Back to Blackbrick

by Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

  I went to my clanky little bed for the last time, and the sharp cold rain was lashing like a whip against the windows and everything was rattling. I kept wishing that I had more time. I kept wishing that I had gotten what I’d come for.

  Anyone who gets to travel to the past should be able to do something really useful to make the future better, but the only thing I’d done was make people think I was a looper. I tried to comfort myself by thinking about my notebook and how it was full of handy information that was possibly going to help Granddad when I got back. But mostly I lay there looking at the bumpy ceiling. And the little window shook, and the wind screamed and whispered under the gap in the door.

  Chapter 15

  THERE ARE so many things I wish I had done. Big things, like killing George Corporamore. Small things, like saying a proper good-bye to Maggie. But when you’re under pressure and when there are important things on your mind about someone who needs you, murdering people and saying decent good-byes aren’t always too easy. And anyway, I guess there was part of me that didn’t want to say good-bye at all.

  I was up very early, before anyone else, which was a massive achievement. I slipped into my clothes and made my bed very carefully. I looked around my room one last time before reaching for the door.

  The noises you make sound unreasonably loud when it’s early in the morning and nobody else is up. My steps echoed along the flagstones. Everything in my bag jangled rowdily together as I made my way to the stables.

  Nobody was there when I arrived—except, of course, for Somerville and Ross. As soon as they saw me, they thought they were going out for a run and got so excited that it made me want to cry.

  “Listen, guys,” I said. “Kevin will take you out later, but I have to go.”

  I didn’t know if they understood, but they nuzzled their soft noses into my face, and I thought I wasn’t going to be able to bear it. “I have to go.” I said it a few more times, plunging my hand into my pocket and then pulling out the key. I could hear footsteps, louder and heavier than I ever remembered Kevin’s being.

  “Glad you’re here. It’s getting late,” I said. I pressed my face into Ross’s shiny neck, feeling suddenly like I wanted to stay there for a bit longer. “I’ll be ready in a minute. We can go straight to the gates.”

  It took me a second or two to realize that it wasn’t Kevin. My brain joggled as I remembered what Kevin had told me about how Lord Corporamore sometimes wandered around the stables, restless and angry, in the dark hours before dawn. And it was Corporamore, right there, pointy and pink, marching toward me. I held on to the key.

  “What gates?” he said hissily.

  “The south gates,” I answered, feeling too surprised and ambushed to tell him anything except the truth.

  “You must know that it is expressly forbidden for anyone, I mean anyone, to come in or go out through the south gates.”

  “Yes I do, but—”

  “And you stand here with the audacity to tell me that you intend to defy that regulation?”

  “You don’t understand,” I said desperately, and he agreed. I rubbed the key in my hand as if it was a magic thing that could rescue me from this uncomfortable situation. But that only made things worse, because George Corpormore suddenly fixed his little eyes on the key, and his nostrils flared with a fresh rage.

  “Give. Me. That. Key. That’s not your key. Tell me where you got it.”

  I knew then that no matter what I said, he wasn’t going to believe me.

  You can’t see power, and you can’t touch it, but it is everywhere. And the person who happens to have most of it is usually the one who thinks he’s entitled to decide what happens next. His sharp hands poked at my shoulders, and he jostled me against the stable wall, shouting into my face. Bits of spit landed on my eyelids and my forehead, which was pretty disgusting. I closed my fist around the key and held it as high in the air as I could, and Corporamore kept reaching up, roughly trying to wrestle it away from me. I could hear Ross and Somerville going mental, fretting and snorting, and I knew from the sound of them that they were on my side.

  “Listen to me,” he grunted, as if there were some other option available to me at the time. “You weasel.”

  If the whole situation hadn’t been so tense, I might have started to laugh.

  “Relax,” I said to him.

  “I have no intention of relaxing until you give me back the thing that belongs to me.”

