The Haunting of Hiram by Eva Ibbotson

Author:Eva Ibbotson [Ibbotson, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330477505
Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books

Thirteen

The friendship between Alex and Helen grew steadily. Helen had buried nearly three hundred pills in the potted geranium, and though the plant was beginning to look droopy, Helen was not. She now went riding with Alex, and swimming with him, and at night they planned their expedition to Patagonia. That wild country at the tip of South America was becoming very real to them: the lakes on which flamingoes swam, the grassy valleys studded with flowers and the mountains with their ice-blue peaks. Neither of them doubted that they would find the giant sloth, but they argued about what to do when they had found it. Alex wanted to bring it back and show it to the world in a really good zoo. Helen wanted to photograph it and leave it where it was.

Mr Hopgood, like Helen, was getting very fond of Alex, but Nurse Boniface hated the Scottish boy. She felt that he was taking her patient away from her and that she’d soon be out of a job, and she was right. For once someone young has really decided to get well, they usually do, and Helen could hardly remember how frightened and hopeless she had felt before Alex came.

Meanwhile Carra was growing and growing. The four towers were halfway to their full height, the gateway was nearly finished and work on the drawbridge had begun.

‘Is everything as it should be?’ Mr Hopgood asked Alex as the foreman took them round the building.

‘Yes, it is. It’s all absolutely correct,’ said Alex – but Mr Hopgood caught a slight doubt in his voice.

‘What is it, boy? Remember, I want the place just the way it was so don’t be afraid to speak.’

‘Well, it’s just that everything looks so clean,’ said Alex. ‘You see, from being so old, Carra was full of… oh, slime and bird droppings and owl pellets. And there were cobwebs and bats and… just dust, I suppose. Of course, I see that you can’t have that here.’

‘What do you mean, I can’t have it here?’ said Mr Hopgood, nettled. ‘I work hard enough – if I want dust and slime and bird droppings, then dust and slime and bird droppings I will have.’

So that night they drew up a shopping list and the following morning the three of them drove to Searly and Rowlock, the most famous department store in Texas.

It was an amazing place. If Alex hadn’t known they were in a shop, he’d have thought they were in a maharajah’s palace. The carpets were ankledeep, perfume wafted through the air; there were real fountains and flowering camelia trees in tubs.

And the things that were for sale!

There were fur coats made of Russian sable and dresses of wild silk sewn with pearls and satin night shirts trimmed with silver braid. In the food hall, live swordfish and exotic eels swam in a great aquarium and if you pointed to one of them, an assistant came and caught it and hit it on the head and filleted it for you then and there.

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