A Secret in Time Read online

  “Well, there you are,” he said, flinging open the bedroom door. “Beds. Windows. Wardrobe. All the usual domestic conveniences.”

  It was a big and rather bare room (in Aunt Joanna’s Applecott House it had been chopped into two smaller bed and breakfast rooms and a bathroom), with two severe-looking single bedsteads and the usual eiderdown-blanket-sheet affair.

  “I’ll just open the window,” said Janet, hurrying over to the sash.

  Ruby squawked. “Are you mad? It’s freezing!

  What do you want to open the window for?”

  Janet looked hurt. “Oh, but fresh air is frightfully important—” she began.

  “Oh, dry up!” cried Sheila, who had been waiting with increasing impatience for the formal part of the showing-around to be over. “They aren’t from the hills at all! They’re from the future! They’ve come to help us find Mrs Eddington’s necklace!”

  There was a short, rather stunned pause. Then Janet said, “Sheila, you mustn’t tell stories.”

  “I wasn’t telling stories!”

  “And,” said Colin crushingly, “I don’t know that people of six have any right to go telling our family secrets to strangers—”

  “She didn’t tell us anything really,” said Alex hastily. “She just said you might want some help—”

  Behind Colin, Ruby mouthed Shut up, Sheila! and made frantic “shut up” gestures with her hands.

  “And it isn’t as though it’s a secret exactly,” Janet said. “Everyone in the village knows all about it.”

  “Oh, the village!” said Colin scornfully.

  “And so it’s my family secret just as much as yours!” said Sheila indignantly. “And they said they were going to help us! Only I ’spect they won’t bother now you’re being so putrid, and Daddy will have to live with the shame forever, and we’ll have to go away – and—”

  Her little face was red with fury. Colin gave Alex a helpless glance that said Sisters! as clearly as though he’d spoken.

  Janet said, “Oh, Sheila, do stop it, please.” She looked anxiously at Colin, and said, “They may as well help since they’re here. I mean, it would be pretty beastly to leave them out. It’s not their fault Sheila’s such a little ass.”

  Colin hesitated. Then he sighed. “Oh, all right,” he said. “But you can’t tell a soul – cross your heart and hope to die.”

  Ruby said, “Yes, yes, anything you like. Swear on Alex’s life. As long as we can have some coats or something before we all die of frostbite?”

  “Yes, why don’t you have coats?” said Colin. “We’re far too polite to ask, but we did wonder.”

  “Lost our luggage,” said Ruby briefly. “And there are rugs and things in Dad’s truck, so we didn’t need them. Why are you wearing shorts in winter?”

  “Isn’t Alex wearing shorts?” said Janet, surprised, looking at Alex’s school uniform.

  “Only for school,” said Alex awkwardly. “Normally I wear trousers. Don’t—”

  But he was interrupted by a loud gonging noise from downstairs.

  Sheila cried, “Oh, dinner! Good-oh.”

  Alex felt a strange sinking sensation in his stomach. Food. Ration books. Would there even be anything for them to eat?

  They charged down the stairs. Alex was wearing a grown-out-of coat that had once belonged to Colin, so worn that the elbows were shiny with wear, and the collar was almost frayed away. Ruby was in a man’s leather coat, which apparently belonged to the children’s father, a woollen scarf and a man’s winter hat. Alex secretly thought she looked rather glamorous.

  They burst into the dining room, which looked like a shabbier, more tired version of its 1912 self. The paint on the skirting boards and the window frames was chipped and grimy. There were scuff marks on the wallpaper and soot stains over the fireplace that nobody had bothered to clean. The rug looked so worn there were actually bare threads where the weave had been rubbed away. Threadbare, literally.

  Sitting at the head of the table was an old man scowling at his plate. He looked tired too. Tired and cold and grumpy. The whole of Applecott House looked tired. Alex supposed world wars must be tiring. He wondered if they still had servants. 1912 Applecott House had had a maid and a cook and two men to do the gardening and the rough work. Here there just seemed to be Mrs Culpepper, a big, rather elderly woman, who shuffled in with the plates of food then shuffled out again. At school they just talked about evacuees and bomb shelters and spitfires and ration books. They didn’t talk about everything looking tired and dirty and not having enough food.

