City of Ships

by Mary Hoffman

  ‘We’ve got to have a reason to get in there and cover for them till Bel gets them both back from Talia,’ said Sky.

  The others nodded and mumbled but it was difficult to think of anything convincing.

  Luckily for them, Tony Evans had an early meeting out of town and, while they were all still arguing outside, he came out of the door, briefcase in hand. It was a quarter to seven.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ he said. ‘What are you all doing up so early? Are you waiting for Bel? She’s still asleep.’

  ‘If only,’ muttered Sky under his breath.

  But Georgia had an inspiration.

  ‘She’ll be down in a minute, Mr Evans. And Charlie. We’re all going on a run before school.’

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘She never mentioned it.’

  He wasn’t sure if they were dressed properly for running but he could never really tell with young people’s clothes; there didn’t seem much difference between sports gear and fashion any more.

  ‘Well, why don’t you go and wait inside?’ he said, obligingly holding the door open. ‘Help yourself if you want anything in the kitchen, but don’t wake their mum if you can help it. She’d like another half-hour.’

  Four relieved teenagers trooped gratefully in, staying as quiet as they could. After a whispered conference in the kitchen, they wrote notes to leave by the stravagating twins and then Georgia crept up the stairs to their rooms. It was a relief to see that neither door was locked. Quickly, she left the notes beside them on their beds, then left, locking their doors behind her.

  She pocketed the keys as she hurried down the stairs. Sky was writing a third note, in what he hoped was a good enough imitation of Isabel’s handwriting.

  Gone for an early run with Charlie and friends from school, it said. See you later. Bel.

  ‘Do you think she’d put kisses?’ he asked doubtfully.

  ‘Does it matter?’ asked Nick.

  ‘Yes,’ said Georgia.

  ‘Girls!’ said Matt.

  Sky added xxx. He propped the note against the kettle.

  ‘If Sarah Evans is anything like my mum,’ he said, ‘it’s the first place she’ll go to in the kitchen.’

  They let themselves out but, before they shut the door, Matt stopped them.

  ‘Hold on – one of us will have to stay,’ he said. ‘Suppose they get back from Talia? They won’t be able to get out of their rooms.’

  Georgia groaned. ‘It’s got to be me, hasn’t it? Just in case one of the parents spots me. They’d be less alarmed than by one of you.’

  ‘We’ll cover for you at school,’ said Nick.

  ‘And for Bel and Charlie,’ said Sky. ‘It’d better be a stomach bug.’

  ‘They’ll think there’s an epidemic,’ said Matt.

  Georgia closed the front door quietly behind her and crept back up to Isabel’s room. She was just in time. As she locked the door, she heard the parents’ bedroom door open and someone cross the landing to the bathroom. A few minutes later Sarah Evans headed down the stairs as predicted and straight for the kettle.

  Georgia realised she had been holding her breath. She tiptoed over to Isabel’s bed and sat on the end. Her friend was apparently in a deep sleep, breathing evenly. The hand that was outside the duvet was clenched into a fist; Georgia guessed the single silver tessera was held tight inside.

  The note seemed to have worked. Isabel’s mother came back upstairs and turned on the shower, without knocking on her children’s bedroom doors. But Georgia couldn’t really relax until Mrs Evans was out of the house at eight o’clock.

  She left it another ten minutes before creeping down to the kitchen to make tea and toast; there had been no time for breakfast at her house. She phoned Nick and found that the three boys were stuffing themselves with coffee and bacon rolls in the café. There was still plenty of time before school.

  Then she wondered how on earth to fill her day. She could only pray the twins would be back soon.

  *

  Four centuries earlier Isabel and Charlie were lying low in Barnsbury. She had tried to fill him in on the situation and, though he didn’t want to believe it, he sort of semi-understood about Talia and the talismans.

  ‘But why didn’t I just go back to our time the way you always do?’ he asked. ‘If you’re right, we’re in the right place but the wrong time by hundreds of years.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Isabel, tugging her hair. ‘It’s never happened before. No one in our time has ever taken someone else’s talisman and stravagated, even by accident.’

