The Key to the Indian

“No. Patrick said not to. Because if I had, it would have changed history. Everything that came from stealing the earrings – things linked to other things, like a chain – wouldn’t have happened, and I – I might never have been born.”

His father swallowed hard. His face had gone very pale. “I wonder if we ought to be meddling with this,” he said at last. “I wonder if we ought not to just – just put the key, and the cupboard, and the cashbox, and the Account, the plastic figures and everything else, safely away somewhere and – and just forget it.”

“No, Dad! It’s no use. I tried that. I did try – you know I did – I put the cupboard and key in the bank and I swore I wouldn’t take them out and mess about with the magic any more, but – but you can’t not, somehow. I couldn’t, anyway. It – when I read the Account, I – I just felt the magic calling me.”

His father was gazing at him with a very strange, troubled expression. “Omri. You don’t suppose—”

“What?”

“Well… don’t be scared. But Frederick obviously inherited some part of Jessie’s ‘gift’, or he couldn’t have put magic into the cupboard he made. I just wondered if that – magic power – if… After all, they were your blood relatives. Perhaps it’s something that can be – passed on.”

There was a long silence. They stared into each other’s eyes.

“Wouldn’t…” Omri found he had to clear his throat. “Wouldn’t – Mum have had some of it?”

His father frowned and went to the window. It was framed by deep eaves of thatch. The sun was just coming up over the hill on the horizon, the one that had on its top a strange little circle of trees, like a peacock’s crown.

“I suppose Mum never told you about the time she saw a ghost.”

Omri jumped. “A ghost!”

“Yes. She told me about it ages ago. I didn’t believe her. Of course. I didn’t believe in anything unprovable in those days.”

“Whose ghost did she see?”

“Well, that’s one of the things I was thinking about, lying awake last night.” He looked down at the little woman-shape in his hand. “I only have her description to go on, and I only heard the story once. Years ago, before we were married. She told it to me when I was saying I didn’t believe in anything supernatural, including an afterlife. And she disagreed, and we were sort of quarrelling. She told me this story, to prove me wrong. And I…” He paused, and swallowed, “I laughed.”

“Tell me!”

“She said she was visiting her mother’s grave – Lottie, who’d died in the bombing of London, when your mum was still a baby. Lottie was buried in the same grave as her father, Matthew, in Clapham Cemetery, near where she was born, where her mother still lived. Jessica Charlotte’s sister.”

“Maria.”

His father nodded. “Yes. Maria, who brought your mother up. She was an old lady by then, in her eighties, but she went every week to the cemetery to put flowers on Lottie’s grave. Mum didn’t often go because she was busy with her own life by then, she was a student, but that day Maria wasn’t well and Mum felt she had to drive her to Clapham instead of letting her go by herself on the bus. Mum said she felt guilty about not taking her gran more often but you know, if you don’t even remember the dead person, it’s hard to visit the graveyard regularly.

“Anyway, they got there, and bought some flowers at the gates, and the old lady filled a plastic bottle with water from a tap. Mum carried the things and held her gran’s arm, and they walked to the grave. And then Mum gave the flowers to her gran, who knelt down by the grave. She was – you know – taking out last week’s flowers and arranging the new ones in the vase with the fresh water, and suddenly Mum saw someone standing beside her.”

Omri sat rigid. He felt as if ice-water were trickling down his spine. He could see it in his mind’s eye. He saw the whole scene as if it were being enacted in front of him. He even saw who his mum had seen, before his father went on:

“She could see her clearly. A woman in an old-fashioned long dress with her hair piled up on her head. There was a strong breeze blowing, but the woman’s hair didn’t stir. She was looking straight at Mum.”

Omri wanted to ask his dad to go on, but he felt frozen, frozen in the scene. He hardly needed to ask. He saw.

The woman was Jessica Charlotte.

She took a step forward, nearer to the grave, looking all the time at the young girl standing on the other side of it. She put her hand – wearing a long black glove – on the shoulder of the bent old woman, busy with the flowers, who didn’t seem notice. She patted her gently. She smiled a sad, sad smile at the young girl who was going to be Omri’s mother. And she nodded tenderly down at the old lady, as if to say, “See how old she is. You must take care of her now.” Maybe she even did say it. And then suddenly she wasn’t there any more.

Omri’s father was talking. He was describing the scene just as Omri saw it in his head. Which came first – what Omri saw, or what his dad said?

When his dad finished, there was a silence, and then Omri said in a choked voice, “Mum must have felt awful.”

“About seeing the ghost?”

“No! About all the times she hadn’t taken her gran to the cemetery. About the ghost needing to come and – and remind her to take care of Maria.”

“Do you think the ghost – was Jessica Charlotte?”

“Of course it was,” said Omri simply.

“You sound sure.”

“I am.”

“Omri – how can you know that?”

“Well it’s not because I’m magic. It’s just – I’ve got a very good imagination, and sometimes it just tells me things.”

His father looked at him, and Omri heard what he had just said, heard it as his father must have, as proof that Omri had a bit of Jessica Charlotte’s gift.

They talked it all over very carefully before anyone else in the house woke up. The sun was well clear of ‘Peacock Hill’ and streaming into the room before they first heard the others beginning to stir, and had to stop.

Omri, though of course he wanted to see Jessica Charlotte again, and thought it very probable that she would have the ability to make them another magic key, one that would work in the car, was very doubtful just the same about his dad’s plan.

There was nothing in the Account about her making a second time-journey. The first one – when she visited Omri and Patrick and sang them a music-hall song – was hinted at in her diary, but nothing after that. Surely if she had been brought a second time, and asked to make another key, she would have remembered it, especially so close after the first time.

Omri’s father was very interested in the time question. “Does it work the same at both ends?”

“Yes.”

“That’s to say, if a week has passed here, a week has passed for the people in the past?”

“That’s right. I know because when Little Bull came this last time, his baby was about a year old, and it was a year here since he was born. Anyway, I knew it before.”

“Okay, so let’s work it out. How many days is it since Jessica Charlotte came?”

Omri thought about it. A week had passed between seeing her, and the day his dad had found the figures and discovered the secret, and three days more had passed since then.

“Ten days.”

“Ten days…” His dad was looking at the notebook. “So. Right after she came here – no, it wasn’t. Let me see. She made the key. That was the day of the victory parade, the day she said goodbye to Lottie, Armistice Day – November the eleventh, nineteen-eighteen. The next day she went back to Maria’s to ‘say goodbye’, pretending she was going abroad. And that was the day she stole the earrings. So that’s one day.

“Then, she writes, a week went by. And at the end of that week, she got the news that little Lottie had been accused of stealing the earrings, and had run out of the house, and her father, Matthew, ran after her and got run over and killed. And that’s where her part of the Account ends.”

“Well, there is a bit more…”

“Not that you can read. When she got to writing that part, all those years later when she was on her deathbed…” he looked up, and looked around. “Maybe in this very room, Omri!”

“No, it was Gillon’s room.”