Tilly and the Bookwanderers

by Anna James

  ‘Be brave, be curious, be kind,’ she repeated to herself under her breath, as candlelight flared up in one of the front windows of the school and Tilly saw the dimly lit shapes of people moving around inside.

  ‘Excuse me, miss, do you have any spare pennies?’ a quiet cockney accent said.

  Tilly looked down to see a girl who could only have been six or seven tugging at the edge of her jumper. Her face was dirty and her hair a tangled mess. She was quite obviously starving and Tilly rummaged in the pockets of her jeans, finding twenty pence.

  ‘I only have this, I’m afraid,’ Tilly said, holding out the coin. ‘I’m not even sure you’ll be able to do anything with it, considering …’

  The little girl turned it over in her hand.

  ‘Are you sure I can have this, miss?’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ Tilly said, wishing she had something far more useful or warm to give the little girl. The ragged girl bobbed a hasty curtsy and scurried across the road to a bakery lit up from within. Tilly shivered and kept her eyes on the school.

  After half an hour or so, the front door opened again and Captain Crewe and Sara left. A tall woman dressed in black stood on the top step and waved them off, a broad smile on her face that dropped as soon as the cab door was closed again.

  Tilly stared at the retreating cab before flicking forward in the book to find the next scene with the man her brain was still adjusting to thinking of as her father. The fog swirled in tight around her so she couldn’t even see her hand stretched out in front of her. It buffeted her hair and she struggled to stay on her feet, but as fast as it had billowed it dissipated, and she found herself inside the school itself, in a decadently decorated room full of eerily lifelike dolls and clothes. Within seconds the door handle started to turn and Tilly spun round, looking for somewhere to hide, sliding herself behind the rich velvet curtains just as the door opened. The deep voice of Captain Crewe filled the space as he and Sara said goodbye to each other.

  ‘Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?’ Tilly heard her father say.

  ‘No,’ a small but strong voice replied. ‘I know you by heart. You are inside my heart.’

  Tilly stood still behind the heavy curtains as she heard them hug each other fiercely, tears running silently down her cheeks as she cried for the father both she and Sara were about to lose. After she’d heard the click of the door closing, she slipped back out into the room, only to realise that Sara was still there, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring into the distance.

  ‘Hello,’ she said politely to Tilly, not seeming particularly surprised that a girl had just emerged from behind her curtains. ‘If you don’t mind, I would quite like to be by myself at the moment, if you please. So, could you come back later, if you are coming to help me unpack?’

  ‘I’m not a … I just …’ Tilly had no idea how to explain herself so instead she left Sara sitting by herself and closed the door quietly behind her, nearly crashing into a skinny girl wearing a neat but very old dress with a dirty white apron over the top of it, with a mop cap on her frizzy brown hair.

  ‘I’m so sorry, miss,’ she said, looking at the floor, and in doing so noticing Tilly’s trainers. She looked up in surprise, and her mouth dropped open as she took in all of Tilly.

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude, miss,’ she whispered, ‘but who are you? If you’re not supposed to be here and Miss Minchin finds you … I hope I’m not being out of line, but you aren’t dressed like any of the other girls, or anyone I’ve seen before. Are you from India, like Miss Crewe?’

  ‘No, not India, but somewhere else that’s rather far away, I suppose. Somewhere I really should be getting back to. It was nice to meet you, Becky,’ Tilly said.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ Becky sounded surprised, but Tilly was already heading down the corridor, although she didn’t know what to do next. She had no idea how she might find Captain Crewe now he had left the story, and she did not know what she would say to him even if she could find him.

  She decided the most sensible thing to do would be to return to Pages & Co., make a plan, and then read herself back into the beginning when Captain Crewe and Sara first visit the school. She could go to those opening pages as many times as she wanted, like watching a favourite film over and over again.

