Binny in Secret Read online

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  For my very special reader Phoebe Maria Kitchener, with lots of love from Hilary McKay

  List of Illustrations

  A voice was shrieking, “LOOK what you’ve done! Look!”

  On a blank museum card she drew the fragile curves and the small hooked beak.

  “Oh James, don’t be silly! This is the best place we’ve found for ages and ages!”

  After a while she went on again, and then, in the soft mud beside a deep puddle, she found footprints.

  “It’s a work of art!” said Rupe.

  There, a few days before, he had located a kestrel’s nest.

  “They go right up to the roof!” exclaimed James, delighted.

  “They were paper all the time,” said Binny.

  Her light suddenly trembled on a dappled bronze coat, and then flew wildly in her shaking hand but returned to find first huge feathered paws and then two yellowy green cat’s eyes.

  “Perfect,” whispered Clare, and even as she spoke, it lifted on the air and was gone.

  Chapter One

  September the first, and the sort of burglar wind that plucked litter from trash cans and petals from flowers and balls from toddlers and anything else it fancied. The market stalls packed up early and the pigeons all vanished and people walked slightly sideways and screwed up their eyes.

  * * *

  Binny, aged twelve, reluctant owner of a dark purple school blazer that looked (though it wasn’t) almost like new, was in town with Clem, her seventeen-year-old sister.

  It was the last day of the summer break. The next day would be school. Binny so much did not want this to be true that she was busy in her head rewriting the future. She told the improved version to herself like a story.

  Lightning zipped . . . zipped or unzipped? Lightning unzipped the sky straight above the Staff Room where all the teachers had rushed to the windows. Not one person escaped the shattering white blast . . . Not cruel, decided Binny. Instant. Painless, probably. And who would want to be a teacher anyway?

  Moments later, the whole school was a great pile of smoldering emb . . .

  A star-shaped brightness interrupted Binny, a glowing painted airiness, a butterfly.

  Lemon yellow, etched with black. Lapis blue edging on the lower wings, each set with a dusty ruby. Caught and lifted on the air.

  It was so different from any butterfly that Binny had ever seen before, so unexpected and so lovely, that she dropped her bag to race after it for a closer look.

  “Binny!” screeched Clem.

  “Oh!” cried Binny, dodging the traffic but colliding with a passerby. “Oh! Oh, stay!”

  It didn’t stay. It vanished over the high church wall, gone between one moment and the next, and Binny tumbled back to earth and for the first time saw the results of her collision. A smashed box lay in the gutter, the pavement was scattered with broken flowers, and a voice was shrieking, “LOOK what you’ve done! Look!”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “Sorry! They’re all spoiled! Where’s the card? Oh! Move!”

  Binny’s victim, a dark-haired girl, gave Binny a sudden furious shove, so hard that she stumbled and fell against the rough stone wall of the churchyard.

  “Ruined!” she heard the girl exclaim. “Ruined!”

  Shocked into silence, Binny picked herself up and began painfully collecting the flowers.

  “Leave them alone! Get out of my way!”

  The girl pushed furiously past as Clem arrived on the scene, clutching the blazer bag, grown-up and indignant, exclaiming in wrath, “Binny! You idiot! How utterly insane and stupid! You could have been hit! You could have caused an accident! And that poor girl! All her things!”

  Clem’s voice made Binny blink, like somebody muddled by magic. She rubbed her eyes, taking in the calamity. “Where’s she gone?” she asked.

  “She ran off just now. Oh Binny, look!”

  It was a birthday card, bent and spoiled, World’s Best Mother and a pink envelope. Binny’s dusty footprint was stamped across the front.

  “They were birthday things!” said Clem. “For her mother.”

  Clem sounded horrified and Binny understood why. All birthdays were important to her sister, but their mother’s most of all. While Binny cheerfully handed over a homemade card, a chocolate bar, and a poem of her own composing, Clem saved and planned for something perfect. A special card, a fresh new book, carefully chosen flowers . . .

