by Helen Peters
As soon as she closed the door behind her, George raised his eyebrows. “Dry bread with the door locked? What’s Miss Fane gone and done now?”
“I did hear shouting last evening,” said Polly. “In the stable yard, it was. I thought the master was shouting at one of the stable boys, but then I heard women’s voices, and I thought that was odd. You was out there, Evie. Didn’t you hear anything?”
I shook my head, my eyes fixed on the tablecloth. “Not really.”
“Mr Ellerdale,” said William, “was speaking to Miss Fane after dinner in the White Parlour, private-like, and all of a sudden he jumps up and takes his leave, all offended-like. And Miss Fane rushes off too, in a big hurry, and then the master jumps up and runs off after her.”
He took a big bite of his bread and a swig of beer. Everyone was looking at him.
“And then what?” said Mary.
“Eh?” he asked with his mouth full.
“What happened next?”
“How should I know? I were clearing dishes, weren’t I?”
Mary sighed with exasperation.
“The master was hitting the whisky bottle pretty hard last night, I know that,” said George. “Kept ringing the bell for more. In a filthy temper, he was.”
“So Miss Fane has upset Mr Ellerdale,” said Betty. “Refused his hand, I expect. And who can blame her?”
The door opened and we all concentrated on breakfast. Mrs Hardwick swept her laser eyes around the table.
“I’d advise you all to keep your mouths shut and avoid peddling tittle-tattle about your betters, unless you want to find yourselves in the poorhouse sharpish. Have you not taken that tray to Miss Fane, Polly? Stir yourself, for goodness’ sake.”
I jumped up. “I’ll do it.”
“Steady on,” said William. “You nearly spilled my beer.”
Polly looked at me curiously. “What’s got into you all of a sudden?”
“Nothing,” I said. “But you’ve been on your feet all morning, Polly. Sit and finish your breakfast.”
I took the tray and walked upstairs as slowly as I dared, trying to give myself some thinking time.
Sophia was lying on her four-poster bed, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t move when I came in.
I set the tray down on the table. “Your breakfast, Miss Fane.”
At the sound of my voice, she turned her head sharply.
“You?” she said, glaring at me. Then all the energy left her face. She turned her head to the opposite wall and sighed.
I took that as a good sign. At least she hadn’t thrown me out. Not yet anyway.
“How are you, Miss Fane?”
“I am kept a prisoner in my own house by my father and my aunt,” snapped Sophia, “so how do you imagine I am?”
Fair enough. It was a stupid question.
“You have to escape,” I said. “You have to get away with Robbie.”
“Shh!” she said, springing out of bed and grasping my shoulders, a look of terror on her face that instantly turned to fury. “Do you wish to get us both killed?”
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “Do you mind not gripping my shoulders? It really hurts.”
Sophia’s eyes were darting around the room, as though she was expecting spies to jump out of the wardrobe.
“I won’t mention his name again,” I whispered. Then, as she continued to grip my shoulder, “It’s fine, honestly. I was speaking really quietly and there’s no one else around.”
Finally she relaxed her grip. She sat down heavily on the bed, frowning intensely at me, as though trying to find the answer to a puzzle.
“Who are you?” she asked eventually. “You foretold what would happen, and you seem to wish to help me. Why? What is your motive?”
Perhaps, I thought, she would be more likely to believe me if she thought I wasn’t just a random housemaid. It was worth a try anyway.
“I had a dream,” I said. “You appeared at my window in a dream, and you asked me to help you.”
She stared at me for an uncomfortably long time, and I couldn’t read her expression. Finally she said, “What is your name?”
“Evie, ma’am.”
She was silent for a while. Then she gave a sad little laugh.
“Well, Evie,” she said, “I suppose I have nothing to lose. I am already locked in my room. And there is nobody else.”
“So you’ll let me help you escape?”
She sighed impatiently. “How can I escape? It is impossible. If I go in daylight, I will certainly be stopped, and there is no means of leaving Charlbury at night. Every door and window is locked and bolted.”
“Then you must leave at dusk,” I said, “just before the house is locked.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “I tried that last night, and look where I am now.”
“Yes, but you’ve got to be smarter in the way you do it. You mustn’t anger your father. If you’d been charming and sweet to Mr Ellerdale at dinner, and then you’d just said you needed some air and you were going outside for a moment, no one would have suspected anything and you could have got safely away before they realised.”
“It is all very well saying that after the event,” she snapped. “What use is your advice to me now I am locked up?”
But my mind was working fast for once. “Your father and your aunt said you’ll be locked up until you agree to marry Mr Ellerdale, is that right?”
“Gracious, gossip does travel quickly. I suppose the entire staff knows everything by now.”
“So you must agree to marry Mr Ellerdale.”
Sophia looked furious. “I shall die in this room before I agree to marry that man.”
“I’m not saying you should marry him. I’m saying you should tell your father you will marry him. Beg your father’s forgiveness for your crazy behaviour last night. Tell him you temporarily lost your senses, but now you have seen the error of your ways and you realise that your duty is to your family and your father. Then this evening you can have dinner as usual, acting the perfect, obedient daughter. And at nine o’clock – that should be a good time, while the servants are having supper and the house is still unlocked – at nine o’clock you smile sweetly and ask to be excused for a second. And then you leave the house, meet Robbie and get away as quickly as you can.”
