What about us?

by Jacqui Henderson

  “I know.” Was all I could say in reply.

  “What should we do?” she whispered and I could see by the fear in her eyes that I was about to lose her again.

  “We explore. Let’s find out everything we can and then try to build a picture of what’s happened.” I said.

  Even to my own ears, I sounded strangely confident, exhilarated even.

  “Ok, let’s start in here... we know there’s no one else in here.” she said and I knew she was trying to find her own inner courage.

  I left her side and walked over to the door. I wanted to see if I could hear any signs of life beyond, but I was also curious as to what lay on the other side. Grace went to the window.

  I pulled the door open and was pleasantly surprised to find a large landing outside, with other doors and two staircases; one going up and one going down. There were gas lamps, which cast a strange glow over the chairs and tables dotted about and over the pictures on the walls too, but I couldn’t hear any signs of life.

  “Oh my god... Jack!” Grace hissed at me from inside the room.

  I closed the door quietly and turned to her.

  “There’s a bloody horse and carriage going down the street!” she said in amazement.

  I quickly crossed the room and stood beside her in the big bay window.

  “Am I hallucinating?” she whispered.

  “No. I can see it too.” I assured her.

  We let the curtain fall back again. Next to the window was a large wooden wardrobe and I opened the door. It was full of clothes, but they were wrong too. I took the first thing out, a woman’s dress and laid it on the bed.

  “Late nineteenth century, I’m sure of it.” I said, turning to her.

  She took a deep breath, went to the dressing table, opened a drawer and then gasped.

  “What? What have you found?” I asked, moving towards her.

  “A pile of money and there’s a lot of it.” she whispered.

  I knew straight away from the colour and design of the large notes and coins that they too were nineteenth century. On top of the pile lay a small watch, attached to a simple gold pin.

  She started to count the money, I suppose because that small familiar act of counting was a little anchor in a sea of weirdness.

  I went back to the window and stared out at the little park in front of us. The street lamps were lit, but they too were wrong. Something was nagging in the back of my mind, something I knew I should remember, but couldn’t. It was exasperating, but I felt alive, really alive for the first time since the accident.

  “There’s just over four thousand pounds here.”

  There was a strange note in her voice as she said it again.

  “Four thousand pounds...”

  I turned to face her, not understanding.

  “So?” I asked, shrugging my shoulders.

  “When you saved me, you had a nice watch and around four thousand pounds on you.”

  “Oh, my watch...” I said slowly, thinking about everything that had happened since we’d been on the harbour wall. “Just before the light came, I was fiddling with my watch.”

  I held out my arm but it was bare; the watch had gone, yet I had a vague recollection of it being there while we were in the light.

  “Maybe I loosened it while I was fiddling with it. It must have fallen off.” I said.

  We walked back to the bed and started to search for it, but it was nowhere to be found. The watch was connected somehow and the feeling that I’d done this before was growing stronger by the minute. Perhaps she’d stumbled upon something. Something felt right in my mind, but I still couldn’t explain it. I knew the house was empty and I also knew that for a while at least, we were safe. I knew these things, but I didn’t know how, or why.

  I reached for her hand. “Come on, let’s take a look at the rest of the house. There’s no one here; I’m certain of it.”

  She trusted me as she always did and so we opened each door one by one, peeped inside and once sure there was no one there, went in. The bedroom we’d started in had been a woman’s, but the next one was definitely a man’s. In the top drawer of the tallboy was a pocket watch and another pile of money.

  Grace counted it quickly. “Four thousand pounds...” she said, confirming what we were both thinking.

  Finally, once we had checked every room in the house, we went back to the sitting room we’d found downstairs. The fire was still burning in the grate and it was warmer than anywhere else. There was a bucket with coal in it and I put some on the fire.

  “There, we have a few hours before it’ll go out.

  We huddled together on a rather uncomfortable leather sofa and thought about what we had discovered.

  “I think we’ve gone back in time.” I said slowly, feeling each word and finding the idea comforting rather than frightening.

  “Well...” she replied, just as slowly, but for a different reason. “That newspaper in the kitchen said December 10th 1888 and it didn’t look that old; a week maybe, but not well over a hundred years old.”

  I nodded before continuing. “There’s no electricity, although there is water and gas. The clothes, the money, the style of everything in fact, it all screams late nineteenth century to me.”

  “But how?” she whispered, a note of fear creeping back into her voice. “And why? Why us?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s almost like I’ve been remembering. I sense that I know the answer and I feel as though I’ve done this before, impossible though it sounds.”

  “It doesn’t sound as impossible as the fact that we’re somewhere else, when we’ve no right to be,” she said, “So don’t go thinking that you’ve gone insane, because I’m way ahead of you.”

  I smiled at her assessment of our situation. She’d captured it beautifully and I held her tight.

  “At least we can go crazy together.” I told her and a muffled giggle escaped from her mouth, buried in my shoulder.

  We must have dozed off, because a passing noise from outside made me jump. Despite the fact that the curtains were still drawn, I could see that the light was changing. It was also chilly.

