Granny was straightening Nathan’s shirt collar, but looked up sharply. “Naturally. But I never knew him. Five hundred years ago.”
“So why did he leave Lashtang?” demanded Nathan.
“Nathan, use your common sense,” exclaimed Granny. “It was five hundred years ago that the Octobrs were thrown from Lashtang by the Hazletts during the ’85 rebellion. Why do you think you’ve been sent back to London at that time?”
But he had no idea.
“Can I,” he asked very quietly, “just once,” and took a deep breath, “see my parents before I go?”
Her gaze was kindly and very sympathetic, but Granny Octobr shook her head, looking down and avoiding Nathan’s eyes. “I’m sorry, my dear. That won’t be possible. But,” and she looked up again, her glasses poised on the tip of her nose, “I can promise you this. You will return to Lashtang one day, and you will eventually meet both your mother and your father. They are very well and there’s nothing to worry about. They most certainly haven’t forgotten you.”
Nathan persisted. “When I was with Alfie and John, sometimes I had dreams when I saw you and you talked to me. Were they real too?”
“Not exactly real,” she told him, “but messages. I sent you emails. Naturally you couldn’t receive proper ones.”
“So send me an email with my parents in.” He sat unmoving. “Can you do that?”
“Well,” and she paused. “Perhaps. I shall see.” And she stood in a hurry, so that Ferdinand the frog had to hop abruptly off her shoulder, and landed in the sugar bowl. “It’s time to go. For both of us.”
He was surprised that she hadn’t changed her clothes, since he had rather expected her to appear in exotic robes or some gorgeous sweeping cloak. Instead she pushed her glasses further onto her nose, and stuck her hands in her apron pockets. Ferdinand quickly snuggled down into one of the pockets, burying himself in flaky pastry and plain flour.
Nathan stood up too, his chair toppling over behind him. He checked his own pockets, knew he had the knife, and a few other things too which he had chosen to take with him. He grabbed up his old cape, and nodded.
The kitchen began to whirl. No balloon and no basket held him, but it seemed as though he would fly through both sky and time as always.
Then, with a slurp of something that looked like black treacle, the worlds began to slip and slide, intertwining, then separating, and finally intermingling like waves on the beach. Nathan saw the old cathedral of St. Paul’s and thought he would land immediately, but then it disappeared and he was back in his kitchen again, but with swooping balls of purple mist. Within the mist the dance of the dragonflies appeared, faded, and then glittered in brilliance. It seemed the dragonflies were singing, and Nathan thought they had seen Granny, and were singing to her alone.
He twisted, finding himself once more back in his house, but falling down the stairs as though running so hard he had lost his footing. But then the stairs turned to the cliff side, with snow dripping from the peaks, soaking him, and melting into the ocean below. An earthquake of molten fire rose up from the cliff edge where he was standing, trying to balance himself against the buffeting of the briny wind. He was carried, sitting on a wave of fire and rock, hurtling down the mountainside towards the remains of the floodwaters lying stagnant in the valley.
First peeping, as though the clouds opened into windows, and he could press his nose on the glass and see inside his bedroom.
Then tipping again, sliding on lava, hotter than fire. It rose up in gaping mouths, attempting to swallow him, turning to long fingered grey hands trying to grab and pull him down.
He saw the remnants of screaming things, then knew they were cheering, and not dying but flying high. Nothing made sense.
His own kitchen, and the kettle boiling.
The dank cellar, and Alice stirring an iron pot on a little fire of twigs.
The flood, with small creatures helping each other. Large whiskered fish pushing small scrabbling lizards up to the water’s surface. Beetles climbing onto the thick feathered backs of ducks. Ferrets reaching down to struggling dormice, carrying them to the banks in their mouths. Then the gurgle of receding ripples, and a tortoise with two baby hedgehogs sitting on its shell, poked out its head having floated for some time, then waddled onto dry ground as the hedgehogs slipped, squeaking from its back. A sloth sat high in a tree, looking down, and with a cheerful squeak released the clutch of baby geckos it had saved. A lobster retrieved a drowning rabbit and tossed it high, so it flew from the water and landed near the hollow of its own burrow with a grateful bound. A fox emerged from the low water; bringing three bedraggled little owlets with him, desperately fluffing up their feathers, wide-eyed.