  ‘So what do we do next?’ he asked.

  ‘No idea,’ said Isabel. She suddenly felt overwhelmed with tiredness.

  ‘I’d settle for somewhere I could get my head down,’ she said. ‘I’m knackered. I’ve been up all night and so have you.’ Then she realised what that meant.

  ‘Oh no! What will Mum and Dad think when they can’t wake us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t understand any of this. All I know is I’m really hungry.’

  Isabel realised she wasn’t going to get any sense out of him till he’d eaten.

  ‘Well, we haven’t got any money so we’ll either have to work for some or we’ll have to steal some food.’

  ‘No one’s going to give us a job,’ said Charlie. ‘Those two back there looked at us as if we were Martians.’

  The door to William Dethridge’s old house was shut now but Isabel still felt drawn to it as the only halfway familiar thing in this strange situation; she knew that Barnsbury Comprehensive was built partly on the ruins of this house and the old alchemist’s laboratory.

  ‘Let’s go round the back,’ she said.

  They turned up an alley and walked round to the back of the row of houses. Doctor Dethridge’s was a little apart from the rest in the row and looked prosperous compared with the others. It had several outbuildings, as well as the stable.

  The woman who had opened the front door was feeding the pig with apple peelings and other kitchen waste. Charlie’s stomach rumbled. The woman went back into the house and he vaulted over the fence.

  ‘Charlie, you can’t!’ hissed Isabel, trying to scramble after him. But she was too late.

  He was bending over to see what was in the trough when the pig started squealing. The man came rushing out through the back door and grabbed Charlie by the ruffles on his shirt.

  ‘Robbers, raiders!’ he cried. ‘Raise the alarum, Martha. Fetch the constable.’

  Isabel didn’t hesitate; she ducked back down behind the wall and ran as fast as she could back along the houses. There was only one way to help her brother and it wasn’t by getting caught.

  Chapter 20

  The World Turned Upside Down

  Isabel kept her head down and ran without looking back. She stopped, out of breath, and looked for some sort of landmark so that she could find her way back to Doctor Dethridge’s house. At the end of the road was a church with a square stone tower. It looked vaguely familiar.

  St Edward’s, thought Isabel, distracted for a moment from her situation. It was a church she passed every day on the way to school but she had never wondered before about how old it might be. Now it looked newly built and unstained by time. There was something else different about it but she couldn’t think what.

  She carried on until she found another stable with a hayloft she could climb into without being seen. She had decided that the only way to help Charlie was to see if she could get back to Talia and talk to Doctor Dethridge, even if only through the mirrors.

  She lay back on the straw, clutching the single tessera that was her lifeline, and toyed with the idea of going straight to Bellezza. But she simply didn’t dare believe that this frail object could take her not only to Talia but to any city in it. So she concentrated on Classe and on the Baptistery, imagining the mosaic in the ceiling with its depiction of flowing water made only out of tiny squares like the one in her hand.

  But it was a long time bef
ore she could calm down enough to relax into sleep. Although she was quite exhausted, she had already stravagated twice, had found herself back in Elizabethan England and seen her brother captured. What did they do to thieves four hundred years ago? Might they cut his hand off? She didn’t even know if she could get back home, let alone Charlie, and she was desperately worried about what might be happening at home anyway. Had Sky got it all sorted? Or were her parents standing over two apparently comatose teenagers?

  And what about Classe? Had Filippo gone back to the fleet to get on with the urgent business of the day? Isabel felt like a mosaic herself, fractured into thousands of tiny pieces and about to become unstuck from the wall.

  She took deep breaths of haydust-filled air and tried to let her mind float free of the chaos.

  Filippo was startled from his long watch by a loud sneeze coming from the baptismal bath.

  ‘Isabella!’ he cried, jumping into the bath himself. He was very pleased to see her. ‘Is everything all right? Has Carlo returned safely home?’

