Castle Barebane by Joan Aiken

Author:Joan Aiken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2018-03-05T14:58:08+00:00

Chapter 11

When Val woke next morning she jumped out of bed and dressed speedily, for the air in her bedroom was arctic; in the course of the night her fire had gone out. Washing in cold water she observed to herself that some means of taking a hot bath must be discovered in this mansion if she was to spend more than a day under its roof—and she had a gloomy presentiment that it would be necessary to stay at least a week—perhaps even longer—to make sure that Elspie was sufficiently inculcated into the correct way of looking after children so as to make her a safe guardian.

Val longed to return to Edinburgh. It was all a great nuisance.

When, clad in all her petticoats under her warmest dress, with a woollen jacket over that, she walked to the window and pulled the curtains back, a surprise awaited her. She had expected to see snow, from the white light between the draperies. What she saw instead was the sea. As they approached it from the back, Ardnacarrig House had appeared sunk in woods. But from this window there was not a tree to be seen. The window itself was half shrouded in ivy with which the whole of this side of the house appeared to be overgrown. Directly below lay a flagged terrace, half obscured with weeds. Steps led down from it to a rough lawn, which was bounded on three sides by a low-spreading azalea hedge. From a gap in the hedge on the far side, a path led across short turf to a pale crescent of sandy beach, beyond which lay the sea, inky-dark but calm, except for a white frill of waves at the edge of the sand. Looking to right and left, Val realised that the house lay on flat land in the centre of a small bay. Headlands rose steeply at either end of the half-moon of beach; to the right, a river ran out beyond a sand bar. Gulls were crying thinly, and she could hear the bleat of sheep and see a few of them feeding on the turf beyond the azalea hedge.

The morning was grey, frosty, and bleak, but at least there had been no more snow during the night. Val was filled by a sudden urge to go out and inspect this new landscape. It was a long time since she had been in the country, after all! First, though, she tiptoed to look at the children through the communicating door. They were still in profound sleep. So she pulled on her coat and fur hood, found a pair of gloves, and went softly out of the room and downstairs.

She took a different stair from the one they had come up last night, and it led to a big half-derelict room with a warped piano, some card tables, and, stacked in a corner, a tangle of rods and fishing tackle.

Two French windows led on to the terrace she had seen from above,

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