A Traveller in Time (5 page)

They were calling to me to hurry, and when I got to the bottom of the crooked staircase Uncle Barny was carrying the best whip from the hall, and Ian was already in the cart holding the reins.

“I shall want a rug, Cicely Anne,” said Uncle Barnabas, and my aunt asked me to fetch it from her bed, where it lay. The everyday rug was kept in the coach-house but we were to have the heavy Scotch plaid.

Upstairs I went again, but when I got to the landing I looked at the closed doors and did not know which was Aunt Tissie's, for there was something strange and unfamiliar about them. I hesitated and opened a door, and then stopped short, for in the room before me, down a couple of steps, were four ladies playing a game with ivory counters. They sat round a table and a bright fire was burning in an open hearth. They were young and pretty, except an older woman whose expression was cold and forbidding. Their dresses were made of stiff brocade, and their pointed bodices were embroidered with tiny flowers. On their heads they wore little lace caps, and I saw golden hair peeping out from one head-dress. Each wore a narrow lace tucker round her neck, and rings glittered on white hands that threw the dice. All this I saw in the moment I stood transfixed at the door. Then a little spaniel rushed across the room and they turned and stared at me with startled eyes. They were as amazed as I, and sprang to their feet, yet there was never a sound. The older lady rose and I caught a glimpse of her scarlet shoe as she came towards me, frowning with hands outstretched as if to hold me.

“I beg your pardon,” I muttered, and quickly I shut the door, my heart pounding, and my hands trembling. I thought I had stumbled on some grand visitors of Aunt Tissie's, but then I saw there were other doors along the landing which I had not seen before. I felt caught in a net, and I opened one with desperation. I stopped dead, for a couple of stairs descended to a long, low-ceilinged passage. A maid-servant wearing a round, white cap carried a tray and knocked on a door to the right. I saw the heavy carvings over the doorway as she entered. Then a servant-man carried another tray to the left and disappeared. A bitter-sweet smell of spices and pungent herbs came to me, but there was never a sound of doors shutting or footsteps. I closed the door and went back to the landing, feeling rather sick and not daring to open another of those mysterious doors.

Then Aunt Tissie came thumping upstairs.

“I couldn't find the room,” I faltered, and I ran to her and took her warm hand in mine.

“Couldn't you find it, Penelope?” Aunt Tissie was surprised. “Why, it's as plain as the nose on your face. Here it is, and here is the rug lying on my bed.” She threw open the door and I saw Aunt Tissie's large, bare room with lime-washed walls and a great wooden wardrobe. The window was wide open, and in front of it was an old dressing-table with a pair of wig-stands and pewter candlesticks, but there was no sign of the strange company I had just seen.

I couldn't believe my eyes and I stood in the doorway, not venturing to cross the threshold.

“Aunt Tissie. I opened a door and saw some ladies sitting in a room. Who were they?” I whispered, shy to speak about it as if I had done something amiss.

She started. “You saw
them
? You've
seen
them?”

She looked at me with astonishment and then drew me to her arms. Down below in the yard I could hear Uncly Barny thumping and banging with his whip-end, impatient to be off, but my aunt took no notice.

“It's the secret of Thackers,” she said very quietly. “They lived here once, my dear, and some say they live here now. I've never seen them, nor has Uncle Barnabas, but my own mother saw them when she was a child, and her mother before her. My mother once told me about them, but nobody has mentioned them since, and that's fifty years since I heard. She said they sat round a table playing some game, and sometimes she saw other things but she didn't tell me all.”

“They weren't ghosts,” I cried eagerly. “They were real, quite alive like you and me.”

“Yes, my dear, I know. They are the people who once lived here. Now, never say a word to anybody, for I wouldn't have it talked about, and nobody but yourself living has seen them, and maybe you'll never catch sight of 'em again.”

I promised to be silent, and followed my aunt downstairs. I climbed into the cart, but as we drove away I turned round and looked up at the house. There was my aunt's bedroom window with the blue curtains flapping, and Ian's room with a fishing-rod sticking out, and my uncle's little room, and our own with the rosebud curtains. There was never a sign of the mysterious passage nor the room I had seen. In the yard stood Jess, a wide grin on his face, and he seemed so solid and real I waved my hand to him, and was reprimanded for my free manners by Alison.

