Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle

by Gabrielle Kent

  “We have been watching you for some time, Master Bloom, to protect Orin Hopcraft’s legacy.” He stood up and brushed down his suit.

  Alfie realized that Caspian soon tired of questions, so was hardly surprised when the conversation suddenly concluded before he could say another word.

  “Now, if you will excuse me, I am almost on time for an appointment. I prefer to be early.” He gave the tiniest bow to Alfie “I’m sure it won’t be long before we meet again.”

  As Caspian reached the drawbridge, he stopped and called back. “The silver whistle on the key ring – to find out what it does, head up to the southern tower.”

  Alfie turned the little whistle over in his hand, then looked up to see a large raven sailing away over the hills.

  By that afternoon, Alfie had explored the ground floor, most of the first- and second-floor rooms and had fought his cousins on the battlements. His favourite room so far was the Great Hall with its gigantic table, huge chandelier and intricately carved beams. A stone fireplace was set deep within an archway, two little benches with plush velvet cushions on either side. Robin informed him that it was an inglenook fireplace. Little stone gargoyles sat at either side of the mantle pulling faces at them as they took turns looking up the chimney.

  Alfie’s cat, Galileo, had also been brought to the castle and seemed just as keen to investigate as Alfie and the twins. He trotted along beside them with his ears and tail perked up, darting in and out of every nook and cranny. After nearly tripping them up three times, he disappeared outside where Alfie imagined he was carrying out an inventory of the mouse and bird population.

  Alfie wasn’t surprised that Robin’s favourite room was the very impressive library. It was filled with bookcases that stretched right up to the high ceiling, with ladders that slid around rails to reach the highest books. Two large wooden griffins sat on either side of an archway between bookcases proudly guarding some of the most beautiful books Alfie had ever seen. Their soft leather covers and parchment pages were incredibly well preserved. The ones he looked at were filled with elaborate calligraphy in many different languages, alongside paintings of everything from mythological creatures and places, to everyday flowers and herbs. Orin must have travelled far and wide to build this collection, although Alfie noticed some slightly more recent books that suggested someone had continued to build the collection well into the seventeenth century before the castle was sealed.

  Further along the rows of shelves were collections of printed books. Alfie noticed Robin’s jaw actually drop when he saw these.

  “That’s a Gutenberg Bible!” he cried out.

  “A what?” asked Madeleine, bouncing on the bed.

  “Only THE first book ever printed. There are less than fifty left in the world. Do you realize that this is over five hundred years old?”

  Alfie laughed as Robin tried to look through the book without actually touching it with his fingers.

  “I’m sure he’s not really my brother,” said Madeleine as Robin managed to open the cover with a large pair of tweezers he had found on the large oak table.

  Alfie finally persuaded the twins to take a break from exploring to help unpack in his huge new bedroom. His clothes barely filled a quarter of the enormous wardrobe. As well as two balconies, his room had window seats, a large fireplace and a secret panel that led to his very own huge, mosaic-patterned bathroom. The bedroom walls were covered in rich fabric rather than wallpaper. Alfie particularly liked the high, curved ceiling, which was painted with stars and planets, a bit like the one in Caspian’s office. They all jumped on to the massive four-poster bed and closed the curtains. Alfie looked around the enclosed space and realized the bed itself was bigger than his previous bedroom.

  “So how come this Orin guy left you the castle?” asked Madeleine.

  “I still don’t know,” said Alfie. “Dad does though, and if he doesn’t tell me soon he can sleep in the cellars!”

  Aunt Grace laid out sandwiches for dinner in the Great Hall. Granny made Alfie take the largest chair at the head of the table. As everyone tucked in hungrily, Alfie asked something he had been thinking about since that morning but had deliberately saved until his granny and auntie were present.

  “Dad, could we have a castle-warming party for the whole village? Please?”

  A look of horror spread over his dad’s face as the twins cheered.

