A Chase in Time

  They slipped out of the living room, into the hall. The mirror was showing the 1912 hallway. Alex’s heart sank. Ruby, however, marched right up to it.

  “Come on then,” she said. “We got your stupid Cup back. It’s your turn now. Take us home.”

  “Ruby—” said Alex.

  “Shut up!” said Ruby. She pressed her finger against the glass. “We can’t stay here forever!” she said accusingly. “We’ve got people waiting for us! Parents! Lives! Send us back! Right now!”

  But the mirror did not change. It stayed looking exactly as it had before, innocently reflecting the 1912 hallway: the table, the green plant and the door.

  Ruby was in shock.

  “Where are we going to sleep?” she said to Dora and Alex. “Where are we going to live? We can’t stay here forever!”

  “You can stay tonight,” said Dora. “Don’t fuss. Everyone will think you’re a distant cousin, or you belong to a friend of Miss Flynn’s or something. After the wedding… We’ll work something out. I promise.”

  Alex was pretty sure that his parents would have noticed two strangers descending on their house, even if they had as many people staying the night as the Pilgrims seemed to. But Dora was quite right. All of the bedrooms were taken, but Dora and Henry and various other children would be sleeping on straw-filled mattresses in the drawing room, and nobody seemed to mind that Alex and Ruby would be sleeping there too.

  Ruby’s lips were pressed together in silence. Alex knew he ought to be worried too, but somehow he felt sure that the mirror – his mirror – wouldn’t abandon them in 1912. And soon Henry was banging the gong and calling them in for a busy, cheerful, rather chaotic dinner in the dining room, and there were all sorts of mysterious foods to be investigated, like “shape”, and suet pudding, and tongue, which was an actual cow’s tongue, fried and cut into slices, and soda water, which came in a siphon, and then one of Mary’s friends discovered the piano and began to play a dancing tune, and Dora’s father discovered an accordion and joined in, and suddenly everyone was singing.

  “You’re enjoying yourself,” Ruby said, just as Mary had said to Atherton. And Alex realised she was right. He was.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ghosts in the glass

  The next day was the wedding.

  The wedding was held in the village church at Dalton, which was small and cool, with devil’s faces painted on the ends of the beams, and dark wood pews with embroidered footrests hanging from their backs. Alex and Ruby had actually been to another Pilgrim wedding in exactly the same church – and probably, they thought, that bride was a descendant of one of the people here. (They still hadn’t figured out which of the three Pilgrim brothers was their however-many-greats-grandfather, although they supposed it must be one of them). The expectant feel in the church was just the same, once you got used to the clothes being different. Ruby was wearing a white muslin party dress of Dora’s, which she said made her look about six. Alex had got away more lightly with a grey suit that wasn’t too different to the one he’d worn to Auntie Debbie’s wedding, if you overlooked the stockings and the knickerbockers and the detachable collar.

  Mary looked most unlike herself in a white dress. Atherton looked exactly like himself in a morning coat and top hat. He was beaming so hard when Mary came down the aisle that several members of the congregation started beaming too, in sympathy.

  Afterwards, there was rice-throwing and photographs outside the church. And then the whole wedding party went to the church hall for scones, and cake, and little triangular sandwiches handed round on trays by girls from the village.

  “See!” said Alex to Ruby. “You did get cucumber sandwiches after all!”

  “Huh,” said Ruby. “Is this all the food we get? At least in modern times there’s a proper meal.”

  There was a telegraph boy on a red bicycle who kept knocking on the door with telegrams for the bride and groom. There was a display of all the presents on a table. (At Auntie Debbie’s wedding there’d been a table for presents too, but all of her presents had been wrapped.) It was very funny seeing what people had thought Atherton and Mary might want to sustain them in their married life. A silver-plated biscuit barrel. A silver fish slice. A little framed cross-stitch motto that read God is Love, with cross-stitch lilies underneath it. There were some rather peculiar presents too: one of Mary’s anthropologist friends contributed a fertility doll from Papua New Guinea, and one of Atherton’s university friends gave a pair of garden gnomes as a joke.

