It wasn’t the best feeling in the world to hear them talking away to each other about how nuts I was. I had enough people in my life who thought I was the world’s biggest lunatic.
I’d say anyone who’s done any time traveling would probably tell you that it’s more or less the best opportunity you can possibly have to reinvent yourself. But in my case, within the space of less than a single night, he obviously already thought I was a loser.
“I suppose we could put him to work to earn his keep,” said the voice, which had continued to soften under Kevin’s clever manipulation. “A bit of extra help would come in fierce handy even if it’s only for a few days.”
And he said yes, he supposed it would. She told Kevin that on second thought he was very kind and compassionate to have put himself out for a stranger, and how goodness knows everyone deserves to be treated with kindness no matter who they are.
I pulled the blanket over my head and I started to wonder about a few things like, for example, what my gran was going to look like when she was young. And I also wondered what Ted was going to do when the sun came up and he realized I was gone, and whether or not he’d tell my old Granny Deedee and the middle-aged Dr. Sally. Either way, I reckoned I’d probably be in trouble for pretty much the rest of my life.
The crackly voice trailed away then and so did Kevin’s, and the low glow under the door disappeared. I didn’t feel like I was going to, but after a while I must have fallen asleep.
Next thing it was early in the morning and thin wisps of light were starting to weave their way around the darkness, and clatters and noises were echoing from down the corridor into my room, and I could tell that someone was making breakfast.
Even when things don’t make any sense at all and you’re feeling very strange, I’ve often noticed that there is one smell that can be quite comforting, and that is the smell of toast.
Chapter 8
IT WASN’T only the toast, though. I was already picturing myself explaining everything to my young gran, and I was predicting how me and Kevin and her were all going to have this massive three-way hug and how it was going to be a million percent brilliant. For the first time in a long time, even though it was something like six a.m., I was looking forward to getting out of bed.
Kevin legged it into the room a few minutes later, saying good morning and pulling the thin curtains along their squeaky rails. “Would you like to come along with me while I do my morning chores?” he said.
I said, “Are you sure you really want to hang out with someone as unhinged as me?”
“I don’t mind, as long as you keep up, because I move reasonably fast.”
I told him I’d already noticed.
So next thing we were back in the kitchen and I was getting introduced to this woman, and she opened her mouth and the crackly voice came out.
“Welcome to Blackbrick,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Kelly.”
She also said that she’d agreed not to ask any more questions about me, even though creeping into someone’s estate late at night is “fierce suspicious,” and not exactly the way to do things. But as long as I was willing to do a few jobs around the place, she wasn’t going to pry. Times were tough, she said, but she seemed to be pretty cheerful all the same.
“We’re doing our best to get on with things, aren’t we, Kevin? We’re not griping about anything, sure we’re not, Kevin, much and all as the temptation to complain sometimes grabs hold, God forgive me.”
She was old, maybe forty. And she was big and her hands were pink and she had a very clean apron on. And when she sighed, the apron rose on her chest like a huge white wave.
“Now come on in and sit down for a bit.”
She kept on looking at me quite carefully, like she was expecting me to make some wrong or possibly dangerous move, but she was very polite, and she said how she had to tell me the truth, which was that it was a good slice of luck to have another strong boy on the premises, even if it was only for a short stay. She said Blackbrick was once well known for taking very good care of its visitors, and that herself and Kevin would do their best to keep that reputation going even though it was going to be difficult, seeing how there were no other servants there anymore.
“If there’s anything you need, all you have to do is ask, she said.”
“Grand, no problem, thanks a lot.”
The first thing Kevin had to do that morning was sweep a whole load of floors. He said that Mrs. Kelly was right about it being handy to have a bit of help for a change. He told me that there used to be more than twenty-five servants at Blackbrick: maids and stable boys and a cook and a butler and farriers and suchlike. Now there was only him and Mrs. Kelly, rattling around having to do all sorts of jobs they’d never have done in the old days. “The Emergency” was on, and not only had a load of the men gone off to fight in the war, but also Lord Corporamore had used the whole situation as an excuse to fire a load more because he was broke.
I told Kevin this was much earlier than I was used to getting up and that my blood sugar levels felt a bit low, but all he did was hand me a broom.
Sweeping a floor is actually not that bad an activity. To tell you the truth it comes with a good bit of job satisfaction—seeing something that has been dusty getting clean and clear just because you drag a broom across it.
After a while this enormous clock in the hall started clanging away, and Kevin said, “Oh, drat. Cordelia’s breakfast.”
It turned out that Cordelia was a Corporamore, and even though she was only a kid, like around eleven or something, anyone who was a Corporamore had to be obeyed, no matter how young they were. Kevin was meant to get breakfast ready for her at exactly eight o’clock every morning. And even though it would have been “most irregular” for a boy like Kevin to bring breakfast to any of the Corporamores in the old days, now there was no one else to do it except for Mrs. Kelly, who was working her fingers to the bone and whose bad knee made climbing the stairs to Cordelia’s room pure torture. So Cordelia was waiting for breakfast, and apparently it was extremely important that Kevin was never late.