  Isabel was shaking, she was so relieved to be back somewhere familiar that she could understand. But she shocked herself by bursting into tears.

  ‘Oh, Filippo,’ she sobbed. ‘No. We both ended up in Doctor Dethridge’s time, right near his old house. And now my brother’s probably under arrest for trying to steal pigswill. It’s all such a mess.’

  Filippo offered her a large lace-edged handkerchief. ‘Come with me to Flavia’s,’ he said hurriedly. He felt it would take a Stravagante’s skills to unravel this problem.

  They walked quickly, with Isabel mopping her eyes and genuinely leaning on Filippo’s arm.

  They went straight up to Flavia’s room, where she sat by the mirrors. But the merchant saw straight away from Isabel’s face that nothing had gone to plan.

  Back in Barnsbury, Georgia was bored out of her skull. She had mooched around Isabel’s room, flicking through her books and CDs. She had even been in to peek at Charlie. But basically there was nothing she could do for either twin and she couldn’t focus on anything else. She texted the boys to find out what had happened at school and discovered that there had been a few raised eyebrows at three students being off sick at the same time with a tummy bug. Especially since Georgia had already had time off with the same illness.

  Apparently their form tutor had asked if they’d all been eating out at the same place. That would be another complication, if they got their favourite café closed down.

  She was just beginning to wonder whether she could bear to read Twilight again when the figure on the bed suddenly sat up.

  Georgia gave a little scream.

  ‘Bel!’ she said. ‘You scared me half to death! What’s going on?’

  ‘George,’ gasped Isabel, ‘am I glad to see you! Is everything OK here? What happened with my parents?’

  Georgia filled her in as quickly as she could.

  ‘What about your end?’ she asked. ‘Is Charlie back too? I’ve locked his door.’

  ‘I wish,’ said Isabel. ‘You wouldn’t believe how complicated it all is.’

  ‘Try me,’ said Georgia. ‘I’ve been going mad with boredom here. You owe me.’

  ‘I’d settle for some boredom,’ said Isabel. ‘Somehow Charlie stravagated back to Barnsbury but in Doctor Dethridge’s time. And I think I followed him there because I was focusing on him rather than on home.’

  ‘No way!’ said Georgia.

  ‘Yeah, but it gets worse. I think he’s possibly been arrested – four hundred years ago.’

  ‘So you just left him?’ asked Georgia.

  ‘What do you take me for?’ said Isabel. ‘I stravagated back to Classe to ask Flavia and Doctor Dethridge what to do.’

  ‘And what did they think?’

  ‘I’ve got to go back to him with a talisman from this world. That’s why I’m back. What do you think I should take?’

  Georgia thought furiously; she knew she was supposed to be the expert on talismans but her mind was a blank. Then she remembered.

  ‘Matt’s bookmark,’ she said. ‘That’s what you need. Remember it’s already done one stravagation – and that was from Talia to here too. Do you think it’ll work?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Isabel. ‘But I’ve got to try. Let’s ring Matt. We need his talisman.’

  It was nearly lunchtime, so Georgia texted him; Isabel’s hands were shaking too much. And he phoned back within minutes. He had the talisman and the bookmark with him and he was soon ringing the doorbell at the Evanses’ house.

  ‘God, you look ghastly,’ he told Isabel.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘No, I mean, sorry. What’s been going on?’

  ‘Let Georgia fill you in,’ said Isabel. ‘I’ve got to get back to Talia with this.’

  ‘Talia? I thought you were going back in time to rescue Charlie?’ said Georgia.

  ‘Doctor Dethridge says I’ve got to go back to Classe first before I can stravagate back to his time.’

  ‘I don’t understand any of that,’ said Matt.

  ‘I don’t have time to explain,’ said Isabel. ‘Look, would you and Georgia mind going to the kitchen or something? I have to try to get back to sleep.’