  Alex and Ruby’s parents had bought Auntie Debbie an ice-cream-maker. Alex wondered if she’d used it any more than Atherton would his silver fish slice.

  The best man made a very funny speech and read out all the telegrams. Then there was champagne and wedding cake, which was just the same as at Auntie Debbie’s wedding.

  While everyone was eating their wedding cake, Atherton and Mary disappeared, then reappeared at the doorway, waving. They’d changed out of their wedding finery and were dressed in more normal – but still nice – clothes.

  “What are they doing?” said Ruby.

  “They’re going on honeymoon,” said Dora. “They’re going to Egypt, only not straight away; tonight they’re just going to Southampton. Don’t you think Mary’s going-away dress is awfully nice?”

  “They’re going on honeymoon already?” said Ruby. “But we haven’t had the dancing!”

  There was definitely going to be dancing. There was a band getting ready in the corner of the hall.

  Dora stared.

  “You don’t dance at your own wedding!” she said.

  “Why not?” said Ruby. “You do in the future!”

  But you didn’t in the past, apparently. There was waving, and hugging, and exclamations, and then Atherton and Mary were driving away, and the band were striking up, and it was time to dance.

  The dancing at Auntie Debbie’s wedding had meant a DJ and disco lights. This dancing, however, had rules. All of the dances had names – polkas, and tangos, and waltzes – and they all had to be done in different ways. Even children were expected to know what to do, and even little children like Henry apparently did. (Alex supposed that was what one learned at the white-socked dancing-class.)

  “Aren’t you going to dance?” said Henry.

  “No. Way.” said Ruby. She looked horrified.

  Alex was rather wistful; he’d liked the dancing at Auntie Debbie’s wedding.

  Dora saw.

  “This one’s a waltz,” she said. “Anyone can waltz, come on.” And she put her arm around him and showed him.

  “Like it?” she said, smiling at him with a rather superior grown-up sort of smile.

  “I like our dancing better,” said Alex.

  The four of them went out into the porch, where the music could still be heard but no one could see them. Dora was in the middle of explaining how a polka worked, when a head appeared around the door. It was Atherton.

  “Oh, hullo!” he said. “I was looking for you four. Want to come and see how the story ends?”

  The village was quiet as they walked back to the house. Applecott House was silent and empty. The only light came from the hall, where Mary was standing in front of the mirror, the Newberry Cup under her arm. She turned as Atherton and the children came in, and smiled.

  “I’ve been admiring my wedding present,” she said.

  Alex came and stood beside her. The mirror looked even more mysterious than usual, there in the twilight.

  “It’s old,” said Alex. “Isn’t it?”

  “Eighteenth century,” said Atherton. “They say,” he added, “that it belonged to a French countess. A woman called Jeanne d’Allonette. She was believed by some to be a witch.” He traced his fingers across the frame. “It belonged to my grandmother. One of my ancestors brought it back from France after the revolution. My grandmother said that during the French Revolution, the revolutionaries came to arrest Jeanne and her child. You understand – if they had been caught,
they would have been executed. Jeanne locked herself and her son in her dressing room. When the revolutionaries managed to break down the door, they found the room was empty – except for this mirror, which showed another room in another place. The men said it was witchcraft and tried to smash the mirror, but they found it would not break.”

  “And what happened to the countess?” said Ruby.

  “She was never seen again,” said Atherton. He glanced at Alex. “They say that this mirror is haunted by ghosts,” he added. “But my grandmother also said it is considered a lucky object.” He patted the glass. “That’s why I gave it to Mary, you see – we like a bit of witchcraft, Mary and I, in moderation, and I thought it might be helpful to have a few friendly ghosts watching over her.” Again, that look at Alex. “It turns out I was right.”

  Henry said fiercely, “They aren’t ghosts! They’re time travellers.”

  Atherton dropped his hand and laughed.

  “Well,” he said. “Perhaps that’s the same thing.”