  She turned to the back of her mum’s copy of A Little Princess, wondering if she should bring Oskar with her when she returned, and then stopped in horror as she realised that the last page was ripped and the last sentence wasn’t readable. The bottom corner of the page was torn, as if caught in a bag, or just worn out from reading and folding and bending. Whatever had happened, it rendered the last few sentences a mystery. Tilly slid her back down the wall into a corner, as she tried to get her ragged breathing under control. She stared at the book in her hands, chastising herself for not checking before she set off, especially so soon after Grandad had made it clear how careful she had to be. Hadn’t she learned anything from Treasure Island?

  Tilly decided there was nothing else for it but to read the last line that was there and hope for the best. She took some deep breaths, tried to block out the shrieking of girls playing downstairs, and read: ‘Then she told him the story of the bun shop, and the fourpence she picked up out of the sloppy mud, and the child who …’

  Without warning everything suddenly went black, as though the whole world had been plunged into a power cut.

  he blackness was so dense that it seemed almost like a physical object that Tilly could reach out and touch. She imagined it sneaking its way inside her nose and mouth and ears and she started to panic.

  ‘Stop,’ she told herself sternly. ‘Be patient. Wait. Something usually happens at this point. Wait for the magic to kick in.’ She concentrated on trying to control the feeling of panic rising inside her and told herself that in just a moment fog would billow, or the walls would fold and slide, and her bedroom or the bookshop would materialise around her.

  She scrunched up her eyes and stood completely still, waiting for the bookwandering magic to work. But, after what felt like an awfully long time in the inky blackness, Tilly was forced to come to terms with the fact that she definitely was not back at Pages & Co., and she did not seem to be in A Little Princess either.

  She took stock of what she could sense. She was standing on something reassuringly solid and ground-like and she was warm. She could smell wood and paper and something sweet, but could not feel anything in her immediate arm span. She held her arms out in front of her and walked tentatively forward until she found something that felt comfortingly like a wall, not an infinite ether trapping her between stories.

  ‘Okay, if this is a room, then there must be a door, or a window,’ Tilly muttered, trying to reassure herself. Eventually her fingertips brushed against what felt encouragingly like a door frame and, as she swished her hands around, she found a cold, round handle. She took a deep breath, turned and pulled it, and a door clicked open.

  Tilly sagged in relief. Outside was not much better, but there was a muted grey light instead of soupy darkness and it was enough to be able to see a light switch right by the door, which Tilly turned on to reveal a very mundane, empty room. There was a small desk in one corner, with a wooden chair behind it, and a stack of notebooks on top. A dead plant was in one corner of the room, and there was a bin with just a rotten apple core inside it in another. Something about the smell and the feel of the place scratched at the back of Tilly’s brain until it dawned on her where she was: the British Underlibrary.

  She edged along the corridor – where most of the lights were off apart from the occasional door outline in gold – trying to get her bearings. She quietly followed the corridor round, hoping she would be able to find Amelia Whisper’s office, and that Amelia would still be there, before Tilly had to knock on a door at random. They were all numbered, so she hoped that meant she was already in the right corridor, but as she looked for number forty-two she realised that the numbers didn’t go in any
recognisable pattern or order – and office one hundred and eleven was next to thirty-one, which was opposite six. It was no help at all and Tilly felt like she was back in Wonderland, until with a sigh of relief she saw door number forty-two with a soft glow of light leaking out from around it.

  As Tilly went to knock she couldn’t help but notice that the next door along, Chalk’s office, was not lit up. She paused with her hand in the air, about to knock on Amelia’s door, before pulling it back and putting her ear against Chalk’s door instead. As she leaned against it the door clicked open and she tumbled noisily inside.

  ‘Enoch?’ she heard a muffled call from the office next door. ‘Everything okay?’

  Tilly hurriedly but gently pushed the door closed and stayed as still as she could, pressing herself up against the wall of Chalk’s office. She heard Amelia push her chair back and open her door, and Tilly held her breath, but a second later she heard Amelia retreating into her own office.