We sprinted to the kitchen, and Kevin fried five slices of bacon. He gave me one—it tasted pretty nice. He curled one into his own mouth and chewed, closing his eyes and humming for a second at the deliciousness of it. Then he put the other three onto two pieces of buttered toast. He stirred creamy scrambled eggs in a pan on the stove and tumbled them out onto a plate. Then he spooned jam into a little carved glass container, quickly and carefully arranging everything on this massive hard-to-carry tray.
He made sure that the knife and fork and spoon were all perfectly straight and that the napkin was folded in this precise way, as if he was someone with a serious case of OCD. He saw me staring at him. He explained that it had to be exactly like that every morning. If he didn’t want Cordelia to become very out of sorts, he needed to be sure that he had everything arranged perfectly.
“She sounds pretty demanding,” I said. He said I should come on up with him so I could see for myself.
So I followed him along more creaking hallways with faded pictures and dusty mirrors hanging on the walls. We stood outside another closed door. Kevin organized his face into a new expression, smiley and round-eyed and exaggerated. He knocked gently at first, but he didn’t get any answer. He banged a bit harder.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” said this little skinny piercing kind of a voice from the other side, even though the person whose voice it was must have known.
“Miss Cordelia, your breakfast,” he said.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, come IN, will you?” she whined.
“Stay here,” Kevin whispered to me, and he shoved the door open with his shoulder and left me standing in the corridor, with paintings of people in ancient clothes gazing down at me.
I could hear him saying good morning and being fabulously polite.
In all the time I’d known my Granddad Kevin, which was my whole life, he’d never said anything about Blackbrick and he
’d never once mentioned that he had been a slave. I personally think he should have told me important things like that.
The voice was the voice of the highest-maintenance kid in the history of the world.
“You were supposed to be here at eight o’clock,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Cordelia. I’m sorry.”
“What’s taken you so long?”
“Well, I’ve had quite a lot to do.”
“Well, I really must tell my father how useless you are. You’re always late. You never do my breakfast the way I like it.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry, Miss Cordelia.”
All Kevin did was apologize and agree, and agree and apologize, and then he backed out of the room kind of bowing, like someone with zero self-esteem.
“You shouldn’t let anybody talk to you like that,” I said when we were back in the kitchen drinking tea. But according to him it was part of his job to let her talk whatever way she wanted, and anyway he said he didn’t really take much notice. According to him there were advantages to being on Cordelia’s breakfast duty. For one thing, you got to swipe a few slices of bacon. And that was quite handy because of it being in the middle of the war. There were massive food shortages, leading to quite a restricted supply of basic foodstuffs. And anyway, he said that as soon as he’d brought up that stupid tray to her and put up with her whining, by far the worst part of his day was over.
He was right. After that it was kind of a great day. The whole time I kept on thinking that very soon I’d be coming face-to-face with my granny Deedee. And I hummed away to myself all through the polishing and sweeping and cleaning and dusting and vegetable preparation.
And before long it was time to go to the stables. He told me it was a famous place. He said that twelve horses used to live there, but now that everything was being cut back, there were only two left.
The paint on the stable doors was split and peeling. There was hay and sawdust and pieces of flat wood underfoot that cracked and snapped as we walked along, and the horses made these warm, low, muffled noises of welcome, and I could feel something going all calm inside me. Kevin opened the stable doors and led the horses into the courtyard. Their backs were sleek and shiny, and they nodded their lovely heads and Kevin said, “Shh, shh, you two. I want you to meet someone.” He talked to them as if they were people. “This fellow’s name is Cosmo.”
I reached out my hands and stroked their noses.
“This is Somerville.” Kevin patted her neck. “And this is Ross,” who was the bigger of the two.
I put my cheek up against Ross’s face and my hand on Somerville’s strong shiny back, and we stayed like that for ages standing very still, breathing in and out.
Eventually Kevin said we’d better get on with things. I looked down and lifted one of Ross’s legs, and Kevin lifted one of Somerville’s, and in exactly the same way I traced my fully intact finger and he traced his stump of one around the grooves, and we both felt the little bolts to make sure they were fine and tight.
There was something magic about us doing exactly that same thing at exactly the same time like that, and I think he noticed it too.
“Who are you, Cosmo?” he asked.
“I thought I wasn’t allowed to talk about that anymore,” I replied.
“Fair enough, then,” he said, and he smiled and looked down again at the horses’ feet.
Hitching horses to a cart is a difficult thing to do, especially when there’s not much light left and there are only two people available to do it, and one of them doesn’t know how to, but I watched him really carefully and tried to remember everything.
“I thought you said you were a horseman,” said Kevin. He reckoned it was weird that I didn’t know anything about carts. I said nobody learns everything all in one go.
Afterward I drew a few sketches and wrote all the details down in Ted’s notebook because you never know when information like that will be useful.