  “And the bottle?” said Alex. “There was a bottle. Silver. About this big. I opened it, and…” He stopped. Making a wish on a genie seemed like a foolish thing to admit to.

  Dora said, “Oh, it’s the witch in the bottle!”

  “So it is!” said Atherton.

  “That’s not Uncle Atherton’s,” said Dora. “It’s older than that. Grandfather got it from a woman in the village. She said there’d be trouble if we ever opened it.”

  “She was right,” Ruby muttered.

  Alex didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he changed the subject.

  “What are you going to do with the Newberry Cup?” he said.

  “Ah,” said Atherton. “The Cup. Yes. Come with me.”

  He took the Cup, tucked it under his arm, and led Mary and the children back into the drawing room. Ruby raised her eyebrows at Dora, but she shrugged.

  In the drawing room, Atherton turned on the electric light and went straight to the corner, and began to tug on the bookcase that stood in front of it.

  “Take the other end for me, would you, dearest?” he said, a little breathlessly. Mary obeyed. The amused expression was back.

  “Whatever are you doing?” she said.

  Atherton pulled the case aside and knelt down on the floor. The walls of this room were covered in old-fashioned wooden panels – wainscotting, it was called, Alex knew. Mary and the children crowded around him.

  He felt with his long fingers at the edge of the panelling. No one spoke, not even Henry. There was a breathless air of expectation, and then, suddenly:

  Click.

  The panel slid back and aside, like a compartment on a puzzle box. Behind it was a dark hole.

  “Whoa!” said Ruby. “Cool!”

  “It’s a secret compartment!” said Dora. “Why didn’t we know about it?”

  “I don’t think even Edmund knows about it,” said Atherton. “I found it when I was a little boy playing smugglers. I used to hide marbles and soldiers and things in it. I always wanted something really valuable to keep in here.”

  “But, darling,” said Mary. “Is it really secure? Wouldn’t a bank vault be safer?”

  “I don’t think you could find many places in all of England more secure than this,” said Atherton. “I believe I’m the only person in the family who knows about it – besides you lovely people, of course. There were simply acres of dust in here when I opened it. I don’t believe it had been touched in hundreds of years.”

  He took the bundle and laid it carefully in the hole in the wall.

  “But – are you sure you want us to know about it?” Alex said awkwardly. “Ruby and me, I mean. You hardly know us.”

  “No,” said Atherton. He gave Alex a curious look. “I don’t, do I?” He slid the panel back and it shut with a click. “Perhaps I ought to find out who you really are … but I’m not sure I want to. Some things are best left a mystery.”

  The dancing was still going on in the hall, but Dora and Henry’s mother appeared to hurry them into bed. Alex supposed they ought to go too; the longer they stayed, the more likely it was that someone would notice them and start asking questions. All of the other cousins were busy preparing for bed; the living room was full of wails over lost possessions and protestations over lumpy mattresses.

  Henry was insisting that he “wasn’t a bit sleepy!” much to the irritation of his mother, a lively woman who looked rather like a grown-up Dora.

  Alex stood in the doorway looking out at the garden. Night was falling, a deep-blue, rather lovely twilight. There was a full moon over the cornfields behind the house, and choirs upon choirs of birds singing to the evening in the garden trees. He could faintly hear the sound of music coming from the hall. He breathed in, savouring the memory.

  When he turned, he wasn’t at all surprised to see that the mirror showed the hallway at Aunt Joanna’s house. It was evening, just as it had been evening when he and Ruby had left.

  “Ruby,” he called cautiously, not wanting to draw attention to what was happening.

  Ruby appeared in the doorway of the drawing room. She gasped when she saw the mirror.

  “Quick!” she said, but Alex shook his head.

  “Clothes,” he said. “You can’t go back looking like that!”

  “But what if the mirror closes?” she said.

  Alex shook his head again. “It won’t.” He wasn’t sure why he was so certain, but he was.