  I gently shook Grace awake. “I think it’s morning.” I told her as she stretched. “And we’re still here, so I don’t think we were dreaming.”

  “Oh.” she said, disappointed.

  As she pulled herself together, I went to the door and listened, but there was still no sound of anyone else.

  From behind me, she spoke and I could tell from the tone of her voice that she wasn’t happy.

  “I’m hungry. I don’t cope well with things out of the ordinary when I’m hungry and tired. I definitely can’t begin to think about any of this,” she said, waving her hands around the room theatrically. “At least not until I’ve had a cup of tea and maybe even a bit of toast.”

  I was left in no doubt as to where her priorities lay. I also knew that this was her way of finding something normal in what promised to be a very abnormal day.

  “Then let’s go and see what delights there are to be found in the kitchen.” I said, stretching my hand out towards her and guessing what she was thinking from the shadow that passed across her eyes.

  “If anyone comes, we’ll deal with it when it happens. Let’s just take one thing at a time. And right now, tea is what we should focus on.” I said, wagging my finger at her.

  I tried to sound convincing, but I too had been worried about how we would explain our presence to the household, should we meet them. Nothing I’d come up with so far had even the remotest ring of credibility to it.

  “Did they have tea in the nineteenth century?” she asked hopefully.

  “Oh yes,” I assured her, “They most certainly did.”

  Chapter fifteen

  Having promised tea, I found myself at a bit of a loss when we discovered that the range in the kitchen was stone cold. Grace though, was determined and she took the kettle back into the sitting room, coaxed some life back into the embers in the
fireplace and plonked the kettle in the middle. In the pantry there was some almost, but not quite off milk and when she returned triumphant, we made a pot of strong tea. Breakfast however, was a disappointing affair; there was jam, but no butter and the only bread we could find was stale. Daylight and a cup of tea certainly helped us both feel better about our predicament, so despite having to put up with dry bread, we still managed to come up with a plan.

  “So we’re agreed then?” I asked, as we headed back up the stairs to change into something more appropriate for the time.

  “Might as well I suppose,” she said, turning to face me and shrugging her shoulders. “I mean we don’t know how we got here and we could be whisked back at any time, so it would be a shame not to; if we can that is. After all, we can’t stay here. Someone’s bound to come home at some point and then what would we say? The only other option I can come up with is to go crazy with it all and I really don’t fancy that!”

  “We’ve always wanted to go to Paris,” I reminded her. “And if we really are in the late nineteenth century, then we won’t need passports.”

  “But there’s the money; I’m really not happy about stealing it.” she said, still disapproving of this part of the plan.

  “We won’t survive five minutes anywhere, or any time I shouldn’t think, without money. We can always repay it once we’ve sorted ourselves out.”

  I was very firm on this point, knowing we wouldn’t get very far with nothing but the clothes we were wearing, which we were also about to steal.

  “Yes, but it’s such an awful lot of money.” she said unhappily. “I’d struggle to repay half that much at home and there I’ve got a job.”

  “Look Grace, if I have done this before, then maybe the money is here for us to use.”

  I was trying to be logical. Everything was so strange, yet at the same time it felt ok, normal even, in a bizarre way.

  “I can’t even begin to think about that as a possibility, not right now Jack, it would tip me over the edge good and proper. You win. We take the clothes, we take the money; but only one pile mind and we get out of here and head for Paris.” she said, opening the bedroom door and walking purposefully towards the wardrobe.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got that might fit...”

  I knew from her tone that the decision had been made. Relieved, I left her there and went to see what was in the other bedroom.

  As I was getting dressed I noticed that if I didn’t think about it, my fingers automatically moved over the unfamiliar fastenings. I mulled over the idea that somehow I’d done this before. Logically it was impossible of course, yet part of my mind knew without doubt that it was not. Try as I might I couldn’t come up with a sensible answer and quickly gave up, just letting anticipation take over. I appeared to be in a different century and the opportunity to see for myself firsthand, that which I’d only been able to read about was intoxicating.

  We met back out on the landing about twenty minutes later. She was wearing a honey brown dress that shimmered in the light, complementing her dark skin beautifully.

  “You look lovely,” I told her, “But I think you’ll be cold in just that.”

  “I already am, the fire went out ages ago.” she complained. “I’m hoping that on that coat stand thing downstairs, there will be something warmer to put over it. Look, I found a bag and I’ve put a change of underwear in it. The knickers are bloody enormous, but there’s another dress in there, a light shawl and some stockings. Somehow, I think it’s going to be a while before we’re across the channel.” she said, smiling ruefully, “And then god knows how long it’ll take to get to Paris.”

  “Good thinking.”

  I took the bag from her and headed back into the other bedroom. I put another set of clothes in there for me, plus some trinkets that we could sell in France. I wasn’t too sure how we would change money and we’d need some cash if we weren’t going to walk all the way to Paris.

  Holding hands, we made our way downstairs to the coat stand in the hallway and I took a long, heavy coat and a hat.

