A Chase in Time Read online

  “Not eaten, my angel, not in Suffolk,” said Atherton. “It was the queerest thing,” he went on. “I just went into town to say cheerio to Charlie Higgins from school – frightfully good chap, he’s off to India, you know, really thought I’d better say goodbye – anyway, Charlie said his old man had a sort of Saxon thing he was trying to get shot of, and would I like a squint at it? Well, once he’d told me what it was, I couldn’t very well say no, could I? So I thought I’d just pop down—”

  “Leaving me to deal with all your hideous relations on my own,” said Mary. “Present company excepted, of course. And—”

  “That’s Uncle Atherton,” Dora said, in a low voice to Alex and Ruby. “He went off to Peru last year to look for antiquities – he’s going to start an antiquity exhibition and tour the country with it. It all started when he went to Mexico and found the most gorgeous hoard of Aztec treasure. It was worth simply heaps of money, and now he’s spending it all on buying things for his exhibition. That’s Miss Flynn. She’s a lady anthropologist and he met her in the middle of a jungle. They kept having fights about whether buying artefacts from the savages was exploitation, or just trade. She made Uncle Atherton pay three times as much as he was going to for everything. And then he and Miss Flynn decided, since they enjoyed fighting each other so much, they might as well get married and do it in comfort. The wedding’s tomorrow. Everyone’s in the church hall putting up bunting right now.”

  The man and the boy had come back with another packing case. The boy bumped against Ruby as he passed. Alex was almost sure he did it deliberately.

  “Scuse me, sir,” he said, with a smirk.

  “I’m a girl!” said Ruby. “And get your hands off me!”

  Atherton and Mary, who were beginning what looked like a proper row, stopped arguing immediately and looked around.

  “Who are your friends, Dora?” said Atherton. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. And why – if it’s not an impertinent question – are they wearing fancy dress?”

  “They’re from the future!” said Henry, before Alex could stop him. “That mirror you gave Miss Flynn – it’s a Time Machine!”

  Atherton pulled what Alex and Ruby called a playing-with-the-children face.

  “A Time Machine!” he said. “Crikey! You’d better not get too close, Mary, you’ll get whisked off to prehistoric Britain. And knowing you, you’ll start investigating their hunting rituals and never come back. And where would I be then?”

  “Ass,” said Mary affectionately. “You’d have to come in after me. You’d make a very fetching prehistoric Briton, all in woad and fur.”

  “So I would,” agreed Atherton cheerfully. “And so would you too. I’ve got a necklace of saber-toothed-tiger teeth somewhere that would suit you admirably. Thanks, Hodges, that’ll do.”

  The man and the boy nodded, and went out.

  “But they really are from the future!” said Henry, who’d been listening to all this with impatience.

  “Not now, kiddos,” said Atherton. He took the crowbar and began levering the lid off the smaller box the boy had been carrying. “We don’t have time for games. Not with all my hideous relations here for the mating ritual – sorry, darling, I mean the happiest day of my life. And anyway, you haven’t seen my artefact yet. What’s inside this box is going to be the centrepiece of my exhibition. I believe it’s the biggest chunk of Saxon gold ever discovered. The Newberry Cup – you’ve heard of it, Mary, of course?”

  “Of course,” said Mary. “You don’t mean to say you’ve actually bought the Newberry Cup, do you? Why on earth didn’t you say so at once?”

  “Couldn’t get a word in edgeways, I expect,” said Atherton. “Mary, my angel, would you—”

  “Here,” said Mary. She took the box and held it as Atherton prised off the lid. The children crowded forward. Alex felt a quiver of anticipation. He could see that Atherton, like himself and Aunt Joanna, loved beautiful things. And anything that made him this excited must be a very beautiful thing indeed.

  But before Atherton could so much as touch the straw that filled the box, a new person appeared in the doorway. A youngish-looking person in an apron, holding a mop.

  “Mr Pilgrim, sir,” she said. “You’re to come at once! Something dreadful’s happened!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Something dreadful, and something more dreadful again

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Mary laughed.

  “Is all this excitement usual, Atherton?” she said. Atherton looked a little indignant, then rather shamefaced. Then he laughed too.