  “It’s a nice idea, Alfie,” blustered his dad. “But that’s a lot of people, and you know I’m no good at organizing parties. Remember your surprise tenth birthday?” Alfie remembered only too well. His dad had forgotten to send out the invites. Alfie hadn’t actually minded at all. He had a feeling only Amy would have turned up anyway, and he wasn’t sure what people would have made of his dad’s peculiar sandwiches and science-based party games.

  “Oh, go on, Will!” said Granny. “If you don’t, everyone in the village will find an excuse to pop up here at some point. This way you can get it all over with in one go.”

  “Well, I suppose it’ll be a good way for Alfie to make some new friends before starting school.”

  “Right then, we’re agreed,” announced Aunt Grace before he could back out. “Let’s make it six o’clock on Saturday evening. We’ll put up posters in the village.”

  Alfie beamed as his dad gave in.

  “Oh, well,” he said, perking up a little bit. “The documents Caspian Bone gave us mention that we’ll have a butler to help out around here. Maybe he’ll be good at organizing parties?”

  A butler! thought Alfie in shock. What next? This was certainly a whole world away from their former life.

  The twins had talked their way into staying over and insisted on setting up inflatable mattresses in Alfie’s room so that they could all spend their first night in the castle together. After Uncle Herb’s truck disappeared down the hill, Alfie’s dad announced that he had a little surprise. He led them to a smaller room just off the Great Hall.

  “Ta-daa!” he beamed, swinging open the door. “I call it the Abernathy Room.”

  Alfie laughed in amazement at the familiar sight of all of their living-room furniture from Abernathy Terrace set out in exactly the same way as in the flat. The slightly worn modern furniture was dwarfed by the room and contrasted with the sumptuous fabrics on the walls, but Alfie thought it was brilliant. He flopped on to the soft sofa and smiled up at his dad.

  “We’re home.”

  The twins reluctantly went home early the next morning. Alfie had never seen his dad so excited as he helped him to set up a workshop in a lower room that looked out just above the moat. He seemed fascinated by everything in the castle. Much as Alfie had enjoyed spending time with his dad, he could tell that he was itching to get back to his own work, so he left him to it and spent the rest of the morning exploring on his own.

  Alfie was still puzzled about who had modernized the castle. The alterations didn’t look out of place, but they seemed to have been carried out by someone who didn’t exactly understand their purpose. The light switches didn’t operate light bulbs, instead making the torches set in the walls burst into flame, even when removed from their brackets.

  The big light switch in the Great Hall did something very interesting. When Alfie flicked it upwards, a hatch opened above the huge chandelier and a mechanical arm descended. With a click, a little flame appeared at its tip and the chandelier began to turn slowly so that the candles were lit one by one. When the switch was flicked the other way, the arm emerged with a snuffer to put out the candles. A small wheel on the wall lowered the chandelier so that the candles could be replaced.

  When Alfie finally found the main bathroom, he was confronted with an enormous brass bath standing on clawed feet in the centre of the room. A wooden archway towered above it, and this was covered in dials and wheels that altered the water pressure and made water shower down into the bath. His first shower was s
o cold that he leapt straight out with a yelp. “Argh, freezing!” The water stopped flowing as if someone had heard him. The pipes began to clank and, with a whooshing noise, steaming water rained down into the bath. Was the temperature setting voice-activated? “Too hot!” he shouted. The steam began to dissipate and the water cooled to a nice warm temperature. Alfie hopped back in. “Perfect. Er, thanks,” he called out to the bathroom in general. The pipes seemed to make a little knocking noise in response.

  Behind a tapestry at the end of the first-floor corridor was the door to the southern tower Caspian had mentioned. It opened with a loud and satisfying creak, revealing a stone staircase spiralling up into the darkness. Fighting his curiosity, he locked the door and pulled the tapestry back across it. It could wait until his cousins’ next visit. He also saved the network of cellars until later. Dark, creepy places weren’t as scary with other people, and he wanted to make the exploration of his new home last as long as possible.