  “I bet that box was a birthday cake,” said Clem, retrieving the squashed mess from the gutter. “It was! Look at the ribbon! And she’d bought pink carnations.”

  “I tried to say sorry,” said Binny, grumpy with shame. “She took no notice. And she pushed me, twice!”

  “No wonder,” said Clem.

  “She could have waited, instead of just running off.”

  “She was crying.”

  “Crying! She wasn’t. She was mad, not crying!”

  “Crying,” said Clem relentlessly. “I should have gone after her. Oh, for goodness’ sake, Binny, mop the blood!”

  “Blood?”

  “Look at your hands!”

  Binny looked and saw her knuckles, grazed and oozing crimson. She took the tissues Clem handed her and wound them round like bandages.

  “Hurry!” ordered Clem. “Or I’m going home without you. What on earth was it all about anyway?”

  “That butterfly! You must have seen!”

  “A butterfly! A butterfly! And she lost all her mum’s birthday stuff!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Binny again. “I’m very sorry. I really truly am. But it was honestly an accident. Not like her pushing me. That was on purpose. Is my head bleeding?”

  “Your head?”

  “Where it hit the wall.”

  “I didn’t know it did. Let me look. Wow! You must have fallen quite hard. There’s a huge lump coming! All this trouble because you thought you saw a butterfly!”

  “I did see it!” said Binny. “Of course I did! It was huge! Amazing! Gorgeous! A different one from any other I ever saw before. You must have seen it, Clem.”

  “I saw the traffic,” said Clem. “And the girl and all her things spoiled. I can see your hands and your head. I picked up your blazer from where you dropped it . . .”

  “Thank you.”

  “ . . . in the middle of the road . . .”

  “Sorry.”

  “ . . . but I think you dreamed the butterfly,” said Clem.

  * * *

  At home there was no one with time to listen to butterfly stories. There was the next day to plan, new schools in the morning for Binny and her little brother, six-year-old James. College for Clem, and work for their mother, who was coping by making lists.

  “Blazer!” she called, the moment Binny and Clem came through the door.

  Carefully concealing her wounds, Binny held out the bag.

  “Well done!” said her mother, ticking it off. “It was the last thing after James’s new shoes. That’s the shopping all finished and you ready for tomorrow. Thank goodness!”

  “Is James ready too?” asked Clem.

  “More or less. I’ve mended his school bag and scrubbed off all those tattoos and I’m trying to not look at his hair. It’s got really long this summer and I seem to have only just noticed.”

  James’s hair was
a sun bleached mop. It was shaggy and golden, and people turned to smile at it in the street. Only that morning the shoe shop assistant had remarked, “You would need a heart of stone to cut off hair like that! What a Goldilocks!”

  “Binny,” James had asked when they were out of the shop. “Did she say ‘Goldilocks’? Goldilocks? Like that girl with the bears?”

  “She was only joking. You don’t even like porridge!”

  “And a heart of stone to cut if off?” asked James, squinting at his reflection in a shop window. “What did she mean?”

  “She meant it would be hard to do.”

  It was hard to do, but James’s heart was stonier than most. It took him some time to get hold of sharp enough scissors but he had managed it at last. Binny’s blazer had just been ticked off the back-to-school list when he walked into the kitchen, shorn and smirking and looking forward to drama.

  “Hello! Don’t kiss me! Guess who I look like!”

  “Hello James, you have been busy,” said his mother, unflinchingly crossing Hair? James? off her list. “You look like Christopher Robin.”

  “Christopher Robin! Who’s Christopher Robin?” asked James, outraged. “I look like Bart Simpson!”

  “They are very alike,” said his mother.

  “I thought you’d all scream and cry when you saw me!”

  “We are screaming and crying inside,” said Clem cheerfully.

  “Why are we?” asked Binny, who had been peering gloomily into her blazer bag. “What’s he done? Oh no! Oh James!”