  Faced with Chalk’s empty office, Tilly realised she was acting primarily on instinct, rather than hard-and-fast clues, but she could not shake the uneasy feeling that there was more to Chalk than Grandma and Grandad had let on, or maybe more than they knew. His excuses for talking to her in Anne of Green Gables, or being in Alice in Wonderland, were setting off alarm bells and raising red flags, and Tilly had read enough books to know not to ignore them.

  She switched on the desk light, which cast a dim glow and eerie shadows round the office. The room was pristine, with barely anything on the desk apart from a computer that was turned off, and a shallow wire tray with a few sheets of paper in it. Tilly flicked through them, and saw that they were all covered in lists of bookshops printed in tiny type. Some of them were crossed out with angry red lines, and some were marked with arrows or stars.

  There were no photos or knick-knacks, no garish ‘Best Librarian’ mugs, no sign of personality anywhere. The only decoration was a large poster pinned to the back of the door titled ‘The Ordnances of Bookwandering’. As she looked closer she realised it was handwritten. As her eyes scanned the list, she felt increasingly nervous. These rules were devoid of the sense of adventure or wonder that seemed to fill Amelia or Seb when they talked about bookwandering.

  ‘One: Travel within a Source Edition without prior permission, training or qualifications is strictly prohibited,’ Tilly read. ‘Two: Entry to the Source Library, as above. Three: All bookwanderers should be registered immediately after abilities manifest themselves, otherwise travelling will be classed as wilfully illicit. Four: No bookwanderer is permitted within five pages of the end of a novel unless trained in Endpapers Travel.’

  The rules went on and on, all seeming to ban something or other. Tilly shuddered and moved over to the shelves of fat ledgers that lined the room. She noticed they were embossed in small gold letters with the dates they covered and pulled one down at random. She saw rows and rows of names and bookshops and libraries, written in handwriting that changed every few years. Tilly ran her fingertips down the thick paper, down the records of so many different people and their stories, and wondered what adventures they had had. She liked knowing that her mum was in one of the ledgers somewhere, and that Grandma and Grandad must be in one too. Generations of bookwanderers all listed together in nearly identical emerald-green ledgers. She wondered if anyone other than Chalk ever looked at them.

  As she put back the ledger she realised the office was not as entirely lacking in personality as she had first thought. At the back, tucked away in a corner, was a bookcase of the sort of books you might expect to find in a librarian’s office – novels, children’s books, classics, a large blue book of fairy tales. A colourful, messy mix of books. It made Tilly wonder if they’d judged Chalk too harshly after all; could anyone with a full set of Harry Potter novels be that bad? He even had a copy of A Little Princess, and Tilly felt her heart thaw an extra degree towards him.

  Tilly forgot where she was for a moment and pulled down his copy; it was a different edition from her mum’s, which was tucked under her arm, or any she’d seen before at the bookshop. The cover was a simple black matte one with the title and the author’s name in gold writing. She flicked through the first few chapters, unable to resist reading the description of her father again, but she was instantly distracted by the scene in which Captain Crewe and Sara first leave the school, which was not quite how she remembered it. She was sure she hadn’t seen their cab swerve in the road to avoid hitting someone, but she was also learning that once you were inside a book anything was possible. But then she found another passage that she was sure was different in her mum’s copy.

  She read it out loud under her breath to herself.

  ‘She went into the shop. It was warm and smelled deliciously. A young woman, wrapped in a warm cloak, stood at the counter, absent-mindedly playing with her necklace as she waited for the baker to finish setting out the piping hot buns.

  “Good morning, miss. How are the children doing in this cold weather?”

  “Quite well, thank you, Nancy. They’re all very excited about Christmas.”

  The baker smiled warmly. “What can I get you then? Anything for the little ones?”

  “A loaf of bread, and some of those tiny almond cakes, please? There are several sweet teeth back at the house.”

  The goods were wrapped up neatly in waxed paper and the woman left the bakery in a gust of cold air as the door closed. The woman behind the counter noticed Sara, shivering in her thin dress.

  “If you please,” said Sara, “have you lost fourpence – a silver fourpence?”’

