wall, thinking that Luke must be a trespasser and nothing to do with the neat and respectable house after all. He was wearing cast-off looking clothes, much like David’s, and he was covered with brick dust, cement dust and what seemed to be soot. And it was plain he did not care two hoots about the broken wall. He sat himself down on a convenient heap of bricks and patted another to show David where to sit too.
“Explain,” he said, and folded his arms, ready to listen, with a very engaging look of interest. Luke had a sharp and freckly face, under the dirt, and a burn or something on one cheek, probably from those sudden flames. His hair seemed to be red. At any rate, he had those kind of red-brown eyes that only go with red hair. David rather took to him.
“I did it trying to curse,” David confessed, and sat down too, though he could not help taking a nervous look at the respectable house first.
“Don’t worry. They’re out, or they’d have been up here raving half an hour ago,” Luke said, which proved to David that he was certainly only a trespasser. “Now, explain. Whom were you cursing?”
“All my horrible relations,” David said. It was a relief to talk about it. He told Luke how his relations did not want him, how they were planning to send him to Mr Scrum so that they could go to Scarborough, about Mrs Thirsk, the food and the chewing gum, and about the row at lunch. Luke listened sympathetically, but it was when David came to the cursing part that he grew really interested.
“What did you say?” he asked. “Can you remember?”
David thought, and was forced to shake his head. “No. It’s gone. But I suppose it was some kind of curse if it knocked the wall down.”
Luke smiled. “No. It wasn’t a curse.”
“How do you know? It brought out a load of snakes too, didn’t it?”
“But it wasn’t a curse, all the same,” said Luke.
David was a little annoyed. For one thing, Luke could not possibly know, and, for another, although it would have been a relief not to have uttered a curse after all, it was plain to David that his words had had a powerful effect of some kind. “What was it then?” he said challengingly.
“Unlocking words. The opposite of a curse, if you like,” Luke said, as if he really knew. David said nothing. He thought Luke was trying to make him feel less guilty about the ruin they were sitting on. Luke smiled. “You don’t believe me, do you?” David shook his head. “Oh well,” said Luke. “But they were, and I’m truly grateful to you. You let me out of a really horrible prison.” He smiled happily and pointed with one slightly blistered finger to the ground under the wall.
This was too much for David, who, after all, had been there to see that nothing but flames and snakes had come from the ground. “Pull the other leg,” he said.
Luke looked at him with one eyebrow up and a mischievous, calculating look on his filthy face. He seemed to be deciding just how much nonsense David could be brought to swallow. Then he laughed.
“Have it your own way,” he said. “But I am grateful, and I’ll do anything I can in return.”
“Thanks,” David said disbelievingly. “Then I suppose you can help me stand this wall up again.”
Luke looked at David in that shrewd and mischievous way again. “I might,” he said. “Shall we see what we can do?”
“Oh, do let’s,” David said sarcastically.
Luke jumped up briskly. “Come on, then. You take the other end of this and help me lift it.” He stooped and put his hands to a section of brickwork, where the wall had come down still cemented together. “Come on,” he said. “Don’t look so glum about it.”
So David, feeling hopeless about it, got up slowly and wandered to the other end of the joined piece of wall. He put his hands to it and found the bricks coming loose as he touched them.
“Heave!” Luke said cheerfully.
David heaved, not very hard. But he must have heaved harder than he thought, because he managed to raise the whole section. Luke lifted his end, and together they carried a whole chunk of wall, grinding and bending, and laid it down in one piece by the compost heap.
“There, you see?” said Luke, and went jumping gaily back across the bricks. “Now this bit.”
In a remarkably short time, they had all the complete sections of wall laid out in order on the gravel. When these were moved, they found there had been a tree growing up against the back of the wall – part of the neat orchard – and the wall had crushed it as it went over. They looked at it, Luke laughing and David glum. Luke shook his head.
“It’s dead,” said David.
“Yes, but we can fake it a bit,” Luke said. “You pull that branch straight.”
They spread the tree out until it looked the right shape for a tree again. Then Luke lifted it in his arms and thumped the broken trunk into the soft ground until it stood upright. Its leaves were withering and wilting still, but it looked as if it were growing.
“Can’t bring the dead to life, I’m afraid,” said Luke, “but they might think it died from natural causes, with luck.”
Then they rebuilt the wall. David had never imagined it could be so easy. True, they worked hard and sweat trickled through the dirt on their faces, but they laughed and whistled as well, and the wall grew in leaps and bounds.
As they worked, David came to like Luke more and more. He was fun. He made jokes all the time, and no difficulty seemed to dismay him. Some of his jokes were complete nonsense, mostly because he chose to keep up the pretence that David had let him out of prison. “My chains,” he said, as they staggered under the largest section of wall, “were a good hundred times heavier than this.” Then again, when they got to the most difficult part, which was slotting the newly rebuilt wall into the jagged ends of the walls at the sides of the garden, Luke said something odd. David was doing the slotting, while Luke held the wall tilted for him. He could see Luke’s muscles standing out in knots.
“Are you sure you can hold it?” David asked.
“Nothing like so heavy as a bowl of venom,” Luke panted cheerfully. David laughed.
Once the wall was slotted in, they were finished. It was not perfect. The upper courses of bricks wandered up and down a little, and because they had used no cement, there were places where you could look through to the orchard. But it stood solidly. David and Luke were very proud of it.
“Not bad, considering neither of us ever built a wall before,” Luke said. “What shall we do now?”
David looked at his watch and found it was nearly supper time. “I shall have to go in,” he said mournfully. “They get furious if I’m late.” He was very dejected. He remembered he was in disgrace and about to be sent to Mr Scrum on Tuesday. It was too bad, now that he had met Luke. “Can you come out after supper?” he asked, thinking he must see as much of Luke as he could while he had the chance.
“Of course,” said Luke. “Whenever you want. Just kindle a flame and I’ll be with you.”
“Meet you here then,” said