We drove across the little bridge which spanned the brook and then took a lane to a small village on the hill, where my uncle called at a farm called Bramble Hall. He left us, with Ian holding the reins, and went round to the side of the house. It was Elizabethan, for on every pointed gable was a round stone ball, and the windows were diamond-paned and mullioned like Thackers, but Thackers was older still. An ivy-covered stone wall encircled the house, and in it was a tall, beautiful iron gate with a flight of circular steps. Through it we could see the front door of the house, with mossy old steps dropping to the lawn and a cut yew hedge and flowerbeds. We sat there, listening to the dogs and calves and the sound of men's voices in the farm-yard, but although Ian and Alison were talking to me and their world was all around me, my thoughts were far away. I felt dazed and queer, and I looked at the old Hall half expecting to see ladies in full, stiff dresses come sweeping down the flight of rounded steps from that front door which was barred as if it hadn't been opened for a hundred years. Every one used the side door, and the ghosts could come as they wished, to walk in the green garden, to pick the daffodils which bordered the uncut lawn where now a calf grazed and a hen clucked with her chickens.

Then Uncle came back to us with a pleased smile on his face, and away we drove over the hill crest, where we looked down on a small town with a row of shops, and a quarry with men blasting stone. We dismounted and walked again, for the way was steep and rough with loose stones, and now and then we had to drive a stray calf or wandering pig out of the path.

“What's the matter with Penelope?” asked Uncle Barnabas. “Has she lost her tongue? She's never spoken all the time.”

Alison laughed. “She's fey, Uncle Barnabas,” said she as I was silent. Uncle Barny looked curiously at me.

“Nay, we mustn't have no mooligrubs here,” said he.

“Have you never heard tell of mooligrubs, with all your book-learning?” he continued, when we laughed. “It's the sulks.”

“Penelope isn't sulky,” explained Alison, kindly. “It's just that she gets queer sometimes and then she imagines too much.”

I frowned at her to be quiet, for I detested Alison to call me “fey”.

“Poor little wench,” Uncle Barny was compassionate. “We'll soon get rid of that. Plenty of milk and good fresh hill-air, and she'll be quite well again.”

As we walked down the steep road to the little town with its smell of limestone, its quarries and caverns and wooded cliffs, and the lovely green river gliding like a snake under the ivy-covered rocks, my mind cleared and I became gay and lively, forgetting everything in the excitements of petrifying wells with birds'-nests of stone hanging in the grottoes, and caves with long underground passages, and hidden streams.

At night we sat round the kitchen fire, Aunt Tissie making a rug and we three helping her. She had a piece of sacking washed and hemmed for the background, and a great pile of strips of cloth, in scarlet, grey, and black. She and Alison had steel hooks with which they pulled the strips through, making a pattern on the sacking. Ian and I were provided with scissors to cut more strips for the workers. I cut up a waistcoat of my uncle's and a pair of narrow trousers which must have been a hundred years old, and Ian slit a soldier's scarlet coat.

Idly I turned over the contents of Aunt Tissie's wooden workbox, and from among the scissors and emery cushion and ivory needlecase I took up a curious spool of silks. It was a wooden figure of a little man, carved with ruff and curling hair, but the body was covered with a web of blue, green, and scarlet silks, wound in a cocoon.

“What's this, Aunt Tissie?” I asked, curious about every object I saw. “Whatever's this?”

“Oh, that's an ancient thing, my silk bobbin-boy, I call it. It's been here I dunno know how many years. I can't think what it was used for, such a queer little manikin. So I keep my silks wound round it, as you see.

“It is an odd little person,” said I. “Can I take the silks off and examine it, Aunt Tissie?” I asked, eager to leave the rug-making for a more exciting occupation.

“Yes. Wind them on some papers, and look at it, Penelope. It's been lying in this workbox for many a long year, and when I asked my mother about it, your great-grandmother, she said she played with it when she was little, and that was all she could say.”

