A Secret in Time Read online

  “It’s hideous,” said Ruby Pilgrim, staring at herself in the mirror. “Absolutely hideous. I look about eight! And you look even worse.”

  Alex didn’t reply. Secretly he rather liked his new uniform. White shirt, grey shorts and blazer, red jersey and socks, striped tie. At his current school the uniform was a red sweatshirt and a T-shirt. At the big noisy school most of his friends were going to in September you wore a blue sweatshirt in winter, and a shirt and tie in summer. Alex didn’t consider sweatshirts a proper uniform at all. This one looked smart.

  “Seven maybe!” said Ruby in disgust. “Six!”

  Things were, he had to admit, worse for Ruby. She was wearing what Aunt Joanna called a gymslip, but Alex and Ruby would have called a pinafore dress, the sort of thing only very little girls would ever have worn at their primary school. The striped tie and blazer were all right, but the whole thing looked most unRubyish. Ruby was thirteen, and currently went to the secondary school with the blue sweatshirt. There she wore her tie as short as she could get away with, stuck badges all over the lapels of her coat and had pulled all the thread out of the school crest on her chest. There she looked like a teenager. Here she looked like something out of Enid Blyton.

  “Everyone else will look the same,” Alex said.

  Ruby glared. “It’s all right for you!” she said. “You’d have had to move schools anyway!”

  It was true. Alex would be leaving primary school forever in September, and everything would change. The old, comfortable routine of glue sticks and topic books and school trays would be replaced with terrifying prospects like algebra and rugby and getting your head flushed down the toilets. He hadn’t been looking forward to it at all.

  But this new school…

  Their parents had taken them on a tour. Ruby had been scowling and furious, but Alex was secretly thrilled. It had its own theatre. Its own swimming pool. Canoes and rowing boats that pupils took out on the river in PE. A beautiful old-fashioned library, with ladders on wheels. School trips to France to go skiing. (“Not that Mum and Dad could afford to send us on those!” said Ruby.)

  “Only Aunt Joanna could think giving us money for school was a good idea,” said Ruby. “St Caedmon’s must cost thousands and thousands of pounds. Just think what we could have done with that! We could go on a round-the-world cruise! We could buy our own yacht!”

  “You don’t even like boats!” said Alex. “And I don’t think she’s paying for all of it. Mum and Dad are helping.”

  He knew Aunt Joanna was trying to be kind. Last summer he and Ruby had stepped inside a magic time-travelling mirror and found themselves in 1912. There they’d helped save a Saxon treasure from some thieves and hidden it in a secret compartment in the sitting-room wall, where it had stayed until they’d triumphantly revealed it to Aunt Joanna. Aunt Joanna had sold the Newberry Cup at Christmas, and now she’d told their parents that she wanted them to have some of the money, as a thank-you. Only instead of just putting it in their bank accounts and letting them spend it on what they wanted, the money was to go towards this new, expensive school.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go and show Aunt Joanna the uniforms and get it over with.”

  Ruby pushed herself off the bed and went downstairs. Alex followed.

  The big eighteenth-century mirror that had started all this hung in the hallway below the staircase. Alex glanced at it reflexively as he passed. Most of the time it just showed Aunt Joanna’s hallway, with the front door and the tiled floor, and the little table with the guest book, and leaflets about local attractions. But sometimes…

  “Ruby!”

  Sometimes it didn’t.

  Sometimes it showed other reflections, long-ago hallways in long-ago Applecott Houses. And at those times you could step into it and be taken … well, who knew?

  Somewhen else.

  This time it showed a dark hallway, papered with dingy green paper, and what looked like a painting of a knight on a horse. A little girl was sitting on the floor laying out a train set. She looked about five or six, with fair hair and bright-blue eyes. Although she was inside she was wearing a brown coat, a pink woolly hat and scarf, and boots.

  “All right,” said Ruby. She looked at the reflection. “When do you think it is?”

  Alex shrugged. It was hard to tell. Twentieth century definitely. Later than 1912, when the girls they’d met had worn petticoats and bodices and all sorts. But longer ago than the photographs of his parents’ childhoods.

  “Hey,” Ruby said. “Do you think we should yell for Aunt Joanna? If she saw this, she’d have to believe us.”

