“What?”
“You know,” she said. “I know it was you.”
“What was me?”
“Throwing coins at me. At all of us. From the bushes. That was just nasty.”
“But I didn’t.”
“It hurt.”
She went back to her friends, and they all glared at me. My throat felt painful and ragged.
I walked down the drive. I don’t know where I was thinking of going—I just didn’t want to be there any longer.
Lettie Hempstock was standing at the bottom of the drive, beneath the chestnut trees. She looked as if she had been waiting for a hundred years and could wait for another hundred. She wore a white dress, but the light coming through the chestnut’s young spring leaves stained it green.
I said, “Hello.”
She said, “You were having bad dreams, weren’t you?”
I took the shilling out of my pocket and showed it to her. “I was choking on it,” I told her. “When I woke up. But I don’t know how it got into my mouth. If someone had put it into my mouth, I would have woken up. It was just in there, when I woke.”
“Yes,” she said.
“My sister says I threw coins at them from the bushes, but I didn’t.”
“No,” she agreed. “You didn’t.”
I said, “Lettie? What’s happening?”
“Oh,” she said, as if it was obvious. “Someone’s just trying to give people money, that’s all. But it’s doing it very badly, and it’s stirring things up around here that should be asleep. And that’s not good.”
“Is it something to do with the man who died?”
“Something to do with him. Yes.”
“Is he doing this?”
She shook her head. Then she said, “Have you had breakfast?”
I shook my head.
“Well then,” she said. “Come on.”
We walked down the lane together. There were a few houses down the lane, here and there, back then, and she pointed to them as we went past. “In that house,” said Lettie Hempstock, “a man dreamed of being sold and of being turned into money. Now he’s started seeing things in mirrors.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Himself. But with fingers poking out of his eye sockets. And things coming out of his mouth. Like crab claws.”
I thought about people with crab legs coming out of their mouths, in mirrors. “Why did I find a shilling in my throat?”
“He wanted people to have money.”
“The opal miner? Who died in the car?”
“Yes. Sort of. Not exactly. He started this all off, like someone lighting a fuse on a firework. His death lit the touchpaper. The thing that’s exploding right now, that isn’t him. That’s somebody else. Something else.”
She rubbed her freckled nose with a grubby hand.
“A lady’s gone mad in that house,” she told me, and it would not have occurred to me to doubt her. “She has money in the mattress. Now she won’t get out of bed, in case someone takes it from her.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “Once you’ve been around for a bit, you get to know stuff.”
I kicked a stone. “By ‘a bit’ do you mean ‘a really long time’?”
She nodded.
“How old are you, really?” I asked.
“Eleven.”
I thought for a bit. Then I asked, “How long have you been eleven for?”
She smiled at me.
We walked past Caraway Farm. The farmers, whom one day I would come to know as Callie Anders’s parents, were standing in their farmyard, shouting at each other. They stopped when they saw us.
When we rounded a bend in the lane, and were out of sight, Lettie said, “Those poor people.”
“Why are they poor people?”
“Because they’ve been having money problems. And this morning he had a dream where she . . . she was doing bad things. To earn money. So he looked in her handbag and found lots of folded-up ten-shilling notes. She says she doesn’t know where they came from, and he doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t know what to believe.”
“All the fighting and the dreams. It’s about money, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure,” said Lettie, and she seemed so grown-up then that I was almost scared of her.
“Whatever’s happening,” she said, eventually, “it can all be sorted out.” She saw the expression on my face then, worried. Scared even. And she said, “After pancakes.”
Lettie cooked us pancakes on a big metal griddle, on the kitchen stove. They were paper-thin, and as each pancake was done Lettie would squeeze lemon onto it, and plop a blob of plum jam into the center, and roll it tightly, like a cigar. When there were enough we sat at the kitchen table and wolfed them down.
There was a hearth in that kitchen, and there were ashes still smoldering in the hearth, from the night before. That kitchen was a friendly place, I thought.