  “Grandfather!” Sheila cried as they came in. “Look who’s come to stay with us!”

  Grandfather looked up and grunted. “So!” he said. “You’re the young limbs who want to turn up and eat all our rations, are you? Didn’t anyone tell you, if you’re going to lose your ration book you should at least have the decency to do it in your own house!”

  “Dear!” said Granny. “It isn’t the children’s fault.”

  “We’re very sorry,” Alex said hastily. “And we’re very grateful to you for letting us stay at all.”

  Grandfather grunted. “Huh!”

  They sat down at the table and looked around. Food was one of Alex’s favourite things about the past. Blancmange, and tea (an extra meal in between lunch and supper that mostly consisted of cake), and home-grown fruit and vegetables, and eggs and ham from nearby farms. Food from the past was generally simpler than food in the present – no pizza or takeaway or Haribo – but in Applecott House at any rate it had all tasted good.

  This dinner was just depressing. There was a serving dish full of potatoes, another full of carrots and turnips and cabbage, and plates with slices of pink wobbly-looking fried meat. There was plenty of vegetables, but the portions of meat were tiny. Alex thought it very likely that his and Ruby’s portions had been taken from everyone else’s.

  “Is this all there is?” said Sheila loudly.

  Janet said, “Hush!” with an anxious glance in their direction.

  Sheila wailed, “But I’m hungry!”

  Alex felt an awful squirmy guilty feeling in his stomach. They were eating these people’s food. They obviously didn’t have much, and he and Ruby were eating it.

  He swallowed and said, “It’s all right. I mean, I’m not very hungry.” He could feel Ruby glaring at him. Actually, he felt much more hungry than usual, perhaps because it was so cold.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake!” It was Granny. “Nobody is going hungry in this house. Do you hear me? You are our guests, and you will be fed. I’ll talk to Mrs Blackstaff at church tomorrow and see if she can help, and hopefully on Monday the roads will still be clear enough to get into Felixstowe and get you new ration books. Do your parents usually shop in the village, do you know? We might persuade Mr Harrow to advance us something, if he knows who you are.”

  “Er –” Alex shot a panicked look at Ruby – “er, no, no, I don’t think so. Mum goes, er…” He trailed off. Their cover story was suddenly beginning to look a lot less clever. What was going to happen when Granny talked to Mrs Blackstaff and realised that she had no idea who they were? How were they possibly going to explain themselves?

  “And as for you!” This was directed at Sheila. “I’ve never been so ashamed of a child in my life. When we have guests in our house, we eat the food on our plates and we are thankful for it. Do I make myself clear?”

  She did. And her tone was so awful it even shut Ruby up. She ate the pink meat, which turned out to be Spam and tasted disgusting. She pulled the most awful face when she did so, but she swallowed it down and even managed to say “Thank you very much, that was lovely” when she was done. At least it was warm. Alex could feel it warming him up from the inside out.

  “Lovely!” said Granny with an amused expression. “My dear child, it was perfectly revolting, and don’t you pretend any different.”

  “Ruddy Labour government!” Grandfather muttered. “Rationing our bread to pay for their National Health Service – what a ridiculous idea that was! Don’t know what the country’s coming to!”

  “I don’t think the bread shortage has anything to do with the National Health Service, darling,” said Granny comfortingly.

  “I say, Granny,” Colin said. “Alex says he wears long trousers – and he’s younger than I am! May I wear long trousers too?”

  “Long trousers!” Granny gave Alex a look of combined amusement and disapproval. “I pity whoever has the darning of your knees. Go through them as soon as blinking, most boys would.”

  The children all looked at the spot where Alex’s knees presumably were, underneath the table and the empty plate.

  Alex squirmed. He didn’t think anyone had ever darned them in his life. “Well…” he said. “They don’t really need darning. I mean … you grow out of them before they do usually. Or I do anyway.”