  Ruby bolted up the stairs to Dora’s room. Alex followed, more slowly. Ruby was changing at lightning speed, pulling off her layers of 1912 underclothes. Alex, rather reluctantly, did the same. Now that the time had come to go, he didn’t want to leave.

  “Oh, hurry!” said Ruby. “We don’t want to be left behind!” She tugged on her shoes and ran down the stairs. Alex shrugged on his T-shirt, picked up his trainers and followed her.

  The mirror was hanging against the wall, looking exactly as they’d left it. Ruby had stopped in front of it, looking suddenly uncertain.

  “Hold my hand?” she said. “I don’t want you to get left behind.”

  “I won’t,” said Alex.

  “I know,” said Ruby. “But … just to be sure?”

  She seemed wary. And, Alex thought suddenly, why shouldn’t she? Who knew what they would find on the other side of the mirror. Perhaps they’d been gone for weeks and weeks. Perhaps that wasn’t Aunt Joanna’s hallway at all. Perhaps, just by being here, they’d changed history so much that when they got home, everything would be different.

  He took her hand.

  “Ready?” she said. He nodded.

  “Ready.”

  And they stepped through the looking glass together.

  CHAPTER TEN

  What happened to the cup

  Alex tumbled forward and landed on his stomach. For a moment he lay breathless and rather dizzy. Beside him, he could hear Ruby making aargh and ow noises, but he ignored her. He sat up slowly and looked around. Cream walls. Brown door. A copy of the Radio Times, Alex’s blue jumper, and a leaflet advertising a pizza delivery company on the hall table.

  “Home!” said Ruby in triumph.

  Home.

  “How long do you think we’ve been away?” Ruby said, sitting up. “Do you reckon that mirror works on Narnia time? I do. Otherwise there’d be policemen and film crews and weeping parents and all sorts, wouldn’t there? Shall we find out? Aunt Joanna! We’re home! Cancel the funeral!”

  She scrambled upright and headed off in the direction of the living room. Alex bent and put on his trainers, then followed slowly. Even the very familiarity of the house was strange. The brightness of the twenty-first-century lights. The radiators. The colour photographs on the sideboard. He felt like he’d been away for years and years and years.

  Ruby was standing in the living room doorway, talking to Aunt Joanna, who didn’t look at all surprised to see them.

  “… and then,” Ruby was saying, “we found ourselves back here! Like
nothing had happened!”

  “Goodness!” said Aunt Joanna. “Did you remember to clean your teeth, in between saving the family fortune?”

  Normally, Alex knew, Ruby would be insulted by the mere suggestion that she’d been playing make-believe games. But today there were more important things to think about.

  “See!” she said, turning to Alex. “Narnia time! But, Aunt Joanna, we can prove it. We met loads of old Pilgrims. Atherton, and Mary, and Dora, and Henry, and – what was their dad called?”

  “Oswald,” said Alex. “And the other one was Edmund.”

  “That’s right,” said Aunt Joanna. “Edmund was my grandfather. We had all their pictures out last year, didn’t we? Or was it the year before? You have got a good memory.”

  “I don’t remember being shown pictures at all,” said Ruby crossly.

  Aunt Joanna went over to the old-fashioned bookcase against the living room wall, the one with the glass doors that opened with little metal keys. Alex realised suddenly that Atherton and Mary and Dora and Henry must all be dead. Of course they must. They must have been dead for years.

  He wasn’t sure why he minded this quite so much.

  Aunt Joanna took one of the old black family photograph albums out of the bookcase and started turning the pages, saying things like, “That’s my brother Gordon, your grandfather. And that’s my father as a baby – doesn’t he look funny? And that’s – oh, yes! There you are!”

  It was a black-and-white studio portrait of a young man wearing a soldier’s uniform and a soldier’s cap and a neat little moustache, looking very solemn and distant and long ago. Alex stared at the photograph. It seemed incredible that only yesterday that same young man had been saying, “What ho!” and kissing his ladylove under the greenery. The man in the picture seemed to belong to a different time entirely.