by Winona Kent
“How peculiar. You must have an unfathomable number of candles at your disposal. Do you employ a man to light them each night?”
“They’re electric. They’re switched on.”
“What is electric?”
“It’s like a wick,” Nick said, “that never burns down.”
“Most odd,” Mrs. Collins remarked. “I am quite convinced now that I am asleep and must be dreaming. When do you propose I should awaken?”
“Just stay asleep,” Sam suggested. “It’ll be easier on all of us.”
She drove into the parking lot adjacent to the Royal Memorial Hospital, and manoeuvred the Civic into one of the places reserved for doctors and nurses.
“Are we here?” Mrs. Collins inquired, staring through the window at the very modern hospital, which had been opened by the Queen in the Millennium Year and which provided excellent—if slightly chaotic—emergency care to the village of Stoneford and its surrounding communities.
“We are here,” Nick replied, humorously, opening the passenger door.
“Will there be bloodletting?”
“No doubt,” Sam replied, unbuckling Mrs. Collins’ seatbelt and bundling her out of the car.
“Then I must prepare myself. I have endured this procedure upon two previous occasions. During the first, I became faint, and was overcome.”
“What about the second?” Nick asked as Sam led the way towards the A&E entrance.
“I was suffering from a fever which rendered me insensible for some days,” Mrs. Collins replied. “Thankfully, I recovered, with no lasting ill effects.”
Nick pretended he didn’t see Sam’s rolling eyes as she opened the door to the hospital, and they went inside.
Chapter 6
“I must apologize for the hurriedness,” Sarah said, as she ladelled out bowlfuls of thick, meaty soup from the iron pot which had been hanging over the carefully banked embers in the fireplace. “If I had been able, I would have finished lessons early and prepared more of a welcoming meal. But the Vicar’s wife was behaving with particular petulance today, and so I felt it best to avoid her discomposure.”
“It’s quite all right,” Charlie assured her. “I don’t usually eat much, really.”
There was bread on the table, freshly baked and crusty and brown, and butter, which Sarah had brought out from a cold cupboard, and tea with sugar and milk.
“So you don’t stay at home during the day to look after the children?” Charlie asked.
“Indeed I do not,” Sarah replied, “or we would have no food on the table. Mr. Foster left me the cottage, but little else to provide for our welfare. The Vicar and his wife employ me as their governess.”
It seemed odd to Charlie that Sarah worked for a living. Many women did, of course, most out of necessity. But they were usually menial jobs, taking in laundry or braiding straw for hats.
And there were also many things which required daily attention in the cottage, the most important being the kitchen fire, which needed to be kept burning at all times. It was their source of light as well as their heat for cooking. In the winter, it was what kept them warm. And all of the candles in the evening would be lit from the kitchen fire’s flames. Who ensured all of this, if the housewife was not in daily attendance?
“And what would happen,” Mary piped up, “if the Vicar and his wife had not been so generous?”
She’s heard this story before, Charlie thought.
“Then I should have to take in washing and you would be sleeping in a hayloft.”
“Like our Great Uncle Hamish!” Jack and Tom finished, in unison, much to Mary’s delight.
Or living in the Poorhouse, Charlie thought, remembering Emmy Cooper’s little flat at the end of the cobbled lane near the Village Green.
“I think sleeping in a hayloft would be interesting,” Jack said.
“Not all year long, though, Jack. It would be very draughty in the winter.”
Sarah passed Charlie a bowl of the hot soup, which she had smelled earlier, simmering in the pot. It was made, from what she could see, of all manner of chopped up root vegetables, and a little barley, and meat she was sure she’d have turned her nose up at, two centuries on.
But, she was hungry. And someone else had prepared the meal. And that made it all the more palatable. She tasted it, cautiously—and then tucked in.
Delicious.
“Now, my dearest cousin,” Sarah said. “Do tell us all about your journey from London.”
“Were you waylaid by highwaymen on the turnpike to Winchester?” Jack added, hopefully.
It was not as if being chucked back to 1825 was something that happened every day. Like taking off in a plane in a winter snowstorm, flying halfway around the world and landing in a place where it was hot and sunny and the beaches were sandy white and populated by tanned bodies smelling of coconut oil and bananas.
Once she’d got over the initial shock, and assured herself that there was nothing, at the moment, anyway, to fear, Charlie was surprised at her calmness. She ought to have been panicking. She ought to have been worried about getting back to the present as quickly as possible. She should have been fretting over bills that needed to be paid. Things at the museum that required her immediate and constant attention, if not her physical presence. She should have been agonizing over what she’d left behind.
Nick.
And Ron Ferryman.
It was, in fact, an utter relief to be here, and not in her own time, where she’d been about to be arrested for vandalism.
And she was sure Nick had probably worked out exactly what had happened, and was busily trying to find a way to reverse it.
If reversal was possible.
The thing was, after the initial shock had passed, and she’d got used to the idea, Charlie had found that she quite liked it here.
And she was entertaining a very daring thought.
This is my time. This is where I ought to be.
