AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The gateway led into a small courtyard. There were archers’ notches high in the walls around them, and one solid door ahead. If it was a real castle, Jaide thought, this was where friends would be welcomed and foes stopped in their tracks.
‘This is the inner passage,’ said Rodeo Dave, fumbling in his pocket for a ring of keys. They jingled and clinked with deep voices of antiquity. ‘The inner door is always locked.’
‘I didn’t see the guard give you those keys,’ said Tara.
Dave didn’t quite look at her as he mumbled, ‘Oh, George . . . Young Master Rourke gave me a set so I could deliver books straight to the library.’
He selected the largest key, and slid it into the lock. It turned with a series of heavy clunks.
He pushed the door, and it swung open with a groan. A wave of cold air rushed out over the twins. Tara went brrr, which startled Jack. He didn’t think anyone actually made that sound in real life.
‘So you’ve been here bef—’ Jaide started to say to Rodeo Dave, but stopped at the flurry of echoes that bounced back at her from within the castle. What lay on the other side of the door was hidden in shadow.
She tried again more quietly. ‘So you’ve been here before?’
‘Not for a few years,’ said Rodeo Dave. He took three steps inside and fumbled along the wall to the right of the door. ‘It’s here somewhere – I’m certain of it.’
There was a click, followed by a series of smaller clicks deeper within the castle. Fluorescent lights pinged on overhead, one at a time. Section by section, the covered courtyard within was revealed – dusty portraits on the walls, sheet-covered furniture on the floors, actual suits of armour guarding the corners, a tall grandfather clock on the opposite wall, and high, wooden beams above. Two particular paintings had pride of place, one of a forbidding man with receding black hair and long fingers, the other of a small, oval-faced woman with startlingly green eyes. They faced each other, unsmiling, from different sides of the hall.
Jack followed Rodeo Dave inside, struck by the thought that, although it looked like a museum, this room had once been part of someone’s home. Jaide and Tara followed him, looking around in awe.
‘Welcome to Rourke Castle,’ said Rodeo Dave, his cowboy boots sparking off the cobblestoned floor. ‘George’s father, Mister Rourke, had this built out of real stone from the country his family came from. Some said it came from an actual castle, but that isn’t true. Just the ruins of one. But the plan was based on a real castle, so there are towers, halls and cellars, just like they would have had centuries ago. There’s even a chapel and an armoury, and a solar on the top floor.’
‘A solarium?’ asked Tara.
‘No, a solar. It’s where the lord of the castle and his family could spend time alone, away from the staff and the soldiers. “Solar” here comes from “sole”, meaning alone, nothing to do with the sun.’
Rodeo Dave was talking more quickly than normal. He seemed nervous, Jaide thought.
‘Is the castle haunted?’ she whispered, suddenly afraid to raise her voice too much.
He smiled at her, but there was no humour in it. ‘Only by memories. See that clock? Your grandfather Giles had terrible trouble with it. It kept losing time and made Mister Rourke terribly impatient.’
Both twins admired its carved wooden panels and painted face, impressed by the fact that this was something Grandma X’s husband had once touched.
‘Now, come this way and I’ll show you the library.’
Rodeo Dave led them from the entrance hall into a wide corridor lined on one side with tapestries depicting hunts, dances and feasts. One showed a whale being speared from two sides at once. Heavy wooden doors, all of them shut, lined the other side of the corridor. Cobwebs stirred above them, swaying in air that might not have moved for years. The castle was tomblike around them.
They reached a fork in the corridor.
‘This way,’ said Rodeo Dave, turning left. Then he stopped, facing a dead end. ‘No, the other way. I’m sure of it.’
They took the other leg of the corridor, stopping at a double door opposite a flight of spiral stone stairs. Rodeo Dave fished out another key and opened the doors. With a flourish, he opened both doors at once, and waved the twins and Tara ahead of him.
