the funeral, but she could not utter a sound. The big hand holding hers was pulling her along, into the passage she had come in by. Polly, as she went with it, cast her eyes round the hall for a last look at its grandeurs. Wistfully she thought of herself jumping into one of the Ali Baba vases and staying there hidden until everyone had gone away. But as she thought it, she was already in the side passage with the door standing open on the gusty trees at the end of it. The lawyer’s voice was out of hearing now.

“Will you be warm enough outside in that dress?” the man holding her hand asked politely.

His politeness seemed to deserve an answer. Polly’s voice came back. “Yes thank you,” she replied sadly. “I’ve got my real clothes on underneath.”

“Very wise,” said the man. “Then we can go into the garden.” They stepped out of the door, where the wind wrapped Polly’s black dress round her legs and flapped her hair sideways. It could not do much with the man’s hair, which was smoothed across his head in an elderly style, so it stood it up in colourless hanks and rattled the jacket of his dark suit. He shivered. Polly hoped he would send her off and go straight indoors again. But he obviously meant to see her properly off the premises. He turned to the right with her. The wind hurled itself at their faces. “This is better,” said the man. “I wish I could have thought of a way to get that poor boy Seb out of it too. I could see he was as bored as you were. But he didn’t have the sense to sit near the door.”

Polly turned and looked up at him in astonishment. He smiled down at her. Polly gave him a hasty smile in return, hoping he would think she was shy, and turned her face back to the wind to think about this. So the man thought she really was part of the funeral. He was just meaning to be kind. “It was boring, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Terribly,” he said, and let go of her hand.

Polly ought to have run off then. And she would have, she thought, remembering it all nine years later, if she had simply thought he was just being kind. But the way he spoke told her that he had found the funeral far more utterly boring than she had. She remembered the way the lady she had mistaken for Nina had spoken to him, and the way the other guests had looked at him while he was walking about looking for a seat. She realised he had sat down on purpose near the door, and she knew – perhaps without quite understanding it – that if she ran away, it would mean he had to go back into the funeral again. She was his excuse for coming out of it.

So she stayed. She had to lean on the wind to keep beside him while they walked under some ragged, nearly finished roses and the wind blew white petals across them.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Polly.”

“Polly what?”

“Polly Whittacker,” she said without thinking. Then of course she realised that the right name for the funeral should have been Leroy or Perry, or Perry Leroy, or Leroy Perry, like the people who got the bequests in the Will, and had to cover it up. “I’m only adopted, you know. I come from the other branch of the family really.”

“I thought you might,” he said, “with that hair of yours.”

“And what part of the family are you?” Polly said, quickly and artificially, to distract him from asking more. She took a piece of her blowing hair and bit it anxiously.

“Oh, no part really,” he said, ducking his head under a clawing rose. “The dead lady is the mother of my ex-wife, so I felt I ought to come. But I’m the odd man out, here.” Polly relaxed. He was distracted. He said, “My name’s Thomas Lynn.”

“Both parts surname?” Polly asked doubtfully. “Everyone’s so double-barrelled in there.”

That made him give a little crow of laughter, which he swallowed hastily down, as if he were ashamed of laughing at a funeral. “No, no. Just the second part.”

“Mr Lynn, then,” said Polly. She let her hair blow round her face as they walked down some sunken steps, and studied him. Long hair had its uses. He was tall and thin and walked in a way that stooped his round, colourless head between his shoulders, making his head look smaller than it really was – though some of that could have been distance: he was so tall that his head was a long way off from Polly. Like a very tall tortoise, Polly thought. The glasses added to the tortoise look. It was an amiable, vague face they sat on. Polly decided Mr Lynn was nice.

“Mr Lynn,” she asked, “what do you like doing most?”

The tortoise head swung towards her in surprise. “I was just going to ask you that!”

“Snap!” said Polly, and laughed up at him. She knew, of course, by this time, that she was starting to flirt with Mr Lynn. Mum would have given Polly one of her long, heavy stares if she had been there. But, as Polly told herself, she did have to distract Mr Lynn from thinking too deeply about her connection with the funeral, and she did think Mr Lynn was nice anyway. Polly never flirted with anyone unless she liked them. So, as they edged their way between two vast grey hedges of uncut lavender, she said, “What I like best – apart from running and shouting and jokes and fighting – is being things.”

“Being things?” Mr Lynn asked. “Like what?” He sounded wistful and mystified.