  Alex felt a surge of panic. “No!” he said far too quickly. He was sure the mirror didn’t want Aunt Joanna to know its secrets. “What if it closed? What if it never opened again? What if this is our one chance?”

  “All right!” said Ruby. “It was just an idea.” She caught hold of his sleeve. “Ready?” He nodded.

  Ready.

  And they stepped into the mirror.

  The familiar sucking sensation. The familiar lurch in the pit of Alex’s stomach. And the violence at the other end as they landed in a heap on the floor of the hallway at Applecott House. And – so sudden it felt like a physical attack – the cold.

  It was freezing – literally, Alex realised, as he sat up and saw his breath coming out in icy clouds. Even in his new school jersey and blazer, it was desperately cold; midwinter, snowy-day-without-a-coat-on cold. The tiled hall floor against his hands and knees was almost colder than he could bear. He looked around, wondering if the door and windows were open or something, but, no, they were shut. It was snowing, though; through the windows he could see the thick white flakes falling through dusky twilight.

  “Central heating!” moaned Ruby behind him. “Even the Romans had central heating! Please tell me they have some!”

  But all Aunt Joanna’s radiators had gone. Alex looked around him cautiously. The floor was patterned with the same black-and-white chessboard tiles it had had in 1912, but now they looked old and cracked and worn. There were several new pictures, and two stiff hard-backed chairs that hadn’t been there before. The wallpaper was different, and so was the stair carpet, although it looked so tatty that it had obviously been there a long time. The whole hall looked worn and shabby and rather dingy. The front door was just the same as in 1912, though, with the same coloured glass in the fanlight. The hall table was the same, and the picture of the little girl with the cat, and, just as in the 1912 house, there was the faint background scent of tobacco. And, of course, the mirror was still there, in exactly the same place it had always hung in Aunt Joanna’s hall.

  The little girl sat surrounded by pieces of train set, her mouth open in amazement. Her cheeks were white with cold, Alex saw, and her hands were an awful blueish colour. There were raw red sores all over her fingers, like swollen scarlet blisters.

  “Hello,” said Alex. He gave her a little wave.

  “Right,” said Ruby. She dusted herself down. “Ruby Pilgrim. Alex Pilgrim. Time travellers from the twenty-first century, here to right wrongs and sort out stuff that needs sorting out and generally be awesome. You’re probably related to us. What year is it, and what needs doing? And is it always this cold?”

  The little girl gave them a sudden, completely unexpected smile, and shook her head. “It’s the coldest winter in three hundred years,” she said proudly. “It’s 1947. Sillies! Fancy not knowing that! Have you come to help Colin find where the highwayman hid his treasure? How super!”

  “I dunno,” said Ruby. “Probably. Have you lost some highwayman’s treasure?”

  “No!” The little girl giggled. “It’s Mrs Eddington’s necklace Colin wants to find. It’s—”

  But she wa
s interrupted by a noise behind her. It was the door to the living room opening to reveal two elderly women. One was pleasant-looking, with white hair and a pink scarf tied on to her head instead of a hat. Like the little girl, her nose was blue with cold and she was wearing her coat inside the house. Despite the cold, she gave the girl a quick smile and raised her eyebrows at Alex and Ruby.

  “Hello! Where did you two spring from? I didn’t miss the bell, did I? I must be going deaf in my old age. Oh!” Her face changed. “Oh, of course! You must be our evacuees from the hills! It’ll be rather nice to have evacuees here again, won’t it, Sheila? Quite like old times! Mrs Blackstaff did say she might billet some on us. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Um,” said Alex. “Yes?” The mirror was surprisingly good at providing them with a conveniently plausible-ish explanation for being wherever it was they’d landed this time. Maybe it was part of its magic? It was one advantage to hideously old-fashioned school uniforms at least. When you actually ended up somewhere hideously old-fashioned, you didn’t stand out.

  The other woman shook her head and pursed her lips. She looked older than the first lady. She was smaller and more wrinkled somehow, and her shoulders were hunched. She scowled at the children as though she thought the first lady was stupid for agreeing to house them.

  As soon as she saw her, Sheila scrambled to her feet.

