The Greenstone Grail Read Online Free PDF

run by monks about an hour’s drive from Eade. Annie had dredged up the long-forgotten Catholicism of her youth to enable him to apply: it was one of the best schools in the area, patronized largely by the sons of the rich and privileged, but with high academic standards for those who wanted to attain them and superb sports facilities for everyone else. Nathan went as a weekly boarder: the distance was too great for him to come home every evening. Jason Wicks and his gang jeered at him for being a swot and a snob, but they soon grew tired of it, since Nathan appeared genuinely indifferent to their mockery and never responded to provocation. At the new school he made new friends, and inevitably saw less of some of the village children, but his closeness to Hazel and George was unaffected. They would foregather at weekends in their special meeting place in the bookshop, known as the Den. There was a kind of storage space, like a very tall, thin cupboard, between two stacks of shelving, and they had discovered that if you climbed up inside with the help of a stepladder you would find yourself in a tiny loft area tucked under the slope of the roof, with a skylight through which you could scramble right outside. This was their secret headquarters where they would go to plan games and adventures, or just sit and talk out of the range of grown-up ears. They kept a biscuit tin there with emergency supplies, three mugs for coke or lemonade, and a lantern with coloured glass in the sides fordark winter evenings. Nathan had even made a cardboard screen to put over the skylight at such times, so no passerby would see it illuminated. Annie sneaked up there occasionally and dusted, when she was sure they weren’t around, to prevent them getting too obviously grubby. She didn’t think either Hazel’s or George’s parents would be pleased if an afternoon in Nathan’s company invariably resulted in grey clothing.
    Sometimes on clear nights they would extinguish the lantern, and open the skylight to look up at the stars. ‘I wish we had a telescope,’ Nathan said. ‘Then we could see them much bigger and closer.’ He’d been doing some astronomy at Ffylde. ‘Look, there’s the Great Bear.’
    ‘It never looks like a bear to me,’ Hazel said. ‘More like a saucepan with a bent handle.’
    ‘Maybe we could see a comet,’ George said hopefully. ‘David –’ his elder brother ‘– showed me one once, through binoculars, but I couldn’t really see anything. I thought it would be very bright, with a tail, like a firework, but there was just a bit of a blur.’
    ‘Where’s Orion?’ asked Hazel, naming the only other constellation she had heard of.
    ‘I’ll show you.’ Standing on a box with her, leaning against the edge of the skylight, Nathan pointed upwards. ‘
There
. That string of stars is his belt.’
    ‘What about the rest of him?’
    ‘I’m not sure …’ His pointing finger wavered; in the dark they couldn’t see him frown. ‘That’s funny.’
    ‘What’s funny?’ said George. There wasn’t room for him on the box, and he was trying to gaze up past the other two, and failing.
    ‘There’s another star, just below Orion. It wasn’t there before: I’m sure it wasn’t. I was up here last night.’
    ‘Show me,’ said Hazel. Nathan pointed again. ‘Perhaps you remembered wrong. Or there was some cloud or something.’
    ‘It wasn’t cloudy.’
    ‘Perhaps it’s a comet!’ George said excitedly.
    ‘If there was a comet it would’ve been on the news,’ Nathan said. ‘Besides, it looks like a star.’
    ‘It’s not very twinkly,’ Hazel explained.
    Nathan climbed down, switched on the lantern, and consulted his star map. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘There shouldn’t be a star there at all.’
    ‘It must be a UFO,’ George declared. ‘They can look like stars. Let me see.’ Now the others had come down, he scrambled onto the box. ‘It’ll whoosh across the sky in a minute and