  Tilly slid the book back on to the shelf, and put her own on Chalk’s desk to check, confused by the differences. Perhaps she was misremembering the scene. Was her mum’s copy special somehow? But, before she could turn up the right page in her book to check, the door handle started to turn. She froze; there was nowhere to hide and all she had time to do was shove her mum’s copy of the book into her pinafore dress, thankful it had large pockets, before the door was flung open to reveal Enoch Chalk silhouetted in the hazy grey light, looking furious.

  ‘Come here, girl,’ he snarled. ‘I knew there was something strange about you the moment I first saw you.’

  Tilly backed into the corner. ‘I’m s-sorry, Mr Chalk,’ she stammered. ‘I got lost and I couldn’t work out how to get home and your door was open and I—’

  ‘Enough,’ he interrupted. ‘No excuses. How did you get here, Miss Pages?’

  ‘Like I said, I was lost in the library and your door was—’

  ‘No,’ he said, tense with anger. ‘We will get to why you are in my office in good time. I want to know how you have come to be in the Underlibrary past closing hours and by yourself?’ He spun round. ‘Is your grandfather here too?’

  ‘No! No. I didn’t mean to come here,’ Tilly protested. ‘I promise. It was an accident. I was trying to get out of a book, but the page was torn and—’

  ‘What on earth is going on here?’

  Tilly was faint with relief when she saw Amelia Whisper join Chalk at the door. ‘I thought you had gone home, Enoch. Why are you out in the corridor bellowing …?’ Amelia tailed off as she caught sight of Tilly. ‘Matilda? What on earth are you doing back here?’

  kay, let’s go and sit down in my office,’ Amelia said, shepherding Tilly out. Chalk went to follow, but Amelia put her hand in his way. ‘I think I just need a moment to chat to Tilly by myself first, Enoch, if you would excuse us.’

  ‘She broke into my office!’ Chalk spluttered in indignation.

  ‘I know, I know, but, as you said yourself, we need to understand why she is in the library at all before we get to that. Maybe you could go and find us some cups of tea?’

  ‘I am not a tea lady, Ms Whisper,’ Chalk said coldly.

  ‘Well, perhaps you could go and find us one then, Enoch. Or, indeed, a tea man.’

  Amelia guided Tilly into her office with a gentle hand on her back as Chalk stalked off down the cor
ridor.

  ‘I actually have a kettle in my office,’ Amelia said with a smile, ‘but I thought we should have a chance to talk by ourselves. Tilly, it’s really important that you tell me the truth at this point, okay?’ Tilly nodded. ‘How did you get back into the library this evening? Did you hide somewhere? Is Oskar here too?’

  ‘No, we went back home, all three of us, I promise,’ Tilly said.

  ‘Okay, so your grandparents don’t know you’re here?’ Amelia asked.

  Tilly shook her head.

  ‘Well, first things first: we need to tell them that you’re safe with me and they can come and get you.’ She picked up the phone on her desk. ‘Hello, Archie? This is Amelia. We’ve got Tilly here. She’s completely safe and is with me. We … Yes, yes, I know … We can talk about this later, but the most important thing is for you to come and get her. Yes … Yes … No. See you soon then.’ She put the phone down and turned to Tilly. ‘They’re on their way. And I’m guessing that your grandad must have filled you in a bit more about everything after you left this afternoon?’

  ‘A bit,’ Tilly said vaguely, remembering what Grandma and Grandad had told her about keeping the details about her father a secret.

  ‘It must have been difficult to hear about everything that happened eleven years ago. No one thought your grandparents did anything wrong really, but—’

  ‘What?’ Tilly interrupted. ‘Why would anyone think my grandparents had done anything wrong?’

  ‘Well, of course they didn’t take the accusations seriously – but because Archie was your mum’s father I’m sure you can imagine that there had to be a full investigation into how Bea got into the Source Library. Thankfully the Archivists weren’t involved.’

  Amelia stopped, registering the look of confusion on Tilly’s face. ‘You look surprised – I … I thought you said your grandparents told you about this?’