Toad in the Hole

Three days later, Silver was in her vegetable garden weeding the cabbages, when she heard Mrs Rokabye calling to her from the house.

It sounded as though Mrs Rokabye was shouting something like ‘Toad in the Hole’, but Silver knew it couldn’t be that, because Toad in the Hole is something to eat and Silver never got anything to eat from Mrs Rokabye.

She’s probably found a frog stuck down the sink, thought Silver. I’d better go and rescue it.

Silver shut the gate on to her little garden so that the hens couldn’t get out, and walked towards the kitchen. She could smell food – hot food, which was very strange.

Mrs Rokabye was standing at the low kitchen door, smiling. It was a horrible sight; the corners of her mouth were drawn up towards her eyebrows, and her eyebrows were pulled up towards the hairnet she always wore in the house. She had been practising smiling all morning, but it was not nearly for long enough.

‘Welcome, dear child!’ she said. ‘Come and eat your lunch while I tell you something very exciting.’

Silver came slowly into the kitchen. It was not a modern kitchen at all. It was enormous, like a bus depot, and it had a stone floor, and a huge iron oven, and a long wooden table with long wooden benches placed on either side. There were hooks from the ceiling for hanging hams and herbs. There were two stone sinks side by side with plate racks nailed on the wall above them. There was no fridge, no washing machine, no dishwasher, no lino, no TV, no nothing at all, except what had been put there four hundred years ago. Oh, and there was Mrs Rokabye’s microwave, sitting on its own at one end of the twenty-foot long oak table, where twenty servants had eaten every day, when the house had been a great house.

The microwave looked very out of place in the old kitchen, as though a Martian had left it there and gone back to Mars.

Today, though, Mrs Rokabye was not heating up Ready-Meals for One in the blue microwave. She was bending over the great oven and lifting out a huge tin dish of sausages cooked in egg batter.

‘Toad in the Hole!’ she said, placing it on the table in front of the hungry and amazed Silver.

Quickly, she washed her hands and sat down, as Mrs Rokabye cut two portions with a gleaming knife.

‘You never said you could cook,’ said Silver.

‘I have been very busy,’ said Mrs Rokabye.

‘You’ve been here for four years.’

‘Is it really four years? All that dusting I’ve had to do – the place was a shambles, as you know. Well, well, four years, how time flies – tempus fugit, as Abel Darkwater would say.’

‘What?’ said Silver, her mouth full of delicious sausage.

‘Tempus fugit,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘It means “Time flies”.’

‘What language is that?’ asked Silver.

‘Latin, I think,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘You must ask Mr Darkwater yourself. Ask him tomorrow – for that is my wonderful news!’

While Silver ate seconds and thirds of Toad in the Hole, Mrs Rokabye told her of their trip to London the very next day.

‘We will have a picnic on the train. We will stay in Mr Darkwater’s magnificent house – nothing like this – all modern inside, and we will be taken to a musical in the evening. Mr Darkwater loves children and all he asks in return for his kindness is that you talk to him as though he were your own father. If he asks you a question – any question, do you hear me – if he asks you a question you must answer it.’

‘What if I don’t know the answer?’ said Silver.

‘I am sure you do know the answer,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘All questions have an answer.’

Silver wondered if that was true, but there was no point asking Mrs Rokabye. Privately, Silver thought that the answer to some questions was another question.

‘Be ready to answer,’ said Mrs Rokabye, ‘it will be better for everyone that way. Then we shall all have a lovely time.’

She said it still smiling, though by now the strain was beginning to show, like somebody desperately trying to hold on to the edge of a cliff by her fingertips.

She turned away to get Silver some chocolate, but really to give her face a chance to relax into its customary scowl.

As she stood with her back to Silver, relaxing and scowling, she didn’t realise that she was reflected in the polished metal door of the Chocolate Cabinet. Silver could see the real look on her face, and she knew that nothing had changed.

The Chocolate Cabinet was where Mrs Rokabye kept her supplies of caramels and cake bars. The cupboard was made of steel and fastened with a metal padlock of the ferocious kind. Silver was never allowed in there.

Carefully, and with something like pain, Mrs Rokabye took out two tubes of Smarties, then put one back, then took it out again. She reminded herself that she was a nice kind lady, at least for the next twenty-four hours, and she guessed that a nice kind lady would not be mean with her sweets.