  “Indeed. And how long would a pair of long trousers last you then?”

  “Um…” Alex glanced at Ruby. He’d never paid much attention to how long clothes lasted. “I dunno. A year? Six months?”

  “Six months!” Granny laughed. “Oh, to live in such a land of plenty! I suppose clothes rations grow on trees in your house, do they?”

  “Golly!” Colin said. “I’ve had these shorts two and a half years. Granny kept letting them down, only now she’s run out of hem so they’re just getting shorter.”

  “Do you really get a whole new outfit every six months?” said Janet.

  “An outfit?” Ruby stared. “How many changes of clothes do you have?”

  “Well…” Janet considered. “School uniform. Two winter skirts and two pairs of shorts for summer. Two shirts. Two jerseys – and my school cardigan, of course. Two vests. Stockings.”

  “And kn
ickers!” said Sheila. “Three pairs of knickers! And a party frock – only mine used to be Janet’s and it’s quite the wrong shape, so it bulges in the most peculiar places. You are lucky, just having a sister,” she said to Alex.

  Ruby’s face was a picture of horror. “Three pairs of knickers! How often do you change them?”

  “Every week.” Janet looked surprised. “How often do you?”

  “Every day,” said Ruby. “That’s disgusting. And you’ve only got one change of clothes! I’ve got loads more clothes than that. And vests! Yuck! That’s such an old-man thing to wear.”

  “That’s enough,” said Granny firmly. “Some of us are trying to eat, not talk about underwear at the dinner table.”

  Janet had gone pink. She looked as though she might be about to cry.

  “I wish we had vests,” Alex said quickly. “And I wish we had proper woolly jumpers like yours – I’m freezing in these!”

  “I bet you jolly well are,” Janet said. No, she wasn’t upset; she was angry. “I wouldn’t want heaps of clothes anyway! You sound horribly spoilt. And affected!”

  “Janet!”

  “Well, she does.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Ruby muttered, but she kept her mouth shut throughout pudding, which was a white gloopy mess with balls of what looked like frogspawn in it. It was apparently called tapioca and it tasted marginally less disgusting than it looked but only just. It was served with stewed apples from the garden, which tasted just like Aunt Joanna’s stewed apples, only with less sugar.

  In between mouthfuls Alex stole glances at Colin and Janet and Sheila. All their clothes had a rather worn and faded look about them. Janet’s jersey had been darned in several places, with wool that was almost – but not exactly – the same colour. Sheila’s skirt had a decidedly home-made look about it, and there was something about the way the cloth had worn that made Alex wonder if it had been cut down from a larger skirt belonging to somebody else. There was a darker stripe at the bottom where a hem had obviously been let down to make it longer. Even Colin’s coat was darned.

  Alex hadn’t worn hand-me-downs since he was a toddler. All his clothes came new from a shop. You didn’t darn the knees or turn down the hems when you tore clothes or grew out of them. You just went and bought new ones.

  Except in 1947, you didn’t.

  When dinner was over, Grandfather and Granny went into the living room, where there was a large wood fire burning. Alex had supposed that they’d go too – fire! Actual fire! Heat! – but Colin shook his head.

  “Come up to HQ where we can talk properly,” he said. And, as Ruby opened her mouth to argue, he added, “It’s warm. I promise.”

  HQ, which stood for headquarters, was a large wooden cupboard on the top-floor landing. Inside was an old-fashioned-looking boiler surrounded by long slatted wooden shelves, with sheets and blankets and pillowcases and so forth piled on top of them. The pipes coming out of the top of the cupboard had been wrapped in blankets – “So they don’t freeze,” Sheila said casually, as though pipes freezing indoors was completely normal – but inside the cupboard—

  “Heat!” said Ruby. “Oh, heat! Blessed heat!”

  They crawled on to the shelves. Ruby wrapped herself in a blanket and rested her back against the boiler. “Oh God, this is the best thing ever,” she said. “You guys can find the necklace. I am never leaving.”