  Alfie wasn’t sure how he knew, but he could swear that the castle seemed happy to have him there. He wondered if it was possible for a building to feel lonely.

  A round room on the first floor felt strangely comforting. The walls were painted sky blue with intricate plants and flowers in soft colours. He stayed in that room for some time, reading comics on the window seat overlooking Lake Archelon.

  “Alfie, where are you?” echoed his dad’s distant voice.

  “Up here!” Alfie kept on calling so that his dad could follow his voice. He doubted he’d ever get used to such a huge home.

  “Funny I should find you here,” said his dad as he appeared at the door with a tray of tea, and slightly burnt fish-finger sandwiches.

  “Why’s that?” asked Alfie as he made room on the window seat and tucked hungrily into the late lunch.

  “When you were little, we told you that you were born in Hexbridge when we were visiting your Aunt and Uncle. Well, that was only part of the story. You were born here, in this room, over six hundred years ago.”

  Alfie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Wait, what? You’re joking, right?”

  “Far from it. Caspian confirmed something I’d long started to believe was a weird distorted memory.”

  “I don’t understand – you’re actually serious?”

  “Utterly. Now it’s time I told you about it, and it’s a very strange story, so I’m afraid you’ll have to be patient with your questions while I tell it.”

  Alfie nodded, still dumbstruck.

  “Remember when we brought you here for your birthday a few years ago?”

  “I remember,” said Alfie. “There was a big Halloween party in the marketplace. Granny said it was a harvest festival.”

  “That’s right, the Samhain harvest festival. It was taking place three weeks before you were due to be born and your mum didn’t want to miss it. The hustle and bustle was a bit much, so we walked up here where it was quiet. She loved to see the castle in the moonlight. We sat next to the moat eating toffee apples and she told me one of your granny’s stories about a prehistoric sea turtle that lived in Lake Archelon.”

  Alfie gazed down through the window into the dark waters of the lake and smiled. Granny Merryweather never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

  “Halfway through, she stopped and grabbed my arm. You were on your way.” He smiled down at Alfie. “You’ve always been impatient.”

  “I was about to run down and get the car when we realized the hill was surrounded by a thick mist. Everything had gone quiet – the music and voices from the village had stopped. I didn’t know what to do. Then the castle drawbridge began to lower. There were lights and voices coming from inside. Before we knew it, a group of women had rushed out and were hustling us inside.”

  Alfie sat in stunned silence. He hadn’t heard any of this before. The castle had opened for his parents on the day he was born? And the mist – was it something like his experience on the last day of term? He stared up at his dad, hanging on every impossible word.

  “Your mum was brought into this very room, I was amazed at how calm she seemed. I tried to follow, but the woman in charge made it very clear I was to wait outside. I spent two hours out there, waiting for news. That’s when I really started to think about this place. The people I had seen were wearing clothes from hundreds of years ago. I started to wonder if they were ghosts!

  “The next time one of the women ran past, I asked how long people had been living in the castle. She said that it had been lived in since it was built fifteen years ago. When I told her that the castle was hundreds of years old, she laughed and said, “Well, of course you would say that, but here and now, it is fifteen years old.”

  “So, what … you time travelled?” said Alfie. He half expected his dad to top it off by saying he had learned to fly too. “How? Was it something to do with the castle?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask, because that’s when I heard you crying. The sound knocked every other thought clean out of my head. The ladies filed out of here and I came in to find your mum holding you all bundled up in a blanket. We couldn’t believe how perfect you were for something so tiny. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door.”

  “Orin Hopcraft?” whispered Alfie. His dad nodded. “What did he look like?”

  “He was wearing a tunic and had thick, grey-brown hair tied back with a strip of leather and a long, plaited beard. It was difficult to tell his age; he seemed old but there was something very youthful about him.”