  “Yes, that’s what I knew you’d be like,” said James with great satisfaction. “What’s for tea?”

  “Sausages.”

  “Just?”

  “With chips.”

  “Beans?”

  “Perhaps. What did you do with the cut off hair?”

  “I swished it down the drain.”

  “Disgusting!” said his mother. “Binny, have you bumped your head? And what have you done to your hands?”

  “It was a butterfly. I saw it and then I . . . then I banged into a wall! It was a special butterfly; the sort you never see. Clem said I dreamed it, but I didn’t. I’m going to call Gareth and ask what kind it was.”

  “It was the invisible-get-Binny-squashed-on-the-road sort,” Clem called after her as she left the room, but Binny took no notice and went off with the phone. Binny and Gareth were a team. Years before, when Binny lost Max, her puppy, it was Gareth who found him and gave him a home. Now Max was shared; school times with Gareth in Oxford, vacations in Cornwall with Binny, and his owners had become friends. Clem had once described them as Fiction and Nonfiction. Gareth was definitely nonfiction, an encyclopedia-reading, bad tempered, naturalist-scientist.

  “Of course it didn’t ‘come out of nowhere’!” he interrupted, as Binny began her description of the butterfly. “And it probably wasn’t yellow. Do you mean browny yellow?”

  “No,” said Binny. “Yellow as yellow! And a cutout sort of shape, with twirly black edges. Big too, and bright! Bright as a picture in a book!”

  “A Swallowtail. You couldn’t possibly have seen one,” said Gareth.

  “How could I have told you what it was like if I didn’t see it?” Binny demanded.

  “You saw a picture somewhere and got mixed up in your head. You’re always seeing things. You spent the summer seeing ghosts!”

  Binny was suddenly silent.

  “And you never know what things are, even when you’re looking at them.”

  “Of course I do!”

  “I remember when you used to think seals were fish!”

  “That was ages . . .”

  “Five and a half weeks,” said Gareth, with his usual awful accuracy.

  “Oh shut up!”

  “Shut up yourself,” said Gareth. “It was a Swallowtail but you didn’t see it.”

  It sounded like a quarrel, but it wasn’t. Binny and Gareth had an understanding that words could not hurt. It didn’t stop them arguing, though.

  “I know what I saw and you don’t know what I saw,” said Binny.

  “Why did you ask me, then?”

  “I didn’t. I just mentioned it. I really wanted to talk to Max.”

  “Well, that’s easy! MAX!” yelled Gareth, and Binny heard the scurry of paws as Max arrived. He recognized her voice instantly and barked intelligently into the receiver until he was cut off mid woof by Gareth’s mother crying in the background that she could not hear herself think.

  “You don’t get those butterflies in Cornwall,” said Gareth, suddenly back again. “Not ever.”

  “Why not? That doesn’t make sense. How would a butterfly know it was Cornwall?”

  “What?”

  “They have wings. They fly around. So why shouldn’t they fly to Cornwall? What’s to stop them? They’re not going to read the road signs, are they? And think, ‘Oh, no! Cornwall! I’m not allowed there!’ What sort of butterfly did you say it was?”

  “A Swallowtail.”

  “Have you ever seen one?”

  “Yes. In France.”

  “I’ve seen one in England,” said Binny. “Good-bye!”

  * * *

  “I wish they didn’t live in Oxford, a million miles away,” she said to her mother, stumping back into the kitchen a minute later. “I wish you’d married Gareth’s dad; it would be much easier about Max. Wouldn’t you like to? Gareth and me think you still could if you tried.”

  “Thank you for your confidence but Gareth’s father is married to someone else.”

  “He’s only just done it, though.”

  “It still counts,” pointed out Binny’s mother. “Although I can see it would be convenient for you. Set the table while you’re moaning. How was Gareth?”

  “He says I see things that aren’t there.”