  And I was pinned up against the wall and his nose was approximately one millimeter from my face.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let go of me, will you, and I’ll give it back to you. I should have given it to you ages ago, because, well, because it’s yours.”

  He loosened his grip and then he let go completely, and I knew I was going to have to stay pretty sharp. I was shivering and my heart was hammering away like a million drums, and I could feel pints of blood galloping around in my head. But the whole time I was doing my best to be calm on the outside. I held the key out to him, and he was all confident and smug.

  The sun was starting to rise, and under it the key twinkled and little bits of light shot out. And he was grinning for a second as he reached over to take it from me. I barely had time to see that smile disappear from his spiky face, because right then is when I ducked. I closed my fist tight again and I slipped past him and darted through the arch, a bit like a weasel, actually.

  I ripped past the Abbey and down by the black pine trees. I scrambled along the gravel, falling to my knees a couple of times but getting up again and keeping going. The thuds of footsteps were very close behind, and someone was shouting, “Stop, Cosmo, stop.” It really was Kevin this time, and because of that I did stop.

  “Where were you, Kev?” I panted. “You were supposed to meet me at the stables. Why didn’t you come?” A blast of unexpected wind hit my face like a slap. I could see Corporamore’s shadow catching up, and there was no more time. I got up and I ran again. I ran for my life.

  Running fast isn’t only a sign of fear. It’s also a sign of hope, which is the thing that keeps you going. I was running for my granddad and his dignity, and for the choices that I thought he still had. And for a few seconds there, I thought I was going to make it.

  But then Kevin’s arms clutched around my knees. He pulled me to the ground, and all the energy escaped from my body.

  “Let me go! What the . . .?”

  “Cosmo, give up. You can’t keep running. You’ve got to give him the key. You don’t know what he’s like. He’ll pursue you forever.” He went on a bit more about how this was in my best interests and how he was saving me from myself.

  Corporamore was standing behind us with his hands on his hips, his mouth a tiny angry straight white line.

  “Honestly, trust me, Cosmo,” Kevin whispered. “It’ll be better if you give it to him now. It’ll save you a hell of a fight.”

  I lay on the cold gravel, and Corporamore strode over. “Thank you, Kevin, my boy. Glad you had the sense to put a stop to this fellow’s gallop.”

  Corporamore pincered open my fist with his spiky hands and plucked out the key, the way someone might pull a twisted nail from the shoe of a horse.

  “I’ll take that, you gurrier,” he grunted.

  My self-respect had disappeared by then, and quietly I started to beg. “Please, Lord Corporamore. Please. You’ve got to let me have it back.”

  “Not on your Nellie,” he said, which was one of the things people used to say in those days. He smiled, threw the key up into the air, and caught it. And still I tried to change his mind. “I have to see my granddad again. I need that key. It’s the only way I know to get back. I’m sorry. Please. Please . . . give it back to me.”

  I was pretty ashamed of the way I was acting, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was embarrassed that Kevin was watching me lose all my dignity like that.

  Corporamore looked at Kevin and pointed at me. “If there’s one more incident involving this boy, so help me
God, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” He started walking back to the Abbey so that we couldn’t hear what horrible thing God would help him to do if I broke the Abbey’s precious rules again.

  I don’t know how much time went by after that, but suddenly Mrs. Kelly was there, hurrying over to the scene of my pathetic collapse, saying, “Oh, for pity’s sake!”

  She told us how Lord Corporamore had just been in the kitchen, ranting and calling me a young guttersnipe, talking about how I had the cheek to sneak around with keys that didn’t belong to me and the nerve to do things that were forbidden. But she wasn’t angry with me. Somehow I could hear in the tone of her voice that she was on my side, which felt like a tiny consolation prize in the middle of the exit strategy that had gone so wrong.

  “This lad is distraught,” Mrs. Kelly said to Kevin as if I weren’t there at all. “This lad needs compassion and assistance. A fellow in his condition must not be hunted down like an animal just because he has a blessed key.”