Nathan saw Granny, sitting complacent with her hands patiently clasped on her aproned lap. Right before his startled gaze, she whirled upside down, righted herself, and abruptly disappeared. Then he realised that Ferdinand was clinging to his hair, slipped with a gasp, hung onto his ear with webbed panic, and managed to hop onto Granny’s nose, where the frog settled on the rim of her purple framed glasses as she made one last obliging appearance.
Zooming in circles like the slats of a windmill, Brewster Hazlett flashed into space, and continued to cackle, his smile as wide as his chin, while licking his sharp pointed teeth with a flick of his long forked tongue.
And then - finally – an alley with wet cobbles and the great stone wall of the Tower closing off the light at the end. So Nathan knew exactly where he was.
He realised, almost immediately, that he felt at home. It amused him, thinking about it, that a place more than five hundred years gone, would be so cosy and familiar to him that he would feel he had come home. But it was true, and he looked forwards to seeing the others.
Walking north, Nathan chose the streets he remembered, quickly up Mark Lane, across Fenchurch Street and into Billiter Lane, and Leaden hall Street to Bishopsgate.
The drizzle was a dreary grey, but as it shone wet over the cobbles, it gleamed and seemed like a welcome to Nathan, encouraging him to hurry. Life seemed safe again. He had his grandmother’s word that Alice was back in her own home, and all his other friends too, and he was very much looking forward to seeing everyone again. Even Mouse. Even Pimple. And perhaps even the king.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“The Lady Alice,” announced the steward, “is at home, sir. But she is resting. I shall ask whether she is able to receive you.” This was not the baron’s officious steward Lacey. He was a plain man with receding hair, and a forehead of frowns.
“Tell her Nat Bannister has returned.”
“I shall inform her ladyship.”
Alice jumped the last four steps of the grand staircase, raced from the shadows onto the doorstep, brushed the drizzle from her eyes, and dragged Nathan into the warmth.
“You’re back. You’re back.” She danced around him. “I’m here in my own grand house, as you see, and so much of that is thanks to you. We were all terribly upset when you went away. And it was all so frightening, and Poppy cried and cried and John went to church to ask for your safe return. I don’t think he’s ever been to church before, but now he got a ‘yes,’ so he’ll have to go again to say thank you. Come in, come upstairs, and show yourself to everybody.”
Nathan followed her, taking the stairs two at a time. “So, no more Lacey?”
“He left when my vile step-father got kicked out. I expect they’re together, but I haven’t asked where. I got rid of the assistant cook Oliver too, and three of the gardeners. “
As she spoke, Alice flung open a door immediately at the top of the stairs, and a dance of candlelight sent the shadows flying.
Everyone looked up, and then jumped up. It was Poppy who reached Nathan first, throwing her arms around him, and then Sam, who was unapologetically excited. Nathan had never been so emotionally welcomed in his life. It made him feel surprisingly overwhelmed, and he hid the slight sniff.
Poppy screeched, “At last. I was s
o frightened. Where have you been?”
It wasn’t a story he felt he could tell everyone, and so Nathan just nodded, smiled, and said he had magically returned to his own time and home for a few short days. “As I have,” Alice said, beaming. “But more than just a few days. It is weeks since you left, and both my uncle and the lawyer have helped me so much. The baron was forced to leave after a very public meeting with the judge, who threatened to take the case to the king if my step-father didn’t leave at once. He went bright red like his hair, it was so funny. I wish you could have seen it.”
“I wish I could have too.”
“But I’ve been back here for just over a week,” Alice explained, “and we are all nearly settled in. My aunt and uncle are here very often but they like going back to their cottage in Hammersmith, so I don’t see them all the time. It’s exactly the way I like it.”
“John and me, we shares a bedchamber,” said Alfie with pride. He was looking very smart in a proper doublet.
“And Peter and me,” said Sam.
“But I have a little room all to myself, which is beautiful,” Poppy said, “because of course Alice, as lady of the house, has her old bedroom back. And there’s space here for everyone, it’s so big.”
