Read Online The Key to the Indian by Lynne Reid Banks - Free Book Online

copy it. When she poured the lead into the tiny mould she’d made she couldn’t be sure it would take such a small impression. She was absolutely bent on doing her best for us, and she worked ‘like a jeweller’, she said, using a magnifying glass and tiny watchmaker’s tweezers and file that she bought specially.
    “But of course, what none of us stopped to realise was that the copy came from her time. So when it came forward to us, when she brought it just now, it got smaller still . Now it’s a miniature of a miniature. Does that make sense?”
    Omri was totally confounded. Of course it made sense. It was obvious. But what a shock – what a disappointment! The key they’d been counting on! Invisible to the naked eye, and completely useless.
    His father was showing him his other hand. In that lay the original car key that they’d sent back, full size, part metal, part plastic.
    “The original key became big again when I brought her, so big it tore free of her pocket and fell on to the floor of the cupboard.” He put it into his pocket.
    Omri sat down sharply at his desk. There was a long silence. “I am so stupid !” he suddenly shouted.
    “Shhh! No, you’re not—”
    “Why didn’t I think ? Of course the copy would be small. Smaller than small. She made it. It had to get smaller still when she brought it back through the cupboard.”
    “That’s it, then,” said his dad dully. “That’s it. That was our last hope.”
    Omri looked at Jessica Charlotte’s figure. He picked it up. “Did she say anything else?”
    “She just said she was glad to have met me. She tried to save face, telling me how hard she’d tried, but I think she sort of realised she’d failed us. She said, ‘I fear it won’t be any use. I did my utmost, but my gift can’t overcome the problem of proportion.’ I think I thanked her… I know she thanked me .” After a moment he added, “She sent you her love. She said she wished she’d had a son like you.”
    “We won’t see her again,” said Omri sadly.
    “No. But there’s one good thing. She won’t try to kill herself again. It’ll be terribly hard for her. But at least she knows Lottie grew up and had a baby.”
    “Good she doesn’t know she died so young.”
    “She found that out at the end of her life, when she poured the lead for herself. It was in the Account.”
    They were silent.
    “So we can’t go, then,” said Omri hopelessly.
    “It doesn’t look like it.”
    “What about Little Bull? Maybe we could give him some advice from here.”
    His father frowned. “I’m not so sure we should give him any. Who are we to give the Indians advice? It’s like the missionaries, who told them what to believe, and rubbished their religion, destroying everything that had ever held them together.”
    “But he asked. Because he knows we know how things are going to turn out.”
    His father said nothing. After a while, Omri felt the need to comfort him. If he himself felt this disappointed, he could only guess how his dad must be feeling.
    “Well, we could always go camping properly,” he said.
    His father snorted. “A wet tent on Dartmoor! Fat comfort!” he said violently.
    For the next two weeks, Omri had a lesson.
    He didn’t realise it straight away. But what gradually dawned on him, watching his father, was that he had been wrong and smug to think for one single moment that he, Omri, was the grown-up one here. Being grown-up was attitude , not size. His dad proved that he was the grown-up.
    Omri, for his part, fell into a steep depression. He couldn’t be bothered with anything. He did no work at school except what he was forced to do. He was rude to his mother. He had a fight with Gillon. He excused himself to himself bythinking that he was desperately worried about Little Bull; but what he was really doing was giving way to a terrible mood, because they couldn’t go, because their adventure was cancelled.
    But his dad was quite different. You’d never