  “It is, rather,” he said. “I say, though! You didn’t want a quiet life, did you?” He turned to the woman with the mop. “Well?” he said. “Tell us the worst. Rats eaten the wedding cake? Archbishop of Canterbury forbidding the banns? Or just my dreadful relations causing their usual havoc?”

  “No, sir!” said the maid (she must be a maid, Alex thought, with that mop). “The stables are on fire!”

  “Great Scott!” said Atherton. He bolted out of the room, into the hall, and through the door that led to the kitchen. The others followed. The back door was open, and through it Alex could see billows of black smoke rising from somewhere at the bottom of the garden.

  Atherton looked around him rather wildly and swore, a surprisingly modern-sounding swear word.

  “Henry!” he said. “Run down to the village hall, can’t you? Tell everyone to come back up here and help! Eileen!” (Eileen must be the maid.) “Call the fire brigade! And tell Cook and Hodges! You!” (He turned to Alex and Ruby.) “I don’t know who you are, but you’d better make yourselves useful. Come on!”

  He ran back into the hall and grabbed his hat from the hall sideboard (hats were evidently one of life’s essentials, because Dora and Henry were also grabbing theirs from the hatstand by the door). Then they all went haring down the garden. Mary, Alex and Ruby followed.

  The black smoke was coming from a long, low stone building at the bottom of the garden. The man in the flat cap who’d brought the crate in earlier – hadn’t Atherton called him Hodges? – was frantically unwinding a hosepipe, which was attached to an old-fashioned hand-pump, of the sort with a lever that you worked up and down.

  Ruby cried, “Oh, what about the horses?”

  Alex had been wondering about them too. A stable had to have horses, didn’t it?

  “It’s all right,” said Dora. “They’re down in the lower field.”

  Mary was calling out orders.

  “Buckets! Hodges, let me do that. Atherton, for heaven’s sake, start pumping. Hodges, you and the children, get as many buckets as you can.”

  “And fire-brooms!” said Atherton. “On the back wall! Go on! Look slippy about it!”

  Hodges dropped the hosepipe and stumbled off in the direction of the back wall. Alex ran after him. The brooms were easy enough to spot – three or four of them, neatly stacked against the wall. He and Hodges gathered them up and pelted back to the front of the stable. Mary had the hose unwound and was pointing it at the blaze; Atherton, his sleeves rolled up and a streak of soot already splashed across his face, was working furiously at the hand-pump.

  From another building across the yard, Dora and Ruby appeared, carrying three metal buckets.

  “Where do we fill them?” gasped Ruby.

  Dora cried, “Water butt! And there’s the horse trough against the wall! Oh, do be quick!”

  The maid, Eileen, came running into the yard, followed by a woman who must be the cook. Alex was rather disappointed by the cook. Cooks in books and on telly were usually middle-aged and round and red-faced and cheerful – this one was about thirty, and was thin and wiry and energetic-looking. Cook behaved in a most un-cookish manner, by running for a fire-broom and beating at the flames. Eileen and Hodges took another, and Mary thrust her hose at Ruby and grabbed a third. Dora threw a bucket at Alex and ran towards a stone trough against the wall of the barn. Alex followed. It was half full of cleanish-loo
king water. He filled the bucket, ran back to the fire, and threw the water on to the flames. It didn’t seem to make much difference.

  For the next twenty minutes or so, everything was a blur. Run to the water. Fill the bucket. Run back to the fire. Throw. Run. When the trough was empty, they ran to the water butt instead; this was a large metal barrel filled with rainwater.

  For the most part, it all absorbed Alex entirely, but fortunately Mary seemed able to work and think. When Atherton began to flag at the pump, she yelled to Cook to take his place. When Alex felt like he couldn’t run any more, she shouted at him to take the hose from Ruby and let her run. Holding the hose wasn’t much easier than running, however; it was very hot this close to the fire, and very smoky and hard to breathe. Alex, remembering something he’d read in a book once, turned the hose on to his T-shirt and pulled it up and over his mouth and nose. It helped, a little, but his eyes still stung and were sore with the heat, and he was grateful when Mary yelled, “Dora! Take a turn with the hose!”