It was, at once, both frightening and exciting. It was as if her life two hundred years in the future, working at the museum, had been a prelude to now. She’d been given a new opportunity to use all that knowledge. She’d been able to slide gracefully and smoothly into someone else’s time. And someone else’s identity.
Supper was finished.
It was Tom’s job to light the candles. The main ones were made from tallow, not the more expensive beeswax that Charlie was familiar with.
“Perhaps, on Sunday, we will make an exception,” Sarah said, showing Charlie her special cupboard in the kitchen.
Inside were two lovely cream-coloured, honey-scented candles.
“A gift from the Vicar. Who can well afford the extravagance.”
“And what are those?” Charlie asked, indicating what looked like reeds, bunched in the corner.
“Do you not have rushlights in London? I confess, I am not overly fond of them. See here—they are picked and prepared and dried, then dipped in animal fat. But they only burn for twenty minutes. Ten if you light both ends at once. And their drip is foul-smelling and their output meagre.”
She closed the cupboard door.
“We only use them if Tom has forgotten to buy candles from Mr. Rigby. I have socks to darn, if you will keep me company for a little while in the sitting room.”
The day’s mending was completed by candlelight, and as the evening’s conversations dwindled into yawns, Mary and Jack climbed the stairs to bed.
Charlie wondered what the best way was to inquire about the toilet.
Two hundred years on, her cottage had a perfectly lovely bathroom that had been fitted sometime in the mid-20th century. It was upstairs, and had all the requisite fixtures; everything was plumbed and piped with constant hot water.
Sarah’s version of the cottage had no such convenience. Water had to be fetched every day in buckets from a common pump near the Village Green. And a flushing lavatory had yet to be properly invented.
“Where might I be able to relieve myself?” Charlie asked, de
ciding that it would be best to just ask.
“Goodness,” Sarah said. “Forgive me for not showing you earlier. Come with me.”
The household convenience was a little brick hut at the bottom of the back garden. It had a thatched roof and a wooden bench with a hole in it, and a cesspit underneath that collected what you left.
Sarah handed Charlie one of the two small candles she was carrying.
“If you would rather not,” she said, “there is a pot underneath your bed. The spiders come out at night, and Mary is quite terrified of them.”
“I’m not afraid,” Charlie assured her.
Sarah returned to the cottage, and Charlie went into the hut.
It was, she thought, a trifle whiffy. But, like chamberpots and lights that were made from beef drippings, it was something the people who lived in this time were used to. They knew nothing else.
Shielding the dancing candle flame with her hand, Charlie trudged back to the cottage, and bed.
“This is where I sleep,” Sarah said, introducing her to the upstairs arrangements.
It was the largest of the three bedrooms. The same bedroom that Charlie had occupied with Jeff. And then occupied alone, after Jeff.
Mary was tucked up under the eiderdown in the double-sized wooden bed.
The next smaller room, where Charlie and Jeff had put all of their books and magazines and where Jeff had kept his guitars and his collection of CD’s, was where Tom and Jack now slept.
“And this,” said Sarah, indicating the tiny third room, “is Mary’s. Which will be yours for the fortnight.”
Charlie smiled. It was her future bathroom.
Moonlight streamed in through the little window high on the wall, painting the room with a silvery wash.
Alone, she sat on the edge of Mary’s bed and switched on her mobile. She had no reasonable explanation for this act. It couldn’t possibly function in 1825 Stoneford. It was more habit than anything else. The last thing she did, every night, was check for messages.
Not that anybody ever really called. But there was always the possibility that Nick had thought of a joke he knew would make her laugh, or Sam was having one of her regular rants about Roger. And the night Jeff had died, he’d texted her just before he’d left, and was getting into his car. She’d been in bed, asleep, when the police had rung to tell her about the accident. Jeff had been dead for two hours when she’d finally read his message, unable to convince herself that he wasn’t still alive and vital at the other end of it. She hadn’t deleted it. She’d saved it in a document that was stored in her phone’s memory. She still opened and read it, every night.
The tiny screen searched for a signal.
Nothing.
It was ridiculous to suppose otherwise.
And she’d used up 2% of the phone’s battery looking. More than 2%. It seemed to have lost some of its charge in the leap from there to here.
Still…what was that?
It was, in fact, a faint image…a flickering candle.
The flickering candle. The one that had been onscreen just before the warm oozing jelly had swallowed her.
Charlie’s heart skipped a beat.
It wasn’t a graphic that was resident in her phone’s memory, like Jeff’s last message. It was an animated picture someone had linked to on Twitter, that she’d clicked on to look at, a few days earlier.
She hadn’t downloaded it. It was still out in there, in the universe.
And the flickering candle was growing stronger, the flame burning steadily and brightly.
This was completely impossible.
But so was sitting on Mary Foster’s bed in 1825, in what was to become the bathroom in her cottage two centuries later.
Charlie stood up, and walked quietly around the room, holding out her phone, searching for…what?
A signal…?
A signal.
Couldn’t be.
It was.
In the dark, Charlie tiptoed out of the bedroom, following the little indicator at the top of her phone’s screen. Down the narrow stairs. Through the sitting room and the kitchen. Out through the kitchen door.
