The Terror Time Spies Read Online Free Page A

important and mysterious spy network - The League of the Gloved Hand.
    “Yes, Sir.  Ever vigilant, Sir.  Just as I always know my limitations.”
    It was Robert Penhaligon’s his favourite phrase and the expression on his face was suddenly especially smug. 
    As the Bonespair children walked on down towards the lodge, at the bottom of the long drive, with its homely plume of smoke rising from a little stone chimney, from the big house not even the vigilant English secret agents noticed a shadowy figure beginning to follow them through the long avenue of trees. 
    The stranger was in an austere black coat, and he had arrived in England just a day earlier, on the express orders of the terrible Committee of Public Security.
    “Peurette,” hissed another Frenchman, stepping up too, and also dressed in a long frock coat and tight black leather gloves:  Frenchie gloves. 
    The first stranger squeezed his left wrist with his right hand, as if strangling something.
    “Yes Deforlage,” he acknowledged, with a sinister smile.
    “You think it’s them , Peurette - the children?

TWO – THE NEW CLUB FORMS
     
    “In which we learn of an Itinerary, false starts, a kidnapping and the Club forms.”
     
    The great morning was here at last and now the excitement in leafy Peckham was unbearable for the Rat Catchers. 
    Nellie and Henry Bonespair had hardly got any sleep at all, dreaming of their great adventure, of guillotines, revolutionaries and terrible Paris, giving Eleanor a horrible nightmare but making Henry’s ache to get going even more painful.
    Now their mother Charlotte Bonespair was ringing her hands desperately in the little lodge house kitchen.  
    The woman was in her mid thirties, with soft green eyes and a kindly smile.  Her tummy was very big indeed, nearing the end of her new pregnancy, which made Spike look at her a little nervously, sitting at the kitchen table now, kicking her heels.
    She was dressed in a neat little floral dress that the tom-boy loathed.  Spike suddenly wanted to dive under the table and hide.  Her brother sat opposite Eleanor, the Chronometer strung proudly around his neck.   
    At 7am that same morning Hal had carefully wound the delicate little gold winding screw and set it precisely by their Grandmother clock in the hall.  He was so proud of his present, he even wanted to show it to pretty Juliette St Honoré. 
    Henry blushed as he thought of it and felt very strange.  Just the week before the pretty French aristocrat had come on his gang, while Henry was inventing another story about the Scarlet Pimpernel, and threatening loudly to bash some more Frenchies on the nose.    
    Rather than enjoying the joke though, the serious minded French teenager had ticked them off for playing anything at all, when real families were dying abroad, and real children too.    
    Henry Bonespair had reddened and insisted that he and Spike were only trying to help.
       “ ’elp?! And how could a game ‘elp, Monsieur? This Pampernelle’s a fable, but if real, an aristocrat, and a MAN, not a silly Land Agent’s boy.  Grow up.”
    Monsieur!  Henry was only fourteen.  Even worse though, that afternoon Juliette St Honoré had then seen him and Spike trying to avoid a group of local roughs and called Henry a coward, to his face.
    “ Havagal ,” whispered Nellie suddenly. 
    It was the most secret language of the Rat Catchers, called Avagum.  To speak it meant you stuck an ‘ avaga ’ in the middle of words and hoped no one unwanted understood you.  Especially not the enemy adults. 
    Henry heard it, but felt water in his ear still and tried to ring it out with a finger.  It irritated him as much as the scratchy rash on his neck.
    “ Yavagess, Spavagike?”
    “Skavagip-avager.”
    Charlotte Bonespair had turned away to boil some water though and Spike resorted to plain English now. 
    “Skipper,” she hissed, “When we get back again, Hal, can Skipper join too...take the