Chapter 3

In the silvery light of dawn, everything looked different. The shadows in the room were dove gray. The cupboard with the framed photo on it of the last house, her bathrobe hanging on the back of the door, her old toy box, and the shelves of books were all soft gray shapes, as if they were waiting for proper daylight for the real colors to come back in.

Tilly listened.

Why had she woken up? Had there been a noise?

Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night and she thought she could still hear the echo of something, some sound. But she couldn’t say what, exactly, she had heard.

The house breathed deeply, as if it was sleeping.

Mom was sleeping. Dad was sleeping.

Tilly climbed out of bed. She padded across the carpet to the curtains and pulled them back just enough to make a gap, so she could see out of the window.

A fox trotted across the lawn below. Its black feet left silver prints in the damp grass. It stopped, looked up at Tilly at the window. For a moment it stood still as a statue, one paw lifted up, ears pricked up, and watched her. It looked deep into her eyes.

Tilly pressed her face closer to the cold window glass. The fox turned, trotted on across the grass, and disappeared between two silvery-gray bushes.

Tilly’s breath misted the glass; she rubbed it clear again but there was no sign of the fox now, just its faint prints left behind in the damp grass. The garden lay still and waiting, full of gray shadows. Tilly shivered. She climbed down off the windowsill and crept back into bed, under the warm blanket. Her hand reached out for Little Fox, but he must have fallen out of the bed, and before Tilly could climb out again to find him, she was drifting back into sleep.

Tilly thought about the real fox while she was at school the next day. When Dad came for her after school, she nearly told him what she had seen. But she didn’t. She kept the fox her secret.

“How’s Mom?” Tilly asked him as they went into the house.

“Resting. But you can see her later and tell her about your day. Now, I’ve got work to do. Why don’t you play in the garden till teatime, Tilly?”

Tilly sat for a while on the seat under the big tree in the middle of the lawn. The garden was warm in the afternoon sunshine. Even though it was late autumn, bees buzzed from one pink flower to another in the flower bed next to the hedge. Flies that looked like tiny wasps, but weren’t, hovered over yellow flowers next to a wigwam of sticks holding up withered, old bean plants. White butterflies flitted over the cabbage patch. The old lady who used to live here had loved her vegetable garden. “When we get ourselves organized,” Dad had said, “we’ll grow our own vegetables too.”

Not cabbages, Tilly hoped. She got up and walked across the grass, the same way the fox had gone so early this morning. The sun had dried the grass; no paw prints were left. She found the two silvery bushes and went between them, brushing against the leaves that looked more green than silver now and left a strong smell on her hands. On the other side there was a metal gate.

Tilly peered through. A grassy path went in both directions, left and right, and just across the other side was another gate, but wooden and tumbledown. Where did that go?

“Tilly? Tilly?” Dad called.

Tilly ran back to the lawn.

Dad put a tray down on the grass next to the seat under the tree. There was a blue mug of tea for him and Tilly’s pink mug for her. Dad had made sandwiches.

“Peanut butter,” he said. “And banana.”

Tilly wrinkled up her nose. Dad had a funny idea about what tasted nice in sandwiches.

“Have one,” Dad said. “It’s a long time until supper.”

Tilly wasn’t hungry. She hadn’t been hungry since Mom got ill.

She nibbled the corner of a sandwich. The peanut butter made her tongue sticky and thick and horrible.

A small bird flew down from the tree and landed on the grass. It looked at Tilly with its beady eye, its head to one side. Tilly picked off a crumb of sandwich and threw it. The bird hopped forward and picked up the crumb. It flew back up to the branch, above Tilly’s head.

Crumb by crumb, the bird ate all of Tilly’s sandwich. Dad didn’t notice. He was busy drinking his tea and thinking. Absentmindedly, Dad ate the other three sandwiches. Tilly knew he was in the middle of writing something, and all he was thinking about was the next bit of his story. That was the trouble with having a dad who was a writer. Most of the time, she didn’t mind.

Dad slurped up the last sip of tea. He looked at Tilly as if he had only just remembered she was there. “How was school?”

“All right,” Tilly said, even though it wasn’t.

