Fire and Hemlock Read Online Free PDF

consider which to take. I was told I could have six.”
    As soon as they started looking at the pictures, Polly discovered that the ones leaning on the left-hand wall were by far the most interesting. She left Mr Lynn to sort through the ones on the other side of the room, and knelt facing the left wall, using her chin and stomach to prop the front pictures on while she leafed over the ones behind like the pages of a heavy book. She found a green, sunlit picture of old-fashioned people having a picnic in a wood, in a pile that was otherwise only saints with cracked gold paint on their halos. The next pile had a strange, tilted view of a fairground, a lovely Chinese picture of a horse, and some sad pink-and-blue Harlequins beside the sea. Polly put all these against the end wall at once. The one on top of the third pile she liked too. It was a swirly modern painting of people playing violins. Underneath that was a big blue-green picture of a fire at dusk where smoke was beginning to wreathe round the vast skeleton of a plant like cow parsley in front. Polly exclaimed with delight at it.
    Meanwhile, Mr Lynn was saying, “I don’t remember half these pictures. Take a look at this. Dismal, isn’t it?”
    Polly swivelled round to be shown a long brownish picture, more like a drawing, of a mermaid carrying a dead-looking man underwater. “It’s awful,” she said. “They’ve got silly faces. And the man’s body is too long.”
    “I agree,” said Mr Lynn, “though I think I may take it as a curiosity. Explain how you got into this house by mistake.”
    Polly got up and carefully carried the violin picture and the smoke picture to the end wall. “Nina started it,” she said. “But I got just as silly.” And she told him about the High Priestesses, and how they had climbed out of Granny’s garden into all the others. “Then we had to hide behind some sheets on the washing line,” she was saying, when she saw Mr Lynn stand up and, in a flurried sort of way, brush at the knees of his suit.
    “Oh hello, Laurel,” he said.
    The lady Polly had mistaken for Nina was standing in the doorway. Seen this close, she struck Polly as plump and quite pretty, and her black clothes were obviously very expensive. Her hair was rather strange, light and floating, of a colour that could have been grey or no colour at all. Polly somehow knew from all this, and most of all from a powerful sort of sweetness about this lady, that she was the one who had inherited almost everything in the house. And from the stiff way Mr Lynn was standing there, she also knew that Laurel was the ex-wife he had talked about. She just could not think how she had taken her for Nina.
    “Tom, didn’t you know I’d been asking for you?” Laurel said. Then before Mr Lynn could do more than begin to shake his head – he was going to lie about that, Polly noticed with interest – Laurel’s eyes went first to the pictures and then to Polly. Polly jumped as the eyes met hers. They were as light as Laurel’s hair, but with black rings in the lightness, which made them almost seem like a tunnel Polly was looking down. They had no more feeling than a tunnel, either, in spite of the sweet look on Laurel’s face.
    “When you choose your pictures, Tom,” Laurel said, looking at Polly, “don’t forget that the ones you can have are the ones over there.” Light caught colours from her rings as her hand pointed briefly to the right-hand wall. “The ones against the other wall are all too valuable to go out of the family,” she said.
    Then she turned round and went out onto the landing, somehow taking Mr Lynn out there along with her. They half shut the door. Polly stood by the window and heard snatches of the things they said beyond the door. First came Laurel’s sweet, light voice saying “…all asking who the child is, Tom.” To which Mr Lynn’s voice muttered something about “…in charge of her… couldn’t just leave her…” She could tell Laurel