  “You two balance each other perfectly!” said her mother. “You see things that aren’t there. He doesn’t see things that are! Such as his father’s extremely nice new wife. When you’ve done the table, will you go and find James and Clem, please. I sent James to unblock the drain and Clem rushed out for beans but she should be back any minute. Tell them it’s suppertime.”

  There were just four people in the Cornwallis family, the children’s mother, Binny, James, and Clem. No grandparents or useful aunts or uncles. Their father was a smiling photograph on the wall of the little sitting room. He had died four years before, leaving behind, like gifts from a wizard: his musical ability for Clem, his love of stories for Binny, and his optimistic self-confidence for James. Binny paused to look at him as she passed. For a long time his eyes had puzzled her, until she realized they were her own. She was gazing at the picture when Clem blew through the door, James’s beans in her hand and a gale of wind in her silvery hair.

  “Goodness!” she panted. “It’s getting wild out there! Hold out your hand, Bin! I caught you a wish! There you are!”

  In the Cornwallis family an autumn leaf caught between tree and ground counted for a wish. Clem uncurled her fingers over Binny’s palm to give her a birch leaf, butterfly yellow and butterscotch brown.

  “Save it for an emergency,” said Clem.

  Binny held the leaf carefully, cradling it in her hand so that it shouldn’t be bent.

  “Thank you,” she said, so solemnly that Clem laughed and said, “You may never need it!”

  “I think I will,” said Binny.

  Summer 1912, Part 1

  There were three of them. Rupert, who was the eldest, and his cousins, thirteen-year-old Peter and Clarry, who was ten. Their mothers had been sisters and their fathers were brothers and every year since Clarry could remember, she and Peter had spent the summer at the house in Cornwall, where Rupert lived with their grandparents. The grandparents seemed to have very little to do with this arrangement. In the term time Rupert was sent to boarding school. During vacations they provided beds and meals and closed the sitting room door.

  “They don’t fuss,” said the boys with satisfaction.
“Wash it well,” they would say at the sight of a cut knee. “Do stop,” at the advent of tears. Only illness surprised them. “You can’t have measles!” they told Clarry the summer that she was eight. Clarry had measles anyway, all by herself in the bedroom overlooking the garden. Now and then people brought her drinks and told her what day it was. It was extremely uncomfortable and boring and lonely and sometimes she wondered if a little fussing would be as bad as the boys seemed to believe. It didn’t happen, so she never found out.

  Rupe, who was hardly ever called Rupert, had been going to boarding school for years. Nothing could frighten him. Clarry and Peter lived in Plymouth with their father. He was perpetually busy, but he was not unkind and he paid their train fares to their grandparents’ house with no complaints at all. He always saw them off from the station, with new hats and books, and apples for the journey. Once he even remembered Clarry’s birthday and added a present, a silver box with a comb and hairbrush and looking glass inside, but Clarry did not usually have birthdays because the day she was born her mother had died. (“Thank you very much,” Peter had said bitterly, when he informed her of this fact, and Clarry, stabbed to the heart with guilt, had thought, Oh Peter! Oh, poor Peter. I must look after Peter.)

  For Clarry, there could have been no better way to spend her birthday than summer with Rupe and Peter at their grandparents’ house. It seemed to her that each was better than the one before. The brightness of those summers illuminated the whole year for Clarry. The glow of the one that had passed did not fade until the shimmer of the one ahead could be seen on the horizon.

  The house was in the country and the grandparents believed the countryside to be safe. Clarry, Rupe, and Peter were allowed to do exactly as they liked. They lost themselves on the moors, poisoned themselves with toadstools, were chased by bullocks, stung by wasps, and tumbled from trees and walls and rock faces. Clarry nearly drowned when the boys taught her to swim by abandoning her in deep water. Rupe was ill for three days after picking up, and being bitten by, a baby adder. When Peter was twelve he jumped from the train that ran through the dark cutting beyond the end of the garden.