Jane Louise Curry, Children's Books Author
  When the Nicholas family of POOR TOM'S GHOST first see the derelict old house near London that Aunt Deb had left to them in her will, they are sadly disappointed. Thirteen-year-old Roger's disappointment was the greatest. All his life had been spent in moving from place to place with his gifted actor-father, and he longed for a home, a place to belong. But then Roger and his father discover under peeling wallpaper and damaged paneling evidence of a much older, more graceful house, and the delighted family sets to work. But... That night the old house is filled with a sound of wild grieving that Roger traces to an empty room. The ghost he sees there is Tom Garland, an actor at the Globe theatre in Shakespeare's day, and not long afterward Roger's father, playing Hamlet in London's National Theatre, is caught up, unaware, in Tom's old tragedy. It is Roger who must find a way to mend the past before its heartbreak is repeated in the present. "Absolutely enthralling..." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Edgar Allen Poe Special Award, Mystery Writers of America Ohioana Book Award, Ohioana Library Association [...and if you're one of the thousands of readers who've read and enjoyed POOR TOM'S GHOST, you'll want to read THE BLACK CANARY, to come in 2005.]  The Nicholas family—Roger, his actor-father Tony, stepmother Jo, and young step-sister, Pippa—have inherited an old wreck of a house in Isleworth, not far upriver from London, and have come to “camp out” in it for the weekend to investigate just how bad it is. The first night, Roger hears strange sounds, but it is on the next day that the family begins to discover the real house hiding inside the house they can see. They have pulled out the disconnected gas fire, and are about to build a coal fire in the fireplace to try to dry out the dampness…  Tony sat back on his heels to scowl at the half-built fire in the new grate, and then at Jo. "Have you any idea how far we had to go for coals in August? Hounslow!" "It's not all that far," Jo said placidly. "I'm sorry I didn't think to ask before, though. I'm surprised I thought of it at all, seeing as I've never had a real fireplace. It just seemed..." "I know. 'Logical,' " Tony drawled. "O.K., Roger, out it comes." Together they lifted out the half-filled grate and set it in the nearest corner. "Pa," Roger asked suddenly, "what about the steel measuring tape?" "What about it?" "It's a long one. Twelve feet. Couldn't we feed it up the opening and try twisting it around? Like one of those Dyno-Rod or Roto-Rooter cables for blocked drains? If it won't go up, we'll know it's blocked." "Not a bad idea. And if it does clear, we can try the same with the fireplace above. The chimney pots are probably more than another twelve feet above that, but if it's clear that far, we can burn a sheet or so of newspaper to see whether it draws. Now, where did I put the blasted tape?". "You'll make an awful mess," Jo warned. "Soot all over the place. I can move the food cartons and the picnic gear, but if you don't want to ruin your clothes, you'll put on your bathing shorts. Believe it or not, there's an old tin bathtub in that cubbyhole off the back end of the garage. If you get too grubby you can toss a coin for who gets the bathroom, and who gets a tin tub down in the kitchen." "And cold water in both of them." Roger shuddered as he said it, and Tony made a face at the prospect. "She may be right. We'll give it a short test poke to see if it's worth it, shall we?" Tony reached for the unread Times and Guardian. and filched the business sections to spread on the hearth and the floor round it. It took a bit of a struggle to open the damper once he located it; then, pulling out a three foot length of the tape and locking it, Tony knelt sideways and pushed it up into the dark opening. A short way in, it stopped, and when he tried to force it through the obstruction, it bent with a metallic twang and sent down a small shower of soot. "Fourteen inches?" Tony grunted. "Some chimney!" "It might be a bend in the flue," Roger suggested. "Not that much of a bend. Has to be a right angle." Tony pulled out the measure and rolled his shirt sleeves well above the elbow. With his right hand he groped upward through the opening. "Hah! You're right at that. It does angle upward, but only barely." He brought his grimy forearm out with a frown. "And it's smooth, except for the soot. Feels more like a stove pipe than a proper chimney. Here, let's have that measure again." Guiding the steel ribbon past the sharp angle in the flue, he fed more and more of its length into the black hole. At last it met some resistance, but at the next insistent push twanged dimly and moved on reluctantly, as if it had rounded another corner. Then it jammed and could be forced no further. Carefully, Tony pulled it down to the second bend and took hold of the tape at the flue opening with thumb and forefinger to mark the length. "What is it?" Roger was excited by the intent frown on his father's face. Jo, watching idly, noticed with some