‘London!’ she said brightly, forcing pleasure and happiness into her voice, like the ugly sisters forcing their feet into Cinderella’s slipper. ‘London! We are going by train at eight o’clock in the morning and we will have a lovely time.’

‘When are we coming back?’ asked Silver. She loved the house and she hated the thought of leaving it. The house was her friend. The house felt alive. Since her parents had disappeared, it was the house that had looked after her, not Mrs Rokabye.

‘Such an ungrateful girl!’ said Mrs Rokabye, keeping her voice light, her fists clenched with fury under the table. ‘Here I am, doing my best to win influence with important people like Mr Darkwater, just so that you can have a holiday like other children, and do you say thank you? Not you! You ask when you are coming home.’

‘Well, I need to know so that I can pack my suitcase,’ said Silver evenly. She knew better than to fight Mrs Rokabye.

‘Ah, well, indeed,’ said Mrs Rokabye, mollified. ‘Then take whatever you like, but only a small bag.’

‘How many pairs of knickers?’

‘Two,’ said Mrs Rokabye.

By now, Mrs Rokabye had been pleasant for a whole hour, and she had smiled through most of that hour, and she had spent the morning cooking instead of lying in bed reading Murder Mysteries, and she had given away some of her chocolate, and the whole business had exhausted her. She decided to go and lie down and take a pill. She told Silver to wash the dishes, and then she disappeared up the stairs.

As soon as she had left the room, Silver ran over to the Chocolate Cabinet because Mrs Rokabye had left the padlock off.

‘1603,’ said Silver, reading the lined-up numbers. ‘Now I can get in here whenever I like.’

She grabbed a couple of extra chocolate bars, and hid them in her jeans. Then, hearing Mrs Rokabye returning, she turned away and ran to the sink.

Mrs Rokabye swept into the kitchen like a hailstorm and went straight to the Chocolate Cabinet and locked it.

‘Do your packing in good time tonight,’ she said. ‘I will leave you ham sandwiches and milk for supper, and I want you in the hall, washed and dressed by seven o’clock tomorrow morning. A taxi will take us to the station. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Mrs Rokabye,’ said Silver, without turning round.

That afternoon Silver went to talk to the house.

The house was very quiet but she knew it was listening to her. She often talked to the house, but she preferred to do it in her special place. It was a room where nobody had ever been but her.

It was triangular room with triangular windows on three sides, and a strange old window in the sloping roof. Silver called it the Sky Window, because all you could see through it were the clouds floating by.

When Silver sat in the special room, she felt like a bee in a hive.

She sat in it today, cross-legged, making a triangle of her body, and closing her eyes so that she could listen to the house. It was here that she knew the house was alive, and it was here that the house spoke to her – not with words, but she understood what it was saying.

‘What will happen to me in London?’ she said.

For a minute the house was silent, then she saw a red light flooding the window in front of her, and colouring the thick wide floorboards red, and her legs and hands red, and the front of her sweatshirt, right up to her neck, but not her face.

‘Danger,’ the house was saying. ‘Danger.’

‘Then I won’t go,’ said Silver. ‘I’ll hide in you and she’ll never find us again.’

The house said nothing.

‘Do I have to go?’ said Silver, who knew the answer in the pit of her stomach.

‘Yes,’ said the house.

And for the first time in her life Silver realised that sometimes you have to do something difficult and dangerous, something you don’t want to do at all, and that you have to do it because something more important depends on you.

‘Will I find the Timekeeper?’ she said, but the house didn’t answer.

‘Will I come back here one day?’

‘Yes,’ said the house, ‘one day.’

Silver sat on the floor as the long shadows of the afternoon filled the room.

What did she know? She knew that something had happened to her parents. She knew that Mrs Rokabye and Abel Darkwater were in league against her, and against Tanglewreck too, and there was the thing called the Timekeeper, but she didn’t know exactly what it was, or why a watch could be so important.

She knew that in the world beyond the house very strange things were happening to Time. She took all her knows and her don’t knows and asked the house what she should do.

And then, without waiting for an answer, she suddenly stood up, because the house had already given her its answer.

And that is how Silver and Mrs Rokabye caught the 8:05 from Manchester Piccadilly to London King’s Cross, leaving the great house watching behind its hedges of beech and yew.