“We eat every single day.” Taking his thumb from his mouth, Peter spoke in a voice of astonishment as if eating daily was virtually unheard of.
“And so does Mouse.”
“And I reckon Pimple does an ‘all,” interrupted John, “though we don’t see him every day. Reckon he’s resting.”
Eating, as Nathan soon discovered, was favourite past time, he had never been offered so much food, on so many different platters, and could never have tried them all. “But that doesn’t matter,’ Alice explained, “because whatever is left over goes to the servants if they want it, and to the poor who come to the kitchen doors.” This didn’t sound ideal to Nathan, but it was, he realised, the habit of the times and it was not about to be changed just because he didn’t approve.
It was a beautiful old house, with three storeys, many casement windows with their leaded mullions, a principal hall with a dining table that could seat twenty, and a high vaulted ceiling, a hearth that stretched almost the length of one wall, and a staircase sweeping upwards. The grounds were not extensive, but there was a gravel walkway that wound between short hedges, and here the sunshine, on a bright day, turned the foliage to emerald. Within the house it was shadowed, but a candelabra of candles was lit each day, and there were many other candles, braziers and torches throughout the corridors and bedchambers.
Nathan sat on his new bed, gazed around him, and grinned to himself. The room was neither tiny nor huge, and more than half the space was taken by the great four-poster bed. Sleeping in one of these was something else that Nathan had never imagined doing in his life, but he found it extremely comfortable. The base swung a little on knotted rope, but he liked that as he curled each night. Wooden shutters blocked out the moonlight, and as he blew out his little bedside candle, Nathan felt safe, enclosed, warm and cosy.
Mouse stalked the corridors, peeping into each bedchamber for a last goodnight before slipping off into the gardens for moonlit hunting. Her babies were growing bigger, their huge blue eyes regarding the world with wonder, their whiskers twitching. They shared the bed with Sam and Peter, who looked after them until Mouse returned to take over in the morning.
But it was in private that Nathan told his story to Poppy. She sat on his bed, leaning back against the carved wooden headboard, listening in amazement to his tales of Lashtang, the dragonflies, the small creatures turned from human to animal, and then the catastrophic flood. But she listened in even greater wonder to what Granny Octobr had admitted.
“Octobr means queen?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Our very own granny is a sort of witch?”
“I don’t think she’d want to be called that either.”
“We’ve been living all our lives without knowing all these strange things?”
“And without knowing who, what and where our parents are.”
Poppy flopped flat out on the bed, stretched out her arms, shut her eyes, and breathed deep. “Crazy.”
“Perhaps we both are.”
“So,” Poppy opened her eyes again and stared at Nathan, “when can I go to Lashtang?”
Sighing, Nathan shook his head. “I don’t know how to go anywhere. Not home. Not Lashtang. No idea. Granny can do things. Of course, the Hazletts can do things. But me – nothing!? Poppy laughed at him.
The weather, now early May, had improved. Although winds whistled around the chimney pots, the sun glittered on the river and peeped in through the windows. Alice and Poppy went shopping in the markets, and even John, now clothed in dark red velvet and a short brown cape lined in lamb’s fleece, could not be recognised as a cut-purse and thief, or chased from the shops.
But there were some things that could not be bought in the market, which Nathan had brought back with him. And they seemed as magical as Lashtang did to Poppy.
“Chocolate.” A bar of different type and flavour chocolate for each of them.
“A ball-point pen.” Four of them, in fact. And four little note pads to write on.
“Tights – I mean hose – for everyone. With elastic waistbands. Really comfy and they won’t fall down. And they’ll fit because they stretch.”
Astonishment, applause, delight.
The chocolate lasted almost two days because each of them wanted the miracle to continue forever, and they sucked slowly, nibbling only a little as they drew the bars reverentially from within their doublets. Only Poppy ate hers quickly, then looked around blank-faced as everyone was staring at her in horror at the lack of appreciation.