Sophia stared at me in silence for a few seconds, her eyes huge. Then she stood up and started to pace the room.
“That might work,” she murmured. “It might actually work.” She walked up and down the room in silence for a few more minutes, and then she turned to me. “Could you ask a footman to take a message to my father, asking to speak with him in the library? I shall ask him to explain to Mr Ellerdale that I was simply overawed by the attentions of such a distinguished gentleman, but now that I have had time to recover my composure, I should be delighted and grateful to receive him.”
“That’s perfect,” I said. “He’ll be overjoyed.”
Sophia’s eyes were alight with excitement now. “We have been planning this for weeks. We shall walk overnight to Lower Mistleham. From there, Robbie says there is a stagecoach to London that departs very early in the morning. In London, Robbie says, we may melt into a crowd and nobody will know us. And from there we shall take stagecoaches all the way to Scotland, and then we shall be married!”
“Scotland? Why don’t you get married in London?”
Sophia looked at me as though I was completely stupid. “Why, because the law is different in Scotland, of course. We can marry there without my father’s consent. We can be married at Gretna Green, as soon as we cross the border.” She flopped down on the bed with a blissful sigh. “Married! Oh, Evie, it is as though I have known him all my life. We are kindred souls. We have read the same books, we admire the same poets, we believe the same things about how the world should be changed.” She was speaking very fast now, the words pouring out of her in a torrent. It seemed that, now I had come up with an idea she liked, she had finally decided to trust me. “Is it not strange? Our
backgrounds so different and yet we think so alike. He has the most wonderful ideas. And his drawings! His drawings are extraordinary. He is the most talented man I have ever met. And yet, my father—”
The landing door banged and footsteps sounded in the corridor.
“I must go,” I whispered. “I was told to bring the tray and leave immediately. I’ll find Robbie during my break. Where should I tell him to meet you?”
“In the orchard. We shall leave by the back gate, across the fields.”
The footsteps were very close now. I nodded, left the room and fastened all the locks and bolts. Madame Perrault passed the door without even looking at me. She had a face on her as though somebody was holding a rotting carcass to her nose.
As soon as she had passed me, I gave an enormous grin and had to stop myself from skipping down the corridor. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. It had gone better than I had dared to hope. And if Sophia played her part well with her father and Charles Ellerdale this evening, there was no reason why she wouldn’t be able to run away with Robbie tonight.
And if they got away successfully, then… Oh, please let it be true… Then maybe … if the time travel really did work in the way I thought it did … then I would wake up tomorrow in Anna’s flat, back in the twenty-first century.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A Threat
George appeared in the doorway of the servants’ hall as the rest of us were sitting down for lunch.
“If Mr Paxton asks for me,” he said, “tell him I have to ride over to Mr Ellerdale’s with a message.”
“Oh, yes?” said Mary. “What’s the message?”
George held up a piece of paper, folded and sealed with wax. “Let’s just say I shouldn’t be surprised if Miss Fane has changed her mind about Mr Ellerdale. The master’s in remarkably high spirits and I was told to ride over and deliver this immediately. So I’ve no time to stand around gossiping with you lot.”
As the others broke out in excited chatter, I turned away to hide my delight.
The first part of the plan had worked.
During our break Polly and I went to the farmyard behind the stable block and found a few lumps of chalk and a broken plank, which would do instead of a slate for the time being. She was a quick learner and it didn’t take long before she could read and write the sentence ‘Polly is a cat and dog’. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but it used all her new words.
Polly was so excited by this that I was worried she would want to use the whole hour and I wouldn’t get the chance to tell Robbie to meet Sophia in the orchard at nine o’clock. I was trying to think of an excuse to go off alone when Polly started yawning.
“I’m going for a quick doss down,” she said. “Coming?”
“Thanks, but I feel like a walk,” I said.
It seemed to be my lucky day, because I found Robbie in the first place I looked. He was weeding a vegetable bed at the end of the kitchen garden, by the shed. To add to my luck, he seemed to be alone again. I couldn’t believe how well this was all working out.
As I walked towards him, along the grassy paths between the neat rows of vegetables, he put his finger to his lips and pointed to a shelf just inside the shed, to the right of the open door.
The inside of the tool shed was dark, and at first I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to be looking at. There was a ball of twine on the shelf, and some empty plant pots.
And then I saw it, and drew in my breath. A neat little nest of twigs and hay and, poking out of the top of it, three huge yellow beaks, gaping open.
I turned, wide-eyed, to Robbie. “Wow,” I mouthed.
He smiled, and then he pointed to a plump robin perched on the garden wall. It looked at us with its shiny black eyes, and then looked at the ground. It seemed to be considering.
We waited, motionless.
Suddenly the robin opened its wings and flew down on to the freshly turned earth beside Robbie’s fork. It plucked a long slimy worm from the soil and immediately flew up again, the worm clamped in its beak. It flew into the shed, perched on the edge of the nest and stuffed the wriggling worm into one of the chicks’ huge open beaks. I watched, fascinated.
