Brightwood Read Online Free PDF

visit every summer. Then he stopped coming.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Her mum paused. “I don’t know the details,” she said. “I think he stole a watch. Or they thought he had . . . I don’t remember what happened.”
    â€œWhere is he now?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Daisy’s mum said. She was never cross with Daisy, but her voice had sounded almost sharp. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
    Now Daisy hugged her mum’s pillow tighter, trying to fight the urge to look at her own watch.
    Had it been five hours, or closer to six?
    Perhaps she was worrying for nothing. Perhaps at that very moment, her mum was turning into the driveway. Daisy hurried downstairs. She seated herself on the stone doorstep, her gaze fixed on the distant gates. She thought perhaps if she stared for five whole minutes without blinking, it would make the car appear. Then she tried closing her eyes and counting to a thousand, not gabbling the numbers but saying each one slowly and clearly.
    Nothing worked. The shadows of the great trees grew long over the tangled meadow. It was evening now. Soon it would be dark. Daisy’s body flooded with panic.
    She has to come back!
How will she do the Day Box if she doesn’t come back?

FIVE

    Daisy’s mum was right about the house being cluttered but not dirty. It wasn’t dirty because they didn’t keep any old clothes or leftover food or rubbish lying around. Instead, Brightwood Hall was filled with three kinds of things. The first was furniture and household items, most of it valuable, which had been stacked in the ballroom, the spare rooms, or against various walls. The second was stores of food and grocery items. These filled the whole of the basement, most of the reception area, and a great portion of the corridors.
    The third was all the Day Boxes.
    There were nearly ten thousand of them. They were about the same size and shape as shoe boxes, except they opened from one end so that when they were stacked on top of each other, you could open one without disturbing the whole pile. At first they had all been kept in the Marble Hall. The shelving units had been specially built to hold them. But they had eventually filled up even that enormous space. They had spread into the Portrait Gallery and then into other rooms and empty corners, until you could hardly turn around without bumping into a pile of them.
    Every evening, another box was added to the collection.
    Daisy’s mum made them. She put things inside that she wanted to remember about the day. Everything held a memory, she said. If she didn’t put it into a box, the memory would fade and be lost. She would never be able to get it back again.
    Daisy sometimes contributed to the Day Boxes, but mostly her mum did them on her own. After she closed the lid of each box, she wrote the date on the side. She always used the same black marker, and she would never run out of those markers because there were thirty-­six packets of them down in the basement and each packet held two dozen pens.
    Daisy’s mum never missed a single day. Not even the time when she had a terrible fever and had lain a whole day and night moaning and shivering and saying strange things. Daisy had sat with her, cooling her face with wet towels, and in the evening, her mum had told her to fetch an empty box. Her hand crept out from under the covers to point out the things she had chosen for that day. Or maybe they were what the fever had chosen, because the things themselves didn’t make much sense.
    â€œYour shoe, Mum?” Daisy had said, putting it into the box. “Are you
sure
?”
    Her mum’s hand gestured feebly towards the wall.
    â€œThat’s just a shadow, Mum. From the chair, see? You can’t put a shadow into a box.”
    Now Daisy leaped up from her perch on the doorstep and hurried back into the house. She crawled across the tops of the shelves in the Marble Hall.