The Reluctant Time Traveller (4 page)

Smells! I had only been in history minutes and already I’d had enough for a lifetime: first tar and bleach, now overpowering soap, and they all made me feel sick. Plus, this was the second cupboard I’d been in and, like I said, I hadn’t exactly been in the past long. I imagined the postcards I would send – they’d be black:

“Whoever it is they’re heading this way,” Agnes whispered in my ear. (The edge of a shelf was jammed into my other ear.) I didn’t need Agnes to tell me that. I could hear STOMP-STOMP-STOMP marching right into that bathroom – and, inside the cupboard, my heart going THUMP-THUMP-THUMP.

“You seeing things again, Elsie Noble? Because if you are it’s a box round the ears you deserve.”

“No, it was a spy; honest, Mrs Buchan, it was. A right rude, ugly one too. You said yourself there was a war coming.”

Agnes nudged me in the ribs. I could tell by the way she was shaking she was trying hard not to laugh.

“Folks speak of little else. War, war, war.” Mrs Buchan
sounded scarily close, like on the other side of the cupboard, and probably at least six feet tall.

“And he was in stranger clothes than any I ever saw. Honest, Mrs Buchan.”

I bit my lip. What if I suddenly got the hiccups? Or if Agnes suddenly sneezed?

“If I was given a penny for every time you said ‘Honest, Mrs Buchan,’ I’d be rich. I’d not kow-tow and polish and mend and Lord knows what else. I’d not rise at six to try and make order in this house. Oh no, Elsie Noble. I’d be off. I’d wash my hands of service once and for all and stride out of this house.”

“I’m not making it up, honest, Mrs Buchan. A big boy was in the broom cupboard, he was. Frightened the living daylights out of me.” It sounded like wee Elsie was ready to burst into tears. What if she got all wet in the face and yanked open the cupboard to fetch a towel?

“Talking of brooms, you need to scrub down the back hallway.
Scrub,
mind, not slap a wet flannel around the floor. That’s after you’ve given this tub a good scouring. The Master complained he took his bath with a spider. Any more shoddy work, Elsie Noble, and you’ll be out on your ear. Now look sharp, and for the love of God, lassie, carry a clean handkerchief with you. We can’t have you coughing all over the place. I don’t need to remind you we’ve an important guest arriving. Lord knows Gaunt reminds
me
of it ten times a day.” At last, the giant housekeeper stomped off. All went quiet out there in the W.C.

Elsie had a wee coughing fit, then sighed and said, “There’s nothing wrong with a spider.” Agnes elbowed me in the ribs. Elsie carried on. “Just because you and me’s little, folks think they can just squash us and step on us, but it’s not right. I’ll put you over by the washstand then I can get on. Looks like the Master’s been in the bath with his riding boots all mucky.
Thinks just because he’s rich he can do as he likes.” Agnes shifted slightly. By this time a towel was sticking in my face. The wee maid kept up her chatter with the spider. “Easy for muckle Mrs Buchan to say ‘Clean this, clean that, scrub this, scrub that.’ It’s not her whit fetches the water, is it? If Frank didn’t help lug it in for me I don’t know what I’d do. And I am too tired by far to fetch water now.”

Then it sounded like the maid clambered into the bath, the very bath Agnes had just clambered out of. Then, judging by the little puttering snores we could hear, she must have fallen fast asleep.

“Saul,” Agnes whispered, “the title deeds are not tucked away under the towels.”

Then I heard her turn the handle. “Time for us to make a run for it.” She opened the cupboard door.

We tiptoed out of the bathroom, leaving wee Elsie snoring lightly in the bath. Out in the corridor I glanced up and down. Agnes was at my elbow pulling on her trusty rucksack.

“This is thrilling,” she whispered.

Something told me the thrills hadn’t even begun. A dead deer with huge antlers was stuck up on the wall of the hall with the sweeping staircase. The house looked totally different from when we were in it with Will and Robbie playing hide and seek. Agnes and I bolted along the gloomy corridor, pushed open a door at the end and came into another big open hallway with black and white tiles on the floor. There was nothing much in it, except a coat stand with a black coat hanging on it. It had a door to the outside. Agnes tried to open it. “It’s locked.” She looked about her in a fluster. “What now?”

“The back of the house,” I said and we sped off the way we’d come along the corridor, our footsteps echoing on the stone floors. No sign of Elsie, or the huge housekeeper. The
place was eerily empty. A few worn steps led down and the corridor got narrower. “Definitely the servant’s quarters,” Agnes whispered, panting. “I read how ladies and gentlemen use the front door and front rooms, and servants use the back.” By this time we’d reached the end of the narrow, dark corridor. “This is a back door,” Agnes whispered. All the time we were glancing over our shoulders like spies. “Let’s get outside,” she hissed in my ear, “find some tree to hide in, then we can work out a plan. Ok, Saul?”