She walked down the garden path, phone held aloft.
This defied logic, physics and everything she knew about the transmission of whatever waves were responsible for mobile telephone calls, text messages and commerce on the internet.
This defied common sense.
She was most definitely picking up a signal.
Chapter 7
It was quite peculiar, wandering along the cobbled road in the dark, the only light coming from the moon and Charlie’s faintly glowing mobile, with its dancing artificial flame.
There was a mist drifting in from the sea, and she could smell kelp and fish and salt water, mingling with the chimney smoke from several hundred kitchen fires.
The village was so quiet. She could hear the waves rushing onto the beach, which was well down the road and over a small cliff. Unheard of in her own time, even at four o’clock in the morning, with all of Stoneford asleep.
The narrow meandering streets and secret lanes of the village were exactly as she knew them. Because the historical heart of Stoneford, like the historical hearts of many little towns and villages along the south coast, had been allowed to stay virtually untouched over the centuries, unimproved and untinkered-with.
And so the old Cliff Road, which took you down to the pebble-strewn beach in one direction, and up to the Village Green in the other, was as it always had been. Except that it was more a cart track than an actual roadway. And the dwellings on either side of it were tiny and ramshackle. They looked as if they’d have no trouble housing the smugglers that the Parish Council in the 21st century liked to play up when they enticed visitors to come and walk in the footsteps of history.
And where Cliff Road became the High Street, Charlie could see that all of the buildings she was used to passing on her daily bike ride to work were exactly the same. Except that their roofs were made of thatch, and instead of being a newsagent, a bakery, a hardware shop, an Indian takeaway, a grocery and a chemist, they were a blacksmith, a butcher, a fishmonger, a tailor, and a shoemaker. Only the greengrocer had survived the centuries.
And there, where the High Street met Church Road to form the top of the Village Green triangle, was The Dog’s Watch Inn, virtually unchanged.
And if Charlie were to follow Church Road along, she knew she would find St. Eligius, its old cemetery not so ancient, its tumbledown granite and marble markers standing alert and new in the moonlight. And the vicarage being used for what it was intended—a home for the Vicar and his family.
Charlie wandered across the road, aware that she was the only person about at that hour. She could see the clock in the church tower. It wasn’t late—only about ten. And she could hear loud laughter coming from inside The Dog’s Watch. Just as she could smell its ale, wafting towards her on the gentle, misty breeze.
As she watched, a large, greasy looking man walked out of the inn, stopped to breathe in the night air, yawned, and then paused, as if he was waiting for someone. Charlie recognized him instantly. It was Lemuel Ferryman, ancestor to Reg and Ron. His portrait hung on the wall of the contemporary Dog’s Watch, behind the bar. It was just above the rack where the packets of crisps and peanuts were kept, and beside the two dozen awards from pub guides that Reg Ferryman, the current owner, had proudly displayed in three tidy rows.
“In the flesh,” she said to herself, as the publican was approached by another fellow, very dodgy-looking and wearing an eye patch. The two exchanged brief pleasantries, and then a quick word about something, which Charlie couldn’t quite make out.
The dodgy-looking man removed something from inside his shirt—a piece of white paper. He unfolded it, and allowed Lemuel Ferryman to look at it—but not to touch.
Indeed, when Lemuel reached across to grasp the paper, the better to see it in the dim light shining through one of the inn’s windows, the other fellow snatch
ed it away, and tucked it back inside his shirt.
Lemuel Ferryman then offered him a handful of coins.
The man with the eye patch laughed derisively, and shook his head.
Lemuel Ferryman was not happy. “You, sir, are a maggot. More than a maggot. A cheat and a crook.”
The man with the eye patch laughed again. “You may call me what you wish. It will gain you no favours.”
He departed with his piece of paper, and Lemuel Ferryman went back inside the inn, foul-tempered and quite red in the face.
Charlie continued to follow her mobile’s signal, like a water-seeker with a dowsing twig. She wandered down Church Road, away from St. Eligius and The Dog’s Watch, along the eastern boundary of the Green…and then…
There.
There it was, standing dark and silent in the night-dewed grass: the Village Oak.
Of course.
She ought to have known.
It had always been there. And it always would be there, in spite of the efforts of those in the future who were trying to drain away its life.
Charlie held her breath as she stared at her mobile’s little screen.
The signal was strong.
And completely impossible.
But—if Alice could tumble down a rabbit hole, and discover keys and cakes and Cheshire cats…
Quickly, Charlie typed in some text. Nothing of major importance. Nothing too shocking. Just that she seemed to have been deposited in 1825, the Village Oak appeared to have peculiar properties hitherto undocumented in the English Quercus robur, and…
She paused.
Do you or Sam know anything about a cousin, Catherine Collins? Married to someone who died before 1825. Need to find out more.
She selected Nick’s number…and touched Send.
And she was absurdly pleased to see the brief, completely impossible, absolutely ridiculous response: Message Sent.
She waited. Nick had to still be awake. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock.
Nothing.
He’d either switched his phone off…or he hadn’t received her message.
She really shouldn’t have expected anything else. What was amazing was that there’d been a signal at all.