“Made any new friends yet?”

Tilly shook her head. It was too soon. It was hard, starting all over again at a new school with new people. She thought about Ally. She wished she were at the new school with her.

“One more chapter and some more tidying up in the attic, and then I’ll stop for today,” Dad said. “You OK out here by yourself for a little longer?”

Tilly nodded. “I like it,” she said.

“Good.” Dad ruffled her hair.

“Don’t, Dad!” Tilly ducked away from his hand.

He picked up the tray and went back to the house.

Tilly walked around the garden on the ashy path that went down one side, past rows of raspberry bushes, along under an apple tree and a prickly bit with other fruit bushes, past a stinky compost heap, and then around the other corner and back next to a hedge. What now?

She picked the last rose petals from the bush near the rickety wooden shed. She found an old jam jar on a dusty shelf inside the shed and filled it with water from the outside tap, and squashed in the petals and stirred them with a stick, to make rose scent. She put the scent jar on one of the shelves in the shed, next to a box of nails and a reel of garden string.

She crossed back over the lawn to the metal garden gate and looked through again. The wooden gate opposite had rusty hinges and no latch. It was rotten and falling off the top hinge, and it was slightly open, with a gap just big enough for a slim fox.

Tilly wanted to go through too. But not yet.

Dad was calling her again. “Time to come in! Where are you? Tilly?”

She was glad she was hidden behind the bushes. If he saw her at the gate, she knew he’d say she shouldn’t open it. Shouldn’t go through. But if he didn’t see her, if he didn’t say the actual words, maybe she still could.

Just as she turned away, back to the house, she thought she heard something—a snatch of a song, in a thin, reedy voice. Someone did live close by, then, Tilly thought. Someone who might be a new friend, like Ally. Her spine prickled. It was an old-fashioned sort of song, like something Granny would know.

“Hurry up!” Dad was calling.

Tilly followed him into the house.

“When I was sorting through the attic I found something you might like,” Dad said.

“What is it?” Tilly asked.

“Come and see.”

Tilly went up the stairs behind Dad, along the landing to her bedroom.

An old-fashioned dollhouse sat squarely on the floor in front of the radiator. The walls were made of thin wood, painted a creamy-white color. It had four green-painted bay windows at the front: two upstairs and two downstairs on either side of a green front door. The roof was painted red like tiles, and it had two chimneys at either end.

“Open up the front,” Dad said.

Tilly knelt down. The whole of the front of the house opened, so you could get to the rooms inside. There were two bedrooms and a tiny bathroom upstairs, and a kitchen, a living room, and a hall with a tiled floor downstairs. The bedrooms had wallpaper with a pattern of pink climbing roses. There was furniture too: a bed in each room, a wooden kitchen table and chairs, even tiny pots and pans, and a china dog in a tiny wicker basket.

Tilly lifted everything out carefully and blew off the dust, and then put it all back again just as it had been before.

“The back opens up too,” Dad said.

Tilly pulled the dollhouse away from the radiator so she could reach around to the back. There were two plain wooden doors with hinges on either side; it wasn’t realistic, like the front of the house. She opened the doors and found another set of rooms, all empty except for a family of small dollhouse people: a mother, a father, and a girl, in faded clothes made of felt and with tiny feet in metal shoes. The figures were soft and bendy, so you could make them sit down or straighten them up again, or move their arms as if they were doing things.

“It’s very old,” Dad said. “It’s probably worth something. But it must have belonged to the old lady, and I’m sure she would have wanted you to play with it.”

Tilly thought quickly of the girls in her new class at school. None of them would play with dollhouses. Not at their age! She could imagine them saying the words, sneering at her. But they weren’t here. They would never know. She made herself stop thinking about them.

“It’s lovely,” she said. “Can I keep it here, in my room?”

“Of course.”

When Dad went downstairs to cook supper, Tilly moved everything around in the dollhouse to make it cozier. She put the father doll in the kitchen. She laid the mother doll on the bed upstairs and sat the girl doll on the chair next to her.

That tune was in her head. The one she’d heard in the garden. The thin notes like a bird’s song, but in a girl’s clear voice, over and over.