  Colin shut the cupboard door and turned on a torch. The atmosphere felt suddenly conspiratorial, like playing at pirates. For the first time Alex felt like they belonged.

  “Well,” Colin said, “Janet’s right that it isn’t exactly a secret – but it’s hardly something we want talked about in the village. It all happened so long ago that mostly people don’t talk about it any more – and we’d like to keep it like that.”

  “Not that Dad did anything wrong exactly – well, not very wrong,” said Janet hastily. “It’s just – well, you know.”

  “Our lips are sealed,” said Ruby. “Now, spill.”

  “Well,” said Colin, “Jan and I were evacuated here in 1939.”

  “On a train with labels round your neck?” said Ruby.

  “No,” said Colin. He sounded surprised.

  “Mum just telephoned Granny and Grandfather and asked if we could live with them,” Janet explained.

  “We all came – Mum and Dad as well. Dad got a job as a steward on Mrs Eddington’s estate. Mrs Eddington lives in Oakden House, you know,” Colin added.

  The children nodded. They did know. Oakden was the big house on the edge of the village.

  “Dad wanted to join the navy,” Colin went on, “but he’d had TB, so they said he’d have to wait until he was fit. He joined up after Sheila was born.”

  “And he hasn’t come home yet?” said Alex. This had been puzzling him. “But the war’s over now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but Granny says they couldn’t bring all the men home at once; it would be a frightful muddle. And then – well – Mum died when Sheila was little. So we’re still here.”

  “Wow,” said Ruby.

  Alex agreed. Imagine your dad going off to Japan for years and years, and then your mum dying! It wouldn’t matter how nice your grandparents were; it couldn’t have been anything but awful.

  “Anyway,” Colin said hurriedly, as though he didn’t want to talk about that, “we’d not been living here long when we found out about the highwayman’s treasure.”

  Alex was sharing a shelf with Colin. He could see, therefore, the rather solemn, almost religious expression that crossed his face.

  “I’ve fallen for you,” he said, “little apple-dweller.” He sounded as though he were reciting poetry. “They cannot force us apart. I’ll keep your secret hidden.”

  There was a pause.

  “You what?” said Ruby. “What does that even mean?”

  Colin grinned. “It’s an old story,” he said. “Apparently there used to be this highwayman who was in love with a girl who lived at Applecott House, ages ago, back in the days of highwaymen. He made his fortune robbing people on the roads, and the story was he and the girl were going to elope. Her parents didn’t want her to marry a highwayman, naturally. But on the night they were supposed to run away together there was a blizzard, and while he was fighting his way through the snow on his horse he was arrested. And then he was tried for theft and hanged. They kept asking him where all his gold was hidden, but he wouldn’t tell them. But on the scaffold he looked at the girl he loved, who was standing there watching him go, you know, and he said that riddle to her.”

  “But what does it mean?” said Ruby.

  “It’s where his treasure was hidden, of course,” said Janet. “You juggins. Everyone kept asking the girl where it was. But she wouldn’t tell them. And she always said she couldn’t get it. Not that she didn’t know where it was – just that she couldn’t get it.”

  “Is that real?” said Ruby sceptically.

  “Oh yes,” said Janet. “There’s a display about it in the museum in town and everything. I know it sounds like rot, but it’s real enough.”

  “And nobody ever found the treasure?” said Alex.

  The children all started talking at once.

  “They did!” cried Sheila.

  “That’s what this whole thing is about!” said Janet.

  “Oh yes,” said Colin. He looked rather grim. “That’s where all our problems begin.”

  “Tell it in the proper order,” Ruby begged.

  “Well,” Janet said, “Mum loved that story when she was a kid. She and her brothers always used to say they were going to solve the riddle, and they used to go looking for the treasure, but they never found it. When Mum told us the story, she always said she thought she knew where it was, but she’d never say where.

  “‘If I’m right, it’s not going anywhere any time soon,’ she used to say. ‘And I’m not having you lot going after it and breaking your necks!’”

  “But didn’t she want to find it herself?” Ruby said, puzzled.