It was horrible out there. Windy rain stormed into her face. Worse still, when she worked the torch through beside her face and got it pointed downwards, all she could see was a sort of trench full of turbulent water just below her and the square shapes of the castle parapet beyond that. The drain was obviously deep under water. She was going to have to guess where it was. The only way Hayley could see to get near it was to ooze herself out of the window headfirst. And then grope.
“We’ve got you,” Troy said encouragingly as Hayley began to wriggle herself forward.
The frame of the skylight was only just big enough for her to get through. As Hayley wriggled onward, the spike that the metal bar hooked on to scraped its way agonisingly down the middle of her chest, while the bar itself hung down and poked her in the head. By the time her feet had left the stool and she was hanging half in and half out, she was still a foot away from the murky ditch of water and being stabbed in the tummy button by the spike. She was going to have to get all of her outside.
Behind her, she could hear the little bathroom filling up with people. Someone said, “She’ll never get to it like that!”
Oh yes I will! Hayley thought. “Be ready to hold my feet!” she shouted and thought she heard someone say “OK.” Then, clutching the torch in her right hand, she began to inch herself down the sloping tiles outside. Rain pelted across her. Before long, she had the feeling it was raining upwards into her pants. The skylight bit into her shins, the tiles scraped her front. The only comforting thing was that she could feel Troy’s hands warm and strong on her left leg and Aunt May’s hands, softer but just as strong, holding her right calf.
They were paying her out of the window like a rope.
The hands had reached her ankles before Hayley could even touch the water. Left, she thought. She had to stretch and ooze and extend herself sideways before her hand could go into the rippling flood. It was surprisingly un-cold to her fingers. The hands were holding her shoes by then. And she stretched and oozed and tried to lengthen herself again, until finally her fingertips met a rough, leaded bottom. She couldn’t feel any kind of drain. Rather desperately, she swished her hand further to the left. Here there was the faintest feeling that the water was pulling at her fingers. Almost shrieking with the effort, she managed to move her hand that way.
The tips of her fingers touched something thick and rubbery-feeling. With another desperate stretch, Hayley somehow got one finger under it, and then her thumb on top. Then she could pick whatever-it-was up.
It came up with a gurgle. Hayley was so surprised at how quickly things happened then that she nearly screamed. Water thundered past her nose from right to left and tried to take her hair with it. To the left, it became a whirlpool, fairly whizzing round and round, and gargled away down the unblocked drain so fast that by the time Troy and Aunt May, thoroughly alarmed at the noises Hayley was making, had started to haul on her ankles, the gutter was empty.
Troy and Aunt May went on hauling. Hayley scraped rapidly and painfully up over the tiles, and agonisingly across the spike, and landed on the stool in the bath again, soaking wet and with her dress torn completely open down the middle.
Someone shouted, “She did it!”
There were cheers from the crowded bathroom behind her. Someone else said, “What was it? What is she holding?”
Blinking in the lantern light, Hayley turned herself around on the stool. Cousins and aunts were packed into the tiny space, dimly lit and staring, with Cousin Mercer ducking his wet head in through the door at the back and Tollie squashed up against the bath in front. Troy gently prised the torch out of Hayley’s right hand and switched it off. Aunt May seized Hayley’s left wrist. “Good heavens!” she said.
Hayley looked that way to find that her fingers were clamped round a pork chop. It was large. It was raw, and whitish with waterlogging, and sort of triangular, but there was no doubt what it was. It was almost exactly the right size and shape to block a drain.
“It’s a pork chop!” Aunt Alice exclaimed. “However did that get into the gutter?”
Hayley looked at Tollie, down near her soaking shoes, and knew at once. If ever she saw guilt and annoyance, it was in Tollie’s face at that moment. No doubt Tollie had hoped to be the one who went heroically out through the window. But when Aunt May said, “We have crows and seagulls here all the time – one of them must have dropped it,” Hayley did not contradict her. Even though Tollie looked up at her with scorn and dislike, for being too feeble to tell, Hayley did not say a word. She was shivering all over and her front hurt.
Aunt Celia said, “Poor child! She’s bleeding!”
Hayley was seized and carried away. The pork chop was taken from her like a trophy and she was carried over marshy carpets, first to somebody’s bedroom, where Harmony bathed her scraped front and spread soothing ointment there, while cousins ran about finding her some fur slippers and a large fluffy dressing gown. Then, wrapped in these luxuries, she was carried downstairs again. “I can walk!” Hayley protested.
“Yes, but you’re not going to – you’ve saved the day,” Aunt May told her.
She ended up in the kitchen, which was still dry and beautifully warm, where the aunts made quarts of cocoa. There Hayley sat in a wooden armchair, surrounded by relatives who were all praising her – except for Tollie, who sat in a corner and glowered at her – sipping cocoa and gradually warming up. Some of the warmth was from the unusual feeling of being the centre of everyone’s admiration – apart from Tollie’s of course. When Troy appeared, in a red dressing gown, he said, “Well done! You’re a brave one, aren’t you!” And Aunt May, now wearing a musty-smelling fur coat, hugged her mightily and said, “You courageous child! We won’t forget this in a hurry!”
Hayley had never known anything like this. The warmth from it was still with her when Cousin Mercer carried her up to bed and she fell asleep, into warm, sunny, contented dreams.
The next day, it was hard to believe that it had ever rained. Hayley woke to find the sky a bright heavenlike blue with great snowy clouds hustling across it. Aunt May woke her by coming in with an armload of clothes.
“Here, dear. Most of these should fit you. Try them on and make sure you’re warm enough. The wind’s chilly today. Breakfast in half an hour.” Aunt May’s hair, because it had been soaked last night, was wilder than ever that morning. Half of it fell down as she crossed the room. And she seemed to have found a whole lot of new necklaces. Red amber beads dangled clacking on her shapeless maroon dress when she threw the clothes on Hayley’s bed and went dashing away downstairs.
Hayley got up and examined the clothes. There were shorts with pockets, trousers with pockets, jeans, socks, T-shirts, jackets with pockets, sweatshirts with both hoods and pockets, knitted things, but not a single dress or skirt. Hayley could feel her face settling into a beaming smile. She made a careful selection: trousers with pockets, because those were like the ones Troy wore, a T-shirt that said “HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE”, thick yellow socks, because the trainers were rather big, and a red cardigan, because she suddenly discovered that red was her favourite colour. Feeling baggy and strange and comfortable, she looked in the mirror to do her hair and wondered what Grandma would say. Her hair had gone right out of control in the night. It radiated from her head in curls, tendrils, ringlets and long feathery locks. Hayley had a moment of terrible guilt. She was never going to get it neat! Then she thought of Aunt May and realised there was no need to bother here. She dragged a hairbrush through the wildness and went downstairs.
There she was greeted as if she was the most important person in the place. It was almost overwhelming. Aunts jumped up from the big table and bent over her asking anxiously if she was all right and would she like sausages with her bacon and egg