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.She knocked on the door but the wood soaked up the sound made by her small fist.She’d need a hammer to make herself heard.Hopefully, whoever lived here had a telephone they would let her use and she could ring her school and warn them that she was on her way back.The door rasped as she pushed it inwards, the old wood catching on the stone-flagged floor.She stepped hesitantly inside and called out.Her words echoed eerily in the silence.No one answered.She was standing in a high-ceilinged room with a fireplace big enough to house a couple of carthorses and walls covered in battered shields and gloomy portraits of the long-since dead.There was an enormous table which would seat about twenty people, with high-backed chairs set round it.She tiptoed across the flagged floor, made her way through a door to her right and along a dimly lit corridor past sleeping suits of armour and a stuffed bear wedged tightly between a bookcase and a hallstand hung with moth-eaten coats.There was a curious smell of dying flowers and burrowing woodworm, mingling with the sweet scent of rosemary and thyme.She stepped through a doorway into an enormous kitchen.As she stood there a shaft of sunlight pierced through the high windows and she had to shield her eyes from the momentary brightness.The room had a dreamlike feel to it, as though she had stepped unwittingly into a fairy story.Big pots and pans hung from nails hammered haphazardly into the thick walls.A bunch of oversized keys dangled from a brass ring above the range, and giant ladles and oversized spoons splayed out of an earthenware pot on the kitchen table.Everything was massive, as if it was a room waiting for a giant to return.Feefifofum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.Catrin shivered in the cool air.Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.Nothing in the kitchen gave a clue to who lived here; it was more like a museum than a real kitchen.It wasn’t likely that she was going to find a telephone here, because everything was ancient.At the sound of approaching footsteps out in the corridor, she held her breath and clenched her fists tightly at her sides as the kitchen door opened.Tony Agosti, walking back from the chapel, noticed that the door to the castle was open, and made his way to the kitchen.When he opened the door he jumped with fright at the sight of the girl standing there.The sunlight streaming through the windows cast a halo round her head and she looked like a figure from a religious painting or a ghost conjured up from another world.He blinked nervously and hurriedly made the sign of the cross.This was no castle ghost.The girl had a mop of dark curly hair and deep blue eyes which looked too large for her small face, a face as pale as graveyard lilies.She reminded him of one of those incurably sick girls in an old-fashioned novel.She was the skinniest girl he’d ever seen, with legs like cocktail sticks and a skirt which swamped her.“I’m sorry if I shouldn’t be here,” she said anxiously, taking a hesitant step towards him.“But I was hoping that whoever lives here would let me use the telephone – if they have one, that is.”“There’s no telephone in here, lovely girl.A couple of carrier pigeons hanging about in the garden, maybe, but nothing as up-to-date as a telephone.There’s no problem your being in here, mind.Mr Gwartney from the library won’t mind one little bit.”“Does he live here?” she asked.“No, no one’s lived here for years.”“But the door was open and there was a key in the lock.”“Aye, Dan Gwartney is the caretaker of the castle.He keeps an eye on the place, lights the fires now and again to keep the rooms aired.The gardens are always open during the day for people to wander in and take a look round, but hardly any bugger sets foot in Kilvenny now.Gone to the dogs, we have, the last few years.”“I should like to look round properly but I’m afraid I won’t have time.I’m catching a train soon.”Tony Agosti looked at her curiously.“That’ll be the ghost train, will it?”“I don’t know what you mean.” She eyed him warily.She didn’t like to hear talk of ghosts while she was standing in the cool kitchen alone with a strange man.“Well, there’s no trains out of Kilvenny now until next week.”She looked at him with dismay.“But there must be.I arrived here by train yesterday.”Tony grinned.“That was the late train.Like I said, there’ll be no more trains until next week.Very few people travel here these days, and if they do they don’t tend to stay long.”Catrin’s face paled.“I was supposed to be staying at Shrimp’s Hotel for the summer,” she said.“Were you, by God? No one stays up there any more.”“I know that now, but I didn’t before I came.” Her voice was impatient.Tony Agosti thought that the girl was a peculiar little thing, very English and proper, old-fashioned-looking and a bit lah-di-dah in her speech.Little girls of her age didn’t usually travel about the country staying in hotels on their own.Not in Wales, anyhow.“Shrimp’s has been closed for years,” he said.“Didn’t anyone tell you?”Catrin shook her head and bit her trembling lip.“Ella Grieve, the owner, shut herself up years ago and never comes out.”“Does no one ever go there?” Catrin said.“Not any more.There was a niece who used to stay there – damn, now, she was a beautiful girl, like a film star or a model.”Catrin bristled.A model for toby jugs, maybe.Why did everyone talk about her mother’s looks and how beautiful she was? They didn’t know her, didn’t know what she was like on the inside.If they did they wouldn’t go on and on about her all the time.As he stood there looking at this defiant little girl, Tony had a sudden vision of Kizzy Grieve running down the steps to the beach, her long, silky hair streaming behind her
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