I shrugged. “Ok, Agnes,” I whispered. Then I pushed opened the back door and we ran out into the past.

We found ourselves in some kind of cobbled yard and didn’t know which way to turn. There were stables and outhouses. I’d never seen them before; none of them survived into the future. Then I heard someone behind me, whistling. I swung round and crashed into this guy who stumbled over and fell on his back, crying out. A fountain of water flew into the air and landed over both of us. I yelled and spluttered and heard a clanging sound as something metal hit the stony ground behind me. I looked down at this stranger sprawled on the cobbles. He was a bit older than us, but looked helpless, his brown baggy clothes all dirty and wet. His cap lay at my feet. It was soaked too.

“You poor thing,” said Agnes, and there she was, quick as a flash, down on her knees next to him. “Are you hurt?”

“Don’t kill me,” he whimpered. His eyes kept darting to me, like he was really scared of me.

“Of course we won’t.” Agnes patted his arm. “What a thought.”

“I wis only helping her out. It’s too much for her. Now I’ll have to fetch more.” He scrambled to sit up, brushing down his dusty brown jacket, then reached for the cap and wrung out the water. All the time he gazed quizzically at our clothes. He winced like he was in pain. and looked beyond us to where a tin mop-bucket was lying on its side. “Are you American?” he asked us, rubbing his knee. His trousers had ripped.

I shook my head, not sure how to go about explaining who we were or where we were from.

“We’re from… near here,” Agnes muttered, busy fumbling about in her rucksack. Next thing she whipped out the roll of toilet paper and a little bottle of something. “That knee looks pretty bad,” she said, pouring a few drops of whatever stinging stuff was in the bottle onto a wad of toilet paper. “Here,” she said, getting ready to dab it onto his grazed knee, “this will clean it. Make sure there’s no infection. Oh dear, you’re bleeding. We are very sorry.” She glanced meaningfully up at me.

“Yeah, really sorry. I didn’t see you,” I mumbled.

The boy on the ground gazed at us, wide-eyed and stunned, like we had dropped from the moon. I glanced down at my wet jeans and trainers and baggy skateboarding T-shirt. Agnes had on cut-off jeans and a bright yellow T-shirt. We didn’t look that bad.

“Ow,” he whimpered. No wonder – I could smell TCP.

“Would you like a painkiller?” Agnes asked, and that really freaked him out. I guess they might not have the word ‘painkiller’ in 1914. Maybe Calpol hadn’t been invented yet. He dropped his wet cap, jumped to his feet, made a lunge for a dented tin mop-bucket behind us, and bolted off between two of the outbuildings. As he ran, I saw the soles of his boots were coming away. “Please, don’t worry,” Agnes called after him, “I didn’t mean…”

But he was off, him and his clanging bucket and his broken boots. His cap was lying on the cobbled ground. I bent down and picked it up. “It might come in handy,” Agnes said, stuffing her first-aid kit hastily back into the rucksack. She glanced about like she expected other servant boys to come crashing into us. But all was quiet again. The poor guy had disappeared.

Agnes looked me up and down then examined her knee-length jeans. I knew she was really proud of these shorts. She had cut them herself and fringed them around the knee, and even put in a few more rips and things. But next to the poor guy in the brown jacket, our clothes definitely looked out of place. “You’re going to have to find something more old fashioned to wear,” she whispered, rummaging about in her rucksack. “You should have thought of that. I brought something.” Then she shook out this piece of brown material that looked like a baggy sack. Next thing she pulled it on. “I made a dress,” she whispered, tugging it down. All of a sudden, Agnes Brown looked the part. “Pretty awful, eh?” She grinned. It was. But she did look right. She had even done something to curl her hair. In all the rush I hadn’t noticed.

“Nice historic hair, Agnes,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said, shaking it about.

A bell rang inside the house. “We need to get out of here,” I said, and we ran over the cobbles the opposite direction from where the guy had gone, round the stables, into the garden and over the grass. My jeans were wet and sticking to me, but it felt good to be back in our garden, even though it was different. The grass was all smooth and freshly mown, no tussocks, no bare patches. We found a tree. I think it was the oak tree we often climbed in 2014, only not as big. Agnes was up it in a flash, even with the bulky rucksack on her back. I wanted to check out the den but this didn’t seem like the moment. I heaved myself up onto a thick branch after her.

Agnes had found a good sitting place and I squeezed in next to her. Up in the safety of the tree she wedged the rucksack between two branches. “Good thing I brought some chocolate,” she announced, unwrapping a huge bar.