  She laughed at me. “You look like someone out of a Charles Dickens story.”

  “Hah! Well you should see yourself in that bonnet and shawl!” I retorted.

  The laughter made it much easier to open the front door. Then we took a deep breath and stepped out into the crisp morning air, standing there for a moment before setting off down the steps into a world we hadn’t expected to find ourselves in.

  We had no idea where we were, so that was the first thing we had to find out. A coalman was making a delivery a few houses down and while he was humping the heavy sacks from the back of his cart to the hole at the front of the house, I asked him.

  If he thought my question strange, he didn’t show it. “Lewisham Mansions guv. Main road’s that way.” he said, pointing to our right.

  I thanked him and we followed his instructions.

  “Do we try to go to Dover?” she asked.

  “I think Dover’s quite a long way off and I’m not even sure if we need to go there. If I remember rightly, Lewisham is a suburb in the southeast of London, which means we should be able to take a ship from the Pool of London, near Tower Bridge.”

  “Ok... and how do we get to this ‘Pool of London’?” she asked.

  “Let’s walk.” I suggested. “We can learn a lot just by watching what’s going on around us and then hopefully we won’t make too many mistakes.”

  She agreed, but pretended to grumble. “Being twenty-one seems to involve walking more than I’ve ever done in my whole life before, but I suppose I did get plenty of practice in over the last few days, so why not?”

  “Good for the soul.” I told her, taking her hand and squeezing it tightly.

  We made a few wrong turns, but thankfully a couple of helpful people put us right before we got too lost and we were soon on the High Street, which was very different from the streets we’d come from. There was bustle and activity everywhere and we were instantly captivated. The high pavement gave us a good view up and down the wide, tree lined road and Grace amused herself for a few minutes, standing in front of shop windows, marvelling at the items on display while I watched what was going on around the vegetable market.

  We continued walking and once past the Silk Mill, the High Street became the main road to London, so we just carried on heading towards the smoke. I didn’t have a notebook with me, or a camera. I didn’t even a pen and I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember everything. I hoped I would have the chance to return one day and do justice to these people and their times. There was everyone on that road, in every condition imaginable.

  We’d pass large, impressive houses built on four floors and then a bit further down there would be a dark alley and what looked like hovels, which were probably home to more people than any of the big houses. As we got closer to the city there were fewer fields and trees, less space between the buildings, more traffic and more noise.

  All of life seemed to be happening there, right in front of our eyes and we weren’t stared at much, so we couldn’t have looked out of place. Despite knowing that social assistance was very limited in that time, the stark difference between those that had money and those that clearly did not was shocking, as was the number of dirty, ragged children running about the streets begging for money. But even with this knowledge, my exhilaration was not dampened. I was there, breathing the air and coughing on it; the air of another century! Nothing could diminish my wonder. Even Grace was taking it all in and seemed to have lost her fear. We excitedly pointed things out to each other and I explained as much as I could remember as we walked, wishing that I hadn’t been so lost in the early twentieth century and had read more about this vibrant and important period of London’s history.

  Once we reached New Cross, we stood on a bridge and watched a steam train pull in and then pull out of the station. It was belching smoke, but looked very solid and like nothing I’d ever seen before. Feeling like a child, I wanted to ride
on it and toyed with the idea of taking the train to London.

  Grace laughed at me. “Well maybe if we can’t get a boat from this ‘Pool’ place you mentioned, we can get a train to Dover. ‘Cos mister, I won’t be walking back again!”

  By mid-afternoon we found ourselves on Borough High Street and I realised I was lost. We were both ravenous and after a bit of teasing each other, we found the courage to approach a street pie seller. He seemed popular, as there was a queue, but it was hard to tell what type of pies they were. I tried to guess what was in the sludgy gravy, apart from gristle.

  “You probably don’t want to know.” Grace declared, pulling a face, but we finished them anyway.

  Not long afterwards, she started to perspire, despite the biting cold wind. She tried to tell me she was alright, but I could see that she wasn’t and I wasn’t sure how much further we had to go. On a corner was a general store, so I went in to ask for directions to Tower Bridge. As I was talking to the woman behind the counter, Grace fainted. We raced outside, but were too late to stop her from hitting the cobbles. I picked her up and the shopkeeper told me to take her inside, out of the wind. The woman brought a chair from the back room for Grace to sit on and started rubbing her hands vigorously, calling to one of the children to bring the smelling salts and a glass of something or other. I just stood there, totally useless.

  “Seems to me you ought to get her into a warm bed. A winter sea crossing is not what she needs right now.” I was told sternly.

  The most terrible images started filling my mind. What was wrong with her?

  “Is there a hotel or anything hereabouts?” I asked, feeling completely lost and starting to panic.

  The woman laughed at me. “Not the sort of hotel people like you should be staying in!”

  She looked me over carefully and then came to a decision. “There’s a house for rent, just up Napier Street here. Number 29, furnished like. Mr Bloom lets it by the day, the week or the month. You’ll find him at number 27. Best you go and see him.”