I did my best not to think too much about the present, but it wasn’t easy. It kept floating into my head in the middle of conversations with Kevin, and I kept picturing John and wondering how he was getting on in his new home and thinking about how much I needed to see him. But I was committed to spending at least a few days in the past, and okay, it was weird that I was there and everything, but I had to stay calm, and I had to keep it together. When I did think about what Ted and Granny and Granddad might be doing now that I was probably an official missing person, I started to feel sick. I just hoped that when I got back, they’d be so relieved to see me that they’d forget about how raging they were. I wondered if Mum had been ringing, and if so, what the heck they were all going to tell her. But I couldn’t let myself get too distracted. When you’re studying your own ancestors’ childhood and taking as many notes as I was trying to—well, it’s a full-time job. You have to stay focused. You can only take care of one time zone at a time. That’s something I’ve definitely learned. It’s a useful thing that everyone should know.
So when Kevin said, “Well? You ready?” I said I was. A hundred percent.
The animals snorted and whinnied at us. Kevin patted them and said, “Easy, girl. Easy, fella,” and then we all went out of the courtyard and those horses were excellent, all serene and obedient. John would have gone mental if anyone had tried to attach him to a cart like that.
Ghostly fingers of fog had started to drift around the trees again. Kevin had brought a blanket, and the two of us climbed up onto the cart, and he said, “Go on, go on,” and Ross and Somerville started trotting along, as if being hooked up to a cart with two nearly full-size humans on it was perfectly grand. Kevin spread the rug over our knees, like we were old people.
There was nothing old about the way we took off. We picked up a load of speed, down a new and different driveway. This was the way to the north gates, he said.
Soon we were rattling along, tearing down to the end of that drive with this new gateway staring us in the face. I scrunched up my eyes, half ready to cross back over some time threshold or other as soon as we went out onto the road. I was on the brink of saying good-bye. But when I opened my eyes, we were already outside and the roads were made of mud. I laughed a bit. The wind was getting stronger, and I could feel the cart wobbling as gusts of it invisibly belted against us from all directions.
“Wow, I’m still here,” I whispered.
And Kevin went, “Of course you are. Where else would you be?”
It turns out that it’s easier to talk to someone who’s on a fast-moving cart than it is in practically any other situation that exists.
“Hey, Kevin, I hope you don’t think this is a personal question or anything, but how did you lose that finger?”
He looked down at his hand and he went, “Good God! My finger. It’s missing!”
It must have been the first time he’d ever cracked that particular joke, because he laughed for ages, and it was kind of infectious. When we calmed down, I said, “No, but seriously, what actually did happen?”
“I’m a stable boy, aren’t I? Finger loss is an occupational hazard. All it takes is one moment of daydreaming, and whack!”
He did this big exaggerated mime of a hammer banging down on his hand. “Learned a good lesson, though. There are times for daydreaming, but then there are other times when it’s not such a good idea.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Well, it is a bit of a nuisance when I’m trying to point at something, but apart from that I get on fairly well without it.”
I told Kevin all about how my mother had left me to go and work in Australia, even though I hardly ever discussed that with anyone because nobody usually knew what to say. As far as I know, it’s not that usual for someone’s mother to go off to a whole other continent. He listened to me very carefully. He didn’t go into bogus sympathy mode like some people do when you tell them stuff like that, and he didn’t interrupt or ask me how I felt about it or how I was coping or any other useless thing a
t all. He waited until I’d finished, and when I had, he said it sounded like I missed her quite a lot, and I said yes I did, sometimes.
And then he told me a bit more about this girl we were going to collect, and of course the whole time I knew exactly who he was talking about. He said she was great, and he went on about how she had this dark curly hair and a face as pale as eggshell.
“Sounds as if you quite like her,” I said, which was obviously the understatement of the entire century.
I asked him why hadn’t he gone to get her before now, and he said he already had, but her parents had sent him away because he’d turned up on his own out of the blue on a horse, with no documentation or advance warning or anything.
“Stop me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but isn’t that exactly what we’re doing again now?”
He grinned and said there was one crucial difference this time. And the crucial difference was me. Me and the cart.
No one ever went into service in Blackbrick, or “the big house,” which is what everyone called it, without hearing formally from the owner or one of his representatives. The Blackbrick cart was always sent, not a wild local boy riding bareback on a horse. If the cart wasn’t sent, then nobody could be sure the arrangement was above board. That’s why the last time he’d gone to get her, they hadn’t allowed her to go.
My chancer of a granddad was trying to smuggle her in. And this was his second attempt.
Then he told me that I was going to have to pretend to be the nephew of Lord Corporamore. I wished he’d let me know about that a bit sooner than three minutes before we were due to arrive.
He told me that he was going to hide behind the cart and that I was to tell them my name was Cyril, which apparently he thought was a pretty realistic name for Corporamore’s nephew to have.
I didn’t argue, although I’d have preferred a nonstupid name for once in my life, even if it was only for a few minutes.
Kevin handed me the reins. He said if I kept on being this good, he’d let me drive on the way back, too. The cart was rattly, and Ross’s and Somerville’s hooves clopped in a lovely way, making an uplifting kind of sound on the ground beneath, and the wind blew, fresh and energetic and whistly, and there was only one thing I kept thinking about.
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