  It felt like forever before other people began to arrive, pounding up the road from the church. There were perhaps ten or twelve men and women and a couple of children, mostly Pilgrims, he supposed – what a strange thought! Some of them had brought buckets and brooms from the hall, some hadn’t, but it didn’t matter, because now Mary was yelling at them to form a bucket chain from the water butt, and Atherton – who had taken over the pump again – was relieved of duty, sooty, sweaty and exhausted. But the fire was already out. By the time the fire engine – a rather wonderful-looking old-fashioned red vehicle with the firemen all standing and holding on to the sides – arrived, there was very little for them to do except inspect the damage, smoke cigarettes, and devour the tea and shortbread that Eileen and Cook brought down on tea-trays. It tasted just like twenty-first-century tea and shortbread, only the tea was rather strong, and the shortbread slightly sooty.

  Dora and Henry and Alex and Ruby sat on the edge of the horse trough and drank their tea and watched. Nearly everyone – well, all of the men, and one or two of the younger women, who Alex supposed must be lady anthropologist friends of Mary’s – was smoking. Most of them had cigarettes, but a couple had pipes, and Atherton had a wonderful mother-of-pearl affair with a shiny teak handle.

  “Everyone smokes!” said Alex.

  “Don’t they in the future?” said Dora.

  “Well – some people do,” said Ruby disapprovingly. “But only idiots. Don’t you know smoking kills you?”

  “I don’t think it does,” said Dora kindly. “Simply everyone does it, you know, and they’re not dead, are they?” She made a sweeping gesture with her arm. Everyone did, indeed, seem not to be dead.

  “It does in the end though,” Alex said.

  Dora didn’t seem too worried by this pronouncement. She was more interested in pointing out everyone important who had come up from the hall.

  “That’s Uncle Edmund. He lives in London and does something frightfully clever for the government. That’s Mother – and that’s Father there, with the green hat. Uncle Edmund’s the oldest brother and Uncle Atherton’s the youngest. Father comes in between. Applecott House belongs to Uncle Edmund, but he always says he hates the country, so we live here instead.”

  “I thought your Uncle Atherton lived here?” said Ruby.

  Dora shook her head.

  “Uncle Atherton doesn’t live anywhere really. He’s always charging about somewhere foreign – before Peru it was Rhodesia, and before Rhodesia it was China, I think, or maybe Japan. Somewhere hot. He just stays here when he comes home, and stores all his antiquities in the hayloft. Mother thought he might settle down when he got married, but it doesn’t look like it. He and Miss Flynn are going to Egypt next.”

  “What do you think was in that box?” said Alex. He hadn’t forgotten the packing crate, with its mysterious contents.

  Dora shrugged.

  “The Newberry Cup?” she said. “It’s no earthly good trying to guess what Uncle Atherton brings home. Could be simply anything. It must be a pretty decent antiquity, though, if he and Miss Flynn are so excited about it. Shall we go and see?” And she hopped off the horse trough and ran over to Atherton, who was standing with Mary and Uncle Edmund – a large, red-faced man with a walrus moustache – talking to one of the firemen.

  “Started deliberately?” Atherton was saying. “My hat! You can’t be serious!”

  “Uncle Atherton.” Henry tugged on his uncle’s sleeve. “Can’t we see your Cup thing?”

  “Cup thing?” Uncle Edmund turned, rather grumpily, to Atherton. “You haven’t been bringing more junk into the house, have you, Atherton?”

  “Eh? What? Oh, no, not at all.” Atherton put a hand on Henry’s shoulder and said hurriedly, “Why don’t we go back and get you cleaned up, eh? Mary! Are you coming?”

  Mary came hurrying over from a huddled conversation with another fireman.

  “Atherton, did you hear what they’re saying?” she said. “That someone started the fire deliberately! I can’t believe it! Can you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Atherton. “I did wonder… It isn’t as though it’s been frightfully hot, and Hodges is very good about not smoking in the stables, although you can’t ever be sure, of course.”

  They made their way slowly up the garden path.

