The Exiles

day), they crouched in the flickering candlelight, soundlessly unpacking and repacking the boxes of forbidden books.
    ‘Natural history!’ exclaimed Ruth to herself. ‘Two whole boxes!’ Many were old, with gold edged pages and black and white engravings. ‘Beautiful!’ thought Ruth. ‘I could have tried to copy them.’ And there were several new ones, full of photographs, the sort of books that Ruth had often pored over in bookshops and at last reluctantly returned to the shelves when the assistant glared too hard.
    Naomi, haloed like an angel in the golden light of her candle, was wandering through Big Grandma’s collection of local history, looking up places she knew and had heard of, and discovering old churches and stone circles that she might have visited if she had known of them in time. Phoebe, sharing her candle and half asleep, turned page after page of storybooks that had belonged, some to her mother and some to Uncle Robert. Occasionally their names were in the front, together with long addresses, which ended with: Planet Earth, The Milky Way, Space . Phoebe remembered the delight with which Ruth and Naomi had conjured up the very same address, and marvelled that her mother and uncle had thought of it too.
    Rachel, in the darkest corner of the room, rifled through comics more than thirty years old, comics with names she had never heard of and prices she could not believe. Gradually she became aware of a change about her, and looking up, saw her sisters staring at each other with tense, listening faces and wide open eyes. Big Grandma had stopped snoring.
    There was a long pause of frozen stillness, and then they heard her turn in bed, and the snoring begin again, but their nerve was broken, and with silent panic they put down their books, crept on stiff and aching legs to the door, and scurried in fright back to their beds.
    ‘Did she hear us?’ whispered Rachel.
    ‘No. She’s still asleep. Go to sleep yourself.’
    ‘What about the door?’
    ‘I think Ruth closed it,’ whispered Naomi, pushing her little sisters into bed before departing, completely exhausted by the activities of the last two days and nights.
    ‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered to Ruth as she crawled beneath the bedclothes, but Ruth, still clutching the key to the storeroom door was already too near dreaming to bother answering. Naomi pushed her head under her pillow and tried to forget her sins, and was soon lost in a nightmare where she had to dig the cabbage patch all over again, and it took even longer than the first time.

Chapter Fourteen
    Ruth woke, as she quite often did, to find herself sitting bolt upright, staring into the first grey light of dawn, cold with fear from some slow fading dream. There was a pain in her right hand, and looking down she realised for the first time that she was gripping something hard. The storeroom key. She had forgotten they had ever been there, but now memory returned to her. How many hours had she been asleep? she wondered. It was still almost dark, but it would soon be morning she supposed. And it was the last morning; tonight they would be back in Lincolnshire, hundreds of miles from the hills and running becks and seascapes of Cumbria. Ruth abandoned all heroic thoughts of returning the key before Big Grandma woke up, and lay down to sob. A minute later she sat up again, and knew what had woken her.
    Smoke. She sniffed again. Definitely smoke. It smelled stronger lying down, but even when she sat up again it was still quite definite. Reaching under the bed she pulled out the candle stump she had stowed there after the escape from the storeroom, half expecting it to be still smouldering, but it was completely out. Peering across the room she could see Naomi’s, lying on the bedside rug beside the dark heap that was her best dress. What had Rachel done with hers?
    Rachel’s candle had been forgotten. For a while it had stood gallantly upright by the pile of comics in the deserted room, and then a paper had slipped and knocked it sideways so that the wax dripped hotly onto the open pages Rachel had left behind her. A little later it fell completely, and the flaming wick spluttered in the pool of candlegrease and the paper began to burn.
    Slowly, because there was very little draught in the room, the comics charred and glowed, red in the centre, smoking but hardly flaming. All the same, by the time they were reduced to white, harmless ashes, the wooden floor was alight. And then