  Kevin coaxed me into a standing position. “I’ll never get back. I’ll never get back now,” I said under my breath. “There’s someone who needs me, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.”

  “There, there,” said Mrs. Kelly. “Try not to be upsetting yourself.” She patted me lightly on the hand, and even though that’s a pretty useless thing to do, still it felt a bit nice.

  “There’s no going back, Cosmo. I know it’s hard, but that’s the way it is,” Kevin said.

  And Mrs. Kelly added, “You know, when you have a bit of time to think about it properly, it’s just as well. Now then, I put the kettle on a little while ago, and there are some scones in the oven. I’d be very glad if you joined me for some breakfast.”

  I liked the sound of scones straight from the oven. And all of us reckoned we could definitely do with a cup of tea.

  I went down to the horses again that night, and I think they were very glad to see I hadn’t gone. I tried singing the song that my mum used to sing to me, the one that I used to whisper to John, but my voice kept cracking at the edges, so I stopped. I told them that nothing was any good, that I was stuck, but obviously they couldn’t really help me. Because they were, you know, horses.

  I’m sure there are people who would say I should have fought harder. Maybe I should have been a bit cleverer, a bit braver. Perhaps I should have been raging with Kevin for being the one who stopped me, but it’s hard to be raging with someone who thinks he’s doing his best for you, even if he has made a massive mistake. Maybe I should have stood up to George Corporamore. I sometimes think I should have tried to make things clearer to everyone. But if you weren’t there at the time, it’s difficult to explain.

  I thought about Kevin’s and Mrs. Kelly’s advice about putting upsetting thoughts right out of my head and getting on with it—it seemed to be a popular theory in those days. And as a matter of fact, sometimes it’s quite good advice to take.

  Chapter 16

  SO THAT’S more or less how I ended up staying at Blackbrick. It might be kind of hard to believe, but eventually I forgot about the present, which was pretty disloyal of me really, but partly, to be perfectly honest about it, it was also kind of great.

  The trees on the driveway were as green and black and thick as ever, but the ones by the stables became bare branches as winter crept up on Blackbrick Abbey, making everything colder than the stones.

  Mrs. Kelly always had a massive list of jobs for us to do, mainly cleaning and polishing. They were the kinds of jobs that took ages because of all the big rooms with millions of chairs and tables, cabinets and ornaments, candleholders and picture frames and things like that, all of which were sitting targets for the dust that it was our job to get rid of.

  It’s good to have a lot of stuff to do, though—that’s one of the things I learned. It keeps your mind focused, and it makes it a good bit easier to sleep at night. But as busy as we were all morning with our cleaning chores, and all evening helping in the kitchen with dinner—something great happened most afternoons at Blackbrick. And what happened was that a delicious kind of silence would settle on the house and the whole place seemed to swell with strange feelings of freedom and possibility. The three o’clock bell would chime in the hallway and Mrs. Kelly would head off with a steaming teapot to her quarters, and nobody would see her again until she bustled into the kitchen much later to get started on dinner.

  It’s those afternoons and how they belonged to us that I remember best. The three of us got used to galloping around the hidden corners of Blackbrick. Somerville and Ross got faster and fitter, and they were proud and strong and fun to hang out with.

  I can sometimes smell the Blackbrick wind in my face still, and hear Kevin’s laugh and see Maggie’s very pale cheeks turning red in the cold air. We never cared if it rained, even though Maggie’s hair would stick to her face and our noses would go numb, and when we were finished, we’d have to rub down the horses with dry rags, and then run back into the house shivering and dripping and cursing the cold. There were brilliant bright days too, when the sun was a giant splash of gladness, showing off the cold crisp sky, clear and perfect. Maggie and Kevin were brave, and they were young. If you’d seen them the way they used to be, you could never imagine either of them ever being delicate or afraid or old or forgetful or anything like that.

  We developed this special way of whispering into the horses’ ears, which made them run really, really fast. And when they did that, we sometimes felt we were going to tumble off their backs, possibly killing ourselves. But we never did fall, and gradually we realized that we never would.

