Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

Edred had full breeches, puffed out like balloons, and a steeple-crowned hat, and a sort of tunic of crimson velvet, and a big starched ruff round his little neck more uncomfortable even than your Eton collar is after you’ve been wearing flannels for days and days. And Elfrida had long, tight stays with a large, flat-shaped piece of wood down the front, and very full, long skirts over a very abrupt hoop.

  When the three days were over the door of the attic, which, as usual after a quarrel, had been quite invisible and impossible to find, had become as plain as the nose on the face of the plainest person you know, and the children had walked in, and looked in the chests till they found what they wanted.

  And now they put on ruffs and all the rest of it to the accompaniment, or, as it always seemed, with the help, of soft pigeon noises.

  While they were dressing Elfrida held the Brownie camera tightly, in one hand or the other. This made dressing rather slow and difficult, but the children had agreed that if it were not done the Brownie would be, as Edred put it, “liable to vanish,” as everything else belonging to their own time always did–except their clothes. I can’t explain to you just now how it was that their clothes didn’t vanish. It would take too long. But it was all part of the magic of white feathers which are, as you know, the clothes of white pigeons.

  And now a very odd thing happened. As Edred put on his second shoe–which was the last touch to their united toilets–the walls seemed to tremble and shake and go crooked, like a house of cards at the very instant before it topples down. The floor slanted to that degree that standing on it was so difficult as to be at last impossible. The rafters all seemed to get crooked and mixed, like a box of matches when you spill them on the floor. The tiled roof that showed blue daylight through seemed to spin like a top, and you could not tell at all which way up you were. All this happened with dreadful suddenness, but almost as soon as it had begun it stopped with a jerk like that of a clockwork engine that has gone wrong. And the attic was gone–and the chests, and the blue-chinked tiles of the roof, and the walls and the rafters. And the room had shrunk to less than half its old size. And it was higher, and it was not an attic any more, but a round room with narrow windows, and just such a fireplace, with a stone hood, as the ones the children had seen when they looked down from the tops of the towers. You must have often heard of events that take people’s breath away. This sudden change did really take away the breaths of Edred and Elfrida, so that for a few moments they could only stare at each other “like Guy Fawkes masks,” as Elfrida later said.

  “I see,” said Edred, when breath enough for speech had returned to him. “This is the place where the attic was after the tower fell to pieces.”

  “But there isn’t any attic really,” said Elfrida, “You know we can’t find it if we quarrelled, and Mrs. Honeysett doesn’t ever find it. It isn’t anywhere.”

  “THE WALLS SEEMED TO TREMBLE AND SHAKE AND GO CROOKED.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Edred. “We couldn’t find it if it wasn’t.”

  “Well,” said Elfrida gloomily. “I only hope we may find it, that’s all. I suppose we may as well go out. It’s no use sticking in this horrid little room.” Her hand was on the door, but even as she fumbled with the latch, which was of iron and of a shape to which she was wholly unaccustomed, something else happened, even more disconcerting than the turn-over-change in which the attic and the chests had disappeared. It is very difficult to describe. Perhaps you happen to dislike travelling in trains with your back to the engine? If you do dislike it you dislike it very much indeed. It makes your head ache, and gives you a queer feeling at the back of your neck, and makes you turn so pale that the grown-up people with whom you are travelling will ask you what is the matter, and sometimes heartlessly insist that the buns you had at the junction, or the chocolate creams pressed into your hand at the parting hour by Uncle Fred or Aunt Imogen, are the cause of your sufferings. The worst feeling of all is that terrible sensation, as though your heart and lungs and the front part of your waistcoat were being drawn slowly but surely through your backbone, arid taken a very long way off.

  The sensations which now held Edred and Elfrida were exactly like those which–if you don’t like travelling backwards–you know only too well–and the sensations were so acute that both children shut their eyes. The whirling feeling, and the withdrawing-waistcoat feeling, and the headache, and the back-of-the-neck feeling stopped as suddenly as they had begun, and the two children opened their eyes in a room which Edred at least had never seen before. To Elfrida it seemed strange yet familiar. The shape of the room, the position of doors and windows, the mantelpiece with its curious carvings–these she knew. And some of the furniture too. Yet the room seemed bare–barer than it should have been, But why should it look bare–barer than it should have been–unless she knew how much less bare it once was? Unless, in fact, she had seen it before?