surprise that Tony's eyes, like Roger's, were underlined with shadow. Odd, when he had slept well. It made the two of them, crouched before the fireplace, look strangely more like brothers than father and son. "I'm not sure," Tony said slowly. He pulled the tape free to have a look at the number beside his grimy thumb. Five feet, it read. "Allowing for the straight-up bit, it looks as if for the first four feet the blasted thing aims for the stair landing in the hall, not for the roof. Then it turns up." He sat back on his heels. "Does that mean anything?" Pippa asked for all of them. "One thing at least," Tony said. "This can't be the original fireplace. It must be set at the front of a deeper one. Deeper and older. Well, well, well!" His voice softened to a whisper. "It would fit," Jo said slowly. "At least, the house looks as if it's been seriously messed about at some point. Do you suppose we have an eighteenth-century swan lurking inside our mucky duckling?" "Only one way to find out." Tony straightened purposefully, looked at his blackened hands, and crossed to the kitchen stairs. In a few moments he emerged again, wiping them dry on the Dutch handkerchief he wore as a neck-scarf. “Now. Where's our new crowbar?" Jo looked a little worried. "You're not going to do anything drastic, are you?" But as Roger produced the short chisel-ended iron bar, her eybrows quirked up in a caricature of resignation. "You are going to do something drastic. And if you're wrong, it will probably cost a packet to put it right again. I'll end up giving up my long holiday, and having to do that ITV play after all." "Oh, do shut up," Tony growled good-humouredly. Lifting the now-clear makeshift table free of the shelf of the middle wall cupboard, he propped it up and pulled the upended tea case across to the hearth. Testing first to see that it would bear his weight, he climbed onto it, carefully placing his feet near opposite corners. The wedge-end of the crowbar he jammed forcibly into the right-of-centre seam high on the painted panelling near where the damp had buckled it out from the cornice, but below the worst of the water stain. It went in with a soft thwump! "Rotten." Tony's grimace was gleeful as he worked the bar in and leftward under the panel until he had leverage. With a slow, careful outward pressure he pried until the top of the central panel groaned outward with a soft, ripping sound. Pippa, who had temporarily lost interest when the chimney failed to produce birds' nests or bat skeletons, was suddenly on the spot with a tin of Old El Paso tortillas to wedge behind the loosened panel. Roger shoved the tea case aside after his father climbed down, and held his breath as the crowbar bit into the lower seam. The wood there was not rotten, and it was only after a lot of patient prying back and forth and not-so-patient commentary, that the bar was worked in far enough for one great wrench. "Out of the way, you lot," Tony grated. His audience scattered. The panel, when it gave, sprang loose with an explosion as sharp as a rifle shot. It flew against the opposite wall with a noisy clatter and only narrowly missed shattering the panes of the nearest French door. The tortilla tin caromed across the room and rolled down the kitchen stairs. Where the panel had been, a four foot width of badly stained plaster extended downward to slightly below shoulder height. The space from there to the top of the inset iron fireplace had been completely filled in with unmortared brick. Jo whistled softly. "Well, well, a cigar for the gentleman." But then her voice sharpened in alarm. "Tony? What is it?" "Pa? Are you all right" Roger crossed quickly from the front room doorway. Tony, suddenly pale, had turned to press his forehead against the cool plaster. After a moment he mumbled, "I'm all right," and brushed the crumbled plaster from his brow. "Things slipped out of focus for a moment. Gave me a bit of a fright, that's all." Roger let go of his father's arm reluctantly. "You're sure?" "I'll make you a cup of tea," Jo said quietly. "Thanks." Tony shook his head as if to clear it and retrieved the crowbar from the floor. "Now then," he said firmly. "Let us see whether it's a swan or a flat-footed bustard we're landed with. This plaster is what I'd call 'dead.' It's been pretty coarse stuff to begin with, and the water seepage has finished it." He raked the crowbar down its surface, cutting into it as if it were soft chalk. But a foot above the brick fill the biting iron rang against stone. Roger's eyes met his father's for one frozen moment, and the crowbar dropped to the floor with a clatter. Tony pulled out his pocket knife, and Roger grabbed the kitchen knife Pippa fetched from the cupboard. When Jo reappeared from the terrace with a steaming mug of tea, they had chipped free of plaster the central portion of a shallow arch of stone. "Looks like we really have something," Tony exulted as he scraped carefully at the plaster imbedded in the carving in the stone. Bit by bit his knife revealed a simple strapwork knotcut into the arch's apex. In the knot's centre was