They entered a huge room with a ceiling forty feet above them and an internal balcony running all the way around, halfway up. Electric lights in shell-like shades sent overlapping pools of illumination all across the library, banishing shadows to the furthest corners. Every vertical surface was lined with shelves, some of them protected by glass doors, all of them holding books. Big books, small books, books with gold writing on the spine, books in different languages – there were so many books that Jaide could only gasp in amazement. How did Rodeo Dave ever imagine that he might catalogue them all in just a few days!
‘You sold him all these books?’ gasped Tara.
‘Good grief, no,’ replied Rodeo Dave. ‘Most of these were George’s father’s. That’s the father there, as a young man.’
He indicated a marble bust sitting on a plinth. It showed a more youthful version of the man in the portrait they had seen earlier. His nose was pointed and his lips thin, with a faint hint of sneer. The eyes of the bust seemed to follow Jack as he walked around it, judging him and finding him wanting.
‘He looks horrible,’ said Tara, folding her arms and turning her attention to the ceiling.
‘I’ve seen him before,’ said Jaide.
‘When?’ asked Jack in surprise.
‘I don’t know.’ The memory was frustratingly incomplete. She definitely knew that cruel face from somewhere. But no matter how she scratched her head, the details weren’t coming out.
Above the room’s enormous inglenook fireplace was a tall painting of a smiling blonde woman in a primrose gown sitting at a table under a tree bedecked with autumnal leaves. She was playing solitaire with a deck of old-fashioned cards, their faces yellow and white, diagonally striped. A pale clay-brick path snaked behind her, between fields of ripened wheat on one side, buttercups on the other. The overall impression was one of intense gold.
That, and the deck of cards the woman was holding, reminded Jaide of what they were supposed to be doing in the castle. The Card of Translocation lay hidden somewhere in its walls. Standing between them and finding it was only one obstacle: the hundreds and hundreds of books they had said they would help Rodeo Dave catalogue.
‘Do you mind . . . ?’ she said. ‘I mean . . . do you think it’d be all right if . . . ?’
‘Of course, Jaide,’ said Rodeo Dave with a smile. ‘I know why you’re really here.’
She blinked in surprise. ‘You do?’
‘Yes. You want to explore the castle. And that’s fine with me. Everywhere you shouldn’t go will be locked, and I’ll be busy for at least an hour or so, just checking the general condition of the books. The actual cataloguing will start once I’ve done that. Unt
il then, you are free to wander. Just don’t touch anything. There are a lot of fragile, precious things in here, including yourselves. Don’t get lost!’
‘We won’t. Thanks!’
‘I’ll ring that when I’m ready for you,’ he said, pointing at an elaborate gong as big as a bass drum, suspended in a black wooden frame opposite the fireplace.
Tara and the twins ran out of the library before he could change his mind.
‘Which way?’ asked Jack.
‘Up the stairs, of course,’ said Tara. ‘Last one to the top is a rotten egg!’
The twins raced after her, the sound of their footfalls echoing brightly off the walls and filling every corner of the castle with life. The next floor up contained a series of locked rooms with brass plaques on the doors: the Right Room, the White Room, the Pygmy Bryde Room, the Bowhead Room. Not until they came across the Humpback Room did Jack guess that they were all named after species of whales. They stopped to peer through a keyhole. Jaide and Tara could see nothing, but Jack’s dark-sensitive eyesight made out a four-poster bed, a cupboard and a tightly shuttered window.
They went back down briefly and explored several other labelled rooms: the Bakehouse, the Pantry, the Garrison, the Granary, the Blacksmith and the Prison. Their doors were open, but they contained little of interest. The door to the Cellar was locked, so they went back upstairs and searched until they found a stairwell that led to a guardhouse in one of the corner towers. The view from the top was spectacular, right out over the lake and surrounding trees. Portland was also visible; Jaide easily found the Rock, and from that landmark she easily worked out where their house was located. She could just make out the weathervane, pointing resolutely south.
‘This would be the perfect place to play hide-and-seek,’ said Tara.
‘You think everywhere’s a good place for hide-and-seek,’ said Jaide. Tara was particularly good at that game.