  She lay back, exhausted and very nervous as she heard them going downstairs. What she had to do seemed so huge and unmanageable.

  *

  Charlie hadn’t understood anything that had happened to him since he had woken up in the Baptistery of Classe. But he knew that what was going on now was definitely the worst thing so far.

  He had been taken to a local lock-up and questioned by people he could barely understand. They had pushed him roughly into a barred room with three other men, who smelled really bad, and locked the door. There were two benches alongside the side walls and a reeking bucket in one corner, which Charlie decided he would rather burst than use.

  Several hours passed while the other occupants dozed or argued but he dared not lose consciousness. After what had happened the last two times he had no idea where he might end up. Charlie remembered when he was a kid watching a TV series called Quantum Leap. The main character hopped back and forth through time becoming other people and never got back home. Now it was haunting him. What if he never got back home?

  He wasn’t too keen on the look of the other men either. What had they been arrested for? Charlie wondered if they had been frisked for knives before being locked up. He certainly hadn’t. So he could not relax. He wondered what had happened to his sister. He knew her too well to believe she had abandoned him but what could she do?

  After what seemed like an eternity, he heard a voice he recognised.

  She was talking in that funny old-fashioned way but it was Bel.

  ‘I am seeking a youthe taken in charge for stealing,’ she said. ‘He is yclept Charles.’

  ‘Wee have one Carolus, son of Antonius,’ said the clerk. ‘Wherefore do ye seeke hym?’

  ‘Hee is my brothire,’ said Isabel. ‘Maie I see him?’

  There was some more low-level muttering and then footsteps outside the door and a clanking of keys. Charlie felt torn between fear and a sense of incongruity – was he in an episode of Blackadder or something?

  But the jailer didn’t unlock the door; he just gestured towards Charlie.

  ‘Thanke ye,’ said Isabel politely and he left her there.

  The other men in the cell became alert in the presence of what Charlie heard them call a ‘comely mayde’ and ‘fayre wench’ when they spotted Isabel. It took a while for them to calm down.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked when she could speak to him.

  ‘Still hungry,’ he said, trying not to sound too bothered about being a prisoner in a place over four hundred years behind his own time.

  ‘Well, I can’t help you with that,’ said Isabel. ‘But I do know how to get us home, which is more important.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Charlie, touching her arm through the bars. ‘I knew you hadn’t just desert
ed me.’

  ‘Well, the good news is that all you have to do is fall asleep holding the red velvet pouch and thinking of the place you found yourself in last time,’ said Isabel. ‘You know, the place with the bath and the mosaics? You have still got the pouch, haven’t you?’

  Charlie nodded. ‘What’s the bad news?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve still got two more journeys to make,’ she said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s getting late,’ said Isabel. ‘Both here and in our time. I’m not sure we’ll make it back before Mum and Dad get in. Georgia and the others are still covering for us but there are going to be some awkward questions to answer.’

  ‘If we get back,’ said Charlie, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever care about anything else again.’

  ‘Me either,’ said Isabel. And realised it was true. If she could only get her brother back where he belonged, she didn’t think she would ever be jealous of him again.

  They were grinning at each other through the bars when, without warning, the ground started to shake.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Charlie but Isabel couldn’t come up with any explanation.

  There were cries from the street and sounds like tons of bricks falling. Charlie’s fellow prisoners were shaking the bars and shouting for help. Charlie was pushed away from the door.

  ‘Bel!’ he cried. ‘Help me!’

  She had been standing paralysed with fear but now ran to the outer room and saw it empty of people, with the outer door wide open. The man with the keys had gone but she saw a spare set hanging on a hook on the wall. With fumbling fingers, she took it and ran back to the cell, the floor rippling and buckling underneath her.

  The men shouted encouragement while she tried all the keys till she found the right one. Praying that she wasn’t releasing dangerous murderers and robbers, Isabel opened the door and the criminals barged out. One stopped and gave her a smacking kiss, which she wiped from her face with disgust.