Although only Alice, and of course Poppy, could read and write, the pens were treated with equal delight, and the notebooks with their little pages, each decorated with the picture of a rose, were considered absolutely beautiful. The elastic wasted tights, black wool, of fine quality, were such a joy that it seemed John would play with his more often than wear them.
Other thrills abounded. Nathan had brought a pocket torch, complete with four spare batteries. Everyone took a turn clicking this on – admiring the light – and then off, with a sigh of wonder.
Lastly was the most magical of all. Nathan had found, and brought with him, a miniature Rubik’s Cube, which everyone thought amazing, loving its colours as each played, spinning the different squares one after the other. Nathan explained the aim, which he had never been much good at himself. He was somewhat surprised to find that after five attempts, it was Alfie who solved the puzzle with a grin.
“Magic,” said John, with a whisper of awestruck wonder, “has done entered our lives. I ain’t never gonna be the same.”
Having left his home in some haste, there were many other things Nathan wished he had brought with him, but had not thought of at the time, yet he hoped one day to learn how to pass through the barriers himself, and come and go at will. Then, he laughed to Poppy, “I could start my own medieval chocolate shop in the middle of Eastcheap.”
But the one other thing he carried in his hidden pockets was the Knife of Clarr, and this he did not show to anyone.
Wearing his sturdy black leather school shoes with the clothes Granny had made him, and the oiled cape he had bought before, Nathan decided that he looked more like Alfie and John’s servant than their companion, so he bought himself new clothes, as had all of them. He felt over-dressed in the deep blue doublet with its padded sleeves slashed in pale blue. A doublet was only a sort of closed jacket after all, but men liked fancy materials and decoration, which Nathan did not like at all. Poppy, he thought, looked like a princess in flowing pastel pink velvet, and Alice had passed on the fur trimmed cloak that John had stolen for her. Alice now had all her own clothes back, and a maid to help her dress in them each morning.
Uncle Henry and Aunt Margaret came regularly and stayed two or three nights ev
ery week, but much of the time they left Alice alone. “She’s only thirteen,” Nathan told Poppy. “No way she’d be left to run her own life in our world.”
“All she has to do is smile and wait for the staff to do everything for her,” Poppy giggled. “It’s an easy life for ladies with titles and money, even if they are only thirteen years old.”
“Except for those with horrible step-fathers.”
The first time Nathan saw the baron, it was not a surprise. He had gone alone to the riverbank, watching the little boats row across, taking their passengers to the wooden planked piers where the wharfs offered easy unloading.
“Taxi ranks,” Nathan said to himself. But as he watched, one boat was heading upstream with two fat gentlemen sitting together, somewhat unbalancing the boat since the wherryman rowing hard opposite them was small and thin. The little boat definitely had a backwards tilt.
The baron was clearly angry and was shouting at his brother, but Nathan could hear no words over the busy thud and splash of the river traffic. Then they were out of sight, and Nathan thought no more of it.
He was equally unsurprised when he saw both Edmund and the baron on the following day when he accompanied John and Alice to market. This was a covered warehouse on the southern corner of Bishopsgate, which Alice called the Foreign Market. No one appeared to be speaking in a foreign language, but Nathan soon realised that foreign simply referred to anyone who was not a Londoner.
The sun was shining and the east wind was blowing, the market was buzzing and the stall’s awnings were flapping for although the market was roofed, there were no enclosing walls. The tooth-puller, pliers and string already blood-stained, stood at his usual corner. Behind him were six stalls all selling root vegetables. John, buying turnips for Pimple, peered at each one.
“How much?”
“Penny a large bag, mister. Fresh and crunchy.”
“Bit much. Do a deal?”
“I’ll throw in two more turnips. Now tis worth a penny and more.”
It was a large bag, but John didn’t seem to mind the weight, and marched cheerfully on. He aimed for the corner where the market stalls edged back, making space for the entertainers. One man was juggling three wooden cups and two platters, dancing as he threw these into the air, one after the other. Next to him stood a man playing a reed pipe with one hand, and beating a small drum with the other. There were chickens for sale, a young goat and some pigs scrounging in the earth, cabbages, herbs and spices, tortoise-shell combs, fresh baked bread and freshly cooked pies.
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