  “Oh, I know,” she cried, standing in her stiff skirts and heavy shoes in the middle of the room. “I know. This is Lord Arden’s town house. This is where I was with Cousin Betty. Only there aren’t such nice chairs and things, and it was full of people then.”

  Edred remained silent, his mouth half open and his eyes half shut in a sort of trance of astonishment. This was very different from the last adventure in which he had taken part. For then he had only gone to the house in Arden Castle as it was in Boney’s time, and he had gone to it by the simple means of walking down a staircase with which he was already familiar. But now he had been transported in a most violent and unpleasing manner, not only from his own times to times much earlier, but also from Arden Castle, which he knew, to Arden House, which he did not know. So he was silent, and when he did speak it was with discontent verging on disgust.

  “I don’t like it,” he began. “Let’s go back. I don’t like it. And we didn’t take the photograph. And I don’t like it. And my clothes are horrid. I feel something between a balloon and a Bluecoat boy. And you’ve no idea how silly you look–like Mrs. Noah out of the Ark, only tubby. And I don’t know who we’re supposed to be. And I don’t suppose this is Arden House. And if it is, you don’t know when. Suppose it’s Inquisition times, and they put us on the stake? Let’s go back; I don’t like it,” he ended.

  “Now you just listen,” said Elfrida, knitting her brows under the queer cap she wore. “I know inside me what I mean, but you won’t unless you jolly well attend.”

  “Fire ahead.”

  “Well, then, even if it was Inquisition times it would be all right–for us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know how I know, but I know I do know,” said Elfrida firmly. “You see, I’ve been here before. It’s not real, you see.”

  “It is,” said Edred, kicking the leg of the table.

  “Yes, of course . . . but . . . look here! You remember the water-shoot at Earl’s Court, and you were so frightened.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were; and I didn’t half like it myself. I wished we hadn’t, rather. And when it started, and we knew we’d got to go on with it. Oh horrible! And when it was over we wanted to go again, and we did, and it’s been so jolly to remember. This is like that. See?”

  “I don’t,” said Edred, “understand a single word you say. This isn’t a bit like the water-shoot or anything. Now, is it?”

  Elfrida frowned. Afterwards she was glad that she had done no more than frown. It is dangerous, as you know, to quarrel in a boat, but far more dangerous to quarrel in a century that is not your own. She frowned and opened her mouth. And just as her mouth opened, the door of the room followed its example, and a short, dark, cross-looking woman in a brown skirt and strange cap came hurrying in.

  “So it’s here you’ve hidden yourselves!” she cried. “And I looking high and low to change your dress.”

  “What for?” said Edred, for it was his arm which she had quite ungently caught.

  “For what?” she said, as she dragged him out of the room. “Why, to a
ttend my lord your father and your lady mother at the masque at Whitehall. Had you forgot already? And thou so desirous to attend them in thy new white velvet broidered with the orange-tawny, and thy lady mother’s diamond buckles, and the silken cloak, and the shoe-roses, and the cobweb-lawn starched ruff, and the little sword and all.”

  The woman had dragged Edred out of the room and by the stairs by this time. Elfrida, following, decided that her speech was the harshest part of her.

  “If she was really horrid,” thought the girl, “she wouldn’t try to cheer him up with velvet and swords and diamond buckles.

  “Can’t I go?” she said aloud.

  The woman turned and slapped her–not hard, but smartly. “I told thee how it would be if thou wouldst not hold that dunning tongue. No; thou can’t go. Little ladies stay at home and sew their samplers. Thou’ll go to Court soon enough, I warrant.”

  So Elfrida sat and watched while Edred was partially washed–the soap got in his eyes just as it gets in yours nowadays–and dressed in the beautiful white page’s dress, white velvet, diamond buckles, little sword, and all.

  “You are splendid,” she said. “Oh, I do wish I was a boy!” she added, for perhaps the two thousand and thirty-second time in her short life.

