Black Rabbit Hall Read Online Free PDF

his flattened palm. ‘If you waste one you’re in trouble.’
    ‘I won’t, Toby. Promise.’
    ‘What do you think? Inanimate object, or …’ Toby hushes his voice, glances over at me again and grins ‘…
Homo sapiens
?’
    ‘Don’t even think about it,’ I hiss.
    Toby glances across the terrace. ‘Okay, let’s do Peggy. But the deal is you won’t blame me if you get told off.’
    ‘Deal,’ says Barney.
    They sit and wait for a couple of minutes, two pairs of honey-brown eyes – flecked with gold, exactly like Momma’s tiger-eye earrings – fixed intently on the small wooden gate that leads from the terrace to the area at the back of the kitchen garden, where the hens peck the ground and washing billows on the line. I settle back on my ringside seat, feigning disinterest.
    ‘The target is in sight.’ Toby flicks his red curls out of his eyes. His hair can’t sit still either. He’s got three natural partings, so it grows at different angles from his multiple crowns, and a cow’s lick, so he always looks faintly electrified.
    I sit forward, hugging my knees.
    Peggy is out of the door. She is moving across the terrace, the wicker basket on her hip filled with white washing, wooden clothes pegs dangling in the cloth bag.
    ‘At the ready, Barney.’
    Peggy is two feet away. Toby stills Barney’s eager thumb. ‘Wait for it … wait for it …’ Peggy is one foot away. ‘And … fire!’
    Barney’s first moss ball falls short. Peggy doesn’t even notice it. The afternoon already feels anti-climactic.
    ‘Again,’ says Toby, stacking up more balls on the wall. ‘Fire!’
    Again it falls short. Hopeless.
    ‘Fire!’
    The third lands in the basket of washing.
    ‘Yes!’ Toby and Barney raise their fists into the air.
    Peggy takes a moment to realize what’s gone on, first staring down at the green ball on her whites, gaze slowly moving to my brothers snorting on the wall. She sniffs – Peggy has all kinds of sniffs, this one is brisk, like she’s smelling sour milk – picks the ball out and tosses it to the ground. ‘Honestly.’
    Peggy says ‘honestly’ like an older person, a teacher, a church-warden. But she is thirty-five, which is pretty old but not quite as old as Ambrose, Matilda’s tortoise. It’s hard to imagine Peggy any younger – or older – existing anywhere but here.
    Toby says a fisherman jilted her at the altar and that is why she ended up at Black Rabbit Hall, cook, housekeeper and everything else. I have no idea if that is true, or how he knows it. But it feels true. Sometimes I catch her staring a bit too long at Daddy.
    ‘Boys,’ Momma calls. ‘No monkey business. Peggy’s trying to get on with things.’
    Getting on with things is what Peggy does best, unlike the rest of us. She’s always in a flap the first few days we arrive from London, walking too fast, like one of Barney’s clockwork toys – I swear she ticks – swooping featherydusters about like wands, wiping floury hands over and over on her apron even when there’s no flour left on them, trying to remind my parents of her efficiency (and her famous pasties with gravy sizzling in their half-moon seams) even though we all know that Black Rabbit Hall would soon collapse into a pile of smoking rubble without her. And we’d have to survive on marmalade toast.
    She has one of those faces you want to look at a little longer than is necessary – Matilda and I have decided this is the definition of prettiness – with round red cheeks that Peggy blames on the heat from our range (‘Hotter than Hades!’) and rain-grey eyes that always smile before her mouth. As my mother infuriates her by insisting she can wear whatever she wants, Peggy has imposed a strict uniform upon herself: an almost-black navy skirt that steams like a pudding if she stands in front of the fire on a damp day; a white shirt with a small frilly collar; a blue and white stripy apron tied around her waist, her name embroidered in cobalt