“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.
Aunt Tissie got out an accordion and he took it in his work-brown hands and I watched his fingers as they moved tenderly over the little white keys.
“What shall I play ye?” he asked. Then he conjured many an old air out of the instrument, and somehow they fitted in with the farm kitchen. As I looked round I could fancy the grandfather clock was staring at him with its engraved brass face, listening to the music, and the high dresser, and the great oak table, and the carved spice cupboard, with all its little drawers, each was hearkening. And others listened also, I could swear, dim figures I saw in the corners, shadows out of reach of the lamplight, coming from somewhere to listen to the old man.
Jess was working in his corner, never speaking, cleaning the harness, brushing and polishing the little brass ornaments and bells, fixing buckles and straps, doing something to halters and head-stalls, unconscious of the moving, flitting shades which passed before him. I kept in the lamplight, away from those pointed shadows, close to my aunt, and the music came dancing up to me, beckoning me to the darkness.
Then came bedtime, and we all went upstairs, I with some misgivings as I opened our bedroom door. I didn’t want to see those ladies, but they were not there, the room was our own with its low rafters, its quiet beds with the little flowery valances under which Alison peered to see if a hen were brooding there.
All was safe, and we dived into the billowy mass of the feather-beds and crept down to the warmth to lie for a few minutes to watch the moon which stared through the open casement at us, to listen to rustles and murmurs of the trees outside, to hear the owl hoot as he flew over the church tower. From down below came the sweet tones of Uncle Barnabas’s accordion, and another music like a flute was mingled with it. I put my head on the cold linen and buried my face in its fragrance. I dragged the blankets tightly round my shoulders, and shut out all the world.
3. The Herb Garden
Uncle Barnabas had a favourite seat where one could always find him. It was under a great oak in the croft, near enough to the farm for him to see all that went on, but leaving him free of the bustle and business if he wished to be quiet. He sat there in the evenings, watching the moon rise above the woods, listening to the call of owls and the rustles of nocturnal creatures. He went there when work was done, taking his rest away from us all. Sometimes I joined him, for he didn’t mind my company; I could be part of the land and forget myself as he did. There we sat, my hand clasping his great warm fingers, as we waited to see the moon shadows and the starlight. Behind us in the house was the joyful preparation of supper, with Alison singing and Ian teasing. From where we sat we could see the glow in the kitchen, and the figures moving in the fire-light, and it used to amuse us to watch them, unconscious of our gaze.
“They dunno know we sees ’em,” whispered Uncle Barny so softly I could scarcely hear, silent as if he didn’t want to disturb the shadows round us, and a hedgehog passed us by and a rat slipped through the undergrowth.
As I sat there one evening listening to the swallows which were darting in and out of the barn, for it was early and light had not faded, I was conscious of much movement and excitement in the great farm kitchen. People walked in and out of the firelight, and came to the porch, strangers whom I did not know, women wearing full, gathered skirts, and wide aprons, and little ruffly collars, men in padded breeches and leather jackets and hunting boots. Some had bare legs and short, ragged leather trousers, and their hair was wild and tousled. They carried shining dishes and wooden bowls and leather jugs; they stooped over the fire and one lighted a slip of wood and carried the flame to candles fastened to the wall. Then I saw them more clearly, their rosy faces and brown hands and rough, uncut hair. They pushed and joked, or so I imagined, for I could not hear a sound. Through a bedroom window I espied another
face, a boy older than I, with fair hair and keen, blue eyes. His face was eager and gay, and he looked at the oak-tree where I sat invisible to him. He took a bow from the room behind him and fitted an arrow and shot at the tree’s trunk, so that I winced and drew aside.
“Who are they?” I asked Uncle Barny. “Who are those people and that boy?”
“Uncle Barny,” I cried, striving to make myself heard, but there was no sound except for my beating heart. “Uncle Barny! Who are they? What are they doing there?” I asked again, and the words were like rain falling from the clouds or mists coming over the fields, making a pattern.
“Uncle Barny!” I made a desperate effort, and clutched his arm and a cry broke from my throat, a queer strangled noise.
“Hello! Have you been asleep, Penelope? Poor little wench. You’ve had a nightmare!” said he gently stroking my arm.
My voice had come back, and I asked, choking with the effort: “Who are those people?”
Uncle Barnabas slowly turned his huge body and followed my trembling finger. Even as I pointed the lights dimmed, the serving men and women faded away, and there stood my Aunt Tissie with her copper kettle and Alison in her little apron, and Jess piling logs on the fire.
“Only your Aunt Cicely Anne and Alison! You’ve been dreaming,” said Uncle Barny again. I kept close to him and when he rose to return for supper, I went too. Everything was as usual, and there was a welcoming creak of chairs and crackle of the fire as we went into the kitchen and sat down to the table.
The surprise which Aunt Tissie had promised us arrived one morning soon after this. There was a clatter of hooves in the lane, and a young man rode up the drive on a chestnut pony.
“Here her is, Mester Taberner,” said he leaping down, and he led the pony to the barn door. “Here her is. I couldn’t get with her afore, because they’re thrutched with work at Bramble.”
“How do you like her, Penelope?” asked Uncle Barnabas.
A Traveller in Time Page 4