  “It’s not that thou’ll be wishing when thy time comes to go to Court,” said the woman. “There, my little lord, give thy old nurse a kiss and stand very cautious and perfect, not to soil thy fine feathers. And when thou hearest thy mother’s robes on the stairs go out and make thy bow like thy tutor taught thee.”

  It was not Edred’s tutor who had taught him to bow. But when a rustling of silks sounded on the stairs he was able to go out and make a very creditable obeisance to the stately magnificence that swept down towards him. Elfrida thought it best to curtsey beside her brother. Aunt Edith had taught them to dance the minuet, and somehow the bow and curtsey which belong to that dance seemed the right thing now. And the lady on the stairs smiled, well pleased. She was a wonderfully dressed lady. Her bodice was of yellow satin, richly embroidered; her petticoat of gold tissue with stripes; her robes of red velvet, lined with yellow muslin with stripes of pure gold. She had a point lace apron and a collar of white satin under a delicately worked ruff. And she was a blaze of beautiful jewels.

  “‘THOU’RT A FINE PAGE, INDEED, MY DEAR SON,’ SAID THE LADY. ‘STAND ASIDE AND TAKE MY TRAIN.’”

  “Thou’rt a fine page, indeed, my dear son,” said the lady. “Stand aside and take my train as I pass. And thou, dear daughter, so soon as thou’rt of an age for it, thou shalt have a train and a page to carry it for thee.”

  She swept on, and the children followed. Lord Arden was in the hall, hardly less splendid than his wife, and they all went off in a coach that was very grand, if rather clumsy. Its shape reminded Elfrida of the coach which the fairy-godmother made for Cinderella out of the pumpkin, and she herself, as she peeped through the crowd of liveried servants to see it start, felt as much like Cinderella as any one need wish to feel, and perhaps a little more. But she consoled herself by encouraging a secret feeling she had that something was bound to happen; and sure enough something did. And that is what I am going to tell you about. I own that I should like to tell you also what happened to Edred, but his part of the adventure was not really an adventure at all–though it was a thing that he will never forget as long as he remembers any magic happenings.

  “We went to the King’s house,” he told Elfrida later. “Whitehall is the name. I should like to call my house Whitehall–if it wasn’t called Arden Castle, you know. And there were thousands of servants, I should think, all much finer than you could dream of, and lords and ladies, and lots of things to eat, and bear-baiting and cock-fighting in the garden.”

  “Cruel!” said Elfrida. “I hope you didn’t look.”

  “A little I did,” said Edred. “Boys have to be brave to bear sights of blood and horror, you know, in case of them growing up to be soldiers. But I liked the masque best. The Queen acted in it. There wasn’t any talking, you know, only dressing up and dancing. It was something like the pantomime, but not so sparkly. And there was a sea with waves that moved all silvery, and panelled scenes, and dolphins and fishy things, and a great shell that opened, and the Queen and the ladies came out and danced, and I had a lot to eat, such rummy things, and then I fell asleep, and when I woke up the King himself was looking at me and saying I had a bonny face. Bonny means pretty. You’d think a King would know better, wouldn’t you?”

  This was all that Edred could find to tell. I could have told more, but one can’t tell everything, and there is Elfrida’s adventure to be told about.

  When the coach had disappeared in the mist and the mud–for the weather was anything but summer weather–Elfrida went upstairs to the room where she had left the old nurse. She did not know where else to go.

  “Sit thee down,” said the nurse, “and sew on thy sampler.”

  There was the sampler, very fine indeed, in a large polished wood frame.

  “I wish I needn’t,” said Elfrida, looking anxiously at the fine silks.

  “Tut, tut,” said the nurse, “how’ll thee grow to be lady if thou doesn’t mind thy needle?”

  “I’d much rather talk to you,” said Elfrida coaxingly.

  “Thou canst chatter as well as sew,” the nurse said, “as well I know to my cost. Would that thy needle flew so fast as thy tongue! Sit thee down, and if the little tree be done by dinner-time thou shalt have leave to see thy Cousin Richard.”