  “Mrs Eddington!” she cried.

  The cheerful-looking woman said, “Now, Sheila—”

  But Sheila ignored her. “Mrs Eddington!” she said. “Daddy’s coming home any day now – he is, isn’t he, Granny?”

  “Well, yes,” said the cheerful woman, who must be Granny. “But, dear—”

  “Mrs Eddington, please say you’ll forgive him – please. If you don’t—”

  “Sheila!” said Granny.

  Mrs Eddington’s scowl grew deeper.

  “But, Granny!” Sheila cried. “You always say we have to forgive people – like when I took Colin’s magnifying glass and dropped it in the river by mistake; you said he had to forgive me!”

  “Sheila, that’s enough!”

  Mrs Eddington held up her hand. She advanced on Sheila, her face hard and stony. “Your father,” she said slowly, “is a liar and a thief. He is lucky I didn’t report him to the constables, and if he comes begging at my door, I will certainly do so! Do you understand me?”

  Sheila looked as though she were going to cry.

  “He is not!” she said shrilly. “He isn’t any of those things! And we’re going to prove it!”

  “Well!” said Granny, as she shut the door behind Mrs Eddington. “What a welcome for our guests, I don’t say! Really, Sheila!”

  “But she shouldn’t say those things!” said Sheila. “Daddy isn’t a liar and a thief! He isn’t!”

  “Of course not,” said Granny briskly. “But you’ll never convince her, I’m afraid. Come now! She’s a dreadful old woman, and let’s not worry about her any more. Can you say hello to our evacuees, like a nice sensible child?”

  “But they aren’t evacuees,” said Sheila, with a mulishness that was very like Ruby’s. “They’re time travellers! They’ve come to help Colin find Mrs Eddington’s necklace!”

  “That’s enough silliness,” said Granny. “They aren’t anything of the kind! There’s more snow expected tonight,” she explained, looking fondly down at the child. “And it looks like some of the farms up on the hills are going to be snowed in. Mrs Blackstaff is trying to get people billeted on families in the village, and I said we’d take a couple of people in. Are we expecting your parents too, dear?”

  “Um,” said Alex again. “No, it’s just us.”

  “Oh, of course!” the woman said. “They must be run off their feet. I don’t think we’ve met, dear. I’m Mrs Pilgrim. I’m Sheila’s granny.” She smiled down at the little girl. “Colin and Janet should be around somewhere – the whole brood were evacuated here during the war, and since it’s taking such an age to demob the men, we’re lucky enough to still have them. But Daddy should be home any day now, shouldn’t he, darling?”

  “Dad’s in Japan,” said Sheila proudly.

  Alex guessed he must be in the army or navy or something – everyone was in the Second World War, weren’t they? He wondered what “demob” meant. A mob was a big gang of people, like an army was, so maybe it meant break up a mob and send everyone home. He knew the Second World War was between 1939 and 1945 (there was a big display all about it on the corridor wall opposite his classroom). He’d thought all the soldiers had just came home when it ended, but perhaps they hadn’t.

  “Ruby and Alex,” said Ruby. “Er, Jones. Ruby Jones.”

  “Lovely!” said Granny. “Now, where are your bags, dears? I’ll take them up and show you your rooms. And I must tell Mrs Culpepper we’ve two more for dinner. Oh! And could you let me have your ration books before I forget?”

  Alex and Ruby exchanged a panicked glance. Ration books. Alex knew all about them – lots of food was rationed in the war, like bread and meat and butter, and you had to hand over ration coupons to get them. He wasn’t sure why you’d still need them in 1947, two years after the war had ended, but apparently you did. What was going to happen when they didn’t hand one over? Would they starve?

  “We, um, we don’t have them,” he said. He looked at Granny and saw, quite distinctly, the expression on her face. It was one of real horror.

  “There, um, there was an – an accident, when we were, er, coming down the hill,” said Ruby. “Our bags were lost!”

  “Lost?”

  “Yeah, they, um, they fell off the back of my dad’s truck. And our ration books were in them. My dad was going to look out for them on the way back up, but it’s been snowing, and it’s dark, and – well. He said he’d try to bring them back down again if he found them, but I don’t know if he’s going to be able to make it through the snow.”

