Tanglewreck Read Online Free PDF

much to the house since it was built,’ he said, reading her thoughts. ‘Time passes so quickly, as you discovered on the train.’
    Mrs Rokabye sniffed. ‘I thought you lived in luxury!’
    ‘Oh, I do, Mrs Rokabye. I live in the luxury of time, and how many of us can say that?’
    ‘When was this house built?’ asked Silver, looking at the wooden panelling that lined the rooms, and the heavy shutters folded back on either side of the windows.
    ‘1720,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘I – that is, my forebears – moved here in 1738. It has hardly been altered since.’
    ‘Like Tanglewreck,’ said Silver, ‘but not so old.’
    Abel Darkwater smiled, Mrs Rokabye glowered. Why did everyone she knew live in horrible old houses? She longed for a white settee and a glass coffee table and one of those plastic palm trees you didn’t have to water.
    ‘Where is the bathroom, please?’ she said.
    ‘It hasn’t been put in yet,’ replied Darkwater. ‘There was some talk of it in 1952, but the plumber never came back. I must telephone him soon. For now, dear lady, please use the commode in your bedroom. Sniveller will show you the way.’
    ‘Sniveller?’
    ‘My manservant.’
    Abel Darkwater took a bell from his pocket and rang it loudly. There was a sniffing sound from somewhere downstairs in the shop, and then the man Sniveller appeared. He was a short wiry man with no hair at all on his head, and black bunches of it protruding from his bright red nose. He bowed to Mrs Rokabye and begged her to follow him up the stairs. Very dubiously she did so.
    ‘Ah, my dear child. Now we are alone, oh yes, and I have tea ready for us in my study.’
    ‘It’s not tea-time,’ said Silver.
    ‘Time is what we make it,’ said Abel Darkwater, leading the way, ‘and in my opinion, there is always time for a piece of chocolate cake, oh yes.’
    What a place it was, Abel Darkwater’s study!
    The floorboards were painted with a circular sundial thattold the hour as the light fell through the window.
    There was a grandfather clock on one wall, its pendulum tick-ticking from side to side.
    Around the window that overlooked the street were more clocks than Silver could count, and each one told a different time, with its place in the world written underneath it – New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Sydney, the North Pole.
    There were other names too, ones she had never heard of, with little pictures of stars beneath them.
    ‘Where’s Alpha Centauri?’ she asked.
    ‘It is the star nearest to ours. It is four light years away. If you were invited to tea on Alpha Centauri in four years’ time, you would have to set off now and travel at the speed of light if you wanted to get there before all the cake had been eaten. Fortunately, you are here today, and there is plenty of cake left.’
    Abel Darkwater smiled. He was better at smiling than Mrs Rokabye, but Silver had the feeling he had just been practising for longer.
    The bookshelves were stuffed with old leather-bound books about clocks and watches. The table was covered in diagrams of cross-sections of old mechanisms. A chronometer lay in pieces in a box on the floor.
    Silver looked up at the ceiling; a clock like a children’s mobile was gentle swinging round and round.
    Everything in the study was ticking, even the two of them, their hearts beating like human clocks.
    Silver had a feeling that they were sitting inside Time, andthen she wondered, though she knew it was silly, if she could ever climb outside Time?
    The second that she had the thought, Abel Darkwater glanced at her.
    He’s reading my mind
, she said to herself, and immediately forced herself to think about cabbage.
    Abel Darkwater gave Silver homemade lemonade, with the lemons still floating about in it, and chocolate cake thick as a mattress.
    ‘After tea I will show you my shop,’ he said. ‘People come from all over the world to buy and sell clocks and watches here. That’s how I became acquainted with your dear