She was right about that. This was the kind of thing we would do in the gang: hang out in trees and munch on
chocolate. It felt kind of comfortable up there. We polished the chocolate off pretty fast.

“How much have you got in there, Curly?” I asked her, picturing a whole sweetie shop in her rucksack.

“That was it, Soggy,” she replied, with a smile. “Starvation ahead.” Then I laughed. My jeans were damp, and a bit of branch was poking into my ribs, but it’s amazing what half a bar of chocolate can do for your mood. I was actually starting to feel excited about being in the past. And there was something magical about Agnes’s rucksack, like everything we needed would miraculously come out of it.

As if on cue she said, “I’ve made a plan,” and fished her diary out. She opened it but didn’t actually read it. She obviously knew her plan off by heart. “First: find out where we are.” She grinned across at me, her eyes shining in the flickering sunlight that was straying in through the leaves. “We got that right, didn’t we Saul, because this is our garden, the garden of the den! And that’s the big house. We did it! High five!” And we smacked our palms together.

“Step two, find out the date. I reckon we got that right too.”

“More or less,” I said and reeled off the clues so far. “Servants. Maids and stable boys. I mean, he looked like a stable boy. And horses. Spies. Enemies. Oh, and a shilling. I’m sure the wee maid mentioned a shilling. And how the war is coming.”

Me and Agnes were feeling well pleased with ourselves. “Step three,” she went on, “find the deeds of the old house.”

For the first time, I really thought about saving our den – really pictured us going back to Will and Robbie and holding up the title deeds, shouting “We’ve got it; they can’t bulldoze the den! We’ve saved it!” I felt the triumph of it. Agnes had been right: if we could do that, it was worth all the risks. Now we were back in 1914, we had to find these documents. Where
could we start?

Agnes tapped her nose, like she did when she was working something out. “I’ve been thinking that it’s probably too dangerous to try and search inside the big house. That housekeeper seems pretty scary. And the wee maid is not very pleasant either.”

“Tell me about it! And what about Gaunt? The big master? He sounds bad news.”

“Totally.”

I was relieved I wasn’t expected to break into the big house and rummage through all the rooms and cellars. I’d probably end up in jail and never get home!

“There are bound to be folk in town who know about this place,” Agnes said. “We should head there and find out all we can. But,” she looked at me through the leafy branches, “you need to dress more 1914, Saul. We’re going to get all kinds of strange reactions with you looking so twenty-first century.” She frowned, then her eyes lit up. “I know! Why don’t you use that black cape thing we saw in the hall on the coat stand? Get that, then we’ll head into town and find out all we can about Mr Hogg. He’s the man my gran said owned this house. He is some distant relative of mine. Gran said I’ve got a great-great-great-great aunt called Jean who knows the truth. All we have to do is find her.” Agnes lifted her rucksack. She was getting ready to climb down the tree. “Borrow that cape, Saul, then we’ll go.”

“Steal, you mean?” I clambered down after her. Agnes plus rucksack jumped down and landed softly on the grass. I followed. We glanced around nervously, but it all seemed very quiet. As we hurried up the garden I was picturing myself in a black cape. What a vision! I wanted to laugh out loud. Normally I wouldn’t be seen dead in a black cape. But this wasn’t normally.

When we neared the house we hid behind trees, checking the coast was clear. It was. No horse. No carriage. Not even a wisp of smoke curling from one of the high chimneys. I imagined little Elsie and the housekeeper and the stable boy, or whatever he was, tucked away somewhere in that big house. Maybe Mr Gaunt, or whoever he was, was off shooting hares.

“All you have to do,” Agnes whispered, cutting in on my thoughts, “is open that window without a sound, slip in, grab the cloak and nip out. I’ll wait for you under the window to check no one appears. Now go!” Feeling like a real thief, I climbed in through the open window, and belted across the empty hall to the coat stand.

“Oi!” I froze halfway across the black and white tiles, and looked up the flight of stairs. There was little Elsie standing on the landing, glaring down at me. This time she had a broom in both her hands, like one of those ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ soldiers. Her wee face was red and fierce looking. She stamped her foot. “Not having no robbers here!” she shouted. “Now get out, or there’s going to be trouble. You hear?”

“This isn’t what it looks like,” I shouted back, as I sidestepped towards the coat stand.

“Mrs Buchan!” she roared and banged the broom on the floor.

I made a dive for the coat stand, yanked at the cape and pulled it off the hook. The stand overturned and crashed to the ground.

“STOP, THIEF!” Elsie yelled. The heavy bundle of the cloak fell into my arms. I turned and ran, my heart hammering like a war drum.