  She looked anxiously at Granny to see how she would take this story, which Alex thought sounded pretty implausible. Granny drew in her breath. Alex thought she was going to be angry, but instead she said rather shakily, “Oh, well! Worse things happen at sea, I suppose. I’ll have a talk with Mrs Blackstaff and see if she can send some coupons our way. And we’ll get on with sorting you out a replacement. Now—”

  Alex and Ruby gave each other a nervous glance. Alex wasn’t sure how you replaced a lost ration book, but he was pretty sure there wouldn’t be an Alex and Ruby Jones on any official list. And what was going to happen when Granny rang Mrs Blackstaff and asked them to help with those children she’d supposedly sent to Applecott House?

  Granny, meanwhile, was looking about her anxiously. “I think, dears,” she was saying, “I might get Colin and Janet to show you to the spare room, then I can go and talk to Mrs Culpepper and see what we’ve got in for dinner. Colin!” she called up the stairs. “Janet! Can you come down here a minute! It’s such a bother the phone lines being down in the snow. But I’m sure I’ll be able to get through to Mrs Blackstaff tomorrow.”

  So they had a day at least. That was something.

  There was a clatter on the stairs and a boy and a girl appeared on the landing. Alex supposed they must be Sheila’s brother and sister. The boy, Colin, looked about thirteen, with thick fair hair and round glasses. He was wearing a green knitted jersey, grey flannel shorts (shorts! In this weather! Even Alex’s new posh school only expected you to wear shorts in warm weather) and grey knitted knee socks. Just William, thought Alex, and grinned to himself. On top of this he wore an overcoat and a blue bobble hat that, rather unexpectedly, looked almost identical to a hat Alex’s granny had knitted for him when he was little. The girl, who must be Janet, was wearing a dark-blue knitted jersey, a thick green knee-length skirt and black knitted stockings. Janet also wore a woolly hat and a coat that looked for all the world like it had been made out of a blanket. She had brown hair, which she wore in a neat bob kept back with a black hair slide. She had a pinched little face with an a
nxious expression, and she looked about eleven.

  “There you are!” Granny was saying cheerfully. “This great boy is my grandson Colin, and this little love is Janet. This is Ruby and Alex. They’re from one of the farms on the hill, and we’re taking them in until the snow’s over. They’ve lost all their bags, so can you show them where the guest rooms are and find them something a bit warmer to wear? I’m sorry this house is so perishing,” she added, turning to them. “Old houses always are, aren’t they? Give me a good old-fashioned farmhouse kitchen any day. And with all the coal shortages… We do what we can, but if you feel like you’re about to catch pneumonia, do give me a shout.”

  Alex was beginning to think pneumonia was a serious possibility. His hands were going a curious shade of blue, and his feet felt rather like blocks of ice. Ruby had stuck her hands under her armpits, but her nose was a raw, painful-looking red, and so were her ears. Perhaps there would be some old coats tucked away in a drawer somewhere. Although… Alex looked doubtfully at Janet’s blanket coat. It didn’t seem very likely. He smiled at Colin and Janet hopefully. Janet gave him a shy smile back and Colin waggled his ears and grinned.

  “C’mon then,” he said. “Golly! Don’t you have any luggage at all?”

  He led them up the stairs, talking cheerfully over his shoulder.

  “I say! Are your parents going to be snowed in then? How wizard! Janet and I long to be snowed in. Did you have to dig your way out like Eskimos? I bet you wish they’d left you up there to live off wild animals and melted snow, don’t you? I suppose they thought you couldn’t interrupt your educations – grown-ups are always fussing about people’s mouldy old educations. What schools do you go to anyway? The village school doesn’t have a uniform. And you don’t go to the Grammar, or we’d know you.”

  “Um,” said Alex. “It’s St Caedmon’s. It’s, um, a boarding school. But. Um. We aren’t there at the moment because of, um, mumps.”

  Being sent home from school because of mumps had happened to someone in a book he’d read once. As soon as he’d said it, he realised what a stupid explanation it was – if they’d been sent home from school, why would they still be in school uniform? And why would they need to be evacuated? But Colin seemed to accept it easily enough.