  “Emily said that he was a druid. Was he really?” asked Alfie. He had read about druids at school: they were teachers, magicians, astrologers, warriors and philosophers. He couldn’t believe his dad might have actually met one.

  “Perhaps the last, from what he told us. He said you were a child of two times, as much at home in his time as ours. But because your mother and I didn’t belong there, the universe wouldn’t let us stay much longer. Then he said that he had something to give you for safekeeping. His right hand glowed with a white light and he touched his fingertips to your forehead. The light seemed to be absorbed into you, and then everything around us started to fade.

  “I woke up in a hospital chair. Jenny was sleeping in a bed nearby with you tucked up in a cot beside her. If it hadn’t been for the blanket you had been wrapped in we might have thought we had imagined it all. The only person we told was your granny – she’s the only one that would have believed us. After your mum died, I hardly thought about it again. It was just a strange, hazy memory until a few days ago.”

  Alfie sat hugging his legs, chin resting on his knees. He had hardly moved during the tale and sat deep in thought trying to piece everything together.

  “So, the thing he did with my head, did he tell you what it was?” asked Alfie.

  “There wasn’t time. We thought it was some sort of blessing.”

  The amazing story whirled around Alfie’s head. A child of two times… He suddenly remembered their first meeting with Caspian. Hadn’t the solicitor said something about him timeslipping on the last day of term? Alfie decided it was time to tell his dad about the strange, misty place he had been transported to, but he strategically left out the fight with Vinnie and Weggis and the fact that he was nearly hit by a car.

  “This is incredible,” said his dad. “Caspian was right. You must have timeslipped, back to before the city existed and most of the land was forest!”

  “You’re seriously saying that you think I time travelled? How is that even possible?”

  “Think about it. Although you grew up in our time, you were born in Orin’s. Who knows? Perhaps this gave you some kind of natural ability to travel in time. The world is a magnificent, magical place with so much left to be discovered. The more you discover, the less you realize you know. Maybe Caspian can tell us more, although getting answers out of that man is like trying to squeeze water from a
stone.”

  Alfie wondered what it meant to be a natural-born time traveller, and if he’d ever be able to do it again. As he started on the last fish-finger sandwich, something more important hit him. “Hold on. If I’m really over six hundred years old, I’m even older than you!”

  “You may have been born hundreds of years ago, but you’re still eleven,” laughed his dad. “So don’t try pulling rank on me any time soon.”

  Following his dad’s revelations, Alfie spent most of the afternoon with his eyes squeezed tightly shut as he tried to force himself back in time by sheer willpower. He finally gave up when all he managed to achieve was a headache.

  At six o’clock that evening, Ashford the butler arrived in Hexbridge Castle’s entrance hall. He was tall and slim with dark hair carefully smoothed back into a short ponytail and wore an elegant dark green suit with white gloves. Alfie thought it looked like something that someone who had only seen pictures of butlers in fairy-tale picture books might wear. His behaviour was a little odd too.

  “Alfie and William Bloom,” he said (a little grumpily, Alfie thought). He shook Alfie and his dad’s hands, looking them up and down and scanning their faces as though scrutinizing every inch of their appearance. “How strange it is to meet you like this. For a man with absolutely no sense of humour, Caspian will have his little jokes.” Alfie eased his hand back from Ashford’s grasp and wondered what on earth he was talking about. “Well, here I am. So I suppose I had better start buttling. I take it I’m down here?” Alfie and his dad stared at each other in surprise as Ashford did something to the panel work under the stairs and opened a door that they hadn’t even known was there. They watched as he swept downstairs with his suitcases.

  After selecting a room and making himself at home on the lower floor, Ashford went straight to the kitchen and began to prepare a delicious-smelling dinner. Alfie’s dad’s request to have his meal brought to his workshop was firmly refused.

  “Sir, I will not collect half-eaten plates of food from all over this castle. You will eat in the Great Hall at the same time as your son.”