Wild Robert Read Online Free PDF Page B

shepherd’s crook, staring from the red, angry faces of the Tollers and the Franceys to the running, bleating sheep, and looking more bewildered than Heather had ever seen her.
    “Oh, poor Mum!” Heather said. “Robert, stop it this instant!”
    But Robert just ran away down the Long Gallery, laughing. Heather ran after him. He was not running very fast, because he kept doubling over to laugh, but he was very good at dodging. Heather almost caught him every time he stopped to laugh, but either he dodged, or the world tipped slightly as she put her hand out to grab him, and she knew that he had got away by magic. In spite of her annoyance, Heather almost laughed once or twice, because Robert so clearly thought of it as a game. She felt more as if she was chasing a small boy, instead of a young man who should have been old enough to know better.

    Robert let Heather corner him, down the end of the Long Gallery at last. By this time the sheep had got out into the Long Gallery, too, and were running about on tottery little hooves crying, “
Baaa
!” in almost human voices. The polished floor was gettingsprinkled with their droppings, so that the fighting Tollers and Franceys, who had also spilled out of the Feud Room in a mass of bright-coloured clothes, kept slipping as they tried to hit one another. Heather saw the fat Duchess skid and fall flat on her back under the picture of Sir Francis Toller and Queen Elizabeth I. She stayed there, puffing and mopping at her bleeding nose with a lace handkerchief. Mum was standing beside the Duchess, still holding the Shepherd’s crook, looking round quite wildly.

    Heather took hold of Robert’s black silk shoulders and shook him. Doing that crumpled his crisp white collar, but Heather did not care. She felt like Robert’s elder sister.

    “Stop them! Turn them back!” she said. “Quickly, before Mum decides she’s gone mad!”
    “But you think of them as sheep yourself,” Robert said. “I know you do.”
    Heather had to admit he was right. “Yes, but I know they’re people really,” she said. “They probably think they’re mad, too. Turn them back.”
    “Now?” Robert asked pleadingly. He made his most charming smile at her. “But all will be back by sunset. Can they not wait?”
    “No. Sunset’s far too late at this time of year,” Heather said. “Do it now. Do it or – or I shall never speak to you again!”
    She said this because it was what she often said to Janine – not meaning it, of course – and it was the only threat she could think of. She was surprised how well it worked. Robert’s eyes went big and sad. “Never?” he said.
    “Never!” Heather shouted firmly, above the bleating and the yelling from the rest of the Long Gallery.
    “Then I am gone maybe another hundred years,” Robert said sadly. “Very well, I’ll undo it, if you promise to speak to me again now, and again tomorrow.”
    “Of course I promise,” Heather said.
    Robert smiled, sighed and held his hand out. This time he tipped it the other way from usual, Heather noticed. Ordinariness swung back across her. The sheep stood up and were real people again, wandering round the Gallery with startled, rather prim looks, as if they had caught sight of something none of them wanted to know about. One or two people were irritably lifting their feet up and obviously wondering where they had trodden in a sheep dropping. Heather looked for the fat Duchess but she was not there at all. Nor were the other Tollers and Franceys. Nor were the wigs and hats that had been knocked off on to the floor.
    “Are they all in their pictures again?” Heather asked.
    “Yes, I swear it,” Robert said.
    “And what would happen if you held your hand out the other way up?” Heather asked. “Does that tip things too?”
    Robert put that hand behind him. “Don’t ask me to show you that,” he said. “That is how my brother’s wife came to hate me so.”
    Heather did not ask. She looked anxiously