the letter G, and numbers set between the corners of the knot appeared to spell out a date. "Am I crazy," Tony whispered incredulously, "or does that say 1603?" It was almost two o'clock before the Nicholases (and Sammy), dusty-haired and happy, straggled down to the Apprentice for a lunch of bread and cheese on the crowded terrace at the river's edge. They were oblivious to the faintly ghostly appearance they presented in the midday sun in their dusting of plaster, and quite unaware of the open curiosity of children and the amused recognition of a few of the adults. Heads together over the table, they made a list of items they would need: wood scrapers to clean the plaster from the oak wainscoting that was the original facing of the chimney wall, stiff nylon brushes for the fine work, a wire one for the wide stone arch, bucket and sponge mop— and a proper wrecking bar. While Jo added to the list of foodstuffs they would need if they were to stay over for Sunday supper and Monday breakfast, Tony edged back into the crowded pub for a secondpint of bitter and a few moments on the telephone to Alan Collet. "Could you get hold of him?" Jo asked when they met outside the door nearest the parking area and made their way across Church Street. "No problem. He was in the middle of making up for this afternoon's performance and didn't quite appreciate the interruption, but he did come to the phone. He'll be here for brunch tomorrow at eleven and, yes, he's bringing our junior architect." "Jemimal" Pippa crowed. "Jemima. They won't stay the night, though. She has to catch an early train back to Cambridge Monday morning." "Let's hope she knows her regional architectural history well enough to tell me how to start tracking down the tale of Castle Cox," Jo remarked as she and Tony rounded the curve in the footpath past the church. Pippa and Roger were already far ahead. "I do wish Rog had some friends his own age," Jo added unexpectedly. Tony seemed startled. "Hasn't he? He always seems to be busy enough." "With us. When we're on hand. Or swimming, or off on his own at a cricket match. Or lugging his blessed cello off to a lesson with that utter zero of an Albert Cluck." "Clock, chucklehead." Tony put an arm around her shoulders and drew hers around his waist "I shouldn't worry. Old Roger's used to looking after himself. After all, he used to look after me until you took the job on. No, he'll be turning up with a girl friend one of these days, and you'll go tacking off in the other direction." "Umm. Perhaps. But I do wish he didn't tread through life so warily. You'd think the Great Cake of the Universe was going to fall if he put a foot wrong." "Roger? Don't be silly," Tony scoffed. He gave her an affectionate squeeze and when they turned in at their own drive, added a kiss that effectively put Roger out of her mind. By teatime the shopping was done, the whole of the original fireplace wall was exposed, the iron Victorian fireplace dragged clear and toppled down the steps into the garden (where it shattered a terrace paving stone), and the insulating bricks chucked over the railing at the side of the garden stairs to be stacked at leisure. There was still a great deal more to be done in the way of cleaning-the wainscoting was grey with soaked-in plaster and some mildew-but they could sit on the floor with buttered raisin bread and mugs of milk or tea and contemplate the patterned wall and the graceful flattened arch of stone enclosing a deep, fire-blackened fireplace some four feet high and seven wide. "Next," Tony said with a determined gleam in his eye, "we measure the entire house, outside and in, to give us some idea of what else might be lurking inside the walls of our plaster castle. Pips, you're the artist. Rog and I can measure and you can put it down on paper. I said right from the first that the proportions were all wrong, didn't I? I'll wager that in every case it's because something has been tacked on or covered over. We, my dears, are going to pare it down to its seventeenth-century heart." When Roger drifted into sleep at last, he fell to dreaming of tape measures that wrapped themselves around corners and slithered up and down walls like flat, silver snakes. Seventeen feet, two-and-a-quarter inches, they hissed. Fifty-four feet and half an inch. Nine feet precisely. When you touched a finger to their backs, you felt a ripple, like a pulse, almost, and when their silver tongues whispered out they sighed Cruel, cruel Roger to use me so. Unreasonably—he knew it was nonsensical—Roger began to be afraid of what they might measure out: a house hidden within a house, meanings hidden in words, feelings bravely tricked out in smiles. Ah Kitten, why? whispered one as it wrapped round his ankle and set to work to measure him. Roger came half awake with a start, the sensation of an icy-cold band round his ankle so real that he lay paralysed, his heart racing, until it died away. It-was-only-a-dream, his mind said, the message shaping itself in some far-off corner and floating towards him. The words were as hard to capture as soap bubbles. Dream? His mind flickered more sharply. Was he awake now, then? His body was a heavy weight, thick, inert as clay; and as his mind struggled towards the surface, his body lay below, dreaming its own dream, like a rock lying on its side in the river bed. Move, he commanded. Stretch. But it would not. Puss? Kitten? Who were they? In the next room he heard a muflled crash, then the creak and slam of what might have been a cupboard door opening and shutting. No grieving. Only angry footsteps, and a heavy door wrenched open. Look. See. Who's there? Roger's brain signalled frantically, and after an endless time his eyelids dragged open and he saw the moonlit rooms. Both. For there were two of them: his own, bare and ugly, and under it—within it?