Free This House is Haunted by John Boyne Page A

“I thought I was still awake but I must have drifted off. I’m sorry for waking you. I don’t … I don’t know what came over me.”
    “You woke Eustace, you know. He’s a light sleeper.”
    “I’m sorry about that,” I said.
    She raised an eyebrow, as if she was considering whether or not she could find it in her heart to forgive me, but settled for a polite nod instead and left me, closing the door behind her.
    I stood by the side of the bed for a long time, until I could convince myself that it must have been my imagination playing tricks on me, and then finally, leaving the curtains open to allow the moonlight to pour in, I climbed back into the bed, pulling the sheets around me, and slowly, very slowly, allowed my legs to stretch out once more, where they encountered nothing other than the soft sheets of the bed.
    I closed my eyes, convinced that I would never sleep now, but exhaustion must have overtaken me, for when I woke again, the sun was streaming through the windows, the rain and wind had dissipated, and a new day, my first at Gaudlin Hall, was upon me.

Chapter Seven
    I T CAME AS A relief that my first morning at Gaudlin should be a bright and sunny one, but also a surprise that a night of heavy rain could give way to such a fine aftermath. I knew nothing of Norfolk weather, of course, and this might have been a typical response to an overnight storm but I could not recall when I had last awoken to such clear skies and pleasant conditions. In London, there was always the murk of a prodigious fog in the air, the smell of burnt coal, the sensation that one’s body was being surreptitiously coated with some infamous parasitic residue that would seep through the pores and sink beneath the skin, an assassin lurking, but here, looking through the large windows across the grounds that surrounded the house, I felt that if I were to run outside and fill my lungs with good, honest country air, then all my traumas of the past week would begin to dissolve and threaten my spirits no more.
    It was this optimistic sensation that lifted my mood when otherwise it might have been deflated by apprehension and loneliness. To my surprise I had enjoyed a good night’s sleep and the various unpleasant businesses of the previous day—my brush with death at the train station, my difficulty in conversingwith Heckling, the uncertainty regarding my employers, that ridiculous nightmare when I went to bed (for nightmare, I was now certain, was all it could have been, a fantasy born of exhaustion and hunger)—all of these things seemed remote to me now. I was determined that today, the first day of my new life away from London, would be a good one.
    The smell of cooking led me directly through a series of connected rooms on the ground floor, the odour growing stronger in each one. The drawing room where I had sat with the children the night before, a rather ornate dining room with a table that might have seated twenty, a small reading room that was filled with marvellous light, a corridor whose walls were decorated with watercolours of butterflies and, finally, the kitchen. I did not know where the Westerleys ate in the mornings for I had not yet received a thorough tour of the house but felt certain that if I followed my nose then I would find the entire family enjoying their breakfast and preparing to welcome me. Surely all this nonsense about Isabella and Eustace’s parents would be sorted out then.
    To my surprise, however, the kitchen was deserted, although the aromas in the air made it clear that someone had been there not long before, preparing breakfast.
    “Hello,” I cried, stepping towards the pantry in search of the cook. “Is there anyone here?”
    But no, there wasn’t. I looked around; the shelves were well stocked. There were fresh vegetables and fruit lying in baskets, and a cold store that, when opened, revealed cuts of beef and poultry encased in glass containers. A bowl of brown eggs sat beneath the