I unwound the silks and exposed the small carved figure. The workmanship was exquisite; the pleated ruff with its pricked edge, the tiny buttons on the doublet, and the slashings of the trunk hose were all clear and delicate. The face was that of a young man, petulant, disdainful, with deep-set eyes, frowning. The figure was broken and stained, with part of the ruff snapped off, and notches where somebody had chipped off pieces to catch the ends of the silks.

“It was lost for years,” continued Aunt Tissie, as she peered with screwed-up eyes at the wooden man, “and we found it again in some rubbish in one of the attics. Then once it got throwed on the fire, and I got it off just as it began to burn. Another time it lay in the yard, and the cattle trod on it, so you see it could tell us some tales if it could speak.”

I clasped the figure tightly in my hand, and I rubbed it against my cheeks, to get the essence of the ancient thing. It was smooth as ivory, as if generations of people had held it to their faces, and I suddenly felt a kinship with them, a communion through the small carved toy.

“You can have it to keep if you like, Penelope,” said Aunt Tissie, as if she read my desires in my flushed face. “You seem set on it, so keep it. I can have my silks wound on ordinary bobbins.”

“Oh, thank you,” I cried. “It's an Elizabethan person, Aunt Tissie, I believe.” I nodded my head importantly.

“Maybe, and maybe not. There's many an old thing in this house, and some are forgot and some are in use, just as they have always been.” My great-aunt bent her shrewd old face to her work, and her wrinkled eyelids were lowered over the piercing blue eyes, as if to screen them in reticence. Her full lips were pursed as if she knew a thing or two. The worn, brown hands reached for a scrap of scarlet stuff and she hooked it into the sacking.

As we worked, Aunt Tissie talked to us in her slow, warm voice, running on and on like the flickers of the fire. She told us of Thackers in the olden days, when her great-great-grandfather lived, and she reminded us that it was in the days of our own ancestors too, for the family of Taberner had lived at Thackers and served the great folk since those early days.

She said the house and farm were the country house of the family of Babington, and the church was their private chapel. Thackers was an old manor house, beloved by them, for although they were rich and owned great lands and a fine town house at Derby, they always made Thackers, where they had been born, their home. The house had been changed, and part of it pulled down after the “trouble”.

“What was that?” we asked.

“The young squire, Master Anthony, was imprisoned and hanged for plotting against the queen,” said Aunt Tissie. “Queen Elizabeth it was. I don't rightly know anything about the Babington Plot, but I know what happened here, a year or two earlier. He tried to help Mary, Queen of Scots, escape from Wingfield, over yonder.” My aunt pointed to the east window. “There's tunnels in the churchyard and garden here and there's a tunnel at Wingfield. She was going to escape down them and Master Anthony would have hidden her at Thackers. But it wasn't to be. God saw otherwise.”

“And did they find out then about Master Anthony?” I asked.

“Nay, I can't tell you. I don't expect they did, but he went to France after that,” sighed my aunt. “They must have been anxious years, those last ones on earth.”

We asked for more, but that was all she knew, except that it happened long ago.

“We've been in the tunnels many a time, when we were children, haven't we Barnabas?” she continued. “But they are closed and filled with earth and nobody can go into them now.”

Uncle Barnabas nodded “Yes”. He had been down the rocky steps into a tunnel which led under the earth. The Queen, the Scottish Queen Mary, was going to walk along it to Thackers, and hide there. His grandfather knew about it, and in his days you could go a long way underground. Stones closed the holes, and earth had fallen so that it was all blocked. There was a honeycomb of passages in which people could hide in those troublous days when Queen Bess reigned and the Papists plotted.

Uncle Barnabas then suggested we should have a tune. He liked a bit of music, something easy that he could understand. Could any of us play or sing, he asked, and he looked at us expectantly.

Yes, Alison played the piano and I sang a little and Ian had bagpipes at home, we told him. But the piano was in the cold sitting-room, and the bagpipes were at Chelsea, and my throat was sore, we excused ourselves, for we were reluctant to perform.

“You give them a tune, Barnabas,” urged Aunt Tissie, knowing that he longed to be asked, but was too modest to suggest his own music.

“Yes, play to us, Uncle Barny,” we cried.