“Making things like heroes up with other people, then being them,” Polly explained. The tortoise head turned to her politely. She could tell he did not understand. It was on the tip of her tongue to show him what she meant by telling him how she had arrived at the funeral by being a High Priestess with the police after her. But she dared not say that. “I’ll show you,” she said instead. “Pretend you’re not really you at all. In real life you’re really something quite different.”

“What am I?” Mr Lynn said obligingly.

It would have been better if he had been like Nina and said he would not be friends unless she told him. Without any prodding, Polly’s invention went dead on her. She could only think of the most ordinary things.

“You keep an ironmonger’s shop,” she said rather desperately. To make this seem better, she added, “A very good ironmonger’s shop in a very nice town. And your name is really Thomas Piper. That’s because of your name – Tom, Tom, the piper’s son – you know.”

Mr Lynn smiled. “Oddly enough, my father used to play the flute professionally. Yes. I sell nails and dustbins and hearth-brushes. What else?”

“Hot-water bottles and spades and buckets,” said Polly. “Every morning you go out and hang them round your door, and stack wheelbarrows and watering cans on the pavement.”

“Where passers-by can bark their shins on them. I see,” said Mr Lynn. “And what else? Am I happy in my work?”

“Not quite happy,” Polly said. He was playing up so well that her imagination began to work properly. Down between the lavender bushes, the wind was cut off and she felt much calmer. “You’re a bit bored, but that doesn’t matter, because keeping the shop is only what everyone thinks you do. Really you’re secretly a hero, a very strong one who’s immortal—”

“Immortal?” Mr Lynn said, startled.

“Well nearly,” said Polly. “You’d live for hundreds of years if someone doesn’t kill you in one of your battles. Your name is really – um – Tan Coul and I’m your assistant.”

“Are you my assistant in the shop as well, or just when I’m being a hero?” asked Mr Lynn.

“No, I’m me,” said Polly. “I’m a learner hero. I come with you whenever you go out on a job.”

“Then you’ll have to live within call,” Mr Lynn pointed out. “Where is this shop of mine? Here in Middleton? It had better be, so that I can pick you up easily when a job comes up.”

“No, it’s in Stow-on-the-Water,” Polly said decidedly. Pretending was like that. Things seemed to make themselves up, once you got going.

“That’s awkward,” Mr Lynn said.

“It is, isn’t it?” Polly agreed. “If you like, I’ll come and work in your shop and pretend to be your real-life assistant too. Say when I found out where you lived, I journeyed miles from Middleton to be near you.”

“Better,” said Mr Lynn. “You also pretended to be older than you are, in order not to be sent to school. But that sort of thing can easily be done by the right kind of trainee-hero, I’m sure. What’s your name when we’re out on a job?”

“Hero,” said Polly. “It is a real name,” she protested, as the tortoise head swung down to look at her. “It’s a lady in my book that I read every night. Someone swam the sea all the time to visit her.”

“I know,” said Mr Lynn. “I was just surprised that you did.”

“And it’s a sort of joke,” Polly explained. “I know a lot about heroes, because of my book.”

“I see you do,” said Mr Lynn, smiling rather. “But there are still a lot of things we need to settle. For instance—”

As he spoke, they pushed out from between the grey hedges into a small lawn with an empty sunken pool in it. A brown bird flew away, low across the grass as they came, making a set of sharp, shrieking cries. The wind gusted over, rolling the dry leaves in the concrete bottom of the pool, and a ray of sun followed the wind, travelling swiftly over the lawn.

“For instance,” said Mr Lynn, and stopped.

The sun reached the dry pool. For just a flickering part of a second, some trick of light filled the pool deep with transparent water. The sun made bright, curved wrinkles on the bottom, and the leaves, Polly could have sworn, instead of rolling on the bottom were, just for an instant, floating, green and growing. Then the sunbeam travelled on, and there was just a dry oblong of concrete again. Mr Lynn saw it too. Polly could tell from the way he stopped talking.

“Heroes do see things like that,” she said, in case he was alarmed.

“I suppose they do,” he agreed thoughtfully. “True. They must, since we both are. But, tell me, what happens when the call comes to do a job? I’m in the shop, selling nails. We each snatch up a saw – or I suppose an axe would be better – and we rush out. Where do we go? What do we do?”

They walked past the pool while Polly considered. “We go to kill giants and dragons and things,” she said.