  After a while hanging out with Kevin and Maggie became an ordinary, everyday kind of a thing to do.

  Maggie loved going down to the south gates to look at the old lodge, and she often asked if we didn’t mind going there and having a look together. It was illegal, I kept reminding her, and besides there wasn’t much to see. On top of all that, it was tormenting for me to go near the south gates—I didn’t like to think about the people on the other side and how I had abandoned them. Plus I wasn’t that interested in getting caught down there again by George Corporamore, so most of the time I tried to stay away.

  The gate lodge was nothing but a crooked little house, a ruin really, but Maggie always said she liked the idea of doing it up and living in it. She said a small house like that, with a cozy fire and good company, and what else would a person need in life? I said she really should start raising her aspirations a bit more.

  We learned to cook dinners, and Mrs. Kelly sighed and said, “Remember, Kevin, the lovely dishes that Bernie Doyle used to make?” Bernie Doyle had been the cook. Apparently nobody could ever have lived up to her legendary status, no matter how hard they tried. Maggie was put on Cordelia duty and had to take her breakfast every day. She didn’t even seem to mind that much.

  We trained the horses until they could have competed in competitions and won. Whenever we had any free time, we legged it around the corners of the estate that nobody else ever went to anymore on the horses, and shouted various things at each other. We invented an excellent game that involved throwing a potato high up in a big arc and the person on the other horse having to gallop over and catch it in time, and when they did, it was their turn. Might sound kind of stupid, but seriously, it was the best game ever. I’m surprised it’s not an actual sport.

  Another thing I won’t forget is how irritating it is trying to teach people how to read and write. Making up for the past’s feeble education system was pretty hard. For one thing, when I was teaching them, Maggie and Kevin kept on chatting to each other and laughing when they should have been concentrating. I started on very easy words, and then a few simple phrases like “The cat sat on the mat.” “Guys, concentrate,” I’d have to keep saying. “I’m trying to improve your overall levels of literacy. You could at least look as if you’re making an effort.”

  Then they might settle down for a bit and get through the exercises I’d given them. It took a
long time, but eventually their writing improved and their words got a lot better. I used to get them to write out lines all across the Corporamore notepaper, which was the only paper I had access to, apart from my notebook, which by then was already full.

  No matter how much progress we were making, Maggie said we always had to leave Crispin’s wing by seven p.m., “in case Lord Corporamore finds you here.” Kevin never once asked her what on earth Corporamore would actually be doing there in the evenings, and neither did I, even though it was sort of an obvious question. There were times when I was literally dying to ask her, but I never said another word about it. The night before I’d tried to escape from Blackbrick, Maggie had begged me to put certain things right out of my head, and I was trying my best.

  Speaking of trying my best, I also did what I could to get Kevin into excellent long-term brain-health habits, but nothing in Blackbrick was a source of omega-3 fatty acids, as far as I could see, except for on Fridays when everyone had to eat mackerel. I wrote out the recipe for smoked salmon pâté in case we ever got our hands on any actual smoked salmon, which frankly was pretty unlikely. But still, when you have knowledge like I had, it’s your duty to share it with others who might benefit, so after I’d written it, I pinned it up on the wall in the kitchen. I also wrote a whole load of my own homemade Sudoku puzzles too, which took me ages, and I taught Maggie and Kevin the rules. They caught on pretty fast and got so good that they were soon very bored with them, even when I made them superhard. They didn’t see the point of them. I tried to adopt a positive mental attitude at all times, and I did what I could to get them to do the same.

  Everyone says you can’t live your life in the past, but I learned to do a fairly decent job of it. It’s funny the way time is. Sometimes it feels like it’s going to go on forever, and then there are other times when it warps and folds and you don’t even know how you got from one season to the next. And besides, even though I’d abandoned the present, it wasn’t really my fault. I was a prisoner.