  Dora said, “But who would set fire to the stables? And why? What would be the point?”

  “I don’t know…” said Atherton again, rather thoughtfully. “You haven’t got any mortal enemies you’ve forgotten to tell me about, have you, my angel?”

  “Not unless you count that chieftain in Peru,” said Mary cheerfully. “And even he rather liked me by the end, I think. And besides, cooking me in boiling oil was more his style, not wilful damage to property. Edmund hasn’t offended anyone, has he?”

  “Half the village, I should have thought,” said Atherton. “But I can’t quite see the good people of Dalton resorting to arson either. I wonder…”

  They’d reached the house. Now that they weren’t frantically running towards the fire, Alex noticed more differences between Applecott House then and Applecott House now. Different curtains. Different windows. Roses where the modern house was clear. And everything looked newer somehow, less tumbledown and shabby. It was disorientating, like seeing a photograph of someone when they were twenty years younger.

  The front door was swinging open. Atherton frowned at it and quickened his pace.

  “What is it?” said Mary. “Darling?”

  “I’m not sure,” Atherton said. “Maybe nothing. But all the same…”

  He hurried into the hallway and through into the living room. The children followed. His anxiety was catching; Alex could feel himself beginning to worry, although he wasn’t sure about what exactly.

  The living room was just as they’d left it. The packing cases were still piled up on every piece of available floor. The newest packing case still sat in the middle of the room, the lid lying on the coffee table next to a rather ugly statue of a rearing horse. And Atherton was standing next to the packing case, staring inside.

  “Dearest,” said Mary, catching something in his frozen expression. “Dearest—”

  The children hurried forward and peered into the box.

  It was empty.

  The Newberry Cup was gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Plum cake, pinafores and pirates

  “Things are always happening in 1912, aren’t they?” said Alex.

  They were in the bathroom upstairs, where they’d been sent to “clean up”. Rather to Alex’s surprise, bathrooms in 1912 looked fairly similar to modern bathrooms, except that the bathtub had brass feet like a lion, there wasn’t a shower, and you flushed the toilet by pulling on a chain, which released the water from a cistern above your head.

  “Mostly I think things just always happen to Uncle Atherton and Miss Flynn,” said Dora, scrubbing at her face with a flannel, and succeeding only in transferring most
of the soot back from the flannel and on to her face again. “They nearly got attacked by pirates on their way home from Peru. And besides, this isn’t two things, it’s one thing really. Whatever rotten beast set that fire obviously did it to get us out of the way, so they could steal that Cup. Oh, bother this soot! I don’t see the point of washing when we’ve all got to have baths tonight anyway.”

  “We’re a bit cleaner,” said Ruby, studying herself critically in the bathroom mirror.

  “Yes,” said Dora. “But look here. You simply can’t go around in 1912 dressed like that. People will think you’ve run away from a circus. You might borrow some of our clothes, just until we figure out how to send you back.”

  “Um,” said Alex. He looked at Henry, who had made no attempt to wash himself, but was busy pulling hideous faces at himself in the mirror. “It’s all right for you and Ruby. But I’ll never fit into Henry’s stuff.”

  “You can borrow some of Dickie’s things,” said Dora. “He’s our cousin,” she explained. “On Mother’s side. Our aunt is always sending us his hand-me-downs for Henry to grow into. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Dora’s and Henry’s bedrooms were nothing like Ruby’s and Alex’s. Henry slept in what was apparently called the “night nursery”, a room with two beds – one for Henry and one for the nursery-maid, who had left last year. The walls were still papered with characters from nursery rhymes, something Henry was rather scornful about. There was a “day nursery” attached, with a rocking horse – a different rocking horse to the one in Aunt Joanna’s playroom, a much more exciting-looking rocking horse on its own rockers, unlike Aunt Joanna’s, which hung from a sort of trestle – a bookcase full of hardbacked books, and a battered cupboard full of toys. Alex had a look at the bookcase. There were some books he recognised: Just So Stories and Peter Rabbit and Alice Through the Looking-Glass. But most he had never heard of: Stalky and Co., The Story of a Short Life, Mother Goose…