“They do that all day long,” said Robbie in a low voice. “Both parents, backwards and forwards, feeding those chicks.”
“But they’re so tiny,” I said. “How can they need so much food?”
“They leave the nest at two weeks old. So they have a lot of growing to do in a fortnight.”
“Two weeks!”
“Yep. And then they’re all alone in the world.”
Something in his tone made me turn to him. There was a look of deep sadness in his eyes.
I looked around the garden again to check we were alone. Then I said in a low voice, “Sophia has told her father she will marry Mr Ellerdale.”
He gave an anguished moan and clasped his head in his hands. I stepped forward and touched his arm.
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “She’s not actually going to marry him.” And I told him the rest of the plan.
It was amazing to watch his mood change from despair to ecstasy in a matter of seconds. By the end of my explanation, he was gazing at me as though I was some sort of god. And I suppose I almost was. I mean, not to boast or anything, but it isn’t everyone who actually gets to change the course of history.
“Why are you doing so much to help us, Evie?” he said. “Why do you care so much?”
I wished that I could tell the truth. It would have been such a relief to tell him the real story. But I couldn’t risk it. He would think I was either a lunatic or a witch, and who could blame him? And I really needed him to trust my sanity. So I just said, “I can’t bear to think of Soph— Miss Fane – being locked up for the rest of her life, that’s all. I haven’t really done much.”
“You have done everything,” he said. “We can never repay you for your kindness.”
“You don’t need to repay me,” I said. “Just make sure you get away safely.”
At five o’clock I went down to the kitchen to fill the hot water cans for the dressing rooms. Mrs Winter was making pastry at one end of the table, while Alice chopped onions at the other. Judging by the clatter coming from the scullery, Nell was washing dishes.
Suddenly the door opened and Mrs Bailey swept in. It was hard to curtsey while holding a water can under a hot tap but I managed an awkward bob. Not that Mrs Bailey so much as glanced in my direction.
“We are expecting Mr Ellerdale for dinner tonight,” she said to the cook.
“Very good, madam.”
“It will need to be a special dinner. We are expecting it to be something of a celebration.”
“Very good, madam,” said Mrs Winter.
That godlike feeling came over me again. I felt as though I was directing a play, and all my actors were playing their parts to perfection. Only a few more hours now until Robbie and Sophia would be safely away from here and I would be back in my own time.
If that was how the time travel worked, said the little voice of doubt in my head.
Be quiet, I told the voice.
Later, as I crossed the stable yard with Sir Henry’s chamber pot, Jacob emerged from a stable and swaggered towards me with a smirk on his face. I had a funny feeling he was waiting for me. Waiting to pounce.
“Did you have a pleasant conversation earlier?” he asked in a strange, affected voice.
“Conversation?”
“I had a little stroll in the orchard a while ago,” he said in the same fake voice. “Delightful place for a stroll, the orchard. And it’s funny, sometimes, what a person can accidentally overhear during an innocent walk.”
My stomach lurched. When I had spoken to Robbie, we were standing only centimetres away from the wall that bordered the orchard. Had Jacob been listening on the other side of that wall? How much had he heard?
My brain worked frantically. It would be no good to demand to know what he had heard. He would
only tell me what he wanted me to know. Could I plead with him, or would that make things worse? Was there anything I could do?
A triumphant look came over his face. Too late, I realised I shouldn’t have shown my panic.
I fixed my eyes on a tree in the wood. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to sound bored and uninterested.
“I should think,” said Jacob, “that Sir Henry would be very interested in what I have to tell him.”
I felt sick. I refused to meet his eye but I could feel him looking at me intently, as if trying to gauge my response.
“Unless, of course,” he continued, “unless something happens to drive the conversation out of my mind.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, loathing him more every second.
He grabbed my shoulders.
“Get off me!” I pulled away, but he tightened his grip.
“Kiss me,” he demanded.
“What?! Get off!”
He pulled me to him, one hand on the back of my head and the other around my waist. Still holding the chamber pot in one hand, I fought to get out of his grasp but it was useless: he was far too strong. I screwed my eyes shut and clamped my lips together, trying to push away his rough mouth against mine, the stink of garlic and onions and rotten breath, the scratching of his stubbly chin. I felt as though I was going to throw up.
“Evie! Get inside the house this instant!”
Jacob shoved me away and, without a backward glance, turned and walked into the stable block.
I turned round, grimacing and frantically wiping my mouth on my sleeve. The bony figure of Mrs Hardwick loomed in the kitchen doorway.
Feeling sick with disgust, I walked towards the house. As I reached Mrs Hardwick, she lashed out with a slap that sent me reeling. My neck felt as though it had been dislocated.
“Get inside, you brazen little hussy,” she hissed. She shoved me in the small of my back, propelling me into the hall. Then she pulled me round to face her and grasped my shoulders with iron-hard fingers.
“I have just about had it with you, young lady,” she said. “If it weren’t for the fact that there’s an important guest staying tonight and we need every hand we’ve got, you’d be out of this house within five minutes.”