—not a room, but a wainscoted passageway and the heavy, carved balustrade of a broad stairwell, shimmering half-seen, like a darkly lit stage setting behind a heavy scrim. Roger blinked heavily. The illusion did not go away; and he could not move his head even to see the downward flight of stairs that must lie at his bed's foot. In that room within his own—that wide upper landing—no hall doorway opened opposite the window at his back. A shadowy carved chest stood against a wall just there, an empty candlestick atop it. And the pale yellow light spilling across the floor not seven feet from Roger's numb gaze came from the empty master bedroom. Through a door that was-not-there. From that not-room, a man burst into the passageway to stand half dazed, candlestick in hand. He was tall and dark and, but for the face, might have been Tony standing, there, costumed for some play in doublet, trunk hose, and half-cloak, a plumed hat under his arm. But the face was nothing like. It was a good enough face, but the grief and anger wavering there had made it ugly. The man's right hand, white-knuckled, gripped the haft of the poniard that hung on a gilt and silver chain from his belt. Roger, frozen fast, saw every link of the chain, every point of lace edging the falling bands at his neck. Then, abruptly, the man moved, hurling himself towards the stair and passing out of Roger's view. He was gone, but the sound of footsteps pelting down and the thud of a heavy outer door were a long time dying. Move. Wake up. Stop the dream. Blood thrummed in Roger's ears like deep, plucked bass notes on a cello, an underwater sound, until the stone that was his body stirred and stretched and sat up shivering, half naked, in the wash of moonlight through the open window. The terrifying thing was that he knew he had been awake all the time.  "Absolutely enthralling, this novel can't fail to entrance readers just as surely as the past entrances Curry's characters." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "When a novelist transports his characters backwards in time he may merely enlighten his readers about other eras or he may thrill them with the powerful drama that the intermingling of centuries can bring into his characters' lives....Poor Tom's Ghost is distinctly superior...its intense psychological undercurrents are enthralling." --ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH "This is a chilling ghost story that will keep you in suspense from start to finish. --LEARNING, Palo Alto, CA "That tiresome convention that time travellers cannot be allowed to alter the past is wearing threadbare these days. In Jane Curry's Poor Tom's Ghost the new house of which Roger hopes so much is haunted, not only by the plastered-over much older house beneath, but a grief-stricken ghost, breaking its heart over an error, a pure mistake. Getting tangled with the Elizabethan ghost improves Roger's father's performance as Hamlet no end; Roger undeceives the wounded lover in the past, and all ends well with perfect emotional logic: who cares about the other sort when deep in a fast-moving and absorbing story like this?" --Jill Paton Walsh in THE GUARDIAN "The best children's fantasies--of which this is definitely one--offer no insult to the intelligence of the adult reader. If you buy this for your pre-teenager and don't read it yourself, you are missing a memorable reading experience, and a very poignant evocation of the preadolescent mind." --Marion Zimmer Bradley in DELAP'S FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW "Eerie sobbing in an empty, moonlit room and illusions which flicker darkly even in the daylight hours lead inexorably to the possession of Tony Nicholas by the ghost of a fellow actor, from Shakespeare's stage. His thirteen-year-old son Roger steps back into the past to free him, and is almost marooned in plague-ridden London. This is a superbly atmospheric story, full of suspense and chilling moments." --THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (London) "...here is a book which approaches greatness, one in which past and present, people and setting, are fused under enormous pressure." THE JUNIOR BOOKSHELF (U.K.) "Poor Tom's Ghost is a triumph for Jane Louise Curry" THE WORLD OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS (Canada) |
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