The Key to the Indian Read Online Free Page B

cautiously. His father was so eager he was trembling. Omri carefully took out the little woman-shape in the red dress with the big plumed hat, the size of his finger. His father took it from him as reverently as if it were a holy relic.
    “This is her?” he whispered wonderingly.
    “Yes.”
    “Where did you get it?”
    “It was in here, in the cashbox that I found with the Account, buried in the old thatched roof. The magic key opened it. She was fast asleep, but later I – well, me and Patrick—”
    “Patrick and I—”
    “Yeah, well, she woke up, and we decided… I mean it was just before she was going to steal her sister’s earrings, you know, the night she made the key. And I wanted to change her mind and get her not to steal them…”
    His father’s face sagged suddenly with horror. “My God, Omri! You didn’t, did you?”
    “No. Patrick said not to. Because if I had , it would have changed history. Everything that came from stealing the earrings – things linked to other things, like a chain –wouldn’t have happened, and I – I might never have been born.”
    His father swallowed hard. His face had gone very pale. “I wonder if we ought to be meddling with this,” he said at last. “I wonder if we ought not to just – just put the key, and the cupboard, and the cashbox, and the Account, the plastic figures and everything else, safely away somewhere and – and just forget it.”
    “No, Dad! It’s no use. I tried that. I did try – you know I did – I put the cupboard and key in the bank and I swore I wouldn’t take them out and mess about with the magic any more, but – but you can’t not , somehow. I couldn’t, anyway. It – when I read the Account, I – I just felt the magic calling me.”
    His father was gazing at him with a very strange, troubled expression. “Omri. You don’t suppose—”
    “What?”
    “Well… don’t be scared. But Frederick obviously inherited some part of Jessie’s ‘gift’, or he couldn’t have put magic into the cupboard he made. I just wondered if that – magic power – if… After all, they were your blood relatives. Perhaps it’s something that can be – passed on.”
    There was a long silence. They stared into each other’s eyes.
    “Wouldn’t…” Omri found he had to clear his throat. “Wouldn’t – Mum have had some of it?”
    His father frowned and went to the window. It was framed by deep eaves of thatch. The sun was just coming up over thehill on the horizon, the one that had on its top a strange little circle of trees, like a peacock’s crown.
    “I suppose Mum never told you about the time she saw a ghost.”
    Omri jumped. “A ghost!”
    “Yes. She told me about it ages ago. I didn’t believe her. Of course. I didn’t believe in anything unprovable in those days.”
    “Whose ghost did she see?”
    “Well, that’s one of the things I was thinking about, lying awake last night.” He looked down at the little woman-shape in his hand. “I only have her description to go on, and I only heard the story once. Years ago, before we were married. She told it to me when I was saying I didn’t believe in anything supernatural, including an afterlife. And she disagreed, and we were sort of quarrelling. She told me this story, to prove me wrong. And I…” He paused, and swallowed, “I laughed.”
    “Tell me!”
    “She said she was visiting her mother’s grave – Lottie, who’d died in the bombing of London, when your mum was still a baby. Lottie was buried in the same grave as her father, Matthew, in Clapham Cemetery, near where she was born, where her mother still lived. Jessica Charlotte’s sister.”
    “Maria.”
    His father nodded. “Yes. Maria, who brought your mother up. She was an old lady by then, in her eighties, but she went every week to the cemetery to put flowers on Lottie’s grave. Mum didn’t often go because she was busy with her own lifeby then, she was a student, but that day Maria wasn’t well and