  “I suppose,” thought Elfrida, taking up the needle, “that I am fond of my Cousin Richard.”

  The sewing was difficult, and hurt her eyes, but she persevered. Presently some one called the nurse, and Elfrida was left alone. Then she stopped persevering. “Whatever is the good,” she asked herself, “of working at a sampler that you haven’t time to finish, and that would be worn out, anyhow, years and years before you were born? The Elfrida who’s doing that sampler is the same age as me, and born the same day,” she reflected. And then she wondered what the date was, and what was the year. She was still wondering, and sticking the needle idly in and out of one hole, without letting it take the silk with it, when there was a sort of clatter on the stairs, the door burst open, and in came a jolly boy of about her own age.

  “Thy task done?” he cried. “Mine too. Old Parrot-nose kept me hard at it, but I thought of thee, and for once I did all his biddings. So now we are free. Come, play ball in the garden.” This, Elfrida concluded, must be Cousin Dick, and she decided at once that she was fond of him.

  There was a big and beautiful garden behind the house. The children played ball there, and they ran in the box alleys, and played hide-and-seek among the cut trees and stone seats, and statues and fountains.

  Old Parrot-nose, who was Cousin Richard’s tutor, and was dressed in black, and looked as though he had been eating lemons and vinegar, sat on a seat and watched them, or walked up and down the flagged terrace with his thumb in a dull-looking book.

  When they stopped their game to rest on a stone step, leaning against a stone seat, old Parrot-nose walked very softly up behind the seat, and stood there where they could not see him and listened. Listening is very dishonourable, as we all know, but in those days tutors did not always think it necessary to behave honourably to their pupils.

  I always have thought, and I always shall think, that it was the eavesdropping of that tiresome old tutor, Mr. Parados–or Parrot-nose–which caused all the mischief. But Elfrida has always believed, and always will believe, that the disaster was caused by her knowing too much history. That is why she is so careful to make sure that no misfortune shall ever happen on that account, any way. That is one of the reasons why she never takes a history prize at school. “You never know,” she says. And, in fact, when it comes to a question in an historical examination, she never does know.

  This was how it happened. Elfrida, now that she was no longer running about in the garden, remembered the quest
ion that she had been asking herself over the embroidery frame, and it now seemed sensible to ask the question of some one who could answer it. So she said–

  “I say, Cousin Richard, what day is it?”

  Elfrida understood him to say that it was the fifth of November.

  “Is it really?” she said. “Then it’s Guy Fawkes day. Do you have fireworks?” And in pure lightness of heart began to hum–

  “Please to remember

  The Fifth of November

  The gunpowder treason and plot.

  I see no reason

  Why gunpowder treason

  Should ever be forgot.”

  “Tis not a merry song, cousin,” said Cousin Richard, “nor a safe one. ’Tis best not to sing of treason.”

  “But it didn’t come off, you know, and he’s always burnt in the end,” said Elfrida.

  “Are there more verses?” Cousin Dick asked.

  “No.”

  “I wonder what treason the ballad deals with?” said the boy.

  “Don’t you know?” It was then that Elfrida made the mistake of showing off her historical knowledge. “I know. And I know some of the names of the conspirators, too, and who they wanted to kill, and everything.”

  “Tell me,” said Cousin Richard idly.

  “The King hadn’t been fair to the Catholics, you know,” said Elfrida, full of importance, “so a lot of them decided to kill him and the Houses of Parliament. They made a plot–there were a whole lot of them in it. They said Lord Arden was, but he wasn’t, and some of them were to pretend to be hunting, and to seize the Princess Elizabeth and proclaim her Queen, and the rest were to blow the Houses of Parliament up when the King went to open them.”

  “I never heard this tale from my tutor,” said Cousin Richard laughing. “Proceed, cousin.”

  “Well, Mr. Piercy took a house next the Parliament House, and they dug a secret passage to the vaults under the Parliament Houses; and they put three dozen casks of gunpowder there and covered them with faggots. And they would have been all blown up, only Mr. Tresham wrote to his relation, Lord Monteagle, that they were going to blow up the King and–”