“I found this the other day in the little attic space just off your bedroom. I thought you might like to meet her.”
“Her?” I peeped round Dad, intrigued.
His desk was unusually tidy. There were no paints or brushes, and no picture of the circus lady like last time. But what was there was so interesting, the thought of paintings went completely from my mind.
“A parrot!” I said, for there on the desk, staring at me beneath a dusty glass dome, was a green parrot with a big black beak and round yellow eyes.
“She’s rather spectacular, isn’t she?” Dad ruffled my hair.
“Can I keep her?”
“I don’t know, Roe. She’s very old, and a bit flea-bitten. Look.” He pointed to the bottom of the jar, where a number of dead insects were lying, their legs in the air.
“Where’s she from?”
“I told you, the attic.”
“No, I mean before. When she was alive.”
“Well...” Dad settled into the seat behind his desk, looking hard at the bird. “Sometimes they’re kept as pets, but originally she would have come from a country far away. Somewhere warm and wet and filled with the raucous chitter of birdsong. In fact...” He shifted in his seat, getting comfortable, and I perched on the edge of his desk, knowing a story was coming and relishing the thought.
“In fact, many years ago, this particular parrot flew over the Amazonian rain forest, calling out her strange song, but none of the other birds understood her. So one day, as the monkeys chattered and the crickets whirred and buzzed below, she took off from the fronds of a barrigona tree and began the longest flight of her life.
“On the way she passed swallows and swifts, and even, once, a seven-tailed peacock from the Peruvian mountains.”
“A what?”
“They’re very rare.”
“Oh.”
“And then, one warm, balmy English summer’s day, she spied this house and came down to land.
“Now, this was Braër House from a hundred years ago, and a different little girl lived here then. The parrot landed on the bridge, and the little girl said, ‘Oh, hello,’ and the parrot found she could understand her. The language she had been speaking all this time was English.”
“Did they have lots of adventures like me and Monty?”
“Well, they would have done, but just as they were beginning to be friends, a witch came to the village, looking for somewhere to stay. She knocked on the door of Braër House and asked if she might have a bed for the night.
“The girl’s father—who was a disagreeable sort—told her to leave. But on her way out, she saw the girl and the parrot. The witch was tired and hungry and somewhat grumpy, and, feeling spiteful, she cast a spell over the two of them. When the daughter didn’t come home for tea, the man went outside in search of her, and there on the grass was the parrot, dead and stuffed and perched in a glass bell jar.”
“No!”
“But that’s not all. When he went back inside his house, he found his daughter in the little study at the end of the hall, also dead, also stuffed, in her own, life-size bell jar, staring out at him, her little hands pressed against the curved glass.”
“But...but the witch wouldn’t leave her like that!”
Dad lifted a finger to his mouth to quieten me. “Sometimes, the girl’s father would come downstairs and the girl and the parrot had changed position.”
“No!”
“The parrot would be standing on one leg, or tucking its head under its wing. And the daughter, well, she was often sitting on the floor of the bell jar, her head in her hands, and once he found her on her knees, her hands pressed together in prayer.”
“What did he do?”
“He decided to open the bell jar, to release his daughter. He imagined that whatever magic was going on, it was contained within the glass, and once the glass was removed, she would resume her original form.
“But he was so desperate to free his daughter, he didn’t consider what might go wrong. He tried to lift the heavy glass dome, but it was stuck tight to the base. His daughter was crouched at the bottom, frozen in a cowering posture, her hands above her head as if preparing for the disaster that was sure to come.
“Frustrated, the man found an ax and took it to the bell jar. As the metal bit into the glass, the jar crazed and cracked and began to shatter, falling over his daughter like rain, landing in her hair and slicing at her skin.”
I put my hand to my mouth in horror.
“But his daughter began to crumble too. She cracked like glass, collapsing into a million shards. The man bent over and picked up the largest piece he could find, a fragment of her eye, and he stuck it right in the center of the fireplace in the drawing room so that she would watch over them always. And then he poured the rest of her away into the moat.”
I jumped down from the desk, pulling the parrot off and carrying it awkwardly into the drawing room. Dad jogged behind me, his arms outstretched in case I dropped it. The drawing room was a large space full of dusty old furniture. Ancient frayed rugs lay underneath spindly chairs with legs shaped like bamboo. There was a huge stone bowl protruding from the far wall that looked like it came out of a church. It had a spout in the shape of a raven’s head, and I eyed it beadily as I came in, thinking how similar it was to the gargoyle in the moat.
The fireplace was a huge brick affair, the kind you could walk into and stare up into the blackened chimney above. Monty was sitting there now, transfixed by the echoing caw of the crows perched on Braër’s roof. He stood up to greet us, his back end coated in soot.
True to Dad’s word, there in the center of the mantelpiece was a dark, shiny fragment that looked like flint, stuck fast in the middle of the brick mantel. I put the parrot on the floor and reached up to touch it, but I was too small, and my fingers brushed the rough brickwork instead.
“What happened to the parrot after that?” I said to Dad.
“The man hid her in the attic because she reminded him of his lost daughter. And that’s where she stayed until I dug her out, covered in cobwebs.”
“Have you ever seen her move?”
“Nobody sees her move, Romilly. They only notice it when she’s changed position.”
I went over to the parrot again. She was sitting straight backed and at attention, her head cocked slightly to one side as if she were listening.
“Come on,” said Dad, “those toffee apples should be cool enough to eat now.”
I hefted the glass dome, my hands barely reaching round it, and carried it, panting, to the kitchen. Dad was levering the toffee apples off the tray with a knife.